Ronnie Biggs is to challenge Jack Straw’s refusal to grant him parole.

Lawyers for Biggs, who is suffering from pneumonia after breaking his hip in a fall, said that they would seek a judicial review of the Justice Secretary’s decision as soon as possible.

Mr Straw wrote yesterday to Giovanni di Stefano, who represents Biggs, setting out his reasons for rejecting the parole board's recommendation that Biggs be released. Whitehall sources said that it was unusual for a minister to refuse to accept a parole board’s recommendations for a prisoner serving a fixed term.

The Great Train Robber’s son, Michael, was called to the Norfolk and Norwich University hospital last night after Biggs’s health deteriorated.

Mr di Stefano said that he was shocked by the decision. “All the preparations were in place for him to be released,” Mr di Stefano said. “It is a cruel and unusual punishment for him not to be released. Mr Biggs legitimately expected that the parole board’s recommendations would be adhered to.”

Biggs, who will be 80 next month, has suffered a series of strokes and is unable to speak. He communicates through gestures and by spelling out words with an alphabet board. He is fed through a tube in the stomach and can walk only a few steps unaided.

Mr Straw’s decision was also criticised by a probation leader, the former Prisons Minister Ann Widdecombe, and prison reformers. Harry Fletcher, assistant general secretary of the probation officers’ union, said: “It’s difficult to see how he poses a threat to anyone apart from politicians.”

Ms Widdecombe said: “The prisons are bursting at the seams. The courts are being urged to let burglars go free, but one fairly doddery and very frail old man is being kept in prison. If you have got a prison place, for goodness sake use it to lock up someone who is genuinely a risk to the public.”

In his letter, Mr Straw said that he was worried about Biggs’s potential to reoffend and his failure to take any courses while in prison to rehabilitate himself. “Whilst the medical evidence indicates that your ability to commit further acts of violence has reduced to a very low level, I am concerned that you might incite and be involved in such acts of violence, through association with criminal peers,” he wrote.

Mr Straw said that he was also worried by his “lack of repentance” and attempts to “minimise a crime”.

A care home in Barnet, North London, had agreed to look after Biggs. Barnet Primary Care Trust is thought to have agreed to cover the cost.

Mr Straw added: “Mr Biggs chose to serve only one year of a 30-year sentence before he took the personal decision to commit another offence and escape from prison, avoiding capture by travelling abroad for 35 years whilst outrageously courting the media. Had he complied with his sentence, he would have been a free man many years ago.”

Biggs is recovering in hospital after falling from his bed in prison at the weekend. Three guards keep a 24-hour watch on him. Doctors want to operate but fear that he would not survive the procedure.

The Times reported in April that the probation officer overseeing Biggs had recommended his early release. He has served ten years of the 30-year jail term imposed in 1964 for his part in the £2.5million robbery of the Glasgow to London mail train.

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