Coroners: Expenditure
(asked on 17th July 2023) - View Source
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what estimate his Department has made of the cost to the public purse of local authority spending on coroner services in each of the last five years.
Whilst the Ministry of Justice is responsible for coroner law and policy, it does not have operational responsibility for coroner services which are a local service, funded and administered by individual local authorities. Local authorities’ independence from central Government means that they are responsible for managing their budgets in line with local priorities. This is appropriate as central Government cannot predict exactly what the cost of a local service will be.
Local authority revenue and financing information for England is published annually on gov.uk. The following table sets out data on expenditure on coroners’ court services for each of the last five financial years:
| Total expenditure (employers’ costs and running costs) (£000) | Expenditure net of fees and other service income (£000) |
2021-2022 | 173,000 | 123,685 |
2020-2021 | 166,376 | 123,453 |
2019-2020 | 149,450 | 108,983 |
2018-2019 | 131,804 | 95,341 |
2017-2018 | 124,796 | 92,360 |
The Ministry of Justice is unable to estimate spending on coroner services from the Pandemic Recovery Fund.