Clause 70
10:15 am
David Howarth (Cambridge, Liberal Democrat)
I do not want to reopen a previous debate, but new clause 10, which we considered during the juryless inquests debate, would have had a similar effect to the hon. and learned Gentleman’s proposals, but in very limited circumstances. The difference between his proposals and ours is that his would make the availability of anonymous witnesses a general power of coroners’ courts, whereas ours would have provided for a more limited set of circumstances in which that might happen. Nevertheless, that difference is not a great one and there seems to me to be no obvious argument why anonymous witnesses should not be allowed in coroners’ courts in the same way as in the criminal courts. I ask the Ministers to explain why, throughout our debates about anonymous witnesses, there was a concentration on the adversarial process of the criminal courts when in fact anonymity is often more useful in the circumstance that we are currently discussing than in criminal cases.