BRITISH SCROOGES

Leftist "compassion" at work: No money for criminal compensation but billions for bureaucrats.

Some might think it would be difficult to make the current compensation scheme for victims of miscarriages of justice any meaner. But this is to underestimate the Scrooge-like mentality of some criminal justice administrators. Already the current scheme blocked compensation payments to Angela Cannings, who spent 18 months in prison before having her wrongful conviction of the murder of two of her children quashed by the court of appeal in 2003. She was ruled ineligible because her acquittal was not based on newly discovered facts but on discredited scientific evidence. Two men wrongly jailed for the murder of the newspaper boy Carl Bridgewater did receive compensation for the 18 years they spent in prison, only to discover they lost one quarter of their loss-of-earnings compensation for their free food and accommodation inside. As the editor of the Prisons Handbook wryly noted at the time: "It has to be the sickest of all sick jokes. Can you imagine Terry Waite getting a bill for the living expenses he saved during his five years wrongly held in Lebanon." Clearly, the Home Office can.

Yesterday Charles Clarke, the home secretary, announced he would be cutting £5m from his department's miscarriage of justice compensation budget. True, his department does face a freeze on spending for the next three years. But its annual budget runs to £13,000m. Just diverting into the community a few of the many thousands of offenders who are still unnecessarily being sent to prison, would have resolved the budget freeze and avoided the new £500,000 ceiling being set on compensation payments. Moreover, a diversion policy would have been in line not just with the urgings of successive director generals of prisons and chief inspectors, but also the home secretary himself.

Penal campaigners yesterday rightly pointed to the failure of the department to take into account the impact of wrongful convictions. The Bridgewater two, wrongly labelled child killers, were subjected to insufferable conditions including regular adulteration of their food with phlegm, urine and glass. Undaunted, and indulging yet again in illogical rhetoric that would make even a Jesuit blush, Mr Clarke declared: "The changes I have announced today will create a fairer, simpler and speedier system for compensating miscarriages of justice." In reality what it means is that people will no longer be able to apply for compensation if their convictions are quashed in a normal appeal process. This is both unfair and unjust.

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