As a freedom of information request, please provide the following data:
1. Total number of inquests opened and thus pending or completed in the year to end 31 December 2019 and 2023.
2. Number of inquests opened and thus pending or completed, split by how long they were open for (for instance, by less than a year, One year, two years, three years, four years, five years, over five years) for the years ending 2019 and 2023.
3. The longest delayed inquest for each year from 2019 to 2023.
Devon County Council does not hold this information.
Coroners are independent judicial officers appointed and paid for by the relevant local authorities who are responsible for investigating violent, unnatural deaths or sudden deaths of unknown cause and deaths in custody that are reported to them.
Coroners are not designated as public authorities under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 and therefore their records are not subject to the information access regime of this Act. There is a separate information access regime for such records over which the Commissioner has no jurisdiction.
We can however point you in the direction of the Coroner Statistical Tool at the following link Coroner Statistical Tool.
You can type in the jurisdictions you wish to check and find any year and compare them.