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 69 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 69 coroner areas in England and Wales, we currently collect automatically from 55. 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.

14 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.

55

Automated

0

Manual

14

Not collected

Areas we do not collect (14)

  • Buckinghamshire — Published, but we cannot collect it

    Buckinghamshire Council publishes its inquest listings in an interactive dashboard online, but we are not able to collect them from it automatically. Hearings are going ahead as normal. The dashboard is up to date, and you can see it on the official website, using the link below.

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

    Cornwall Council publishes its inquest listings online, but we are not able to collect them automatically. Hearings are going ahead as normal. You can see the listings on the official website, using the link below.

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

    Rochdale Borough Council publishes its inquest listings online, but we are not able to collect them automatically. Hearings are going ahead as normal. You can see the listings on the official website, using the link below.

  • Hampshire, Portsmouth & Southampton — Published, but we cannot collect it

    Hampshire County Council publishes its inquest listings online, but we are not able to collect them automatically. Hearings are going ahead as normal. You can see the listings on the official website, using the link below.

  • Hertfordshire — Published, but we cannot collect it

    Hertfordshire County Council publishes its inquest listings online, but we are not able to collect them automatically. Hearings are going ahead as normal. You can see the listings on the official website, using the link below.

  • Isle of Wight — Published, but we cannot collect it

    Isle of Wight Council publishes its inquest listings online, but we are not able to collect them automatically. Hearings are going ahead as normal. You can see the listings on the official website, using the link below.

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

    Lancashire County Council publishes its inquest listings online, but we are not able to collect them automatically. Hearings are going ahead as normal. You can see the listings on the official website, using the link below.

  • Norfolk — Published, but we cannot collect it

    Norfolk County Council publishes its inquest listings online, but we are not able to collect them automatically. Hearings are going ahead as normal. You can see the listings on the official website, using the link 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 Yorkshire East — Published, but we cannot collect it

    Doncaster Council publishes its inquest listings online, but we are not able to collect them automatically. Hearings are going ahead as normal. You can see the listings on the official website, using the link below.

  • Teesside — Published, but we cannot collect it

    Middlesbrough Council publishes its inquest listings online, but we are not able to collect them automatically. Hearings are going ahead as normal. You can see the listings on the official website, using the link below.

  • West London — Published, but we cannot collect it

    West London Coroner’s Court publishes its inquest listings online, but we are not able to collect them automatically. Hearings are going ahead as normal. You can see the listings on the official website, using the link below.

  • Wiltshire & Swindon — Listings not found online

    We have not been able to find upcoming inquest listings for Wiltshire and Swindon on the council’s website. Hearings can be confirmed by contacting the coroner’s office, using the link below.

  • Wirral — Published, but we cannot collect it

    The Liverpool and Wirral coroner area publishes its inquest listings online, but we are not able to collect them automatically. Hearings are going ahead as normal. You can see the listings on the official website, using the link below.

Automated updates (55)

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

Contact

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

Get in touch