Ronnie Biggs, the Great Train Robber, will apply for parole next week, hoping for release in time to celebrate his 80th birthday in August as a free man.

A panel of the Parole Board is expected to recommend his release after considering his application on Thursday, concluding that Biggs is unlikely to reoffend. But the final say rests with Jack Straw, the Justice Secretary, who can reject recommendations on prisoners serving a fixed sentence of more than 15 years but less than life.

The decision is likely to prove controversial, given Biggs’s role in one of the 20th century’s most notorious and audacious heists and his escape to a life of indolence in Brazil.

He is in the hospital wing at Norwich prison after suffering several strokes. He cannot walk or talk and communicates with an alphabet board. If he is freed, he will need constant care in a nursing home.A dossier for the Parole Board will include details of the original offence and the judge’s remarks when sentencing Biggs to 30 years.

Times Archive, 1965: Train trial man escapes

Ronald Arthur Biggs, serving 30 years, escaped yesterday afternoon from Wandsworth gaol with three other convicts

• Archive Topic: The Great Train Robbery

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It will include reports from prison and probation officers and there will also need to be a “resettlement plan” on his release. Giovanni Di Stefano, Biggs’s lawyer, says in a written submission that the board has before them a wholly different person than the man in 1963.

“Mr Biggs has changed and changed for the better,” he says, describing an aged gentleman posing zero risk to the community. He argues that criminal justice will have been well served by Biggs’s example of voluntarily returning to Britain “to face the music”.

Mr Di Stefano expects the Parole Board decision to be made on Thursday and the result faxed to the governor of Norwich jail. However, the board is allowed five working days to inform a prisoner of the result. Even with parole, Biggs will remain in jail until July 4, when he will have served one third of his sentence.

He was jailed at Buckinghamshire Assizes in Aylesbury after the Glasgow to London Royal Mail train robberywhen £2.5 million — £40 million at today’s prices — was stolen.

The train was stopped at a set of signals that the 15-member gang had switched. The driver Jack Mills got out to investigate and was coshed with an iron bar and knocked senseless. He never returned to work and died in 1970 of an unrelated illness. Biggs served only 15 months before escaping by scaling a 30ft wall. He went to Australia and on to Brazil where he lived openly for three decades, safe from extradition because he had fathered a child by a Brazilian woman.

He returned to Britain in 2001, impoverished and in ill health, after 36 years on the run. His son, Michael, was given British citizenship after his parents married in Belmarsh jail, southeast London, in 2002.

Bruce Reynolds, the robbery mastermind, went on the run for five years but was recaptured and served ten years. He now makes a living writing about big crimes for newspapers.

Ronald “Buster” Edwards fled to Mexico but gave himself up in 1966. He served nine years and after his release sold flowers at Waterloo station before hanging himself in 1994.

Charlie Wilson was given a 30-year sentence but escaped from jail after four months. He was found in Canada, returned to Britain and spent 12 years in jail. He was shot dead outside his home in Marbella, Spain, in 1990.

Roy James was jailed for 30 years and released after serving 12. In 1993 he was jailed for six years after shooting his father-in-law and hitting his wife with a pistol butt. He died in 1997.

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