---

Coroners and Justice Bill

I take on board the hon. Gentleman's point, and that is why there must be swift and effective action if there are breaches. However, that action should not be too swift or else the early stages will not be passed, but it should be understood that failure to undertake a community sentence will be acted on very quickly. As with antisocial behaviour orders, the point is to say to people, ““If you accept that you ought to stop that sort of behaviour and that you should do what the court has asked of you in passing sentence, then the consequence will be rehabilitation and support for re-engagement in the community, but if you don't, the deal is off.”” That has to be a part of the deal, and it has to be seen by the public as being so. My main point is that our focus must be on what works. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State has seen what happened in Cardiff when a clinical approach was taken and it was asked, ““Where does violence happen? Are there facts about the incidence of violence that mean that we can intervene to reduce that offending and therefore reduce the likelihood of becoming victims?”” That approach has been a great success, and has been taken up elsewhere. The media will always go for the frightening and the specific. We will always see on the front pages of newspapers the faces of people who have been beaten up, and there will always be incidents of that. That is a fact of life and I do not blame the media for reporting that; horrific incidents are horrific. However, what we can do is seek to reduce crime rates by adopting a clinical approach and reducing the opportunity for crime, rehabilitating people and challenging their behaviour in the community, so that it is not a question of their going away and coming back into the same environment, but a question of changing their behaviour over time. The sentencing council must be not a comfortable lawyers' club, but an evidence-based body that helps sentencers do the right thing in preventing reoffending. I bear in mind the evidence we heard from Victim Support. The question was asked, ““In a sentence, what do victims want?”” The answer that was given was, ““Short of being able to turn the clock back and not be a victim of an offence in the first place, what victims would like to know is that it is not going to happen again.”” Therefore, the prevention of reoffending is not an alternative to supporting victims; it is, in fact, at the heart of supporting them. Witness anonymity is an issue that requires great care. I appreciate the risks involved in that process, but intimidation and fear are very real factors that undermine justice. Many Members have had the experience of people coming to them and describing a series of events in their street or neighbourhood where a small number of individuals are able to get away with incidents of intimidation and cannot be brought to justice. Therefore, there is a need for the provisions on witness anonymity to be strengthened, albeit with care. There is also a great need to address internet-related crime and nuisance, to which my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State referred at the end of his remarks. It is, I think, easy to agree on the actions that are needed to prevent child abuse, although it was not easy in the early stages to get agreement between the police and the internet industry on ways of preventing the display of what were incidences of child abuse—not just pornography, but much more serious than that. There is a great need for a joined-up approach across Government Departments, where there is a great deal of duplication, in order to create a partnership right down to the local level to prevent internet-related crime and make the UK the safest place to do business online. A lot of work is going on, to which Parliament is contributing a great deal, such as through all-party groups in particular, and I commend those examples to my right hon. Friend. I wish to highlight two points on coroners. One is the issue of resources. There is a need for adequate resources, but also for the capacity to move them to the right place at the right time. In the proposals before us, my right hon. Friend is grappling with the eternal dilemma of how to strike the balance between the national and local. It was suggested at one stage that if Nye Bevan had become Secretary of State for Education and Ellen Wilkinson had been Secretary of State for Health, we would have ended up with a local health service and a national education service. In both those services, the tension between the national and the local always exists. That tension is inevitable in relation to coroners. There are not just the headline examples, which have been referred to in interventions, but very often there have been ordinary cases of people just wanting to know what happened and hoping that a coroner's inquiry will give them the answer. Our experience suggests that there is a need to amend the system in this regard. The second issue that I wish to discuss relates to health: the need to ensure the independence of medical evidence coming before the coroner's court. Again, all Members of Parliament will have had experience not only of NHS trusts that are good and open when things have gone wrong, but of NHS trusts that are defensive and that seek to avoid getting down to the facts in difficult cases. We need certainty that medical evidence will be objective and based only on medical professionalism. I hope that as this Bill goes through its processes my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State will find ways to increase the assurance about that independence of medical evidence, because I am sure he is as concerned as I am, and as the Committee has been, on that point. There is perhaps a need to re-examine that part of the Bill to ensure that objectivity can be built in. The Bill addresses some important issues. It deals not, as I first thought, with a series of small issues, but with some of the big issues in relation to improving our justice system. It does so not in terms of great symbolic gestures that change the earth, but by dealing with things such as the sharing of information and way in which sentencing is undertaken, where we do need progressively to find more objective, more evidence-based means of finding the right way forward.