West London Coroner’s Court

Tania Mathias Excerpts

Wednesday 16th December 2015 Westminster Hall

[James Berry]

That experience is by no means unique. In terms of the telephone service, when I called up on behalf of a constituent very early on in my role as a new MP, I had to wait on the telephone for more than 45 minutes, and then it became clear that the call was never going to be answered. Frankly, that plumbs the depth of poor service for bereaved families. As I understand it, the senior coroner’s position is that he inherited a backlog from his predecessor in 2013. Be that as it may, he has not cleared that backlog since November 2013, and has compounded the situation with an ill-conceived staff reorganisation and shocking failures to communicate with bereaved families.

[Dr Tania Mathias (Twickenham) (Con)]

On the point about the attitude towards bereaved families, I would like to put on the record that twice I have had people in tears in my constituency surgery over inaccuracies on post mortem certificates, as my hon. Friend the Member for Kingston and Surbiton (James Berry) described. It is extremely distressing for MPs not to be able to improve the situation. I absolutely agree with everything he said.

[James Berry]

Finally on the delays at West London coroner’s court, it would be easy to blame the situation on cuts, but they are not to blame. I wrote to the chief executive of Hammersmith and Fulham Council, which is responsible for funding the coroner service in west London. He made it clear that although the council has had to make cuts to various areas, the coroner service has been protected from those cuts. The responsibility for sorting out this shambles lays squarely with the senior coroner for west London. He needs to get his house in order for the sake of bereaved families living across the boroughs represented here.

--- Later in debate ---

[Stephen Pound (Ealing North) (Lab)]

I echo the feelings of everyone here today in thanking the hon. Member for Kingston and Surbiton (James Berry), and I express our sympathy for his personal loss. He understands, as do many of us, but perhaps not to the same degree, how much pain can be caused by even casual incompetence. Just under 18 months ago, a very talented and beautiful 14-year-old girl in my constituency, a neighbour of mine, died. I will not refer to the case directly, but we now know that the case papers were left on a train—I can scarcely imagine the pain and agony caused to that family, who suffered again.

Like all Members here, I have a catalogue of complaints about the operation of the coroner’s office, and they tend to fall into two categories. One is the most basic administrative errors. A constituent of mine, Roniel Mulchan, died on 28 November last year. His mother had some very basic and simple questions to ask of the coroner. We wrote in February 2015, in March and in June—no answers did we receive.

I hear from the hon. Gentleman that the telephone system has improved, and I would like to say that to my constituent Sally McMahon, whose mother died very recently, God rest her soul. My constituent tried to ring the coroner’s office and was told that it shut at 4 o’clock —this was at 3.20 pm. I rang on 10 December and received the same message at 3 o’clock in the afternoon saying, “We are only open until 4 o’clock.” That is casual incompetence of a degree that piles Pelion on Ossa when it comes to the suffering of individuals.

In another particularly unpleasant case, the absence of information was so awful that I wrote to the Judicial Conduct Investigations Office in July 2015 on behalf of Dr Batten, whose relative, a constituent of mine, had died. The complaint started with the typical waiting for 45 minutes, rudeness and that sort of stuff, which could almost be discounted. However, as part of the response I received from the Judicial Conduct Investigations Office—my hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith (Andy Slaughter) is familiar with this, as I am sure the Minister is, but I had previously been unaware—I learned:

“The Coroner’s Office is not run directly by the Coroner, staff and resources are provided by the Local Authority for the area and the Police service. Therefore, if you wish to further your complaint about your experience with the Coroner’s Office…you may wish to contact the Police Service and the Local Authority”.

Sir Roger, you are a distinguished Member of Parliament and you have probably dealt with more casework than anybody else in the room. When you receive a letter such as that, I am sure your reaction is precisely the same as mine, which is, “How on earth can we operate a system where the buck is passed with such dizzying speed that it is more like an ice hockey puck, and it cannot be slowed down in court?”

However, in many ways the most unpleasant, the most egregious and the most disturbing case that I know of relates to the daughter—the child daughter—of my constituent, Mr Seefat Sadat. His daughter died on 17 April 2013. After six months, he came to see me to ask why the inquest had not yet taken place, and I wrote, and I wrote, and I rang, and I wrote, and I wrote again. I then contacted the then Minister, the right hon. Simon Hughes, and received a response from the right hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell (Chris Grayling) in April 2015. Two years after this child’s death, the inquest had not taken place, and we were told that there were various reasons for that. The right hon. Gentleman—I place no blame whatever at his step—said that the West London senior coroner, who has been referred to obliquely today, telephoned my constituent, as he says,

“on or around 1 April”—

he cannot be sure—

“explaining the problems within his area that have caused this long delay and that he now expects the inquest to take place in June”,

And saying that the coroner was going to reallocate the case on Morwa Sadat’s death. The right hon. Gentleman then went on to point out some structural difficulties and problems within the system.

That simply is not good enough—it is not good enough. We are talking about people who are in agony, who are grieving and who are in pain, and they are hanging on the telephone. They are being fed nonsense, and a child’s death remains unexamined for two years—two years—and I have to bring in Ministers in the coalition Government and even Ministers in the present Government. Fortunately, thanks be to God, it has now been resolved.

How on earth can we say to our constituents, “Trust the system, trust the coroner’s office”, when we have this constant, almost ceaseless, list or catalogue of incompetence? Even when the incompetence is almost casual incompetence, the reverberations it causes throughout a family are so awful.

[Dr Mathias]

I have had experience of very similar situations, and what is distressing for us as MPs is that people’s grieving process is unnecessarily extended and made worse, so there are not just administrative consequences.

[Stephen Pound]

The hon. Lady speaks from a privileged position, because in her profession before she entered this place she obviously had closer dealings with the coroner’s office than many of us do. The fact that she says that certainly adds weight to the point, and I am even more concerned given that she makes those comments.