About Inquest Index

What is this?

Inquest Index is a free, independent service that helps you find an inquest. We collect inquest listings and inquest dates from coroner courts across England and Wales and make them searchable in one place.

There are 76 coroner areas in England and Wales, each with their own website. Hearing schedules are published in different formats — PDFs, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, HTML pages — with no central directory. This makes it unnecessarily difficult for families, journalists, researchers, and the public to find upcoming hearings.

This project exists to fix that. We collect the data daily and present it in a consistent, searchable format, always linking back to the official source.

Who runs this?

Inquest Index is an independent project with no commercial purpose and no affiliation with HM Courts & Tribunals Service, the Ministry of Justice, or any local authority.

The project is open to collaboration. If you work in journalism, law, or academia and would find this data useful in other formats, please get in touch.

Why does this matter?

Inquests are a critical part of the justice system. They determine the circumstances of deaths and can lead to Prevention of Future Deaths reports that save lives. Most inquests are open to the public, and public scrutiny helps ensure the coronial system works effectively.

Jury inquests, in particular, often involve deaths in state custody, police contact, or other circumstances requiring public oversight. Making these hearings easier to find supports transparency and accountability.

Data sources & methodology

We collect data directly from official coroner court websites operated by local authorities. For areas with machine-readable listings, we run automated scrapers daily at 6am. Lincolnshire and North East Lincolnshire are the exception: they share one directory that takes around a thousand requests to read, so we collect those weekly rather than daily to keep the load on the council's website reasonable. For other areas, the data requires manual collection or is not published online at all.

Some coroner areas do not classify their hearings by type (jury, conclusion, opening, etc.). Where type information is not provided by the source, we display it as “Hearing” rather than guessing.

This is not a comprehensive index. Even for areas we actively scrape, individual inquests may not appear here. Council websites vary in format and structure, and changes to those sites can cause our scrapers to miss listings without warning. Some inquests that are publicly listed on a council website may never appear on this site.

The local authority and coroner's court websites remain the definitive sources. Always verify directly with the relevant coroner's court before relying on this site for scheduling information.

Coverage

Of the 76 coroner areas in England and Wales, we currently collect automatically from 61. Automated collection does not guarantee completeness — individual inquests may be missed even in areas we actively scrape. If a hearing you expect to see is not listed here, check the official coroner court website directly.

13 areas are not collected here, listed in full below with the reason for each. Most of those coroners do publish their listings — the gap is at our end, and we have asked for access in each case.

61

Automated

0

Manual

15

Not collected

Areas we do not collect (13)

  • Buckinghamshire — Published in a dashboard we cannot read

    Buckinghamshire Council publishes its inquest lists inside an embedded Power BI dashboard rather than as a page or document, and we are not able to read them from it. We have asked whether the underlying data can be published too. The dashboard is linked below and is up to date.

  • Cornwall & Isles of Scilly — Published, but we cannot collect it

    Cornwall Council publishes its inquest listings, but the part of its website they sit on is excluded by the site’s robots.txt, which asks automated tools not to fetch it. We follow that, so we do not collect them, and we have asked whether an exception is possible. Hearings are going ahead as normal — please use the official listings below.

  • Greater Manchester North — Published, but we cannot collect it

    Rochdale Borough Council publishes its inquest listings, but the part of its website they sit on is excluded by the site’s robots.txt, which asks automated tools not to fetch it. We follow that, so we do not collect them, and we have asked whether an exception is possible. Hearings are going ahead as normal — please use the official listings below.

  • Hertfordshire — Published, but we cannot collect it

    Hertfordshire County Council publishes its inquest listings, but the part of its website they sit on is excluded by the site’s robots.txt, which asks automated tools not to fetch it. We follow that, so we do not collect them, and we have asked whether an exception is possible. Hearings are going ahead as normal — please use the official listings below.

  • Inner North London — Published, but we cannot collect it

    Camden Council publishes its inquest listings, but its website blocks automated access, so we are not able to collect them. We have asked for access. Hearings are going ahead as normal — please use the official listings below.

  • Isle of Wight — Off while the council rebuilds its site

    The Isle of Wight Council’s coroner pages are unavailable during a redesign of its website, so there is nothing for us to collect. We have asked to be told when they return.

  • Lancashire & Blackburn with Darwen — Published, but we cannot collect it

    Lancashire County Council publishes its inquest listings, but the part of its website they sit on is excluded by the site’s robots.txt, which asks automated tools not to fetch it. We follow that, so we do not collect them, and we have asked whether an exception is possible. Hearings are going ahead as normal — please use the official listings below.

  • Milton Keynes — Not currently published

    Milton Keynes City Council’s "Upcoming inquests" page is currently empty; only completed-inquest documents for previous years remain. We have asked when the forthcoming list will return. Inquests are still being held.

  • Norfolk — Published, but we cannot collect it

    Norfolk County Council publishes its inquest listings, but its website blocks automated access, so we are not able to collect them. We have asked for access. Hearings are going ahead as normal — please use the official listings below.

  • North Wales East & Central — Not published online

    The coroner for North Wales East and Central does not publish inquest listings on its website. Hearings can be confirmed by contacting the coroner’s office directly, using the details below.

  • South Northumberland — Published, but we cannot collect it

    Northumberland County Council publishes its inquest listings, but its website blocks automated access, so we are not able to collect them. We have asked for access. Hearings are going ahead as normal — please use the official listings below.

  • Wiltshire & Swindon — Published, but we cannot collect it

    Wiltshire Council publishes its inquest listings, but its website blocks automated access, so we are not able to collect them. We have asked for access. Hearings are going ahead as normal — please use the official listings below.

  • Wirral — Published, but we cannot collect it

    The Liverpool and Wirral coroner area publishes its inquest listings, but the part of its website they sit on is excluded by the site’s robots.txt, which asks automated tools not to fetch it. We follow that, so we do not collect them, and we have asked whether an exception is possible. Hearings are going ahead as normal — please use the official listings below.

Automated updates (61)

Data scraped automatically from official websites. Timestamps show when each area was last successfully collected.

No online data (2)

These areas do not publish inquest schedules online, or their websites are currently inaccessible to our scrapers. Contact the coroner's office directly for scheduling information.

  • North Northumberland
  • South Yorkshire East

Contact

For questions, corrections, data issues, or to report a broken scraper, use the contact form.

Get in touch