Criminal Justice System: Families Bereaved by Public Disasters

Robert Neill Excerpts

Thursday 16th September 2021 Commons Chamber

[Sir Robert Neill (Bromley and Chislehurst) (Con)]

It is a privilege and it is actually very humbling to speak in this debate. I wanted to do so both as Chair of the Justice Committee and out of respect for my fellow Committee member, the hon. Member for Garston and Halewood (Maria Eagle)—as well as the victims, of course, of this awful disaster and many others—because she has pursued this issue with great vigour as a constituency MP. She has also pursued it—I am grateful to her for doing so—through the Justice Committee and the report that we recently published on reform of the coronial system, so I particularly wanted to be here.

As you will know, Madam Deputy Speaker, I will start by asking the House’s indulgence of the fact that I may need to leave before the end of the debate, because there is a pressing family matter that I need to attend to and which the Front Benchers and the hon. Lady also know about. None the less, I thought it was important to be here.

I also welcome the Minister to his place. He will know from his service on the Justice Committee how seriously this matter has been taken and the energy with which the hon. Member for Garston and Halewood has pursued this case. She has done a service for the House, for her constituents and for the country more broadly, because this raises important issues of policy relating to how we deal with a particular tragic set of circumstances, where there are multiple deaths in consequence of a catastrophic failure through the regulation or other form of conduct by a public authority, in most cases, and sometimes by significant private corporations.

I was also particularly pleased to see my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May) here, and I join the tributes to her for the courage and sheer decency that she showed throughout her pursuit of this issue both as Home Secretary and Prime Minister. The fact that she continues to pursue these issues having left office, says a great deal about her and the calibre of person she is. I agreed with everything that she said in her speech, and I hope that the Government will take it on board.

I cannot see for the life of me why we did not continue that commitment to a public advocate in the 2019 manifesto. As far as I am concerned, to paraphrase John Maynard Keynes, the facts have not changed, and I see no reason why we should change our opinion either. The overall cost of such a matter to the public purse is very small indeed in comparison with the importance in human terms of the issues that arise, and the public good that can arise. The purpose of inquests is not simply to determine the cause of death, but also—particularly through the powers of the coroner to write a statutory letter—to improve behaviour for the future, and to change practice. I think the importance of that is often underestimated.

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for all those reasons. I also wish to join in the tributes that have been paid to my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for South Swindon (Robert Buckland), who showed such sensitivity towards this issue during his time as Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice. I have made no bones about what I feel about his departure from government. I simply say now that the Government are the poorer for his departure.

The specific issues that we are debating have been well rehearsed by the hon. Member for Garston and Halewood, and I do not seek to repeat what she has said, but I do point out that what she has said is reflected, in many respects, in a number of the recommendations of the Justice Committee’s report on reform of the coronial system, which was published earlier this year. I am grateful to other members of the Committee, past and present, for being here today.

The coronial system has many merits, but in these cases it does not work satisfactorily. There are other issues with it, some of which coincide with the issues that are highlighted here. Examples are the variation of practice between coronial areas and the lack of a strong system of central support—the appointment of a new Chief Coroner, together with the work of the first two Chief Coroners, has done a great deal to improve that, but there is still a lack of structure to underpin it—and the fact that the inquest rules and procedures do not give the coroner anything like the degree of case management control that, for instance, a High Court judge or a circuit judge would have in the same circumstances, in terms of dealing with interlocutory issues, admissibility of evidence, and the appropriateness of lines of cross-examination.

If we are to try to preserve the coronial system, which I think is a good one, we must ensure that it can be adapted to different types of case. That which relates to a tragic death, for example in unexplained circumstances, but where the medical issues are pretty simple and straightforward and there are no other significant extraneous issues of fact to consider—or even to a comparatively straightforward but sad personal injuries death—requires a procedure that is wholly different from, and much simpler than, that which occurs in multi-handed inquests in which significant state or private actors are engaged and in which the issue of legal resource will come into play.

We also need to think about the position of a purely inquisitorial system when there are third parties, the bereaved families, who have a direct means of engagement. Regrettably, the current system cannot always guarantee that they will have the level of input to the system that they should have, and that they will have, for example, sufficient access to evidence to make the case in a way that enables them to feel that all the relevant issues have been fully ventilated.

There are broader issues, too, that arise from Hillsborough, in relation to what I think we can now perceive to be deficiencies in the substantive law itself, in two areas. One, to which my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead referred, is the whole question of the status of evidence given to a non-statutory inquest. I think most people were surprised that that exists. It was inevitable—the ruling of the judge, Mr Justice Davis, a very experienced trial judge, cannot be faulted in law—but that does say something about the position of the law.

Perhaps, as my right hon. Friend suggested, it would be a measure of over-engineering to require every such inquest to be conducted on a statutory basis, but that is the only safe means by which people could be held to account in these circumstances. Perhaps we could expand the definition in some way, let us say by analogy with the law of perjury or by adopting other definitions of misconduct in public office, because after all these people were acting in public office in this case when they made the demonstrably false statements. There ought, surely, to be a legislative device which could achieve that, and I am sure that it would have the support of the whole House. Maybe the Law Commission could be asked to look swiftly at these matters. It is able to respond in a timely way to specific technical issues of law when required.

There is also the issue of procedure. We need to strengthen the tools for coroners to get to the truth and ensure fairness for all the relevant parties and interests involved. We also have to ensure that, in cases involving bereaved families, the families are made much more central to the system. That is why we have recommended that there should be a charter for bereaved families appearing before the coronial system. There is already a guide to service for bereaved people, and that is fine as far as it goes, but it does not go far enough. We recommended going further and putting this on a much stronger and more formal basis. We also recommended strengthening the amount of specialist support services available.

I rather regret that the Government have not gone as far as I would wish in adopting all these recommendations. Again, the cost in the overall scheme of things is tiny. The Minister, when he was a very effective member of the Justice Committee, often made the case that, when we talked about spending on the courts system, we were talking about a fraction of a fraction, and I totally agreed with him. Well, spending on support services for bereaved families in coroners inquests and proceedings is a fraction of a fraction of a fraction, if I can put it that way, but the benefit in human and societal terms would be very great indeed. I hope that the Government will reflect that they can move further on their response to our recommendations.

In addition to arguing for a charter of rights, we argued that there should be a much more structured means of ensuring access to evidence. At the moment, this is far too dependent on the discretion of the individual coroner. There are not the same rules on the disclosure of evidence as would exist in a criminal trial on like facts in the Crown Court, and that is unsatisfactory. We also supported the recommendation for a duty of candour, and I suspect that Bishop James’s report will also go down that route. I know that the Government have said that this recommendation will be considered alongside their response to Bishop James’s report. The Select Committee reached this conclusion on very compelling evidence. The evidence that we heard throughout the inquiry pointed strongly in one direction on virtually all the points before us. I hope that, when the Bishop has produced his report, the Government will take the opportunity to act and bring in a duty of candour.

The other important issue that we want to look at is equality of arms. Where there has been a significant loss of life and where significant public interest issues arise in terms of the conduct of those responsible for the premises or the events that have given rise to the deaths, it cannot be right that one side can be represented by heavyweight legal teams, effectively at the taxpayer’s expense when these are public bodies, while the families have to rely on the very restrictive parameters of the exceptional funding scheme for legal aid. Again, we are not talking about a large number of cases. We are not talking about a general extension of legal aid to inquests, because that would change the inquisitorial nature of the system. That is not what we are arguing for, and that is not what the evidence has suggested. It said that, for a specific type of inquest involving specific tragic events, equality of arms and fairness would dictate that those families should have access to non-means-tested legal aid. That would be in the public interest, to ensure that all the issues were properly ventilated and that the coroner’s recommendations would fully deal with any issues relating to the prevention of future deaths.

I have perhaps trespassed for some time on the House’s time, but I think this issue warrants full and proper debate. It is a shame that we do not have more people here to discuss it, but I hope that we will have other opportunities to do so. If I am unable to be here when the Minister responds to the debate, I shall read his remarks with interest. I know that he will respond fully and conscientiously, for he is a considerable asset to the Government and I very much hope that he will continue to be so when the day is out. I am confident that he will, if there is any reward for ability and diligence in politics. I know that he is well seized of these issues, and if he cannot give us everything that we would like today, I urge him to ask the new Lord Chancellor—who I hope will continue to be his boss—to take these issues seriously and not to be afraid to revisit them, because there is profound evidence to support them. On that Keynesian basis, if the evidence and the facts are there, a shrewd person will act according to the evidence and facts and make these reforms, which would cost very little but would achieve a great deal.