But we held at least two Family Listening Days, and then there were other opportunities as well and I obviously had one or two previous occasions where I’d had the opportunity. And it was interesting looking at my colleagues on the Panel, that for some of them, this was a very new experience, because obviously you were getting a lot of raw emotion. I was very conscious of we were creating, or we were at risk of creating a high expectation that somehow we would solve all of these things that had really upset and depressed these families and while you don’t want to say, it’s going to make no difference whatsoever, whatever you say to us, the reality in the back of my mind is, you know, we’re going to have to work really hard to try and make any of these things different. But it just made it so clear, some of the failings and some of the problems, because you were hearing at first hand from people who’d seen it with their family member.
At all sorts of levels, I mean, you know, one of the images which stuck out for me, which is about the inquest hearings themselves, and I remember one family describing the very meagre facilities at the Coroner’s Court and that there was one little waiting room with, you know, a sofa and two chairs or something like that, and they said we’d arrive in the morning and we’d be going towards the waiting room, and then we’d hear behind us this sort of trundle of the wheelie suitcases of the lawyers, most of whom were, well, nearly all of whom were representing people who as far as they were concerned had killed their child, and it was almost a race to get to the room so that we could sit down and we were going to be in the same little waiting space as the lawyers for the people representing the people we regarded as being responsible for what had happened. And that really brought it home about how inadequate that mechanism is and that process. And there was also, you know, the sheer reminder that every single person involved in their child’s death or their relative’s death would be legally represented by the state, each with their separate representation, and they would be struggling to get any representation just to clarify information, what actually happened. And often they hadn’t had a lot of the basic information about what had happened until that moment. So that was one example of what you gained from it.
Again, the mechanics of people raising with us the difficulties of communicating concerns they might have about a relative in prison, the sheer mechanics that, you know, there’s one phone number, it doesn’t get answered or it’s an answerphone. What you’re trying to do is, I’m really, really worried, I’ve just had a call from them, they sound as though they’re absolutely desperate, something’s going to happen, and you can’t phone back, you can’t get through. The sheer logistics of telephone access within prisons in terms of prisoners phoning out and the phone cards which have to be programmed in with the numbers for reasons which one understands in terms of some prisoners, you know, you don’t want them phoning, you know, victims or something else of something they’ve been involved in, but they move from one institution to another and it’s a new phone card and there’s then a whole gap before they’re issued with a card which enables them to phone relatives. And that’s at a period when the change from one prison to another is a period of potentially high vulnerability. So again, it’s a problem which needed to be solved.
