I rise to support Opposition Front Benchers. Lords amendment 112 uses the words,
“conclusively that the evidence against the person at trial is so undermined that no conviction could possibly be based on it”.
I put it to the Minister that that is surely about as good as we are going to get as an effective definition in taking things forward. If we have to take the route of proving that an offence was not committed, then I see all kinds of injustices occurring further down the line. A point was made about Barry George. We all agree that the murder of Jill Dando was disgusting, appalling and revolting, and obviously the person who did it should suffer the consequences of committing it. Barry George was imprisoned and later released. Therefore, the court had decided that he did not commit the offence. Has he now to prove his innocence even though he has been released by a court? That case is very well known, and I suspect that very many others do not get that degree of publicity. Miscarriages of justice happen all the time.
Like my hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell), who has had to leave to chair a Public and Commercial Services Union group meeting but will return, I was very involved in the Birmingham and Guildford cases. Indeed, Paul Hill, who was the first person ever arrested under the Prevention of Terrorism Act 1974, was a constituent of mine. I went through the whole business of the campaign, and eventually those people were released and compensation was paid. However, I have to say two things about the compensation. First, there seemed to be a calculation based on the expected income of those people throughout their lives, yet at the time of their arrest, the Guildford Four were not particularly well paid, working as part-time building workers in some cases, and one would not have said that their economic prospects were particularly good. But who knows what would have happened to their economic prospects had that terrible miscarriage of justice not happened?
Secondly, one area of compensation was not effectively taken into account. This was not just about the emotional cost to the wider families—my hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington is correct that there have been some awful traumas in the families of the Guildford Four, the Birmingham Six and many others—but the financial cost. In mounting a campaign to try to gain the release of a convicted prisoner, particularly when they have been convicted of very serious offences, it is difficult to gain public support and even more difficult to find anybody to help finance it, so in many cases the families paid out a great deal of money themselves.
The step forward that was taken on the release of the Birmingham and Guildford people was the establishment of the Criminal Cases Review Commission, from which we took very interesting evidence last week in the Justice Committee. There are a number of cases that it does not review because it does not think there is enough evidence to do so. When people come back and demand a re-examination, in some cases the CCRC will then review. In the very large number of cases where it does review, it sends those cases back to the Court of Appeal and subsequently the individual is released. On that basis, compensation should be automatic—a given. If
someone has been convicted, the case has been reviewed by the Court of Appeal, and they have been released, obviously the Court of Appeal must have had some very good grounds for releasing them. I do not see why they should then have to go through another hoop of trying to get compensation by proving that they did not commit an offence that they have been released for not committing. We are getting into a big problem in this regard.
3.15 pm
I realise that the Minister is unlikely to change his mind at this stage, but if we as a House do the right thing and accept the Lords amendment, that would be good. If we reject it, I hope that the Lords will return to it and insist on it, because it protects some of the very good advances that we have made in dealing with miscarriages of justice. As my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Erdington (Jack Dromey) pointed out, the judicial system is not perfect. No legal system is perfect. The jury system is as good as we will get, but it is not perfect. Juries can make mistakes or misread evidence; all kinds of things go wrong. Highly trained legal minds can misread evidence and get things wrong. These things happen. Therefore, there must be the failsafe of an appeals system. There can be gross miscarriages of justice, as we well know. There has to be a further safeguard, and that is where the review system and the Court of Appeal come in.
When society as a whole has got it wrong about an individual, that individual cannot get the years back. They cannot get their youth back, they cannot get their life back, and they cannot get back all those years of missing their children, their grandchildren, their friends, their family and everything else, but they can at least get some financial compensation, which is society’s way of saying that we got it wrong and we are determined to make sure that it does not happen again in future.
We owe it to the families who campaigned for justice for the McGuire Seven, the Guildford Four, the Birmingham Six and so many others to say “Thank you” for the work they did in bringing about these changes. I feel very sad that the Government now seem in part to be undermining that progress by rejecting the Lords amendment. I hope that the Minister will think again on this subject.