Faith leaders meet Michael Gove over London coroner service concerns

Jewish and Muslim community leaders met Justice Secretary Michael Gove on Tuesday to discuss concerns over the coroner service in London.

Unnecessary post-mortem rulings from a senior coroner for Inner North London, Mary Hassell, have in recent months upset religious members of both communities, with delegates expressing frustration.

Leaders have also clashed over the scrapping of weekends and out-of-hours services, which has meant burials being delayed.

Rabbi Asher Gratt of the Adath Yisroel Burial Society said: “People of the Muslim and Jewish faiths are highly traumatised by the delay of a funeral. Their pain is often worse than the pain of the death itself.”

He added: “Their trauma can be compared by way of analogy to the anguish of relatives of victims of an air crash waiting for the retrieval of their body.”