Legal Aid for Inquests

Gloria De Piero Excerpts

Wednesday 10th April 2019 Westminster Hall

[Gloria De Piero (Ashfield) (Lab)]

It is an honour to serve under your chairship, Mrs Main. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Barnsley East (Stephanie Peacock) on having secured this debate.

Families affected by a state-related death are already going through some of the most difficult moments of their lives, but if they cannot afford legal representation, the process of finding out what happened and why is made harder still. It is almost impossible for me to put into words the pain, fear and frustration that is in these human stories. The stories we have heard about their constituents from my hon. Friends the Members for Ellesmere Port and Neston (Justin Madders), for High Peak (Ruth George) and for Hammersmith (Andy Slaughter) and from the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) are the most compelling arguments for change that anyone could make.

Reading through the testimonies that bereaved families have provided to the Government’s recent review highlights the gaping injustice at the heart of our justice system, which must be addressed. My hon. Friend the Member for Barnsley East made an excellent speech, and it is worth reading part of one of the comments from a family member once more:

“We had to do everything ourselves. We had no lawyer at the inquest. Those three weeks were the most terrifying thing I’ve ever done in my life”.

Another explained:

“Families are often left in the dark, trying to sort out numerous matters associated with a loved one dying whilst under the protection of the state, while trying to make sense of what has happened both emotionally and legally. Having access to funded legal representation is paramount for justice.”

Today’s debate is about the fundamental values and principles of our justice system, which should never leave people feeling afraid and helpless when seeking truth and justice for their loved ones. My hon. Friend the Member for St Helens South and Whiston (Ms Rimmer) spoke particularly powerfully about that point: is our justice system fair if state bodies are legally represented at inquests, and victims’ families are not?

The Government’s recent review states that about 30,000 cases per year result in an inquest. Of those, about 500 are related to deaths in custody or other forms of state detention, whether that is police, prison or immigration detention or detention under the Mental Health Act. Will the Minister confirm what the year-on-year rise is in litigants in person at such inquests? In such cases, the bereaved families deserve state support in their pursuit of the truth, but proper legal representation is also about preventing others from suffering, by identifying mistakes and ensuring future deaths are prevented. It is an urgent and ongoing issue for everyone in this country and should be treated as such, as my hon. Friend the Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston stated in his contribution.

The need for better state-funded legal support for bereaved families at inquests has been a central recommendation of several major reviews in recent years, including Bishop James Jones’s powerful Hillsborough report; Dame Elish Angiolini’s independent review of deaths in police custody, which was initiated by the Prime Minister herself; the independent review of the Mental Health Act; and Baroness Corston’s review of vulnerable women in the justice system. All of those reviews called for a major improvement to funding for bereaved families at inquests, in order to prevent further miscarriages of justice of the sort that shocked us all in the cases that have been mentioned. When such heavyweight reports about profound flaws in our justice system, often commissioned by the Government, call for better legal representation, it would be astonishing if the Government did not do the decent thing and adhere to their recommendations.

However, the Government’s review into legal aid for inquests just let bereaved families down again. The charity Inquest, which works with bereaved people, lawyers and support agencies, providing expertise on state-related deaths and their investigation, labelled the Government’s inaction

“a betrayal of those who invested in this review in the hope of securing meaningful change”.

Having listened to the story about the constituent of my hon. Friend the Member for High Peak, it is hard to conclude anything different. If the Government do not listen to me, or even to the charity sector, can the Minister give me one good reason why they have chosen to ignore the powerful, united voices of Bishop James, Baroness Corston and Dame Angiolini?

There are families trying desperately to afford the crippling costs of legal fees they never expected to need to pay. We are seeing increasing numbers of families whose loved ones were killed in horrific accidents crowdfunding vital legal help, and the ongoing failure of the legal aid system to treat even the most determined families fairly.

Last year—Mrs Main, this is all in the public domain—the families of five men killed when a wall collapsed at a recycling plant were denied legal aid for the inquest. The men were crushed to death under a pile of concrete, bricks and scrap metal in 2016. Their families, who are from Gambia and Senegal, applied for funding for a lawyer to represent them at the inquest, to establish the circumstances around the deaths, potentially leading to compensation from the employers. Despite meeting the means test and not speaking English, they were turned down for legal aid. The Health and Safety Executive and the recycling company were both to be represented by lawyers, so the families would have been at a significant disadvantage if they had been left without one. Could they represent themselves in court, with no English and no knowledge of the legal system? Of course not. They resorted to crowdfunding their legal fees—reduced to shaking a modern version of the collection tin in pursuit of their basic rights to truth and justice. They managed to raise over £3,000 to fund their costs before their appeal was finally heard and legal aid was granted—after the inquest had already begun.

That completely unnecessary stress during such a traumatising process can be blamed only on a totally dysfunctional system, which should obviously have known that the families were eligible, given that they met the means-testing criteria and spoke no English. This protracted process cannot possibly have had any advantages for the public purse, but it will have cost bereaved families a great deal in emotional stress. It is that process that was raised by the hon. Member for Banbury (Victoria Prentis), and also by the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton), who spoke about the 11 men who lost their lives and the inadequacy of exceptional case funding.

Will the Minister tell me how common she believes crowdfunding is for inquests? Following on from the comments made by my hon. Friend the Member for Barnsley East regarding the Government’s inadequate consultation, will the Government publish a list of respondents to their review and a summary report of the responses? Will they also publish the findings of their survey of coroners and the coroners support service?

A Labour Government would commit to providing proper legal support to those who have been the victims of deaths in custody, with legal aid for representation at inquests. Truth is the first step towards justice, and quality legal support is a key first step towards the truth.

Although she did not make a speech, I should just mention my hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff Central (Jo Stevens). I always learn things from her when she makes an intervention, because she brings so much experience to these issues.

Unless the Government will commit, as Labour has, to giving automatic, non-means-tested legal aid funding to families to allow them to seek specialist legal representation following a state-related death, I suspect bereaved families and those who support them through the inquest process will continue to feel nothing towards this Government but a deep sense of betrayal and abandonment.