ALMOST 300 grieving families in Staffordshire have been left waiting more than six months to find out why their loved ones died.
The coroner service for the county currently has a backlog of 281 cases which have gone over the six-month statutory time limit for an inquest, with 121 of these taking longer than a year.
Councillors have now agreed a £519,000 funding boost to help the service reduce the backlog and improve its ability to meet the current demand for inquests.
The money, which will come from Staffordshire County Council and Stoke-on-Trent City Council, will pay for the recruitment of new coroners and support staff.
Members of the joint coroners committee for the two councils put off making a decision on the funding request in June to allow time for a business case to be drawn up.
Councillors said they were now satisfied that a strong argument had been made for the extra funding.
Acting senior coroner Emma Serrano told the committee that the service had managed to reduce the backlog slightly in recent weeks by employing more assistant coroners, who are paid a daily rate, focusing on complex cases that had waited the longest, as well as ensuring that simpler, new cases are dealt with straight away.
But she said that this approach would not be sustainable in the long-term.
Ms Serrano said:
“If I keep dealing with matters in this way, listing 15 courts per week, the overspend would be more than we have budgeted for and I would be worried about the wellbeing of the staff who I’m asking a lot from. It wouldn’t be sustainable.”
The committee heard that the service is on course to overspend its budget for 2023-24 by £104,000, mostly due to the increased use of assistant coroners.
Mr Serrano explained that Staffordshire had more than its fair share of complex inquests requiring juries, partly due to the presence of eight prisons in the county – more than any other part of the country.
She said:
“Jury inquests are still our biggest issue. That’s where the backlog comes from.
“At the moment we have 27 prison inquests, and 15 of those need a jury. They can be anything from three days to two weeks.
“So when you consider the worst case scenario for 15 jury inquests, that’s 30 weeks of being in court.
“Other parts of the country might be comparable to us in the level of work we get from our prisons and other institutions. If we didn’t have that issue, I’m confident that the coronial spend we have would be enough.
“The problem is that the complexity of the work we have to do, it’s practically the equivalent of a full-time person.”
The funding request includes £175,900 of extra staffing for dealing with the backlog, along with another £343,100 for “business as usual”.
The county council will cover £334,800 of these costs, with the city council contributing £184,200.
Committee members asked for reassurance that the extra resource would achieve the desired results. Cllr Victoria Wilson said:
“It sounds like you’re doing incredible work with what you’ve got. I just wonder if we’re sitting here in a year’s time, what do you think you’ll be telling us, in terms of backlog, and retaining staff and so on?”
Ms Serrano said her target would be to reduce the backlog to the extent where only cases with legitimate reasons for delays would go over the statutory time limit.