Laurence Turner

I beg to move, That this House has considered compensation for criminal injuries. It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship for the first time, Dr Murrison. At the outset, I thank the members of the Backbench Business Committee for agreeing to allocate this debate and all hon. Members, across parties, who supported the application. I also thank those constituents and members of the public who have been in touch in advance of the debate. Criminal injuries are, by their nature, not easy matters to discuss, so I am grateful to all the people who took the time to recount their experiences. I am also grateful to all the Members present today, in particular my hon. Friend the Member for Warrington North (Charlotte Nichols), who has already done much in this and the previous Parliament to highlight some of the problems that we will talk about in this debate. It is also good to see the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) in his place. I should make it clear that, I will be talking about the criminal injuries compensation scheme as it operates in Great Britain, but I am aware that different arrangements apply in Northern Ireland, and I am glad that that perspective will be represented today. It is also important at this early stage to pay tribute to the staff of the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority. Nothing in the opening of this debate is intended as a criticism of them. They work within parameters that are broadly set by us in Parliament, and with staffing numbers that have fallen by 19% since the current iteration of the scheme was introduced in 2012. The civil service people survey reveals that they take pride and find purpose in their jobs, and I am grateful to them. The question of how the victims of serious physical and mental criminal injury may be fairly compensated has occupied this House for many decades. We are, to the month, at the 60th anniversary of the introduction for the first full year of the original, non-statutory scheme, which was introduced in recognition of the fact that there will always be cases in which the perpetrators of serious violence cannot be identified or awards cannot be recovered from their assets or incomes. In preparation for this debate, I was delighted to learn of a local connection: the guiding and determined force behind the original scheme was the Birmingham magistrate and first secretary of the Howard League for Penal Reform, Margery Fry, who up to her death was a tireless campaigner for better support for the victims of crime and for the principle that perpetrators must, wherever possible, pay the cost of restitution. Those are principles that I am sure Members on both sides of the House will endorse today. However, there is another, unhappy point of emerging agreement on the criminal injuries compensation scheme: it does not adequately serve the people it is meant to aid. As the Victims’ Commissioner put it in 2019, victims of violent crime reported “delays, uncertainty about next steps and poor communication. To many, fairly or unfairly, the Scheme seemed calculated to frustrate and alienate.”