CICA’s Role In Supporting Victims Of Terrorism – A Follow Up

ARTICLE BY DARYL SMITH

Late last year, I put together an article on how the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority (CICA) held a responsibility to compensate the survivors of terrorism when they had nowhere else to turn. The CICA are able to provide compensation to ease the process of moving on after such atrocities occur. To quote what I previously wrote, the CICA held the role of making sure the awards they deliver are “swift, just and fair.”

It is with this in mind that we take a look at the recently published article documenting Lisa Bridgett’s recovery two years after surviving the Manchester Arena bombing.[i] Lisa was picking up her daughter Ashleigh following the Ariana Grande concert in 2017, when one of the devices was detonated just five metres away from her.

Her story is simply miraculous. She was on the phone at the time and, astonishingly, a steel nut from the explosive hit the phone which absorbed most of the impact. While this almost certainly saved her life, it did not leave her without injury. The middle finger of her left hand was wounded to such an extreme that amputation was left an inevitability, the steel nut deflected into her nose leaving her with breathing issues, she was left with a gaping hole in her thigh and her ankle was broken to the extent that pins needed to be inserted which have caused her to suffer a continuing significant disability.

Determined to progress with her life Lisa turned to the CICA to provide the compensation she was entitled to. We are now two years on since the attack and Lisa is yet to receive a penny.

The CICA made an initial offer of £12,400, the majority of the award (£11,000) arising from her ongoing issues with her ankle. When making this award, the CICA failed to take note of Lisa’s psychological injuries (anxiety, flashbacks and PTSD) and thus Lisa has requested that the CICA review their decision.

While the values of the injuries are a debate in themselves, that the CICA have now taken two years with Lisa’s claim shows one of the major flaws of the scheme. The CICA was set up to help, not to hinder, and by prolonging the duration taken for a claim to conclude, they are, in essence, re-traumatising victims.

As I mentioned in my previous terrorism article, a victim is left unable to move on until a final decision has been issued. This claim will hang over them as a constant reminder of the event, leading to negative effects on a claimant’s mental health and therefore building further pressure on the mental health and support services of this country which are fundamentally struggling as it is.

Realistic expectations should be applied to government-funded schemes such as the CICA. There will never be excessive amounts of funding made available to them and the complexity of some claims will always mean that some will take more deliberation than others. However, the lack of compassion and empathy shown by the CICA in instances such as this one is worrying. “Swift, just and fair” was the phrase I used in the first article and it is the phrase I am drawing attention to once again.

A victim of a major terrorist attack, still awaiting some semblance of compensation two years down the line and the level of her psychological injury remaining unassessed is not ‘swift’, ‘just’ or ‘fair’.

With the ministers’ review of the CICA growing ever closer, and increased victim support being high on the agenda[ii], I await the findings of the full review with bated breath in the hope that changes will be made in the near future to finally make the CICA’s scheme “swift, just and fair.”

[i] Mirror Source

[ii] Government Source

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