HC Deb 05 June 1964 vol 695 cc1510-6

Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—[Mr. Pym.]

4.4 p.m.

Mr. G. H. R. Rogers (Kensington, North)

On Thursday, 13th February, I asked the Home Secretary if he would pay compensation to Mr. John Francis Lane of Latimer Road in my constituency in respect of his imprisonment from 5th December, 1962, until 21st June, 1963, in view of the fact that his conviction at London Sessions on two charges was quashed by the Court of Criminal Appeal.

The Home Secretary declined to grant my request and in his reply he made two points. One was that Mr. Lane had omitted to appeal to the Court of Criminal Appeal until three months after his conviction. I wish to explain, for the record, why this was so. As the Joint Under-Secretary of State probably knows by now, the Home Office had already been advised that Mr. Lane had no legal assistance at the time to draw up the grounds of his appeal and he could not lodge an appeal until he had time to study the transcripts, which did not come to him until some considerable time after his conviction. That was the reason why there was a delay in applying to the Court of Criminal Appeal.

The other point made by the Home Secretary was that compensation is granted only in exceptional cases where there is negligence or misconduct by the police. In reference to this denial of any negligence I wish to read what the Court of Criminal Appeal has said. In quashing the judgment it held that: the summing-up was wrong in law, that it contained mistakes of fact, and it failed to give sufficient weight to the defence evidence". I do not know how the Home Secretary interprets negligence. I do not know what word the House would apply to a judgment of the court about which such strong language was used by the Court of Criminal Appeal, but I know what word I should use and I cannot accept the view of the Home Secretary that compensation should not be granted on the grounds that he gave.

In asking the Joint Under-Secretary to reconsider the matter, I wish to make an entirely different point. Recently her right hon. Friend introduced legislation designed to give power to the Government to compensate victims of criminal violence. This means that when the Bill becomes an Act, in addition to the power of the Home Secretary to compensate people who are victims of acts of negligence or misconduct by the police, we shall be able to compensate the victims of criminals. I think that the Joint Under-Secretary will agree that this will leave a gap. The only people who will not be compensated are those who are wrongly imprisoned or punished wrongly by the faulty decisions of the courts. I think that this is wrong and inconsistent and I wish to ask the Joint Under-Secretary to look at the problem from that point of view.

Although, because of their formation and composition, our courts may be less fallible than other groups of men, no one would say that they are infallible. Mistakes are made, as we all know, and in many cases people suffer grievously from the faults of the courts. It may be within the recollection of hon. Members that a good many years ago an hon. Member of this House was put into prison for six months because of a decision of a court. Because of the position which he held in addition to being a Member of this House, his reputation and family life and his income suffered severely. I see no reason why in justice the victims of errors by our courts should not be compensated out of public funds. Because I believe that we ought to close this gap I ask the Joint Under-Secretary to look at this case from that point of view.

4.10 p.m.

The Joint Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (Miss Mervyn Pike)

The hon. Member for Kensington, North (Mr. G. H. R. Rogers) has pursued this matter with great determination and this afternoon he has spoken persuasively on behalf of his constituent. I can assure him that we have gone into this matter very thoroughly, but I can only repeat the Answer which the Home Secretary gave to the hon. Member on 5th March—that it is only in the most exceptional circumstances that he feels able to make a payment from public funds to a person whose conviction has been quashed on appeal and that he has not felt justified in making such a payment to Mr. Lane.

In explanation of this conclusion I must say something about the legal position, and about the policy of successive Home Secretaries in these cases. As I am sure the hon. Member knows, the law imposes no obligation on the Executive to pay compensation to persons who have been acquitted, either on trial or on appeal. If such a person thinks that he has grounds for compensation his legal remedy is to proceed in the civil courts, and, if he is successful, recover damages. It is true that payments are authorised from time to time, but these are ex gratia and do not imply that the Government accepts any legal liability.

What I propose to do is to explain the long-standing policy in this matter, and the reasons for it, and then to say why the Home Secretary has not felt justified in making any payment in this particular case. I think that the hon. Member will agree that it would not be practicable or reasonable for payments to be made from public funds as a matter of course to all successful appellants.

In the years 1961 and 1962 the Court of Criminal Appeal quashed more than 100 convictions, and more than 800 were quashed on appeal to quarter sessions. The grounds on which these convictions were quashed were many and various. Sometimes the court's decision resulted from the production of new evidence; sometimes it depended on the interpretation of difficult points of law; sometimes on some procedural defect at the trial.

I think that it may be generally agreed that not all these cases can be regarded as deserving. Moreover, although the successful appellant has suffered the stigma of conviction and sometimes that of detention as a convicted person, there is otherwise no distinction in principle between his case and that of the defendant acquitted on trial. If the successful appellant is regarded as entitled to compensation, then the same principle logically should be applied to acquitted defendants.

This would be a great extension of the potential field of compensation, since in round figures there are more than 9,000 cases every year in which a person charged with an indictable offence is acquitted or discharged—this is leaving out of account the very much larger total of summary offences.

It seems to me that it would be difficult to argue that compensation was justified, on merits, in all these cases. I am sure that nobody would argue that. But, it will be objected, this is not a ground for refusing payment in exceptional cases—obviously, some are more deserving than others. Why should there not be discrimination? Why, for example, should the Government refuse to recompense a man who, through mistaken identity, has been wrongly accused and convicted of a crime with which he had no connection at all?

But we must ask: what should the criterion be for selecting the deserving cases? This is the real difficulty here. Is the Home Secretary to say that he will entertain claims for compensation only where he is satisfied that the claimant is really innocent and deserving?

The implication of that would be that the successful appellant or acquitted person whose claim was rejected was not really innocent. I am sure that that is not a policy of which the House would approve. So it is that the Home Secretary confines the payment of compensation to those cases where there has not only been an acquittal or successful appeal, but where the claimant has suffered hardship through the negligence or misconduct of the police or some other public official.

The hon. Member claims that negligence was the case here. This brings me to the particular case of Mr. Lane. The hon. Member has not suggested that the police or anyone else concerned with the prosecution acted in bad faith so we can, I hope, agree that no question of misconduct arises. What then the Home Secretary has had to consider is whether the police were negligent in prosecuting Mr. Lane. I have studied the facts very carefully.

First, I give the relevant dates. The offences of which Mr. Lane was convicted took place on 13th November, 1962; he was charged with the offences on 14th December, 1962; he was convicted at the County of London Sessions on 17th January, 1963, and sentenced to 12 months' imprisonment; he applied for leave to appeal against his conviction on 17th April, 1963; and on 21st June, 1963, his conviction was quashed by the Court of Criminal Appeal and he was discharged.

The delay on his part in applying for leave to appeal, which I understand was due to the time he had to wait to obtain and study a transcript of the proceedings at his trial, does not, of course, have any bearing on the question whether compensation should be paid, and I mention it only because of the references which have been made to the length of time he was in custody before his appeal was allowed.

Now may I refer briefly to the circumstances in which Mr. Lane was charged. On 13th November, 1962, two police officers in a "Q" car went to factory premises in Kensal Road, W.10, in response to a wireless call. What time they arrived was one of the matters in issue at the trial, but the evidence of the police officers was that the call was received at 10.46 p.m. and that it took them six or seven minutes to get to the premises.

At about 10.55 p.m., the two officers saw three men in the factory doorway. The officers did not stop, but doubled back through side streets and stopped where they were able to watch the doorway. Now only two men were to be seen, and a window over the door which had previously been shut was open and broken. One of the men, who was later convicted, was arrested a few minutes later as he was trying to hide in a car parked nearby. A detonator was found on him, and various house-breaking implements were found in the car. The second mar was subsequently identified by these two police officers as Mr. Lane.

A third police officer, who arrived on the scene at about the same time, also identified Mr. Lane as a man he had seen walking away from the factory. He had stopped this man and asked him to wait while he spoke to the officers in the "Q" car, but when he returned the man had gone.

At the trial it was not disputed that Mr. Lane had been outside the factory on 13th November, waiting for a friend, but it was not, the defence said, at the time alleged by the police when he had been with three friends in a public house 1½ miles away. He had spoken to a constable, who told him that a factory breaking had been reported, but the constable had not told him to wait. A witness was called who testified that he had arranged to meet Mr. Lane, and a publican gave evidence that at the material time Mr. Lane was in his public house.

Mr. Lane was found guilty by the jury, but, as we have heard, the Court of Criminal Appeal found that the chairman had misdirected the jury in his account of what the prosecution had said about Mr. Lane's movements on the night in question and had not given sufficient weight to some of the evidence for the defence.

The court took the view that, although the jurors had heard the evidence, they would have attached the greatest importance to what the chairman had said, and that the conviction could not be allowed to stand.

I do not think there is any more I need say about the facts. I have given them as fully as possible for the record, and it is clearly impossible, in the time allotted for this debate, for me to review all the circumstances, but what I have given are the essentials. I do not think that it can be said in the light of these facts that it was wrong or negligent to proceed against Mr. Lane.

The hon. Member suggested that the time is right to review and broaden the principles on which the Home Office makes ex gratia payments in these cases. I assure him that I will certainly give further thought to what he said. But I have indicated the reasons—and they seem to me compelling ones—why successive Home Secretaries have strictly limited such payments, and I should be misleading the hon. Member if I encouraged him to think that my right hon. Friend would be prepared to change the policy now.

I cannot agree with the hon. Member that the impending introduction of a scheme of compensation for victims of crimes of violence provides ground for changing the policy. That scheme provides compensation, for which public and Parliamentary opinion has long felt the need, for those who have suffered physical injury as a result of violent crime. The considerations which apply to such people are quite different from those which apply to people acquitted in the courts, and, indeed, I cannot see that the two groups have any more in common than that both contain potential claimants for compensation.

I, however, assure him that we shall consider the plea which he has made. In conclusion, I can only repeat that, giving the fullest weight to all that the hon. Member said, I cannot regard this as a case in which the Home Secretary should take the exceptional course of paying compensation.

Question put and agreed to.

Adjourned accordingly at eighteen minutes past Four o'clock.