Victims and Prisoners Bill

Lord Russell of Liverpool Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 18th December 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, for me, there were echoes of the arrival of the Online Safety Bill in your Lordships’ House earlier this year when this Bill arrived. The similarities they have are years in gestation, promises repeatedly made, and undertakings and apparent commitments made, particularly to victims, but the feeling upon arrival is slightly underwhelming. Rather like the school reports which my despairing parents had to read year after year when I was put in various penal establishments which purported to be educational establishments, which would say, “Could do better if he tried”, in this case, as the noble Baroness, Lady Newlove, said, it is, “Could do better if His Majesty’s Government tried”.

As the Minister said at the beginning of his speech, we need to avoid the needless politicisation of the Bill. When the Minister was kindly giving us a briefing last week, I said that the duty of most of us in this House is to try to drain the politics from the Bill. That is certainly what I intend to do. Yes, we are apparently going to be in an election year quite soon, but in no way, shape or form should victims become political footballs.

The huge imbalance in the resources that are going to be applied to different parts of the Bill mirrors rather accurately the differing focus on priorities. Are victims really at the centre of the Bill? The estimated costs of Part 1 are £30.4 million. The estimated costs of Part 3 are £530 million. Part 1 is 18% of that total; that does not feel like a particularly strong focus on victims. To add insult to injury, Part 3 is part of a continuing effort by His Majesty’s Government to repair a parole system which was comprehensively blown up by an earlier iteration of this Government, almost exactly nine years ago. However, we are where we are.

I will be focusing primarily on Part 1 of the Bill as it goes through Committee and Report. The victims’ code must be made flesh. It must not just be an aspiration, or a nudge to authorities to do the right thing. We tried that approach over many years and it does not work. If at first you do not succeed, you emphatically should not try repeatedly to do what has been proven to fail.

I would never be so rash as to deem to speak on behalf of the noble Baroness, Lady Newlove, but I always listen to what she says with great attention. I suspect her patience and hopes of delivering a marked improvement to the unacceptably varied experiences which victims are undergoing is being sorely tested by what is currently going on. If she, the domestic abuse commissioner, the victims’ commissioner for London—to whom the noble Lord, Lord Sandhurst, referred—and the Children’s Commissioner are collectively or individually unhappy with parts of the Bill, I think the Government can expect significant pushback from a great many of us.

As I think the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd, said very forcibly earlier on, unless you have two things in tandem, this is not going to work. You need a serious fundamental culture change and you also need resources. It is a painful word for the current Government: money.

There are many examples of where we could do better but I will mention only a couple. As the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, mentioned, stalking is one of the most common and prevalent crimes which creates victims. However, looking at the Bill it is very hard to see an acknowledgment that this is the most prevalent type of crime and that it has the most impact on the largest number of victims, particularly women. We can and we should do better there. The lack of funding to support community-based services, where 70% of domestic abuse victims receive their support, should certainly be looked at.

Other noble Lords have mentioned having a proper statutory definition of child criminal exploitation to ensure children who have been forced into committing crimes are recognised as victims and not as perpetrators. The Children’s Commissioner has come up with five very clear asks, which I am sure have been forwarded to the Minister, and I support all of those.

Lastly, on needs, I will mention a friend of mine. She is a lady called Stella Creasy, and one of the bravest Members of Parliament I know. Some of you may have read what she went through in the press. As your Lordships probably know, she is somebody who is not afraid to call out misogyny in its many forms. Some men do not like this. A particular man put in a complaint to Leicestershire Police, basically saying that, given her views on men, she should no longer be in charge of her children. Leicestershire Police, in its wisdom, made a formal complaint to Waltham Forest Council. This eventually went to court and was completely and comprehensively thrown out. The response of Leicestershire Police was that this had been referred to its professional standards department and some “advice and reflective learning” was provided to officers. What she has gone through is pretty shocking. She is a brave and a tough lady. I saw her the other day and it had really shaken her. Out of sheer spite, somebody had tried to take her away from her children. That is totally and utterly unacceptable.

Working with other noble Lords, I am trying to elicit from the police and other victim services what they want from the Bill. We are talking about an awful lot of push today—what we would like and what is not working properly. Those that are charged with doing something to help victims know they are not doing a good job and they want to do better. I am trying to encourage them to come forward to say what would be most helpful and useful for them in the Bill. But in such a devolved and disjointed landscape, with 43 police forces and the same number of police and crime commissioners, how do you get best practice? Each change in leadership results in a change of focus and prioritisation. The victim ends up being a powerless bystander in this transient postcode lottery. That is not good enough.

We have to avoid in this Bill the temptation to say, “My victim is more important than your victim”. They are all equally important. We have much to do. Let us try to do it in a co-operative spirit, focusing on the victims. If it is not working for the victims, let us not insult their feelings by trying to justify the unjustifiable.

Lastly, let me I say how sympathetic I am to the noble Lord, Lord Carter, who is about to give his maiden speech. Normally in your Lordships’ House, a maiden speech happens about a quarter of the way through. He has been made to suffer a cruel and unusual punishment by waiting so long, and I wish him all the best.

Victims and Prisoners Bill

Lord Russell of Liverpool Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 24th January 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, the Minister kindly came to today’s Cross-Bench meeting and talked us through the Bill from his point of view. He started by saying that we will have quite a problem defining a victim because, as evidenced by this group of amendments, there are an awful lot of groups of people who clearly identify as victims and for whom there is evidence that they are victims. Although I understand the Government’s wish to try to contain this to some extent, it is important that we have a proper discussion about all these different groups and work out whether there is an intelligent, sensible and pragmatic way for us to be cleverer about the definition than we are at the moment.

The noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, who put his name to my Amendment 4, apologises for being unable to be here to speak because of another appointment. Amendment 4 seeks to ensure that victims of persistent anti-social behaviour—we all love acronyms, and I will mostly refer to it as “ASB” from now on—are recognised as victims and provided with their own code rights. Persistent anti-social behaviour can be defined as behaviour that meets the level required to trigger an anti- social behaviour case review; this means three reported incidents of ASB over a six-month period.

Currently, many victims of ASB are not recognised under the code because the criminal threshold has not been met. The police may treat and regard some of these incidents simply as misdemeanours or disputes between neighbours. The police’s failure to recognise the reality of what these victims undergo can make it worse, so it is important that we and the police are able to look at the whole picture.

The cumulative impact of ASB can be, and is, devastating. It affects victims’ sleep, work, relationships, health and feeling of safety, even in their own home. Left unpoliced, the consequences can be absolutely devastating. In this instance, an example would be the deaths of Suzanne Dow, Fiona Pilkington, Bijan Ebrahimi, Matthew Boorman, Stephen and Jennifer Chapple, David Askew, Louise Lotz and—last but by no means least—Garry Newlove, the ex-husband of the former Victims’ Commissioner, the noble Baroness, Lady Newlove. In the case of David Askew, he collapsed and died on his own doorstep after years of torment.

Every day, victims of ASB in England and Wales are failed by the system and are unable to access the support they need and deserve. Every year, the charity ASB Help receives tens of thousands of pleas from victims trying to work out how they can find help. This is made worse because no single agency holds responsibility for tackling ASB, resulting in a not untypical diffusion of responsibility across the police, local authorities, housing associations and private landlords.

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[Lord Bellamy (Con)]

My Lords, I entirely accept the points that my noble friend is making, and I am very happy to have a further meeting to discuss this, the interrelationship between the bits of legislation that we are dealing with, the interrelationship between the various authorities and who exactly is responsible for what.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, to further emphasise that, I think it would be helpful to the Committee to recognise the sheer scale of anti-social behaviour. Some freedom of information requests looking at the period between 2019 and 2021 identified that, believe it or not, there were 3.5 million reports of anti-social behaviour, so it is on a similar scale to stalking on an annualised basis. Those are probably the largest two areas of cases involving victims across England and Wales.

Those statistics were done across 34 out of the 43 police forces. They demonstrate the huge variability across the country, police and crime commissioner by PCC, and police force by police force. That is the problem. Some areas are doing really well with existing resources, without needing extra money. With proper leadership, organisation and training, they are doing a really good job. Kudos to the Government and the Minister for achieving good results in some areas. The challenge for the Government is: what is the problem with taking action to ensure that is replicated efficiently and systematically right across England and Wales? The evidence is clearly that it is not. If the authorities can do it within existing resources, we are not talking about huge amounts of extra money. That is not the issue; the issue is the way they go about what they do.

[Lord Bellamy (Con)]

I am grateful to the noble Lord for that intervention and entirely accept the point he makes about the variability across the country. Although this evening we are not on Clause 6 and supplementary Clause 11, for example, or Clause 10, about code awareness and reviewing compliance by criminal justice bodies, one of the main drivers of the Bill is to raise the standard of victim support equally across the country; to publish league tables; to have the data; to put pressure, if you like, by almost shame and stigma on those that are not performing as well as they should so that it is publicly known; and, in extreme cases, to give directions that they need to improve and so forth.

The steps we need to think about are how we make the various parts of the legislation consistent and operational, what role the code plays in anti-social behaviour when it is criminal conduct, as it often will be, and how we operationalise the way in which particular police forces and other agencies offer consistent services across the country. That is my thought on this point.

Victims and Prisoners Bill

Lord Russell of Liverpool Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 31st January 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Brinton (LD)]

My Lords, I have tabled Amendment 20 and I thank the noble Lord, Lord Russell of Liverpool, and the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, for signing it. The background to this amendment is that victims and their family members often feel that they are bystanders in the justice process, unable to have their voices heard and sometimes actively dissuaded from having any involvement in proceedings. We believe that open justice means transparency for the public, but even more so for the victim, because they have arguably the most vested interest in seeing justice done.

My honourable friend Sarah Olney had an Adjournment Debate down the other end and correspondence with Ministers Edward Argar and Mike Freer on this issue. She tabled an amendment to this Bill when it was in the Commons; it was not selected for debate, but she continued to take the matter up and Ed Argar announced in the Commons a one-year pilot scheme to enable victims of rape and other serious sexual offences to request Crown Court sentencing remarks. But this is insufficient, and it is the reason we have retabled this amendment.

We have heard in some of the stories from victims that they are not just actively dissuaded from returning to court after they have given their evidence but that various people in the criminal justice system have told them that they should not return to court. The reason for that is they are told, whether by court officials, their own counsel or even the judge, that their presence in the court will affect the jury’s attitude towards them and, as a result, might mean that the jury would go against them—as if they wish to be voyeurs in the case in which they have been victimised.

Claire Waxman, a long-term victim of stalking, was told repeatedly not to attend her offender’s sentencing as it could make her look vindictive. Another victim said: “I was told I could not watch the court case after giving evidence, as I’d look like I wasn’t scared of the perpetrator and it could harm the jury’s decision”.

After inquiry, we have some data that shows there is a range from about £30 for a copy of a judgment to more than £300 for an original transcript of sentencing remarks. Where a victim requires a transcript of the entire court case, we have seen figures going from about £7,500 to £22,000. That is absolutely unacceptable.

Sarah Olney reported that in 2020 one of her constituents was raped and drugged by a former partner, who was sentenced to 18 years in spring 2022. Her psychiatrist advised her to apply to the court to obtain a copy of the trial transcript, to aid her recovery and understanding. Her application for a free transcript was denied by the court, and she was then quoted £7,500. That was unaffordable, as she has been unable to work following the attack because of PTSD. Unlike many other victims she attended the 10-day trial, but she said she could barely remember what was said due to emotional distress.

Judges need to ensure that the discrimination that is happening is cut out. The Bill cannot address that, but I would be really grateful if the Minister gave some thought as to how we can stop victims being victimised yet again in the middle of their own court process when their case is being debated. The current system of fees flies in the face of open justice, because a victim must pay for the details of their justice. Many will not want it, but some will. The psychiatrist of the lady I just referred to thought it was absolutely key for her to come to terms with what had happened to her, and indeed to her offender.

Technology has moved on, I suspect, since concern was first raised about this. One of the issues is how easy it is to get access to audio in Crown Courts. That would leave the victim, even if they could not get a written transcript, to be able to listen to a judgment, at the very least. We know that this is already available in coroners’ courts—and without charge. Why not in Crown Courts?

Above all, AI technology means that the old days of having to get a stenographer to listen to audio and spend many days typing it, perhaps getting some of it checked back to make sure that names and exact details are right, are long gone. Obviously a court would not want something that had not been checked to go out, but the really long part of it has been completely overtaken by events.

As Mike Freer MP said in the debate in the other place:

“The ability to access transcripts from court proceedings is an essential part of maintaining transparency and accountability within the system”.—[Official Report, Commons, 16/11/23; col. 848.]


From these Benches we really wish the pilot well, but the pilot itself is too narrow and does not cover the wider range of crimes that victims are covered by in Part 1 of the Bill. Secondly, the pilot has not even started and will run for at least a year. I hope that the Minister will consider expanding it a bit—at least for the pilot to cover other crimes, but also to ensure that it is not a wonderful pilot that will then sink into the long grass. I beg to move.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I support the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, in this amendment. I pay tribute to her and to Sarah Olney, who has been meticulous in her pursuit of clarity on this issue.

At a trial, the judge’s summing-up and sentencing remarks in particular are of obvious and great importance to victims. As the noble Lord, Lord Marks, said in the debate on the previous group, for many victims the experience of being in court is highly stressful and often quite traumatic, and one would not exactly have total recall of what was going on. Indeed, I suspect that most of your Lordships would not have total recall of many of our proceedings here. The ability to read and review the summing up and sentencing and ensure that they are taken fully on board is surely a fundamental right.

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[Baroness Newlove (Con)]

My Lords, I support all the amendments in this group on child victims. I thank my noble friend Lord Polak for speaking about Poppy’s story. She is in the Chamber—a very gracious young woman who articulated her story very well. As a mother, when I watched my children have to give evidence, covered in blood, on the actions against their father—my sisters were told to turn in a corner when they were trying to ID on a VIPER parade—I called them “my heroines”. And Poppy is a heroine. As a mum, I felt that evening for her mum because, believe you me, as mothers we want to wrap you in cotton wool to protect you from pain. It was very emotional to listen to, and I send my huge respects to her mum as well.

This Bill needs to take into account the needs of all victims, but especially children. Children need to be recognised in this Bill. They are victims in their own right. As I said, my three daughters witnessed every kick and punch to their father, having to pull his tongue out because he was choking on his blood and say goodbye while he was in a coma. They live with that on a daily basis. They were not treated as children—they were told to act properly, because they were children.

Children who have been victims of crime, especially sexual abuse and exploitation, are among the most vulnerable in our society. This type of abuse can devastate the lives of children, impacting on their mental health, relationships and education. We in this Chamber have a responsibility to make sure that this Bill recognises and provides for them. The needs of children are not the same as those of adults, so they require specific provision that is designed for them, not against them. The victims’ code should consider children’s specific needs. They should be able to access registered intermediaries who can help them give their best evidence and, when they are interviewed, it should be done by people with specialist training in interviewing children.

When I was last in this role, I undertook a report on registered intermediaries. One of its findings was that the police and the CPS had a lack of awareness of the existence of registered intermediaries and how they worked. That was in 2018 and it is still the case now. This Bill gives us an ideal opportunity to make sure that these code rights are secured for our children. They are our future and we must care for them. That is the key here.

Children must have a needs assessment that takes into account their individual requirements, and we must have properly funded victims’ services, such as the “child house” model. This offers children who have experienced sexual abuse a child-focused, targeted response that can support children and their families as they recover from their ordeal—although, to be honest, they never recover; they survive. Currently, there is only one “child house” in the UK, which is the Lighthouse, in London, and, as a northerner, it really gets me to say that.

Children face a postcode lottery when it comes to support services. An FoI request by Barnardo’s to PCCs found that, of all the local authorities that responded, 68% had not in the last 12 months commissioned any support services for child victims of sexual exploitation. That is why I support these amendments, both as the Victims’ Commissioner and as legislator in this House—but, more importantly, as a mother of three daughters who, to this day, suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder because they felt they were not listened to but were told what to do. As a mother, I could not give them a hug because I might persuade them to give other evidence.

This amendment is so important for children and the victims of crime. We need to make sure the Bill provides specialist support services designed for children—in fact, designed for children, by children, because they will know their individual needs and vulnerabilities. We have a duty to help them cope and recover from such horrific and traumatic experiences.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I will speak briefly and cover all the amendments, as did the noble Baroness, Lady Newlove. I put on the record that I am a governor of Coram, the oldest children’s charity in the United Kingdom, and I am a trustee of the Foundling Museum.

Like other noble Lords, I have had the privilege of listening to some of the child survivors of child abuse. It is difficult for them to speak of their experiences; it is also extraordinarily difficult to listen to them—it really is. I pay tribute to Poppy, who described the trauma she went through in the most brilliant, clear way, without undue emotion or embellishment, and it was far more powerful than anything I—or, I suspect, any of us—will say this evening. It is an honour to try to speak on their behalf, although I fear we are poor substitutes for the way in which they are able to describe what they went through.

What they are asking for is very simple. It is one word: recognition—that is, recognition of the fact that they are not adults. The vast majority of victims whom we are going to talk about during the course of the Bill, including, of course, the part about prisoners, are adults. However, a very significant proportion of victims are not adults, and children have very specific needs and are particularly vulnerable and open to manipulation. They can often have great difficulty in understanding what is going on around them and discerning what is right and what is wrong, depending on who is telling them what. To help them navigate their way through some of the situations which adults—usually—have landed them in, requires particularly sensitive, careful and deeply knowledgeable treatment. At the moment, the reality is that it is a postcode lottery for children.

My colleague on the Cross Benches, the noble Lord, Lord Hennessy, is well known for his theory about some of the difficulties we appear to have got ourselves into in this country. We still seem to subscribe to what might be called the “good chaps” code of government: assuming that, if you tell people what it is they should do, that is what they will do. If one has a law, a code or guidance, the assumption is that people will read the guidance and then follow and adhere to it in a consistent manner. However, the evidence we have is overwhelming. When it comes to the treatment of children, there is a total and utter lack of consistency. There are statistics to back this up, and financial statistics which explain the cost of it. It is unacceptable that large parts of the country are effectively a desert when it comes to helping children who might get into the same sort of ghastly situation that Poppy was in.

As a Cross-Bencher I am not going make a political point, but, if I was a member of His Majesty’s Government, after being in office since 2010 and looking at the state of the way in which children are treated as victims at the moment, it is not a record I would feel proud to defend. It would be nice, for a change, to hear people say, “We have tried various things and spent money on them, but it is not all working and we acknowledge that. We have learned from it and we are doing something about it”. But to try and continue with the “good chaps” version of government—in which you tell people what they should be doing and they do it—is just fantasy. We need to wake up to that and do something about it, for all the poor children who deserve much better.

[Baroness Brinton (LD)]

My Lords, I will speak on Amendments 108 and 109, in the absence of the noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin, who would have made a contribution. She comments that child abuse and exploitation can happen to any child, in any family, in any location, and, as she would always say, “Childhood lasts a lifetime”. Child abuse and exploitation can have a detrimental impact on children that stays with them for the rest of their lives, harming their mental health, their development and sense of trust. Right at this moment, there is a child experiencing this type of trauma. Of course, it also has a devastating impact on their family and friends, and society as whole. As a country, we still do not provide or fund anywhere near enough for specialist support services to stand up for children’s rights and those who have experienced devastating trauma and abuse. It is shameful that, as a nation, children are left with the horror of abuse, and suffer in silence without any statutory right to support.

Support services are vital for child victims. They give children a space to work through their trauma and begin to recover, offering mental health and counselling services, and advocacy services which help children and their families to navigate the complexity of statutory agencies and the criminal justice system. Child-centred services, such as the Lighthouse, which was described earlier, can also reduce the impact of harm and other risks later in life, including going missing from home, alcohol and drug misuse, homelessness and interaction with the criminal justice system.

In one study, more than eight in 10 male prisoners said they had experienced at least one adverse childhood experience, which includes physical and sexual abuse, and domestic abuse. Yet local services, mostly run by the voluntary and community sectors, are chronically underfunded and undervalued. The Centre of Expertise on Child Sex Abuse, which is hosted by Barnardo’s, has recently published a comprehensive study of the current landscape. I will not go into the detail because the noble Baroness, Lady Newlove, has already covered the results. But just as much as Barnardo’s and the other children’s charities feel that they have a moral duty to support vulnerable children and young people, we cannot continue to see these vital support services as just a charitable add-on that is nice to have. These are life-saving services for a lot of children who have experienced abuse and exploitation. We must ensure that enough are available to support the number of children who, every year, face abuse and exploitation.

From these Benches, we support the amendments tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Polak, which would place a duty on the relevant authorities to commission sufficient child-specific support services for child victims of abuse and exploitation.

My own Amendment 100A in this group follows on from the very thorough report from the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, which gave the Government 20 recommendations, of which the first is a statutory duty of mandatory reporting, by which those in certain employment, whether paid or voluntary, and regulated professions should report allegations of child sex abuse to relevant authorities. The Government have yet to respond on these recommendations. I hope that will change soon.

This Bill is not the right place for an amendment on mandatory reporting. The amendment would provide children and young people with the status of a victim if a person in a regulated profession had a suspicion that they were a victim of child sex abuse. As we have heard from most speakers on this group of amendments, children and adults react differently to trauma. Children need specialist help right from the start. Giving them that recognition as a victim is vital.

Victims and Prisoners Bill

Lord Russell of Liverpool Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 31st January 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, very briefly, I can only entirely agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Newlove. If something like this does not happen, what we are all asking ourselves is: will anything really change? The noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, contrasted the last part of the Bill, which has more substantive legislative power that will go on to its face, with the part of the Bill we are talking about at the moment, which is largely advisory and selective. It tells people what they should do. However, it does not tell people what they must do.

Most importantly, it does not even give the Victims’ Commissioner, himself or herself, the authority to insist. Unfortunately, the noble Baroness’s predecessor did not have her tenure extended because, I gather, she was felt by certain members of the current Government to be somewhat unhelpful in her attitude and demeanour; thus her tenure was not renewed. Until the noble Baroness, Lady Newlove, was put in on an interim basis, the role of Victims’ Commissioner was vacant for a significant period. That is not good or acceptable. It speaks volumes to some people about the level of real intent of His Majesty’s Government to put their legislative money where their mouth is.

I do not think I need to say any more than that. The onus is on the Government to demonstrate that this law will have real teeth and that the code, wherever it is, needs to be complied with and understood. The track record of the past few years has resulted in these amendments being put forward. There is a loss of faith in His Majesty’s Government’s true intent to put muscle and weight behind the provisions in the code, so the onus is on them to explain, on Report if the House so chooses, why we should not insist on amendments such as these.

[Baroness Hamwee (LD)]

My Lords, to answer the noble Lord’s rhetorical question, or perhaps pre-empting it, the Justice Committee in the House of Commons said that this was

“not … strong enough to drive the necessary cultural change”.

At the heart of the Second Reading debate was the importance of compliance with the code. If the code is not statutory, compliance is that much harder to achieve. We heard from the Minister at Second Reading, and in his letter following it—for which I was grateful—about guidance proposed by the Government for where non-compliance is severe and persistent, and how the ministerial taskforce may issue a public non-compliance notification. That is much too convoluted. One can see that it would take very serious non-compliance—something very dramatic—for such a non-compliance notification to be issued. I am sure it would be regarded as a very extreme step. We should not have to get to that point. It should be the norm and understood by the affected stakeholders—I hate that word—that they must comply.

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[Baroness Newlove (Con)]

My Lords, the role of the commissioner is to review the operation of the victims’ code. The 2004 Act, which introduced the code, also created the post of a Victims’ Commissioner. It was the clear intention of the Government and Parliament that an independent Victims’ Commissioner should be able to champion the needs of victims and challenge the Government when code entitlements were not being complied with. Given the concerns many of us have about code compliance, the importance of the commissioner role cannot be overstated.

Since 2004, there have been just three Victims’ Commissioners: the noble Baroness, Lady Casey; Dame Vera Baird; and me. We have all come to the post through very different journeys, but, as those of your Lordships who know the three of us will testify, we have one attribute in common: we are, shall we say, a feisty bunch. However, I have to tell your Lordships, and I feel sure that my erstwhile fellow commissioners would agree, that there are times when being feisty is simply not enough.

Twenty years after the role was created, the time has come to give future Victims’ Commissioners the tools to do the job Parliament intended. This means that, when the commissioner makes recommendations, the Government and agencies take the trouble to consider them and respond. In my experience, this rarely happens. I therefore welcome the provisions in the Bill to make this a statutory requirement.

However, we need to go further. A basic requirement should be that the Victims’ Commissioner is consulted when the Government amend the code or issue statutory guidance in relation to it. Yes, the Government do consult me, but as a favour, not as a statutory duty. All too often, the consultation comes after the policy has been developed, and occasionally on the day it is to be announced, giving the sense of a fait accompli. Changes in the law will not necessarily stop this happening, but it is a start. That is why I am supporting Amendments 24, 26, 27, 28, 29, 35, 43 and 48 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti.

I also welcome Amendment 49, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, which requires criminal justice agencies to co-operate with future Victims’ Commissioners. Again, if successful, this clause will not take effect until after I have left office. In my experience, many agencies I deal with are very helpful. HMPPS, for example, is particularly helpful. With some others, it can vary. For an independent Victims’ Commissioner to offer robust scrutiny, they need to have access to data and information relating to their statutory duties.

The duty set out in this amendment is not without precedent. The domestic abuse commissioner has exactly the same power. I understand it has never had to be used, but all parties concerned know it exists. These amendments combined will change the dynamics of the relationship of the commissioner with the agencies and with government. It makes her or him a formal part of the criminal justice architecture, and it gives them the authority to speak and be listened to.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I will amplify what the noble Baroness just said by actually quoting from the Government’s own description of the Bill and what is in it. A paragraph headed

“What happens if victims do not receive their entitlements?”


says:

“We think that all the measures set out will strengthen the service victims receive. As the Code is a statutory code of practice, all relevant bodies should already comply with it”.


We know they are not, so the status quo we are starting from is, to a very large degree, that the bodies which are meant to be complying with the statutory code of practice are not doing so. The paragraph continues:

“However, if things go wrong, victims can make a complaint”.


It is up to victims themselves, who may or may not be aware of what their rights are under the statutory code, to identify that they are not receiving their rights, and then it is up to them to make a complaint. What is the Victims’ Commissioner for if not to act as the obvious channel and filter for all such complaints so they can go directly through her or him to His Majesty’s Government?

What the Government have described here is a complete, accurate illustration of the problem we have. It is not working at the moment. What the Government have said will improve it, on the basis of the evidence we have, but, frankly, the arguments we have heard so far do not really give us any room for optimism, so I suspect I speak for everybody in the Committee when I say that, rather like my school reports, I think the Government “should do better”.

[Baroness Hamwee (LD)]

My Lords, I have my name to Amendment 49 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, on the duty to co-operate—which seems to me not something that should have to be said, but clearly does. It is another aspect of compliance. As ever, it is important to have the data on which to make recommendations and directions, give advice, or whatever. That is what Amendment 49 is about. It is about providing the tools for the independent Victims’ Commissioner to be effective. The amendment is based on the importance of monitoring compliance with the code, and one would think that the commissioner will be expected to be on top of the data. That needs co-operation. I think that is probably enough said. I am very much on the same page and the same paragraph as other speakers.

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Moved by

[Lord Russell of Liverpool]

30: After Clause 4, insert the following new Clause—
“Compliance with the code: minimum thresholds(1) The Secretary of State must by regulations issue minimum threshold levels of compliance with each right of the victims’ code.(2) If a minimum threshold is breached by an organisation for two consecutive years, the Secretary of State must commission an inspection of that body with regard to that breach.(3) The Secretary of State must, as soon as is reasonably practicable, lay before Parliament the report of any such inspection.” Member’s explanatory statement
This clause requires the Secretary of State to establish for agencies listed in the victims’ code minimum levels of compliance with code entitlements, which, if breached, will prompt independent inspections.

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[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, we are starting this group, but I suspect that we will stop it in about 29 minutes, so we will make what progress we can.

In moving Amendment 30, I will speak also to a large number of amendments in this group: Amendments 37 to 46, 50 and 83. They come in three groups. Amendment 30 is to do with requiring the Secretary of State to set minimum threshold levels of compliance for each right of the victims’ code, carrying on from the discussion that we had on the previous group. The group of amendments consecutive from Amendment 44 seek to place a statutory duty on the Victims’ Commissioner to compile and publish an independent annual report on justice agencies’ compliance with the victims’ code. Amendment 83 is an old chestnut for the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, and me, to do with training for the police to better understand and deal with stalkers.

Starting with Amendment 30, which is about the minimum threshold levels of compliance for each right in the code, during the pre-legislative scrutiny of the Bill, the Justice Committee stated:

“As drafted, the Bill fails to adequately address the issue of agencies’ noncompliance with the Code—we are concerned by this given that it is one of the principal reasons for the Bill”.


Therefore, this amendment has been designed, working very closely with the Victims’ Commissioner and her office, precisely to fill the gap that was identified by the Justice Committee.

For many people, experiencing crime is a life-changing event, as the noble Baroness, Lady Newlove, has testified on more than one occasion. It is the effect of not just the crime but the justice process that may follow it which victims have to endure. While we know that some victims receive an exemplary service, this is not everyone’s experience. Victims can end up in a very bad place, feeling lost, voiceless, in a complex and seemingly unfeeling system, feeling like a bystander, being told about rights which in theory they have but which are probably not properly explained to them and certainly do not feel as if they are being received.

Clearly, this should not be the case and I do not think that it ever was the intent of His Majesty’s Government when they were drafting the original Bill, the code and now this Bill. However, we are where we are. While the victims’ code sets out the minimum level of service that victims should receive, that they should be treated with respect, dignity, sensitivity, compassion and courtesy, be provided with information and updates about their case and be referred to the right support services, we know that this is not always the case, and a systematic lack of compliance with the code means that many victims are being let down.

The most recent survey by the Victims’ Commissioner found that only 29% of victims had been offered the opportunity to make a victim personal statement, despite that being one of the key rights under the code. That is under one-third, on a part of the code which the Minister said a few minutes ago is a statutory requirement to deliver. That is not a very impressive scorecard. The Bill as it stands does go some way to address this: it places the key principles of the code in law and introduces a duty on criminal justice agencies to collect and share data. However, while these are welcome steps, they do not go far enough. They go some way towards monitoring victims’ rights, but they do not ensure that victims receive them. Introducing minimum compliance thresholds will strengthen accountability and provide a means of putting the victims’ code into force.

Organisations which persistently—by which one means over a period of two consecutive years—and systematically fail to meet the thresholds will be subject to an inspectorate inspection to investigate problems and drive improvements. The thresholds that will be put in place by this amendment will make absolutely clear the levels of service that victims must receive. They will provide a systemic and consistent way of holding justice agencies to account for how they treat victims. If victims are consistently not being referred to support services, not being provided with updates and not been given the chance to make a victim personal statement, this amendment provides a clear way of identifying this, of escalating it and, perhaps most important of all, putting it right.

The Government made it a laudable aim of the Bill to

“put victims’ interests firmly at the heart of the justice system”,

but we contend that the Bill falls somewhat short of that.

The next series of amendments, from Amendment 44 onwards, seeks to place a statutory duty on the Victims’ Commissioner to compile and publish an independent annual report on the compliance of justice agencies with the victims’ code. The Government are committing in the Bill to collect the sort of data that will identify what is happening out there, but data alone will not deliver the culture change that is required to ensure that victims are treated better within our justice system. We must go further to ensure that victims have guaranteed rights, not apparently guaranteed favours.

Clause 10 requires the Secretary of State to produce an annual national report on code compliance. The Government are proposing that they collect, analyse and publish a report on code compliance themselves. Sceptics could possibly perceive that the Ministry of Justice is, in effect, marking its own homework. I suppose the question we are asking is: do we feel that is right? I think we feel that there should be—this is absolutely crucial—robust and independent scrutiny of code compliance. The proposed system of police and crime commissioners collecting compliance data locally, and the Ministry of Justice preparing a national report, provides neither independent rigour nor effective challenge.

One of the core remits of the Victims’ Commissioner is to monitor how criminal justice agencies comply with the victims’ code. Surely, as this is a core function of this office, it only follows that it is right and proper that the Victims’ Commissioner should be the person to collect, analyse and publish this report on code compliance. It is only by having a truly independent appraisal of code compliance, issued by the Government’s own appointed Victims’ Commissioner, that we can start to deliver true accountability, with criminal justice agencies fully held to account on their delivery of victims’ code rights.

Lastly, there is the matter of training for dealing with stalking. Last week, I had the privilege of speaking virtually to Richard Spinks, the father of Gracie Spinks; your Lordships may remember this particularly horrendous case where Gracie was attacked and killed by a man, a rejected partner, who had been stalking her continuously for an extended period. She had made more than 40 complaints to Derbyshire police; but they did, in effect, nothing. The coroner’s report was absolutely devastating. The Derbyshire police were not trained; they did no proper assessment of the level of risk; and they were found to be guilty of gross negligence. One of the results of this was that South Yorkshire Police, which was brought in to investigate the lamentable performance of the Derbyshire Constabulary, was so affected by what it found in this investigation that it resolved to go back and transform the way it prepares for, deals with and understands cases of stalking. The effect was such that it saw how bad bad could be.

The good news is that there is some good practice out there. I thank the Suzy Lamplugh Trust for giving those of us who have tried to advocate for better policing and understanding of stalking for many years such enormous support. It has embarked on a scheme in Cheshire, working with the Cheshire Constabulary, which is, undoubtedly, the best in class. The police are properly trained; they can assess risk quickly and effectively; they are organised in such a way that they are properly resourced and can act very quickly. They have excellent internal communication channels, which is not the case in every force, and are able to make it work.

Perhaps I can just remind noble Lords of the sheer complexity of stalking, because there are many different kinds of stalker. The most common is the rejected stalker; I think that was the individual who was in the BBC news today—the gentleman who was confronting police officers with a crossbow two days ago, and who was shot dead. He had not only a crossbow but body armour, several knives and machetes et cetera, and he was determined to break into the bedroom of a woman who lived in that area, no doubt to try to kill her. This is a man who had a record of harassment and bad behaviour, and was supposedly under monitoring by the police. None the less, he managed to accumulate this variety of weapons and personal armour, and we must be very thankful that the police managed to intervene and at least put the perpetrator out of his self-inflicted misery, although I am sure that the trauma felt by the intended victim will live with her for a great many years.

Victims and Prisoners Bill

Lord Russell of Liverpool Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 5th February 2024 Lords Chamber

I hope this gives your Lordships at least some reassurance that we are committed to ensuring that there is a framework in place to achieve clear awareness, accountability, accessibility and affordability, and appropriate training. I therefore urge the noble Lord to withdraw his amendment.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, first, I pay tribute to the Minister, who for 25 minutes has responded to this group when he quite clearly would rather be in another place; I do not mean down the Corridor. We all wish him a speedy recovery, but we would also be well advised to keep a fairly safe distance from him for the immediate future.

The Minister said at the beginning that the key to making the victims part of the Bill work is culture change. To mix metaphors, there was culture change with teeth—which sounds like a strange creature for well-paid Harley Street specialists to dream up new procedures for.

Before I continue with that, it would be nice if we could try to stop in its tracks the growing confusion which has come since the arrival in your Lordships’ House of a brace of Russells. I point out that I am a lowly Baron—the bottom of the heap, Lord Russell of Liverpool—and not the much more elevated noble Earl, Lord Russell, who is in his place. To back up my point, I will quote the letter that the noble Earl’s grandfather and my grandfather wrote jointly to the Times in 1959, which I think makes the point rather clear:

“Sir—In order to discourage confusions which have been constantly occurring, we beg herewith to state that neither of us is the other”.


I hope that puts that particular care to rest.

When talking about what the Government are proposing in the victims part of the Bill, the Minister asked the rhetorical question of whether it is a credible structure. Do we need, as the Government are saying, a strengthening and reinforcing of the current structure or—and this is not rhetorical—is the structure itself part of the problem? The structure has been in place in a slightly weakened form for many years and it is clearly not working. The Government have recognised that, and put a commitment in the 2019 manifesto to try to put that right and produce a victims Bill.

In reflecting on how best to respond to the manifest failings in the current structure—although there are some good points—I suggest to the Government that the best solution is not to try to reinforce the current structure by putting sticking plasters and various forms of glue into various parts of it.

I also point out that, while best practice certainly exists—we know it is exists; there are examples all over the country—we also know a great deal about human nature. Human nature is perhaps best exemplified by something known to anybody now in your Lordships’ Chamber who was once a Minister—a political Minister, not of the Church—in any shape or form: hell hath no fury like different government departments trying to ignore one another, and, above all, like a department doing everything it can desperately to avoid taking on any good practice from another department, which might be seen to imply that its own practice was not as good. We have all known about that; “Yes Minister” was a very successful programme for many years, partly on that premise. That is human nature; it is the same with departments of state, police and crime commissioners and the 43 separate police forces in England and Wales—all the different bodies dealing with this.

I come back to what I mentioned last week: the paean for a past age identified by the noble Lord, Lord Hennessy, when you could essentially rely on people and parts of the state doing what is expected of them—the “good chaps” theory of government and administration, if you like. There is so much evidence to indicate that, for all sorts of reasons that we will not go into today, that is not happening. We would be doing ourselves, and in particular the Government, a favour if we looked in the mirror and recognised that it is not working.

The Victims’ Commissioner has to be the most obvious channel for dealing with an awful lot of these issues. In particular, the current interim commissioner, who was largely responsible for the role being created in the first place, has direct experience of being a victim at great cost and has, for the last 15 years or more, dedicated her life to helping other victims and to talking to a variety of individuals and organisations to work out how better to understand what victims are going through and to do something to help them. She knows what she is taking about—she really does. When she talks to the Government and suggests, in her usual very polite way, that things are not quite as they may seem and that things may not turn out quite as the Government hope they will, it behoves the entire House to listen to her very carefully.

An unfortunate fact in recent history is that because the noble Baroness’s predecessor as Victims’ Commissioner was not invited to return for a second term of office, there was a significant period when there was no Victims’ Commissioner and no proper voice for victims. That took place at a critical time when the Bill was going through its birth pangs and was being put together. It would be good for the Government to acknowledge the insights and information that the noble Baroness could have given to the inception, crafting and architecture of the Bill—particularly its structure, which we will come back to. The Bill would have been infinitely improved if it had had the benefit of more input from her and the team around her. It is never too late, and I hope that we can use the time between now and Report to have some intensive meetings and discussions in a completely non-combative way. I and others said at the beginning of the Bill that our role is to drain any politics from the Bill to the extent that we can. It is not about politics; it is about people and victims. The Victims’ Commissioner is the obvious driver of culture change; she is better placed to do that than anybody else, and it behoves the Government to acknowledge that and to listen to her.

As for the minimum threshold, I hear what the Minister said about having a range of indicators rather than minimum thresholds. The sceptic in me would point out that if you are asking a range of institutions—which are themselves being asked to work out whether they are meeting those thresholds—to come up with their own preferred indicators, you may possibly not come up with some of the more challenging and awkward indicators. You may well come up with a preferred list of indicators that are rather more easy to accede to. Philosophically, there is at least a question mark over that approach, and we would like to discuss that further.

I say a big thank you to the Government for acknowledging that an annual statement of the state of affairs is very welcome. I think I can see the noble Baroness nodding. We are grateful for that and regard it as a good step forward.

To come back to the role of the Victims’ Commissioner, whoever is in this role should be front and centre in making the Bill as effective as possible, and then being accountable for holding the Government and the different agencies to account for delivering on it. It is not a satisfactory course to expect the Government to hold themselves to account. In theory, the Government have held themselves to account in this area for the last 20 years, and the report card is perhaps not as stellar as the Government would like it to be. I am grateful that the joint criminal boards are acknowledged as an important part of the process; that is a good move.

As far as training is concerned, I am grateful in particular that the Government are looking at the super-complaint that the Suzy Lamplugh Trust put forward on the basis of some dreadful stories. Stalking is incredibly complex. We need to sit down and try to make sure that people understand just how large scale, complex and insidious it is. To expect any public servant—or even victim—to understand what they are dealing with without effective, precise training will not give a good result, as I learned from talking to Richard Spinks, the father of Gracie Spinks, two weeks ago. He was not bitter, but he was desperately disappointed that Gracie had complained to the Derbyshire police more than 40 times about the way she was being threatened and the concerns she had about what might happen—and it did happen. It happened in plain sight, and the Derbyshire police in effect chose to be blindfolded and mute. To their credit, they have acknowledged after the event that they failed egregiously. What was needed was proper training in place, a proper understanding of dealing with this and, above all, proper leadership. If you want real culture change, you need really good leadership. I put it to noble Lords that having the leadership of a really effective Victims’ Commissioner is probably the most effective way to drive this forward.

We all welcome the Minister’s invitation to have further meetings to, as he put it so elegantly, reflect further—hopefully when his sinuses permit. On that basis, I withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 30 withdrawn.

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I beg to move.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, as it happens, I did read the article in the Financial Times, and pressed the little button to save it, because I thought what an interesting idea it expressed, particularly as this Bill was sailing on its way into Committee.

Victims in our system, depending on where they are in the system, are often invisible. I spoke earlier about the case of Gracie Spinks, and the number of times she complained to the police, yet none of it was joined up. Eleven years ago, there was a lady called Helen Pearson, who was repeatedly stabbed in a churchyard after she had been given a new and different reference number for each of the 125 previous reports she had made against her stalker. The failure to link these reports meant that the police had missed vital opportunities to understand the pattern that was building up and the degree of danger that she was potentially under. That is a graphic example: there were 125 different reference numbers for the same person, in each case complaining about the same person. That is not good practice, and it is not acceptable.

We do not have an answer today, but I pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Bach, for raising the issue at this stage, to give us a chance to look at it carefully. I know that His Majesty’s Government, and many other institutions, do not have a brilliant track record in implementing new data and information systems, and many careers have suffered as a result. But that is not a good reason for not looking into this and seeing whether we can use modern technology to try to make victims’ experience better, and above all to help the bodies that are charged with trying to identify what those victims are suffering to do something about it. Having a tool such as that suggested by the noble Lord seems a bit of a no-brainer, and it would be an excellent topic for further discussion between now and Report.

[Baroness Newlove (Con)]

I too support the amendment. I am grateful that we have put people into the Bill, because that is what this legislation is about: it is about people. I do not think that victims want to be at the centre of the criminal justice system, but they do want a level playing field; that narrative has been overused, although I mean no disrespect to the noble Lord, whom I met as police and crime commissioner—I loved travelling round the country on trains for two and a half years, meeting everyone, when I was previously Victims’ Commissioner. I agree that the Bill is about people. We hear many times that the police servers do not talk to one another, and all these servers do not seem to interact with all the other agencies or all feed into the Ministry of Justice.

I am delighted that this issue is being raised. This morning we talked about it in the context of the National Health Service. A Times Health Commission report out today looks at a similar thing. Even GPs cannot talk to hospitals, and even consultants within the same hospital cannot talk and get the information out. Again, that is about patients. It is important that we are talking about it at this stage. I would welcome further discussions. Victims are given different messages, different police officers and different everything. It does not mount up. How many recordings and crime reference numbers do we need? It should be one. There is one portal for every police force that a victim can feed into. Therefore, it should be the other way around. A victim should have one record and be able to put the narrative together so that they feel safe in our communities. I welcome the amendment.

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[Lord Hampton (CB)]

My Lords, I will speak briefly to my Amendment 53, which would insert the concept:

“Collaboration may include the co-location of services in accordance with the Child House model”.


We have heard much talk about the child house model pilot project at the Lighthouse in Camden. It is a multiagency model for children and young people who have experienced any form of sexual abuse. I urge noble Lords to visit this place; it is a shining example. It is an extraordinarily light, welcoming and unthreatening place where children and young people can go to receive medical help and counselling, but also where they can tell their story. As we have said, children tend to tell their story only once, so if we want justice from these places, this is the place to do it. It is a pilot scheme that needs to be rolled out.

At the moment the Bill seems to be in either/or mode when it talks about local authorities. The amendment would clarify that a multiagency, multiborough or multi-council format could be used as best practice for child victims when, as must happen, this model is rolled out across the country. With that, I beg to move.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I shall speak to a variety of amendments. I support the amendment just moved by the noble Lord, Lord Hampton, but I will leave it to the noble Lord, Lord Ponsonby, to talk about it when he winds up. I will speak to my Amendments 54 and 81. I support Amendments 56 and 59 in the name of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester. I will then speak to my Amendments 58, 60, 62 and 64.

Amendments 54 and 81 return to the subject of stalking. There were 1.6 million victims of stalking in the year ending 2023, so it seems strange that there is relatively little mention of stalking and stalking victims in the Bill. That is something we hope to persuade His Majesty’s Government to consider. Part of that is the importance of independent stalking advocates, which we will come to in a later group. We particularly welcome the Government’s new measures to expand Clause 15 to include guidance about a number of specialist support roles, including, we hope, independent stalking advocates. But I stress that, although what they propose is extremely welcome, it is obviously a very good idea to think about this and develop the list in close co-operation with some of the organisations and bodies closest to the front line in dealing with victims and experiences.

Stalking should certainly be included within the scope of the duty to collaborate in Clause 12. The Minister said in considering the previous group that the Government are looking carefully at the super-complaint made by the Suzy Lamplugh Trust about stalking not being dealt with effectively, but again, we know that it is being dealt with extraordinarily well in some parts of the country. So we know that there are ways of tackling it, but unfortunately that is being done in only a handful of parts of the country. If you are unfortunate enough not to live in those parts, you will have a pretty ghastly experience, like Gracie Spinks and so many other people. That is probably enough on stalking; I think the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, can be relied on to talk about that in more detail, and, very importantly, from direct personal experience, which has its own power.

The two amendments put forward by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester try to ensure that funding for victims and witness support services is sufficient to meet the needs across the country, particularly the demand for specialist domestic abuse services. While the idea of a duty to collaborate is a wonderful one, to be truly effective we judge that it would be helpful if there was a requirement on the Secretary of State to support duty-holders to meet the needs identified by providing adequate and sustainable funding. The figures are not insignificant. Women’s Aid estimates that it would cost at least £238 million per year to meet the need for community-based services across the country. We feel that the Bill is an opportunity to put in some safeguards to provide a legal framework through which sustainable community-based services and funding could be provided.

Turning to Amendment 59, some “93% of frontline workers” surveyed for Refuge’s Local Lifelines report said that

“their service was being impacted by staff shortages”,

and

“64% said their service was impacted by short-term contracts”.

Therefore, the principle of multiyear funding to try to enable these services to be set up to a sustainable and effective level is extremely important. I am sure that the right reverend Prelate will expand on that in a minute.

I come to the last set of amendments—Amendments 58, 60, 62 and 64—which come from working closely with Nicole Jacobs, the domestic abuse commissioner, and her team. There is a patchwork of provision for victims, survivors and their children when trying to access services. Community-based specialist domestic abuse services are literally life-saving and life-changing for many of these victims. Despite this, there is no duty to fund these community-based services, and in the current economic environment, you can imagine that they are not necessarily at the top of every cash-strapped local authority’s “must do” list of services to which to try to apportion diminishing funds.

Without making too much of it, this is a crisis, and in the Bill we have an opportunity to ameliorate that. We must really try to focus our minds on what is required to deliver sustainable, entrenched, well-run, effective services across the country. This Bill is a chance to try to do it right, so I hope we will take that opportunity.

[The Lord Bishop of Manchester]

My Lords, I rise to speak to Amendments 56 and 59 in my name; I also support the other amendments in this group. These amendments would all help to firm up the very good intentions set out in Clauses 12 and 13.

In an earlier group, I tabled an amendment to ensure that victim support services were properly signposted; it is no use a service existing if the people it is meant to serve are not able to access it. But now we come to, if anything, a more fundamental point: how do we ensure that the right services exist for victims, and in each and every part of the country?

The Bill as drafted gets much right: it requires policing bodies, integrated care boards and local authorities to collaborate in assessing the needs of victims, producing a published strategy and, indeed, revising that strategy as occasion requires—so far, so good. But, as things stand, and as the noble Lord, Lord Russell of Liverpool, has indicated, that assessment and strategy could be little more than a combination of the unaffordable and the non-existent—a bit like an overambitious child’s Christmas wish list.

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[Earl Howe (Con)]

That is clearly a concern, and we must listen to the domestic abuse commissioner very carefully. I have tried to set out how we have responded within existing powers and structures to improve funding across the piece. If one is not careful, there will be too much micromanagement from the centre. I always resist that, and we know that it can lead to perverse results in all sorts of contexts. I would be very happy to talk further to the noble Baroness about the domestic abuse commissioner’s concerns in this context after we finish the debate, as I am sure my noble and learned friend Lord Bellamy would also be glad to do.

Moreover, as part of the joint needs assessment in the duty, commissioners will be required to have regard to the particular needs of victims with protected characteristics. This could result in the commissioning of by-and-for services.

I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Russell of Liverpool, for submitting Amendment 64, which would introduce a statutory requirement for certain commissioners and sector stakeholders to be consulted before issuing statutory guidance on the duty to collaborate. The Bill already requires the Secretary of State to consult such persons as they consider appropriate before issuing the guidance, without specifying particular bodies or roles. This is because of the wide-ranging nature of the duty and the key stakeholders involved—a list of relevant consultees could be extensive and change over time. Naturally, the department would continue to engage thoroughly with the various key stakeholders as the guidance develops. Therefore, we do not need a legislative requirement specifying who exactly that should be to enable them to do so.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

I thank the Minister very much for what he said. Does he accept that the officeholder, who is perhaps in the best position of all to guide His Majesty’s Government towards the most effective organisations with which they should be co-operating and talking, is the Victims’ Commissioner himself or herself? The Victims’ Commissioner is at the centre of an information web and, frankly, is likely to be better informed than His Majesty’s Government.

I understand the virtues of police and crime commissioners and, in principle, would agree with the Minister that micromanagement can be a very bad thing. However, if I were a victim, I would be in favour of slightly more micromanagement to make sure that, wherever I lived in England and Wales, the type of service I got was more uniform, consistent and joined up. In evidence, I cite a glossy 2022 document from the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners celebrating

“10 years of PCCs Making a Difference”.

It lays out no fewer than 39 different schemes across England and Wales that different PCCs have put in place for

“advocating for victims; developing innovative services for victims; and using multi-year funding to fund quality services”.

While that is a wonderful idea—let a thousand flowers bloom—what the system is currently sorely lacking is any comprehensive follow-up and measurement to see how effectively all those initiatives work. Do any of them still exist? Have they been developed any further? If some of them are working particularly well, is there an effective mechanism to ensure that other police and crime commissioners are taking on those best practices and applying them in their areas?

[Earl Howe (Con)]

First, I take the noble Lord’s point about the Victims’ Commissioner; I am happy to feed that into the department. Secondly, I come back to the point I made earlier about building transparency into the process. The local strategies will be published and then scrutinised by the oversight forum, which will be ministerially led, so there will be a way for the commissioning practices to be exposed to daylight at the local level. I suggest that that could reveal the kind of disparities that the noble Lord referred to; that would be very helpful, not only as regards funding but for sharing best practice. He raised a very important point, but I like to believe that we have thought about it and are addressing it.

I turn to the issue of stalking. I do not think that any of us could fail to be impressed by the horrific examples given by the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton. I listened also with care to the noble Lords, Lord Russell of Liverpool and Lord Ponsonby, on this issue. Amendment 54 seeks the inclusion of support services for victims of stalking under the duty to collaborate. Stalking—which I am the first to agree is a tremendously important and emotive issue—can already be covered by the duty. The accompanying statutory guidance will make it clear that stalking is one of a number of crime types that sits across the scope of domestic abuse, serious violence and sexual abuse, and needs should be assessed accordingly. I fully appreciate the concerns raised by stakeholders that, all too often, stalking is considered only as a form of domestic abuse, and support is provided largely on that basis. The definition of serious violence under this duty is deliberately broad to allow commissioners to determine what constitutes serious violence in their local area, which can include stalking as well, including where it is not perpetrated by an intimate partner.

It is important to retain legislative flexibility in this area so that the duty can evolve, if it needs to, just as the overarching offences of serious violence, sexual abuse and domestic abuse evolve. A prescriptive approach, as proposed by the amendment, would restrict our ability to be flexible, but we will continue to engage with commissioners and stakeholders on the guidance as it develops, and with noble Lords who are willing to lend their expertise. I am sure that my noble and learned friend Lord Bellamy would be glad to do that. I can commit him in his absence to meet the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, and the noble Lord, Lord Russell, if they would find that helpful.

[Earl Howe (Con)]

Indeed. We come back to the earlier amendment tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Bach, on how one should best join up individual reports of crime, abuse or whatever else so that the police and others can obtain a rounded picture of what is going on. I fully take the point about changing practice. This is perhaps a subject for a longer discussion than today’s debate. I do not pretend to be expert on operational practices at the local level, so it would be wrong of me to chance my arm. The point is well made, and I am very happy to ensure that we have a separate discussion about it before Report.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

Can I make one additional point? The Minister just referred to allowing police and crime commissioners—and, I assume, chief constables—to decide what type of criminality should be regarded as serious or violent. One of the issues with the complexity of stalking is that, in many cases, stalking does not start from a violent position. Stalking, in many cases, can evolve, sometimes over a period of years, in a series of interactions by the predator, in such a way that, unless you know what you are dealing with, it is very hard to understand that there is a pattern developing or what type of stalking it is. We will come to the issue of training and advocates in the next group, but all the evidence produced by using the police force in Cheshire as a test case—to drive through the organisation clear understanding, training, lines of communication and technology to put this all together—has been transformative for the victims.

This is a victims’ Bill. Often, when I hear the Front Bench talking about the response to some amendments, I hear the voice of—understandably—the Government looking down on the victims. I very rarely get a sense of the Government articulating and espousing the rights of the victims themselves as they look up into the system, which they feel is failing them at the moment.

--- Later in debate ---

I realise that in his amendment the Minister will be changing the clause that we would amend here. However, that does not undermine the case for what these two amendments seek to do. I beg to move.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, for speaking to these amendments.

We return to stalking; stalking is stalking us yet again, as I am afraid it will continue to do through time immemorial, and until and unless we really grab hold of this. The case for independent stalking advocates is fairly undeniable. One can scarcely imagine what it must feel like when you do not know where to turn, you do not really understand what is going on, and the people that you are turning to for help clearly do not really understand what is going on either. It must be a pretty horrendous state to be in, and the independent stalking advocate can and does make an enormous difference. They can undertake risk assessments and work with the different authorities to ensure that safety plans are put in place to protect victims—and, importantly, where children are involved, those around them—from further harm.

The research that has been done by the Suzy Lamplugh Trust indicates that: 77% of stalking victims are not able to access an independent stalking advocate; 69% could find no advocacy support of any kind whatever; only 4% access support from a non-specialist service; and only 15% of victims were referred to an independent stalking advocate by the police. So even the police themselves, in 85% of cases, failed to point the potential stalking victim in the direction of help.

The demand for such stalking advocates far exceeds current capacity. National stalking services supported a combined total of just under 12,500 stalking victims in 2021, and there were 1.5 million stalking victims in total. Noble Lords can do the maths; that is not a highly impressive percentage. In some parts of the country, there are effectively no local specialist supporting services whatever.

I mentioned earlier that I had the privilege of speaking with Gracie Spinks’s father, Richard Spinks, a couple of weeks ago. One of the extreme examples of the more than 40 reports that Gracie made to the police over an extensive period was a case when, after she had pointed out that she was again being threatened, the police undertook a search in the vicinity of where she lived, and they found a bag of weapons—knives, hammers and so on. What did they conclude from having found that cache of weapons? They told Gracie that they were probably theatre props. Clearly, the officers involved had undergone extensive training, but probably in how to supervise playgroups, rather than in helping victims of crime. That shows the gulf between the sort of support, help and advice that one might expect as a victim of stalking and what actually happens.

As we mentioned on earlier groupings, at the end of 2022 the Suzy Lamplugh Trust submitted a super-complaint against the police, outlining systemic issues such as those that we have talked about in previous groups. One of the recommendations was that the College of Policing

“mandate that all officers that deal with cases of stalking complete training by a specialist stalking training provider, in order to adequately identify, investigate and—

this is very important—

“risk assess cases of stalking”.

We referred earlier to the pilot that the Suzy Lamplugh Trust ran in Cheshire. I conclude by giving some quotes from the senior police officers involved in the study and what they observed happening through the results of this programme. One front-line officer said:

“It’s an injustice that in nearly half of all stalking cases unrelated to prior intimate relationships, victims must rely on luck for access to specialised, local advocacy—something that should be a non-negotiable right. Including Independent Stalking Advocates … in the Victims and Prisoners Bill isn’t just an option; it’s an imperative step towards rectifying this imbalance.”


Finally, the Police and Crime Commissioner for Cheshire said:

“Cheshire’s example shows that multi-agency working delivers results for victims and it benefits all agencies involved. The impact of ISAs”—


independent stalking advocates—

“here is clear to see, and I believe it would hugely enhance our collective ability to deliver justice for victims of stalking if they were to be included in the Bill”.

Victims and Prisoners Bill

Lord Russell of Liverpool Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 7th February 2024 Lords Chamber

Data regulations put in place to safeguard our children must not be allowed to become a weapon in the hands of abusive partners, stalkers or those who seek to harass people in public life. The time has come for us to act.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I support effectively all the amendments in this group, but your Lordships will be relieved to hear that I am not going to speak to all of them. I will speak briefly to Amendments 101 and 102, introduced very ably by the noble Baroness, Lady Bertin. The essential point behind these amendments is to try to align this Bill with the clauses in the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act that lay down the rules for digital disclosure.

I thought it might be helpful to try to find out what was happening with these new rules and whether they were actually working, so the Victims’ Commissioner’s office put in a request to try and find out. In true and typical form, the Government have not done any evaluation of before and after the Act came into effect specifically in this area.

However, a part of the Project Soteria programme is enacting this new code and some academics are looking at it, so we asked them for their feedback on whether the new code was working in terms of access to private data. They said they had

“seen a move towards better proportionality which they attribute to the Act. They have also seen less threats that investigations will end if the victim does not want to hand over their phone. There is also greater consideration given to alternative means of obtaining digital evidence such as screen shots”,

rather than taking everything off a phone. In conclusion —and this gives kudos to the Government—they said that

“the intentions of parliamentarians to change culture via the legislation do seem to be bearing fruit”,

which is very good news. So, since the evidence shows that it is working, it is not difficult to suggest that what was enacted through that Act should be mirrored exactly in this.

I move to Amendment 106, so ably spoken to by the noble Baroness, Lady Finn. This is personal for me. I have known Stella Creasy since before she acquired a family, during the troubles and strife of the years that went by before she was blessed with two children. To have an individual who has never met you decide to use an anonymous profile to make complaints about you on the basis that he does not like some of her views, specifically on misogyny and the behaviour of some men, and say that on that basis you are an unfit mother, is simply staggering. It is also staggering that the police decided to take this seriously; they finally admitted that that was wrong and, in doing so, said that the officer had been spoken to and that it was a time for reflection and some learning. My own view is that he should have been given a complete and utter bollocking and should probably have been asked to leave the service, or at least put on probation. That is wholly unacceptable.

So it is wrong that this can happen in the first place. When it happens, if the police decide to take the complaint seriously, having not investigated it, and pass it on to social services, social services are in a sense obliged to put on your record that an investigation is taking place on the basis of the complaint, regardless of whether it has any merit. Despite the fact that Stella’s persecutor was found to be malicious and sentenced, it remains on the record. Waltham Forest says that it can and will do nothing about getting rid of it. Perversely, it says that it will keep it on the record because she is a safeguarding risk to her children, as people in future might try to cause her harm through them. I fail to understand that logic. I do not know what the barriers to entry are to gain employment in Waltham Forest, but I suggest they might be elevated somewhat if that is the degree of logic applied in a situation such as this.

So I implore the Government to look at this seriously. As the noble Baroness, Lady Finn, said, they should sit down and talk with interested parties to understand how this happened and try to work out how to prevent it in future, or how to develop very clear guidance to enable authorities to which complaints might be made to go through a decision tree, to analyse the veracity and probity of such allegations, thinking very carefully about the implications of actions they might take without having fully thought them through.

--- Later in debate ---

[Earl Howe (Con)]

I will be very happy to do that because I fully recognise the seriousness of the issue, and in particular the appalling events that Stella Creasy had to endure.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

The noble Earl has laid out, in his usual exemplary way, the way that the system is meant to work and the way it is designed. I suggest that the acid test would be to go to the officials concerned in Waltham Forest and ask them to describe, without leading the witness, exactly how they see what the noble Earl has just described—how they understand it—and how they therefore see what they can and should do. I suspect the results would be some distance away from what the noble Earl has just described, and therein lies the problem. It is fine to have a system, a process and a code that are meant to work, but if they are not working, which they clearly were not in this case, to put the onus on the individual victim to try to rectify that does not seem like justice, and neither does it seem sensible or proportionate.

[Earl Howe]

I have heard the strength of feeling on this, and I will be more than happy to take the issues raised back to my colleagues and officials in the department. I will be happy to write to noble Lords about this, and I would also be happy to arrange for my noble friend and interested Peers to meet me, or my noble and learned friend Lord Bellamy, to discuss the issues that have arisen.

I turn to Amendment 103, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Hampton. We recognise the importance of ensuring that the distinct needs and experiences of children are reflected in the code of practice that the noble Lord mentions, and that is why we have included specific guidance in the draft code for handling victim information requests for children. I agree with the noble Lord that it is essential to make sure that the final code reflects best practice in this area, and that is why my noble and learned friend Lord Bellamy has instructed officials to review the list of statutory consultees for this code of practice.

I turn next to the amendments tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, which seek to require the development of proposals for schemes to give victims of rape access to free independent legal advice and representation. I agree that it is extremely important that victims are confident in their rights and are aware of those rights, particularly when preparing for trial and when requests for their personal information are made; I found much that I could agree with much of the contribution from the noble Lord, Lord Marks.

We wanted to ensure that our understanding of this issue is as comprehensive as possible and, to that end, the Government asked the Law Commission to consider the merits of independent legal advice for victims as part of its comprehensive review into the use of evidence in sexual offence prosecutions. The consultation closed in September last year, and we expect the final report to be delivered in the autumn of this year. To avoid making changes at this stage that could pre-empt the outcome of the Law Commission’s review, and to ensure that we are considering all the evidence as a whole, we will consider the Law Commission’s report and respond in due course. There is no reason why the tenor of this debate should not form part of the Government’s deliberations once we have the Law Commission’s report in our hands.

Perhaps I could add something around the therapeutic support issue. Victims of rape should not be told that they cannot access the therapeutic support that they need to heal from the trauma that they have endured. The Crown Prosecution Service pre-trial therapy guidance is absolutely clear that therapy should not be delayed for any reason connected with a criminal investigation or prosecution. The guidance sets out clearly that it is for the victim to make decisions about therapy with their therapist and that criminal justice practitioners should play no role in the decision-making process.

In the rape review action plan, we recognised that victims of rape frequently experience intrusive requests for personal information. To improve that situation, we have taken a number of actions, including legislating through the Bill to introduce a statutory code for the police to ensure that requests for victim information are made only when necessary, proportionate and relevant to a reasonable line of inquiry. The police must also provide full information to the victim on what information has been requested, why it has been requested and how it will be used. A draft code of practice has been published. When it is finalised, it will be statutory, and police will have a duty to have regard to the code when making requests. I hope that that is helpful.

Victims and Prisoners Bill

Lord Russell of Liverpool Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 26th February 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Thornton (Lab)]

It is a great pleasure to move Amendment 148A and speak to Amendment 148B. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Russell, and the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, for their support in this suite of amendments, both of which deal with stalking. They insert two new clauses into the Bill, and they are part of the whole suite of amendments on this.

I will be brief because my noble friend Lady Royall is in the Committee today, and she has been tireless over the years in championing this cause and using every opportunity to find remedies to deal with this pernicious crime, almost always perpetrated by men on women, wrecking lives, sometimes with fatal consequences. These two amendments, and the group following this concerning MAPPS in the name of my noble friend Lord Ponsonby, seek to bring further coherence to law enforcement, record sharing and protection for these victims.

If only the police could see stalking for what it truly is—often a stepping stone on the route to murder—perhaps they would take it more seriously. At present, I am afraid they do not—certainly, it is patchy—and stalking victims are dismissed too easily and too often. They are told, “It’s just online. It will die down. Change your number. Delete your social media accounts. It’s just a lovers’ tiff”.

I will give just one example and then sit down. When the Derbyshire police accepted that they failed Gracie Spinks—who was murdered after reporting her stalker to the police—and when they apologised to her family and promised that lessons would be learned, I could almost feel the weariness of victims, their families, the campaigners and the Victims’ Commissioner in saying, “How often do we have to be told that lessons can be learned when they haven’t been?” That is what these amendments and the ones we have already discussed are about: they seek to make a change. I beg to move.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I was happy to put my name to these to these two amendments, and I am equally happy that the noble Baroness, Lady Royall of Blaisdon, is here. She will go into some current and fairly shocking detail about some recent examples of stalking that show that it is as pernicious and present as ever.

Both of these amendments are proposed in the clear and distinctly uncomfortable knowledge that I think all parties acknowledge: we have some way to go, to put it mildly, before we can say, with any degree of truth, that we have the measure of the huge and insidious problem that is stalking. These amendments propose some changes to MAPPA, including perpetrators in MAPPA, as a condition of potential release and licence, and the creation of a register to make perpetrators subject to notification requirements as a condition of release. The important common theme to both these amendments is the requirement for the Secretary of State to commission reviews to look at the issues and challenges around stalking in a comprehensive and informed manner.

But what is repeatedly and continuously frustrating is that we have proper on-the-ground evidence of approaches to stalking that are proving to be effective. In particular, there is the multi-agency stalking intervention programme—MASIP—which has marked a significant advance in our ability to anticipate, identify and tackle the complex issue of stalking. The MASIP model, thankfully funded by the Home Office, has pioneered this approach in London, Cheshire and Hampshire, and it works. Early evidence is compelling and extremely positive. So one just asks oneself: why is it not possible to do this more widely? The approach co-ordinates activity around both the victim and the perpetrator, and it incorporates an essential pathway to address the fixation and obsession in perpetrators that might be contributing to their stalking offending. The final evaluation proves that it works, so why is it so difficult, first, to acknowledge best practice when it is staring one in the face and, secondly, to implement it more widely?

One frustrating thing—here I refer to an article in today’s newspaper—is some news about the Government’s end-of-custody supervised licence programme, which was introduced in the autumn to relieve some of the huge pressure on our overcrowded jails, enabling perpetrators to be released earlier than their recommended sentence. It was put in as a temporary scheme, but it has apparently now been extended indefinitely. That does not mean for ever; it just means that the Government have given no indication of how long they intend to continue to allow this degree of leniency, the sole reason for which is the huge pressure on our prisons.

The Government rather inelegantly call this the problem of demand and supply in the prison population. If you were to try to explain that terminology to victims, they would find it slightly difficult to understand why supply-side economics should govern the early release of some perpetrators, particularly of domestic abuse and stalking, in many cases without the victims knowing what is going on.

We will make concerted progress only when we acknowledge the complexity of stalking and finally design a proactive and joined-up approach that is implemented consistently across all jurisdictions and agency boundaries and effectively identifies, outlaws and penalises any evidence of the unfairness and madness of what we are allowing today—effectively, a postcode lottery for victims.

[Baroness Brinton (LD)]

My Lords, I have signed Amendments 148A and 148B in this group. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, for her introduction and look forward to hearing from the noble Baroness, Lady Royall. The first amendment sets out an important addition to the arrangements for Multi Agency Public Protection Arrangements, or MAPPA. We will hear about the detail of these amendments from the noble Baroness, Lady Royall, but I want to add that, throughout this Bill and its predecessors in your Lordships’ House, including the Domestic Abuse Bill and the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, we have repeatedly asked for more protection for people who have been victims of serial domestic abuse and, in particular, stalking.

Laura Richards’s ground-breaking work over many years in developing the dashboard profiling and documenting the most serious repeat offenders has changed the way in which specialist police teams view these perpetrators, but—I hesitate to say this for probably the third Bill running—MAPPA are still not applied consistently across police forces. One of the aims of these amendments is to make sure that happens. As we have heard, repeat perpetrators are far too often allowed to commit further crimes, including murder. Shockingly, a couple of years ago police research found that one in 12 domestic rapists was raping outside the home. A violent and controlling man leaving a partner does not mean that the violence ends. Many have extensive histories of abusing multiple women.

Amendment 148A sets out the licence conditions for serial and serious harm domestic abuse and stalking perpetrators, saying that anyone so identified should be part of a MAPPA. Proposed new subsection (4) sets out the definition of a relevant domestic abuse or stalking perpetrator. Similarly, the other amendment says that we must have an effective register. Non-domestic stalkers always seem to be left off. I always raise this problem in your Lordships’ House; there is an assumption that stalking is carried out only by a current partner or an ex-partner—or somebody who would like to be a partner and is therefore regarded as domestic—but about 40% of stalking cases have nothing to do with that at all. As we see from many stories in the papers day after day, these days people such as celebrities face massive amounts of stalking and do not get protection. Often, when people are arrested, it appears that they have stalked others as well.

The noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, made passing reference to the Gracie Spinks case. Derbyshire police and the police force that investigated its failings have learned from that, but we need consistency. I will give one recent example from Laura Richards. Last month a victim, Sadie, had been back in contact with her about her living hell over seven years. She is terrified that her ex will kill her children. In 2018 he was arrested for battery of her eight year-old daughter and an assault on her while she was holding her other daughter. He was convicted in 2019 and received a suspended sentence and restraining order. The police did not arrest him for stalking or coercive control. They told her that, because she had moved away, they would not arrest him for stalking and they would amend the restraining order to a lifelong RO. He has repeatedly breached it. As we discussed on earlier amendments, he then started family court proceedings.

I will not go on, except to say that she has had to flee three more times, and each time has hit problems with the new police force. There has been no consistency. He has a history of abusing others—exactly the point I made about police research finding that one in 12 domestic rapists rapes outside the home. This woman has no solution nearby to stop him continuing to behave in this way and mess up her life and those of her children. We need MAPPA to work effectively. These amendments are the first step in that direction.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I would like to put my name to this amendment, because it is a continuation of the theme around stalking which we have repeatedly returned to in the Bill, as indeed we went on at length about in the Domestic Abuse Act.

In listening to the reply of the Minister to the last group of amendments, I was trying to imagine what a robust list would look like. I was somewhat puzzled as to how it would really have any effect at all. I was also pondering the term “discretionary management”, given that if only 1.4% of stalking cases actually end up in a successful prosecution, it is quite easy for the advisers who are writing the Minister’s brief to talk about percentage increases in performance. If one knows anything about mathematics, it is relatively easy to get rather spell-binding percentage increases in performance by starting from an exceedingly low base—a base of 1.4% of stalkers being successfully prosecuted, I am not a fan of percentages in a situation like this.

As the noble Lord, Lord Ponsonby, said, effective multiagency co-operation is clearly not working at the moment. This amendment gives the Government the opportunity to provide the single most important thing to make multiagency co-operation work: clear, outstanding, determined and consistent leadership. Leadership which transcends politics and different Ministers being responsible for the same area as the ministerial merry-go-round continues is incredibly important. The attempts by MAPPA to create an effective multiagency co-operation environment are so far not compelling. This amendment is an invitation for the Government to sit down and reflect on the lessons of what has not been and is not working as we would wish it, to create something more fit for purpose, and—in a non-political environment—to create a form of new MAPPS which is nothing to do with politics.

If the Great British electorate—of course, we are not allowed to participate—decide on a change of His Majesty’s Government at some point in the next 12 months, I hope that the department can come up with a form of multiagency co-operation which an incoming Government, should they be of a different political persuasion, would be positive about and could run with and make effective, rather than starting the clock all over again and losing valuable time. During this time, goodness only knows how many more victims will fall to the pursuit of stalkers, many of whom have been operating and stalking for many years, and many of whom are known all too well to the victims, but whom various multiagency authorities seem to be wilfully blind to.

[Baroness Brinton (LD)]

My Lords, I have also signed Amendment 148C and thank the noble Lord, Lord Ponsonby, for introducing it, and the noble Lord, Lord Russell, for his very eloquent contribution just now.

I too return to the Minister’s remarks at the end of the previous group, because it will help with this amendment. Part of the problem is that those of us who raise these issues about multiagency protection have assumed the corporate knowledge of the House about the previous six days and of all the amendments we have debated—in particular, those relating to domestic abuse and stalking. I fear that is not the case. One of the reasons we need this report is to ensure that Ministers and officials absolutely see what is happening in the data and bring it to Parliament to be held to account for it.

When I gave an example of a live case, I used the term “restraining order”. In his response to me, the Minister talked about a “stalking protection order”. They are completely different tools. An SPO is given by the police as a sort of special caution. It identifies the crime and says to the offender—there may not even be an offender at that point—that they have to mend their ways. A restraining order is given by the courts—it can happen at various levels of the courts—and is much more serious.

Most stalkers who are on restraining orders now will have been through the earlier processes, including, I am afraid, a number of stalking protection orders. While they may be a useful tool for the one stalker who is obsessed with one person but can get over it, the group of people that we are talking about in the MAPPA arrangements are completely and utterly different. They are extremely obsessed and manipulative people, who are physically dangerous in some cases, and certainly through coercive control. Not only are they a danger to the person for whom a restraining order may have been given but, in all the examples I gave in my speech on the previous group, they are known to be likely to offend with other people and to move around the country to get out of trouble and get away from the police force taking notice of them.

Given that we are talking about the most serious level of offences, whether it is domestic abuse or stalking, we need a consistent system across the country. Amendment 148C, through the report, would hold the Government—whatever Government, of whatever colour—to account, forcing them to produce data to show that they understand the difference. Until that happens, there will be Members of your Lordships’ House who will return, Bill after Bill, with horror stories of murders, attacks and everything else, but nothing will have changed.

Victims and Prisoners Bill

Lord Russell of Liverpool Excerpts

Report stage
Tuesday 16th April 2024 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Russell of Liverpool]

1: Clause 1, page 1, line 5, leave out “a person” and insert “any adult or child”

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, this will be a mercifully brief group and I will speak primarily to Amendment 1 in my name, which has the great virtue of complete and utter simplicity. It was an attempt to get His Majesty’s Government to recognise that children are different from adults and have different needs and requirements. I am glad to say that in the discussions we have been having, particularly between the Children’s Commissioner, the Victims’ Commissioner and the Minister and his team, we have made significant progress in recognising in various places in the Bill that children have particular needs and are a particular group that needs to be thought of in a particular way. The reason behind that is simply the need to recognise children’s unique and special characteristics.

I suspect that, like many of us, one has been to meetings where different charities and others that help children have brought parliamentarians together to listen to the experience of victims. It is pretty searing to hear directly from victims who have suffered a whole variety of terrible things happening to them, but particularly searing is listening to children who have experienced this. Some of us who have been working in this area were privileged to listen to some of those children, who very bravely spoke about their experiences, some of which were truly shocking. In one instance we not only had a victim talking powerfully but immediately after that we had the victim’s mother talking about the effect that it had had on her child and her family. In this instance, it was made even more ghastly by the fact that the perpetrator of her daughter was actually one of her grandfathers. It was almost unimaginable.

The needs of children who have gone through that sort of trauma are very specific. However well intended it may be to say that we will allow children to have access to what are essentially adult services, those services may be very good at treating adults but children are definitely different. Done well with individuals, psychologists and trained people who really know how to deal with children sensitively, the outcomes can be hugely better than well-intended interventions by people who, frankly, are not qualified to do so. I am hoping to hear from the Minister at the Dispatch Box on not only the amendments that the Government have brought in but, more broadly, the Government’s intention to try to do everything they can for children. On that basis, I beg to move.

[Baroness Butler-Sloss (CB)]

My Lords, I tried to add my name to this amendment but in fact I was on holiday, staying with my daughter in Spain. The suggestion that I sent put me on to Amendment 2 instead of Amendment 1, but I strongly support Amendment 1.

I was for many years a family judge and President of the Family Division. I spent a great and uncomfortable part of my time hearing about the sexual abuse of children, very seldom from the children, though occasionally, but otherwise from the doctors—the paediatricians and psychiatrists—on the trauma suffered by children. Since I left being a judge, on a number of occasions I have met those adults who cannot forget, 20, 30 or 40 years later, what hit them sometime around the age of eight, 12 or 14. The trauma is shocking; it may be short, medium or, for many, long. Those who live with it are never quite the same.

We therefore have to look at what we do for children in the Bill, and this is the purpose of the amendment that the noble Lord, Lord Russell of Liverpool, has put down. I support it for those reasons, given my own experience over 35 years in different parts of being a judge, where I lived that at second hand. I have to tell the House that judges obviously do not cry in court—except one, once—but I sat in my room sometimes in floods of tears from hearing what happened to these children. I strongly support this amendment.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for that helpful reply. What a change of atmosphere in the Chamber from the business that we had earlier on this afternoon—long may it continue. I pay tribute to the Minister and his colleagues for the amount of time and effort that they have put into this issue. While this amendment may not be perfect in the legal sense, its sheer simplicity has helped to galvanise the debate to make it clear how important it is that children are identified clearly as a group. It has achieved its purpose in that sense.

The noble Lord, Lord Ponsonby, talked about meeting those child victims and how struck he was by their resilience. The moment he said that, I reflected on it, and I asked myself why they were so resilient. In large part the reason why they were so resilient is, first, down to the individuals themselves but, secondly, due to the fact that all the victims who spoke to us had had the benefit of working with highly specialised help in the major children’s charities. That had helped them to emerge from the unspeakable traumas that they had experienced, to the extent that they could stand up in front of a group of probably slightly intimidating parliamentarians and they were able to speak clearly, without undue emotion and with great clarity and force, about their experience and how important it was for us to understand what we need to do as parliamentarians in this Bill to enable as many other victims as possible to benefit from the support that they had received. That was the key message that I got from that.

--- Later in debate ---

Moved by

[Lord Russell of Liverpool]

2: Clause 1, page 1, line 14, at end insert “, including the death by homicide of a British national outside the United Kingdom”
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment would provide bereaved victims of homicide abroad with the same support given to victims of homicide within the UK in recognition of the distress they experience and which is exacerbated by having to deal with the criminal justice systems of foreign jurisdictions.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, in speaking to Amendment 2, I shall speak also to other amendments in the group.

Amendment 2 deals with the victims of a homicide that has taken place outside the United Kingdom. I am very glad to see the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay of Llandaff, behind me, as this amendment was in her name in Committee and, but for a slip of the pen, she would be the person standing here speaking, rather than me. However, because we wanted to get this amendment down, it has my name on it, so she will speak in due course about this, very knowledgeably indeed.

In essence, this amendment seeks to ensure that victims of homicide outside the United Kingdom are guaranteed to receive adequate support and are provided for adequately in the victims’ code. At the moment, no single UK agency has an overarching view of the end-to-end experience of victims of homicide abroad. Families fall through the gaps between the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, the Ministry of Justice, the jurisdiction of the crime and our own police. I am aware that the Government are likely to argue that expanding the remit of the code will bring cost and place greater pressure on services, but we would suggest that the cost is relatively minimal. We are looking at between 60 and 80 cases in total per annum, and the number of cases has been going down year on year. That is less than 0.01% of the total number of victims in the UK.

There is a precedent for giving victims of crime abroad access to criminal injuries compensation. Since 2015, if a victim is killed by a terrorist, the family has a legal right to claim compensation. We can see no apparent rationale for differentiating between victims of terrorism and other victims of homicide. To those bereaved families, murder is murder.

We feel strongly that the FCDO must be included as an agency with accountability under the code. The joint memorandum between the Foreign Office, the MoJ and the police, which is currently a document that does not have legal status, must be incorporated within the code. That is what this amendment seeks to achieve.

Three successive and very distinguished Victims’ Commissioners have all been very strongly in favour of this amendment, and remain so. I am talking about the noble Baroness, Lady Casey, who unfortunately cannot be with us today, as well as Dame Vera Baird and the noble Baroness, Lady Newlove. If three Victims’ Commissioners, who, in total, have been arguing the case for this for the past 16 or 17 years, are still arguing for it and still feel passionately that it is something that needs to be addressed, that has a certain force. I look forward to hearing what the Minister has to say at the Dispatch Box.

By mistake, we put down Amendment 3 and Amendment 6, which the Public Bill Office discovered this morning were identical—better late than never. I will speak to the amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Ponsonby, on anti-social behaviour and trying to ensure that victims of persistent anti-social behaviour are recognised as victims and provided with their own victims’ code rights. The evidence is that anti-social behaviour is quite frequently, in relative terms, trivialised by criminal justice agencies. We have had evidence from a great many different people about the devastating impact that that can have. Time and again, we also hear that victims are told that they have to put up with it: “If you can’t take the heat, why don’t you think about moving house?” That is not an adequate way of telling a somewhat traumatised victim of anti-social behaviour that that is the best that can be done for them. Effectively, it means that they have to help themselves.

This amendment would ensure that a victim who meets the anti-social behaviour case review threshold is referred to victim support services and receives the help they need. I know the Minister is well aware of the scale of the problem and that work is being done at the moment to try to achieve a resolution, but I commend this amendment as part of the debate to try to move this forward and see whether we can get something done. Again, I look forward to his comments on this.

I will speak briefly to Amendment 8 on child criminal exploitation, as others will cover it. Creating a statutory definition of child criminal exploitation would create a degree of understanding across agencies and professions that at the moment is not clear. If you asked a variety of people what child criminal exploitation was, you would get slightly different answers. In the interests of children, we feel that that is simply wrong. We need complete clarity on what it is and how it should be dealt with, and that is not the case at the moment. There is some way to go to make this happen. I look forward to hearing the contributions of others to this debate, but for now I beg to move.

[Baroness Finlay of Llandaff (CB)]

My Lords, I am most grateful for the way that my noble friend Lord Russell introduced these amendments. I will speak to Amendment 2, which I tabled in Committee. I am also grateful to the Minister for having arranged a meeting for me, the noble Baronesses, Lady Newlove and Lady Brinton, and others with officials from his department, and for the positive conversation that took place.

I remind the House that there is more than one murder a week abroad, involving different countries, languages and legal systems, and very different circumstances. The report from the All-Party Group on Deaths Abroad, Consular Services and Assistance showed that there is a lack of consistency in contact and communication with the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office. It highlights that there are protocols but that these inconsistencies seem to override them. There are particular inconsistencies about reporting a death and methods of communication. Staff rotation in the FCDO means that people are sometimes repeating their story time and again, which results in secondary victimisation, as they are retraumatised by having to repeat the same story to different people. In some countries, legal processes are very rapid and there are huge language barriers. Sometimes people have been given a list of lawyers with no details about their ability to speak English or even their specialisation, and have found themselves referred to a legal team who do not know much about homicide. In one case I came across, they knew about conveyancing property, which was completely inappropriate.

After all that, there is a real problem with repatriation of the body, which can be very expensive. Some people have had to resort to crowdfunding because there is no assistance. The other problem that families face when they come back to this country is that, if there have been difficulties with the body or it has been disposed of abroad somehow, they then have to prove that the death has happened and the veracity of whatever processes went on.

I am most grateful to the charity Murdered Abroad for an extensive briefing, which I will not go through because this is Report. It is very keen to work with the FCDO. It has a great deal of experience and could be involved in training and drawing up clear protocols. It could provide the resource, which would not be expensed to the FCDO; in fact, it would probably be cost-effective because it would avoid duplication of work that is going on. It could ensure good communication skills and the language and translation that need to occur. One problem with having a small team in the FCDO is that staff change and move on and collective memory, which is really important, is lost.

I am grateful to the Minister for communicating that he does not intend to accept this amendment, but I hope that in reply he will take forward that officials need clear protocols, with good education, liaison and learning from experience, rather than simply to be responding to cases as they come in from all over the world to embassies or consulates. Sometimes they come to somebody quite junior who happens to be on duty that day. The whole thing could be better streamlined and support should be given when they come back to this country.

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[Lord Bellamy (Con)]

My Lords, I do not think I can, at the Dispatch Box this evening, commit the Government to proposing such a checklist in that detail, because the details will have to be worked out. However, the Government hear what the noble Baroness says and it is an obvious matter to consider. That is as far as I can go this evening.

Finally, I hope the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, will forgive me if I take the question of carers a little bit shortly. The central problem with the amendment is the extension of the code and the rather blurred boundaries that might lead to quite a lot of extra resource demands, extra entitlements and so forth, so the Government are not persuaded that we should go as far as that. However, this point is correctly raised as a social and quasi-legal issue, and I can commit that the Government are already working with the Children’s Commissioner specifically on children’s needs and looking afresh at the needs of vulnerable adults ahead of public consultation on the code. I can commit to considering the experience and needs of parents and carers as they support particular victims through the criminal justice system. As to whether that requires further provision, I can commit to carefully considering how the accompanying statutory guidance might best set out how criminal justice bodies can effectively engage with the very important group that the noble Baroness identifies, who are so key to the support of their loved one, the direct victim, but I think that is as far as I can go on this group.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister very much for summing up so comprehensively —in fact, going over the new Report stage time limit, for which I am grateful. The issues we are talking about, in particular murder abroad, anti-social behaviour and the definition of child criminal exploitation, are long standing and not new; they come back again and again. However, as the noble Baroness, Lady Newlove, said, in a situation such as in 2015, after the incident in Tunisia, the Government decided that they were going to do something about it, got their act together in short order and demonstrated what is possible if they really put their mind to something. In a sense, that is what we are challenging the Government to do, in separate ways, on each of these issues.

On anti-social behaviour, the Minister talked about joining the dots and getting the code right. He admitted that it is not as joined up as it should be. The problem that I think many of us have with the way the Government are responding to some of these issues is that they keep returning to saying what different agencies and individuals should be doing, but they seem very afraid to say what they must be doing. The common theme in all these areas is that we are challenging the Government. Indeed, what are a Government elected to do—albeit not by noble Lords, because we are not allowed to vote—if not to make things happen? That is really what we are looking for. In the case of anti-social behaviour, if the noble Lord, Lord Ponsonby, decides to test the opinion of the House I would fully endorse that.

On child criminal exploitation, the updated guidance is fine. The key, as ever, is consistency, and at the moment there is a lack of consistency. The Minister said, and I am quoting, that it should be “in the heads” of front-line practitioners. The fact is that it is not in their heads in the same way for all the key front-line practitioners. That is the complexity. The challenge for the Government is to try to get a degree of consistency in the way child criminal exploitation is understood and dealt with, which is clearly not the case at the moment, so there is more to be done.

I thank my noble friend Lady Finlay very much for what she said about homicides abroad. I take the point about what happens if the perpetrator is not a UK national but, again, if the Government really wanted to put their mind to this, I am sure they could find a way. We are talking about such a small group—60 to 80 individuals per annum. It is not beyond the wit of man, let alone a Government, to focus and try to find a way of ameliorating a situation that has been festering for years and really does need to be dealt with. We also have more to do on carers.

I reiterate that the challenge for the Government is that we are looking for guidance from them as to what must be happening, not simply what should be happening. That has been the case for the last 15 years, and what should be happening is not happening in so many areas. With that, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.

Amendment 2 withdrawn.

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[Baroness Gohir (CB)]

My Lords, I have proposed Amendment 16 to ensure that all victims have the same right to have a CPS or police decision reviewed. At present, the criminal justice system does not allow the same right for all victims. This anomaly, which the Government seem to want to retain, has arisen because of the inherited EU legislation that we have adopted. It could be put right if my amendment is accepted. We have discussed amendments on how to strengthen the Bill in relation to victims of anti-social behaviour and child sexual exploitation. This amendment seeks to help those types of victims and victims of other horrific crimes such as gang rapes—in other words, crimes committed by multiple perpetrators.

At present, a review can be requested only if there are no perpetrators. In cases where some perpetrators are charged, or even one perpetrator is charged, and others are not, a victim cannot then go and ask why the other perpetrators are not being charged. It is not about opening up new cases; it is about reviewing the decisions that have been made. We know that the police and CPS make mistakes. There have been cases where there have been no charges at all and, when a review has taken place, charges have been brought forward.

One argument used against the amendment is that it could delay justice for the perpetrators who have been charged; but surely, at that point, it could be explained to the victim that, if they go for review, it may delay the process. At least the victim can then make an informed choice. They may decide that, actually, they do not want to have a review.

Including the amendment in the Bill would not only help victims to have the same right to review but would make sure that the police and CPS were not cutting corners. At present, the system works in favour of the CPS and the police rather than the victims. In cases where there are multiple perpetrators, they can choose to charge some perpetrators or just one, fully knowing that their decision cannot be challenged. That is exactly what happened in a case on the helpline of the charity that I run: the Muslim Women’s Network, in which I declare my interest as the CEO. In that case, where a woman was gang-raped, only one person was charged; the other perpetrators were not. She was shocked, and she tried to get a review, but was unable to get one. That resulted in more trauma and the case was then dropped.

Charging one person involves far less work than charging several perpetrators. I am not suggesting that police are cutting corners in every case, but it is plausible to suggest that this may, and does, happen some of the time.

We know also that racism exists in the criminal justice system, and there is plenty of data showing that minority-ethnic victims are treated less favourably in the system. The loophole that currently exists in the right to review could lead to further inequalities. The amendment would therefore also help to reduce the misuse of police and CPS power.

I thank the Minister for meeting me online last week and discussing this in more detail. I know that he understands the concerns. One suggestion has been that, in exceptional circumstances, in the cases that I have described, there could be a right to review, but, unless that is written down somewhere, it simply will not happen. If it can be included in the code of practice, the term “exceptional circumstances” will need to be defined. I hope that I can persuade the Minister to change his mind and accept my amendment.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I will speak briefly on several amendments. On Amendment 16, on which the noble Baroness has just spoken, it is hard in principle to disagree with her. Clearly there is an anomaly here that needs to be dealt with. The way that it is working at the moment is inconsistent and not as clear as it could be. I do not think I need to say any more than that. I echo her wish that the Minister and the Bill team will reflect on this and find a way of clarifying the situation and improving the lot of those victims. One can hardly imagine what it must be like to be a victim of the type that the noble Baroness described and to find that, having been violated by a whole series of perpetrators, they have absolutely no idea why one is singled out and the others are left out. I entirely endorse and support that amendment.

On Amendments 46 and 47, about publishing code compliance, we have made—I thank the Minister for this—significant progress in this area, so I do not need to talk any further about that.

I will speak a little bit about Amendment 58, on training, which is in my name with the support of the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton. Clause 6 of the Bill says that criminal justice bodies must

“take reasonable steps to promote awareness of the victims’ code”

to victims, but what it fails to mandate is that professionals within those bodies receive any form of training. In our view, the Bill should ensure that all organisations that come within the victims’ code not only understand it but are capable of delivering the rights that the victims’ code embodies.

There is a clear evidence base for training and a widespread lack of awareness of victims’ rights. In Committee, the Minister said:

“The noble Lords are quite right that there is an obvious need for more training”,


but he also said:

“The Government hesitate to have a national training framework because so much will depend on the local situation”.—[Official Report, 5/2/24; cols. 1467-68.]


I understand that point of view but I am not sure I entirely agree with it.

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[Lord Bellamy (Con)]

My Lords, I thank all noble Lords for the sincerity with which their various points have been made. I will briefly reply to the amendments not proposed by the Government. Unfortunately, while understanding all the points that have been made, the Government are not in a position to accept the amendments as they are. Although noble Lords have been kind enough to say that this is good progress and to express their thanks, I make it absolutely clear that I work with my right honourable friend the Lord Chancellor Alex Chalk, and he is the boss, and my right honourable friend Minister Argar was responsible for this Bill in the other place. Although it is very kind of noble Lords to make compliments to me, they should please bear in mind that I am part of a wider team, supported by an excellent staff.

We are not in competition with Marsham Street—or at least, we do not see it that way—but under the present Lord Chancellor, progress on this Bill has reflected the current ethos of the Ministry of Justice. I fully welcome and support the plea from the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, for more financial resources for the Ministry of Justice; that would be wonderful. But we work with what we have and, of course, some of those constraints have provoked the Government’s inability to go quite as far as others would like.

Amendments 23 and 122, from the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, would place the victims’ code in a schedule to the Bill and make related changes. I hope I have reassured her on our strengthened approach, and that compliance with the code is not optional. It may have been seen as optional in the past, but this is quite a change. As an alternative to Amendment 32, which would promote enforcement through the courts, we have a different non-compliance notification process which I hope will be equally effective. We are very reluctant as a Government to go down a court-based route because that can take up more resources and be less effective and more counter-productive than other routes.

We are very much in favour of the other routes that we have developed, I hope comprehensively, in the Bill, including the need to have clear compliance procedures, bolstering the accountability framework to make sure that there is appropriate recourse and, in particular, relying heavily on the independent scrutiny of the Victims’ Commissioner. So those various mechanisms collectively should give us a good framework; let us give them a good try and see, as noble Lords have suggested. At some point we may need to go further, but this is a good start, is it not? That question is rhetorical, so noble Lords do not have to answer.

Amendments 24, 26, 27, 29 and 30 concern consulting the Victims’ Commissioner. We have effectively covered the same ground in the Government’s amendments, and I do not think I need say any more about that. We have not gone down the route of putting all this through the affirmative procedure. I am not entirely persuaded that the affirmative procedure is as good as it might be, in that you can only say yes or no, et cetera. But the procedures we have for bringing the code into force, reviewing it, issuing it and consulting on it are all good and should work quite well. I hope that, in the light of that, there is no need to pursue those amendments.

Similarly, Amendments 55, 68 and 69—the latter being one of the amendments proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Russell of Liverpool—concern consulting various commissioners and “by and for” services on the duty to collaborate. I am very grateful to all the commissioners who have collaborated with us on developing these measures. We will publish draft guidance on this part of the Bill, but the Government’s position is that the overall framework we have for consultation and publishing guidance is already sufficient and appropriate.

Of course, the department will continue to engage with all national commissioners. I am particularly grateful for the support of the Victims’ Commissioner. I mentioned earlier the Children’s Commissioner, and I work very closely with the Domestic Abuse Commissioner. They are all making a very significant contribution to a better system. Of course, we will continue to engage with a whole range of providers, including the “by and for” organisations. It is very much in the Government’s interests to consult and engage as widely as possible, so there is no reason not to.

Amendments 46 and 47 would require code compliance data to be shared with the Victims’ Commissioner. We have put forward a number of amendments to make the central role of the Victims’ Commissioner clear. I hope these are sufficient to place the Victims’ Commissioner at the heart and centre of the system, remembering that they already have existing and separate powers to issue reports and recommendations, and, under this Bill, the agencies have to respond to them.

This brings me to the important subject of code training in Amendments 34 and 58 from the noble Lord, Lord Russell. He is rightly concerned about this and has emphasised it throughout. I do not at all hide behind this fact, but if you believe in devolution—and we have 43 different police forces, different local authorities and 43 police and crime commissioners—you have to accept a certain degree of difference in the way those authorities operate. That is inherent in any devolved system. None the less, it is of fundamental importance that front-line staff are adequately trained to support victims of all crimes. That is why I can and do commit to using the statutory guidance to be issued under Clause 11 to set a clear expectation that agencies should have adequate training on the code so that staff know what the code is, can inform victims of their entitlements under it and do their job in a way that complies with it.

The Government are of the view that legislation is not the right place for such matters, given the level of operational detail required and the diverse requirements of the various organisations delivering the code. However, we appreciate that there needs to be a mechanism to ensure that training not only exists but is effective. I believe we can achieve the right balance by committing to prescribing in the regulations that bodies must collect and share information on the training they have in place to ensure that the code is delivered effectively as part of the delivery assessments within the compliance framework.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

The Minister mentioned that he works very closely with the Domestic Abuse Commissioner. Given what I said about her experience that, for training, the statutory guidance which is part of the Domestic Abuse Act is very inconsistent, despite being statutory guidance, will he undertake to go back to her and explore in more detail what she has experienced since the Act was passed and see whether any lessons can be learned that can be applied immediately to this Bill?

[Lord Bellamy (Con)]

I am quite happy to accept the noble Lord’s invitation to have a conversation with the Domestic Abuse Commissioner to explore her experience and see whether it is transferable to what we are discussing here.

Victims and Prisoners Bill

Lord Russell of Liverpool Excerpts

Report stage
Tuesday 23rd April 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ponsonby of Shulbrede (Lab)]

My Lords, a number of the amendments in this group are in my name and that of my noble friend Lady Thornton.

Addressing first Amendment 19, which the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, has spoken to, we agree with every word she said about the importance of this amendment. Access to transcripts for victims seems basic, given that this is a victims Bill, and the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, eloquently set out her case. Unfortunately, if she is to press this question to a Division, we will abstain. I regret that position, but it is a reality of the costs involved implicit within the amendment. I know that the Minister is going to acknowledge the desirability of court transcripts; I know that judges acknowledge that as well. There needs to be a technical fix for this, which will take a certain amount of investment and redrafting of existing contracts. But it is eminently achievable and I hope that the Minister will explain how the Government propose to achieve this end.

Moving on to Amendment 57, which is in my noble friend’s name, this proposed new clause would place a duty on specified public authorities to co-operate with the Commissioner for Victims and Witnesses. The Government have previously agreed that it was vital for bodies to co-operate with the Victims’ Commissioner. However, the Government Minister, Mr Argar, previously stated that the Government chose not to add the duty to the Bill as they

“have not seen any evidence that there have been problems with a lack of co-operation in practice and therefore feel that the additional duty is unnecessary”.—[Official Report, Commons, Victims and Prisoners Bill Committee, 29/6/23; col. 258.]

They concluded that it was neither “necessary or proportionate” to alter the powers of the Victims’ Commissioner in this way.

The proposed clause would allow the commissioner to request a specific public authority to co-operate with them in any way they considered necessary for the purpose of monitoring compliance with the victims’ code. It also places a duty on the specified public authority to comply with that request. The clause would increase the powers and authority of the Victims’ Commissioner, in line with those of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, the Independent Anti-Slavery Commissioner and the Domestic Abuse Commissioner, who is the most recent commissioner to be granted that power. These powers are essential for commissioners to drive forward change, and to hold agencies and national government to account for their role in responding to domestic abuse. It is therefore perfectly reasonable to grant the Victims’ Commissioner the same authority. I know that the Minister has moved in a number of ways on this issue, and I will listen very carefully to what he says when considering how to proceed with this amendment.

Amendment 61 is in my name. It seeks to ensure that consideration of children’s support needs is built into the heart of the Bill. We require that authorities must provide evidence in the published strategy of how they are meeting victims’ and survivors’ needs under the duty to collaborate. The needs of children are distinct from those of adults. It is vital that this legislation directs named authorities to explicitly consider this when delivering victim support services. They must be held accountable.

The support that children and young people require after experiencing abuse or exploitation is specialised in nature. It demands services and practitioners that understand their specific needs and requirements. We must support authorities to get it right for children. In order for the duty to collaborate model to be successful, the Bill must direct attention to and seek consultation with those who are best placed to understand the needs of children affected by abuse and exploitation.

I remember attending various meetings with other noble Lords taking part in this Report stage about the very specialist support that children need and the ambition to arrange things so that children have to tell their story only once. That is a difficult ambition to achieve and it works only when different authorities integrate their support, with people who understand children’s particular vulnerabilities. This amendment seeks to address that issue.

Amendments 72 and 73 are in my name. They state that the Secretary of State must issue guidance about specified victim support roles in England, but that Welsh Ministers should issue guidance in Wales. I tabled the amendment on behalf of the Welsh Government. The same amendment was tabled during similar stages in the other place. The Government have tabled Amendment 75, because previously there was no requirement in the guidance for the Secretary of State to consult Welsh Ministers. The government amendment is an improvement to the Bill—we acknowledge that—because it will require the Secretary of State to consult Welsh Ministers about the guidance to be issued under Clause 15. Nevertheless, I will listen with interest to the Minister’s response to Amendments 72 and 73, although I acknowledge that Amendment 75 has gone part way to meeting the requests in the amendments in my name. I will certainly not be pressing my amendments to a vote.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, this is quite a large group and I will speak briefly on the amendments I have my name to or on which I have something to say.

The first amendment in the group, from the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, is on free transcripts. What I would ask the Government—I think the answer will be yes—is whether they agree in principle that this is and should be a right of victims: a proportionate right, without exorbitant costs and without needing pages and pages of transcripts. Do they agree that it is a fundamental right for victims to have the essence of what is said in a trial that involves them or their perpetrator, to understand the deliberations and the verdict that the judge and jury have come to, in a form and manner that is helpful to them and that they can use? In the same way that prisoners or perpetrators who have been found guilty go to appeal, the right that they have to access transcripts—quite rightly—is completely disproportionate when compared with the current right of victims to get almost any proceedings from the trials that concern them.

I think we are looking and hoping for an acceptance by the Government that the principle is right, understandable and correct; we are trying to find a practical way of achieving a form for that right to be exercised in a proportionate way for victims. While the RASSO model is a good start, it is clearly quite limited in extent. I will listen very carefully to what the Minister says in reply, and, of course, the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, will come to her own conclusions about what she decides to do.

Amendment 57, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, is about the duty to collaborate. The Minister may recall that, last week, we spoke about the fact that, if there is not a duty to collaborate, certain agencies will take it upon themselves to interpret statutory guidance in a way that is convenient to them, rather than in a way that is aligned to the requirements of the relevant commissioner.

In particular, I mention the Domestic Abuse Commissioner, Nicole Jacobs. I was able to catch up with Nicole yesterday afternoon—I suspect it was not very long after she ran into the Minister—and we had a discussion. The content of the discussion was that, even if you have statutory guidance that says one should be collaborating, the fact is that some agencies will take that on board in the spirit it is intended and will collaborate, while others will say that they understand in theory that it is very important and should be done but will decide that they have other things that are more important, or that they do not have the time, money or resources to respond. That makes the role of a commissioner extraordinarily difficult.

Data is king. Knowing what is going on is fundamental to interpreting what is and is not working. If you do not have systematic, reliable data from every part of the country, it is very difficult to do one’s job and give sensible advice to the Government. It is hard, frankly, to look victims in the face and say, “We are doing everything we can for you”. Despite the fact that statutory guidance is written down, some agencies are deciding for themselves whether or not to comply. This is clearly unsatisfactory.

I asked the Domestic Abuse Commissioner what she would change, with the benefit of hindsight, about the way in which this was encapsulated in the Domestic Abuse Act and the guidance. She said that it is ultimately about accountability in so many areas; it is about who is ultimately responsible and who will be held to account if something which should be happening is not. At the moment, that is quite unclear. Having 43 different police forces, with police and crime commissioners on top, makes it rather difficult. The commissioner’s instinct was that perhaps one should hold police and crime commissioners’ feet to the fire and make them primarily responsible for ensuring that all the agencies in their jurisdiction take the statutory guidance seriously and comply. If they did not comply, some very awkward questions should then be asked of the police and crime commissioner to find out why.

Another thing that would be helpful is something that we have started to do in the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee. We have a table which lists each department and ranks them by the egregiousness and inadequacies of their Explanatory Memoranda and the idiocy of their impact assessments. We are hoping that this will concentrate minds because, once again, data is king. It is extraordinarily important that one is able to measure what is going on.

I will listen carefully to what the Minister says on this and to the response of the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton. From the well-intended evidence about what we hoped and thought was going to happen in the Domestic Abuse Act, we have a chance to learn from what we thought was going to work well and which is not working so well and to try to do it better this time.

[Baroness Hamwee (LD)]

My Lords, I will say a couple of words on—

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[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

Nearly—soon, I devoutly hope, but I have more to talk about, sorry. My Amendment 59 is about the inclusion of stalking within the scope of the duty to collaborate. Alongside the noble Baroness, Lady Newlove, I had the privilege of speaking at a conference of the Suzy Lamplugh Trust this morning, because this week is National Stalking Awareness Week. I say on the record that we are extremely grateful that the Home Office issued some new guidance yesterday on the creation of stalking protection orders, which has significantly changed the game. Previously, one had to reach the level of criminality for a stalking protection order to be put in place, but it is now at the level of a civil offence, which is a great improvement that we are extremely grateful for. But I can only emphasise again how important it is that stalking is included. The Suzy Lamplugh Trust made a freedom of information request to every police force about what they were doing on stalking, and only seven had a dedicated stalking officer in place, while 12 of them admitted to having none at all. You have to concentrate on this really hard to make people realise that they have to take it seriously.

The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester will, I am sure, speak to his amendments, so I will not go on about them, other than to say that I broadly support them. I will listen carefully to the arguments he puts forward and to the Minister’s reply. I understand that any plea that involves pounds and pence does not go down terribly well with His Majesty’s Government at the moment, but I will listen carefully to what they have to say.

Lastly, Amendments 62 and 71 are in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Polak, who is unable to be here. I suspect that the noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin, will speak to those later—I see her nodding, so I do not need to go on at length about them. They are part of our campaign, working with the children’s coalition, to better support children through the provision of services and of advocacy for children, both of which are incredibly important.

[The Lord Bishop of Manchester]

My Lords, I will speak to my Amendments 60, 64 and 70, which echo amendments on support services for victims that I tabled in Committee. I am grateful to the Minister for his responses at that stage and for his kindness in meeting me and representatives of Refuge and Women’s Aid in the interim. In light of those conversations, it is not my intention to press any of these amendments to a Division today. However, I hope that, in this debate and in the Minister’s response to it, we can clarify a little further how His Majesty’s Government will seek to ensure that victims across the country have access to quality support services provided by organisations that hold their confidence and understand their specific circumstances. As we are now on Report, I will not repeat the detailed arguments of Committee, but I think their force still stands.

Amendment 60 places a duty on the Secretary of State to define in statutory guidance

“the full breadth of specialist community-based support domestic abuse services”.

This would ensure that victims receive quality support that meets their needs, and that they are made aware of the variety of community-based support available to them. Victims seek various forms of support, which might include advocacy, outreach, floating support, formal counselling or being part of a support group. All of these have a vital role to play. The guidance could cover the holistic support intersectional advocacy that is often provided by what we call “by and for” services —these are particularly helpful for black and minoritised women—as well as those providing specialist advocacy to deaf and disabled people and LGBT+ victims.

The implementation of the Domestic Abuse Act 2021 demonstrates why a clear and precise definition is now critical. Under Part 4 of that Act, a statutory duty was placed on local authorities to fund domestic abuse support in safe accommodation. We found that organisations with a much wider remit than domestic abuse, and often services that had no expertise at all, because they are eligible for refuge funding under the duty, have now moved into that area, entering a sector previously run by specialists who really understood the service users.

What we find when local commissioning bodies rely too much on non-specialist organisations—which can be for financial reasons, or because they are easier to get hold of or to deal with—the result is that victims, particularly those from minority backgrounds or specialised contexts, receive much poorer support, yet these are, of course, often among the most vulnerable in our society. The amendment would simply ensure that commissioning bodies have to pay attention to their needs. Although I am not pushing it to a Division, my question to the Minister is: in the absence of placing a duty on the Secretary of State in the Bill, what assurances can he offer us today that the Government will place appropriate pressure on local commissioning bodies to procure the full range of specialist services from specialist organisations that such victims need?

Amendment 64 would require the Secretary of State to address the funding gaps identified by joint strategic needs assessments and support local authorities, integrated care boards and police and crime commissioners to deliver their duties under the duty to collaborate. The amendment has been framed so as to avoid requiring the Secretary of State to go outside the normal spending review processes, which I hope will give some assurances that this is not about trying to break the bank.

Without sufficient funding, it will not be possible for local commissioners to have regard to their joint assessments when producing strategies and providing services. The gaps in service provision that will likely be identified are already known, and there simply is not the funding available to plug them. Ultimately, the scale of the funding shortfall facing local commissioners —and in turn those specialist services—means that the Government do have a role to play.

Although the Ministry of Justice has committed to increasing funding for victim and witness support services to £147 million per year until 2024-25, this funding is not ring-fenced to domestic abuse services. Of course, existing commitments are simply insufficient to meet the demand around the country. Women’s Aid has found that a minimum of £427 million a year is really needed to fund specialist domestic abuse services in England: £238 million for community-based services and £189 million for refuges. Moreover, specialist services are now feeling the effects of this concerning rise in local authorities issuing Section 114 notices. This is a crisis that will only get worse.

However, I welcome the Minister’s statement in Committee that a ministerially led national oversight forum will be set up to scrutinise the local strategies. This could be the vehicle to identify systemic shortfalls in service provision, and hence to put pressure on commissioning bodies to plug the gaps. It could also provide the evidence to justify more adequate funding settlements, with specific requirements to include specialist community-based services. I would therefore be grateful if he could say a little more about how the ministerial-led forum he has promised will function.

Finally, Amendment 70 would require the Secretary of State to include advice on sustainable, multi-year contracts with statutory guidance. I know that the Government are already committed in principle to multi-year contracts in the victims funding strategy. The problem is that in practice, this is not happening. Refuge monitors all commissioning opportunities nationally, and half of commissioning opportunities are for less than three years. There is no enforceability mechanism for the victims’ funding strategy, and in the absence of that, short-term contracts are prevalent across the specialist domestic abuse sector. Such contracts make recruitment and retention of staff more difficult as services cannot offer fixed-term contracts. That leaves survivors forced to find alternative sources of ongoing support at critical points in their recovery and prevents services being able to take root properly in local communities. This is why I feel that a statutory requirement is necessary.

This amendment is a change from the one I proposed in Committee, where I sought to put the requirement into the Bill. I am glad that the Minister acknowledges the problem and would be grateful if, in responding, he could set out what further action the Government will take to ensure that longer-term contracts for specialist service providers become the norm and not the exception.

Finally, I support other amendments in this group, in particular Amendment 79 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, but will leave my right reverend friend the Bishop of Gloucester to speak to that.

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Implementing victim identifiers would also address concerns raised by victims’ groups about the progress that has been made following the publication of the rape review in 2021. In short, the introduction of victim identifiers would both help secure the success of the Bill before us and enable the Government to deliver on several other policy commitments. Put simply, the police count crimes, the CPS counts defendants and the courts count cases, but no one is counting the people who rely on the justice system to protect them. I hope the Minister will give a sympathetic hearing to what I have said, and I look forward very much to hearing what he has to say. I beg to move.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I rise very briefly to support this, with a slightly heavy heart. It has the virtue of common sense, which I feel might not necessarily chime terribly well with the Front Bench; it seems eminently sensible. I realise that the Minister often talks about the need to join the dots, and I think this is a textbook example of a challenge of trying to join up a great many dots that are all over the place at the moment.

I recognise that the Front Bench is not going to stand up and say, “What a wonderful idea; we will do it immediately”. At the very least, if there is an acknowledgement of the fact that we have a problem—and I think we all agree that the status quo at the moment, as far as victims are concerned, is a long way from where we would wish it to be—it behoves the Government to think about putting together a properly resourced project to look at this systematically, across all the different agencies, and at least analyse the scale and complexity of the problem and perhaps come up with a range of two or three possible solutions, with the pros and cons of each, the costs and the time they would take to implement. We would then, at least, have a better handle on how we might deal with this problem, which we all acknowledge is a problem.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, it is important to acknowledge that we need to improve the kind of data collection that we have. This is a really good idea, and I would like it to be pursued. I have an amendment later on consistency of data. One of the things I felt when I was looking at the issues was that, too often, victims are not counted properly. We know that there is a range of ways to produce crime statistics: discussions about victims can be very emotive and subjective. The more accurate information we have and the more rationally collected it is—a point was made about common sense—the better it is for society, so that it cannot be turned into a political football. We would know exactly what was going on, so that the right kind of research and resources could be allocated. I would like to hear from the Minister some ideas about at least being open to this and experimenting with it. It is eminently worth exploring further, and I would like to hear a positive response.

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Moved by

[Lord Russell of Liverpool]

58: After Clause 11, insert the following new Clause—
“Training: support for victims(1) The Secretary of State must publish and implement, in consultation with the Commissioner for Victims and Witnesses, a strategy for providing mandatory training on the contents and application of the victims’ code for relevant staff of the following organisations—(a) the police,(b) the Crown Prosecution Service,(c) probation services,(d) the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office,(e) health and social services,(f) victim support services, (g) maintained and independent schools and colleges of further education, and(h) such other bodies as the Secretary of State deems appropriate.(2) The strategy under subsection (1) must be reviewed and updated every three years.”Member's explanatory statement
To ensure justice agencies responsible for giving effect to the Victims Code are properly trained and familiar with its provisions and deliver it effectively.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, we debated this amendment on the first day on Report last week. It is to do with training. All of the discussions that I have had in the intervening time with the Domestic Abuse Commissioner, with the noble Baroness, Lady Newlove, and with others, demonstrated the overwhelming importance of training, and the lack of training being a common theme, again and again, when things go wrong for victims. I wish to test the opinion of the House.

Victims and Prisoners Bill

Lord Russell of Liverpool Excerpts

Report stage
Tuesday 30th April 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Morgan of Cotes (Con)]

My Lords, I am sorry that due to a family matter I could not be in the House for the Committee stage of this Bill to move the similar amendment tabled earlier. I am very grateful to my noble friend Lady Finn for speaking to that amendment. This amendment was tabled in the House of Commons by Stella Creasy MP based on her experience as a victim of harassment, but it is not unique to her situation. I am grateful, and I know she is too, for the continuing support for this amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Russell of Liverpool, the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, and my noble friend Lady Finn, and for the engagement we have had with the Opposition Front Bench. I am also very grateful to Ministers and officials who have engaged with us in recent weeks on the issues raised by this amendment.

To recap briefly, just to put the amendment in context, if an individual makes a malicious complaint about someone to the police, the police can act to remove that record, but malicious reporting to other organisations, whether social services or an employer, as part of a campaign of stalking and harassment, does not carry the same safeguard. As a result, data is retained on individuals who have been targeted maliciously, whether that be workplace harassment, stalking or some other malicious behaviour. Such harassment, stalking or malicious behaviour might well include allegations about the parenting capacity of the victim, but it often takes other forms.

Many victims find that even if the person targeting them has been convicted, their harassment continues because such records remain in existence. This is because current data protection rules mean that records such as this cannot always be deleted. The retention of this data has long-lasting consequences for all individuals involved. In fact, having to repeatedly disclose the existence of the complaint, even if it has been proven to be part of a campaign of stalking or harassment, is in many ways a repetition of that harassment.

I think that where we are now, after that engagement with Ministers and officials, is that there is now a recognition by the Government that reporting by a third party can be used to perpetuate harassment or as part of a stalking campaign, and also that victims should be better supported to have those reports deleted. I understand that the Government’s concern has been to strike a balance between the right to erasure of data held as a result of malicious conduct or intent and the need of organisations to retain data that could become relevant in some future safeguarding context, particularly involving children.

That is why the proposed new clause before the House seeks to enable the deletion of data where a clear threshold is met to show that the report was the result of malice and its retention would continue the harassment. I think all those involved in the discussions, including the Government, agree that the threshold would certainly be reached in the case of a criminal conviction. Many of us also believe that the threshold is reached in the case of a civil order, where such an order is applied for by the police or made by the court, and where a breach of that order is in itself a criminal offence. It is important that we do not put victims off having such orders applied for in order to stop the harassment or stalking behaviour.

It is also important that the burden of getting the data deleted is not placed back on the victim of the stalking and harassment. Careful amendments to statutory guidance and the victims’ code would also be very welcome to ensure that in the right circumstances there is a presumption for the removal of data and the relevant authorities are given clear guidance on how to treat victim applications where malicious reporting is involved.

Having said all that, I shall now listen carefully to the rest of this debate, particularly to what to my noble and learned friend the Minister has to say in reply to these points. This is an important issue that we can do something about in the Bill to support victims of this malicious behaviour, and I hope that the House, Ministers and the Government will take the opportunity to do so. I beg to move.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I was happy to add my name to this amendment, to which several of us spoke at Second Reading and in Committee. I pay tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, and Stella Creasy MP for the dogged way in which they have pursued this issue. I give the Government and the Bill team credit for being worn down to the extent that a degree of accord, and indeed a recognition of this particular form of invasive behaviour, have been reached.

There is a lot in the press at the moment about a phenomenon known as sextortion. I would almost call what we are talking about in the amendment a form of domestic terrorism. It is somebody making a completely unfounded allegation about, in this case, somebody else’s fitness to be a parent of small children in order to, in a sense, force a situation in which an investigation has to take place. Even though the investigation finds that there is absolutely no basis in the allegation, the allegation remains on that individual’s record, and that individual is compelled to reveal that allegation in a variety of situations in which they are required to provide due diligence. In each case they have to explain that it was malicious and the result of harassment. That is what we are trying to avoid.

I too am looking forward to what the Minister will say in response. I hope that at Third Reading there will be an amendment that we can all agree with. Your Lordships will be aware that, as Stella Creasy was surprised to find out, we in your Lordships’ House are able to table an amendment at Third Reading. We very much hope that will not be necessary, because we are sure the government amendment will meet what is required. To that extent, the sooner we are able to see the wording of the government amendment and have a further dialogue about it if necessary, so that we are all on the same page at Third Reading, the better. I thank the Minister and the Bill team for being so accommodating.

[Baroness Finn (Con)]

My Lords, I spoke in Committee on behalf of my noble friend Lady Morgan and I support her amendment today. I commend the tenacity of Stella Creasy, my noble friend and other noble Lords in engaging with various government departments, and I thank my noble friends the Ministers for engaging with her and Stella over some of the more complex issues involved.

I appreciate that this is not completely straightforward, but the fact that it is difficult to reach a conclusion should not prevent us tabling the amendment and getting it right. While it is disappointing that we do not yet have a government amendment to scrutinise, I thank my noble and learned friend the Minister for agreeing to table an amendment that we hope will cover all the areas of concern at Third Reading.

It is hard to overemphasise the toll that malicious complaints take on individuals, their mental health and their family life. I take a real case of someone who suddenly, out of the blue, received a call from the local police sharing details of a complaint made about the treatment of her children. Despite the false claims being robustly rebutted—her children had attended school, were taken to the dentist and were registered with their local GP, despite allegations to the contrary—this mark remains on her record and that of her children. She describes it as feeling like “the sword of Damocles hanging over my head”. It is a constant worry. It is simply not right that many victims find that, even if the person targeting them has been convicted, their harassment continues because such records remain. The retention of this data has lasting consequences for all individuals involved.

I am not going to repeat all the arguments but will quickly emphasise three points. First, limiting this amendment to victims of crime where the data is linked to that crime would ensure that it does not become open to abuse, but stalking and harassment involve many actions by perpetrators, so it is important that the drafting of these amendments should not be too narrow. Secondly, while there needs to be a clear threshold to show that the retention of data will continue the harassment, the removal of data should not be confined to criminal convictions. My noble friend Lady Morgan has made the case for the various thresholds very clearly.

Finally, if an individual makes a malicious complaint about someone to the police, the police can act to remove that record. If chief constables have clear guidance that covers the removal of malicious allegations, it should surely be possible to have similar guidance for malicious reporting to other organisations. I am very grateful that my noble friend the Minister has agreed to explore this further.

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[Baroness Brinton (LD)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to lay Amendments 100 and 101 for your Lordships’ consideration. As we had a considerable debate on them in Committee, I propose to outline only the briefest reasons why I have re-laid these amendments originally laid by the noble Lord, Lord Sandhurst.

The whole object of the Bill is to give victims some rights that would at least go some way towards matching the rights for offenders and other participants in the criminal justice system. At present, the permissions for a victim to argue and challenge a sentence for being unduly lenient are completely different from those of everybody else involved in the system. For example, offenders can exceed a 28-day timeframe by exceptionality—all they and their counsel have to do is demonstrate that there really are exceptional circumstances. But, for victims, there is no such exception at all, even if they were not informed by the police or the courts about the sentence itself but were left completely in the dark.

We know from the many stories that were retold in Committee that there is a real sense of injustice. One victim had received notification of the sentence on the 28th day by which she had to apply for a challenge. It was delivered to the Attorney-General’s office, and nobody was there, even though it was within the timeframe. Because it was not opened, she was not permitted to challenge the sentence.

I am very grateful to the Minister for the discussion we have had, and I look forward to hearing him speak from the Dispatch Box. What we seek through these two amendments is to make sure that victims have the right, as everybody else in the criminal justice system does, to say, “Please will the Attorney-General reconsider this sentence for this crime, because we believe that it is unduly lenient?” I beg to move.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

I am happy to add my name to these two amendments from the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton. There is no need to speak at length about them; it is essentially about trying to ensure that victims have equality of rights, in this case with prospective prisoners. At the moment, frankly, they are disadvantaged and are put through a series of hoops—if, indeed, they can find out what in theory they are entitled to. I shall say no more than that I entirely support everything the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, has said, and I look forward to the Minister’s response.

[Baroness Thornton (Lab)]

My Lords, we had a very full debate on this issue in Committee. From these Benches, we are deeply committed to these two amendments. This is a victims’ Bill, and it seems to me that we really need to be doing things to support victims, which is what these two relatively modest amendments do. If the noble Baroness decides to test the opinion of the House, we will support her.

Victims and Prisoners Bill

Lord Russell of Liverpool Excerpts

Report stage
Tuesday 21st May 2024 Lords Chamber

The system does not work. It is failing women and children. A condition of the release and licence of these perpetrators should be that they are included in MAPPA and subject to notification requirements so that this information can be shared and accessed nationally, thus saving lives and other lives from being lived in fear. I beg to move.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I am very happy to add my name to both these amendments, and I pay tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Royall, for the many years that she has pursued this subject—seemingly to no avail but cumulatively, the more people hear about it, the more we might finally get something done. As I was listening to the powerful examples she was giving, I was mindful of the maiden speech of my noble friend Lady Casey of Blackstock, which some noble Lords may have heard recently, where she repeated the litany of women, mainly, who have died at the hands of their male partners which Jess Phillips MP normally gives every year. The litany will go on and on until we have the moral courage to face up to this and to the fact that what we have currently is not working.

Why do we persist? I draw your attention to Hansard of 26 February of this year, which was our sixth day in Committee, and I will read directly from the words of the Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Roborough:

“The Government agree that robust management of perpetrators of domestic abuse and stalking is crucial to help keep the public safe. We completely agree with the spirit of these amendments; however, we believe the objectives can already be met through current provision and policy”.—[Official Report, 26/2/24; col. 860.]


We then go to the Minister again, who gives us an example of how well the current system is working:

“The VAWG strategy confirms the Home Office will work with the police to ensure all police forces make proper use of stalking protection orders. Among other actions, in October 2021, the then-Safeguarding Minister Rachel Maclean MP wrote to all chief constables whose forces applied for fewer orders than might have been expected to encourage them to always consider applying for them. In February 2023, the former Safeguarding Minister, Sarah Dines MP, did the same”.—[Official Report, 26/2/24; col. 862.]


It goes on and on. The evidence is that the current system does not work.

In a meeting which the Minister kindly had with us to discuss some of the issues around stalking, we referred to the voluminous evidence put forward by the Suzy Lamplugh Trust in its super-complaint to the Government. This super-complaint will have a response from the Government, probably within the next two months, and in that meeting we exhorted the Government to look carefully at its evidence. Given the opportunity we have in this Bill to try and put it right now, rather than go through the charade of having the Government’s reaction to the super-complaint, more discussions about it, and then perhaps more discussions about what might be done, why do we not actually pull our finger out and do it now?

I entirely agree with the two amendments that the noble Baroness has put forward and I ask all noble Lords in the Chamber to consider very carefully supporting them when, as I think she will, she divides the House to see how we feel.

[Baroness Brinton (LD)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Royall, and the noble Lord, Lord Russell. I also thank Laura Richards, Claire Waxman—the Victims’ Commissioner for London —and the Suzy Lamplugh Trust for their consistently helpful briefings for us. I am very moved by the powerful examples that the noble Baroness gave us and I agree with everything that she and the noble Lord said.

I just want to reiterate the point that we as a group keep making, which is that the government arrangements often mean that stalkers are missed out. They are often mischarged with other crimes, such as harassment or malicious communication. It is common for the National Stalking Helpline to see high-risk stalking cases managed as low-level nuisance behaviours or even as isolated incidents, and as a result fewer perpetrators are convicted and even fewer sentenced to 12 months or less.

There are also some concerns. The Minister has told us that the Home Office domestic abuse and stalking perpetrator intervention fund for last year was made available for PCCs to commission services covering all forms of stalking, including non-DA. However, there were a disproportionate number of funds apportioned to DA-specific stalking services or even DA services that do not address stalking at all, or claim to address stalking but without any stalking expertise. Some 65% of awards in this grant were solely for domestic abuse interventions, with no stalking provision. The problem is that whatever we say here is not ending up on the front line, so can the Minister tell us how the Government propose to manage a more comprehensive approach for stalking perpetrators?

The Suzy Lamplugh Trust has provided plenty of evidence over the years, and indeed in its super-complaint, about how investing in perpetrator management saves money. It saves money because there is no constant repeat of crimes committed by these obsessed and manipulative stalkers, and it helps the state as well. On that basis, from these Benches we support the noble Baroness, Lady Royall, if she wishes to call a vote on these two amendments.

Victims and Prisoners Bill

Lord Russell of Liverpool Excerpts

3rd reading
Thursday 23rd May 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Morgan of Cotes (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to speak on this very important Bill. I am delighted that it covers so many vital issues and will proceed, we hope, to Royal Assent before Parliament is prorogued.

I shall speak to Amendments 1 and 2. I thank my noble friends the Minister and Lady Barran, and their officials, for their engagement on this matter at some speed. I am delighted that Stella Creasy is here to listen to the debate. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, my noble friend Lady Finn and the noble Lord, Lord Russell, for their support, as well as the Opposition Front Bench.

Politics is the “art of the possible”, as the important quote goes. The Government have now accepted, after resisting for many months, the principle behind Amendment 2, which we repeatedly tabled in this House at various stages of the Bill. As we have heard, the law should be updated to recognise that, in cases of stalking and harassment, one of the things that the stalker or harasser can do to prolong their victim’s agony is to make a false and malicious allegation which stays on the record, and data controllers hide behind their rights in not deleting it even when the allegation has been found to be both false and malicious.

I recognise the progress that has been made in the tabling of Amendment 1. As ever, of course, the devil is in the detail. As my noble and learned friend Lord Bellamy has said, there are still grounds under Article 17(3) of the GDPR on which a data controller could refuse to delete the data. I really welcome his clear commitment that there needs to be strong guidance to the ICO and data controllers in the Explanatory Notes to the Bill, and also provisions in the victims’ code. The danger with all this is that we still leave the burden on victims to argue for the data to be erased, and the power remains with the data controller. That is what worries me about those exemptions in Article 17(3).

In that guidance, the data controller must be told that they need to set out substantive grounds for refusing any request for erasure of the data. We also hope that the Government will set out scenarios in which those exemptions in Article 17(3), provided for in law, cannot be used in cases where data records have been created as a result of malicious conduct.

Having said all that, I recognise where we are at this time in this Parliament. I will be interested to hear what other noble Lords might say in this short debate and what the Minister might say in summing up. I recognise and thank my noble and learned friend for the progress that he has made on this issue.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I will speak very briefly. I pay tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, for her persistence and skills in negotiating with her own party, which is possibly easier than doing it from outside the party.

I stress the absolute importance of giving crystal clear guidance. The occupation of data controller is not necessarily high on the list of most of us as a potential career. I suspect that it is not the most exciting part of many bureaucracies. I also suspect that it is an area where one follows the rulebook, or what one perceives to be the rulebook, particularly closely. I suspect that the ability of individuals to feel that they have the power to exercise their own judgment is somewhat limited and probably not encouraged. It is incredibly important that there is absolutely no doubt in the mind of even the least curious or the most obdurate data controller as to what is and is not acceptable in terms of erasure.

Other than that, I thank the Government for having thought about this carefully, and for having responded. I hope that as a result of this, the data controller in Waltham Forest who is making Stella Creasy’s life rather difficult will at least read this debate or be told of it and will rethink his or her decision to not erase the data.

[Baroness Brinton (LD)]

It is my privilege to follow both the noble Lord, Lord Russell, and the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan. I signed this amendment and continue to offer my support. I echo and agree with everything they said.

I have slight concerns that this is not just an issue about the data controller; it is also about social work practice. That really worries me, because there is a mindset that says that if anyone makes a complaint, we have to have it on the record just in case for the future. I hope that the government amendments are sufficient to provide an answer, but should we discover either that Stella Creasy’s case is not dealt with or that there are others, I put all future Governments on notice that there is a team in this House that will return to the subject.