Coroner reform 'missed opportunity'

Plans to reform the way deaths are certified and investigated have been slammed as a missed opportunity by MPs.

The Commons' all-party Constitutional Affairs Select Committee said the question of how to avoid a repeat of the Harold Shipman serial killer scandal had been left "unsolved" by ministers' plans.

Proposals published by the Government in 2004 had gone some way to devising a system which could prevent doctors covering up crimes, it said. But a draft Bill published last month by constitutional affairs minister Harriet Harman dropped some of the vital reforms, it said.

"It is disappointing that the Government has retreated from its 2004 proposals, leaving out much of what was good," the committee said.

As a result, the plans were merely "tinkering at the edges" of a system which had "critical defects", and the Government risked wasting a "golden opportunity" to improve the set-up, the MPs suggested.

The draft Bill includes plans to reform the coroners' system in England and Wales, including the creation of the new post of chief coroner.

However, earlier proposals to update the death certification system - by ensuring that all death certificates were scrutinised by a medical examiner in the coroner's office - meant that loopholes would still exist, the committee said.

Ms Harman came in for particular criticism, with the MPs saying she was "unclear" in evidence to them. Her claim that the package was a "good set of proposals" was also contradicted by the committee, which reported: "The evidence we have received is overwhelmingly to the contrary."

The senior judge who investigated the Shipman killings, Dame Janet Smith, told the committee in February that the reforms proposed in the Bill meant "there could still be a Shipman out there killing patients".

The committee urged the Government to reintroduce reform of death certification and ensure coroners were supported with sufficient resources to do the job.