Andrew Malkinson, who spent 17 years in jail for a crime he did not commit, has described having to use a food bank and struggling to survive on universal credit while he waits for compensation.
Writing in the Guardian, Malkinson said that while the public might think he had been paid millions by the state after he was exonerated last summer, he was still living in penury as he navigated the compensation system.
As well as receiving no recompense from the state, he is having to pay back £5 a month of his universal credit “for what it considered an overpayment” after he left the country for more than 28 days to fulfil his “long-held dream” of travel.
Malkinson said he needed urgent help with his mental health after living as a someone wrongly convicted of sexual offences for 20 years but he had been told it would be a five-month wait on the NHS to receive support. Instead, he has weekly counselling with a charity, which has meant he was removed from the NHS waiting list.
He was homeless last summer after his exoneration and is now living in southern England in a one-bedroom council flat with his lawyer’s “absurdly needy” cocker spaniel Basil.
“When I emerged blinking into the sunlight outside the court of appeal last July declared a ‘free man’, I was also an impoverished man,” he wrote. “I was living on universal credit, homeless and in urgent need of mental health support from clinicians who would at last recognise the enormity of what I had been through for the last 20 years.
“In the days that followed my exoneration, news stories were followed by comments from the public offering the consolation that I must be due a major payout from the state. Millions, they reckoned. Enough to make sure I could own a home, make up for lost time, and secure the support I needed for my mental health.
“This week I found myself in line at the local food bank. I feel so grateful to the people who so generously stocked my kitchen for the week, but at the same time, given what the state owes me, I should not be in this position.”
He described how he was “encountering nothing but barriers” in accessing compensation because of the way the law has been set up. The situation has left him having to choose whether to take an interim payment under the statutory compensation scheme now and risk losing legal aid to sue the police later. He said the government had promised to reform this issue later in the year, but in the meantime he is left waiting.
Other barriers he described include a requirement to fight a civil claim through the courts before being compensated through the statutory scheme, though he has been told this should not apply, and “a refusal to adjust the cap on compensation of £1m, despite it not increasing with inflation since it was first introduced in December 2008.”
He wrote that those who designed the compensation scheme in 2014 were “paranoid” and “labouring under the delusion that the state was somehow being consistently ripped off by prisoners whose convictions had been quashed”.
Malkinson, 57, has already overturned a law that had meant prison board and lodging would be deducted from compensation, and he continues to push for an overhaul of the justice system.
In an interview with the Guardian this week, he called for reform of the jury system to ban majority verdicts like the one that wrongly convicted him of rape.
A Ministry of Justice spokesperson said: “Andrew Malkinson suffered an atrocious miscarriage of justice which is why the Lord Chancellor has launched an inquiry into what happened, has scrapped the ‘saved living costs’ deduction from compensation and is changing legal aid rules so this form of compensation may be discounted from eligibility criteria.
“Mr Malkinson is free to apply to the Miscarriage of Justice Application Service for compensation and this will not affect or delay his plans to sue the police.”
