MPs spoke out against the ‘cruel’ and ‘inhuman’ miscarriage of justice compensation scheme which rejected more than nine out of 10 applications. In a Westminster Hall debate earlier this week, Plaid Cymru MP Ben Lake highlighted the ‘devastating’ impact of changes introduced by the Coalition government in 2014 which has restricted pay-outs to those who could prove their innocence ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’. It was revealed that the scheme had a ‘more than 93% rejection rate’.
Ben Lake, MP for Ceredigion Preseli, paid powerful tribute to his constituent Brian Buckle who attended with his family in the public gallery. He was sentenced to 15 years on 16 counts of historical sexual offences before his conviction was overturned in September 2022. There was a retrial in which a jury returned unanimous not guilty verdicts in just over an hour following a three-week trial. Brian Buckle spent five years and four months in prison. His application for compensation was rejected by the Ministry of Justice who told him that having ‘carefully considered’ his application: ‘I do not consider your case demonstrates beyond a reasonable doubt that you did not commit the offences for which you were convicted.’
Ben Lake said he could not imagine the strain his constituent has had to endure. ‘Let us remember what the wrongly convicted must go through and its impact,’ the MP said. ‘He missed important family milestones, such as his daughter’s 18th and 21st birthdays. His imprisonment cost him over £500,000 in lost income and devastated his plan to retire at 55 with a private pension, because he had been unable to make any contributions following his imprisonment. Furthermore, his state pension is now in jeopardy, given that he was unable to make any national insurance contributions for more than five years.’ Lake added that Buckle has since been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. ‘His mental health is such that he has been unable to work since his release,’ he added.
The trauma of wrongful conviction has been well documented – see here.
Tune into @BenMLake at Westminster Hall yesterday representing his constituent Brian Buckle – one of the many denied compensation following a miscarriage of justice. He explains how the brutal compensation test goes against our principles of justice.
Time to #PayUp4TimeSpent! pic.twitter.com/wGu04ulgeW— APPEAL @we-are-appeal.bsky.social (@we_are_APPEAL) March 20, 2025
Orwellian doublespeak
Ben Lake noted that prior to the introduction of the 2014 change in the law introduced by the then Lord Chancellor Chris Grayling, close to half of applicants received compensation (46%) but presently just 6.6% of cases were successful. ‘This new test has virtually put a stop to compensation payouts for these kinds of miscarriages of justice,’ he said. The Labour MP Warinder Juss noted that represented ‘a rejection rate’ of more than 93%. He quoted Suzanne Gower, an academic specialising in miscarriages of justice at the University of Manchester, who called the system ‘inhuman’ and ‘cruel’. ‘It sends a message that the state does not accept responsibility when it causes harm—that is clearly wrong,’ he added.
The MP called the law change which effectively reversed the burden of proof ‘legally illiterate’ and quoted the judgment of the European Court of Human Rights in 2024 in the conjoined case of Victor Nealon and Sam Hallam as ‘an insurmountable hurdle’ (here).
Brian Buckle was refused compensation by the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) in an extraordinary letter which sought to assure him that his case had been ‘carefully considered’ and asserting that, despite rejecting his claim, he was still presumed to be innocent (see BBC report: ‘I just burst out crying’). Ben Lake called the letter ‘Orwellian doublespeak’. ‘By reversing the burden of proof, the 2014 change undermines the presumption of innocence and forces the Ministry to perform quite impressive, but illogical, linguistic gymnastics.’
Kim Johnson MP, chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Miscarriages of Justice, highlighted the case of Andrew Malkinson, who served 17 years in prison for a rape he did not commit before his conviction was overturned in 2023. ‘In the months after leaving prison, Malkinson was reliant on food banks and universal credit, suffering from mental ill health due to his wrongful conviction,’ Johnson said. ‘Last month, he was finally awarded a six-figure sum as compensation, but he is one of only a handful of people wrongly convicted of a crime to be compensated in recent years.’
The MP for Liverpool Riverside argued that the 2014 change in the law led to ‘a virtual halt’ in all payouts. She noted that the MoJ paid out less than £1.3m in compensation to victims of miscarriages of justice between 2020 and 2023 which, as she put it, followed ‘a two-year period when not a single penny of compensation was paid out’. ‘To put that in context, between 2007 and 2009, a total of £20.8 million was paid out,’ she added.
Andy Slaughter, chair of the House of Commons’ Justice Committee, told MPs he had recently attended the 50th anniversary event of the Birmingham Six a week organised by the APPG. ‘The fact remains that were the Birmingham Six now being exonerated, or the Guildford Four, the Cardiff Three or many other cases, they would not receive compensation,’ the MP added. ‘The line has moved so far to one side that in almost every case there is an injustice.’
The MP said that the problems of compensation needed to be understood in the context of what he called ‘recent turbulence’ at the top of the CCRC. His justice committee is holding a special session on the CCRC at the beginning of next month when the watchdog’s chief exec Karen Kneller is expected to attend. ‘We are awaiting the appointment of an interim chair following the resignation of the previous chair. We need an interim chair, and we need a strong interim chair. We also need a good process for selecting a permanent chair of that body.’
He backed the recent recommendation of the Law Commission to scrap the CCRC’s ‘real possibility’ statutory test – the MP described the test as ‘faulty’. He also backed the Law Commission call that the CCRC should ‘return to what I think it was originally intended and have an investigatory function’. He said: ‘In so many cases, evidence presented to the CCRC is not looked at in good time, and when it is looked at, it is looked at purely on the merits of what is submitted, rather than the CCRC going behind the case to see whether there has been a substantial miscarriage of justice.’
Kim Johnson noted that there were now ‘significant backlogs’ at the CCRC ‘with only a trickle of cases making it through to the Court of Appeal’. She welcomed the recent resignation of the chair Helen Pitcher but added: ‘We know the systemic failings and the lack of funding reveal the need for a complete overhaul, not just a change of leadership. Cases like the Birmingham Four are still awaiting a decision on their application to appeal. People who believe they can prove their innocence and who have a right to appeal their convictions are rotting in jail, while the system creaks.’
On compensation, Andy Slaughter quoted Law Commission calling the legal framework ‘incoherent’ and ‘indefensible’ which, the MP noted, was ‘incredibly strong language’ from a body ‘as thoughtful and reserved as the Law Commission’.
There was support from the other political parties. The Lib Dem justice spokesman, Josh Babarinde said that the compensation scheme was serving to ‘perpetuate the injustices it was meant to put right’. ‘The Liberal Democrats are proud to have been part of that tradition, and we continue to be. We believe that when the state wrongfully convicts an individual, it has a moral and legal duty to provide full and proper compensation without unnecessary bureaucratic barriers, or barriers that undermine fundamental maxims of our legal system. That is why urgent reform is necessary.’ The shadow minister for justice, Kieran Mullan urged the Government to consider the responses to the Law Commission’s consultation carefully, and to ‘consider how we might better support the wrongfully convicted’. ‘I am sure that all Members here would agree on the importance of providing appropriate compensation for the victims of miscarriages of justice.’
However there was pushback from the justice minister Alex Davies-Jones who asserted, without evidence, that miscarriages of justice were ‘thankfully very rare’. She argued that the 93% refusal rate did ‘not necessarily provide the full picture’ because the MoJ received applications from people who did not qualify for the scheme. In the six years to April 2024, there were 591 applications received but the minister claimed only 133 passed an initial triage. Of those 133 applications, she said 39 had been awarded compensation with the Government paying out £2.4m.
The minister said there was ‘some debate about where the line should be drawn’ for compensation. ‘We believe it is right that there should be a process by which eligibility for compensation from the Government should be assessed.’ She argued that in the Strasbourg ruling in Nealon and Hallam, the European Court of Human Rights found that the test did not breach the presumption of innocence under article 6. As reported on the Justice Gap, the ruling was hardly a ringing endorsement of the present arrangements. Five of 17 judges dissented highlighting the fact that most European countries provide for compensation after a miscarriage of justice and that the UK had a ‘highly undesirable attitude towards the presumption of innocence’. The majority of the court recorded that it was ‘not insensible to the potentially devastating impact of a wrongful conviction’; but noted its role was not to determine how the UK should change its laws to reflect ‘the moral obligation they may owe to persons who have been wrongfully convicted’.
Alex Davies-Jones also suggested there was support out there for victims of miscarriages of justice. She said compensation was ‘just one route by which someone whose conviction is quashed can receive compensation or support’. She said they could bring a civil claim and support was also available through the miscarriage of justice support service run by Citizens Advice at the Royal Courts of Justice.
