CCRC Applicant Experience Report Presentation at the House of Commons

'The political class are in denial about having a criminal justice system that doesn’t work’ - Danny Barrs, APMI

Since 2023, Drs Lucy Welsh and Amy Clarke at the universities of Sussex and Brighton, respectively, have been compiling their report into applicants’ experiences of the Criminal Cases Review Commission, or the CCRC. On a mid October evening in 2025, and along with representatives from the All Party Parliamentary Group on Miscarriages of Justice, they presented the report in a committee room at the House of Commons.

Along with the good doctors were also Dame Vera Baird, interim Chair of the CCRC, and chairing the presentation was Member of Parliament (and staunch Joint Enterprise campaigner) Kim Johnson, down from Liverpool. Dame Vera had only been in post for a few months of the 18 she is scheduled to serve, brought in after public outrage over the Andy Malkinson scandal, where it transpired Greater Manchester Police had known about exonerating DNA in his 2002 conviction for rape for the latter 12 years of his sentence - but only after charity APPEAL were able to uncover it, and have Andy exonerated.

Speaking of APPEAL, Emma Torr was a part of the presenting panel, with strong words for the quango: ‘The public can’t trust the CCRC’, and ‘personnel at the CCRC need to change’. Torr’s colleague Matt Foot, co-director of APPEAL was in the viewing gallery, and in questions after the presentations commented that he knew of two investigative journalists who had applied to the CCRC but been refused.

The sole male on the presenting panel was also its only ‘lived experience’ representative, Danny Barrs of the Association of Prisoners Maintaining Innocence (APMI), and a very compelling, British Robert De Niro type presenter he was too: ‘The CPS is there to prosecute, not to find the truth’ said Danny, before wondering if PMI’s I(prisoners maintaining innocence) should be released on tag in order to pursue their claims of innocence more easily.

Barrs was also critical of the ‘victimhood’ language so awash in the Criminal Justice System, including to a certain extent at this presentation, wondering if those using the term victim ever think it also applies to victims of miscarriages of justice, or as he put it ‘victims of the state’. The impression is that if it does, it’s only ever at a push. Danny’s conclusion was that politicians don’t seem to have the political will to deal with MoJ’s, only seeming to care about the short-term or the next election at best.

That said there were three MP’s in attendance (for most of the session) in Andy Slaughter (who was scheduled to be a panel speaker, but was held up in another parliamentary matter on the day, so had to join later), Ian Lavery and Andy McDonald, all Labour. Penney Lewis of The Law Commission also spoke, her first point being that the CCRC needed to ‘look at’ the Real Possibility Test, which Dr Michael Naughton of Empowering The Innocent has been critiquing for more than twenty years. Dr Naughton says the RPT is designed to actively prevent miscarriages of justice from coming to public attention to defend the system and avoid the decrease in trust and confidence in the criminal justice system that they cause, and is the main factor in the organisation’s 98% refusal rate. The Law Commission proposed in its recent report that the RPT be replaced with a Potential Miscarriage of Justice Test, as per the organisation’s founding brief - but this would need a change in the law. Was there sufficient political will in the room to make this happen?

Andy Slaughter said: ‘The CCRC needs to become a challenger organisation again’, while Dame Vera said: ‘The criminal justice system is not infallible, and neither are we’. Baird went on to say that it was difficult to communicate such an ‘esoteric’ organisation as the CCRC to the public, while introducing the amusing new terminology of 'CRIM' for the CCRC’s ‘overworked’ Case Review Managers (CRMs). Her CRIMS were now going slower rather than faster due to the Malkinson case, but she said new applicants would now receive a phone call in order to establish clearer contact.

She also said that submissions would sometimes run to dozens or hundred of pages, and that a ‘top ten points’ would be a solution to such Sisyphean tasks as the CRIMs were regularly facing. Dame Vera noted that some of the young women CRIMs were ‘fiercely good’ at their jobs; let’s hope the young (and old) men on her staff are too! Other women present with a fierce interest in proceedings included representatives from Transform Justice and Spoken Injustice, and most got a chance to ask a question at the end (except your unfortunate reporter!).

The controversies surrounding previous Chair and CEO Helen Pitcher and Karen Kneller were glanced over - I don’t recall their names being mentioned - but Danny Barrs was alone at the Big Table in calling out the general dysfunction of this ‘niche’ of the criminal justice system, and all the unnecessary bureaucracy that goes along with it. There is a sense that if the CCRC start referring cases to the appeal court based on actual suspicion of wrongful conviction then the ‘floodgates will have been opened’, and they’ll all be flooded. It’s either that  - fair justice being enacted, and being seen to be enacted - or let a zombie quango just trudge on, saying all the right weasel words.

Lucy Welsh and Amy Clarke’s report touched on all these points, in studious and academic detail, and in Lucy’s introduction she highlighted how frustrated and angry were many applicants in prison due to the difficulties of communication for those inside. When that is compounded by an obstreperous bureaucracy that is designed to bat away applications rather than consider them seriously, the damage to a sense of justice is redoubled.

Maybe Dame Vera’s Ten Points idea, along with the abolishment of the Real Possibility Test in law, might make for a better-functioning machine? Without the RPT going, there is no hope. This presentation, in tandem with the Law Commission’s own recent report, has at least brought the subject to a head.

By Sean Bw Parker