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Coroners and Justice Bill

My Lords, I am extremely grateful to the Minister for his comments and in particular for replacing "may" with "must". I discussed the matter with the late Lord Kingsland and am aware of a frequently expressed concern. It is that in relation to Schedule 2 deaths, particularly those in custody, it takes some time to have an inquest. That frequently means that afterwards, when lessons learnt are discussed, it is alleged that during that passage of time the Prison Service may have introduced changes and that there is therefore no point in referring to a matter that took place, say, four years ago. Frequently, that is proved to be wrong because it is not always the case that the Prison Service has done what it says, or has imposed what it says ought to be in place. It would therefore seem incumbent on a coroner, irrespective of what the Prison Service might have done, to make his report and recommendations based on the incident itself because it is the incident which will be picked up by senior coroners, the Chief Coroner and ultimately in the reports made to the Lord Chancellor. Clause 32 states: ""The Lord Chancellor must publish each report given under this section and must lay a copy of it before each House of Parliament"," which is where Amendment 48 comes in, because I would like added to that the words, ""and take any action he or she considers appropriate in response to the report"." It may well be that in the body of the reports coming from senior coroners and the Chief Coroner are lessons learnt which should be imposed on the Prison Service, on the Police Service, on the Armed Forces or on special hospitals, through their various Secretaries of State. Therefore, the amendment is intended to refine the proposal in the Bill, rather than to propose anything new. The analysis referred to in Amendment 46 is, as I said, very much based on what we hope that coroners will report, so that all the lessons are learnt and there can be a general improvement in the systems which are subject to investigation. I therefore commend the amendment.