People who have been wrongly convicted should not have to pay “living expenses” for the time they spent in prison, No 10 has said after a man spent 17 years inside for a rape he did not commit.
Rishi Sunak thought the practice was unfair and had launched discussions with Home Office officials to “establish the facts”, prompted by the case of Andrew Malkinson, who had his conviction overturned last week.
There was never any DNA linking Malkinson, now 57, to the crime and he always insisted he was innocent, which doubled the amount of time he spent behind bars.
“In principle, for someone who has been wrongfully convicted, it doesn’t seem fair that they would have to repay or reimburse costs,” the prime minister’s press secretary said.
Asked why the prime minister had not considered changing the rules, which can be traced back to a 2007 ruling by the House of Lords, they added: “It’s not something that he has necessarily come across … part of a brief that he has never been leading on. But he has been speaking with the Home Office and others in government to establish the facts and to make sure the approach is right and fair.”
At the time, judges in the House of Lords decided by a four-to-one majority that those wrongfully jailed must pay back 25% of their compensation.
Disagreeing with the measures, Lord Rodger told the house that it was not hard to see why people would feel they were, in effect, paying for their keep during the long years when they were wrongly deprived of their liberty.
The senior Conservative MP Sir Bob Neill, who is chair of the Commons justice committee, voiced his concern that Malkinson could lose part of his compensation to pay for prison costs.
“I think any fair-minded person thinks this is just wrong. It goes back to a tightening of the rules of criminal compensation, or compensation for miscarriages of justice in this case, by the Labour government in 2006.
“And the argument that was made was that the public might be potentially offended for forking out money towards people who are cleared on technicalities.
“It’s clearly not right that somebody who was deprived of their liberty, because of the failures of the state and its institutions for a number of years, then should pay the state or be obliged to give some money back to the state, for the privilege of having been wrongly incarcerated. That surely offends any kind of sense of justice.”
The former justice secretary Robert Buckland described Malkinson’s case as “egregious” and suggested he should get special consideration.
“What happened to Malkinson is a dreadful set of circumstances and it doesn’t sound right that he’d have to pay for bed and boarding costs,” he said, adding: “I trust the justice secretary will assess the whole system, before making reform on a case-by-case basis.”
