Recommendation 21

HM Government Acknowledged

The Government acknowledges the calls for a national coroner service. However, it does not think that a single service would necessarily address the issues facing the coronial system or be the best solution. It does not accept this recommendation. Creating a national coroner service would represent a massive change project to bring 85 coroner services into a single service, entailing complex negotiations to bring staff with different salary ranges and job roles into a single entity. Indeed, many local authority staff who work on coroner issues have other roles within the authority, whilst police authorities employ many of coroner’s investigating officers. There would need to be negotiations on other issues such as on the ownership of coroner’s courts and offices. The project to bring 42 magistrates’ courts committees into HM Courts Service took a large team and significant resources over three years to implement. The cost of the creating a national coroner service could be disproportionate to the benefits it might bring. Nationalised organisations do not necessarily eliminate inconsistencies or postcode lotteries. Further, a national coroner service would only address the funding issues currently experienced by some coroner areas if its funding reflected the true costs of running the service; as the Committee heard, local authorities support many “hidden costs”. With increased pressures on public services, in particular as they recover from the impacts of the pandemic, there is no guarantee that funding levels would remain consistent to support a national coroner service. As a localised service, coroners are familiar with the particular characteristics of their area and use their expertise and knowledge to respond to the needs of local bereaved people. This might be the case, for example, where a coroner has a large faith community in their area. The Government accepts that there is still a need to address inconsistencies in the delivery of coroner services but it acknowledges the tremendous work of the previous Chief Coroners and present incumbent who have provided judicial leadership and guidance to coroners as well as regular and compulsory training, which has promoted significantly greater consistency of standards and practice in coroner services across England and Wales. As at recommendation 2 above, it is a long-standing central government and more recently Chief Coroner objective to merge coroner areas when the opportunity arises to improve consistency of coroner provision and standardise practice. The Chief Coroner’s Model Coroner Area blueprint (annexed to the then Chief Coroner’s Annual Report for 2018/19 and 2019/20) highlights the need for areas with a lower activity to merge, where appropriate, to lead to more jurisdictions of similar size and workload. This also helps to standardise processes and share best practices within the new area. Working with the local authorities concerned, the number of coroner areas has been reduced from 110 in 2012 to 85 coroner areas today. The aim is to reduce it further to around 75 coroner areas in England and Wales, each with between 3,000 and 5,000 deaths reported annually, when the opportunity presents itself, invariably when a Senior Coroner retires or resigns. The Ministry of Justice will continue to identify opportunities to work with local authorities to achieve this and notes that there a number of potential mergers in train.