For six decades, the Criminal Injuries Compensation Scheme (CICS) has existed to provide redress to people who have been injured by crime. It’s supposed to help them get back on track. It is a great idea and supporting people who have been wronged and are suffering because of the actions of others is the right thing to do in a just society. It has the potential to be the envy of the world. But no compensation scheme is perfect and the CICS in particular has some major flaws. There are some key changes which need to be made to this scheme if is to live up to its potential and truly help innocent victims of crime.

Each year approximately 480,000 people across Great Britain are injured because of violent crime, yet in the 2022/23 financial year there were only 36,686 applications for compensation - a mere eight per cent of victims of violent crime. There is clearly a lack of awareness of the scheme. More could be done to point victims in the scheme’s direction.

Of the 36,000, less than half were compensated. That’s a terrible success rate by anyone’s measure. But it is not without reason.

For the people who do know about the scheme, the criteria around eligibility present another hurdle. Under current rules you only have two years to apply to the scheme, although exceptions can be made in exceptional circumstances. While two years doesn’t sound too restrictive, it is the experience of APIL members that police often advise victims of crime to wait until all the legal proceedings in relation to the crime have been concluded before they apply to the scheme. With the current, well-documented delays in the criminal justice system, legal proceedings often take longer than two years to conclude, meaning victims of crime are frozen out of the scheme through no fault of their own. APIL believes the time limit should extend to three years, but that there should still be exceptions to a three-year time limit. People in abusive relationships, for example, tend to take longer to come forward and will need more time to seek redress.

It can often be decades before survivors of childhood sexual abuse are ready to come forward and talk about what happened. They may not even realise what happened to them, or the impact it has had, until later in life. Unless the time limit for applications is changed, these survivors are denied compensation. The Government must finally implement the recommendation from the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) and increase the time limit for applications to the CICS by child sexual abuse survivors to seven years. The time limit would run from either the date of reporting the abuse to the police, or from when the victim turns 18 if the crime was reported while the victim was a child.

Another easily made change that would benefit victims of crime is again to do with eligibility. Under current rules, the crime must have been reported to police for it to be considered for the scheme. This rule fails victims who do not go to the police for fear of not being believed or feelings of shame. The Government should go back to the pre-2012 rules which meant victims were eligible so long as the crime had been reported to “responsible people”. This encompassed not just police, but also teachers, doctors, and ministers of religion. This was a sensible and fair approach that should be adopted again.

Perhaps the biggest barrier to entry for this scheme is that it only serves victims of “violent” crime. This is locking hundreds, potentially thousands, of victims out of the scheme. Not all scars caused by crime are physical. Stalking and online sexual abuse for example, are often not physically violent in nature. They can, however, cause psychological and emotional harm to victims, as well as potential long-term mental health troubles. These victims deserve to be recognised as much as any other victim of crime. The Government should remove the term ‘violent’ from the scheme’s eligibility criteria.

APIL has raised all these concerns in three separate Government consultations between 2020 and 2023, and yet no changes have been forthcoming so far, and we are still awaiting Government responses to these consultations. Until the Government makes the necessary changes to the scheme, most injured victims of crime will not receive the redress they deserve.

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