Examination of Witnesses (Questions 238-239)
RT HON
HARRIET HARMAN
QC
27 JUNE 2006
Q238 Keith Vaz: Minister, can I warmly
welcome you to your first session before this Select Committee.
Minister, this Committee has been asked to carry out pre-legislative
scrutiny of the draft Coroners' Bill, as you know. You subsequently
announced what you have termed as "pre-legislative scrutiny"
by a panel of recently bereaved people to be held at Westminster.
What is the status of your proposed consultation exercise?
Ms Harman: I think that we would
all agree, would we not, that we need to get more of a sense of
the public involved in the parliamentary process. I think we would
all agree that we want to be absolutely sure that any Bills we
bring forward actually meet the objectives which we say that we
intend to have. Also, that anything that government is doing should,
as far as possible, be shared with the legislature, so that there
should be as much sharing as possible between the knowledge and
information which the Executive has, and that we should share
that with the legislature. So what we are planning to do is, having
undertaken a general quantitative survey of people with recent
experience of the inquest system, we would then get the general
spread of views in terms of people's experience being positive,
negative or neutral, and we would then have a panel of something
like 12 people and they would be able to go through the Bill here
in the Palace of Westminster, or possibly at Portcullis House,
and the idea would be that Members of this House, and Peers—many
of us do not have in our constituency surgery that much direct
practical feedback from people with recent experience of the coroners'
system—if people wanted to involve themselves in the second
reading debate and they wanted to hear from a group of people
who had recent experience who were actually going through the
Bill saying which bits of them they thought would or would not
help, but then the idea was that it was to assist the parliamentary
debate so it would be before the second reading.
Q239 Keith Vaz: But as the panel
will not meet until after the Bill is in its final form for presentation
to Parliament, in what way will it represent pre-legislative scrutiny?
Why are you creating a parallel form of scrutiny when the Select
Committee is already reviewing the legislation?
Ms Harman: I do not think it is
parallel, I would say it is additional. I think that the question
about whether or not it is the right time to do it, I think that
if you have a Bill, which we have tried to do, translated into
plain English it is not wrong at that stage, when the Bill is
still in draft, to ask people to look at the actual measures in
the Bill rather than to have a general discussion, "Let us
see whether that works."
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