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Coroners and Justice Bill

Ever since the underground fire in King's Cross station in my constituency in the 1980s, I have been pressing—first as an Opposition Member, then as a member of the Government and now as a Government Back Bencher—for reform of the coroners' system. Generally speaking, it is unsatisfactory, so I welcome most of the provisions in the Bill. It seems to me, however, that the coroner provisions are ruined by the proposition to hold what will effectively be secret inquests. I do not believe that my right hon. and hon. Friends on the Front Bench are wicked or sinister, and I recognise that they have to balance security and individual liberty, but I think that they are getting the balance wrong. I say that particularly at this time when they have quite rightly talked about rebalancing the criminal justice system in favour of victims and relatives. The secret inquests proposal is a rebalancing in the wrong direction, because inquests are all about victims and their relatives—they are the reason for the inquest system. If someone has been done to death, the truth needs to be brought out, victims' relatives and friends are entitled to know what happened, the public are entitled to have confidence in our system, and lessons are supposed to be learned. The proposition is that a Minister would certify that a normal inquest could be prejudicial to national security, to relations with another state—that is the bizarre one—to the prevention and detection of crime, and to the prevention of threats to jurors or witnesses. However, even under the amended system—I welcome the changes, compared with the original proposal—the Minister will go to a judge, and I do not know whether a single case can be quoted in which a judge has not accepted the Executive's statement that national security was at risk.