Victims and Prisoners Bill

Baroness Burt of Solihull Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 18th December 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Burt of Solihull (LD)]

My Lords, in the main I welcome the measures introduced in Parts 1, 2 and 3 of the Bill, with provisos. While I welcome the enforcement of the victims’ code in law, it needs to have sharper teeth by requiring the measuring and monitoring of service levels—otherwise, how can we know whether agencies are complying?

I heard the Minister’s arguments about transparency in his opening remarks, but the charity Victim Support found that as many as six in 10 victims do not currently receive their rights under the victims’ code. Improving enforcement rates will need adequate funding. What additional resources will be allocated to ensure that the code is enforced?

There is a narrative running through the Bill to empower and protect victims and give them more of a say—but not all victims. The Government are leaving out two or arguably three classes of victim. According to the Centre for Women’s Justice, more than half the women in prison or under community sentences are themselves victims who have been coerced in some way into crime, as so ably described by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Newcastle. I expect the Committee stage to involve amendments to ensure a new statutory defence for victims: that the victim was made to or pressured to commit certain offences.

The second group of victims are victims of human trafficking and other migrants who fear to report abuse to the police because, according to research by the Victims’ Commissioner, every single police force in England and Wales had passed on data to Immigration Enforcement. If the Government truly mean it when they say that no victim of domestic violence should be fearful of coming forward, they must erect a firewall, as several Peers have said today—otherwise, the most vulnerable victims will continue to suffer.

There is much more to say about victims, but time does not permit because I want to move on to Part 4 of the Bill, which I do not agree with. The victim protection theme continues, in that public safety is made paramount. Indeed, the thrust of the Bill concerns not prisoners but protecting the public against them and, apparently out of sheer vindictiveness, punishing some of them to the extent of contravening the convention on human rights, which should be for everyone. For example, why rob the whole life tariff prisoner of the right to marry or form a civil partnership? It boils down to the medieval concept of “civic death”, like the fact that we continue to flout the convention by not allowing prisoners to vote. If you have committed a severe crime, been found out and punished with imprisonment, you become a non-person—your stake in society is lost. Taking away the right to marry from whole life tariff prisoners is vindictive, especially, as I learned only today, because it appears to be based on just one case. If the Minister believes it is not vindictive, let him explain why in his concluding remarks or write to me.

The new right for the Secretary of State to refer release decisions for so-called top-tier prisoners to an Upper Tribunal or High Court is better than the Secretary of State, a politician, making that decision, but best of all would be to allow the Parole Board to make all release decisions, as recommended by the Law Society. After all, that is what it is there for. According to the Howard League, referral to another level will bring further delay and uncertainty. Why not just let the Parole Board do its job?

Finally, I want to talk about indeterminate-sentence prisoners, who are arguably victims in their own right since almost all have now been forced to overstay their original tariff and 85% have served more than 10 years over tariff, according to the charity UNGRIPP. While I welcome the measure to introduce a new right for IPPs to be eligible for release from licence after three years, the Bill still fails to deal with the 1,312 IPP prisoners who have never been released, and possibly never will, because they are deemed to be unsafe to the public. Last week the Justice Secretary said at an all-party group meeting that these prisoners are likely never to be released, so that is why the Justice Committee’s recommended re-sentencing programme could not be adopted, but what sentences were given for similar cases before and after the advent of IPP prisoners? Surely that is exactly why they should be re-sentenced. The Crown is holding out the false hope of release for these poor people, year after miserable year. The UN special rapporteur on torture, Dr Alice Jill Edwards, argued that we

“must reject the misleading public safety arguments against reviewing these unfair sentences and review all such sentences. Locking people up—and in effect throwing away the keys—is not a solution legally or morally”.

I do not accept the Government’s argument against re-sentencing, and I never will.