Deborah Coles 2025 Perrie Award Winner

This year’s Perrie Lectures Prize is award to Deborah Coles. She is the Executive Director of INQUEST where she has worked since 1989. 

Deb is synonymous with INQUEST where she leads on its strategic policy, legal and parliamentary work with her considerable expertise in working to prevent death and ill treatment in all forms of detention. INQUEST’s specialist casework includes deaths in police and prison custody, immigration detention, mental health settings and deaths involving multi-agency failings or where wider issues of state and corporate accountability are in question. This includes work around the Hillsborough football disaster and the Grenfell Tower fire.  At the heart of her approach to her work are the experiences and needs of bereaved people. INQUEST’s approach is crucial to families, not only in making sure their voices are heard and holding the state to account for individual deaths, but also in changing policy and practice to prevent future deaths. As the Guardian commented, she leads "…an organisation that shines a light into the state’s darkest corners, often on behalf of society’s most vulnerable people." 

Beyond her work at INQUEST she has been an independent expert advisor to numerous committees and inquiries, including the special advisor to Dame Elish Angiolini, the chair of the Independent Review of Deaths and Serious Incidents in Police Custody, a member of the Independent Advisory Panel on Deaths in Custody and represents INQUEST as a member of the Ministerial Board on Deaths in Custody. She is also a trustee at Clean Break Theatre Company and an advisor to Women in Prison – taking her back to one of her earliest places of work.

Deb has a long track record of championing social justice and equality issues.  She is radical, relentless (in the nicest possible way), tenacious  and un-wavering. She is a deserved recipient of the 2025 Perrie Prize.