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Coroners and Justice Bill

That is a very important point, and I hope that the Government and the usual channels are listening. Let us turn to subject of secret inquests without juries. My starting point is that the Bill is already somewhat defective as it fails to guarantee that there will be a jury in any case where there is reason to suspect that the death occurred in any way at the hands of the state. Provisions in the Bill move in that direction, but they do not go far enough. Deaths at the hands of the police and in custody count, but a jury should be required in any case of any death in which state power is implicated. My starting point is therefore with the jury rather than with secrecy. There are problems with secrecy and privacy—it is important to recall the points raised by the hon. Member for Hendon (Mr. Dismore), such as the question of how a family will get closure if it is excluded from the process—but the jury is at the heart of the question. The main historic function of the inquest jury is to provide a check on the abuse of state power and on the temptations for state officials to mislead and to gloss over the facts about what has happened. The Secretary of State's defence of the provisions on secret inquests did not go to the heart of the problem about juries. In my view, the Government appear to think that juries are not to be trusted—that juries are members of the general public and that we need to have as few of them taking part in the process as possible. That seems to me to be entirely the opposite of the attitude that we should be taking. Instead, we should be looking for ways in which juries can take part in even the most sensitive cases. As the hon. and learned Member for Beaconsfield (Mr. Grieve) said, if there is a limit to how sensitive the information might be, we can deal with that by excluding some of it from the information made available to the juries. Our initial reaction should not be that the best thing to do is to get rid of the jury. Such matters are very important in a range of cases. They are not merely important in the politically embarrassing cases, although they are important in those cases, too: in the de Menezes case, the Baha Mousa case, the inquests into the deaths of soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan and any repeat of the David Kelly affair. It is enormously important from the point of view of maintaining faith in the system that when the Government assert in such a case that nothing really went wrong, they should be able to say, even if all the facts do not come out in public, that the matter was decided by independent members of the public who were not part of the state or of the Government apparatus and that those people back up what the Government say. I admit that the provisions in this Bill are better than those in the Bill that became the Counter-Terrorism Act 2008. Thankfully, the provisions in that measure that allow the Secretary of State to influence the selection of a special, trusty coroner have been removed from this Bill. I hope that whoever advised the Government to include those outrageous provisions will never again be allowed to advise them on a matter of constitutional importance, but we are still left with inquests that are not just secret but jury-less. The conditions under which the Secretary of State may issue a certificate that bans or removes the jury from a case are still the enormously wide ones contained in the Counter-Terrorism Act 2008. They include anything to do not just with national security but with relations with another state, and anything that the Secretary of State thinks might cause real harm to the public interest. I suppose that one might wonder what unreal harm to the public interest might be but, even so, the conditions seem extraordinarily broad