A Scottish Review investigation

Kenneth Roy
Life is cheap

What is the value of a human life? There is a figure. There is a precise answer.
     Earlier this week, SR exposed the spending habit of a public body which believes that it is both necessary and financially prudent to spend £300,000 promoting itself to another public body. The highest-paid employee of this organisation (NHS Health Scotland) received a pay increase of £35,000 last year, taking his salary to £185,000 and his pension pot to £1.2 million. You can take it that the official value of a human life is very considerably less than Dr Gruer's pay increase.

Based in Glasgow but covering the whole of the UK, the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority (CICA) administers a scheme to help the victims of crime. Its staff of 450 assesses and determines eligibility for monetary awards fixed by the UK parliament. It aims to provide, in its own words, 'a fast, efficient service' to applicants. It undertakes to treat them 'with sensitivity'. It promises to act 'efficiently and fairly'.
     Just over two years ago, the National Audit Office disputed that CICA was doing any of this competently. In a damning report, it attacked the 'bureaucratic and repetitive' procedures and the 'long and difficult' application forms. We asked CICA if anything had changed. It replied that significant progress had been made and explained how. The average waiting time for a case decision has been reduced from 14 months in autumn 2007 to under 10 months in spring 2009. 'A new suite' of application forms, 'tailored to individual circumstances', has been introduced, There is now a telephone helpline advising callers whether they are likely to be eligible. As a result of these changes, the authority's caseload has been reduced by 20,000 despite a 'significant' increase in the number of applications. Administration costs have been cut by £3m.
     But there remains a problem. The statistics produced by CICA won't make it go away; no amount of cost-cutting will make it go away. The problem is simply this: among its more prominent claimants, there is bitterness about the system's perceived lack of humanity. This bitterness extends beyond critical questions about the functioning of a bureaucracy. It poses questions about our values as a society.

I first became aware of discontent over CICA when I interviewed Margaret and Barry Mizen at one of the courses of the Young UK and Ireland Programme. They lost their son Jimmy, the day after his 16th birthday, when he was murdered in a baker's shop in east London. The Mizens could have retreated into private grief, as most victims do. Instead, they have devoted themselves to a foundation in their son's name, starting an apprenticeship scheme and counselling young people. This selfless work has come at great personal cost. Barry is self-employed (he runs a shoe repair business). Inevitably, his business has suffered.
     The Mizens' expectation of the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority was realistic; that is to say, low. The bereavement award is £11,000; if there are two qualifying applicants, the amount to each is £5,500. Margaret and Barry started to fill in one of the 'new suite' of application forms and, in their sorrow and confusion, got it wrong. They submitted a joint form which came bouncing back: the Mizens were told they must each submit a separate form. Barry received his cheque for £5,500 eight months later. When I last spoke to them before Christmas, Margaret was still waiting. Meanwhile, the Mizens had been forced to re-mortgage their house: the money released in this way gave them the financial breathing space to cope with their grief and to commemorate Jimmy's life in a positive way. Some members of the family are still struggling to work regularly. In the Mizens' situation, any form of normality is achieved slowly, if it is ever achieved.
     The Mizens will receive the pathetically small public restitution to which they are entitled: that much can be said in their case. They are relatively fortunate.
     SR has a file of correspondence on the case of Hazel Cameron, then living in Perthshire, whose father died in suspicious circumstances in August 2000. She had to give up her business, spent a period out of work, and her teenage son suffered depression – symptoms all too familiar to the victims of crime. She heard a radio programme in which a legal expert talked about CICA and encouraged victims to claim, 'making it sound a straightforward matter'. So she went ahead.
     From the date of her original application in October 2000, many months elapsed without progress or contact from CICA. She telephoned several times to ask what has happening. CICA eventually replied in March 2002 with the news, distressing to Hazel Cameron, that neither the police nor the Crown Office had provided information essential to its understanding of her application. The following month, 20 months after Mr Cameron's death, his daughter's case was finally rejected on the grounds that the authority was not satisfied that his fatal injuries were 'directly attributable to a crime of violence'. She appealed against this decision and the catalogue of poor administration, painfully obvious from a study of the correspondence, continued for many more months. 'I found dealing with CICA a nightmare,' she writes. In the end, her appeal was turned down. The whole process had taken three years.
     It should be pointed out that the Cameron case pre-dated the National Audit Office inquiry and the subsequent reform of CICA's systems.
     Yet still the problem has not gone away.

When 23-year-old Kevin Johnson was stabbed to death by a gang outside his house in Sunderland after telling them to be quiet, there was universal horror at this arbitrary violence against an innocent citizen and many expressions of admiration for Mr Johnson's courage in standing up to the gang. The Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority, when it came to consider the claim for a bereavement award by the victim's family, took a different view; it concluded that Kevin Johnson had contributed to his own death by intervening. At first it turned down the application for compensation; finally, it awarded half.
     Westley Odger, aged 27, was attempting to withdraw cash from a machine in Colchester when someone in the queue pushed in front of him. Mr Odger remonstrated with the queue-jumper and was stabbed to death. In that case too, CICA decided that the victim had contributed to his own death and halved the bereavement award to his mother; halving also the state's contribution to the funeral costs. Ann Oakes-Odger now helps other victims to deal with compensation claims, encouraging them to take their cases to appeal if necessary, but as she points out: 'This is beyond the scale of any normal bereavement. When families have their claims rejected, many cannot face fighting on. Most of the victims are ill, physically or mentally. They are completely debilitated by the experience. In my own case, having given CICA my son's death certificate when they asked for it, they then wrote again, a week before Christmas, to demand his birth certificate.'
     Ann asks: Why should the families have to fight at all? She sees no justification for bureaucratic 'cruelty' – her word – to people suffering grievous loss. She believes that the number of murders in the UK is so low, and the bereavement award so small, that victims should be compensated automatically without having to endure the humiliation of CICA scrutiny.

What is the value of a human life? If you measure it according to the bereavement award distributed by the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority, it amounts to £11,000 plus the cost of a funeral, though only if you satisfy the critera of the authority. For this insulting figure, CICA cannot be blamed: the value of the award is the responsibility of the UK parliament. When it introduced the tariff in 1996, the UK parliament set the bereavement award at £10,000; in 2001, it raised the award to £11,000.
     Had it simply kept pace with inflation, the award would now be worth £13,000. But it has not kept pace with inflation. It has remained the same for nine years, a period during which public sector pay has rocketed. The chief executive of the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority earns £90,000 a year – equivalent to eight bereavement awards.
     Ann Oakes-Odger says she has lost faith in the criminal justice system. Yet, like Margaret and Barry Mizen, she goes on fighting, running a charity which campaigns against knife crime. Her work is not only inspirational. To any official of the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority reading this, to any parliamentarian, to any public sector manager, it ought also to be profoundly humbling.

http://www.knifecrimes.org/

http://www.jimmymizen.org/