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Christopher Traynor

I thank my hon. Friend for agreeing to meet the family. In my contribution to start this discussion, I made it absolutely clear that the coroner had written twice to the Foreign Office to express his extreme concerns about this issue. What is not clear is whether the Foreign Office did anything to take those forward. The reason why I raise that is that in the end the coroner has to rely on our posts abroad when dealing with deaths abroad. Therefore, it would be useful—certainly for the meeting if the Minister cannot do this now—to find out with some clarity whether those concerns, worries, indeed straightforward, simple allegations of failure in the investigation were simply filed away or were acted on. The reason why I ask him that is simple. His officials quite openly sent us a note showing that they had done a review of the file, and it stops dead in 2005, yet my hon. Friends and I have been in communication about this matter since then, including the fact that we asked for a meeting to be organised with Merseyside police and for the Foreign Office to offer its facilities to give Merseyside police a way of engaging with their counterparts in France. So it is not simply a matter of saying here, "The coroner works in this box; Merseyside police operate in that box." We need to get the boxes to work together, because without that, Christopher's death will remain a mystery and it is important that it does not. He was a human being. He was somebody's child—lonely, frustrated and concerned, as he had expressed days before he died. I therefore ask the Minister to think out of the box about what the Foreign Office is prepared to do in terms of resources to help us to get to the next stage, as outlined earlier.