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The 1976 Act provides for public inquiries to be held in respect of fatal accidents, deaths of persons in legal custody, sudden, suspicious, or unexplained deaths, or deaths which occur in circumstances giving rise to serious public concern. As the Lord Advocate's powers to investigate deaths in Scotland under this legislation are wide-ranging, this provision will have relevance to UK government departments operating in Scotland in a wide variety of circumstances where a death occurs, even where the death does not occur in "legal custody". For Whitehall departments, these will of course be in areas of 'reserved' policy/operations, such as, for example, defence (deaths of MoD service personnel based in Scotland) or immigration (deaths of asylum seekers in Home Office detention in Scotland). And in such cases the relevant exemptions (s.26, s.31, etc) may also be relevant.
Like section 31(1)(h), this provision is limited by the following factors:
Some statutes, which have their own provisions about inquiries into deaths, expressly allow for the disapplication of the 1976 Act, to prevent a death triggering two parallel statutory inquiries. Examples include section 14(7) of the Health and Safety at Work etc Act 1974, and section 271(6) of the Merchant Shipping Act. Such provisions will limit the application of this provision.
The section 31 (2) "purposes" most likely to be relevant to the investigations referred to in connection with the 1976 Act are: