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Coroners’ System and Death Certification

I totally agree, but, alas, what is proposed will not achieve that. The attitude of the Durham coroner was such that he would not necessarily have conducted an inquest into my constituent’s case if he had not had to. Christopher’s family—like most families to whom I have spoken after they have lost someone—just want answers. They do not want vengeance. The family have never been concerned with compensation, although they are now pursuing a private compensation order in Greece. They just want answers to questions: what happened and how did the person die? That is the core of what the service should be about: getting answers for the next of kin about how people died, and learning lessons from avoidable accidents. I ask the Government to reconsider the clause. I must declare an interest in making my final point, as the chair of the all-party group on cardiac risk in the young. It is about consistency of coroners’ findings and the usefulness of pooling the verdicts given by the coroner service. Cardiac Risk in the Young estimates that eight young people die every week of unexplained cardiac arrhythmia. Fit, healthy young men and women die playing sport, drowned or simply in their sleep. More often than not the deaths are put down to drowning, or are left unexplained. How the deaths happened is not examined. Expertise in dealing with such cases varies around the country. The real importance of identifying sudden cardiac death is that it makes the condition treatable for other family members. Not only are answers provided for the families, but it becomes possible to ensure that the young person’s siblings, and other family members, are checked for what is often a hereditary condition. With the best will in the world, with the current pressures on the coroner service—certainly financially—it is difficult to build up the necessary level of expertise. That is why I am pleased that, as a charity, CRY is investing £300,000 in coroners’ referrals to an expert cardiologist to try to build up that expertise and assist the coroner service in identifying why sudden cardiac death occurs. If we could build up a body of evidence that showed how many people die each week from that disease, it would, as the right hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed said, put pressure on the health service and others to take it seriously. Cardiac Risk in the Young is doing a great job in highlighting that tragic disease, but without the statistics and the force of coroners and medical professionals, I do not think that a great deal will be done about it. We are part way through the process, we are scrutinising the Bill, and the Government must take seriously the report and today’s debate to reframe it before it becomes an Act. If, as the right hon. Gentleman said, the issue is about limited resources, I am sorry but that is not acceptable in a modern society. If the issue is about money, money must be found to create a system of which we can be proud and which supports coroners. They are very good professionals who do a hell of a hard job in very difficult circumstances.