Courts and Tribunals Bill (First sitting)

Tristan Osborne Excerpts

Wednesday 25th March 2026 Public Bill Committees

[Jess Brown-Fuller]

Q Thank you all for being here; I am very grateful to you for coming to give evidence to the Committee. Farah, you mentioned the presumption against parental responsibility. I agree that that is a really important step that the Labour Government are taking, but the rest of the family court process is currently out of this Bill’s scope. Could anything fundamental be introduced into this Bill to make the experience better for victims, who often go down a twin-track approach through the criminal courts and family courts?

Farah Nazeer: Thank you for the question. There are a few things around presumption that could make a big difference. One is training for the entirety of the court staff, because the stories that we hear and the experiences that we support women and children through are frankly appalling. The staff are not trauma-informed and there is no understanding of what a victim is going through. The courts are weaponised and survivors are brought back to the courts repeatedly. It is an appalling process. No policy area that you work on at Women’s Aid is a picnic, but this is the worst. People describe the trauma that they go through in the family courts as worse than the trauma that they endured through the abuse that they experienced.

One thing is for the court system to understand domestic abuse, understand sexual violence, understand coercive control and be trauma-informed. That means having processes in which a survivor knows what is happening, understands what the next steps are and is supported through the system, and having separate places where a survivor can be. Some of it is quite basic, but it is really important to improving the survivor experience.

Another thing is the regulation of experts. We often have unregulated experts coming into the family courts to provide expertise and advice to the judge on what is happening in a relationship. You would not have unregulated experts in any safeguarding context; it is absolutely wild that you would have that. One thing we really want to see is regulated experts: psychiatrists and psychologists who are regulated by the appropriate body, rather than, seemingly, people who are just not.

The last thing that I want to focus on is the concept of parental alienation, which is often invoked in family courts. It is a concept that is not evidenced and is not recognised in psychiatric or medical practice, but it is often invoked as a concept to defend against claims of domestic abuse. What needs to happen is a child’s safety being put at the heart of the decision by a regulated expert, by a trained judge. If you get that right, you immediately improve the experience for survivors and children, and you improve the safeguarding around survivors and children. Those three things are absolutely critical to changing the culture and the experience and to ensuring safety.

[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.