Miscarriage of Justice application service (MOJAS) claims Management Information
Published 25 April 2024
Applies to England and Wales
© Crown copyright 2024
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This publication is available at https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/miscarriage-of-justice-application-service-mojas-claims-management-information/miscarriage-of-justice-application-service-mojas-claims-management-information
1. Introduction
The Secretary of State has a statutory duty to decide whether to award compensation to someone who has suffered a miscarriage of justice in England and Wales, in line with the test set out in section 133 of the Criminal Justice Act 1988.
There is no automatic entitlement to compensation under the Statutory scheme and the Miscarriages of Justice Application Service (MOJAS) is just one route in which an individual can receive compensation for a wrongful conviction, with other options including making a civil claim. More information on applying for compensation can be found at MOJAS. It should be noted that the Post Office compensation scheme is separate from this scheme and is not covered in the figures below.
This report provides an overview of applications to MOJAS received in relation to the statutory scheme and all decisions made on applications in the period between April 2016 and March 2024. Data from earlier years have not been included due to concerns about the quality of data as it was not collected on a consistent basis. The information and data presented in this document should be considered as management information presented to give one coherent and quality assured version of these statistics.
Necessarily some applications will still be in progress at the point that the statistics were collated for publication and so not all applications captured in the data will have completed all stages of the process.
The total amount of compensation payable to or in respect of a person under section 133 cannot exceed the overall compensation limit. The limit is £1 million where the person was detained for at least 10 years and £500,000 in any other case.
2. Rationale for publishing
This publication provides an overview of statistics on applications received and all decisions made for miscarriage of justice applications that were made between April 2016 and March 2024.
The department is releasing the figures following public interest in the subject and requests made following media coverage. The publication of these statistics provides a coherent set of publicly available data. The publication will provide equal access in line with the data requested by the public and with the Code of Practice for Statistics which states, “Statistics and data should be equally available to all, not given to some people before others.”
3. Coverage
The report relates to financial years from 2016/17 to 2023/24. Data from earlier years have not been included as they were not collected on a consistent basis, and the quality of the data is not adequate for publication. The report covers the journey of compensation cases, the total amount paid, and the time taken to reach key stages:
4. Summary of findings
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The Ministry of Justice has paid £2,380,700 in compensation under the Miscarriage of Application Service in the period 2016/17 to 2023/24.
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The amount paid in a single claim range between £250 and £500,000. Over the period, 591 applications for compensation for a miscarriage of justice have been received.
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From April 2016 to March 2024, 133 applications were accepted as eligible to be considered against s133 criteria and 460 were rejected.
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From April 2016 to March 2024, 39 applications were deemed to meet the s133 test and 69 were refused. There is a high threshold for acceptance. The main reason for refusal is that there is no new or newly-discovered fact and/or that the new or newly discovered fact does not show beyond reasonable doubt that the person did not commit the offence.
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On average it took 127 weeks from application receipt to compensation payment in the period covered by the figures. When an applicant is notified that the test has been met, they are given up to 6 months (although this can be extended) to gather supporting evidence to quantify the losses arising from the miscarriage of justice.
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The Lord Chancellor announced on 6 August 2023 that saved living costs would no longer be deducted from compensation payments.
This publication has been released as a standalone publication, but this may be repeated in the future in line with user needs.