Oral Answers to Questions
Caroline Voaden Excerpts(4 days, 3 hours ago)
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Alison Bennett (Mid Sussex) (LD)
Caroline Voaden (South Devon) (LD)
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (Sir Nicholas Dakin)
A key priority of this Government is that our prisons rehabilitate offenders, making them better citizens rather than better criminals. I take this opportunity to pay tribute to the fantastic prison staff, who mentor and support prisoners in custody every day. I saw at first hand the benefit of the creating future opportunities programme when I visited HMP Humber in April.
Sir Nicholas Dakin
The hon. Member is right to highlight dyslexia, and neurodiversity is common among people in our prisons. That is why we have neurodiversity officers in each prison to ensure that we are doing our very best for these people so that they can be rehabilitated and become better citizens when they come out of prison.
Caroline Voaden
The former chief inspector of prisons said that LandWorks in my constituency
“provides one of the best examples in the country of how we can reduce reoffending, turn lives around and prevent future victims.”
Its reoffending rate is just 6%. The Government have announced £2.3 billion towards prison builds over the next two years. When will they commit to investing in projects like LandWorks that can radically reduce the prison population, transform the lives of offenders and cut crime?
Sir Nicholas Dakin
Third sector organisations like LandWorks deliver valuable rehabilitation, wellbeing support and advocacy services across England and Wales, and they partner effectively with HMPPS in many different ways. The work of key organisations like the one the hon. Member mentions is incredibly important and essential in reducing reoffending, and we continue to invest in it. I would be happy to meet her to discuss the matter further and see what more can be done.
Independent Sentencing Review
Caroline Voaden Excerpts(2 weeks, 2 days ago)
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Shabana Mahmood
My hon. Friend puts it very well, and he is absolutely right. We have made more progress on the deportation of foreign national offenders than the previous Government and we will go further. We accept the review’s recommendations on reducing the threshold for early removal from 50% to 30%. For offenders who get less than three years in prison, we will work with the Home Office on proposals to move to immediate deportation.
Caroline Voaden (South Devon) (LD)
The national average reoffending rate for people who have done a short-term sentence is 54%. Among those who graduate from a prisoner rehabilitation programme in my constituency, the average reoffending rate is just 6%—and the programme is still in touch with every single graduate, after operating for 10 years. In the spirit of trying to reduce the prison population, does the Lord Chancellor agree that such rehabilitation programmes are absolutely crucial and that investing in rehabilitation not only keeps people safe in the community because it reduces the reoffending rate, but helps the mission to free up prison places for the dangerous criminals who absolutely need to be there?
Shabana Mahmood
The hon. Lady makes a good point. I pay tribute to the work that is going on in her constituency. As I have said before, 80% of offenders in this country are reoffenders. That tells us how broken our system is, and how imperative it is that we sort it out.
Victims and Courts Bill
Caroline Voaden ExcerptsTuesday 20th May 2025
(2 weeks, 4 days ago)
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Caroline Voaden (South Devon) (LD)
The hon. Member is talking about the length of time it can take for victims of sexual violence to get over their trauma and seek help. Does he agree that organisations such as Rape Crisis do absolutely vital work in helping survivors of sexual abuse and rape to move past what has happened? Does he also agree that it would be a fantastic improvement to the Bill if there was some national Government oversight of how much money is put into funding such victim services?
Jas Athwal
Certainly, coming from a local council that is strapped for cash, I agree with the hon. Member’s emphasis; we must look at that as we go forward.
The Bill will prevent perpetrators from being involved in a child’s life, safeguarding children from further trauma and enabling them to start healing. This new restriction is shamefully overdue. Our current system is not built for survivors; it is full of gaps and loopholes for predators, reflects society’s biases and is perilously hard to navigate. To truly centre survivors, the Bill should go further. The automatic restriction of parental responsibility should be extended so that if an individual abuses any child, not just their own, their parental rights are automatically removed. That would further safeguard children, saving families the vast personal and emotional cost of navigating the family court system and ultimately preventing the retraumatisation of survivors and their families.
I welcome the Government’s actions to begin building a justice system that finally centres survivors, rather than treating them like an afterthought, and I hope this Bill will empower those who have not been properly protected for so long. However, as we know, there is still so much further to go and so many more battles remain to be fought in order to prevent sexual violence and empower victim-survivors—online, in our schools, in our homes and on our streets. This Bill is a desperately needed first step, but it must be the beginning of our campaign to get justice for victim-survivors, not the end.
Oral Answers to Questions
Caroline Voaden Excerpts(1 month, 2 weeks ago)
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Sir Nicholas Dakin
My hon. Friend is exactly right. We must do whatever we can to move people away from a life of crime and keep the public safe. This year, despite the fiscal challenges we inherited, we are investing more than £100 million in youth offending teams across the country to identify children and divert them away from crime. With turnaround funding, Staffordshire youth offending team delivered skill-building activities for children in antisocial behaviour hotspots during a successful six-week summer programme.
Mr Speaker
Are we really sure that this question is linked to young people in Staffordshire committing crime?
Caroline Voaden
It might not be about Staffordshire, but we also have young people in Devon. We have a case in my constituency of a young offender who has been arrested multiple times and put under a court order, but the presumption is against incarceration because of his age. Local residents tell me that there is a disaster waiting to happen—
Mr Speaker
Order. The hon. Member is not linking her question to the original, so we are going to move on.
Shabana Mahmood
I thank the Chair of the Justice Committee for raising an important issue for his own constituents that also has wider significance. I will publish the full terms of reference and place them in the Libraries of both Houses very soon. Regardless of whether the review goes into the specifics of every other type of case, I am sure that it will make findings on how such cases, particularly involving people with mental health conditions, are properly managed. I am sure that those findings will be of interest not just to our Department but to others, and will be implemented by the Government in due course.
Caroline Voaden (South Devon) (LD)
We have a case in my constituency of a young offender, well below 16, who is causing havoc—he has been arrested many times—and is not complying with a court order. The assumption is against incarceration because of his age. Will the Minister explain what work the Government are doing to crack down on prolific offending by young people well below 16 who are causing stress and fear in their local communities?
Sir Nicholas Dakin
I am very happy to answer queries about that particular issue, if the hon. Lady wishes to write to me. The Government have increased the youth offending team budget this year and continue to invest in the turnaround programme. As I said before, it has been shown that young people who are engaged in that programme have only a 5% chance of reoffending.
Bereaved Parents: Birth Certificates
Caroline Voaden Excerpts(4 months ago)
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Caroline Voaden (South Devon) (LD)
Twenty-two years ago, I became part of a club that no one wants to join: the young widows club. My husband Nick died of oesophageal cancer, and I was left with an 18-month-old baby and a toddler. Over the course of the next couple of years, I met dozens of young widows, including Beth, whose husband Simon had died of bowel cancer just two days before their beautiful baby daughter Elsa was born. Beth and I navigated this strange and unwelcome new reality together, spending time with our three little girls, who were all too young to understand the awfulness of what had happened.
Beth was part of an even smaller, even more unlucky club than me: the one where you have to give birth alone, to a baby you have longed for, while at the same time grieving for the partner you have lost and the future you will never share. For many of those tragically unlucky women, it gets even worse. Every year in the UK, around 200 young bereaved women are drawn into a ridiculous, unnecessary and costly legal battle to have their baby’s father’s name registered on the birth certificate. Incredibly, in 2025, if a woman is pregnant when their partner dies but they are not married, the law says that they cannot automatically name the father on the birth certificate. If ever there was a case of adding insult to injury, that has to be it.
The law seems to think that if a woman is legally married, there is no question but that her baby is her husband’s. But if she has been living in a committed relationship, perhaps for years on end, the fact that she does not have a ring on her finger means that the paternity of her child is in question. Having been through the unimaginable experience of losing her partner while carrying his child, and then giving birth alone, she is then expected to enter into a legal process to prove that he was indeed the father, so that the child does not grow up with a blank space on their birth certificate. This is out of date, out of touch and, frankly, quite traumatic for all those involved. Women have described it as demeaning, insulting and overwhelming.
The reality is that more and more couples are choosing to live together without getting married. In 2022, the number of children born outside marriage in the UK surpassed the number of babies born to parents who were married or in a civil partnership for the first time since records began in 1845, according to figures from the Office for National Statistics. It is high time the law was updated to remove this anachronistic insult to unmarried mothers.
Not long after I was widowed, I became involved with a brilliant organisation called WAY—Widowed and Young. It is where I met Beth and made many other lifelong friends. WAY has been running the Blank Space campaign to try to change this out-of-date law, which penalises people for not being married. I commend WAY for its campaigning and am proud to bring this issue before the Minister so that the anomaly can be addressed. The women I will talk about are all members of WAY, and I thank them for sharing their stories.
Nicola and her partner Stewart had been through a successful in vitro fertilisation journey, which was needed because he had had testicular cancer 10 years earlier. Six weeks after a positive pregnancy test, they found out that Stewart’s cancer had returned, and he died seven months into Nicola’s pregnancy, so he never got the chance to meet the son he had so desperately fought for. Nicola booked an appointment with the registrar, knowing that she would be going alone, but she took as much paperwork as possible to show that Stewart was the father. She had a range of hospital documents signed by him, which not only proved that he was the father but detailed his documented wishes for their embryos if he were to die. However, the registrar explained to Nicola that because she and Stewart were not married, he had to be physically present to be named on the birth certificate. Her evidence did not count, and she was sent away with a birth certificate that had a blank space where Stewart’s name should have been. Nicola says:
“We had made this baby together, literally and scientifically, and for him not to be recognised at all was devastating.”
It took a year and over £1,000 to get to court. Stewart’s father went along to attend the hearing with Nicola, and it took just a few minutes for the court to discuss and approve the change, and to add Stewart’s name to the birth certificate. It was almost as if the court could not believe that she had had to go through the process in the first place. Given the overwhelming evidence and the support of blood relatives, it was the obvious decision. She says:
“To have to go through this whilst bringing up a newborn on my own and grieving was utterly humiliating and exhausting.”
I can attest to the fact that no young widow who is learning to be a mum and grieving at the same time should ever have to fight to have their partner listed on a birth certificate, and many of them cannot afford to do so, even if they wanted to.
Paula was 18 weeks pregnant when her partner was killed while cycling to work. Despite having his DNA and a proven 99.9% match, it took three and a half years for her to get a birth certificate with his name on it, and the process cost nearly £3,000.
Eleanor’s partner Robin was killed in a road traffic accident 18 days before his baby daughter was born. Eleanor says:
“If you haven’t been through this situation, you may not understand how demeaning this rule is. It made me feel like I wasn’t to be trusted, as if an unmarried woman has no rights or voice. My partner and I lived together and planned to have a child—we just weren’t married. It wasn’t a one-night stand, and simple tax records would have proven that. While I shouldn’t have had to prove anything beyond my word, I would have willingly provided documentation and statements from both our families to confirm our relationship.”
In the end, the complexity and expense of having to fight the system proved too much for Eleanor, so her daughter’s birth certificate was never changed and the blank space remains.
These examples show just how difficult and cruel this situation is, and they also show that the process can be very different depending on where a woman lives, which court she applies to, and who hears the application. Like so many other things, it can become a bit of a postcode lottery.
Under UK law, a birth needs to be registered within 42 days. If the parents are unmarried, they both have to be present to be named on the birth certificate—one parent cannot add the other. If a parent has died, the surviving parent can amend the birth certificate at a future date to include the deceased parent’s name, but they have to apply first to the family court for a declaration of parentage. This involves a form and a court fee of £365, and the court application takes three to four months to be processed. Then, at an initial court hearing, a senior family judge will consider the application. Many judges have never come across this process, and I have read stories of young widows not only having to go through the process themselves, but having to explain it to judges and court administrators while doing so.
There may be a second hearing some months later, and in between there will be requests for DNA, evidence and witness statements. If the court approves, it will issue a document confirming that the deceased person was the child’s parent, and it then makes a declaration at a court hearing. This will then be sent to the registrar of births, deaths and marriages, and it can then take several more weeks for the re-registering of the birth to be completed.
I am sure I do not need to tell Members that this is a tortuous process—one of those bits of bureaucracy that seems ridiculous when we spell out the whole process, as I have done here. At the best of times it would be frustrating and slow. At the worst of times, it can simply be too much to cope with. The paperwork of death is long, frustrating and sometimes complicated. I remember being told by one organisation that it had to have written confirmation from my husband to close an account, even though I had written to it to say that he had died. I would like to think that things have moved on in the last 23 years, but we seem to have created a system that overcomplicates everything.
Clearly, it would not be right for someone to be able to put someone else’s name down on a birth certificate as the father without reasonable proof; what WAY is campaigning for is a way to resolve this issue so that women whose partners have died during pregnancy can follow a clear and simple process to register their partner on their child’s birth certificate. It should not cost thousands of pounds, and it should not be so complicated that some women just give up through frustration.
In Switzerland, France and Germany, unmarried fathers can declare their parentage early in the pregnancy to protect their rights. We have parental responsibility agreements here for unmarried fathers, so perhaps one answer would be to bring that forward into pregnancy so that if the worst, most unimaginable tragedy happened during pregnancy, there would be one less thing for newly widowed mums to have to worry about. Doctors could make a record of who the father is when the pregnancy is first entered into medical records, and this could be used as a legal document. Advice could be given at antenatal appointments, bringing people’s attention to the issues that can arise for parents who are not married, so that they could be more aware. The executor could be called in as a witness to confirm paternity. There are ways around this if we are creative and clever. In honour of Nicola, Paula, Elanor and their children, I look forward to hearing how the Minister will take this dilemma forward and hopefully find an answer.
When you are widowed young, you lose so much. You lose the partner you love, you lose the life you had built together and you lose the future you had planned. Your children lose their father—or sometimes their mother—their family is never the same again, and their lives will be shaped in many ways by the loss, however young they are when it happened. Being widowed when pregnant is all this and more. The trauma of birthing and grieving at the same time runs deep and lasts a lifetime. I really hope that the Government will move swiftly to make some changes so that one tiny little bit of this awful journey is made easier for those who have to navigate it.