Clause 10
6:15 pm
Bridget Prentice (Parliamentary Under-Secretary, Ministry of Justice; Lewisham East, Labour)
I am not sure that I shall necessarily be capable of putting the mind of Inquest at rest, but I shall do my best as far as the hon. Gentleman is concerned.
As I have repeatedly said throughout the debates, coroners’ inquests are findings of fact—who the deceased was, how, where and when he or she died, and any particulars required to allow that death to be registered. In some circumstances, it might also cover the circumstances by which the deceased came by his death. The most important thing is that all those determinations have to be framed in such a way that they do not appear to determine the question of criminal liability on the part of a named person, or of civil liability. It is not the job of the coroner’s inquest to apportion blame or to decide matters of legal liability. That is for the criminal and civil courts. In order to ensure that the distinction between the functions of the different courts remains crystal clear, the outcomes of any coroner’s investigations have to be framed in the way in which they are in clause 10.