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Counter-Terrorism Bill

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Miller, for the amendments. They are a valiant attempt to address the knotty problem of ensuring that coroners’ inquests can progress while protecting sensitive material from public disclosure. There has been considerable debate in this House and in the other place about the broad issues. Unfortunately, for reasons that I shall go into, Amendment No. 106B does not provide a solution to this most difficult of problems. It would enable a High Court judge sitting as a coroner to require disclosure of sensitive material where he is satisfied that exceptional circumstances exist that make disclosure essential to enable matters that are required to be ascertained by an inquest to be ascertained. Where this material is central to ascertaining the cause of death but there are national security concerns over its disclosure, he could not disclose it to the jury. However, it is the jury, not the coroner, who are the finders of fact in these coroners’ inquests; and as the noble Baroness, Lady Manningham-Buller, pointed out, the jury already has material in redacted form. So the amendment would still not enable inquests to be completed or provide any further material to the jury and interested parties that cannot already be made available to them, and indeed already is available to them. That redacted information, without the material about which there is a security concern, is provided to them. In view of the ongoing Chilcot review and the work we intend to do in the Coroners Bill, the points on pre-emption made by my noble friends Lord Robertson and Lord Harris are valid as well. However, in view of the point about redacted material and the question of what will be gained, this amendment would not achieve the right result—much as I wish that it did, as it would be very good to resolve the issue. The amendment tries to resolve it but does not. For those reasons, I ask the noble Baroness not to press her Amendments Nos. 106B and 133B.