I speak to my amendment in this group, which is similar except in terms of who ends up paying. I tabled this amendment very much for the reasons mentioned by my noble friend Lord Rosser and the noble Lord, Lord Paddick—the nature of inquests and the importance of creating a level playing field to enable the coroner to get to the truth of what has happened in cases of tragic death. The cases that I have been involved with relate to deaths in custody. For a number of years, I was chair of the Independent Advisory Panel on Deaths in Custody, which was concerned with not only police custody and deaths following police contact, but with deaths in prison and in secure mental hospitals. On a number of occasions, I spent time with the families of those who had died, as far as they were concerned, at the hands of the state.
I remember one family very movingly describing the experience of the inquest. They wanted to know what had happened to their loved one. They were not necessarily looking to apportion blame or for someone’s head on a platter. They just wanted to know the facts. They were confronted with a complicated legal system, with everybody else being fully represented—at public expense. They were having to fight for legal representation through the legal aid system.
I do not know how many noble Lords have been in a coroner’s court when such matters have been discussed. They are not always the easiest of environments. I remember one person describing that there was one small area for everyone to wait—counsel, witnesses and the bereaved families themselves. There were not sufficient chairs in the waiting room for everyone concerned. They described walking down the corridor and hearing behind them the trundle of wheeled suitcases
filled with legal papers being dragged by highly paid legal officials, employed by the state to argue and create confusion around what had happened to their loved one. For that reason, we should consider the proper operation of the inquest to enable the truth to be obtained.
What concerns me about the present system is that when this issue was raised in the past, we were told that families were eligible for legal aid. But it is not as simple as that because there are strict criteria on the income that people can have in order to obtain legal aid. Of course, when a case relates to a family, it is not related to an individual, so before eligibility for legal aid can be established, the financial means of every single member of the family has to be assessed, whether or not they are actively engaged in the process. That can be long and drawn-out, extremely intrusive and not helpful. The reality is that the legal aid pot is tiny, and it becomes increasingly difficult to deal with cases humanely.
The purpose of my amendment is slightly different from that of my noble friend Lord Rosser. Yes, there should be parity of funding, but rather than an off-the-top call on the legal aid fund—therefore diminishing the amount of aid available to people who need it for criminal cases, for example—the agency that had custody of the individual at the time of their death should provide the funding. The agency will almost certainly be paying a substantial number of legal costs. In the case of a death in a police custody suite, it is probable that several police officers were involved, all of whom may be legally represented separately at the expense of the state. The police force itself may be represented separately, and at the expense of the state. Then there is the bereaved family, who may be quite traumatised by what has happened and facing extreme difficulties because they do not know what to do. If it were not for charities like INQUEST, with which I have worked over the years, which provides support for such families and has a panel of lawyers to assist them, many families would essentially go unrepresented at inquests. Yet it is important that those families have the right to challenge the evidence being presented to make sure that they are satisfied that as far as possible, the truth has been obtained at the inquest.
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The extra costs that would be imposed on the police and crime commissioner in this instance—I would actually like to see this principle applied in other areas where the state has an Article 2 duty—would be small by comparison. That would not draw down the legal aid budget but it would mean that families would get the help they need. There might also be, if you like, an incentive on police services or indeed any other agency in a similar position to go that extra step further to avoid situations in which a death occurs when someone is in their custody.
The purpose of my amendment is to say that where such a death has occurred and an interested family is involved, it should be recognised that the legal costs will be paid by the police and crime commissioner. It may be said that there are no precedents for doing this. I can cite a precedent because I was responsible for it, although it was not exactly the same situation.
Some years ago when I was the chair of the Metropolitan Police Authority, there was an extremely difficult death in custody case which, in the nature of these things, dragged on for many years. An inquest verdict was reached and as a result a challenge was mounted against it on behalf of some of the police officers involved. Because essentially their legal costs would ultimately be borne by the Metropolitan Police Service, the Metropolitan Police Authority, after some considerable deliberation, agreed that it was right and proper that the authority should fund the costs due to the representative of the family to try to resolve the issue, which was then going on to judicial review. So there are precedents, and I think that this is the right principle. There should be equity of funding to ensure appropriate access to representation for the bereaved families in these circumstances, and the right location for taking responsibility for this should lie with the police service or the agency concerned which was responsible for the person at the time of their death.