Criminal Justice System

Cathy Jamieson Excerpts

Wednesday 17th October 2012 Westminster Hall

[Cathy Jamieson (Kilmarnock and Loudoun) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a pleasure to speak in the debate this afternoon, Mrs Riordan, and I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Manchester Central (Tony Lloyd) on securing it. I speak today as a member of the trade union USDAW, the Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers—I draw attention to the Register of Members’ Financial Interests—but also as the former Cabinet Secretary for Justice in the Scottish Parliament for four years. I am proud that I was able to introduce legislation that improved the lot of victims and witnesses in the court system in Scotland, as well as speeding up court processes to stop victims and witnesses from having a lot of their time wasted and to ensure that public money was not wasted in unduly lengthy processes.

Today I want to concentrate on the changes to the criminal injuries compensation scheme. Just before Parliament broke up for the recess, I had the opportunity to present a petition to Parliament signed by thousands of people—mostly, but not all, members of USDAW—who were concerned about that. The process of presenting a parliamentary petition means that it is in formal parliamentary language, which I felt did not really give the flavour or the opportunity to explain what it is like for the victims of crime. That is why I was so keen to speak in this debate.

Earlier today I had the opportunity to hear directly from a number of people who have been victims of crime fairly recently, including a young man who was walking to his place of work to cover the shift of a colleague who had been unable to turn up. He was set upon by three drunken teenagers, hospitalised, ended up in a coma for some days and possibly suffered a stroke. He said that the criminal injuries compensation scheme allowed him “to reset his life”, as he described it. It perhaps did not provide all the compensation mentioned by the hon. Member for Enfield, Southgate (Mr Burrowes), but no one would ever say that monetary compensation is enough in such circumstances. What that young man said was that it had at least given him the opportunity to put right some of the wrongs.

I also heard from another young man from Glasgow, who was going home from his workplace—he works in retail—to see his baby daughter at lunchtime; at 2.40 in the afternoon he was violently attacked and left unconscious and with scars that will last for a lifetime. As he said, it is not only the physical scars, which both he and his family have to deal with, but the emotional scars. Every time he goes out, he sees faces in the crowd who he believes may yet be those same people who attacked him. His clear message to us as parliamentarians is that our focus should be entirely on cutting crime and not on cutting compensation. He laid out clearly that the compensation was not about the finance—he lost more financially, by being off work for a year, than he ever got back in compensation.

I appeal to the Minister, who is new but whose background I know. She is a reasonable person, not to be seen—I am sure she does not want to be—as on the side of the assailants in such circumstances, rather than on the side of the victims. It is a real concern to me that the Government’s proposals would do away with compensation for a huge number of serious injuries—in particular those covered in the lower bandings, bandings 1 to 5. The amounts of compensation for the individuals are relatively small, but the message, the signal sent to the victims, is that the state—society—has recognised their suffering and is prepared to do something about it. I hope that the Minister will listen and that she will bring any proposals back to the Floor of the House for us all to debate in more detail.