Sentencing Bill

Lord Russell of Liverpool Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd December 2025 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Russell of Liverpool]

93C: After Clause 19, insert the following new Clause—
“Unduly lenient sentences scheme: extension to victims of technology-assisted child sexual abuse offences(1) The Criminal Justice Act 1988 is amended as follows.(2) In section 36 (reviews of sentencing), after subsection (2) insert—“(2A) An application may be made to the Attorney General to review any sentence passed by either a Magistrates’ or Crown Court under the terms set out in this section.(2B) An application can be made under subsection (2A) where a sentence has been passed for one or more offence under the following provisions, in either the Magistrates’ or Crown Court— (a) section 1 of the Protection of Children Act 1978,(b) section 160 of the Criminal Justice Act 1988, or(c) section 62 of the Coroners and Justice Act 2009.(2C) An application can be made under subsection (2A) by a victim, or their next of kin where the victim is a minor, of one of the specified offences under subsection (2B)(a) to (c).”.”Member’s explanatory statement
This new clause would extend the Unduly Lenient Sentence Scheme, allowing victims of technology assisted child sexual abuse offences, and their next of kin where the victim is a minor, to apply to the scheme regardless of where the sentence was passed.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I am glad to see that we are picking up the pace slightly. The last group was a fairly brisk 13 or 14 minutes, so let us hope we can keep this up and get the Minister to bed at a half-decent hour. Of course, we are missing the joys of hearing about the somewhat shaking edition of the American constitution by being in the Chamber at the moment.

This amendment is linked to Amendment 34, which we discussed last week. Again, this is as a result of working in co-operation with an organisation I mentioned last week: the Marie Collins Foundation. I will start by referring to statements by various bodies that illustrate the nature of the problem this amendment seeks to flag up. The following quotation is from the 2023 report of the College of Policing and the NPCC on the national analysis of police-recorded child sexual abuse and exploitation:

“Within the online space, perpetrators of sexual grooming are most commonly adults aged 18 to 29 years. This highlights the risk posed to children in the online space by adults looking to abuse and exploit them. Abuse of children by adults is more likely to be hidden and requires a strong law enforcement response focusing on pursuing perpetrators, as well as a response focused on prevention”.


The next quotation is from the National Crime Agency this year, in the national strategic assessment of serious and organised crime:

“We estimated in the National Strategic Assessment 2024 that 710,000 to 840,000 adults in the UK pose varying degrees of sexual risks to children”,


a pretty horrifying total.

“However, police recorded crime does not effectively reflect the full scale of online offending, as one offence can relate to multiple instances of child sexual abuse material, and the most serious physical offence is recorded instead of any precursor online offences such as grooming”.

Lastly, hot off the press, as of yesterday, is part 2 of the Angiolini inquiry, which is pretty horrifying reading for those of your Lordships who have not read it. On page 173, under the heading, “The effect of pornography and social media”, Dame Angiolini says that

“there needs to be recognition of the link between perpetrators’ online behaviours and their behaviours in the physical world”.

They are directly linked.

The key issues in this area are, first of all, an overreliance on non-custodial sentences. In 2020, 80% of those sentenced for sexual communication with a child avoided prison. It is the magistrates’ courts rather than the criminal courts that dominate the outcomes. Online child safety risk is escalating rapidly. The Internet Watch Foundation reported an 830% rise in child sexual abuse material on the internet since 2014, making 2024 the worst year on record. The phenomenon of technology-assisted child sexual abuse—I think I introduced your Lordships to the acronym, TACSA, last week—lives in the shadow of child sexual abuse and is underrecognised.

We all acknowledge—it is the reason that we are talking about this Bill—that there is an issue with capacity in prison places. One factor in this area is that offenders can effectively strategise what the outcome of their offence might be. If it is a sufficiently heinous offence, with a lot of class A material, for example, on their computers, rather than going to the criminal court, where it is quite possible they might get a custodial sentence, what they can opt to do, and many of them do, is plead guilty, which automatically means the case goes to the magistrates’ court, in which case the sentencing powers are much more limited. This is a tactical way in which it is possible to get out of jail early by pleading guilty and opting to go to a magistrates’ court. That is causing a lot of concern, particularly, as you might imagine, to victims.

There is a coverage gap to do with the unduly lenient sentence scheme, because that reviews only Crown Court sentences. If a magistrates’ court with a particularly unpleasant case decides that a custodial sentence is the right way to go, there is no appeal mechanism under the unduly lenient sentence scheme to challenge that. Further, there is a misconception of harm. This type of online abuse is regarded as less serious than contact forms of child abuse. However, there is an increasing amount of research making the direct link that those who start off abusing children online are particularly statistically likely at some point to go on and actually do it physically.

I turn to what one would like to see happen. The first thing is improved parity and sentencing range for this particular type of egregious online abuse, so that the technological abuse of a child has parity with the physical abuse of a child—or they are brought more into balance, because at the moment, there is a clear imbalance between the two. Secondly, we should expand the unduly lenient sentence scheme to include all offences of this type, so they could be looked at if a magistrates’ court has given a rather lenient sentence. In an ideal world, one would like to prohibit the use of suspended sentences for these kinds of offences, many of which are deeply unpleasant. We should prohibit the use of what is called good-character mitigation in many of these cases. It is very hard to use good-character mitigation when an individual is found, as in some cases, to have more than 1,000 examples of class A child abuse material on their computer.

Last week, in response to discussion about Amendment 34, the Minister said on mitigation, or the ability to challenge the sentence, that it was possible for the offence to be challenged under the unduly lenient sentence scheme

“where the court is of the opinion that the offender is dangerous”.—[Official Report, 26/11/25; col. 1369.]

However, that does not cover the cases that I mentioned that go through the magistrates’ courts.

Finally, I shall give one or two examples of what happens when individuals go through the magistrates’ court. An 18 year-old from east London who had 183 category A images got a two-year community order. A 62 year-old from Cumbria had 503 category A images, and he got an eight-month sentence, suspended for 18 months, and 200 hours of unpaid work. A 26 year-old from Norfolk had 69 category A videos, and he was sentenced to six months in jail, suspended for 12 months. And the list goes on. One of our more energetic newspapers, the Sun, profiled a large number of these individuals under the usually slightly brash headline. Basically, it said that something is wrong with the system if this is what is happening.

I have explained the background to why I have brought this amendment forward. It would be really helpful for us to look at this in more detail. The Minister indicated last week that he would be interested to hear more about this particular foundation and what it does. If he is willing, I would very much like to follow up his invitation to talk about this in more detail and to lay out what is happening and the imbalance that there is currently in the system, which is allowing a lot of deeply unpleasant men to get away with virtually no sentence whatever. On that basis, I beg to move.

[Baroness Hamwee (LD)]

The noble Lord reminds me of a comment that was made, I think, during the proceedings on this Bill, but which is certainly apt. The online world and what my generation would regard as a different, real world have actually come together, and it is one world now.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Timpson (Lab)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Russell of Liverpool, for this amendment and for raising awareness of the Marie Collins Foundation on the first day of Committee. I am looking forward to meeting a representative of the foundation, with the noble Lord, on this matter, I think in the coming weeks.

The unduly lenient sentence scheme allows any person to request that the Attorney-General consider referring a sentence to the Court of Appeal for review if they believe it is unduly lenient. I have in fact been listening to some very interesting podcasts to learn more about this topic. This amendment would create a specific right for victims of technology-assisted child sexual abuse offences and, where the victim is a child, for their next of kin to apply to the unduly lenient sentence scheme, even where the sentence was imposed in a magistrates’ court. Currently, the unduly lenient sentence scheme covers all indictable-only offences, such as murder, manslaughter, rape and robbery, as well as certain specified triable either way offences sentenced in the Crown Court, including stalking and most child sex offences.

Parliament intended the unduly lenient sentence scheme to be an exceptional power and any expansion of its scope must be approached with great care. The Law Commission is currently reviewing criminal appeals, including the range of offences within the scheme, and expects to publish recommendations in late 2026. When it comes to sentencing for child sexual offences, the data shows significant variation by offence type. Around 20% of offenders convicted of sexual offences against children receive an immediate custodial sentence. This rises to approximately 70% for the most serious crimes, such as sexual assault of a child under 13, familial sexual offences and possession of indecent or prohibited images. These patterns have remained broadly consistent over the past five years.

As I have noted previously in Committee, sentencing decisions in individual cases are for our independent judiciary, guided by robust Sentencing Council guidelines that already address technology-enabled offending. For example, the guidelines require courts to consider intended harm even where no actual child exists and to take account of aggravating factors such as image sharing, abuse of trust and threats. While I fully recognise the importance and severity of the issue raised by the noble Lord, given the exceptional nature of the unduly lenient sentence scheme and the ongoing Law Commission review of criminal appeals, I respectfully ask him to withdraw his amendment.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

I thank the Minister for his response, which was pretty much what I think probably all of us expected. There is a case to be made for looking at this more carefully. The exponential rise in the volume of this type of abuse using technology has outpaced the ability of the system to understand what is going on. It has outpaced the statistics that the Minister mentioned. That is the tip of the iceberg; it does not actually tell one what is going on.

As in so many cases to do with the online world, we are all behind the curve. This is happening now, in plain sight; it is not theoretical. I hope that, in the meetings that we will have, we can explore this more fully and explain the extent and the depth of this and the deeply worrying link that is increasingly being demonstrated between perpetrators abusing online, using images, and then at some point moving on to actual physical abuse of children. I hope that we can explore that in more detail. I thank all noble Lords who contributed and, on that basis, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 93C withdrawn.

--- Later in debate ---

Moved by

[Lord Russell of Liverpool]

114: Clause 29, page 56, line 5, leave out “both” and insert “more”
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment, linked to another in the name of Lord Russell of Liverpool, enables an additional condition to be added for consideration by the Secretary of State, when determining if an offender should not be released at the end of the section 255BA automatic release period.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 118 and the related Amendments 114 and 115 in my name. I thank the noble Baronesses, Lady May of Maidenhead and Lady Jones, and the noble Lord, Lord Polak, for adding their names to these amendments. I am concerned that the provisions in Part 2, which allow the automatic re-release of recalled offenders after 56 days, will put victims of domestic abuse at serious risk of harm if, as drafted, perpetrators of domestic abuse remain eligible for automatic re-release.

These amendments have the full support of Nicole Jacobs, the Domestic Abuse Commissioner. She stated her concerns directly to the Secretary of State, David Lammy, in a letter on 11 November.

For victims and survivors of crimes such as domestic abuse and stalking, their perpetrators know everything about them: where they live and work, where their children go to school, and all their regular routines. They remain fixated on their victims, and escalations in the risks they pose are consistently in relation to particular individuals. If we think about this provision from the perspective of a domestic abuse victim, they are already likely to have been subject to years of abuse before reaching the point where their perpetrator is convicted and sentenced.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

Yes.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

I thought so, but I got confused.

Amendment 118 responds to a serious problem: automatic release after 56 days of individuals who have been recalled specifically because they breached the licence condition relating to the victim of the original offence. In other words, they have shown, as the noble Lord, Lord Russell, said, that they are willing, even while on licence, to breach restrictions designed to keep that victim safe. This is a behaviour that may indicate continuing risk, which, under Bill as it stands, will not be assessed before release.

The victims, overwhelmingly women in these circumstances, must not be put in this potential danger. The amendment is essential to ensure that if there is a victim-related breach, the individual is not released automatically. If necessary, the case must go before a parole board—an expert independent body whose very purpose is to assess risk. The Government have been very clear through the Bill that their aim is to ensure that public safety remains paramount. This amendment seeks to deliver on that aim.

--- Later in debate ---

The Secretary of State has the power to cancel a recall if satisfied that the offender has complied with their licence condition. This is unchanged by the Bill. I am confident that the safeguards already built in to the Bill provide the necessary assurance to address the noble Lords’ concerns. I therefore respectfully ask them not to press their amendments.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, can I ask for a bit of advice on the procedure, because we got slightly out of order in this group? Mistakenly, the first four amendments in the group were not moved but were then spoken to. I stood up first and spoke to Amendment 114, so I am not quite sure whether it is me who is meant to reply to the Minister, but if everyone is happy and Jake the clerk is happy, then I am happy.

I thank the Minister for his response, but the Domestic Abuse Commissioner feels that she has genuine reasons for concern. It would be helpful, if the Minister agrees, for him to meet us between now and Report. We feel strongly enough that if we are not able to resolve this to her satisfaction, we will certainly want to bring it back on Report and may take it to a Division.

[Lord Timpson (Lab)]

I am very happy to meet as suggested. It is a very good idea.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

I thank the Minister. On that basis, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 114 withdrawn.