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Criminal Injuries Compensation Scheme 2008

rose to move, That the draft scheme laid before the House on 18 June be approved. The noble Lord said: My Lords, criminal injuries compensation is part of the Government’s wider commitment to put victims at the heart of the criminal justice system. We have transformed the way that victims of crime are supported. Victims now have a legal right, for the first time ever, to a high quality of service from the police, the Crown Prosecution Service and the courts. We have introduced 165 witness care units across England and Wales to support victims and witnesses to attend court. At court itself we have introduced special measures such as giving evidence by videolink or with the support of an intermediary to ensure that victims who are vulnerable or intimidated can give their best evidence. The criminal injuries compensation scheme is another part of our strategy to support and protect victims of crime. It provides payment at public expense to innocent victims of violent crime in Great Britain. Compensation is based on a tariff, or scale, of awards for injuries of comparable severity. There are 25 tariff bands ranging from £1,000 to £250,000. More seriously injured victims can get additional compensation for loss of earnings and special expenses, subject to an overall ceiling of £500,000 in respect of any one claim or any one death. Last year the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority paid out £235 million in compensation, and since the scheme’s inception in 1964 it has paid out more than £4 billion to more than 1 million victims of violent crime. Ours is the most generous scheme within the European Union and one of the most generous in the world. For example, in 2007, the United States of America paid out £221,783,000; in the same year, the Great Britain scheme paid out £183,900,000. Considering that the population of the United States is five times greater than ours, the House will acknowledge how generous our scheme is. In September 2005 we consulted on whether to refocus the scheme on victims of the most serious crime while also improving the practical and emotional support available to victims. Many respondents to the consultation wanted the practical and emotional support it proposed. We have taken this forward through the victim support plus model, where Victim Support contacts the victim within 48 hours of referral from the police and a thorough needs assessment is carried out identifying the individual support needed. But respondents also commented that these direct services should not be at the expense of awards for less serious injuries. We agree. We will not, therefore, be refocusing the scheme and have funded Victim Support to roll out its model of practical and emotional help across the country. Criminal injuries compensation does not exist in a vacuum. It is intimately linked to the other support, protection and information that victims of crime receive from the criminal justice system. When we started the Rebuilding Lives consultation we were at the start of a major period of reform—for example, the introduction of witness care units and the victims’ code of practice. We wanted to be clear on the results of these reforms before making any changes to the scheme; in particular, we were keen to see the results of Victim Support’s new victim support plus scheme. In these pilots, 88 per cent of victims said that they felt their needs were completely met, and 92 per cent of victims judged the quality of service to be excellent or good. So the success of its pilots influenced our decision to roll out that initiative across the country, just as it influenced our decision not to refocus the scheme but to instead look at making its administration more efficient and more victim-focused. As a result, the main changes we are bringing before the House relate to the appeals provisions of the scheme. These have become necessary as a consequence of the Tribunals, Courts and Enforcement Act 2007. The provisions that we are inviting noble Lords to approve today are therefore mainly focused on these changes, and the basic structure and rules of the existing scheme will remain much as before. The criminal injuries compensation scheme currently in operation incorporates the functions of both the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority and the Criminal Injuries Compensation Appeals Panel. The main reason for bringing these changes before the House is the 2007 Act, which creates a two-tier tribunal structure, the first-tier tribunal and the upper tribunal, and requires that the Criminal Injuries Compensation Appeals Panel, along with a number of other government tribunals, will be absorbed in the first-tier tribunal on 3 November this year. From that date, the Criminal Injuries Compensation Appeals Panel will cease to exist as a separate body and therefore cannot remain part of the criminal injuries compensation scheme. From the same date, the appeals rules and procedures of the first-tier tribunal will be set out within the relevant tribunal procedure rules, which have yet to be laid before the House. That is why the coming into force date of this draft scheme is 3 November. As opportunities to amend the scheme arise so rarely, we also want to make a number of other changes. These have become necessary with the passage of time since the scheme was last changed in 2001 and in the light of operational experience. In the main, they are needed to clarify meaning or intent where there is doubt or ambiguity, to provide greater clarity, to restore the original intention of the scheme where court judgments or operational experience suggest that the previous wording was not doing the job, and to help streamline some scheme processes. All the changes are clearly set out in annex B to the Explanatory Memorandum that has been laid before Parliament with the draft scheme. The changes are all clearly shown as ““tracked”” changes, and I shall briefly mention some of the more significant ones. Perhaps most importantly, we have substantially recast the paragraphs dealing with additional compensation for loss of earnings and future earning capacity; the payment of awards in fatal cases; and the reduction of compensation on the grounds of benefits received from other sources. Our aim was to modernise the rules to make them simpler and more logical, and to avoid cases of claimants getting double payment from the state in some circumstances. As to other changes, we have made it clear in paragraph 8 that not only must the injury have been sustained in Great Britain but it must have been directly attributable to an act occurring in Great Britain. This is specifically to clarify the original intention of the scheme that both the incident and the injury must have taken place in Great Britain. For example, following the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the USA in 2001, the authorities there determined that qualifying relatives of those killed and who had witnessed the events on live television in Great Britain were eligible for compensation for the mental injuries suffered. Thirty-seven applications were made, of which 26 received awards, totalling £68,000. Our scheme was never intended to cover such cases and this alteration puts the meaning beyond doubt. We are strengthening the criteria for withholding or reducing awards on account of the claimant’s previous unspent criminal convictions and the criteria dealing with time limits for applying for compensation and accepting offers of award. The reason for clarifying how long an applicant has to apply is that the time limit for making applications has been set at two years since the introduction of the statutory tariff-based scheme in 1996. The power to waive that time limit has been used frequently, but inconsistently, within the authority and this clarification is to insure against anomalies or unfairness. We have not altered the number and value of the 25 tariff bands but we have made a number of changes to the tariff of injuries. We have made changes to some of the descriptions of awards for sexual offences using terminology from the Sexual Offences Act 2003 to ensure consistency, and we have inserted some new categories and made some other changes to rectify inconsistencies. We have substantially recast the section dealing with compensation for brain damage to recognise the wide range of brain injuries and to enable the award to be more closely aligned to the injury suffered. We have increased the awards made payable for injuries to teeth in recognition of the reality that victims will often have to use some of the award to pay for corrective dental treatment. We have also inserted a number of new injury descriptions, changed the descriptions of others and moved one or two injuries into higher or lower tariffs where operational experience and medical and legal advice have suggested this would now be appropriate. The tariff now lists some 450 injuries. If parliamentary approval is given, as I have said, the draft scheme would come into force on 3 November 2008. We believe that the changes we are proposing will complement the radical changes that the authority has been making to its end-to-end case working and business processes over the past two years or so. I am happy to say that these changes have already led to improvements in how the authority operates. This will all help to result in a more efficient operation, providing a better, faster and more transparent service to victims of violent crime and making the best use of the available resources. I commend the draft new scheme and invite the House to accept it. I beg to move. Moved, That the draft scheme laid before the House on 18 June be approved. 23rd Report from the Joint Committee on Statutory Instruments.—(Lord Bach.)