Victims and Courts Bill

Baroness Maclean of Redditch Excerpts

Tuesday 16th December 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Maclean of Redditch (Con)]

My Lords, I always find it slightly daunting, when speaking towards the end of a debate, to follow so many eminent noble Lords. In my short time in this place, I have learned that your Lordships do not like needless repetition, so I will absolutely attempt to abide by that stricture.

The first observation I make, while broadly welcoming the Bill, is that nobody really expects to be a victim of crime. It is not something that ever really appears in our political debates, that politicians major on when they make election campaign promises, or that appears in the media with great regularity. But when someone is a victim of crime they very often find themselves being badly failed by the services that are supposed to be there to support them and which they assumed would be there. Until they need to use them, they do not understand what is actually going on in the system.

I served as a Minister in the Home Office and in the Ministry of Justice, and it is a huge privilege to hear from victims who are brave enough to come forward and speak about their experiences. I and, I know, many others welcome the Government’s work on strengthening support and services for those victims. When victims come forward to speak about those things, they exhibit a huge amount of bravery. We can learn a lot from that. That is how we go forward, tailor the services and get it right for them in the future.

As people have said, this is not a party-political point. We made some progress towards improving services for victims under the previous Government. We quadrupled legal aid for victims, enshrined the victims’ code in law and began the task of unpicking automatic halfway early release for serious offenders, but there was always more to do. It was the start point, not the end point, of a journey.

I have a couple of key concerns about the Bill, particularly around rape and serious sexual offences. I will add my comments to what others have said about the window for victims to apply to the unduly lenient sentence scheme. I do not think that 28 days is enough. Will the Government please look again at the issue of court transcripts? As so many others have said, those really need to be provided in cases such as that of the grooming gangs. It will give confidence to everybody in the system.

Attendance at sentencing is so important. It is just fantastic that the Government are doing this, taking forward some of the early steps that we took in the previous Government. I too have some knowledge of Zara Aleena’s case. Her family said that when their niece’s killer did not appear in court, it was a slap in the face to them. They wanted the killer, McSweeney, to face his actions. They felt it was so important for them. They wanted him to hear what impact his despicable actions had had on their family and how he had destroyed them as a family. I really hope that, in the name of them and so many others, we can get that done as a Parliament and help those people.

There are some operational difficulties around this that we will look forward to working with the Government on. If police officers are required to enforce attendance, they should be issued with stab vests and tasers. They need to have the right kit so that they can do it, otherwise there is a worry about the use of the defence of reasonableness and appropriateness. We have all seen that people sometimes use that to get away from actually doing what they need to do, which is facing justice in open court.

Before I conclude, I ask the Minister to reflect on some really important work that the previous Government did on rape prosecutions. It might be slightly outwith the scope of the Bill but, against the backdrop of the work that the Government are doing on the VAWG strategy and on the court system as a whole, we introduced an operation called Operation Soteria. We worked with the Crown Prosecution Service, with police forces across the country and with the courts. We were improving the experience of rape victims when they went into court and the pace at which those trials moved through the court system. By the time I left the role, we had City St George’s perform an objective study, which found that that operation had objectively improved both the time it takes for those cases to come to court and the experience of victims. I would be really interested and grateful if the Minister could touch on that when she comes to sum up, or else write to me about how that work has been taken forward and how it fits into the wider plans.

The Government are completely right in their ambition to tackle the backlog of 74,000 cases at the Crown Court, but I think the public will find it extraordinary that we are looking at getting rid of jury trials, or even magistrates’ trials, when we know that there are courts sitting empty. The Minister shakes her head, so perhaps she will address that when she responds. As I have said, I look forward to seeing the Bill go forward and to working with the Government and others. I very much hope that victims outside here will see that we are doing our job and standing up for them.