§ Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—[Mr. Malone.]
12.30 am§ Sir Humphrey Atkins (Spelthorne)It was almost exactly 22 years ago that the Government of the day, with the full approval of both Houses of Parliament, established the criminal injuries compensation scheme. The scheme was intended, and still is intended, to provide some measure of compensation to people who have suffered injury through criminal action and who are unable to get any kind of recompense, either because the criminal could not be identified or, if he was identified, was in no position to make any recompense himself. The scheme is administered by a board whose chairman and members are appointed by my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary and who make annual reports to Parliament. It is a measure of the general satisfaction with which Parliament regards the way the board has conducted its activities that, so far as I can trace, not one of these reports has ever been debated in this House.
However, a situation has now come to light of which I believe the House would wish to he aware and I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for making himself available to answer this debate tonight. The situation arises from the events of October 1984 when a terrorist gang exploded a bomb in the Grand hotel at Brighton during the Conservative party conference. This fearful event led not only to much destruction of property but, far more seriously, to the death and serious injury of many people. We all, of course remember that one of our own number was killed and many of us here also remember the others who were killed.
As a result of this crime, no fewer than 21 applications were made to the criminal injuries compensation board for compensation, 19 from civilians and two from the police. Naturally, applications such as these take a little time to process because, for example, it is not always possible to determine very quickly the precise extent of personal injury and, therefore, the loss of earning power or whatever it may be that may be permanently with the injured person. I do not know what has happened in the majority of these 21 cases, but I do have personal knowledge of three of them and it is these three that I would like to bring to the attention of the House.
Let me say straightaway that I do not propose to identify the applicants. They have suffered enough and if I were to mention their names they would, I fear, be the subject of further publicity and inquiry and I am sure that none of us would wish to inflict that upon them. I will simply refer to them as applicants A, B and C, but my right hon. Friend, of course, knows precisely to whom I am referring in each case.
Applicant A's claim was comparatively easy to process, although the injuries were serious in all conscience, and the boars: assessed the claim, made an offer, had the offer agreed and made the payment all within a comparatively short time and the whole matter was settled in the first half of last year. Applicant B's claim was more complicated and so the board, clearly accepting that the claim had validity, but without being able to determine the precise level of payment which 1145 should be made, gave applicant B an interim award which again was paid in the first half of last year. No further payment has been made, for a reason to which I will come back in a moment.
Applicant C's claim was the most complicated of the three and the details could not be settled until the second half of last year. Here again the board has refused to make any further progress with this claim and applicant C has not yet received a penny piece. Since it became known that I was to raise this matter tonight, several other people have told me that they, too, have not yet received anything in respect of their claims following this same incident. Applicant C's case, therefore, is by no means unique.
The board has given one reason and one only why it has brought to a halt all further work on these outstanding claims and why it is leaving these claimants without any payment over a period which now amounts to many months. It is that in June last year a man was arrested and a little later was charged with complicity in this bomb outrage, and the board takes the view that it cannot make any payments because, if it did, it might prejudice the fair trial of the accused. I must tell the House that I find that excuse completely unacceptable, and, what is perhaps even more important, completely untenable, for three reasons.
The first is that I cannot for the life of me see why the making of a payment under the criminal injuries compensation scheme in respect of a crime has any bearing whatever upon the identity of the person who committed it. Mr. X, who has been charged, may or may not be guilty; I do not know, and the board does not know. Only the courts can decide, but, unless it is to be argued that the setting off of a bomb in the Grand hotel in Brighton is a perfectly lawful act and, therefore, no crime was committed, which everybody will agree is ludicrous, I cannot see why the fact that somebody had been charged prevents payments from being made.
My second reason is that, even if that argument is accepted as valid, the pass has already been sold. As I mentioned earlier in the case of applicants A and B, payments have already been made, and for all I know other payments have been made, too. The chairman of the board, Mr. Ogden, speaking on "The World This Weekend" on the radio on Sunday, said that the first payment was made "a long time ago". That has no bearing on the matter. Either the making of payments is prejudicial to a fair trial, in which case he was wrong to make any payments, or, as I contend, it is not, in which case he is wrong to stop making payments now.
My third reason is that Mr. Ogden and his board stand condemned by their words. Paragraph 43 of its 20th report to Parliament for the year ended 31 March 1984—Cmnd. 9399—discusses at some length the problems of making awards when criminal proceedings are pending and refers to such matters as the possibility that an accused might plead that injuries were inflicted by him in self-defence and matters of that sort.
However, I draw my right hon. Friend's attention to one part of paragraph 43 where the board says:
However in cases as clear cut as bomb outrages, we do not consider ourselves so limited".It goes on to say: 1146Provided we are satisfied on the balance of probabilities after a detailed investigation that the application satisfies the requirements of…the scheme …then we feel able to make awards in such cases.I simply cannot understand why, in view of all that I have said, and of the board's words, the board is behaving in this extraordinary way today.The scheme was set up to provide some relief to people who had suffered injury and financial hardship. The scheme received the approval of Parliament when it was established, when it was revised in 1979 and, of course, again every single year when the money for the scheme, including the salary of the chairman, is voted by Parliament. Furthermore, our Select Committee on Home Affairs, which in 1984 investigated compensation and support for victims of crime, produced a report—its first report in Session 1984–85—and referred at some length to the need to avoid delay in payments.
In paragraph 49 it said:
untoward delays in settlement can only detract from any satisfaction and consolation the victim might derive from the outcome of his claim: he gives twice who gives quickly".And yet here is this board quite deliberately delaying payment heedless, it seems, of the needs of the claimants.There is no reason to suppose that any or all of them are financially able to manage quite happily without any kind of compensation. Physical injury, loss of earning capacity, damage of all kinds make, as we all know, a devasting impact upon a family's finances. There can be little doubt—indeed, I know this for a fact—that a number of outstanding claimants are suffering considerable financial hardship. That is why Parliament willed that everything possible should be done as quickly as may be to try to help people in these unhappy circumstances.
I know that Mr. Ogden, in the broadcast to which I referred earlier, said that it was open to anyone who felt that he had been badly treated by the board to go to the courts and ask for a ruling that he or she ought to be paid. If I may say so, this is a most unreasonable proposition. We all know the cost of legal proceedings and the suggestion that someone ought to put at risk possibly the whole amount of any award seems to me, although possibly legalistic, completely heartless.
Having set out my view of the matter, I should like to ask my right hon. Friend two questions. First, does he agree with Mr. Ogden's statement that the correct course to follow is to withhold all further payments by way of compensation until the trial of anyone accused of complicity in the offence is completed, however long that may take? If he does, I know that he will wish to explain to the House in greater detail than is at present available why he thinks it is correct, and furthermore why it is that the scheme under which the board operates contains no reference to this provision and also why it is that the board never tells any claimant that the charging of anybody in connection with the offence will bring an immediate stop to any further action on his claim.
If, however, he does not agree with Mr. Ogden, I come to my second question. What is my right hon. Friend going to do about it? There seems to be a rather grey area here. The scheme is non-statutory; therefore, there is no Act which lays down the powers and responsibilities of my right hon. Friend. Paragraph 3 of the scheme makes it clear that the board will be entirely responsible for what compensation should be paid in individual cases and its decisions should not be subject to appeal or ministerial review. I think that we would all agree that this is a 1147 sensible provision because otherwise my right hon. Friend would no doubt be inundated with requests for the review of awards.
However, I draw attention to the fact that this provision specifically addresses the question of what compensation should be paid, not when it should be paid. Could my right hon. Friend tell the House please whether he has any power to give directions to the Board about how it should conduct its operations? If he does not have any such power, are we not in an intolerable situation?
Here is a hoard, appointed by my right hon. Friend, responsible for the distribution to innocent victims of crime of £40 million a year of taxpayers' money, which we vote, seemingly able to withhold payment for months or even years on grounds which no one here believes to have any validity, and to behave in a way which is clearly contrary to the will of Parliament, whose Chairman claimed on the radio that he could not be removed from office, and my right hon. Friend can do nothing about it. If this is really the case, it is my view that the situation is wholly unacceptable. In this first debate on the matter—we can always return to it—I look forward to hearing my right hon. Friend's observations.
§ The Secretary of State for the Home Department (Mr. Douglas Hurd)I am grateful to my right hon. Friend the Member for Spelthorne (Sir H. Atkins) for raising this issue. It must be right that an important and sensitive issue, which affects people in circumstances with which every Member of this House has the utmost sympathy, should be raised in this House. My right hon. Friend, as one would expect, has deployed his case in a clear and impressive way.
I should begin by explaining the role of Ministers in the criminal injuries compensation scheme. Criminal injuries compensation in England and Wales and Scotland is at present on a non-statutory basis, and awards are ex gratia. Governments have concluded that the system of criminal injuries compensation would be more orderly and satisfactory if set out in a formal scheme. This tells Parliament, applicants and the general public what they can expect, and provides a basis for judicial review of the board's decisions in individual cases. The scheme itself is the responsibility of my right hon. and learned Friend the Secretary of State for Scotland and myself. Under the terms of the scheme, compensation is administered by the Criminal Injuries Compensation Board, which is entirely responsible for deciding what compensation should be paid in individual cases. The board's decisions on such matters are not subject to appeal to Ministers or to ministerial review. The general working of the scheme is, however, a matter for review by the Government, and my colleagues and I take a keen interest in its operations, as I hope to show before I conclude. It is right on that basis that my right hon. Friend should bring his concerns before the House this evening.
As one would expect, the scheme itself does not deal in detail with particular matters of administration, nor has it been the general practice of Ministers to intervene in such matters. The expectation is that, having set out in the scheme the main principles of eligibility for compensation and similar matters, and having appointed an independent board to administer the scheme, we can rely on the board to deal sensibly with the cases.
1148 As my right hon. Friend said, the Brighton explosion took place on 12 October 1984. In all, 32 people were injured, including five who were killed by the explosion or as a direct result of it. Police inquiries were, from their earliest stages, based on the premise that the explosion had been caused by a bomb. Press reports at the time were to the same effect. The board heard in September 1985 that the extensive police investigation had resulted in charges being brought.
The Criminal Injuries Compensation Board received a total of 28 applications as a result of the incident. This figure updates that mentioned by my right hon. Friend. The latest position is that 10 of these applications have been resolved and awards made. Of the further 18 cases still awaiting resolution, in 11 cases the board does not yet have enough information to enable it to decide what award, if any, should be made: it needs further medical or other reports, and the delay in these cases has nothing to do with the criminal proceedings.
Tonight, my right hon. Friend has focussed attention on the seven other cases which are otherwise considered ready to be put before a board member for a decision but which have been held up, as my right hon. Friend said, because of the impending criminal proceedings.
The question how to mesh its own procedures with criminal proceedings is a question that the board may have to consider in every case which comes before it. It has to have a general rule, and the general rule which it has adopted is that where criminal proceedings are in train, the board will not reach a decision on the application to it until the trial result is known.
Despite the apparent contradiction—to which my right hon. Friend understandably drew attention—with part of its 20th annual report, the board has explained that it has basically two reasons for this approach. First, if it takes a decision in the absence of information which may come out at the trial, its decision may be wrong. The extra information which may come out is not precisely foreseeable in advance, but the obvious category of information which is likely to be added at the trial is the defendant's own side of the story. The board has no power of its own to summon and question the alleged assailant, although it can take into account any information which is volunteered to it. I could elaborate at this point, as part of the board's general explanation, but I will not do so, because my right hon. Friend could say with justice that this is far from the present case.
However, there is a second reason why the board is reluctant to make awards when criminal proceedings are pending, and this second reason is more relevant to this set of seven cases. In the view of the chairman of the board, there is a risk that a decision to award compensation could itself become an issue in the later proceedings and be a matter of embarrassment in those proceedings. For example—and this is the key point—the defence could argue that the trial had been prejudiced if a public body had previously reached a conclusion about the origin of an explosion.
Where no alleged offender has been traced, the board obviously cannot wait for ever but must get on and do the best it can. If, later, someone is prosecuted, the fact that the board has made an award is not something anyone can do anything about.
But the chairman of the board feels, as I understand it, that there is a notable difference between that situation and the one in which the board makes an award in the 1149 knowledge that a criminal case is pending. That is the board's answer to the point that my right hon. Friend made about the difference of treatment accorded by the board to the various cases.
§ Sir John Stradling Thomas (Monmouth)I am sympathetic to the point that my right hon. Friend is making and that Mr. Michael Ogden made. But I cannot see any connection between the prejudicing of the case and the right to compensation for those who have suffered as victims. Under our system of law, that could be taken care of by the learned judges without prejudicing the trial of any culpable defendant in a trial and without having any relationship to the question of the right of the victim to compensation. Will my right hon. Friend address himself to that?
§ Mr. HurdI am doing so. The board is entitled to make compensation only where there is a case of criminal assault, and I wish to develop carefully what I understand to be the board's interpretation of this and explain what support it has had, and in doing that I will cover the point that my hon. Friend makes.
I was dealing with the difference between the situation to which I referred and the one in which the board makes an award in the knowledge that a criminal case is pending. As I said, that is the board's answer to my right hon. Friend's point about the difference of treatment accorded by the board to the various cases.
Those which reached the settlement stage before criminal proceedings were instituted were settled. Those which did not have been held up. The thought here must be that, while the degree of actual prejudice may be the same, the disregard of the risk is more wilful and, therefore, more reprehensible on the board's part.
It is difficult for a non-lawyer such as I to reach a definite view on the prejudice issue. It may seem far-fetched, as it does to my right hon. Friend. But—and this is now the crucial point in this case—I have not the slightest inkling, and nor has the board, of what defence any of those accused in connection with the Brighton explosion will raise.
I have personal views, as does my right hon. Friend, on how likely it is that the jury will be persuaded that the explosion resulted from, say, a fractured gas main rather than an explosive device. Less easy to judge—my right hon. Friend raised the question whether a criminal attack was involved—is whether the jury is likely to be influenced at all by a decision reached before the trial by the Criminal Injuries Compensation Board and whether it could with any force be claimed by defence counsel that they may have been influenced.
I am sure that my right hon. Friend would wish to join me in hoping for a fair trial and a trial that proceeds without diversion from the issues that will properly be before the jury. The chairman of the board, applying himself to the matter diligently, has reached the conclusion that the awards should not proceed while the trial is pending.
The chairman of the board is not alone in this view. He has, in this case, sought the views of the Lord Chief Justice on whether there would be a risk of prejudice if the board were to proceed to make awards. The Lord Chief Justice has confirmed the view to Mr. Ogden, and separately to me, that a risk of prejudice does exist, both as a question 1150 of general principle as well as in the case that we are now considering. Of course, the view taken in the trial would be a matter for the judge concerned, and the arguments put forward, but it is clear that authoritative legal opinion is that the risk of prejudice cannot be dismissed.
Indeed, in these circumstances, in view of the publicity which this matter has, naturally, received and the crucial importance of getting a proper trial in which any guilty person can actually be found guilty, I have been forced to conclude that it would be foolish to intervene, even if I had the right to do so.
The trial will open in the next few weeks. I understand—and it is certainly my wish—that the board should be free to resolve the outstanding cases as soon as it is clear from the process of the trial that the fact that a criminal act took place is not in doubt. This means that it should not be necessary to wait for the result of the trial to be known before the board can proceed. So the remaining delay should not be great, although I accept that any delay on the scale that has occurred in these kind of cases can cause hardship.
But we cannot leave the matter there.
§ Mr. Jeremy Hanley (Richmond and Barnes)For a jury to be prejudiced it has to have heard of the amount of compensation given as a result of a particular act. Of the 30,000 compensation cases dealt with last year, I wonder how many were published in the newspapers and how many juries ever heard of compensatory amounts being paid.
§ Mr. HurdThat matter has rightly and honourably been raised by my right hon. Friend. It is not a matter which can be dealt with in a corner and nor has anyone sought that it should be. I have mentioned not only the views of Mr. Ogden but the views which support him in that respect of the Lord Chief Justice. I have also mentioned, which I think that the House would agree with, the crucial importance of getting a proper trial in which diversionary issues are not raised in any way which might prevent anyone who may be guilty from being found guilty. That thought has rather dominated my non-legal mind in tackling this matter.
As I said, we cannot leave the mattter there. The general issue which emerges from these cases may recur and further thought must be given to it. It would be too easy to reach a conclusion based simply on the notion of playing safe without regard to the considerations of humanity, touching the lives of individuals which my right hon. Friend has clearly and properly expressed.
My right hon. Friend mentioned that this is the first debate on the subject, and that is correct so far as the Government's intentions are concerned, as well as, perhaps, his own. I have announced in the White Paper on criminal justice, recently published, that we intend to put the criminal injuries compensation scheme on to a statutory basis for the first time. So there will be, when we come after the next Gracious Speech to a Bill which will implement this and other proposals, an opportunity for Parliament and Government to consider the matter further. Parliament will, as part of its consideration of our proposals for putting the scheme on a statutory basis, need to tackle the relationship between the scheme, the Government and the courts. There will be occasion, and, I think, obligation, to think about the matter, among others.
1151 I have given the reasons why, quite apart from the convention that Governments do not intervene in the administration of the board, for obvious reasons which my right hon. Friend accepted, in this case, with a trial of this importance pending, it is difficult for me to go against the considered view of the Lord Chief Justice. But this is not a matter which will go to sleep and there will soon be opportunities as part of the general consideration of the 1152 scheme for the House to return to it. The cases to which my right hon. Friend has referred will be a test of the view formed in particular of the relationship between the board and the courts. This debate may thus turn out to be an important prelude to future decisions and I am glad that it has taken place.
§ Question put and agreed to.
§ Adjourned accordingly at two minutes to One o'clock.