Victims and Prisoners Bill

Lord Sandhurst Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 18th December 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Sandhurst (Con)]

My Lords, I look forward to hearing the maiden speech of the noble Lord, Lord Carter of Haslemere, whom I am sure will bring much to this House. I also congratulate my noble friend Lord Moylan on his powerful speech on IPP prisoners, a subject which I shall not be addressing. My focus today is simply on Part 1, on victims. I am particularly grateful for the briefing which I received from Claire Waxman OBE, who is London’s Victims’ Commissioner.

I welcome this Bill, but I believe it could, and should, be strengthened in significant ways to assist the victims of crime. Bills like this do not come along every year. We have waited a long time for it and we really must take the opportunity we have; it may be another 20 years before we get another one. As other noble Lords have said, it can and should be strengthened to make it clear that agencies are under a statutory obligation to deliver certain core rights for victims. A bland entitlement that victims should receive certain rights, with no adequate machinery for enforcement, is not enough. The Bill must make it clear that victims’ rights must be identified. These must be unequivocal and must be enforceable in the event that agencies default—so the drafting of the code will be very important.

It must be premised on the basis that victims are entitled to, and must have, the benefit of certain treatment, and that there must be an enforceable obligation on the agencies so to provide. That will require measures to ensure positive compliance. Such measures will require minimum threshold levels and sanctions or, at the very least, inspections of agencies that do not meet those requirements. There must, of course, in addition be obligations on the agencies to collect and publish data on compliance, and those must be enforced. I say that because, as Claire Waxman has helpfully explained in her briefing, Clause 5 of the Bill replicates the non-compliance provisions of the Domestic Violence, Crimes and Victims Act 2004. Her coalface experience is that these have proved insufficient in practice, and we should learn from that.

My next point is to turn to Jade’s law, which of course we all applaud and are pleased that it is introduced. I heard with interest what the noble Lord, Lord Meston, had to say, and he has great experience, having sat as a family judge for many years. We appeared against each other in the family courts many years ago, so I bow to his experience, but I think we can and should do something, at the very least on an optional basis, to protect children who have been abused by their parents.

So, while I welcome the provisions that will ensure that parents who kill a partner, or former partner, by whom they have had children, will upon sentencing have their parental responsibility automatically suspended, I favour also giving the Crown Court an optional power: in other words, to expand Clause 16 to go further, to include among those whose parental rights may be suspended by the Crown Court parents convicted of committing serious sexual offences, such as rape, against their children or other children in the household, and other serious offences such as grievous bodily harm with intent, contrary to Section 18 of the Offences Against the Person Act.

This should be only for really serious cases. We heard from the noble Lord, Lord Meston, about the issues that can arise in complicated family situations, but there will be clear cases where to make a decision on sentencing at the end of the trial will be of enormous benefit to the family, so the court should have discretion. I am persuaded of this by the story of Sammy Woodhouse, a victim of the Rotherham child sexual abuse scandal. According to a report in the Times, the man, Hussain, was sentenced to 35 years’ imprisonment for offences including rape, abduction and indecent assault—but not murder. He was then allowed to participate in family court proceedings when the child, the progeny of the rape, became the subject of voluntary care proceedings. By definition, he was the rapist of the mother. That should have been the end of that. It must be possible to extend the scope of Clause 16 to protect children and mothers who are the actual victims of such sexual offences, but I agree that it must be discretionary and not on a mandatory basis.

Finally, continuing with victims, I draw attention to the witness preparation programme developed over the last 35 years in the province of Quebec in Canada. It uses crime victims assistance centres and carefully trained workers to prepare adult victims who will give evidence at a trial in ways that ensure that the specifics of the case are not discussed and that there is no adverse impact on the evidence presented by a victim at trial—no coaching, in other words. This is important because, very often, in practice a vulnerable witness does not meet Crown counsel until the morning of the trial and knows little of the reality of what lies ahead in the Crown Court.

As John Riley of the Criminal Bar Association told the Commons Justice Committee inquiry into sexual offences evidence, defence counsel may have had one or more conferences with the defendant and discussed the evidence in detail with them. The defendant knows what is coming, as is right and proper, but too many victims have no practical grasp of either the process or what they may be confronted with. Time does not permit me to go into the detail of the Quebec process, but Ms Waxman has produced a short report of her visit this May and I will provide a copy to the Minister.

In short, I commend this Bill but it could do even more.