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Coroners and Justice Bill

I rise to support Government new clauses 33, 34 and 35. Today is a good day for service families. I will never forget 12 September 2006, the day on which a C17 Globemaster landed at RAF Kinloss in my constituency. It was repatriating 14 servicemen who had died aboard Nimrod XV230 some 10 days earlier in Afghanistan. It was a very moving ceremony for the families, all those who attended and everybody who worked at or had a connection with the station. Ten of the 14 personnel lived in Scotland, and most of them lived in Moray. However, not long after their return to RAF Kinloss, the bodies were flown back to RAF Brize Norton for the subsequent coroner's inquest in Oxford. The new clauses will rectify shortcomings that were vividly displayed by the experiences of families who lost loved ones aboard Nimrod XV230. Since 1968, the MOD has repatriated service personnel who died abroad, but in those 41 years no one has sought to rectify, or has succeeded in rectifying, the anomaly that sees the legal system of England and Wales play its part in explaining overseas military death while the Scots legal system does not. The consequence is that families already traumatised by the loss of a loved one have to travel hundreds of miles to attend coroner's inquest proceedings in Oxfordshire, Wiltshire or elsewhere, and suffer substantial delays caused by the backlog of cases.