Coroners and Justice Bill
12:00 pm
André Rebello: This is regarding how the chief coroner will influence local authorities to comply with, I think, clause 23—the duty on the local authority to provide the infrastructure, accommodation and staffing that the coroner needs to carry out coronial administrative and investigative duties. One difficulty is, of course, that power is devolved to local government and local governments have to set their budgets. As well as being responsible for the coronial system, they are also responsible for children’s services, services for the elderly and lots of other essential things. From the media, we know about the tragic cases of essential services falling short. One can see that local authorities have a difficult job.
I cannot see a chief coroner turning round to a local authorities and saying, “That coroner needs a court to hear this inquest and a room for the jury. The jury need separate toilet facilities. There are 12 properly interested persons and each has a solicitor or barrister who needs conference rooms, and the witnesses need privacy and bereavement rooms. You will have to provide those.” If the local authority turned round and said, “Sorry, we can’t afford it,” I do not see what the chief coroner could do. Presumably, the chief coroner could apply for judicial review. It would be very strange legislation that had built into it a safeguard giving the chief coroner the power to enforce a sanction by judicial review. One would have thought that if Parliament was considering that, it would put some sanctions in to allow the chief coroner to deal with the situation. I cannot think of any method whereby the chief coroner could control a local authority budget. It is an invidious position.
In my submission notes, I say that there is a danger of the chief coroner being made a scapegoat because we will not have a national service even with this Bill. We have a national tone to the service and national leadership, but we still have 110 or so separate legal jurisdictions serving their own local infrastructure. Of course, every coronial jurisdiction is different. Some have prisons, some have special hospitals and some have large teaching hospitals. The infrastructure and services required in each are different.