Senior Coroner for Northamptonshire v Lovell and Teague [2024] EWHC 2331 (Admin) 30 July 2024. Judgment here

It is rare for the High Court to refuse an application by a Senior Coroner to overturn their own inquest. However in this case the judges were not persuaded that it was either necessary or desirable to make the order that the Coroner sought.

The case centred around two deaths in the same fatal road crash.   What the Coroner wished to correct was a single aspect of the determination she had arrived at in the car passenger’s inquest (relating to the amount of alcohol the driver had consumed), which the car driver’s subsequent inquest had revealed to be incorrect.

However the Court did not agree that a fresh investigation and inquest was necessary:  the consumption of alcohol had not been stated to be causative of the passenger’s death and in any event the existence of the High Court judgment alongside the driver’s Record of Inquest meant that the public record taken as a whole now clarified the true position.

It was also not desirable to hold a fresh inquest given the wishes of the parents of the deceased who did not relish the distress of the thought of a second inquest re-opening painful matters for them, and where holding yet another inquest also opened up the risk, however small, of yet further inconsistent findings relating to a single accident which had killed two young people.

University Hospitals Bristol and Weston NHS Foundation Trust v The Mother of G [2024] EWHC 1288 (Fam)

Generally coroners will not be involved in a case until the fact of death is clear (advance consultation in organ donation cases perhaps being the notable exception). But for those rare times when there may be a dispute about whether a death has or has not yet occurred, so as to trigger the coroner’s jurisdiction, Mr Justice Peel has provided helpful guidance on this area of law and how an application for a declaration of death might be made.

Parkin v HM Asst Coroner Inner London (East), and London Borough of Havering and North East London NHS Foundation Trust (interested parties) [2024] EWHC 744 (Admin)

In the context of Article 2, the State’s obligation to take appropriate steps to safeguard the lives of citizens is a constantly evolving jurisprudence. The categories of cases giving rise to the duty are not specifically defined and can never be regarded as closed.

However, as the Court has underlined many times, Article 2 cannot be interpreted as guaranteeing to every citizen an absolute level of security in any activity in which the right to life may be at stake, particularly when the person concerned bears a degree of responsibility for the events, having exposed himself or herself to danger.^[1]  

In this latest judicial review decision, the High Court has drawn a line in the sand by clarifying  that even where a public body is aware of a real and immediate risk to a person’s life and health and social care professionals have drawn up care plans  to ameliorate that risk, the Art.2 duty may still not arise.  Helping and supporting an individual, even in the discharge of a public body’s legal duties, does not routinely give rise to the operational Art 2 duty to protect life.   More is required than merely offering services to the person that might assist in ameliorating a known risk of death.

The key to when the Art 2 duty will arise remains the Rabone indicia which need to be considered in the specific factual context of the case.

HM Area Coroner for Cumbria v Leech [2023] EWHC 3476 (Admin)

In the wake of the Wandsworth decision (see our earlier blog post here) in which the High Court emphasised how correlation is not causation when dealing with a death from mesothelioma, those who read the above judgment from a s.13 application will be forgiven for scratching their heads wondering when,  if ever, a death from lung disease where there was a clear work history of asbestos exposure alongside asbestos fibres being found in the lungs at autopsy, might be safely considered to be a death from ‘industrial disease’.