Minister of State for Constitutional Affairs
Harriet Harman MP
Mr Speaker, with permission, I wish to make a statement on reform of the Coroners' Service.
The coroners system is of great importance.
When someone dies a violent or sudden death or where the cause of death is not certain or where the identity of a body is not known, there must, in the public interest, be a proper inquiry and the bereaved relatives need to know what happened and why.
Coroners, and the coroners officers who support them, deal with cases that are always sad, and often tragic - most recently exemplified in the work of the 3 coroners who dealt so sensitively and expeditiously in coordinating the identification process in the tragic aftermath of the July 7th London bombings
I would like to pay tribute to coroners and coroners staff, to acknowledge the difficult and important work that they do.
Mr Speaker, there are, within the coroners service many coroners and coroners staff who are dedicated and committed, but I think that we all believe that the system, within which they do their work could be much, much better
There has been longstanding interest and concern in this House about the Coroners system. Because we all, as members, have constituents who've involved us in cases where it has ended up in the coroners court
What I'm sure that we all want, Mr Speaker, is to have a coroners system that enables committed coroners and their officers to ensure that for all inquests in every part of the country the public interest is served and the bereaved relatives have their answers.
But that is not the case. In the current coroners' system
The system must serve the public interest and the bereaved families' concerns in a way that frankly, it does not at present.
That is what the proposals that I set out to the House today aim to achieve
Mr Speaker our proposals will do three things
The question of a second certification of a death was a key issue in the third report of Dame Janet Smith into the Shipman murders. The Government has continued to examine the proposal that every death in England and Wales, some half million a year, should have an additional medical scrutiny by the coroner service. The coroner reforms I am announcing to the House today do not stand alone. They will be complemented by further work being taken forward in the Department of Health aimed at improving patient safety and promoting quality in the NHS.
We need a system that can identify and investigate suspicious deaths yet allows families to proceed quickly with funeral arrangements where there is no cause for concern. We are not sure that the proposals to have all deaths referred to coroners achieves this, but we will be looking further at this and are not ruling out the possibility of further reform.
I'd like to thank both Dame Janet and Tom Luce for their work and I'd also like to thank the voluntary organisations who have advised me from the viewpoint of bereaved families
I have placed a background note in the House of Commons Vote Office and the libraries of both Houses which gives more detail on the measures I have announced today and shows how we have built on the work of Dame Janet and Mr Luce.
We intend to proceed by way of a draft Coroners bill this Spring to enable pre-legislative scrutiny probably by the Select Committee for the Department of Constitutional Affairs. I intend to arrange in parallel to the parliamentary pre-legislative scrutiny a separate strand of pre-legislative scrutiny which I think will greatly help and inform the House. This will be pre-legislative scrutiny by families who have recent experience of the Coroners system.
I commend these proposals to the House.