Clause 31
Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill
8:00 pm
Edward Garnier (Shadow Minister, Justice; Harborough, Conservative)
Clause 31 sets a limitation period for the bringing of complaints. Subsection (2)(a) provides a limitation period of no more than one year. After that year, the complaint is barred. I will read the relevant subsection so that the Committee understands what I am talking about:
“Those requirements are...that a period of no more than one year”—
my amendment would make it three years—
“has passed since the relevant person first became aware of the matters giving rise to the substance of the complaint”.
Amendment no. 148 deals with subsection (2)(c), which states that the requirements are that
“where the responsible authority has responded to the substance of the complaint following such a communication (whether by rejecting it or by addressing it in some other way), that a period of no more than three months has passed since it did so.”
I would substitute a period of 12 months.
First, I want to know why the Government have chosen a limitation period of one year for making an initial complaint, and a three-month limitation period for bringing a further complaint based on the adjudication. In civil law, a limitation period of three years is not unheard of. I appreciate that some torts have a limitation period of one year, but there is a procedure by which, if the complaint or the cause of action became known to the complainant only after that period has elapsed, the court has discretion to extend the period.
When we are dealing with prisoners, many of whom may be intellectually impaired, mentally ill or badly affected by substance abuse of one sort or another, one year will not necessarily for them to get their heads around the issues confronting them. Equally, three months is quite a short period of time for the typical prisoner—the typical person affected—to take advice or, off his own bat, to do something about the response from the responsible authority.
The amendments are not earth-shattering, but they are humane and sensible, and do not undermine the power of the commissioner to act properly in any given case, prevent him from rejecting complaints, or make him do things which he would not think proper in the ordinary course of. They would provide a little more justice.