I am conscious that the Committee is valiant and well into the third hour of today’s proceedings; nevertheless, the next is a very important group. We are now in Chapter 4 and we are not talking even about £25 million; we are talking about life and death, bereaved families and the vital work of our coroners’ courts. We are talking about provisions that will broaden the circumstances in which coroners may discontinue their investigations. We are talking, once more, about the power to hold inquests on the papers, in writing only, and we are talking about the wider use of remote hearings. Amendments 40, 42 and 43 are in my name and I am honoured to share those with my noble friend Lord Ponsonby and maybe even my noble friend Lady Chapman of Darlington as well—I am doubly honoured. I also have the support, I am delighted to say, of the noble Lord, Lord Thomas of Gresford, for the Liberal Democrats.
Further amendments in this group are about providing an appeals process for families who disagree with discontinuance, about ensuring that there are no audio-only inquests, even within the class of remote inquests—no telephone or audio-only inquests—and to ensure that remote hearings are still accessible to the public. Amendment 53 ensures pre-implementation consultation before the remote inquests come into effect. The noble Lord, Lord Thomas of Gresford, supported by his noble friend Lord Marks of Henley-on-Thames, has a very important amendment to ensure a right of address for bereaved families. I do not see the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans in his place, but he may appear in the way that only the Lords spiritual can, and his Amendments 50A and 50B contain important provisions in relation to cases of death by suicide. The indefatigable Minister will speak to his provisions on the register of deaths, which will be important; there are things to tidy up there where an inquest has been discontinued.
I turn to Amendments 40, 42 and 43 in my name. Amendment 40 is about ensuring vital safeguards before a coroner can discontinue an investigation into a death. I hope I do not need to go into too much
detail about why safeguards are important in such a scenario, but these include ensuring that family members and personal representatives of the deceased get at least a provisional indication of why this is to be the case, so that they can evaluate whether they support the discontinuance of an inquest. Amendment 42 ensures that inquests will not be held without a hearing—in other words, not on the papers only—if this is against the wishes of the bereaved family. Amendment 43 ensures safeguards before there can be a remote hearing, including by giving interested persons the reasons for that judgment.
I say to the Committee that we need to remember the position that bereaved families, in particular, and other interested parties are in when there is an unexplained or unnatural death. I commend the briefing that will have been provided to, I hope, all members of the Committee by the NGO Inquest. It has done vital work in this area for many years. I remind the Committee that legal aid is not available to these families, and it has often been inquests, over the years, that have been the sole source of support and advice to them. Sometimes these will be deaths in custody, deaths in hospital or deaths in other circumstances where people were very vulnerable and looked after, especially by the state to begin with, before that unnatural and unexplained death happened.
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On my Amendment 40, we are really concerned that there must be some testing of evidence. It is all very well to suggest that the reasons for the death have become clear, but under the current law they become clear because of a post-mortem; they are now to be clear for other reasons and other evidence. Perhaps that evidence has not yet been tested. I remind the Committee, as briefly and succinctly as I can, that it is in no small part in our coroners’ courts that the system does its best to comply with the United Kingdom’s obligations under Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights. If that jurisdiction is overly eroded we will be in trouble, because we will not be providing adequate investigation in relation to unexplained deaths. We will then not comply with the right to life, which means the right to an investigation into an unnatural and unexplained death under Article 2.
Legal provisions and human rights conventions notwithstanding—there are controversies down the track about how much we care about all that—surely we all care about bereaved families. Any citizen in this country, any ordinary member of our community, regardless of their attitude towards activist lawyers, human rights conventions and international law, would understand why bereaved families are in an unusually tragic situation. Those who have meagre or no means and who are not highly legally literate will be very concerned about any erosion of the possibility of a full inquest in which they can adequately participate. The nature of the coronial system and of inquests means that answers are found not just for those family members but for the wider community. This has been proven to be the case time and again when scandals have been exposed relating to inadequate provision in hospitals or, dare I say, in custody and so on.
I listened as carefully as I could to the extensive debate on the previous group on the need to deal with backlogs after the pandemic to save money, to be speedy and efficient and all that, but coroners’ jurisdiction is a very special case. It is not normal civil, let alone commercial, justice that we are discussing, so this group needs particularly important attention before we go too far down the streamlining, online, no hearings and remote hearings road.
That was my best attempt to be as succinct as possible, because I know other Members of the Committee will want to say more about each of the new provisions in this group. For now, I beg to move.