Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill

I strongly support the amendments, especially the second one. To put any formal limit on the time when application may be made for compensation is flawed in itself, but six years would be better than two. As the noble Lord, Lord Elystan-Morgan, said so eloquently, there is no moral equivalence between the state stepping in to offer some recompense for a wrong committed by someone else and the state itself being in one sense or another the perpetrator of the wrong. The noble Lord also referred to an important difference, which is that in the case of someone injured by another party, there is always the possibility of recourse to the civil courts if there is either an insurance policy or some wealth that can be attached. In other circumstances, there is at least the possibility of the courts giving whatever compensation they think is just in the circumstances. It is wrong for the state to set a limit, even of £1 million. Imagine someone who had had a professional career who had been in prison for 15 years. Today, for someone rebuilding their career, even £1 million seems a modest amount. There is no moral equivalence between those different cases. That has been implicitly admitted by the Minister in his offer to come back on Report with a limit of £1 million. How much better it would be to leave the matter for the courts to take a proper, principled and moral view of the situation as cases arise and to do away with this rather shoddy proposal that the state should, as it were, insure itself against its own moral mistakes.