---

Coroners and Justice Bill

A number of Members have raised that issue as well as my hon. Friend. We will reflect on it and we will look to see what we can do to give bereaved families more support when they find themselves at inquests. At the moment, they have very good personal support in many areas from some of the coroners' officers and so on, but I know that hon. Members want us to go further than that. We recognise the issue that has been identified in terms of private inquests, and I am glad that other hon. Members recognise the problem that we face. The right hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Sir Alan Beith), in particular, described those difficulties in a very reasoned way. We will welcome constructive dialogue on that subject. If hon. Members have suggestions about how we can make that section of the Bill better, we will be happy to look at the provisions again. There are very few occasions when a coroner's investigation will involve highly sensitive information, for example, intercept evidence or the identity of a human intelligence source that simply cannot be made public. As my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State said, inquests are unlike criminal trials as one cannot decide not to proceed with an inquest. We have to go ahead with an inquest and so we have to find a way to deal with the problem posed by such information properly and sensitively. We have made significant changes to the original proposals and I hope that in reflecting on what we can do to make the provisions better, colleagues will recognise that we have moved some distance from the proposals in the Counter-Terrorism Bill. We have also made it explicit in the Bill that all other ways of enabling an inquest to be held in public have to be considered fully before the PII certificate is considered. If that is not possible, we have tied in the criteria for triggering the certification and placed a duty on the Secretary of State to notify interested parties of the certification decision so that they can lodge an application for judicial review. There are already important safeguards. The hon. Member for Cambridge (David Howarth) said that the Bill was made up of red rags and contraband—I rather liked the images that he conjured up. On the ““red rag”” provisions, he asked when the jury would be called. If he looks at clause 7, he will see that there are specific situations where juries would have to be called. We are open to discussion about how best to cover the arrangements for what most Members agree are difficult issues regarding sensitive material. Families would be excluded from the inquest only at the points when that sensitive material was being discussed. They would be present for every other part of the inquest. My right hon. Friend the Member for Knowsley, North and Sefton, East (Mr. Howarth) made a moving speech about the victims of Hillsborough. He rightly highlighted the distress and offence that has been caused to bereaved families. Under these reforms, an inquest would almost certainly be held under article 2 conditions. In future, the chief coroner will maintain links with prosecuting authorities, including the Crown Prosecution Service and the Director of Public Prosecutions, to ensure that investigations into large scale disasters progress as quickly as possible.