Victims and Prisoners Bill

Baroness Thornton Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 18th December 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Thornton (Lab)]

My Lords, my noble friend Lord Ponsonby and I have not mixed up the order in which we are speaking, even if the speakers’ list has. I thank the Minister for introducing the Bill today with such clarity. That greatly helps the House. I also thank the many organisations that have sent briefings, particularly the Library. I look forward to the maiden speech of the noble Lord, Lord Carter.

The level of interest in this Bill suggests that there is no doubt that many people recognise the importance of the Bill and the opportunity it presents. I will focus on victims. Notwithstanding the words of the Minister, as with many matters associated with this Government, we are worried that the lack of grasping the opportunity that the Bill presents is the challenge we face and why so many organisations are so interested and want to make recommendations about how it might be improved. I think we would all agree that the challenge for this Bill is to redress a terrible and historic imbalance. In an adversarial system in which the state investigates and prosecutes the defendant, the judge ensures that he or she has a fair trial and the jury decides their guilt, it is easy for all the agencies to look in the defendant’s direction while the victim, even if a witness, comes and goes as what the academic Professor Paul Rock has called fodder for the system.

It may not be what anyone intends, but it is what happens—and worse, victims’ experience may be callous, careless and deeply scarring. We are currently failing victims, as I think we all agree, and they in turn may increasingly be abandoning the criminal justice system. So this is our long-awaited chance to bring about change.

The recent Victims’ Commissioner, the right honourable Dame Vera Baird KC, summed it up very well in her submission to the victims Bill’s consultation process in June last year, when she said:

“We emphasise that a profound cultural change will be needed from the criminal justice agencies to achieve the expectations and the Government’s aims”.


We can put this right if we focus on what victims have told us they want as a minimum, and ensure that it is delivered and can be done without impacting in the slightest on the fair trial rights of the defendant. So, despite the positive words of the Minister and after all the years waiting for this moment, we think the final product needs to be better than this, and it is our job to make it so. This was in the Conservative manifesto in 2015, so we know that we have been a long time waiting.

We need to improve support for victims who are leaving the justice system through its lack of regard for them and endless delay. People cannot move on with their lives while locked into the 65,000-long case backlog in the Crown Court—a backlog higher than at the end of the pandemic. The latest survey from the Office of the Victims’ Commissioner is a disheartening read—71% of victims were dissatisfied with the police response to their crime and only 28% believed it had been taken seriously. A tiny 6% agreed that victims were fully supported by the Crown Prosecution Service and only 8% that they were fully supported by the courts. Even more worrying, a full third—34%—of victims said they would not even report a crime to the police after their previous experience

The thing is that victims are not asking for much. Like all of us, they want a competent, speedy justice system. Vital to them are the delivery of simple procedural justice; being given a voice about what happened to them; and sensitivity to their interests and needs. Victims’ needs and interests are well-identified in the victims’ code of practice, which sets out the minimum standards of service required from criminal justice agencies and was introduced by the Labour Government in the Domestic Violence, Crime and Victims Act of 2004. The code has been updated since then; the problem is that it is simply not implemented.

There are plenty of instances we will all hear about in this debate of where things have gone wrong and victims have found themselves put into terrible positions, both before and in our courts. The Office of the Victims’ Commissioner’s most recent survey shows that only 29% of victims had ever heard of the victims’ code, despite their journey through the very agencies required to deliver on it—that is an identical figure to the one in 2021.

We agree with the Justice Select Committee that, while putting the code on a statutory basis, which the Bill does, is important, it will not, of itself, make it effective. That PCCs will have to collect data on compliance is welcome, although accurate compatible data has proved difficult to find and PCCs have no means to enforce collaboration. If we give somebody a right, in this case the victims, we must give them a means of enforcing it and a remedy for its breach. Local victims’ champions in PCC offices might play a key role in prioritising the right in the currency of the case and dealing with complaints in default. The Government frequently say that they are increasing sentences of one kind or another to put victims at the heart of the criminal justice system, but these simple rights will not actually help the victims if the victims’ code is not enacted.

This is what the Justice Select Committee said:

“The Government has committed to enshrining the rights of victims in law. We find that the draft Bill does not appear to do any more to achieve this than is already provided for in existing legislation. The draft Bill includes overarching principles that are weaker than those consulted on and which, as currently drafted, will do little to improve agencies’ compliance with the victims’ code”.


So one of our main jobs is to ensure enactment and implementation of the victims’ code.

There are other issues that we will look for and raise during the course of the Bill’s passage which we hope will strengthen it. We want to look at free legal advocates for rape victims—a statutory right to free legal representation for the protection of the rights of rape victims. Protection for third-party material of rape complainants is proposed. That would mirror the PCSC Act for the contents of phones.

We need to test excluding pre-trial therapy notes being used in a sex case at all unless a judge, after a fully contested application, agrees to their relevance. It is a major deterrent to women taking a case forward when they are told that what they have said to their therapist may have to be revealed. The Minister is aware of this matter. I think we will have some useful discussions in Committee about that.

We wish to include victims of anti-social behaviour in the definition of “victims”. We want to consider the commissioning of specialist women’s community-based domestic abuse and sexual violence support services. We agree with Barnardo’s and the NSPCC about putting children at the heart of our considerations, particularly on the inclusion of child criminal exploitation and supporting children throughout any of these proceedings.

We think it is important to enshrine a duty to co-operate with the Commissioner for Victims and Witnesses. We want that to be included in the Bill.

Finally, there is the issue of migrant domestic abuse victims with no recourse to public funds and without a firewall against immigration controls. They are entitled to criminal justice support if they are victims and should not be treated as suspects; that seems an important matter of injustice that we have to address.

I very much look forward to working with my noble friend Lord Ponsonby on this important Bill, with the Minister and other noble Lords, and I very much look forward to the rest of today’s debate.