About Inquest Index

What is this?

Inquest Index is a free, independent project that collects scheduled inquest hearings from coroner courts across England and Wales and makes 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. For others, 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.

Coverage

Of the 76 coroner areas in England and Wales, we currently have automated coverage of 73. The remainder either require manual data collection or do not publish schedules online. We are transparent about these gaps — if an area is missing, it means we genuinely cannot get the data, not that there are no inquests.

Contact

For questions, corrections, data issues, or to report a broken scraper: contact@inquestindex.co.uk