Subpostmasters betrayed, contaminated blood victims forgotten: why is Britain so bad at righting wrongs?

Andrew Malkinson is sitting in a tent somewhere in Spain, released from jail after 17 years for a rape that he did not commit. After one rejected appeal and two unsuccessful reviews, he finally had his conviction overturned this summer after forensic testing linked another man to the crime. He is clearly entitled to compensation. This is capped in such cases at £1m, but Malkinson was at first told he would have to pay the Prison Service for 17 years of free board and lodging. English justice is beyond satire.

In August, the justice minister, Alex Chalk, cancelled the payment – the payback rule has been scrapped – and added a catalogue of apologies. Malkinson’s conviction had been “an atrocious miscarriage of justice and he deserves thorough and honest answers”, Chalk said. The Criminal Cases Review Commission also said sorry and so did Greater Manchester police. They all slept soundly in their beds. But there was no sign of compensation actually being paid. Malkinson lingers in his tent. An independent inquiry has been announced, but he wants it to have statutory powers.

Switch to the Post Office’s Horizon scandal, when more than 700 postal workers were wrongly convicted of theft, fraud and false accounting between 1999 and 2015 because of a faulty IT system. Just 132 had the energy and resources to appeal against their conviction, of whom 83 were successful. Dozens either lost heart or had their appeals thrown out for failing to “prove” their innocence. Only in 2021 did the court of appeal admit its decisions had been “an affront to the conscience of the court”. But the government, which owns the Post Office, allowed its executives to take home handsome bonuses, partly for working on the inquiry itself.

The government set up a Horizon compensation advisory board, but compensation went only to those who had won their appeals. Hundreds of small business owners remain “guilty” and in limbo. Every year those imprisoned for a crime they never committed go to their graves, with ministers saving £600,000 on each one.

A third case goes back to the 1970s and the injection of contaminated blood into people with haemophilia, and other patients. There were about 30,000 victims, of whom thousands became infected with HIV and hepatitis C and some 2,900 are estimated to have died. An inquiry into the scandal was not announced until 2017 and has yet to report. It took a leisurely seven months just to appoint a former high court judge as chairman, Sir Brian Langstaff. Like all inquiries it has moved at a snail’s pace, benefiting not victims but lawyers. While it was expected to publish its report this autumn, this has now been delayed until March.

For some reason the government commissioned an interim inquiry from another lawyer, Sir Robert Francis, whose report, in 2022, demanded that compensation was paid to victims now dying at the rate of one every four days. He suggested a compensation payment of £100,000 a person to be paid now, before any final awards are made. Some payments were made last year to survivors and bereaved partners, but campaigners said many were not eligible. After a series of bizarre appearances before Langstaff last July, the government said analysis of Francis’s findings “cannot be completed hurriedly”. It would await Langstaff’s own report, it said – in which case why did it appoint Francis? In other words, since the offence was half a century past, why hurry?

In all three cases, justice is denied and responsibility dodged through the device of delay. The gambit is: admit, apologise in general and kick the specific down the road. In Malkinson’s case, Greater Manchester police must be negligent for failing to hand over clear evidence of his innocence. The Criminal Cases Review Commission, which twice rejected his appeal, also has serious questions to answer. In the case of the Post Office, blame must primarily fall on Fujitsu, whose IT system was clearly rubbish. But it falls also on the Post Office bosses – and its owner, the government.

As for contaminated blood, blame is lost in the mists of time and NHS bureaucracy. But who cares, since what matters is compensation for the thousands of chronically ill people and their families for half a century of pain and in some cases, death. Here the tactic is endlessly “to await the outcome of an inquiry”. In each case the government machine draws its wagons into a circle and does everything to defend its reputation, past as well as present, and not distress the Treasury. Blame collectivised is blame denied.

Languid public inquiries, vastly profiting the legal profession, are a toxin to responsible government. Other inquiries continue into Grenfell Tower and the Covid pandemic. No one seems to know how many years these will consume, or whether anyone will still be held responsible – and to what purpose – when they finally report. They are just early drafts of history.

The law’s delay is one thing, but the next on Hamlet’s list of sins is rarely mentioned. It is the insolence of office. If I were Malkinson, I would take a long lease on that tent.

• Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist

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