Coroners: Standards

(asked on 3rd June 2020) - View Source

Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what steps his Department taken in each year since 2013 to raise the standards of coroner investigations to ensure that bereaved families are satisfied with that investigation process.


Answered by
Alex Chalk Portrait
Alex Chalk
Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice
This question was answered on 10th June 2020

In July 2013 we implemented the coroner reforms in the Coroners and Justice Act 2009 with the aim of putting bereaved people at the heart of the coroner system. This included the appointment of a Chief Coroner of England and Wales who provides training to all coroner and coronial officers through the Judicial College and reports annually to the Lord Chancellor on standards across all coroner areas.

Since July 2013 we have merged a number of coroner areas across England and Wales to deliver new areas that are better placed to provide a consistent standard of service to bereaved families There are now 85 coroner areas compared to 110 in 2012.

In April 2017 we removed the requirement for inquests where the deceased had been deprived of their liberty under the Mental Capacity Act 2005 removing the need for unnecessary inquests where a person died from natural causes.

Our report of the Review of Legal Aid for inquests published in February 2019 set out the work we have been doing to make inquests more sympathetic to bereaved families.

This includes a revised Guide to Coroner Services, published In January 2020 (the original was published in February 2014) which is focused on the needs of bereaved families and contains a new protocol on the approach government departments and its lawyers will take when they have interested person status in an inquest, to make sure that bereaved families continue to be at the heart of the inquisitorial process.

We continue to work with the Chief Coroner to review we are doing to ensure that bereaved families are well supported.

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