Schedule 6
Coroners and Justice Bill
8:30 pm
Bridget Prentice (Parliamentary Under-Secretary, Ministry of Justice; Lewisham East, Labour)
Schedule 6 provides a clear structure for paying allowances to jurors, witnesses, pathologists, coroners and anyone else who is eligible to receive them. The structure should be appropriate and transparent as well as flexible, which will make it simpler both to claim for and to pay allowances. I am not prepared to accept the amendments as they stand. None the less, I understand what the hon. Lady is trying to achieve. There is a discrepancy in coroners paying out that money directly. We made the change in the 2006 draft Bill as a direct result of the representations made by the Coroners Society, which wanted such flexibility to be available. I will have to think seriously about whether to change that during the Bill’s progress through Parliament.
On judicial review, I can only repeat what I said earlier. Coroners may have misunderstood something in the past, but I can assure them that they would be indemnified if they were judicially reviewed. At the moment, I would be reluctant to remove the local flexibility that the Bill makes available to both coroners and local authorities in the way in which reimbursements are made.