‘Ordinary people don’t matter.’
This is an oft-heard complaint where the state and its agents are found to be culpable for avoidable tragedies. Hillsborough, Grenfell, Infected Blood, Windrush. Decades elapse before victims and their families achieve closure – if they ever do. Class and/or racial prejudice often intrude, too. This is the UK after all.
This perception of bureaucratic indifference, even hostility, is compounded by the ad hoc nature of compensation schemes. Sometimes it seems as if the state is actively seeking to prolong the anguish. Last week there were calls for the Windrush scheme to be taken out of Home Office hands after the parliamentary ombudsman secured nearly £500,000 for people wrongly denied compensation. The department was found to be wrongly applying its own rules and not always looking at the evidence.
It is long past time for such redress schemes to be reformed. That is the principal recommendation of a new report published today by King’s Legal Clinic of King’s College London. Based on insights shared at a roundtable involving victim advocates, lawyers and academics, the report calls for a new public body to ensure fair and independent outcomes for victims, and for compulsory guidance to be created for setting up and operating redress schemes.
Experience shows that redress schemes have commonly suffered from delays in their establishment and operation, with the wheel reinvented each time. That serves officialdom, which too often operates on the principle of delay and deny, but it is torturous (and tortuous) for victims. It also means claimants generally have to wait a very long time before they see any money.
Will Labour listen? The new government has pledged to push through a ‘Hillsborough law’, forcing public bodies to cooperate with investigations into major disasters or potentially face criminal sanctions. This would seem to be a logical next step.
There would be a cost, however. One of the report’s more politically difficult recommendations is that funded legal advice should be made available from the outset of a claim, ‘due to the fear and distrust felt towards the state’ and ‘the need for lawyers to act as a buffer and support victims to make objective decisions in emotionally charged circumstances’.
I am persuaded. Persuading the Treasury will be harder.
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