I am sure that we are all grateful to the hon. Member for Burnley (Mr. Dan Jones) for the manner in which he has approached this case. He has spoken persuasively on behalf of his constituent, and I can assure him that I have listened to him with attention and sympathy. I am the more sorry that I cannot give him the answer he is seeking.

I can only repeat tonight what I have told the hon. Member in correspondence; that it is only most exceptionally that the Home Secretary feels able to make a payment to a person who has been prosecuted but not convicted of a criminal charge, and that he has not felt justified in making a payment to Mr. Ayres. To explain why the Home Secretary has reached that conclusion, I must first say something about the legal position and about the policy which successive Home Secretaries have adopted in these cases. In law there is as I am sure the hon. Member knows no obligation upon the Home Secretary, or any other member of the Executive, to pay compensation to a person who has been acquitted by the courts. If such a person thinks he has grounds for compensation he can proceed in the civil courts and, if he is successful, recover damages. Any payment that the Home Secretary may make to such a person is paid as an act of grace. It is quite true that such ex gratia payments are made from time to time, but they are made in one set of circumstances only. The very long-standing policy has been to make a payment only where the claimant has suffered hardship through the negligence or misconduct of the police or of some other public authority or official. I will try to explain, first, why it has been thought right to restrict payments to this category of case and, secondly, why, in our view, Mr. Ayres' case is clearly outside the category.

First, as to the general policy, it goes without saying that not every prosecution for a criminal offence results in a conviction. There is bound to be a substantial proportion of unsuccessful prosecutions; the safeguards that we have built up over the years into our judicial system would not be working if there were not. In round figures, there are more than 9,000 cases every year in which a person charged with an indictable offence is acquitted or discharged. That leaves out of account the very much larger total of summary offences. Ought all these 9,000 to be compensated? Their acquittals will have been for a variety of reasons. In one case, innocence will have been unquestionably established. In another, it will be more a question of the prosecution's having failed to discharge the onus of proof; in another, the acquittal may be on some wholly technical ground. It would be difficult to argue that compensation was justified, on merits, in each such case.

Even those people who dislike the Home Secretary's present policy would concede, I think, that there would have to be some criterion for selection, and what we have to decide is what this criterion should be. There is a very real difficulty here which I ask the hon. Member to appreciate. Is the Home Secretary to make compensation only where he is satisfied that the claimant is really innocent and deserving? That sounds attractive, but let us consider its implication.

The implication would be that the acquitted person who had grounds for a claim but whose claim was rejected was not really innocent. The Home Secretary would be imposing his own standard of moral guilt or innocence on the standards applied by the courts. That would be an impossible policy, as I am sure the hon. Member would agree, and I am sure, too, that the Home Secretary would soon be in trouble in the House if he tried to work it. So it is that the Home Secretary confines compensation strictly to those cases where there has been not just a discharge or acquittal but a failure of the system through negligence or misconduct of the kind I have described.

That brings me to the specific case of Mr. Ayres. I am sure that the hon. Member is not suggesting—he certainly did not seem to—that the police or anyone else concerned with the prosecution acted in bad faith, so we can, I hope, agree that no question of misconduct arises.