Rape and Serious Sexual Offences: Jury Directions

Debate between Lord Lemos and Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top

Monday 9th November 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top (Lab)]

My Lords, the evidence is that judges sometimes look as though they have not actually read the guidance, which leads to very different interpretations and control of trials. In the north-east, in Northumberland, a previous PCC recruited a group of women as volunteers who were given in-depth training around what the law actually meant and said, and they would turn up at rape trials. The judge would know that they were there—it was all agreed beforehand—but it meant that the judges were much more attentive to how they conducted the trials. When that happened, you did not get what I saw, with one group of perpetrators behaving so badly that the victims—or the alleged victims, as the alleged perpetrators would have said—actually left the courtroom and left the case because they were being so intimidated during the trial. We need to improve how we do it. Can we make sure that we improve these things by widening the number of people who say something?

[Lord Lemos (Lab)]

My noble friend is clearly right that if the experience of being a victim and giving evidence in these cases is so traumatising or retraumatising, one can understand—particularly, as the right reverend Prelate said, in the context of long delays—why victims would find that a really serious problem. As I have said, that leads to us not having the track record that we would wish for in prosecuting these cases. The specific initiative that my noble friend refers to is a civil society initiative, and I welcome civil society initiatives such as that as part of an ongoing social campaign to change this question of rape.