This factsheet is for anyone who is unhappy with coroner services and who may be considering making a complaint about them.

The Role of coroners and their officers

A coroner is an independent judicial office holder. The local authority (council) selects, appoints, and funds the coroners for its area, sometimes jointly with other council areas.

There may be a Senior Coroner, Area Coroners and Assistant Coroners, especially in larger or joint council areas.  By law the council also provides staff and accommodation unless they are provided by the local police service.

The role of a coroner is to investigate unexplained deaths and to hold an inquest when necessary to decide how a person died. A coroner may also hold an inquest into a find of ‘treasure’ in the coroner’s area. There is more information about the role at Coroners - Courts and Tribunals Judiciary.

How do I complain?

• You should normally complain to the council first. Councils often have more than one stage in their complaints procedure and you will usually have to complete all stages before we will look at your complaint.
• Then, if you are unhappy with the final outcome, or the council is taking too long to look into the matter – we think 12 weeks is reasonable – you can complain to us.
• Usually, you should complain to us within 12 months of when you first knew about the problem. If you leave it any later, we may not be able to help.

Can you investigate my complaint about the Coroner?

In almost all cases, no. By law coroners, their officers and their support staff carry out coroner functions, not council ones, so we cannot investigate them.

We can consider complaints about the local council’s role in appointing coroners, paying their salaries fees and expenses, and providing staff and accommodation which is not provided by the local policing body.

It is unlikely these actions could result in a significant injustice to someone who could complain to us about it. As we will only investigate complaints meeting the tests in our Assessment Code we would be unlikely to investigate in most cases of this type.

The Ministry of Justice has published a short Guide to coroner services which says:

• The Judicial Conduct Investigations Office handles complaints about the conduct of a coroner
• The coroner’s service and the local council consider complaints about coroner administration or not meeting the service standards in the Guide
• The Ombudsman can investigate how the council handles a complaint about coroner services.

We will consider each case separately but may decide not to investigate a council’s handling of a coroner services complaint. This is because we do not usually look at complaint handling if we cannot investigate the matter which led to the complaint. In most cases the handling of a complaint alone does not cause separate injustice which would be significant enough to warrant our involvement.

Example of a complaint we have considered

Our fact sheets give some general information about the most common type of complaints we receive but they cannot cover every situation. If you are not sure whether we can look into your complaint, please phone 0300 061 0614.

August 2024