Urgent reform has long been acknowledged by a government that has itself commissioned a raft of reports on the coroners' system.

In this year’s Queen’s Speech, the Government has proposed a Bill that combines the Coroners and Death Certification Bill and the Law Reform, Victims and Witnesses Bill. Thus reform of the inquest system will now be combined with yet more criminal justice legislation.

The new Bill is not due to be published until early next year but as well as introducing reforms to inquests it will also establish a sentencing council; provide for courts to grant Investigative witness anonymity orders in certain gun and knife crime cases; simplify the law on assisted suicide; and reform the law on homicide. Already the new Act has been described as a "Christmas tree" Bill with individual measures hung on it.

Precisely what will be included in relation to inquests remains uncertain. Some aspects are likely to be uncontroversial: such as the introduction of a chief coroner, an appeals system and a new death certification system of secondary certification of deaths that are not referred to the coroner, covering both burials and cremations. The Bill will also provide for coroners to have powers to secure evidence as well as a “charter for bereaved families”.

The needs of families of service personnel are specifically to be addressed. Most of those proposals had been incorporated within the previous draft Coroners' Bills and had attracted broad support, although there had been concern that unless adequate funding resources were made available along with the legislative changes then the new system would run aground.

Coroners have justly complained that they are the poor relation of an already impoverished court system and that they lacked critical resources - such as adequate court facilities and staffing - to do their job.

The Ministry of Justice has said that the Bill will also provide for Inquests, “few and far between, to be held in private if non-publicly disclosable material is relevant to proceedings”. It has thereby signalled that it is considering resurrecting its controversial plans for “secret inquests” that it dropped from the Counter Terrorism Bill.

Under the abandoned proposals, the Secretary of State would have been able to intervene in inquests concerning national security and international relations and direct that they should be heard by a specially approved coroner. In those cases the “special coroner” would not be permitted to sit with a jury. The Bill had also included a clause allowing intercept material to be used, although it could be disclosed only to the special coroner and to specially appointed counsel.

Originally it was proposed that the Secretary of State would appoint the “special coroner” but the Government backed down and agreed that the appointment could be made only by the Lord Chief Justice. Equally controversially, the Bill allowed for the Secretary of State to intervene in a case where the inquest would hear evidence that he considers should not be made public for the broadly defined reason that its disclosure would not be in the “public interest”. It was unclear what circumstances - national security or international relations already having been provided for - could properly justify such an intervention.

The proposals had been widely criticised. The Joint Parliamentary Committee on Human Rights had called for the proposals to be removed from the Bill. During a debate in the House of Lords on the Bill, Lord Lester of Herne Hill, QC, derided the plans as “an infernal cheek”.

Those criticisms notwithstanding there may well be legitimate concerns as to how the Inquest procedure can be adapted to balance proper national security concerns against the fundamental principle of open justice.

The current law provides for the coroner to exclude the public from part of an Inquest for national security reasons. Even if national security requires the public to be excluded how can a coroner ensure that a bereaved family’s rights, both at common law and under Article 2 of the European Convention, to participate effectively in the Inquest are protected in such circumstances?

An “in camera” hearing at which only families and lawyers are present may represent a pragmatic solution but may not be acceptable if the evidence is highly sensitive. The abandoned proposal to allow the use of intercept represented an advance in some respects - intercept material may not presently be used in an inquest at all - but that its contents could not be made known to a bereaved family obviously raises problems.

The Ministry of Justice has said that there will be an informal consultation on the “secret inquest” proposals before the draft Bill is introduced. Juries are involved in only about 2 per cent of all inquests. Whether the inclusion of these proposals that would affect only a small minority of - albeit important and highly publicised cases - will sabotage the chances of the rest of the Bill becoming law before the next election remains to be seen.

The author is a barrister at Matrix Chambers and is editor of the forthcoming Blackstone’s Guide to the Coroners and Justice Act

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