Shabana Mahmood – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Ministry of Justice

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Shabana Mahmood on 2016-02-09.

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what the level of funding was for coroners in the coroner areas of (a) Birmingham and Solihull, (b) the Black Country and (c) Coventry in (i) 2009-10 and (ii) 2015-16; and what assessment he has made of the implications for such funding of trends in the number of cases dealt with by coroners between those two years.

Caroline Dinenage

The Ministry of Justice does not have operational responsibility for coroner services, as they are funded and run by local authorities. The level of funding for the Birmingham and Solihull, Black Country and Coventry coroner services is a matter for the relevant local authorities and the Ministry of Justice holds no information on this.

Statistics for deaths reported to coroners, including deaths in state detention and those subject to Deprivation of Liberty Safeguards, are published annually at https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/coroners-and-burials-statistics.

We do not have information on the number of deaths in state detention reported to coroners in 2010 as this information has only been gathered centrally since 2012. The statistics for 2015 will be published in due course.

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