Courts and Tribunals Bill

Lord Russell of Liverpool Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 27th October 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, when the Minister started this debate, he said that our court and judicial system has never stood still. For many of us in this Chamber, we feel not only that it has not stood still but that it has been going backwards in recent years. That is very much the backdrop to today’s debate. We have had several years of what, to a non-lawyer, appears to be managed decline—some of it benign, some of it unthinking and some of it, if you are uncharitable, marginally malign. As ever, it has had unforeseen consequences.

I pay tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Levitt, for her speech, because it is a cardinal example of the rule of “physician, heal thyself”. She knows what she is talking about.

Like the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, I will focus on the people at the bottom of this problem: the victims. While all areas are under strain, as the noble Baroness, Lady Levitt, said, the strain on the participants in the system—the people responsible for administering it—must occasionally be almost unbearable. But the experience of victims is profound and traumatic. For many of them, what they feel they are experiencing is not a million miles away from what the noble Lord, Lord Howard, referred to as trial by ordeal, because that is precisely what it feels like.

There are three asks for the Bill that those of us concerned for victims would hope to see answered. The first is to tackle the backlog, and the second is to improve the victim’s experience of the court process. Those of us present at the briefing that the Victims’ Commissioner gave us a few weeks ago were horrified—particularly those of us who are not lawyers—by what we heard. I was particularly horrified to learn of a process that is known as the pooling of rape cases, which is when a group of cases involving rape are put together in a category where it is deemed more than likely that the person who has been raped will withdraw from the process because of the trauma of going through it. The fact that this syndrome is present and known about is an indictment of our system.

The third ask is to strengthen accountability and oversight. I would like the Government to think seriously about finding a way to use victims’ experiences as a core measurement of court performance and effectiveness as we go forward. There must be a way of doing it that is meaningful and live.

There are clearly some potential red flags in the Bill. Jury trials are highly trusted by many minority groups, whose members, as they look around at the court and judicial system, may not see a great many people in it who look, sound and feel like them. For that reason, when they look at many juries, they see more people who they feel understand them and come from their communities—they know some of the trials and tribulations they have been through. That is often particularly the case for women.

I feel that magistrates are in danger of being overwhelmed if we are not very careful in how we decide to place new burdens on them. We are recruiting a large number of new magistrates, which is good news, but I feel that many of them are in danger of being thrown in at the deep end.

I will briefly return to the individual whom the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, was talking about earlier: the young lady called Emma, who spoke very movingly to us in the Victims’ Commissioner’s presentation. I will briefly add some of what she told us. This is not her real name, and she was clearly being extraordinarily brave, and was finding it very difficult to talk to us. She read from it—obviously, it was very carefully constructed—and it is extraordinarily moving. She said:

“There are consequences I continue to live with long after a hearing has ended. The court process has required me to revisit what happened, prepare to give evidence, wait through delays and face further uncertainty. Throughout that time, I have also been trying to manage my health and rebuild some sense of normality. There have been times when simply functioning day to day has been difficult. I have kept going because I wanted what happened to me to be taken seriously. I wanted to engage with the justice system and see the process through. But I have had to do that while my health has deteriorated and while I have struggled with the physical consequences of trauma. I do not think that it should take a person reaching this level of physical distress before the impact of a criminal case is properly understood … I am not a case number. I am a person whose health has been profoundly affected, whose body has been through repeated physical crises and who is still trying to recover from what has happened. I wanted justice. I wanted to feel safe. I wanted to be able to move forward with my life. I am still trying to do these things”.


To summarise: the success of the Bill should be judged ultimately by whether victims can access justice within a reasonable timeframe, through a process that supports their participation and confidence, without fundamental trauma or delay. Now, since nothing sits not between me and the cocktail hour, but between me and the noble Lord, Lord Stace, I will sit down.