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Coroners and Justice Bill

The hon. Member for Bolton, South-East (Dr. Iddon) spoke a great deal of sense. I shall return to his speech in a moment, largely to agree with him, but to differ in detail with regard to suicide websites. He was right to say that the Bill is gigantic. It is a Christmas tree of a Bill, a sweepings off the factory floor of a Bill, a hotch-potch of a Bill. There are all sorts of things in it, and the notion that in a Second Reading debate one could speak in favour or against the principle of the Bill is nonsensical, because there is no such thing as a principle in the Bill as a whole. It is a mixture of good things and bad things. I strongly agree with the hon. Member for Stafford (Mr. Kidney) that it would have been better if we were dealing only with a Coroners Bill. For the sake of brevity I shall not address myself to some of the more controversial issues, although I agree with the remarks of a number of my right hon. and hon. Friends and others across the Chamber, particularly on the transfer of data. My hon. and learned Friend the Member for Torridge and West Devon (Mr. Cox) summed up what many people feel about that. It is a fundamental undermining of our rights as citizens, and extremely worrying. I hope we will oppose it in Committee and on Report and Third Reading. Equally, I shall not deal at length with the excessively emotional topic of freedom of speech and the way we are seeking to stop homophobic hatred. Of course we all want to stop homophobic hatred. At the same time, however, I have some sympathy with Rowan Atkinson and certain Christian groups, for example, who feel that unless the Waddington amendment remains in the original Bill, they will be prevented from doing and saying perfectly legitimate and sensible things that in no sense incite people to murder or commit violence against homosexuals or others. I very much sympathise with such views and, like the right hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Sir Alan Beith), I have seen no change since the original Act to suggest that we ought to amend it further now. I want to focus on two aspects of the Bill. The first—the question of military inquests—was expertly covered by the hon. Member for Blackpool, North and Fleetwood (Mrs. Humble). I entirely agree with her that the excellent coroner for Oxford and in particular the retiring coroner for Wiltshire, David Masters, have developed huge expertise due to the geographical accident that multiple inquests, when the bodies of a number of soldiers are repatriated to the United Kingdom, are carried out by the coroner in the place where the plane happens to land. At the moment, that place happens to be RAF Lyneham in my constituency. The two coroners have built up extraordinary expertise about military activities of one sort or another. The Bill makes no reference to military inquests, but it seems to me that it could go two ways. On the one hand, it would be possible, I suppose, to dissipate that expertise by saying that the inquest should be carried out in the places where the soldiers originally came from. That would be a legitimate line to take, and to some degree it is happening already: when a single body is repatriated to this country, the inquest is indeed carried out by the local coroner. My inclination, however, is to say that we should seek to maintain the expertise built up by those two coroners over the years and, in doing that, make sure that the council tax payers in Wiltshire and Oxfordshire are not disadvantaged by it. I welcome the extra resources that the Government have pumped into the Wiltshire coroner service in the past year or so. That must be continued if operations in Iraq and Afghanistan are to continue in years to come. If that huge burden is to be placed on the coroner in Wiltshire, resources have to follow it, and some formal structure has to be put in place to make sure that that occurs. Equally, it would be wrong if civilian inquests in Wiltshire were delayed in any way because of the large number of military inquests. I also very much agree with the hon. Member for Blackpool, North and Fleetwood that on occasion it is important for there to be legal representation. In the case of the crash of Hercules XV179, it was strange that originally the only person who was to have legal representation on the state at the inquest was the Australian soldier killed in the flight; the Australian Government chose to pay for a barrister to represent him. Initially, the British Government refused to pay for such representation, although under pressure the Secretary of State made special provision and there was lead representation. If the Ministry of Defence is to have legal representation defending its position in the inquest, surely it is only right that the families of the soldiers involved should have equal representation, and that that should be paid for by legal aid. I hope that the Bill will be able to address that imbalance in respect of legal representation at military inquests. The right hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed argued that I had got the third aspect of military inquests slightly wrong. I am concerned about the possible secrecy of inquests. It appears that the provisions of the Bill are intended to make sure that grave, secret cases affecting the national interest could be heard in secret. There will, of course, be occasions when that is worth doing. However, we are concerned that when there was implicit criticism of the state—as in two or three of the Oxfordshire coroner's recent inquests, for example—the state would somehow or other seek to keep it quiet. It would not want criticism of military defence or the military in general and would seek to use the national interest as an excuse for making the inquest secret. Such inquests, and others—those into prison deaths, for example—involve exactly the kind of cases in which the public have a right to know what went wrong. The state should overcome its natural inclination to keep that kind of inquest secret, and ensure that it does not do so. The Secretary of State might like to think about ways of narrowing the definition of secret inquests. The right hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed reckons that these fears are misplaced; if so, let us see a narrowing of the parameters so that the secrecy aspect of inquests can apply only to a very few. The whole question of military inquests is worthy of further development in the Bill. The second subject that concerns me greatly is suicide. I am pleased to serve on the all-party group on suicide prevention and to have a close relationship with the organisation Papyrus, which represents the parents of the 38 people so far who have committed suicide using the disgraceful sites on the web, which really are extraordinarily bad. This afternoon, I googled ““How to kill yourself””, and the sort of stuff that came tumbling out was simply appalling, describing how to tie the piano wire around one's neck and how it is better to shoot or poison oneself in a river because one stands a better chance of success. Some of these sites not only describe how to do it but encourage people to do it, saying, ““Oh, you're a bit depressed, well here's how to end it all.”” They are absolutely disgraceful. In a civilised society such as ours we cannot allow that to continue, and there was a debate about how to set about the task in a meeting of the all-party group the other day. The hon. Member for Bolton, South-East correctly said that the Samaritans, among others, have reservations, because banning anything with the word ““suicide”” in it would by definition ban the Samaritans site, which we cannot do. However, it should not be all that difficult to analyse the dozen or 20 really wicked, vicious, nasty sites and find ways of banning them and having them taken down. The excellent report recently commissioned by the Government agreed that that was a worthwhile thing to try to do. Australia and Japan have, with greater or lesser degrees of success, found ways of achieving exactly that. One of the problems with the clauses regarding internet-assisted suicide is that most of the sites come from overseas. It is fine to outlaw people who write these sites and threaten them with a 14-year prison sentence when they are based in the UK, but most of them are from elsewhere. The Government should consider whether extradition might be possible for some of these people. I put that forward as an idea; I am by no means recommending it. When people around the world are sending material into the UK designed to encourage our teenagers to kill themselves, surely there is an argument to say that we could enter into discussions with other nation states about possible extradition treaties so that these wicked people could be brought to justice here, even if writing such sites is not a crime in their countries. I hope that the example of the Bill may be followed by some other countries around the world, including America and in the European Union, so that this might be increasingly an international crime. The other matter that the Bill needs to address is what we can do to allow and encourage the internet service providers to take these sites down, because at the moment it is extremely difficult for them to do that. The Bill makes no reference to ISPs. We should find a way of saying to them, ““These things are wicked; we as a nation and as a Parliament deplore them. If they were written in this country they would be outlawed and the people involved would go to prison for 14 years. We require you, as ISPs, to take them down, get them stopped, block them and finish them.”” I do not know how to do that because I do not know enough about computers, but they are a blot on our society and they must be dealt with.