Clause 15
Coroners and Justice Bill
4:00 pm
Brian Iddon (Bolton South East, Labour)
I am sure that you will be pleased to hear that I have no correspondence to shuffle today, Mr. Gale, just as I did not have any correspondence to shuffle in our last sitting week, despite the fantasies of journalist Henry Porter in The Observer the Sunday before last.
The amendments are interrelated. About 10 years ago, Her Majesty’s coroner for the Manchester Central jurisdiction, Len Gorodkin, proposed that post-mortems should be possible by non-intrusive examination of bodies by magnetic resonance imaging. He had the sizeable Jewish communities in Greater Manchester in mind when he made the proposal. In the past few years, working mainly with the Bolton Council of Mosques, Her Majesty’s Manchester West coroner, Jennifer Leeming, has developed the technique into an acceptable way of carrying out post-mortems, and the so-called Bolton protocol has spread to other Greater Manchester boroughs and towns and cities throughout the country.
The Manchester West jurisdiction covers Salford, where there is a sizeable Jewish community, Bolton, where there is a sizeable Muslim community, Wigan and Leigh, but I should stress that MRI post-mortems are available for the whole community, not just the Jewish and Muslim communities. Some families have asked for MRI post-mortems because they need the procedure to be carried out in a hurry—for example, if they are visiting a loved one in this country who dies, and they need to return quickly to their own country because of their occupation.
The Manchester West jurisdiction is one of the 10 busiest in the country, with more than 4,000 deaths reported each year, costing the council tax payers in the four local authority areas £1,434,000 each year. Council tax payers in the jurisdiction therefore bear a higher cost than council tax payers in other jurisdictions.