Coroner asks for £210k in extra funding

The service in Staffordshire costs taxpayers £2.3m a year (generic image)

A coroner has asked for £210,000 in extra funding, following increasingly complex cases and requests for more detailed investigations from families.

Senior coroner for Staffordshire and Stoke-on-Trent Andrew Barkley said the county had a record number of cases where people were waiting at least a year to find out why loved ones died.

A service of three full-time coroners and seven assistant coroners is paid for by Stoke-on-Trent City Council and Staffordshire County Council, costing taxpayers £2.3m a year.

Mr Barkley has made the case for a full-time area coroner, costing £182,000 annually, and a £28,000 part-time personal assistant, to councillors on the coroners joint committee.

He said while the rise in inquest complexity was a national trend, Staffordshire was particularly affected by the issue of deaths in custody, with eight prisons, and the presence of a regional trauma centre at the Royal Stoke University Hospital.

The coroner said the number of cases "being referred in hasn’t radically changed", but the "sheer complexity we're dealing with" had changed "beyond recognition".

He added: "We're dealing with far more elderly patients, far more technical medical deaths, we're dealing with families who are far less accepting of a service, which may have been acceptable five or 10 years ago."

'Very real concerns'

Mr Barkley said it was not unusual to walk into an inquest that was previously done in half-an-hour to an hour "and has now turned into a two-day hearing".

"That’s because the family has very real concerns over the care their loved one received, and the failings that they believe contributed to the death," he said.

The coroner said with prison deaths, even if they were due to natural causes, it was quite common to face families who were legally represented by experienced, specialist counsel.

The joint committee agreed to ask officers to prepare business cases for the two posts, with the final decision on funding them to be taken at a later date.

Committee vice-chair Victoria Wilson said while she understood issues faced by the coroners service, councillors had to be certain the extra spending was justified.

This news was gathered by the Local Democracy Reporting Service which covers councils and other public service organisations.