How does the state treat those it has wronged – whether through its actions or failures to act? Badly. Some examples:

Blood Contamination

The majority of the victims have died while waiting for compensation. Why?

• Initially there was a refusal to provide any at all, as there had been no fault by the NHS or government. This was untrue.
• Lengthy delays before agreeing even to provide some ex gratia payments to some groups.
• When finally established, those schemes were continuously underfunded and run in a way which humiliated applicants, rather than in their best interests.
• Despite complaints, there was yet more delay before a national scheme was finally established. Even this did not provide the same support to different groups.
• Government ignored the compensation recommendations made by Sir Robert Francis KC in his report in 2022 and in the Second Interim Report of Sir Brian Langstaff in April 2023. In his press statement at the time, the judge said how unusual it was to publish compensation recommendations ahead of the findings but that he:

“could not in conscience add to the decades-long delays many of you have already experienced due to failures to recognise the depth of your losses. Those delays have themselves been harmful.”

Despite some interim payments made in October the judge went on:

“My judgement is that not only do the infections themselves and their consequences merit compensation, but so too do the wrongs done by authority, whose response served to compound people’s suffering.”

He recommended payments that year and further interim compensation for those whose deaths had until then been ignored – 380 children infected with HiV who died and children orphaned because their parents had died after being infected – and to alleviate “immediate suffering”. These recommendations were ignored. It was only in summer 2024 that the government announced that payments would start from December 2024. By then the majority of those affected had died, unsurprisingly given how many decades ago this harm started.

The Post Office

Full compensation has yet to be paid to most of those affected. The eldest subpostmistress is 92. She received a meeting with the Minister last autumn and a promise that her compensation would be speeded up. She is still waiting. 100 of the 550 subpostmasters who won their case in 2019 have died. The total amount paid to them so far is only slightly more than the amount paid so far by the Post Office to its lawyers dealing with this. It is an example of the government standing by in the face of a grotesque conflict of interest. Compensation is payable by the Post Office. But why should it be involved at all in the compensation schemes? Those schemes have been devised in such a way as to make it difficult for subpostmasters to claim compensation. Well, of course. The Post Office has every financial interest in limiting what it should pay out. But this scandal arose in part because of the conflict of interest the Post Office and its investigators had in the prosecutions. It is unconscionable that the compensation for a scandal caused by one conflict of interest should be limited or delayed through yet another such conflict. 

Having – wrongly – abdicated responsibility for the Post Office’s prosecutorial function, despite criminal justice being one of the most fundamental of the state’s responsibilities, the government is compounding that error by abdicating responsibility for putting it right. The Post Office’s legal team too should have realised this but given all the previous conflicts of interest they ignored, it is unsurprising to see them ignore this one. Deeply disappointing. But unsurprising.

There is also a dishonest sleight of hand in referring to this as “compensation”. The Post Office forced subpostmasters to pay over monies on false pretences – either by claiming without evidence that the monies were owed or by making it impossible for them to continue trading without them paying or by making it a condition of plea bargains that the money be paid. Repayment of those monies is not compensation; it is restitution of money which was never rightfully the Post Office’s. Compensation for the consequences of the prosecutions is in addition to this.

Miscarriages of justice

Andy Malkinson, released from prison in December 2020 with his conviction finally overturned in July 2023, only received some compensation in February this year.Since his release he has been living in his words  “pretty much bereft of everything.” 

You’d think, wouldn’t you, that people wrongly convicted are automatically entitled to compensation. You’d be wrong. Despite the Supreme Court ruling in 2011 that the term “miscarriage of justice” in the statutory scheme should include all those cases where a new or newly discovered fact “so undermines the evidence against the defendant that no conviction could possibly be based upon it”, to save money the government legislated to reverse this. 

Since 13 March 2014 a miscarriage of justice only exists – for the purpose of compensation – “if and only if the new or newly discovered fact shows beyond reasonable doubt that the person did not commit the offence”. This reverses the burden of proof. You should not have been convicted. Your conviction has been overturned. You are innocent. And yet you must now prove your innocence – and beyond reasonable doubt – in order to get any compensation for the years and the life you have lost. It is an abuse of the state’s power – and done to save miniscule amounts of money. It also carries with it the nasty implication that despite the conviction having been quashed you are really guilty. Little wonder that a 2015 House of Commons paper pointed out that compensation for miscarriages of justice was the exception, not the rule. The government is effectively profiting from its own iniquity at the expense of those it has harmed. It is an unconscionable way to behave. It has compounded this by its appointment of plainly useless leaders of the CCRC, the body meant to uncover and deal with miscarriages of injustice, still without a CEO. Its institutional ineffectiveness resulted in Patrick Sullivan, just exonerated after 38 years, to remain in prison a decade longer than he might have done had the CCRC done its job.

IICSA

One of the recommendations of its final report was a compensation scheme for those children sexually abused in care homes. Scotland and NI have such a scheme. But the government has just announced that there will not be one for England & Wales because of the financial climate.

Saving money on the back of the most vulnerable, the most harmed, those least able to help themselves. “Labour is a moral crusade or it is nothing.” Nothing it is, then. Whether you get anything seems entirely arbitrary, dependent on whether you can get the ear of those in power and embarrass them sufficiently or ingratiate yourself. It is little better than hanging around a royal court with your petition hoping to catch the eye of someone important who might – possibly – listen to you.

And today MPs are set to vote on a Bill which contains a clause granting total civil immunity to any medical professional even if they have acted negligently or maliciously or breached all the law’s requirements and which removes any oversight of any possible wrongful deaths.  That’s the spirit! Make it impossible to know what has happened or take action for any bad behaviour and all these demands for restitution, compensation, accountability from those harmed will disappear. As will they: dead and forgotten. It’s one way of learning a lesson, certainly.

And the lessons our society has learnt are these: that our obligations to those who are vulnerable, those who will be harmed when – not if – a system and the people running it fail are unimportant by comparison with the demands of those who want something for themselves regardless of the effect on others. The state knows the price of everything but the value of nothing. Its promises to do right by those it harms cannot be trusted. And now it has given up even doing that.

Cyclefree