Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask Her Majesty’s Government, further to the Written Answer by Lord Faulks on 24 June (WA 144), what was the overall cost for the last three years of legal aid claims in respect of false imprisonment; and into which categories they record such costs as falling.

The table below shows the total amounts claimed against closed false imprisonment matters from the 2011/12, 2012/13 and 2013/14 financial years. These matters cover domestic false imprisonment, and both legal and illegal immigration false imprisonment matters.

The claim values represent the total amounts paid against cases closing in the respective period, and as such, some of the expenditure against these cases may have been incurred in earlier periods. The costs are recorded as falling in the category Actions Against the Police.

The increase in claim value in 2013/14 compared to previous years is largely due to one case which started in 2002, for which a final bill was submitted in January 2014. This case, known as Austin and Saxby, was a test case on behalf of a much larger group of individuals relating to protests on May Day 2002. They claimed that they had been unlawfully subjected to the procedure known as kettling by the Metropolitan Police. The case went to the House of Lords (Supreme Court) where they lost and the law was eventually clarified.