TG v FTT and CICA

I held an oral hearing of this application for judicial review in London on 9 th May 2013. The applicant, who was the claimant for compensation, attended in person and was not represented. The Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority (the �Authority� or �CICA�), which is the interested party in this application, was represented by Jessica Simor QC, instructed by the Treasury Solicitor. I am grateful to them all for their assistance. The First-tier Tribunal is the respondent but had, quite properly, taken no part in the proceedings.

The claim for an award was made under the Criminal Injuries Compensation Scheme 2008 (�the 2008 scheme� or �the scheme�), paragraph 18 of which provides that an application for compensation must be made on the appropriate form as soon as possible after the relevant incident and must be received by the Authority within two years of the date of the incident. The Authority (or, on appeal, the tribunal) may waive this time limit only when it considers that

(b) in the particular circumstances of the case, it would not have been reasonable to expect the applicant to have made an application within the two-year period.

In Hutton & Others v First-tier Tribunal & CICA [2012] EWCA Civ 806 the Court of Appeal made clear that the use of the phrase �particular circumstances� (in that case in the 2001 scheme) did not refer to any notion of exceptionality but was a reference to the specific facts of the specific case.

Paragraph 19 provides that it is for the applicant to make out her case, including the case for a waiver of the time limit. Conceptually this is difficult to apply in respect of paragraph 18(b), which requires a judgment of what is reasonable, but it can apply to the facts that are asserted and on which the judgment is to be based.