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Coroners and Justice Bill

My Lords, reform of the coroners’ system is long overdue. I will concentrate my remarks on the first part of the Bill. There is a need for consistency and transparency in the system and for the bereaved to be better considered. I fear that the Bill does not go far enough. Like the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, who has just spoken, I have concerns over medical examiners. They will be working in parallel to and with coroners. They need to be of equal status and be able to stand apart from their other local medical colleagues to avoid conflicts of interests arising. If the medical examiner is paid by, overseen by and potentially disciplined by the primary care trust or local health board, how can he or she be truly independent? What if a colleague or even a partner of the medical examiner, if they are a GP, is before the coroner and subject to scrutiny and investigation? What if there are systematic failures in the PCT or LHB that actually employs that medical examiner? The medical examiner needs clear blue water between him and those potentially under scrutiny. Otherwise, the bereaved will fear conflict of interest and will not feel that justice has been done. Being linked with the local clinical governance system does not determine the employer. It would be much safer for the medical examiner to be appointed and managed by the Ministry of Justice and also for there to be a chief medical examiner to work along side the Chief Coroner. I turn now to the external scrutiny aspect of the coroner process. There has been emphasis during consultation on the role of the press in external scrutiny while valuable independent rigorous research has been ignored. Indeed, it has actually been hindered and blocked. Recently, a research project about suicide amongst vets, which had been well approved and had a local research ethics committee, consulted the Coroners’ Society out of politeness, which then took delaying action that blocked the study. Yet properly conducted research will provide both important insights into, and scrutiny of, what is happening in premature deaths. Nowhere has that been more needed recently than in the spate of young deaths in Bridgend. Madeleine Moon, the local MP, has to be commended. She has worked with great sensitivity to bring many lessons to light. We saw social contagion in action. It was seen previously in suicides in Oxbridge. We are still seeing social contagion in Bridgend. It is now beginning to appear with other suicides, such as the woman who killed herself after seeing Anne Turner’s suicide portrayed on TV and the young man with early lung cancer who said in a radio interview that he had never thought of suicide until hearing an interview with Nietzsche. In Bridgend, a general atmosphere of hopelessness pervaded—I saw it first hand in the staff who lived there. A sense emerged among many young people that suicide was the thing to do when not coping. Internet sites provide information on how to kill yourself. Some are worse than that. They indulge in entrapment and active encouragement and promotion of suicide. Some responsible websites are moderated—they have pop-ups from the Samaritans—but others are dangerous. They are already illegal in Australia, and the Byron report recommended that we do the same. The Government are to be commended on picking up those recommendations. Policing such websites is terribly hard, but it can be done. From 1997 to 2008, the Internet Watch Foundation achieved a 17 per cent fall in child pornography sites through monitoring. I am glad that the Government have included in the Bill provisions on pseudo-photography of children. That inclusion is essential for this work, as some really disturbing images are emerging, particularly out of Japan. Inquests into tragic events, wherever they are, need to be conducted near people’s homes, so that distressed families do not have to travel. That is to be welcomed. The family must be in control of what is supplied to the media. The Bill and the Explanatory Notes do not go far enough. The press intrusion in Bridgend was terrible. Families described having to fight their way past reporters to get into the coroner’s court, being pressurised for quotes, and then misquoted, with school friends being bribed for information and photos of the deceased. Sometimes the first time that the bereaved family had ever seen a photograph was when it appeared in the local paper. The Press Complaints Commission code of conduct has been in place since 2008, but it was only after the events that I referred to that the editors’ code was tightened, indeed to good effect. The press cannot now disclose the method. This has improved the situation. The press have not reported on subsequent suicides, of which more than 80 per cent are linked, which further demonstrates the effect of social contagion. A complaint against the Reading Chronicle was recently upheld, which was a welcome decision. The public interest was not served by gratuitous details, even though they might have sold papers. The bereaved need privacy. Issues around reporting were considered in 2007 by the Family Division. The court upheld that coroners’ inquests are court proceedings. Section 39 of the Children and Young Persons Act 1933 safeguards children and, if it were properly interpreted, would give children privacy in death, as well providing privacy for those appearing as witnesses. Why is privacy important? It is because other children have to cope with questions back at school and in the community, and the inquest may occur some time after the death. The inquest lays bare raw wounds that a family have begun to live with, abruptly taking them back in their grieving. For some, the inquest does not herald the closure that they hope for. If afforded privacy, the family can go to the press if they want to; and many do because they want to expose dangers, such as those of carbon monoxide poisoning. However, they need to be afforded some control in their grief. In the 10 years up to 2008, more than 37,000 deaths were recorded as suicides in England and Wales, and more than 27,000 with an open verdict. Compare that to the figure of 100 quoted earlier as regards people who have gone to Switzerland. Many of the deaths recorded as open verdicts were actually suicides, but some coroners seem to avoid the term "suicide", perhaps because of stigmatisation; but without consistent reporting, we will never get a true picture. It is essential that deaths are classified, using the World Health Organisation’s international classification codes to provide consistency in verdicts. Deaths can then be centrally collated by the Chief Coroner’s office to reveal trends and clusters of any type—not just suicides—where there is a problem. Any cluster of deaths could then be identified early. Independent research must be encouraged, to provide scrutiny and detect inconsistency. I welcome the Minister’s opening statements about assisted suicide, and I agree that we should not use this Bill as a Trojan horse to try to revisit the issues that were looked at during three of the Bills of the noble Lord, Lord Joffe. I should simply and respectfully correct the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer of Thoroton, in that the unit called Dignitas is not a clinic; it has no therapeutic intervention whatever; it is, quite simply, a suicide service, probably for commercial gain. How do you actually provide immunity for those travelling abroad? How do you detect coercion—subtle coercion—whether internal or external? I will not discuss safeguards further, but I am sure that we will revisit those matters. In the mean time, I simply welcome the Minister’s statement and I welcome this reform of the coroner system. Some responsible websites are moderated—they have pop-ups from the Samaritans—but others are dangerous. They are already illegal in Australia, and the Byron report recommended that we do the same. The Government are to be commended on picking up those recommendations. Policing such websites is terribly hard, but it can be done. From 1997 to 2008, the Internet Watch Foundation achieved a 17 per cent fall in child pornography sites through monitoring. I am glad that the Government have included in the Bill provisions on pseudo-photography of children. That inclusion is essential for this work, as some really disturbing images are emerging, particularly out of Japan. Inquests into tragic events, wherever they are, need to be conducted near people’s homes, so that distressed families do not have to travel. That is to be welcomed. The family must be in control of what is supplied to the media. The Bill and the Explanatory Notes do not go far enough. The press intrusion in Bridgend was terrible. Families describe having to fight their way past reporters to get into the coroner’s court, being pressurised for quotes, and then misquoted, with school friends being bribed for information and photos of the deceased. Sometimes the first time that the bereaved family had ever seen a photograph was when it appeared in the local paper. The press complaints code of conduct has been in place since 2008, but it was only after the events that I referred to that the editors’ code was tightened, indeed to good effect. The press cannot now disclose the method. This has improved the situation. The press has not reported on subsequent suicides, of which more than 80 per cent are linked, which further demonstrates the effect of social contagion. A complaint against the Reading Chronicle was recently upheld, which was a welcome decision. The public interest was not served by gratuitous details, even though they might have sold papers. The bereaved need privacy. Issues around reporting were considered in 2007 by the Family Division. The court upheld that coroners’ inquests are court proceedings. The Children and Young Persons Act 1933 in Section 39 safeguards children and, if it were properly interpreted, would give children privacy in death, as well providing privacy for those appearing as witnesses. Why is privacy important? It is because other children have to cope with questions back at school and in the community, and the inquest may occur some time after the death. The inquest lays bare raw wounds that a family have begun to live with, abruptly taking them back in their grieving. For some, the inquest does not herald the closure that they hope for. If afforded privacy, the family can go to the press if they want to; and many do because they want to expose dangers, such as those of carbon monoxide poisoning. However, they need to be afforded some control in their grief. In the 10 years up to 2008, more than 37,000 deaths were recorded as suicides in England and Wales, and more than 27,000 with an open verdict. Compare that to the figure of 100 quoted earlier as regards people who have gone to Switzerland. Many of the deaths recorded as open verdicts were actually suicides, but some coroners seem to avoid the term "suicide", perhaps because of stigmatisation; but without consistent reporting, we will never get a true picture. It is essential that deaths are classified, using the World Health Organisation’s international classification codes to provided consistency in verdicts. Deaths can then be centrally collated by the Chief Coroner’s office to reveal trends and clusters of any type—not just suicides—where there is a problem. Any cluster of deaths could then be identified early. Independent research must be encouraged, to provide scrutiny and detect inconsistency. I welcome the Minister’s opening statements about assisted suicide, and I agree that we should not use this Bill as a Trojan horse to try to revisit the issues that were looked at during three of the Bills of the noble Lord, Lord Joffe. I should simply and respectfully correct the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer of Thoroton, in that the unit called Dignitas is not a clinic; it has no therapeutic intervention whatever; it is, quite simply, a suicide service, probably for commercial gain. How do you actually provide immunity for those travelling abroad? How do you detect coercion—subtle coercion—whether internal or external? I will not discuss safeguards further, but I am sure that we will revisit those matters. In the mean time, I simply welcome the Minister’s statement and I welcome this reform of the coroners’ system.