Victims and Courts Bill (First sitting)

Jonathan Brash Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 17th June 2025 Public Bill Committees

[Bradley Thomas (Bromsgrove) (Con)]

Q Do you support the publication of sentencing remarks in the interest of transparency, supporting victims and their families, and wider public confidence in seeing justice delivered?

Baroness Newlove: I certainly do. The media give out information, and I have learned more about my sentencing remarks because I never got them until very long afterwards. Every victim, not just those of sexual crimes, has a right to see those sentencing remarks, because it gives them time to digest. You leave the courtroom thinking that you know everything, but as your memory and emotions come, you start asking yourself questions.

Sentencing is very technical: you hear a sentence, then it is reduced if they have been on remand—there are boxed-off things. Also, as I found out, there are tariff reviews for juveniles, which even the probation service was not aware of because there are very few of them. If you look at the crime rate, you will see that we are getting younger offenders in prison. We have to prepare families for the tariff review, which means that offenders go to appeal to reduce their tariff, so you go through that.

It should not simply be a case of saying, “There are the sentencing remarks.” There are implications, and every victim has a right to see the sentencing remarks. It is about them, and it affects the decisions about what the offender will do, and it should be the victim’s right to have that information. They do not have any advocates to speak for them, and the prosecution pursue their own case. If the media can get things out there, why can we not give it to victims and families?

Katie Kempen: From our perspective, accessing sentencing remarks is an issue for victims. They would like to be able to access them. We welcomed the pilot and its continued roll-out.

I have a nuanced response because victims’ needs differ. If there is to be wider publication, we need to see whether any protection is needed for individual victims, rather than carte blanche, “Yes, publish them all.” A key issue is explaining the sentencing remarks to victims. Again, in our “Suffering for Justice” report, where victims did not have the sentencing remarks explained to them, it caused them real anguish and distress. They should be able to have the sentencing remarks explained to them, and where they do, it helps their recovery journey and brings closure. My answer is yes, with some nuance. We need the explanation, and we need to treat the victims like a human being who has gone through a traumatic experience.

Dame Nicole Jacobs: I agree.

[Mr Jonathan Brash (Hartlepool) (Lab)]

Q We have talked a great deal about the changes in definitions around victims. We have also talked about the role of social landlords. Is not one of the challenges in implementing this Bill making the many stakeholders that come into contact with victims clear that they are dealing with a victim, and them knowing what a victim is and what their responsibilities are once they realise that?

Katie Kempen: Yes. Particularly when looking at antisocial behaviour, we absolutely welcome the additional powers for the Victims’ Commissioner. Brutally, the Victims’ Commissioner knew what the issues were surrounding antisocial behaviour—the last time she was in office, she wrote a fantastic report that has still not been fully implemented and enacted.

At Victim Support we would like to see an ASB charter so that victims of antisocial behaviour have clarity on their expectations and rights, and on the responsibilities of each organisation. Victims are far too often ping-ponged between different organisations. They do not hear their rights in terms of the reviews.

As Baroness Newlove has said, there is a cohort of victims who slip through the net in accessing victim support services. Their case may not reach the criminal threshold that gets them to victims code rights, but they are still finding that their lives are essentially ruined by antisocial behaviour. Those cases are complex, difficult to resolve and take significant advocacy. We need some clarity on rights and responsibilities in that arena.

Baroness Newlove: I add a request to get rid of the term “low level.” The police start by thinking that antisocial behaviour is low level, and if you train your police officers with that narrative, they will not give respect to victims. Antisocial behaviour is horrendously violent to the individual. For my last report I met victims whose houses were nearly burned down, but the local authorities never came. I have met a victim of arson against their car, which nearly murdered the family because she was sleeping on the sofa—the police never came out, but the fire officers sat there for two hours.

We have to get away from looking at antisocial behaviour as low level, because it is the route for violence upon violence. I do not want to talk just about me, but my husband was murdered. Before that, it would have been treated as antisocial behaviour. If he had lived, it would have just gone through the system. If you leave antisocial behaviour, it is like a cancer; it will spread and spread.

That is where it helps communities, if you really want to get to the nub of all this. As Victims’ Commissioner, I am delighted about being able to go to a housing provider, but you are quite right about the implementation and accountability. This is going to take many attempts, but it has to start with the police to stop the ping-ponging. There is a human there who is feeling suicidal. You will act if they take their life, like Fiona Pilkington or David Askew did, and that is too little too late.

[The Chair]

There are three people on this panel. Please be focused.

--- Later in debate ---

[Caroline Voaden]

Q Rebecca, you talked about situations in which there is a complex mixture of housing and mental health issues, and possibly drugs and alcohol, and the housing association or local authority struggles to move the person on because it is not clear where they would go. Do you think the agencies involved have the tools and resources they need to comply with the Bill in respect of the Victims’ Commissioner?

Rebecca Bryant: I would say that the vast majority of local authorities and housing providers up and down the country resource their response to antisocial behaviour, but there has been a significant impact on that since 2008, with austerity and the cuts that have happened across local authorities. I believe that the toolkit itself is strong. There is a mixture of early intervention and prevention, which we absolutely know work. Around 75% of complaints around antisocial behaviour are resolved first time. When we are talking about taking cases to court, we are only talking about a small minority of all the complaints.

There is something there about us understanding the real picture of antisocial behaviour in the country. A million incidents of antisocial behaviour were reported to the police last year, but our YouGov survey suggests that over 50% of people do not report antisocial behaviour, so imagine doubling that number to 2 million, and then adding on top the incidents recorded by housing providers and local authorities: we are probably looking at more like 4 million or 5 million incidents of antisocial behaviour. It is a really significant problem; it is pernicious and causes great damage to communities and individuals alike.

There are certain things that we strongly feel should happen. We did some work with the all-party parliamentary group a couple of years ago, looking into the complexity of antisocial behaviour. We made a recommendation that there should be a pilot for a specialist housing court that could look at the complexity around antisocial behaviour. You are asking an ASB officer to be an enforcement person, a mediator, a victim support person, a mental health expert and a social worker.

We recognise that people who perpetrate antisocial behaviour can often be victims themselves and have had traumatic experiences—adverse childhood experiences—in their lives, which might be the root cause of their antisocial behaviour. We need to have something like a specialist court, and we need the judiciary who look at antisocial behaviour to be trained to understand the complexity, because we often find that judges are not necessarily trained in antisocial behaviour when they look at complex cases.

The resources required are wide. It is about not just local authorities and housing providers but the community safety partnership, because we know that a partnership response is what resolves antisocial behaviour. It is not about one single agency, and it is certainly not just within the auspices of the police.

[Mr Brash]

Q In my experience, housing is often at the heart of antisocial behaviour and the related problems and, of course, at the heart of that is usually the tenant. What are your views about how the provisions in the Bill can be effectively communicated to tenants so that they have knowledge of what their rights are and how to access them, in relation to local authorities and social landlords?

Rebecca Bryant: We have long called for a campaign on antisocial behaviour to explain rights. That is one of the reasons why we have Antisocial Behaviour Awareness Week, when we talk about how to report and what people should expect when they report antisocial behaviour. I liked the idea from Victim Support that perhaps we should have a charter that explains people’s rights: you can ask for an ASB case review, you can make a complaint to the ombudsman if you are dissatisfied, and you can—if this element of the Bill passes—make a complaint to or request support from the Victims’ Commissioner.

Equally, we must remember that this is about stopping antisocial behaviour. Often when members of the public report antisocial behaviour, they are looking for a specific outcome. That outcome might be to evict the person who is the perpetrator, when actually, that is not our role. Our role is to stop the antisocial behaviour from happening. So there is always something, on behalf of housing providers and local authorities, about managing the expectations of the individual who is making the complaint and being really clear on what antisocial behaviour is, what you can resolve as an individual, and what we can do to support you as an organisation. We need to be much clearer about what people can expect from us as the agencies and our response.

Charlotte Hamilton-Kay: Absolutely. I will make a couple of points. Rebecca has mentioned the ASB case review. The disparity in its administration across England and Wales is a real issue for victims. We released a report last year that showed there are some areas in England and Wales that, in four years, have still not held one ASB case review, and this legislation has been around for over 11 years. That is purely because victims are not aware of the case review’s existence. They are not able to make an application because it is not publicised. We have to ask why it is not publicised. Practitioners feel that it is a complaint process and will involve them being questioned on why they have made the decisions they have made in case management, and victims are really missing out on the opportunity to explain the impact of what they are experiencing.

As Baroness Newlove mentioned, we really need to standardise the threshold for an ASB case review application, so there are no additional caveats—it is three instances in six months and that is it. We also need to standardise how it is publicised and how victims are made aware of it, because a lot of people are still unaware. A report that you at Resolve issued in the last couple of years said that 87% of people were still unaware of this tool’s existence, so in 11 years we have not done a very good job of making people aware of it.

Finally, on the concept of a victim being able to express what they are experiencing, when we are talking about tenants, everybody experiences things differently. What might be really impactful to me could just go straight over your head. It is all about your personal circumstances and what your experience is, what your triggers are and what you happen to have been experiencing that day. We need to be very clear about what is antisocial behaviour, what is unreasonable behaviour and what is inconsiderate behaviour, and manage the expectations of what people can and cannot demand change to. Managing the expectations of victims is part of the support network. When they know what to expect and what can and cannot happen, and when they are not dealing with that unknown, it makes it a lot easier for them to cope.

[Adam Thompson]

Q Good morning both and thank you for coming to give evidence. We have rightly discussed antisocial behaviour in depth. I know from my own email inbox that it is a huge scourge on my constituents’ lives in Erewash. Broadly, what is your general assessment of how the Bill’s measures on antisocial behaviour will help us to tackle it as a whole?

Rebecca Bryant: It is very difficult to see this Bill in isolation, considering we have the Crime and Policing Bill going through Parliament at the same time. We want to be in lockstep and to recognise that we need not only to support victims and communities, but to consider the drivers for antisocial behaviour—where it is happening and how we can better respond, whether that is through a legal toolkit or by putting checks and balances in place. For example, I gave evidence to the Joint Committee on Human Rights last week around checks and balances on ensuring that we recognise the human rights of individuals versus the community, and how we do that.

Having a spotlight on antisocial behaviour can only be a good thing if it is what the majority of people in the country say is a high priority. Having spoken to lots of Ministers, Governments and civil servants over the last 25 years that I have been working on antisocial behaviour, that priority has not gone away. When you look at our survey results on the impact of antisocial behaviour, one in seven people say that their mental health is impacted, and one in 10 actually move home because they are a victim of antisocial behaviour. Over 50% of people do not report it to us. Why not? Is it because they do not trust us to respond? Is it because we do not advertise how to report it to us? There is something there that we need to be think about, and we need to do more research into that.

With the Crime and Policing Bill, there will be mandating of data collection. For the first time since the crime and policing Act that is there at the moment, we will be gathering information on use of early intervention and prevention tools, and we will be able to evaluate what works, what we want to invest in and how we train our staff. We will look at legal action and whether the new respect order—as it will be once it has been piloted—works. What is the impact of positive requirements and what is the impact of sentencing? What is the impact of increasing fines as a deterrent?

At the centre of that, we will have the Victims’ Commissioner, advocating for individual victims of antisocial behaviour—in a different way, perhaps, from the way the ombudsman will be looking at complaints, the ASB case review looks at a response or the social housing regulator looks at things. The Victims’ Commissioner is actually advocating for the individual victim or the communities that are being impacted, and that can only be a good thing.

Victims and Courts Bill (Second sitting)

Jonathan Brash Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 17th June 2025 Public Bill Committees

[Alex Brewer]

Q Do you see any gaps in the Bill, or areas where you would like it to go further?

Mark Brooks: It is not so much in the Bill, and the Minister knows our position on this, but there continues to be an issue with how male victims of domestic abuse, sexual abuse, stalking and other crimes are seen by society and, importantly, within the justice system. We know that the present and the previous Victims’ Commissioners support the position that male victims of domestic abuse should not be classed as victims of violence against a woman or a girl. A son, as covered by the Victims and Courts Bill, has been characterised, classed and defined by successive Governments as a victim of violence against a girl, even though he is obviously a boy.

The same issue applies to male victims of domestic abuse. Successive Governments have officially classed them as being victims of violence against a woman. We are asking that “violence against women and girls” be changed to include male victims. When the Bill is enacted, any male victim covered by it should no longer be classed as a victim of violence against a woman or a girl. That has to change; it is quite Orwellian, aside from anything else, as it is clearly incorrect.

We therefore need to get more male victims recognised in their own right. They would then have more access, more understanding and better support to be able to come forward and benefit from the measures in the Bill. This is a wider political issue. Just to reiterate, we want to keep the violence against women and girls strategy and definition, but we want a parallel view for male victims.

[Mr Jonathan Brash (Hartlepool) (Lab)]

Q Thank you, Mark, for coming here today. I want to draw your attention to the provisions on compelling offenders to attend their sentencing. First, I am genuinely quite interested in your specific perspective on that. Secondly, we have heard evidence today that the use of force, if it were to become disproportionate, risks making a spectacle of the offender, drawing attention away from the victim. Do you have any thoughts on that?

Mark Brooks: We believe it is right that a perpetrator, or somebody who has been sentenced, should be forced to be present at court, including at sentencing. It is important that victims not only see that justice is being done in terms of sentencing and the court experience, but feel that it is being done. Seeing the person being convicted in front of them, with their family and the wider community, is absolutely essential, so we support the measures on that in the Bill.

In terms of it being a spectacle, the bottom line is that we must act in the interest of the victim, the person who has had the crime committed against them. They must be the priority, so we are in favour of the measures put forward by the Government.

[Mrs Elsie Blundell (Heywood and Middleton North) (Lab)]

Q Thank you for giving evidence today. It is important that we do not forget the plight of men and boys who are affected by violent or sexual crime. We need to make sure there are clear pathways for those men to secure justice and support. You have made it clear that you welcome the helpline. How do you think we can make sure that the helpline and the victim contact scheme reach all eligible victims, including men from marginalised, disadvantaged and working-class backgrounds? How do you think we could do that?

Mark Brooks: I work in wider policy around men’s health and I have been helping the Government on the men’s health strategy call for evidence, which is out now. In terms of language, I often see literature in which men are not visually present, so it is important that men in all their shapes, sizes and guises are visible. Also, there needs to be more outreach, often targeting where men go, not where you think they should go. Leaving things in libraries and GP surgeries, for example, will not reach men. We need far better promotion online and through community groups, barbers and sports clubs—Facebook is also really important for men—basically reaching out to where men go.

There is a huge growth in community-based support charities for men, which have grown exponentially in the last five years—things like Men’s Sheds, Andy’s Man Club, Talk Club and so forth. Some of them are in the room next door, giving a presentation about the men’s health strategy, so use those. The justice system and the people within it can be smarter in reaching out to non-statutory organisations.