Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill

Lord Russell of Liverpool Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 12th January 2022 Lords Chamber

I am therefore delighted to present this as a solution to a problem that I think requires a solution. It will make a real difference to victims of domestic abuse and will stop perpetrators, in effect, hiding behind an unfair limitation on victims’ ability to seek justice. I beg to move.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for what he has just said and for the actions he has taken. I thank his colleague in the other place, Victoria Atkins, for having given the original commitment, and I thank the noble and learned Lord, Lord Stewart, who responded in a very positive way to the amendment from the noble Baroness, Lady Newlove, in Committee.

I also particularly thank Yvette Cooper in another place because the beginning of this was when one of her constituents came to her who had suffered an assault and had been timed out. That was really the first time that Yvette Cooper had come across this; it was one of those problems that was hidden in plain sight. It took a series of freedom of information requests to try to get the necessary information to understand the nature of the problem and, indeed, the scale of it. If this was not a government amendment and we were still trying to persuade the Government, I would have stood up to say, “I do not rise to speak briefly, because I am going to make 12,982 different points”, as that is the number of cases of alleged common assault that were timed out within a five-year period. That was revealed by the freedom of information requests, albeit only 70% of the police forces that received the FoI requests actually bothered to respond, so that number is probably an underestimate.

I am extremely grateful for this. The noble Baroness, Lady Newlove, would have been here, but she was sitting at the back earlier, doing her impression of the young noble Lord, Lord Young of Graffham, in his usual place, with a large cushion behind her, because her back has been giving her a lot of problems, so she has gone back to her hotel to rest it. On her behalf, I pay tribute to the work that she has done and thank her for having put it forward in Committee.

In a very helpful online call with the Minister, in which he explained what the Government were intending to do, we discussed how it is one thing to have laws, and laws which are well intended, but laws which are well intended, even forensic, are of little use if they are not applied properly and understood effectively. The issue we must focus on is when the police start responding in a different way to some of these allegations of assault. The ability to understand the exact nature of what is required and the ability to move very quickly to get it into a form where it is prosecutable within the six-month time limit is extremely important. I thank the Minister and the Government for this amendment, but can the Minister ensure that the combination of the Ministry of Justice, the Home Office, the College of Policing and the National Police Chiefs’ Council will keep a really close eye on the enactment of this new legislation, to ensure that what we hope and intend should happen is happening, and that if it is not proceeding as we hoped and intended, to keep that under review and, if necessary, adjust it? Again, I thank the Government very much for bringing this amendment forward.

[Lord Marks of Henley-on-Thames (LD)]

My Lords, we add our thanks to the Minister to those of the noble Lord, Lord Russell of Liverpool, for his approach to changing the time limit for common assault prosecutions in the context of domestic abuse, and for engaging with us on this and other issues over the last few weeks.

It is clearly a sensible compromise for the six-month time limit to start from the first formal step in criminal proceedings of taking a witness statement or a formal recorded interview. We understand the reason for retaining the overall time limit of two years. It is a compromise in these cases between the need for finality and recognition that it frequently takes some time for victims—generally women in these cases—to report assaults formally, even though, as the noble Lord said, they may have some sort of informal interaction with the police at an earlier stage. We warmly support this amendment and thank the Government for coming to this view.