Andrew Barkley, the senior coroner for Staffordshire and Stoke-on-Trent, has requested £210,000 worth of extra funding to cover detailed investigations and complex cases.
The taxpayer currently pays £2.3 million per year to support three full-time coroners and seven assistants.
Specifically, Mr Barkley has said that the extra money would go towards paying for a full-time area coroner, which would cost £182,000, and a part-time personal assistant, which would cost £28,000.
Mr Barkley has expressed that the number of cases hasn’t changed but the “sheer complexity” of the cases has changed “beyond recognition”.
He has blamed this rise in complexity on the high volume of deaths in custody Staffordshire coroners handle, given that the county has eight prisons.
He also 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.”
Victoria Wilson, a Cabinet Member for Communities and Culture, has stated that extra spending was justified.
Experienced writer and journalist James McKean leads the daily editorial output at StaffsLive. To contact him, email news@staffslive.co.uk
