Independent Sentencing Review

Calum Miller Excerpts

Thursday 22nd May 2025 Commons Chamber

[Shabana Mahmood]

I am very grateful to my hon. Friend for raising issues relating to the Probation Service. We have already expanded the number of staff. Last year, we recruited 1,000 extra, and this year we are on track to hit our target of 1,300 extra staff. Increasing resource—first and foremost with more staff—is a clear priority for us. We are investing in technology to help the Probation Service to be more productive. We have already funded programmes and pilots on AI tech designed to decrease the amount of file work that probation officers have to do to allow them to have more time to do the things that only a human can do: to spend time with the offender in front of them, to come up with a proper plan to reduce their reoffending and therefore to keep the public safe.

[Calum Miller (Bicester and Woodstock) (LD)]

I very much welcome the Lord Chancellor’s statement, and I know that victims and survivors of domestic abuse and sexual violence in my constituency will do so as well. I thank her and her ministerial colleagues for their cross-party working, including with my hon. Friends the Members for Eastbourne (Josh Babarinde) and for Twickenham (Munira Wilson).

On the domestic abuse recommendations and the application of domestic abuse at sentencing, will the Lord Chancellor consider whether it is possible to tag those offences retrospectively, as well as at sentencing? Also, I welcome her remarks about transcripts and transparency. In the light of the pilot on transcripts for sexual violence and rape cases, will she consider including in that pilot the entire transcript, not just the transcript of sentencing?

[Shabana Mahmood]

On tagging retrospectively, I will certainly go away and have a look at that point. I suspect, although I do not want to mislead the hon. Member or the House, that a retrospective trawl of all cases—including common assault, which is where we see most domestic abuse cases land for a charge and a criminal case—may be beyond where we can get with the data available to us and the time it would take. However, going forward we will try to capture exactly those cases—not only domestic abuse-connected offences, but other offences such as common assault, which we know have taken place in a domestic abuse context—so that they are all flagged and proper data is kept.

On transcripts, sentencing remarks are currently available for other victims, such as in murder cases and so on, and that will be extended to victims of rape and serious sexual violence. To repeat a point I made earlier, I believe in a transparent justice system. I would like to be in the position of using AI technology to make not just sentencing remarks available. We are thinking about making broadly what happens in courts and such transcripts more widely available. What inhibits us is cost, and we are trying to take out that cost by looking at AI models, but we cannot proceed with anything unless we are absolutely certain about its accuracy because, as I am sure the hon. Member appreciates, a document purporting to be a record of what was said in court needs to be bang on.

Domestic Abuse Offences

Calum Miller Excerpts

Monday 17th March 2025 Commons Chamber

[Josh Babarinde]

I completely agree. We know that there are links between domestic abuse and animal abuse. We also know that there are links between domestic abuse and child sexual abuse, for example—this is a link that I have experienced the hard way. Again, our legislation and the data we are collecting are not helping us to make that link in the way that we could, so that we could figure out which interventions are best at busting these social ills.

There are more reasons why a specific offence of domestic abuse is so critical. Let us take Clare’s law, which is the scheme that allows individuals, mostly women, to request to see information about the offending histories of their partners. If they qualify for the scheme, they get to see things like the charges that individual has faced or the offences they have been convicted of. It would be very easy for an abusive partner to explain away a conviction or a charge for assault or battery as, say, a brawl with a stranger in a pub, but would they be able to explain away domestic abuse-aggravated assault in the same way? No.

[Calum Miller (Bicester and Woodstock) (LD)]

I thank my hon. Friend for making such a powerful speech and for his courage and leadership on this matter. He asks about the ways in which the perpetrators of domestic abuse might hide their crimes. In my constituency of Bicester and Woodstock, I have heard too many examples of women suffering abuse who are not finding a way to cut through to the authorities. Does he agree that, too often, cuts to victim support and an inaccessibility of legal aid are preventing the victims of domestic abuse from starting the process that might ultimately lead to charges for the kinds of aggravated offences that he is so rightly calling for?

[Josh Babarinde]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. It is critical at a time like now, when we have heard about the scale of the national emergency of domestic abuse, that victim support organisations are adequately funded. I have met representatives of a number of organisations, including Victim Support, that in light of cuts to police and crime commissioner core funding and the national insurance contribution increase are facing a 7% real-terms funding cut. We should be funding these organisations more, not less, at this time to support constituents such as those my hon. Friend has mentioned.

There might be some challenges to my proposal. A challenge that was put to me was, “Josh, might this not lead to the very sentencing inflation that the Government are trying to avoid now to ensure that our prisons do not fill up so quickly?” My response to that is twofold. First, domestic abuse, as we have explored in this debate, is already an aggravating factor in sentencing. It already carries a greater sentence. I am proposing that we enhance the front end, as I said earlier, not just the back end.

My second response to that challenge is that the Crime and Policing Bill that the Government put before this House very recently—Second Reading was last week—creates a number of brand new offences. They are offences that I completely agree with and commend the Government for, including assault of a shop worker and a dedicated offence of spiking. These are the right things to do, but if we can do that for those crimes, surely we can do it for the crime of domestic abuse.

I remember in the Crime and Policing Bill debate several Members, particularly on the Government side, praised the trade unions for their campaigning to get the offence of assault against a shop worker over the line. I agree that great campaigning by trade unions helped to achieve that, but the survivors and victims of domestic abusers do not have such a union. We in this House are their union, which is why we must campaign for a dedicated offence of domestic abuse to protect them.

I am pleased and proud that so many have rallied around this proposal to create a specific set of domestic abuse offences in the law. Women’s Aid, ManKind Initiative, Refuge, Victim Support and many more charities and support organisations in this space believe that this needs to be done. I am really grateful to many of my Liberal Democrat colleagues, who are sitting around me now, for backing this proposal, but also to those across this House; I am particularly thankful to Members on the Government Benches who have privately reached out to me to express their support for these proposals, and I know a number of them have expressed that support to their Front Benchers as well. I am grateful to lots of our media outlets for getting behind this and for platforming the campaign, in particular the team at “Good Morning Britain”, which helped me launch this campaign and the Bill I am holding in my hand to make this proposed offence closer to a reality.

I am also thankful for the many warm and constructive conversations I have had with Ministers, including the Minister for victims the hon. Member for Pontypridd (Alex Davies-Jones), the Minister for safeguarding the hon. Member for Birmingham Yardley (Jess Phillips) who I met a couple of weeks ago, and the Minister for prisons Lord Timpson, but also for the exchanges I have had with the Solicitor General and the Secretary of State for Justice in this Chamber. I appreciate that constructiveness, but I am really keen now for more than warm words: I am keen for action.

Victims and survivors need and deserve the recognition that the creation of a brand new specific offence of domestic abuse in law would create and I stand ready to work with anyone in this Chamber and beyond to make it a reality.