Victims and Courts Bill

Baroness Maclean of Redditch Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 16th December 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Maclean of Redditch (Con)]

My Lords, I always find it slightly daunting, when speaking towards the end of a debate, to follow so many eminent noble Lords. In my short time in this place, I have learned that your Lordships do not like needless repetition, so I will absolutely attempt to abide by that stricture.

The first observation I make, while broadly welcoming the Bill, is that nobody really expects to be a victim of crime. It is not something that ever really appears in our political debates, that politicians major on when they make election campaign promises, or that appears in the media with great regularity. But when someone is a victim of crime they very often find themselves being badly failed by the services that are supposed to be there to support them and which they assumed would be there. Until they need to use them, they do not understand what is actually going on in the system.

I served as a Minister in the Home Office and in the Ministry of Justice, and it is a huge privilege to hear from victims who are brave enough to come forward and speak about their experiences. I and, I know, many others welcome the Government’s work on strengthening support and services for those victims. When victims come forward to speak about those things, they exhibit a huge amount of bravery. We can learn a lot from that. That is how we go forward, tailor the services and get it right for them in the future.

As people have said, this is not a party-political point. We made some progress towards improving services for victims under the previous Government. We quadrupled legal aid for victims, enshrined the victims’ code in law and began the task of unpicking automatic halfway early release for serious offenders, but there was always more to do. It was the start point, not the end point, of a journey.

I have a couple of key concerns about the Bill, particularly around rape and serious sexual offences. I will add my comments to what others have said about the window for victims to apply to the unduly lenient sentence scheme. I do not think that 28 days is enough. Will the Government please look again at the issue of court transcripts? As so many others have said, those really need to be provided in cases such as that of the grooming gangs. It will give confidence to everybody in the system.

Attendance at sentencing is so important. It is just fantastic that the Government are doing this, taking forward some of the early steps that we took in the previous Government. I too have some knowledge of Zara Aleena’s case. Her family said that when their niece’s killer did not appear in court, it was a slap in the face to them. They wanted the killer, McSweeney, to face his actions. They felt it was so important for them. They wanted him to hear what impact his despicable actions had had on their family and how he had destroyed them as a family. I really hope that, in the name of them and so many others, we can get that done as a Parliament and help those people.

There are some operational difficulties around this that we will look forward to working with the Government on. If police officers are required to enforce attendance, they should be issued with stab vests and tasers. They need to have the right kit so that they can do it, otherwise there is a worry about the use of the defence of reasonableness and appropriateness. We have all seen that people sometimes use that to get away from actually doing what they need to do, which is facing justice in open court.

Before I conclude, I ask the Minister to reflect on some really important work that the previous Government did on rape prosecutions. It might be slightly outwith the scope of the Bill but, against the backdrop of the work that the Government are doing on the VAWG strategy and on the court system as a whole, we introduced an operation called Operation Soteria. We worked with the Crown Prosecution Service, with police forces across the country and with the courts. We were improving the experience of rape victims when they went into court and the pace at which those trials moved through the court system. By the time I left the role, we had City St George’s perform an objective study, which found that that operation had objectively improved both the time it takes for those cases to come to court and the experience of victims. I would be really interested and grateful if the Minister could touch on that when she comes to sum up, or else write to me about how that work has been taken forward and how it fits into the wider plans.

The Government are completely right in their ambition to tackle the backlog of 74,000 cases at the Crown Court, but I think the public will find it extraordinary that we are looking at getting rid of jury trials, or even magistrates’ trials, when we know that there are courts sitting empty. The Minister shakes her head, so perhaps she will address that when she responds. As I have said, I look forward to seeing the Bill go forward and to working with the Government and others. I very much hope that victims outside here will see that we are doing our job and standing up for them.

Crime and Policing Bill

Baroness Maclean of Redditch Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 9th December 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Shawcross-Wolfson (Con)]

My Lords, I also support the amendments tabled by my noble friend Lady Owen and will try to keep my remarks as brief as possible. As we have heard today, technology continues to provide new avenues for abuse, in particular for the abuse of women. Abusers use technology in ever more inventive ways to harm, harass and try to humiliate their victims. Thanks to the work of my noble friend Lady Owen and others in this House, the law has made huge strides in recent years; however, more needs to be done.

Broadly, these amendments fall into two categories: those that seek to update the law to ensure that it addresses new and growing forms of tech-enabled abuse, and those that seek to provide more effective support to the victims of non-consensual intimate image abuse. We need action on both fronts. I will not go into detail here, as it has already been covered, but I will just reiterate that some of the gaps that need to be closed are: updating our definition of what constitutes taking an image; including audio recordings in the framework for tackling non-consensual intimate images; ensuring that images which may have been innocuous when they were taken but are then transformed into something sexual or degrading are also captured by the law; and, finally, recognising the practice of doxing as an aggregating factor.

Unfortunately, we know that, however the law changes, abuse will not be eliminated any time soon, so we must also ensure that the law supports victims in the aftermath of their abuse. As it stands, there is no proper framework to ensure that intimate images that the courts have found to be taken or shared illegally are then removed and destroyed. Instead, survivors see their images being repeatedly uploaded, posted on to pornography sites, shared in anonymous chat forums and even allowed to remain untouched on their abusers’ devices or cloud accounts. It cannot be right; the law must change. Between them, Amendments 295BA, 295BB, 295BC and 295BD would create a proper mechanism for victims to ensure that images are promptly removed from online platforms, deleted and then hashed to prevent them from resurfacing elsewhere.

Making progress on this issue is crucial. We know the trauma caused to victims who have to live with their images remaining online or live with the knowledge that they could be re-uploaded at any point. As one survivor told the Women and Equalities Committee:

“I am terrified of applying for jobs for fear that the prospective employer will google my name and see. I am terrified when meeting new people that they will google my name and see. I am terrified that every person I meet has seen”.


We cannot allow this situation to continue. The amendments from my noble friend Lady Owen would make the law more effective, more enforceable and more protective to victims, and I hope that we will be able to make progress on them in this House.

[Baroness Maclean of Redditch (Con)]

My Lords, I add my voice to the support for my noble friend Lady Owen from across the Committee. She has done a great service to victims of these crimes all across the country, most of whom we know are women and girls, but men and boys can be affected too.

I will focus on Amendment 334 which, as my noble friend Lady Coffey has mentioned, would add the word “reckless” in relation to the spiking offence. This is very important. I remember being the Home Office Minister when the phenomenon of needle spiking first hit the headlines. It focused a lot of attention on spiking in general as a phenomenon and meant the Home Office had to put its focus and resources behind it. We found it was very difficult to prosecute these crimes. Often, the substance had left the body. Often, victims were blamed for their behaviour, for putting themselves in those situations.

When I went to talk to the victims, I often heard that they thought that people were just doing it for a laugh, and a lot of the hospitality industry—bars, clubs and festivals—said the same thing. They said that it was really inadequate to have the requirement to prove harm or a sexual motive. That was part of the reason, though not the whole reason, why we have seen such a woefully low level of prosecutions for this. It is my belief that we need to make sure we include this recklessness element, and that is also the belief of most of the campaigners that I have worked with, including Stamp Out Spiking and, of course, Richard Graham, who did a tremendous job. I hope that the Government will adopt this amendment and all the others.

[Lord Clement-Jones (LD)]

My Lords, it has been a privilege to take part in today’s Committee. I think anyone reading Hansard subsequently will get a much better insight than they ever had before of the risks and experience of young women and girls in today’s world, sadly. It has been a privilege listening to all the speeches, particularly on these amendments.

Like others, started by the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, I pay tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Owen of Alderley Edge, for the forensic way she has identified the digital loopholes that currently allow abusers to evade justice. As we have been reminded, she has been a doughty campaigner on the Data (Use and Access) Act, with a winning streak that I hope will continue.

At the same time, I welcome the government amendments in this group, which at least signal a positive direction of travel. For far too long, victims of intimate image abuse have been timed out of justice by the six-month limit on summary offences. The noble Baroness, Lady Owen, identified this injustice, and I am delighted that the Government have listened with their Amendment 300. Then, of course, we have a number of other amendments. The noble Baroness’s amendments go further than time limits; they address harms that the Bill completely misses.

In particular, I highlight Amendment 298B, which addresses the malicious practice known as doxing. It is a terrifying reality for survivors that perpetrators often do not just share an intimate image; they weaponise it by publishing the victim’s address, employer or educational details alongside it. This is calculated to maximise distress, vulnerability and real-world danger. This amendment would rightly establish that providing such information is a statutory aggravating factor and would ensure that the court must treat this calculated destruction of a victim’s privacy with the severity it deserves.

While we welcome the government amendments regarding deprivation orders, I urge the Minister to look closely at Amendment 295BB, also in the name of the noble Baroness. Current police powers often focus on seizing the physical device—the phone or laptop—but we live in an age of cloud storage. Seizing a phone is meaningless if the image remains accessible in the cloud, ready to be downloaded the moment the offender buys a new device. Amendment 295BB would create a duty for verified deletion, including from cloud services. We must ensure that when we say an image is destroyed, it is truly gone.

I also strongly support the suite of amendments extending the law to cover audio recordings. As technology evolves, we are seeing the rise of AI-generated audio deepfakes—a new frontier of abuse highlighted by the noble Baroness, Lady Gohir, and the Revenge Porn Helpline, as we have heard today. I pay tribute to her for raising this issue. By explicitly including audio recordings in the definition of intimate image offences, these amendments could future-proof the legislation against these emerging AI threats.

Finally in this area, Amendment 295BD offers a systematic solution: a non-consensual intimate image register using hashing technology, which was so clearly described by the noble Baroness, Lady Owen. We cannot rely on a game of whack-a-mole, where victims must report the same image to platform after platform. A hash registry that identifies the unique digital fingerprint of an image to block its upload across providers is the only scalable technical solution to this problem.

Like the noble Baroness, Lady Coffey, we also welcome the new offence of administering harmful substances in Clause 101, but the current drafting requires specific intent to “injure, aggrieve or annoy”. Perpetrators of spiking often hide behind the defence that it was just a prank or done to liven up a friend. This leaves prosecutors struggling to prove specific intent. Amendment 334 would close this gap by introducing recklessness into the offence. If you spike a person’s drink, you are inherently being reckless as to the danger you pose to that person. The law should reflect that reality, and I urge the Government to accept this strengthening of the clause.

Finally, we support Amendment 356B, which would modernise domestic abuse protection orders. Abusers are innovative; they use third parties and digital platforms to bypass physical restrictions. This amendment would explicitly prohibit indirect contact and digital harassment, ensuring that a protection order actually provides protection in the 21st century.

Sentencing Bill

Baroness Maclean of Redditch Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 12th November 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Maclean of Redditch (Con)]

My Lords, in this Second Reading debate, I will open by speaking about women who cannot speak for themselves and highlight what I think are two significant omissions. First, may I associate myself with the comments on IPP sentences made by the noble Lord, Lord Woodley, whom I have the pleasure to follow, and others. I had never heard of these until I held my first MP surgery and I was visited by a prisoner’s mother. She told me the whole sorry story. I was totally shocked, and I never understood why the last Government, which I served in as a junior Minister, did not fix this. It is a matter of deep regret to me, and I wish we had done something about it while we had the chance.

I pay tribute to the campaigners and families I had the privilege of working alongside while I served as Safeguarding Minister. Poppy Devey Waterhouse was just 24 when she was stabbed more than 100 times by her ex-boyfriend in her own home. Her killer, who had subjected her to coercive and controlling behaviour, received a minimum term of 16 years. Joanna Simpson was bludgeoned to death by her estranged husband in front of their children. He received 13 years. These are not isolated tragedies. They are the visible tip of a system that still treats domestic homicide as less grave than other murders.

The families of these women, particularly Carole Gould and Julie Devey, who lead the Killed Women campaign, have fought for years to expose this injustice. I thank them for briefing me ahead of this debate. Their campaign has attracted support from across the House and the other place and has revealed how many domestic murders involve what forensic experts call overkill —multiple stab wounds, strangulation, bludgeoning, and coercive control. Yet those killings, which are often triggered when the victim tries to end a relationship, attract lower starting points than murders of strangers in the street. For a man who takes a knife out of his house intending to use it in public and commits murder, the penalty starts at 25 years. However, if that same knife is already in his kitchen drawer and he uses it to kill his partner after years of coercive control, the starting point is still just 15 years.

The Killed Women campaign asks that murders following a history of coercive or controlling abuse attract the same 25-year starting point as other aggravated murders and that the justice system collects and publishes data on domestic homicides to track patterns and ensure consistency. We began to look at this issue in the Wade review under the last Government. I understand how many factors are at play in the sentencing framework, as we have heard from many learned Members of your Lordships’ House, but this Bill is precisely the place to act. It is disappointing that the Government have not used the vehicle in front of us now.

While in opposition, I was often opposed by the now Safeguarding Minister Jess Phillips. She argued passionately and repeatedly for reforms to toughen sentences for domestic homicide and to close the gap between murders committed in the home and those committed with a knife on the street. She called these measures essential to delivering justice for victims of domestic homicide. Now that she sits in government, she and her ministerial colleagues are noticeable by their silence on this issue. The Killed Women campaign said last December that they were told that the Law Commission review would take at least three years to complete, delayed by a lack of resources. Realistically, we will not see significant change until the next decade— so much for the current Government’s pledge to halve violence against women and girls. I hope that the Government reconsider their approach to this and come back to this in Committee.

The second omission in the Bill is the absence of explicit recognition of the, in my view, egregiously named honour-based abuse in our sentencing regime. To take one example, 20 year-old Somaiya Begum was murdered by her uncle in Bradford. The judge said that it was impossible to identify a motive, even though she had been under a forced marriage protection order. Without honour recognised in law, the very reason for her death was absent from the courtroom. There are many such cases. We usually prefix “honour-based abuse” with “so-called” because there is nothing honourable about such abuse. It is often family-orchestrated, community-endorsed and underpinned by the appalling logic that a woman who asserts her independence has brought shame on her family, shame that must be cleansed through violence.

According to Karma Nirvana, which runs the national helpline, around 80% to 85% of callers identify with a south Asian heritage—Pakistani, Indian and Bangladeshi —and around 90% are from Muslim, Sikh or Hindu backgrounds combined. Victims also include white British, eastern European, Christian and Traveller women, but data is very scant and patchy. We know that this form of abuse is found wherever patriarchal or collectivist values override individual rights. These are values which are alien to the freedoms that we hold dear in Britain. However, we must not shy away from these facts for fear of offending people. In the context of grooming gangs, we saw how the denial of cultural and communal drivers allowed abuse to persist for years in plain sight. An estimated 12 women a year are murdered in the UK to defend so-called honour, but these cases are too often hidden in wider domestic homicide statistics. I had the privilege of being the Minister who took the Marriage and Civil Partnership (Minimum Age) Act 2022 through the other place, outlawing forced child marriage. I know that we can legislate when the will exists.

Back in 2024, Labour shadow Ministers proposed new clauses to make honour-based violence an explicit aggravating factor in sentencing for murder, ensuring that courts recognise its motive and the community pressures behind it. Again, Jess Phillips described it as essential to delivering justice and, again, the Government have not acted. Furthermore, the promised violence against women and girls strategy, due in summer or autumn—we are now in November—has still not been published. The Domestic Abuse Commissioner said in September that halving violence against women and girls within a decade was an ambitious and laudable target, yet this strategy is still delayed. No major funding has been announced for specialist domestic abuse services—and I fail to see where the momentum within government is coming from.

I finish by asking the Government: when will they fulfil their commitment to ensuring that honour-based abuse is an aggravated factor in sentencing—if not in this Bill, when? When will they fulfil their commitment to levelling up domestic homicide sentencing—if not in this Bill, when? When will they finally publish the long-promised violence against women and girls strategy, which is not directly in the Sentencing Bill but must include many elements connected to sentencing policy? These reforms are overdue. The women whose names I have mentioned this evening deserve not just to be remembered but to have the law changed.