Shabana Mahmood – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Home Office

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Shabana Mahmood on 2016-10-07.

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what assessment her Department has made of the implications for its policies of the conclusions and recommendations in the Hutton review of forensic pathology in England and Wales, submitted to the Minister of State for Crime and Prevention in March 2015.

Brandon Lewis

Since the completion of Professor Hutton’s review the Home Office Forensic Pathology Unit has been consulting with stakeholders on a range of options for implementing the Review’s recommendations. This includes an assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of various options to take forward the main recommendation of establishing a ‘National Death Investigation Service’.

Recommendations on the preferred option will be presented to Home Office Ministers in October 2016. In parallel, the Pathology Delivery Board, chaired by the Home Office, assessed all the recommendations and established a programme of work to address them individually. This programme has progressed to completion and is set to be formally signed-off at the next meeting of the Pathology Delivery Board, chaired by the Home Office, in November 2016.