Clause 32
Coroners and Justice Bill
9:00 pm
Bridget Prentice (Parliamentary Under-Secretary, Ministry of Justice; Lewisham East, Labour)
I hope that I can give the hon. Lady some assurances. I think that there are sufficient powers elsewhere in the Bill dealing with making annual reports. For example, clause 33(3)(d) and (e) allows for regulations to be made on the provision and disclosure of information, and for the Lord Chancellor or the chief coroner to require information from senior coroners. That measure will enable that information to be collated and published. I can also confirm that the regulations are likely to include the matters that the hon. Lady proposes in new clause 17. For example, each year the chief coroner will have to provide a report to the Lord Chancellor with an assessment of different coroners’ performance and on a range of other issues, which will then be published. That covers some of the hon. Lady’s examples. Having said that, there is no great principle at stake here, and although I will not undertake now to table a Government amendment at a later stage, I will reflect before Report on what the hon. Lady has said.
I will touch on clause 32 stand part. While we have argued and discussed all other elements of the Bill, this clause is important in that it gives the Lord Chancellor the ability, for the first time, to issue statutory guidance on how the coroner system is expected to operate in relation to interested parties. For the purpose of clause 32 interested parties include a spouse, a civil partner, a partner, a parent, a child, a brother, a sister, a grandparent, a grandchild, the child of a brother or sister, a stepfather, a stepmother, a half-brother and a half-sister. A full list is in clause 36.
We anticipate that the first guidance that the Lord Chancellor issues will be the charter for the bereaved, and that is why I wish to speak a little on this now. We published a revised draft charter along with the Bill, and I am grateful for the many positive comments that hon. Members have made about it. That charter will set out the services that bereaved families can expect to receive under a reformed system and the means of redress if those services are not met, and it highlights other opportunities that families will have for involvement. Equally, it sets out families’ responsibilities, including information to be provided to the coroner. Given that our immediate aim for reform is to improve the service that bereaved people receive, the charter is specifically for the bereaved. However, it is likely that guidance will be issued on other aspects of, and participants in, coroners’ investigations, such as non-professional witnesses who have been involved blamelessly, in transport crashes for example. This clause is central to our aim to standardise and improve the service that bereaved people receive from the reformed coroner system and on that basis I commend the clause to the Committee.