Courts and Tribunals Bill (First sitting)

Rebecca Paul Excerpts

Wednesday 25th March 2026 Public Bill Committees

[Matt Bishop (Forest of Dean) (Lab)]

Good morning, all. I welcome your work and the support that you offer victims—all of you, in what you have been doing. I am sure there is cross-party support for that in the room this morning. Do you think the changes in the Bill will improve the confidence of victims that, when they report crimes, they will receive justice more swiftly than they currently do and, more importantly, that the changes will also encourage more brave victims to come forward and report crimes?

Claire Waxman: There are a lot of good measures in the Bill that, if delivered and implemented well and with important safeguards, should have positive impacts for victims. We are removing appropriate cases from the Crown court, easing the burden there, and limiting the right to elect for a Crown court trial. By the way, victims view that right as an injustice. They feel that power and control is being given to the defendant, knowing full well that there is a chance they will come out of the process or that their evidence will be impacted over the years. That is something that victims regularly talk to me about. The measures around the automatic right to appeal and to make the magistrates a court of record will open up transparency in the courts and hopefully stop victims having to be called back in for a rehearing. That has devastating impacts; you cannot overestimate what it does to a victim when they think that they have gone through the process of giving evidence, and then they have to come in again.

If all those things ease the pressure and burden on the Crown court, that will give reassurance and confidence to victims who are thinking about whether to stay in the process currently. The measures Katrin talked about—putting in important safeguards around the cross-examination of rape victims—are so important. Vera and I have worked on this since 2019, because of section 41, past sexual history, and issues around cross-examination and compensation claims. That is a financial motive used to undermine the credibility of victims. Victims come out of the system and often say, “I will never report again,” but they tell their friends and families about their experiences, and that deters people and erodes public trust and confidence.

[Rebecca Paul (Reigate) (Con)]

Q Thank you for your time, Claire. If I am interpreting your answer correctly, your basis for supporting the removal of jury trials is that it will save time and allow victims to get justice quicker. Would your position change if that is not the case and those time savings do not come through?

Claire Waxman: That is impossible to answer. We need to see it happen. You need to come back to me and say if it is not going to reduce—

[Rebecca Paul]

Q Your letter says that this will result in quicker justice for victims, and that is why you support it. My question is: if that is not the case, would you not support it?

Claire Waxman: It is the case. The Crown court is overburdened. You have heard Sir Brian Leveson’s analysis; it cannot continue in the state it is in. If we do not take appropriate cases out of the Crown court, then what is the answer?

[Rebecca Paul]

Q That suggests to me that if it did not save time, you would not support the proposal.

Claire Waxman: But I cannot imagine it. If you are taking cases out of the Crown court that cannot deal with the pressure, that will save time.

[Rebecca Paul]

That is what we will be analysing over the next few weeks—whether it will or not.

[The Chair]

We will limit ourselves to one question each at this stage so that everyone can get in. If there is more time, I will call people again.

--- Later in debate ---

[Tristan Osborne (Chatham and Aylesford) (Lab)]

Q Thank you for your testimony so far and for your bravery. Morwenna, you mentioned that you waited two and a half years before your court date. My apologies for going into the detail, but can you go through the stresses and strains of that wait and its impacts on your life and possibly on other victims as well?

Morwenna Loughman: Absolutely. One thing that kept me going—I was so close to pulling out multiple times—was that I had this sense that he had done it before. In fact, what I was later told—it was not admissible, but under the Bill it would become admissible—was that he had broken his ex-partner’s leg repeatedly and raped her as well. His defence barrister stood in front of the judge, the jury and me, and said, “This man has never hurt a woman.” Given that this man was out on bail and repeatedly breaching his bail conditions, brutal is the word. I cannot overstate the impact that that has on victims. It was devastating. I did not look people in the eye for two years. I wore a hat everywhere I went so I could hide my face, because he could have been anywhere. I had to move out of my home. My home became a crime scene. I lost my job. It was daily torture. I echo what Natalie Fleet said the other week in the House of Commons: that the one thing worse than being raped is waiting four years or more to hear if people actually believe you.

[Rebecca Paul]

Q I thank you all for being here. I know that this must be incredibly difficult. You are incredibly brave, and it is wonderful to see you channelling something that was so negative for you in a positive way, so thank you for that.

We have focused a lot on jury trials, but there is a real opportunity here to think about what we need to deliver improvements in our judicial system, because the thing we all agree on here is that it is not working as it should. We might disagree on the best way to address that, but we do agree on the fact that change is needed in some form. What would you like to see in this Bill that is not there? What is needed to address some of the issues? Any of you who want to answer, please feel free to take the question.

Jade Blue McCrossen-Nethercott: It is a very big question. It is tricky, because I do not think that we can really ask for perfection; we are very much asking for a system that is bearable and has a bit of credibility about it. That just has to be centred, with lived experience at the forefront. So often, many victims, myself included, have said that it feels like it has gone so far to the defence side that it is no longer a justice balance. It has flipped so much on that side that I really want to urge you to consider that aspect: that it feels like the balance has gone in favour of the defence, essentially. In any decisions that you make about the Bill, just consider rebalancing that and ensuring that victims’ voices are centred in the decision-making process. If increasing magistrates to the three-year limit reduces the delays by even a small percentage, that can only be a positive thing. All those smaller elements will eventually snowball into more meaningful change across the entire sector. I could ramble on, so I will let someone else have a go.

Charlotte Meijer: I guess the other thing to add, which has been discussed a few times already, is the training of judges and magistrates. We have to find a way to do that—you would not let an untrained teacher into a school—because they are making decisions that mean life or death. After my not guilty verdict, I tried to kill myself, because nobody believed me, clearly. There is a huge impact. Things do need to change.

As I mentioned, I was a victim of rape. The rape did not go to court, because of many mistakes. The police offered to reinvestigate and I declined, because I knew what I would be going into and I did not want to go into that again, as it stands. A lot of that is about not just the courts, but the process leading up to it: the police and the CPS, and making sure that the police, the CPS and the courts are working together, which at the moment they are not. I am going through a three-year complaints process with the police, and they just blame each other. There needs to be accountability from start to end, because, while the Government have many different institutions that you deal with as a victim, you do not always understand it. You should not have to. I should not have to know that the CPS needs to do this and the police need to do that. It should be me coming in and other people understanding that journey for me and holding them to account.

There are no consequences if the victims’ rights we have at the moment are not adhered to. I was failed on at least seven points of the victims’ rights, but there is nothing that anyone can do. It has gone up to the ombudsman, and they said, “Yes, they failed”—great.

[Matt Bishop]

Q At the risk of sounding like a broken record, thank you to the panel for coming in. It is very brave of you to come and relive your stories and experiences. Following on from the previous two questions, maybe this is one for Jade, Charlotte and Morwenna: given the delays and uncertainty in the court process and how that affected your recovery, how do you think the changes in the Bill will better protect victims and survivors in future from the impact that you have experienced?

Morwenna Loughman: I did not actually know that it was the defendant’s right to elect where their trial was heard, and that was a real shock to me. I echo what these extraordinary women on my right have said: it feels like a system that has been weighted against you, and there is no doubt that defendants are gaming the system. As it stands, I would absolutely not recommend this system to someone who finds themselves in my position.

I also agree with what Sir Brian Leveson said. A cultural reform needs to take place, because we are way past the mark of funding being enough. It needs a systemic, systematic, fundamental paradigm shift in how the system is run.