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Gordon Brown’s knife-edge victory came at a price, with a pledge to pay potentially thousands of pounds in compensation to suspects released without charge under 42-day time limits.

The eleventh-hour concession, cautiously worded, avoided figures but the sums of £3,000 a day being bandied about looked set to undermine the already fractious relations between the Government and the legal profession.

At its most basic, according to Christopher Sallon, a QC specialising in criminal law, the concession was “entirely redundant”. For suspects lawfully detained, compensation was unnecessary. If they were unlawfully detained, the law already provided for compensation. In any case, how could money compensate for the “angst and trauma” of being held?

John Cooper, a barrister and Bar Council member, condemned “paying to have human rights thrown away in a lottery windfall to people detained by the police”. He also raised the spectre of claims from anyone held without charge: to have immigration status checked, for instance..

Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, said that an ex-gratia payments scheme would be developed because of the “very distinctive” circumstances of holding suspects beyond 28 days. Such talk, others said, demeaned the essence of the debate. Robert Brown, a criminal lawyer with the London firm Corker Binning, said that this was to do with civil liberties and public protection, freedom and state power. The notion that such issues could be tackled by paying sums of money was insulting to the intelligence.

There are also practical problems. Who, asked Simon McKay, a criminal solicitor from Leeds, would qualify? And who would decide? If an arrest were based on secret intelligence, closed hearings would be needed of the kind recently prevalent in the terrorist arena. The measure could backfire, leading, he predicted, to a laissez-faire attitude by police to the withdrawal of liberty, not to mention a disincentive to using powers if they were likely to result in payments to those held.

Andrew Holroyd, the President of the Law Society, summarised the view of many, dismissing the move as “unnecessary, potentially counter-productive and a disproportionate interference with all citizens’civil liberty”.

The Lords may well agree.

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