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Some will recall a discussion last March of a rather extraordinary claim by the British government that a prisoner, subsequently found to have been wrongly convicted, was nonetheless to be treated as having received a benefit through his incarceration, on the ground that he was saved living expenses. (This was not a direct claim against the former prisoner, but an argument to reduce the amount he was to be paid by way of compensation for the miscarriage of justice).

The Court of Appeal have now held that this deduction was perfectly proper, so long as it is merely a deduction from the claim for wages lost while in prison and does not cut into the pain-and-suffering award. I will get the judgment up on the restitution site as soon as I can. The relevant passage is in para 103:

"As to Mr Blake's argument that an Independent Assessor should not regard prison accommodation and keep wrongly imposed on a claimant as a benefit to be deducted, it should be remembered that the deduction is from his claim for pecuniary loss in the form of loss of earnings. It has no impact on the award that he is entitled to receive for his non-pecuniary suffering for his enforced incarceration and its conditions. All the unpleasant aspects of involuntary incarceration are, or should be, taken into account in that part of the award. And the deduction should be on the premise, as is the award for loss of earnings, of a conventional life style in which the claimant would have had to pay for his own living expenses out of those earnings, unless there is evidence to the contrary. If, factually, there was no such basis for the deduction, that argument should have been addressed to [the assessor] ...."

Steve Hedley
Faculty of Law, University College, Cork