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Public Bodies Bill [HL]

My Lords, as you might expect from these Benches, I should like to offer a pastoral word in support of the amendment. One of the recent features of the discourse around bereavement has been closure, and the number of times that people now say, ““All I want is closure””. There may be numerous reasons for that. It could be to do with the fact that we are now a society which is rather more distant from sudden and unexpected death than previous societies were, and therefore coping with those eventualities becomes that much more challenging. Closure becomes a significant dynamic in handling those kinds of bereavements. The need for closure could also relate to the culture of accountability in which we find ourselves, whereby people seem to need to be able to apportion not only a reason for why something happened, but perhaps a degree of blame and responsibility. That seems, rightly or wrongly, to be part of the culture of closure that matters to people these days. I also have to say, of course, that another reason could be due to the declining reliance on the consolations of religion at the time of death, and therefore the search for other consolations would include a clear sense of what happened, why and at whose hand. If the amendment can enable the office of the chief coroner to add another dimension to the potential for people in their bereavement and sorrow to feel a sense of justice being done and, therefore, achieve a degree of closure, on those pastoral grounds, if no other, the amendment deserves support.