Courts and Tribunals Bill (Tenth sitting)

Debate between Siân Berry and Rebecca Paul

Thursday 23rd April 2026 Public Bill Committees

[Siân Berry]

I support this clause quite strongly. We heard powerfully from Claire Throssell in oral evidence how important its impact could be.

Most Members will have experiences like mine through casework of cases where this clause could help. I have heard from parents and family members so distressed at how their cases have been determined, despite clear evidence, where this presumption was obviously given far too much weight in decisions. These words in legislation, which were added and have had an influence on decisions, need to go.

I want to read parts of correspondence I received after the announcement in October 2025 that this measure was going to be changed. My constituent described it as an enormous relief. They were very impatient to know exactly when this was going to come forward. I am very pleased that we are discussing this now before the end of the Session.

My constituent said:

“I have personal experience of the impact the current legal framework can have. I am unable to provide specific information as a very close family member is still going through Family Court hearings to protect a child in a case of domestic abuse. However, as recently as January this year”—

this was in 2025—

“the aforementioned person was advised by two independent firms of solicitors to avoid the Family Court at all costs, due to the ‘presumption of involvement’, allied with the inconsistent and regionally patchy training and understanding by Family Court judges in domestic abuse (in spite of changes to the Domestic Abuse Act in 2021), referring to potential outcomes in Child Arrangements as ‘a lottery’.”

I really do support this clause. I also support the amendments in the name of the hon. Member for Chichester, which will help to tackle training gaps and which also reflect experiences that I can recall from casework. They are based on high-quality work and requests from organisations that work directly with victims and survivors, who have asked for these changes. I hope that the Minister will look at making changes that further strengthen the Bill in this way.

[Rebecca Paul]

I begin by echoing the comments made by my hon. Friend the Member for Bexhill and Battle. I completely understand why the Government have brought this clause forward. I welcome the debate. Similar to the hon. Member for Chichester, who spoke so eloquently, I was deeply moved by the evidence we heard from Claire Throssell. I cannot even imagine how she has coped. To do what she has done and to try to take something positive from that is an incredible thing.

The evidence this Committee has heard from those witnesses and other survivors of domestic abuse is that they feel that the family courts have not properly identified risk and believe that a pro-contact culture has, at times, overridden safety. That is extremely concerning, and it is absolutely right that we take it extremely seriously.

Child safety must come first. Where the present framework has contributed to poor outcomes, it is right that the Government act, but it is also incumbent on us today to make sure that the clause that is being repealed is indeed the cause of the harm to those children. I also make the point that, where Parliament removes an existing statutory principle, it has a duty to be clear about what will replace it.

My concern today is less with the Government’s objective than with whether repeal on its own is sufficiently precise, evidence based and thought through to achieve the Ministers’ intended objective. The Government’s own impact assessment, which has already been set out, says that

“repeal alone is unlikely to materially change outcomes”,

even though it is expected to

“change the process judges follow”.

That is an important starting point for this debate. It is really important that we do not make changes to law because everyone wants us to make those changes and thinks that will improve things when, in reality, we have the evidence and facts to know that it may not deliver those outcomes.

It is incumbent on all of us to make sure that we actually deliver the outcomes that we all desire; we all have the same ambition. I know this comes from a good place and we are all approaching this debate in the best way we can to protect children. My purpose this afternoon is to be constructive—I am not saying I have all the answers on this, and I hope my comments will be taken in that spirit. If the Government proceed with repeal, do they also need to do more to provide a principles replacement framework, clearer guidance and stronger supporting reforms?

It is important to start with the facts around the presumption. The current presumption does not give any parent an automatic right to contact, override the welfare checklist or override the paramountcy principle in section 1 of the Children Act 1989, and it certainly does not require courts to make orders that place children at risk. The Family Services Foundation is clear in its written evidence that current law already places the child’s welfare first, stating:

“Section 1(6)…expressly ensures the presumption applies”

only where parental involvement

“does not put the child at risk of suffering harm”.

It says that practice direction 12J and the Domestic Abuse Act 2021 already provide an important framework for identifying and responding to abuse in family proceedings.

Equally, I recognise the contrary concern expressed by survivors who say that, in abuse cases, the presumption can place pressure on courts to prioritise parental contact even where there are serious safety concerns and can make it harder for victims to be properly heard and protected. The real question is therefore not whether safety matters more than contact—it plainly does—but whether removing the current presumption will improve how risk is identified and acted upon, or whether it risks creating new uncertainty while leaving the deeper operational problems untouched and discouraging parental involvement in cases where it would actually be beneficial.

There are already substantial protections in the current legal framework, although they clearly fail in the worst way on occasion. The Family Services Foundation points out that the Children Act 1989, practice direction 12J and the Domestic Abuse Act 2021 already equip the courts to restrict or refuse contact where “harm is shown”. It also reminds us that the UK is bound by the UN convention on the rights of the child, including article 9, which recognises that children should maintain regular contact with both parents unless that is

“contrary to the child’s best interests”.

Both Parents Matter makes a similar point, saying:

“The Presumption was introduced in 2014”

to reflect the UNCRC and provide a statutory benchmark that the safe involvement of both parents generally furthers child welfare. I emphasise the word “safe”—no one has ever said that parents should be involved if it is not safe. I make those points not to argue that nothing should change. If the Government are minded to proceed, we need a clear understanding of how the replacement framework will continue to distinguish between safe parental involvement, which can be beneficial, and unsafe parental involvement, which must be stopped. At present, I am not sure the Bill by itself gives enough reassurance on that point, and I am worried that safe parental contact will be discouraged.

That leads to one of the most important points of all. The Government’s own documents suggest that repeal alone may not be the solution that they are hoping it will be. As mentioned earlier, the impact assessment says,

“repeal alone is unlikely to materially change outcomes”,

although it is expected to change the process that judges follow. That is a significant admission. It suggests that if the Government want safer and better outcomes in family proceedings, repeal can be only part of the picture, and perhaps not the decisive part.

We should keep in mind that many of the awful failures that have rightly horrified people seem to be failures of risk assessment, information sharing, institutional practice, professional judgment and resourcing. The Centre for Policy Research on Men and Boys puts it well:

“If abusive contact is being ordered or preserved inappropriately, then the concern lies with the quality of risk assessment, the speed and fairness of investigation, and the consistency with which courts and agencies apply the law.”

That is a useful and constructive way of putting the point. It does not deny the seriousness of the problem, but it does ask whether the solution is the right one. My concern is not that the Government want to strengthen protection; it is that repeal may be presented as more self-sufficient than, on the basis of the evidence, it really is.

I also think the Committee should be careful and candid about the strength of the evidence base behind repeal. Both Parents Matter says that the Government’s own review

“provided limited and inconclusive evidence of the impact of the Presumption. It could not determine how often the Presumption was applied in judgments, nor could it assess how harm…related to the application of the Presumption.”

It also criticises the underlying methodology:

“Quantitative analysis was based on only 245 court judgments, with over half from a single magistrates’ bench. Qualitative analysis involved only 29 parents.”

It added that the literature review

“examined only 55 studies, excluded all research published after April 2024,”

and omitted

“major studies showing positive outcomes”

from safe shared parenting and ongoing parental involvement.

Other evidence goes further, arguing that the Government review appears to have misunderstood or overstated the conclusions to be drawn from Professor Anja Steinbach’s work. I recall a striking line from Professor Steinbach, who said:

“There is plenty of research showing that contact with both parents is beneficial”,

and

“except for violence…contact with both parents is the baseline.”

I do not think that material should make the Committee cautious about treating the review as a fully settled or exhausted evidential platform for repeal.

Again, my point is not that that means that repeal must not happen; it is that we should not over-claim what the existing evidence can prove or support. I also think it is important to avoid turning this into a false choice between protecting children from abuse and supporting children to maintain safe relationships with both parents. The Centre for Policy Research on Men and Boys says that the public debate often frames the issue in that way. However, it says:

“A good family justice system must do both. It must protect children and adult victims from abusive parents. It must also protect children from the avoidable loss of safe, loving, and important parental relationships.”

I think that is right.

The Family Services Foundation similarly said:

“reform should focus on enhancing the protections available, rather than creating conditions that may inadvertently prevent children from maintaining safe, meaningful relationships with their parents.”

That is why I urge the Minister not to present clause 17 as though all principled concern about repeal is somehow concern for parental rights over child safety. It is perfectly possible to support the Government’s child safety objective while asking whether the law should continue to recognise some clear and carefully framed way, where there is no established risk of harm, of enabling children to benefit from stable and safe relationships with both parents.

Several of the written submissions that we received raise concerns about unintended consequences if repeal proceeds without a clear replacement framework. Both Parents Matter warns:

“Removing this important statutory benchmark, and relying instead on practice and non statutory frameworks”

may increase uncertainty, inconsistency and conflict. The Family Services Foundation says something similar, warning that repeal may confuse frontline professionals, affect negotiations outside court, reduce the incentive for out-of-court resolution and, ultimately, increase strain on a family court system that is already under pressure. It notes that only a minority of separated families ever come before the courts, but many more families and professionals orient their expectations around the legal framework.

That is a serious point. Even if the court’s paramount consideration remains unchanged, removing a statutory starting point may still alter behaviour before a case ever reaches a final hearing. It may affect how solicitors advise, how CAFCASS frames disputes, how mediation is approached and how parents negotiate. With that point in mind, I hope that the Minister might be in a position to share some more detail on how she expects the changes to operate, and why she is confident that they will improve outcomes rather than simply shift conflict elsewhere.

Courts and Tribunals Bill (Ninth sitting)

Debate between Siân Berry and Rebecca Paul

Committee stage
Thursday 23rd April 2026 Public Bill Committees

[Siân Berry (Brighton Pavilion) (Green)]

I am happy to have you back in the Chair today, Dr Huq. I wish to oppose the clause and the schedule. I am grateful to the hon. Member for Bolton South and Walkden for pointing out so clearly that the restrictions on appeals will push down hardest on the least advantaged people and will compound injustices in wider society, as well as the injustices put in place by other clauses.

I will not reiterate in detail the evidence we heard, or the speeches I made previously, about the risks of more errors due to the speedier but rougher and readier justice of the magistrates courts being applied to more cases, or the risks arising from higher sentences. However, clause 7 adds yet more risk to the potential harm from reducing the right to select a jury trial in clause 1 and the restrictions put in place by other clauses. This is counterproductive for the overall courts workload, too.

As others have pointed out, the clause will introduce a multi-step process. We heard in oral evidence from Emma Torr of Appeal that the

“multi-step process…will only increase the workload of both the magistrates and Crown courts. To give a very brief outline of how it works at the moment, the defendant or the solicitor can fill out a very simple form, which results in a quick rehearing at the Crown court. It takes a couple of hours at most and even less for sentence appeals.”

She also pointed out that the Law Commission had carefully considered the matter last year in a consultation paper that ran to 700 pages. She said:

“Its independent analysis was that the removal of the automatic right to appeal will increase the workload of the magistrates court and the Crown court.”––[Official Report, Courts and Tribunals Public Bill Committee, 25 March 2026; c. 83, Q174.]

In our oral evidence sessions, we heard clear views about the lack of legal aid in magistrates courts for people without representation to meet fairly the test set for appeals. Fiona Rutherford of JUSTICE told us:

“Without a lawyer being present, and of course without there even being the right to appeal directly, you are leaving a whole load of defendants, who may well be wrongly convicted or may get the wrong sentence for the crime they have committed, floundering…I simply don’t know who will inform these people about how they will put grounds of appeal together, what grounds of appeal even are, how you formulate those, what key points you need to make in them to persuade a Crown court judge sitting alone in a room with just some evidence papers and how to put your best case forward.” ––[Official Report, Courts and Tribunals Public Bill Committee, 25 March 2026; c. 86, Q184.]

These are serious matters of injustice. I do not know how the least advantaged defendants will be able to do anything to use the application to the High Court for judicial review, which seems to be the only remedy that the Minister has put forward to us today. I do not know how many miscarriages of justice are acceptable to the Minister, but I believe that these measures must not form part of the Bill, because of the impact that they will have on the right to justice for too many people.

[Rebecca Paul (Reigate) (Con)]

It is an honour to serve under your chairmanship, Dr Huq. I do not support clause 7 or schedule 2. I welcome the debate on various amendments and the comments from the Minister.

Clause 7 and schedule 2 would replace the current automatic right of appeal from the magistrates court to the Crown court with a much narrower permission-based system. At present, a defendant convicted in the magistrates court can appeal to the Crown court against conviction or sentence, and that appeal is heard by way of a full rehearing, usually before a Crown court judge sitting with between two and four magistrates. About 40% of conviction appeals and 47% of sentence appeals succeed.

We are now being asked to introduce a system that would instead require permission for such appeals, would usually proceed on written grounds, would be heard by a single judge and would limit the grounds on which permission is granted. The Government say that that would save about 500 Crown court sitting days. I feel that I may be running out of ways to phrase this sentence, but yet again we are seeing a significant roll-back of an important safeguard, justified on the basis of a small hypothetical gain.

We should ask ourselves whether an important protection is being weakened for anything like a proportionate return. On clause 7, I do not believe that it is. I strongly emphasise that appeals are not historical oddities or a procedural quirk; they are one of the principal safeguards against the risks inherent in summary justice. The Bar Council is very clear:

“The proposed change would remove a vital safeguard against wrongful summary conviction and excessive (or unlawful) sentences imposed by magistrates. The consequence risks adding to the burden on the criminal courts rather than reducing it.”

It goes further and says that the current right

“does not appear to be exercised frivolously or vexatiously.”

The Law Society made similar points in its written evidence: it said that the automatic appeal route is a “vital safeguard” and that in 2024 it was used in 2,487 cases, overturning magistrates’ decisions in 41% of convictions and 44% of sentences. It describes about 1,000 miscarriages of justice as being corrected through that route. That is the central fact that the Government cannot really get around. If four in 10 conviction appeals and nearly half of sentence appeals succeed, that cannot be read as evidence that the appeals process is being abused. In fact, it is the opposite: the process is demonstrably being exercised appropriately.

I am deeply concerned that if we roll back the right to appeal, we will be locking the door on an unknown number of cases in which a conviction might have been found to be erroneous, but will now not be identified as such. That is an unknown number of miscarriages of justice not put right, and an unknown number of lives ruined. I am not willing to pay that price for the gain of 500 sitting days, and I cannot bring myself to believe that Government Members are differently inclined.

We do not particularly need to speculate about what the safeguards protect against, because we can point to recent examples. In the notorious Hamit Coskun case, a defendant convicted in the magistrates court of a section 5 public order offence had his conviction quashed on appeal to the Crown court. The appeal court found that the prosecution had failed to prove essential elements of the offence and stated plainly:

“For these reasons we allow this appeal and quash…conviction”.

That is the automatic appeal route doing exactly what it is supposed to do and correcting a conviction that should never have been imposed.

Courts and Tribunals Bill (Fifth sitting)

Debate between Siân Berry and Rebecca Paul

Thursday 16th April 2026 Public Bill Committees

[Rebecca Paul]

I completely agree with the hon. Lady. She has set out a good example of the type of things that happen in reality. Life is not tidy, and unexpected things happen. As we look at the Bill and whether a sentence is over or under three years, it is easy to think in simple terms but, in reality, people who work in the justice system—I have not done so, but I have spoken to people who do—understand the movement and flexibility that is required. That is why amendment 24 works really well by taking that into account. The hon. Member for Bolton South and Walkden, who drafted it, clearly has real-world experience of what actually happens in a courtroom.

The Bill already recognises elsewhere that there can be a relevant change of circumstances requiring the court to revisit allocation, so the Government’s own drafting accepts that these matters are dynamic rather than static. If that is so, why would we not want to build in a bit more foresight at the front end as well? Paragraph (f) in amendment 24 is not some wild departure from the structure of the Bill; it sits comfortably with the Government’s own recognition that allocation decisions can become unsound as a case develops. It is simply a more prudent and realistic approach to cases in which the true seriousness may emerge only over time.

Finally, the reference in amendment 24 to “other exceptional circumstances” is extremely important. No statute, however carefully drafted, can predict every factual scenario. That is especially true in criminal justice, where the facts and human consequences of a case can vary enormously. A residual exceptional circumstances test is therefore not a weakness; it is a mark of maturity in the law. It recognises that Parliament should not force judges into injustice. If the Government truly believe in justice rather than mere throughput, they should have no objection to preserving a narrow, exceptional route to jury trial where justice plainly demands it.

Amendment 39, tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Bexhill and Battle, deals with the alternative, broader approach to building flexibility into clause 3. It is an especially important amendment because it puts the issue in the clearest possible terms: those of natural justice. The amendment says that a trial should still be conducted with a jury where the defendant demonstrates that to be tried without one

“would amount to a breach of the principles of natural justice.”

That is an extremely modest safeguard. It would not wreck the clause; it would merely build in additional protection through allowing an element of judgment to decide the mode of trial. It would not restore the right to a jury trial in every either-way case; it simply says that where the injustice is plain, a jury trial must remain available. I struggle to see how any Government serious about fairness could object to that.

This is an issue of paramount importance on our side, and I hope on the Government’s side too. My hon. Friend the Member for Bexhill and Battle tabled amendment 39, as well as amendments elsewhere in the Bill—in relation to clause 1, in relation to reallocation under clause 3, and in relation to clause 4—to seek to protect natural justice. We will keep making these points. If Ministers insist on creating judge-only routes, they must at the very least accept a residual safeguard based on natural justice.

For all the reasons I have outlined, I support amendments 23, 39 and 24. They would deliver the additional safeguards needed, so I urge the Government to adopt either the Opposition’s amendment or the amendments tabled by the hon. Member for Bolton South and Walkden.

[Siân Berry (Brighton Pavilion) (Green)]

It is great to have you in the Chair, Dr Huq. I am looking forward to today’s debates. I have not tabled any amendments to clause 3, but I want to talk about some necessary changes to the clause that fit in with this group of amendments. I hope the Committee will have patience with me.

I want to raise again the principle of jury equity, which the Government are effectively abolishing by abolishing the right to elect a jury trial completely. I previously asked whether the Minister had considered the Bill’s impact on jury equity when drafting it, but she did not answer. I also asked whether the Minister could tell us whether we can honestly expect a judge triaging a case under the provisions in the Bill ever to allow a jury trial on the grounds on which some people currently choose one, which is to allow for the possibility of jury equity to achieve real and proportionate justice, rather than the criteria in clause 3.

This issue is complicated, and trying to fix it in the context of a Bill that includes clause 1, which abolishes the defendant’s right to choose, is tricky, which is why I spoke so strongly against it. The principle and the right of juries in respect of jury equity comes out of common law. I mentioned the 1670 case, and the High Court has commented that it has been a well-established principle in common law ever since then. As it is not in statute it is, by tradition, relatively unspoken. I spoke of the case of Trudi Warner, who tested the principle through her desire to make sure that the information about jury equity was seen by people taking part in a protest. She did that not just in case they spotted the plaque in the Old Bailey, but through the demonstration that she passively took part in.