Just Thinking makes an interesting point.
Few to none have been charged with riot: as I\’ve been saying, this might well mean that there wasn\’t in fact a riot and thus the rozzers not having to pay for the damage caused in those not riots.
What slightly worries me is that Frank Dobson thinks this a possible reason for there being no charges of riot: which makes me question my own first surmise. As would agreeing with Frank Dobson on anything.
However, we seem to be getting from the government that this won\’t change the situation under the Riot Damages Act.
Hmm, I dunno give the bureaucrats a loophole and they\’ll drive a truck through it.
As a result of your posts on the subject, and some independent reading I’d done, I emailed my MP on Wednesday. His response:
Which I found reassuring, looks good, anyway.
Dave gave a cast-iron promise in Parliament yesterday that people would be compensated under the Riot Damages Act. It’s going to happen, isn’t it?
I’ve looked up the Riot (Damages) Act, and there’s nothing in it that requires anyone to be charged with riot before it operates.
http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Vict/49-50/38/contents
Of course there may be case law on it, but I’d doubt it.
Obviously it’s much easier for the owner of the burnt-out shop to prove that there was a riot if someone has already been convicted of riot. And it’s a bit difficult for the police to argue that there wasn’t a riot if they’re charging people with riot.
But that’s different to saying that you can’t claim if no-one is charged.
If the government were to weasel out of its commitments by claiming this wasn’t a riot, I suspect it’d end up facing something that closely resembled a riot. Not in the “idiots burning down their mate’s nan’s shop” sense of the term, but in the “righteously angry citizens storming Parliament” sense of the term.
@ MatGB
6) is good news; a few years ago a local business closed down for good when planning officers refused permission for shutters after its windows had been broken twice in fairly quick succession and got a court order to remove the ones it erected after the third occasion.