Victims and Courts Bill (Second sitting)

Caroline Voaden Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 17th June 2025 Public Bill Committees

[Dr Mullan]

Q I will move on to talk about the expansion of the victim contact scheme. Are there resource implications for the service in extending it, and what are your initial views on how capable you will be of meeting those expanded resource requirements?

Chris Jennings: There are some resource implications, but not massive ones that are causing us particular concern at this stage. A lot of the legislation is about bringing work that we already do on to a statutory footing, so we are not adding a huge amount of new work into the system, albeit the helpline is an expanded service that will be new. However, for the victim contact scheme, there is nothing massive, and we have published an impact assessment that sets out our views on that, and the numbers of new staff and resources are not massive.

Kim Thornden-Edwards: We already operate with a helpline that addresses some aspects of this. We would be looking to build on and expand the resources into that helpline. We already have resources in place, so it will just be about building out from that. As Chris says, our impact assessment so far does not indicate that a significant uplift in resources will be required, but we will keep that under review.

[Caroline Voaden (South Devon) (LD)]

Q To follow up on the previous question, there are long-standing concerns about staffing levels in the Probation Service. As the Bill will bring more victims under the auspices of the victim contact scheme, more victims might use it. You sound pretty confident that you will be able to manage that, but if you are already facing staffing challenges, how do you think that will look if a lot more victims suddenly want to use that scheme and helpline?

Chris Jennings: We have staffing challenges in different ways in the Probation Service. Victim liaison officers are a particular group of staff that we recruit through a particular route. It is not the same route that we recruit probation officers through, and that is not the same route that we recruit unpaid work supervisors through. There are different role types within the service, and some of them are under more pressure than others. VLOs are not one of the areas where we are under most pressure, despite your description being absolutely true for some of the other areas.

There is also a geographic spread of where we are under pressure operationally; it is not the same everywhere. Some places are very well resourced and some are less well resourced. Those combinations lead us to a place where we do not think that resourcing should be the thing that holds us back from making a success of this. Of course, we have to pay close attention to it, because if the numbers go up more than we anticipate, we will need to make sure that we resource that adequately, but we are not hugely worried about it at the moment.

Kim Thornden-Edwards: The victim contact scheme is a discrete service, so we do not transfer staff across or expect people to do a multiple brief on it. It is a discrete service that we recruit to separately. Our recruitment of victim liaison officers has been on an upward trajectory over the last 10 months. The banding and grading, and therefore the salary, of victim contact officers also increased last year, so we anticipate that there will be further uptake in terms of recruitment. Across the Probation Service, most grades saw an increase over the last year, so we are generally on an upward trajectory for staffing. You may be familiar with the Lord Chancellor’s announcement that we will look to recruit a further 1,300 probation officer staff during this financial year. We anticipate continued significant growth of probation areas over the period of the spending review.

[Caroline Voaden]

Q Are you confident that you have the resources and capacity to give the officers involved in the victim contact scheme the training they require in domestic abuse, abuse and traumatic sexual violence and their particular effects on the victims they will deal with through this helpline?

Chris Jennings: Yes. We are very used to dealing with the impacts of all those sorts of crimes in our world. It is the bread and butter of what we do. We will need to make sure that we give people the appropriate skills and training and do not throw them in at the deep end, but we are well used to doing that and we have the skills to do it. I have no reason not to be confident that we can make that work.

Kim Thornden-Edwards: We are also building on a service that is delivering good outcomes currently. In 2024, so very recently, His Majesty’s inspectorate of probation, which provides our external scrutiny, found our statutory victim work to be outstanding for three of our regional inspections. We also had an inspection in 2023 of general victim services that found the services to be good. We are building on a good level of service delivery currently and victim liaison officers who are doing a good job. We are very concerned to ensure that their training remains relevant and pertinent to the specific issues that the victims who use our service are often involved in. There is dedicated training for domestic abuse.

We are also concerned, as the service, and particularly the helpline, expands and extends, to ensure that those who deliver the helpline will be involved in the most appropriate training, including domestic abuse and a trauma-informed approach. We will build in those training requirements at every juncture and for every member of staff involved in the scheme.

[Tristan Osborne]

Q I have two questions. First, is it correct to say that your officers in court settings are not trained to gag prisoners or to engage in restraint of prisoners to present them before the court? Would it require wholesale retraining of officers in the system to engage in that change of behaviour?

My second question is about restriction zones. We are pivoting away from exclusion zones to restriction zones, which is giving more focus to victims. Do you think the monitoring is in place for the Probation Service to be able to manage that change of approach, to ensure that there is a pivot away from the rights of the perpetrator to the rights of the victim?

Chris Jennings: Maybe I should pick up the first question. Depending on how a perpetrator appears before the court—whether they are beaming in from prison via video link or attending in person at court—there are different responsibilities in terms of who undertakes the potential restraint of the prisoner. If we deliver somebody to court, court officers take custody of that person and look after them in the dock. I am less able to speak about the skills of the court staff, because it was many years ago that I worked in the court service and I do not feel up to date.

If you are in prison and beaming in via video link, I guess—to an earlier question—it would be possible to train prison officers who are already skilled in some forms of control and restraint in a different way. My instinct would be, although I am not perfectly qualified, that for court staff that would be quite a leap.

Kim Thornden-Edwards: On your second question about a switch from exclusion zones to restriction zones, we are currently working through the finer detail of that policy change and its impact and implications. We will take stock and determine what policy change is required to enable staff to make the change, what practice and operational guidance and instructions will be required, and what training element will be required, should that be necessary. We will be working through all those potential implications to this change. Our staff are very well versed in exclusion zones and understanding those. I am confident that they will be able to understand the change in emphasis and what some of the implications are, and will be able to bring the necessary degree of professionalism, integrity and foresight to those arrangements.

Chris Jennings: Our relationship with the police will be key, too. We work closely in partnership with them on these sorts of things. That will be required during this change, too, to maintain those close operational relationships on the frontline.

--- Later in debate ---

[Dr Mullan]

Finally, I just point out again that our amendment addresses the issue of making threats, for example. Those are things that you cannot do anyway, in terms of free speech, so our amendment covers that issue also. I encourage the Minister to look at our amendment again more closely, to see whether she can support it.

[Caroline Voaden]

Q I would like to talk about the measures to change parental responsibility. Could you tell us why the provision in the Bill applies only to people who have been convicted of offences against their own children and not serious sexual offences against other children?

Alex Davies-Jones: I am happy to clarify the Government’s thinking behind why we have kept this measure quite tight. It is important to say at the outset that there are other mechanisms to remove parental responsibility from offenders and perpetrators, and those mechanisms will still remain, such as the family court process.

What this measure does is quite novel: it removes parental responsibility at the point of conviction in the criminal courts, and it is an untested measure in doing so. It is important that we can see the impact this will have on victims, survivors and, first and foremost, children. It is important to stress that perpetrators will be able to appeal this through the family courts, and they will be able to apply for legal aid through the system as a result of this.

Therefore we feel that, at this point in time, it is important to keep such a novel approach quite tight. That is why we have chosen to restrict it to offenders who have been committed of any sexual offence against their own children and been sentenced to four years or more. We are not saying that we would not be open to expanding it in the future, but, as I think we heard quite clearly throughout the evidence sessions today, we must consider the impact this could have on the family court system as it currently stands.

The family court is under immense pressure. Sadly, another element of the criminal justice system that we inherited from the previous Government is the immense pressure from the backlog. You also heard about the issues that currently stand within the family court, and how many victims and survivors, particularly victims of domestic abuse, feel that it retraumatises them. I would not want to put any other victims through that process, and that is why the Government have chosen to target this measure, as a starting point, at that specific cohort. We feel it is a novel approach; it has never been done this way, and so we have chosen to be quite specific with it.

[Caroline Voaden]

Q I think you have answered my follow-up question, which was whether you think that if somebody has committed a serious sexual offence against a child, they should not have parental responsibility for any child.

Alex Davies-Jones: There is a mechanism available to remove parental responsibility via that route, currently through the family courts. I am aware that that would require the other parent to take the perpetrating parent to the family court, and I have been made aware that it is not easy to do that, but that route is available. That is why we have chosen to keep this measure quite tight at present.

[Caroline Voaden]

Q One more question on that: why did you settle on four years?

Alex Davies-Jones: Because there are sadly quite a lot of sex offenders in this country, so extending the measure to any sex offender could bring waves of people into scope. We are not saying that that is not appropriate, but this is a novel approach and those perpetrators can have parental responsibility stripped through other means. I am very cautious about putting extra strain on the family courts, given the issues that they face. At present, we want to keep it to any sexual offence where the perpetrator gets four years or more in prison and it is against their own child, in order to keep that child safe from the perpetrator.

[Caroline Voaden]

Q If the four years is reduced on appeal, would that measure still stand?

Alex Davies-Jones: I would have to come back to you to clarify that point, but I am happy to do so.

[Anneliese Midgley (Knowsley) (Lab)]

Q I thank the Minister for listening to my constituent Cheryl Korbel, the mother of Olivia Pratt-Korbel, who was killed by a stranger when she was nine years old. He did not attend his sentence hearing. You listened to her and acted. Another part of her ask, which is in the Bill but not spelled out so much, is for sanctions if the offender refuses to turn up to the sentence hearing. Can you say a bit more about what that would look like? What mechanisms—they are not currently in the Bill—can be used to compel them? The point that my constituent made is that, for someone whose sentence is four years or even 10, a few extra years would be compelling, but if it is life imprisonment, that would essentially be meaningless.

Alex Davies-Jones: Thank you for that question. We have built on the previous Government’s measure to compel perpetrators to attend their sentencing hearings. The previous measure was merely an extra two years on their prison sentence. As you have stated, and as victims have told us, for someone serving a whole-life order or life imprisonment, an extra two years on their sentence is not really an incentive to come to court.

We listened to the Pratt-Korbels and other families who have been through this horrific situation, and have done something quite novel. For the first time ever in this Bill, judges will be given powers to issue sanctions on perpetrators once they are in prison. We have not listed those sanctions on the face of the Bill because we do not want to be prescriptive. A whole range of measures is available, and we feel that listing them in the Bill would be too restrictive. By not doing so, we enable judges to use every tool at their disposal to issue sanctions in prison. They include, for example, limitations on access to a gym, to work programmes or to television. We are looking at visit restrictions, and salaries can be taken away if the offender is in a work programme. All that can be looked at in the round; those are all available to a judge as part of a sanctions programme.

We want perpetrators to attend their sentencing hearings in person. You heard how important it is to victims and survivors to have them there in person to hear justice being done. We have looked at all the practical ways in which that can be done. We have worked with stakeholders, including the judiciary and prison governors, and we felt that this is the best course of action.