Courts and Tribunals Bill

Baroness Brinton Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 27th October 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Brinton (LD)]

My Lords, from these Benches we welcome the noble Lord, Lord Stace, to your Lordships’ House and look forward to his maiden speech. I welcome the noble Lord, Lord Ashcombe, to the Conservative Front Bench. I too am not a lawyer. It is good to have another non-lawyer in these very legal debates.

The Courts and Tribunals Bill has been a long time coming to your Lordships’ House. My noble friend Lord Marks will focus on the changes in the courts system, and I will focus on the experience of victims in the Bill as we see it.

The Bill, as originally introduced in the Commons, created measures in line with the recommendations made in Part 1 of the Independent Review of the Criminal Courts by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Leveson. They included the establishment of a Crown Court Bench division to hear lower-level cases without a jury. The Bill we are considering today has removed a large part of the proposed changes to cases without a jury. But the reasons for those proposals—how to clear a very large waiting list—remain.

I thank the Minister for sending us the factsheet on current problems in the system. That was extremely helpful. Statistics in September this year show that the Crown Court backlog stands at nearly 81,000, more than double what it was in 2019, even if it has reduced a bit. The figure from the magistrates’ courts is significantly worse. In June this year, there were 380,230 open cases. Can the Minister tell us how on earth the magistrates will be able to add cases that will now come from the Crown Court to this already massive list? I do not understand why we do not refer to the magistrates’ courts’ open cases lists as a backlog, because clearly it is.

The noble Lord, Lord Lemos, was right to say that justice delayed was justice denied. In the House of Commons, the Liberal Democrat justice spokeswoman, Jess Brown-Fuller MP, proposed that better use be made of court buildings to allow each courtroom to be used for two trial hearings a day: a morning hearing from 9 am till 1 pm and the second from 2 pm till 6 pm. Her proposal is based on pilots that were undertaken during the Covid era, when courts cleared an average of 3.5 trials per week, compared with fewer than one per week in the current courtroom system. Will the Minister consider her proposal?

Other key reforms need to be considered, including renegotiating transport contracts to ensure that defendants are delivered to court—and the dock—on time and cancelling real-terms cuts to the Ministry of Justice capital budget. The poor state of the courts is also a key factor in delays. We hear regularly about literal buckets being put into courts to catch leaks coming in from above. Another factor is the unavailability of advocates and interpreters, as the Rights of Women group has pointed out to your Lordships.

Above all, however, Liberal Democrats want to see victim-led intensive case management. There are some good proposals in Clauses 7 to 16 in relation to victims, picking up on the commissioner’s recommendations, but they are not universal. We like the restrictions on evidence or questions about complainants’ sexual history, and evidence about previous false complaints relating to sexual offence. What is needed is a fundamental change in approach to support anyone suffering this type of crime. In Committee, we will probe exactly how these proposals will work.

It is still frustrating that, no matter what Parliament says, the judiciary can continue to choose not to have full training for judges in both the criminal and family courts to ensure that victims get the support they need as they access the criminal justice system. I note that the new courts for rape and serious sexual offences, known as RASSO cases, will have training for the judiciary in trauma-informed and victim-led support throughout the process. I ask the Minister, therefore, why the same would not be true for other serious cases. That is needed because victims’ experience of the court system is just not consistent. Not everyone within the system is trained. Security staff on the door can push defendants and victims through security at the same time. Court staff can put a victim in a seat that happens to be next to the dock, so that they are sitting beside their alleged attacker. This is re-victimisation.

The Victims’ Commissioner brought six victims to meet a number of Peers a fortnight ago, and they told us of their own experiences in the court system. In that discussion, what happened to them was second to their experience once the whole system started to work. We heard from Emma—not her real name. She was stalked, and after her stalker broke through two doors of her home, he was arrested. Emma disclosed that he had been physically abusing her too, and she felt unsafe, even in her own home; but she had no idea how bad things were going to get, all in the court system.

The magistrates’ court proceedings lasted two and a half years. There were 34 adjournments. She said:

“A court date is not simply a date in a diary for a victim. You prepare yourself emotionally … You rearrange your life around it. You try to get yourself into the right frame of mind to attend and participate”.


That court decided that sentencing should go up to the Crown Court. Paperwork was delayed and special-measure arrangements were promised. Three years later, an appeal was heard and the case was overturned. During that appeal, material was put to her while she was giving evidence. She felt exposed, overwhelmed, underprepared and understandably let down when the appeal was granted.

Emma said the impact was profound. It had caused her to have dissociative seizures, which now affect her ability to work. Her general health has deteriorated, and each court process forced her to revisit what had happened to her originally. Emma and the other brave victims we heard from were not speaking just on their own account. They were speaking for all victims.

Women’s Aid and other victims’ organisations welcome the repeal of the legal presumption of parental involvement in family courts, as we do from these Benches. We disagree with the Conservatives on this because some perpetrators of domestic abuse manipulate the family justice system to further their abuse. It sits alongside invisible abuse. It has taken years to get coercive control taken seriously; I thank the previous Government for recognising it. But the abuse of the family courts by a limited number of parents is truly shocking. Since Women’s Aid began reporting on this issue, the legal presumption of involvement has cost the lives of 67 children, including Claire Throssell’s beloved sons Jack and Paul. She has headed a 12-year campaign to have the presumption repealed. I know that the Conservatives opposed this repeal in the Commons and spoke about parental entitlement to access, but this should not be about the parent. It should—no, must—always be about the safety of the children.

Finally, these Benches are concerned about Clauses 21 to 23, which are on powers to make “consequential amendments” and “transitional or saving provision”, and the power

“to state effect of provisions commencing Sentencing Code amendments”.

There is wide scope, in these three clauses, for Henry VIII powers that could substantially undo the changes that the Government have announced since the passage of the Bill and its arrival here in the Lords. We will lay probing amendments to make sure that that will not happen to quite the extent that we fear it may.

There are good elements of the Bill that we support, including the desire to repair the damage to our court system, but there are other parts that we believe do not go far enough. Through the passage of the Bill, we will lay probing amendments and discuss the issues with the Minister in the most positive way that we can.