Clause 16
Coroners and Justice Bill
4:15 pm
Tim Boswell (Daventry, Conservative)
I have two comments to make. The first adverts to something that I talked about the other day, where a former employee died on my farm, in a field. The difficulty was that because it was located in the county of Northamptonshire, the body was removed to Northampton, whereas it would have been much more convenient for all the relatives and everyone else had it gone to Banbury, which is a much shorter distance but would have entailed crossing a boundary. I say to the Minister that although I understand that she has made provision in earlier clauses for the transfer of jurisdiction, it is important that that is tied up fairly early on, particularly when there are those borderline issues, so that the process is as unintrusive to the family as possible. There may well be a role for training undertakers and it may well be that the coroner’s officer has some ability at least to make inquiries at an early stage to see what would be appropriate.
My second point relates to the provision in subsection (3) about removal of a body
“to a place provided by a person who has not consented to its being removed there.”
That seems entirely reasonable. No one, to put it crudely, wants a body dumped on them without their knowledge or consent. I realise that there is a saving for local authority premises in the second part of that subsection, but if the practice in, say, an area of relatively low coronial intensity, where there were only a few cases, was to use private sector premises such as an undertaker’s chapel of rest or something similar, things would be difficult if that was not easily available on a 24/7 basis. I hope that the Minister can address that point administratively and ensure that if outsourcing, if I may call it that, is to be applied, it is done in a way that does not create further delay.
The common interest, which is also shared by the hon. Member for Cardiff, Central, is to produce as easy, unintrusive and unobjectionable a procedure in difficult circumstances as possible. That is important both for the process of justice and for the interests of the family, who are bound to be feeling low when a death has occurred.