Victims and Prisoners Bill

Steve Reed Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 15th May 2023 Commons Chamber

[Steve Reed (Croydon North) (Lab/Co-op)]

I congratulate the Secretary of State on his appointment. I am sure all of us, in all parts of the House, wish him well, because victims need him to succeed. That is particularly the case when we realise that every year one in five people in the United Kingdom become a victim of crime: their freedom is assaulted; they are left feeling angry, fearful and sometimes even helpless.

Our system of justice, once a beacon to the world, should give victims of crime the ability to seek redress for what they have suffered. Victims deserve to be at the heart of the criminal justice system. Those who have wronged them deserve to be prosecuted and held to account in open court. Criminals should face punishment for the harm they have done.

Justice is a cornerstone of any modern and democratic society, the very foundation of law and order. Justice demands respect for the rules that govern the fair functioning of our society. But after 13 years of Conservative government, our justice system is broken. The Conservatives have let victims down time and again. Prosecution and charge rates are now so low that it is no exaggeration to say the Conservatives have effectively decriminalised many serious crimes. Only 6% of burglaries and 4% of robberies come to trial. Victims of car crime are told to report incidents online, and only rarely is there ever a police officer to follow up. Fraud is growing exponentially, with online scammers threatening people’s entire life savings, yet the previous Conservative Chancellor dismisses fraud as not an everyday worry.

Most shocking of all is the fact that fewer than two in every 100 reported rapes result in a prosecution and the average wait for a rape trial, for those very few that ever reach court, is now over three years for the first time ever. A three-year wait for a rape trial is devastating for victims, but under this Government three-year waits are the norm, not the exception.

I was contacted by the father of a 16-year-old girl who had been waiting two years for her attacker to face trial. Just four days before the trial was due to begin, his daughter was told it had been postponed for a further nine months. Just imagine how it must feel for a teenage girl who has survived such a horrific crime, and who had the bravery to stand up and report the attack, to then have to wait years and years for her attacker to face justice.

This weekend new research from the Labour party found that delays had become so bad that six out of 10 rape victims now drop their cases. They are left in absolute despair as their attackers remain loose on the streets. While Ministers routinely dismiss the reality of what they have created, the number of outstanding rape cases has almost doubled over the past year alone, and we must remember that over 98% of reported rapes never result in a prosecution anyway. The legacy of this Conservative Government is victims left facing the longest trail delays on record, which is an absolute disgrace.

But the criminal justice crisis extends way beyond the courts. The Government broke the probation system with a botched privatisation followed by a panicked renationalisation. Under the Conservatives, every week on average one murder and two rapes are committed by offenders who are supposed to be under supervision, but the probation service has never recovered from the wrecking ball that the Conservatives took to it. Some parts of the service still carry 40% vacancy rates. Probation officers are not routinely given full information about an offender’s full history when they are asked to risk assess them on release. That was how Jordan McSweeney’s risk rating was so catastrophically mis-assessed before he was released and targeted Zara Aleena in one of the most shocking and brutal murders of recent years.

Victims have a right to believe that offenders convicted in court of crimes that deserve a custodial sentence will be locked up—but they cannot under this Government, because they have run out of prison cells. The previous Justice Secretary wrote to judges telling them to avoid locking convicts up. Inside our prisons, violence and drug abuse are raging out of control. Drug and alcohol use in prisons has skyrocketed by more than 400% since 2010, and staff assaults have more than doubled. Instead of offenders being rehabilitated behind bars—that is what the Secretary of State just said he wants to see—they leave prison fired up by violence and high on drugs, posing an even greater threat to the public. Eight out of 10 crimes are committed by someone who has offended before—those are Ministry of Justice statistics. Under the Conservatives, the broken system is not stopping criminals; it is breeding them. If we do not stop criminals, we create more victims. It is a vicious cycle that leaves the law-abiding majority feeling weak and victims feeling abandoned.

Since 2014, convicted offenders have been sentenced to 16 million hours of unpaid work in community sentences that they were never made to carry out. That is a quite staggering failure. What message do the Government think that sends to offenders and their victims? It says: the system does not care. It tells low level offenders that they can get away with it, so they progress to committing more serious crimes. They have learned that they can get away with crime with no consequences under a Government who have gone soft on criminals. Under this Government, crime is not prevented, criminals are not punished and victims are not protected. No wonder victims feel abandoned when so many crimes, from antisocial behaviour to violent sexual assault, go unpunished.

It is eight years and eight Justice Secretaries since the Conservatives first promised new legislation to support victims. For all of that time, Labour has been telling them to act. Now—finally—we have a Bill, but I am afraid that it is a wasted opportunity because it fails in so many ways to rebalance the scales of justice and make a real difference for victims. The Bill lets down rape survivors. It offers no specialist legal advice or advocacy that will help them to navigate the justice system.

[Richard Foord (Tiverton and Honiton) (LD)]

On the hon. Member’s point about victims of rape who have been let down, does he consider that the Bill could protect child victims of rape from alleged child perpetrators where both the victim and the accused are due to attend the same school?

[Steve Reed]

I am grateful to the hon. Member for his intervention. He makes an important point. That is one of so many important ways in which the Bill could do more for victims. I hope that we will get the chance to make some changes to it and strengthen it as it passes through Committee and during the rest of its journey before it becomes an Act of Parliament.

Labour will table an amendment offering free legal advice for rape survivors. We want to ensure that survivors are supported every single step of the way from first reporting a rape at a police station right through to trial. It cannot be right that so many rape survivors describe their experience in court as so traumatising that it feels like they are the ones who are on trial. Labour has been calling for some time now for the protection of third-party material, such as counselling or therapy records, for rape and sexual violence victims. It is welcome that the Government are proposing some changes on that, but victims want more detail, and we will seek that as the Bill progresses. We need to support victims of crime throughout the justice system if we want to reduce victim dropout rates, which deny them justice and let criminals get away with their crimes.

There has, quite rightly, been a great deal of attention in recent years on victims of state failure that have led to major tragedies: Hillsborough, Grenfell and the Manchester Arena to name just three. Tragically, the Bill lets them down, too. Victims of major tragedies deserve the same legal representation as the authorities that fail them in the first place, but that does not happen, and the Bill does not put it right. Labour stands unequivocally with the families and survivors of those tragedies. Giving them proper legal representation is not only a matter of justice for them but helps the system learn from when went wrong, so that future tragedies can be prevented.

We will table amendments to establish a fully independent legal advocate accountable to families, as the Hillsborough families and campaigners have demanded; an advocate with the power to access documents and data not only to expose the full extent of failure but to prevent the possibility of cover-ups, such as those that denied families justice immediately after Hillsborough.

The Bill also lets down victims of antisocial behaviour. Those crimes can leave communities feeling broken and powerless, and lead to a spiral of social and economic decline that we should not tolerate. Whether it is gangs trashing local buildings, offenders intimidating local residents or selfish individuals dumping their rubbish on local streets and green spaces, we must support the law-abiding majority who deserve to feel proud of where they live.

[Sarah Champion]

Does my hon. Friend agree that not only does the Bill let down victims of antisocial behaviour, but its definition of a victim actively excludes them?

--- Later in debate ---

[Steve Reed]

As is so frequently the case, my hon. Friend makes an important and apt point. I hope that we will have opportunities to amend the Bill as it passes through Parliament. Victims of antisocial behaviour are victims of crime just as much as anybody else.

Labour wants to support victims of antisocial behaviour so that they can choose their own representatives to sit on community payback boards, where they can choose the unpaid work that offenders carry out to put right the wrong that they have done. Victims need to see justice carried out, as part of a functioning criminal justice system. To end the scandal of so many community sentences never carried out under the Conservatives, we would give victims the power they need to make sure that every sentence handed down by the courts is carried out in the community. Justice seen is justice done.

One of the most damaging experiences for any victim who reports crime is the years spent waiting for that case to come to trial, yet the Bill does nothing to cut the court backlog that warps the justice system under the Conservatives. Cases collapse as witnesses forget key details. Victims give up and criminals get away with it. This Government care so little that they have allowed the court backlog to reach record levels.

Ministers will routinely stand at the Dispatch Box and blame the pandemic, but that is just an attempt to cover up their failure. Court backlogs were already escalating to record levels before anyone had heard of covid-19. If the Government cared, they would do something, but there is nothing in the Bill to speed up justice for victims. Maria is a young woman who was subjected to multiple attacks by a serial rapist. She reported the crimes in March 2019, but had to wait three years and seven months for her case to come to trial. The pressure on her grew so intolerable that Maria attempted to end her own life, leaving her with life-changing physical injuries. That is abhorrent. Victims are sick and tired of hearing about failure on this scale while this Government refuse to take responsibility.

It is essential for victims that we speed up justice, but only Labour has a plan for that. We will double the number of Crown prosecutors to speed up trials. We will introduce specialist rape courts to fast-track cases through the system, to put criminals behind bars and get the wheels of justice turning again.

[Sarah Champion]

I am sure my hon. Friend welcomes the section 28 measures that came in recently, which allow pre-recorded information to be submitted and take a lot of trauma out of the sometimes hostile environment in which victims find themselves. However, from my experience, their use depends on the judge’s understanding and granting of them. Will the Bill contain anything to prevent that postcode lottery?

[Steve Reed]

Once again, my hon. Friend raises an important point that needs to be taken into account fully, not just as the Bill progresses but as we review the different forms of giving evidence that can make the experience of a rape survivor much easier, which makes it less likely that a case is dropped or collapses and that an attacker gets away with it.

In recent months, victims of the most horrific crimes have faced the insult of convicted criminals refusing to turn up in court to face sentencing in person. We have called on the Government to act on that and they have repeatedly said that they will, yet they have done nothing while killers, rapists and terrorists pick and choose whether they turn up to face the consequences of their crimes. Just imagine how the families of Sabina Nessa and Zara Aleena felt when the brutal men who had killed their loved ones refused to come to court to be sentenced. It is grossly offensive to victims and their families to let criminals have that hold over them at such a difficult and traumatic moment. It is disappointing that that is not part of the Bill, and I hope the Government will reconsider. If they will not act, the next Labour Government will. We will give judges the power to force offenders to stand in the dock, in open court, while they are sentenced, and we will do that because victims deserve nothing less.

With the Victims and Prisoners Bill finally coming before Parliament today, disappointingly there is still no Victims’ Commissioner in place. The Government have left the post vacant for six months now, and there is still no sign of a new appointment, which sends a message to victims about the Government’s intentions. I hope the new Secretary of State will be able to speed up that process. Whoever is eventually appointed, the Bill does nothing to strengthen the powers of the Victims’ Commissioner, which, at the very least, should include the necessary powers to enforce the victims code in full and to lay an annual report before Parliament. That would help immensely in holding the Government to account and amplify victims’ voices. I hope this too is something the Government might reconsider in Committee.

Victims will have serious concerns about some of the Government’s proposed parole reforms. It is essential that the Government should not politicise decisions that should be based on robust professional experience that keeps the public safe. Where the parole board has not been working effectively enough, the answer is to strengthen it, not to undermine it. While I am sure that the current Justice Secretary is reasonable, not all his predecessors have been. We need processes that work effectively and protect the public, whoever is in that post. There have been parole decisions that raised legitimate concern and there is clearly a need for appropriate intervention by a Justice Secretary without unduly politicising the whole system. We will return to that issue in Committee.

To conclude, the first duty of any Government is to protect the safety of citizens. The current state of the criminal justice system shows how badly the Government have failed in that duty. They have repeatedly let criminals off and let victims down. In many ways, this is a victims Bill in name only. Labour will seek to strengthen the Bill and rebalance the scales of justice in favour of victims and the law-abiding majority. We want to strengthen the Bill to speed up justice, to offer rape survivors the free legal support they need and deserve, and to give victims of antisocial behaviour a voice and the power they need to make community sentences really work. Our aim is to prevent crime, punish criminals and protect victims. That is what the public and, above all, victims expect a functioning justice system to do.