---

Coroners’ System and Death Certification

My hon. Friend makes an important point. The object of the Government’s reform ought to be to deal with such matters by doing what is done with the judiciary. If a judge is thought not to be the right person to deal with a case, perhaps because he does not have relevant experience or because he has interests that would make doing so inappropriate, another judge can be found; it is a national judiciary. There is no similar system with coroners’ jurisdiction. That is why Ministers have to send High Court judges and senior barristers to be deputy coroners in Oxfordshire. I refer not to the competence of the coroner in that case, but to the overwhelming nature of the task with which he was faced. There is no central system by which to move coroners around to deal with particular cases. Neither the Minister nor anyone else has the power to do that. There are perhaps two aspects to this issue. I have talked about removing a coroner from office on the grounds of misconduct or unsuitability, which should be difficult, but a national system should be able to fit a coroner to a particularly difficult case and deal with someone who is not capable of handling a certain level of case. I have concerns about the proposed system. I want to give a very different illustration of the pressures caused by the current system. In rural areas, in my part of the country, it is common for the police officer who happens to be on duty when and where a death occurs to assume the role of coroner’s officer for that case, but it is not certain that chief constables will always be ready to agree to such an ad hoc arrangement. Neither is it certain that the relevant officer has the necessary training to act as a coroner’s officer. He might simply be a local constable who was on duty when a death occurred. The complications of getting someone else to serve as the coroner’s officer have hitherto prevented any other solution.