Courts and Tribunals Bill

Baroness Neate Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 27th October 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Neate (CB)]

My Lords, it is a privilege to be part of this debate in which so much legal expertise and experience are evident. I too warmly welcome the noble Lord, Lord Stace, with his important expertise and experience. I will speak in support of Clause 16 and also mention some ways in which I believe the Bill could be further strengthened.

In the Children Act 1989, the Conservative Government took what was then a huge step for children by establishing the principle that children have rights, whereas parents have responsibilities. At that time, however, domestic abuse and the dynamics of power and control that sustain it, often well after separation, were not as well understood as they are now. In 2015, when the noble Baroness, Lady May, was Home Secretary, the country took a major step forward in creating the criminal offence of coercive control, which was further consolidated in the Domestic Abuse Act 2021. I mention this because we are learning as a country. What the present Government are doing, therefore, is bringing together our present knowledge of domestic abuse with the founding principle of the Children Act that the best interests of the child must always be paramount.

This change took a decade of ardent campaigning to bring about. The Minister and others have mentioned the incredibly courageous Claire Throssell. She and I launched the campaign when I was chief executive of Women’s Aid. As noble Lords have heard, Claire’s two sons, Jack and Paul, had been killed by their father during court-ordered unsupervised contact—contact that, importantly, Claire and her children warned the court might be lethal. These children were by no means the only ones to meet this preventable fate. Claire’s children and others might be alive today if abuse survivors and their children were heard and believed—they still frequently are not—and if the courts always treated the child’s best interests as paramount. The presumption of contact where there has been domestic abuse can facilitate post-separation abuse, which in turn impacts the non-abusing parent’s ability to parent and can lead to the child entering care.

Even now, the myth that the family courts are biased against fathers has huge traction over both people who appear in the courts and those who work in them. The highly organised activists who perpetuate that myth now are from the same mould as those who egged my house multiple times and slashed my tyres when we launched the campaign. That is nothing compared with what their heirs on social media threaten to women who expose the way our institutions inadvertently facilitate coercive control and abuse. I urge noble Lords in this House to retain a laser focus on children, whose best interests should indeed prevail in all cases.

However, this change alone will not be sufficient to enable the family courts to deal fairly with cases where there is domestic abuse. I urge the Minister to consider amending the Bill in some crucial ways. First, the need for effective regulation of experts providing evidence in the family courts has been acknowledged across specialist organisations and by judges. In particular, the highly contested concept of parental alienation is used in ways that wrongly discredit both survivors and their children. When I was at Women’s Aid, I met many survivors who had been ignored and belittled in court in the name of parental alienation—and little has changed. Just in the last few weeks, survivors have told the committee of this House scrutinising the Domestic Abuse Act 2021 that they suffered more in the family court than during the abuse itself.

Furthermore, in the Re C (‘Parental Alienation’; Instruction of Expert) judgment, the President of the Family Division, Sir Andrew McFarlane, stated that it was “unhelpful and potentially confusing” that the

“generic label ‘psychologist’ is not protected and may be used by any individual, whether registered or not”.

I urge the Minister to consider prohibiting the appointment of unregulated psychologists and psychotherapists to conduct a psychological assessment of any party or family member involved in child contact proceedings, and to ensure that all psychologists appointed as experts in the family court are appropriately qualified.

Secondly, despite domestic abuse appearing in 83% of private law children case files in the Domestic Abuse Commissioner’s 2025 report, research and survivor testimony show that there is a significant lack of understanding of domestic abuse by family court professionals. Judgments are less likely to serve the interests of children without sufficient understanding of how coercion and control—the heart of all domestic abuse—show themselves in the family court setting. The Government’s strategy for addressing violence against women and girls guaranteed training for all staff in criminal courts, but not family courts. I urge the Minister to mandate high-quality, trauma-informed training on domestic abuse for all family court professionals, including the judiciary.

I urge noble Lords to use this opportunity, when it comes, to reinforce the paramountcy of the best interests of children, and to reject misogyny and coercive control in the family courts by supporting Clause 16 and the other changes I have mentioned.

Crime and Policing Bill

Baroness Neate Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 18th March 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Stroud (Con)]

I am not giving way; I am sorry.

Secondly, in-person consultations protect against coercion and abuse. Far from protecting victims of abuse, as is claimed, the lack of such consultations is a traffickers’ charter, allowing traffickers and abusers to cover up the effects of sexual exploitation by coercing their victims to phone up and ask for abortion pills. In-person appointments prior to an abortion in a confidential setting mean that such abuse is more likely to be detected. The disturbing case of Stuart Worby emphasises this need.

[Baroness Neate (CB)]

My Lords—

[Baroness Stroud (Con)]

I am just carrying on; I am sorry.

Mr Worby was jailed in December 2024 after arranging for a friend’s girlfriend to pretend to be pregnant and acquire abortion pills for him via the pills by post scheme. He then spiked a woman’s drink with those pills to induce an abortion against her knowledge. Again, he could not have obtained the pills if in-person appointments were still mandatory.

Thirdly, in-person appointments allow for possible health risks to be checked to assess whether it is safe for a woman to undergo a medical, rather than a surgical, abortion.

The problems with the pills by post scheme are well documented, with FoI requests suggesting that one in 17 women requires hospital treatment afterwards. These risks were strikingly drawn to our attention by a letter, which has already been mentioned, from more than 1,000 medical professionals who support Amendments 424 and 425. I am glad too for the support of Dr Caroline Johnson MP, who still practises as a paediatrician and brought forward the same amendment in the other place.

The seriousness of this issue was brought home to me when I had the opportunity, in January, to meet with a woman whose sister tragically died after taking abortion pills via the pills by post scheme, leaving behind young children. The medical conditions the woman had, which meant she should have been deemed high risk, may well have been picked up in a clinical context. However, after a telephone consultation, she was sent pills in the post by BPAS and died suddenly minutes after taking the final set of pills.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Neate (CB)]

My Lords, as a former chief executive of Women’s Aid, I will specifically address the comments made about domestic abuse, particularly in relation to telemedicine. It is common for domestic abuse to begin in pregnancy, and it is common for all aspects of pregnancy, including conception, to be tools used by perpetrators of domestic abuse. That is why groups wishing to end violence against women and girls—domestic abuse groups, those who deal with so-called honour-based violence, those who deal with forced marriage, Rape Crisis and many others—have written to parliamentarians saying that creating clinically unnecessary barriers to abortion helps abusers, not survivors. I would really like noble Lords to take note of the fact that, in denying women discrete space for action, they are actually enabling abuse much more than they are preventing it.

[Baroness Hazarika (Lab)]

My Lords, Amendment 423A in my name would ask the police to cease investigations into women since the other House passed this vote back in June. Since June, in a number of cases women and mothers have been investigated. At Christmas, a woman in her 40s thought she was in her early pregnancy. She delivered a foetus in its gestation sac. She was very distressed. It turned out that that was actually at 24 weeks; she had not realised. She called the ambulance, and it was made clear that she had safeguarding issues. She was a victim of domestic violence. She had children. Then the police came. Her house was searched, including the Christmas presents for the children. It was incredibly distressing. The children had to leave the house. Many noble Baronesses here have talked, rightly, about the effects on the unborn child, but what about the children of the mothers who are taken away for investigation? So this is a very important addition to the other amendments. I very much support the amendment that the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, has tabled.

As the noble Lord, Lord Pannick said, I am sure that nobody, whatever side of this debate they sit on, thinks that anyone has a late-pregnancy abortion for the fun of it. No one is doing it to get some promotion at work or to get a late holiday—some of the excuses that we have heard suggested. This is an incredibly traumatic thing. Actually, I would say that an abortion at any time was an incredibly traumatic thing for a woman. I urge noble Lords to go, if they have not seen the Tracey Emin exhibition at the Tate; she speaks incredibly movingly but in a very harrowing way about her own lived experience of abortion. This is not something that is taken lightly.

For that small number of women who end up doing this at a late stage in their pregnancy, they are not doing it for the fun of it. They are often abused and often in situations of domestic violence; they are often from very marginalised communities, such as my own community—from the Muslim community, or from other more isolated communities. Many of them are from deprived backgrounds; they are not from nice families such as ours, where you can talk about these things. Many of them are told, by the way, that they do not know what is going on with their bodies, by their abusive partners or abusive parents, because coercive control does not just come from the husband or partner —it can come from within the family structure. They are not even told about their bodies; they are not given agency about their body—and they are told that if they dare to go to anyone for help, they will end up in prison, and here is the evidence. While I understand the concerns about coercion and care and making sure that we protect vulnerable women—it is very well intended—this could further push those very isolated women into situations that are ever more dangerous.

The final point that I want to make is that, whatever side of the divide we are on, we know that the police are really struggling with resources right now. We have had many conversations about how we do not think that police are investigating serious sexual assault against women and severe anti-social behaviour. Do we really want our police to be rifling through the bins of women who have just had a stillbirth? Do any of us think that that is a good use of time? Do we honestly want to see vulnerable women put in prison, when there are very few places in prison right now?

Finally, you cannot solve this problem by just prosecuting vulnerable women. I have had many conversations with people on the other side, and I understand that, as the Chief Whip said on our side, these views are profoundly and genuinely held by all of us. But I have heard the argument from people who say that, when the terrible thing happens and there is a late abortion, someone has to pay the price—someone has to go to prison. I would push that back. Throwing women, vulnerable women who have often been beaten and treated violently, into prison, is not the answer. Believe you me: these women need compassion, and their kids also need a mother, so that they do not fall into the patterns that lead to bad outcomes. If anyone thinks that these women need to be punished, trust me—what they will have gone through is punishment enough, which will stay with them for the rest of their lives.

Better Prisons: Less Crime (Justice and Home Affairs Committee Report)

Baroness Neate Excerpts

Thursday 12th February 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Neate (CB) (Maiden Speech)]

My Lords, I feel acutely the responsibility to use this privilege for good and to represent the vital role of civil society in addressing the troubling challenges our country faces. My father often said—really often—“You’re not special; you’re just lucky”. It sounds harsh, but not when you think of the many people who are very special and not at all lucky. I have met many of them in my career. I know full well that great good fortune has brought me to this place.

I thank my noble friend Lord Kinnoull, the staff of the Convenor of the Cross Benches, Black Rod’s office, and the doorkeepers, who showed such amazing kindness to my family on my introduction. I am grateful to the noble Baronesses, Lady Hunt of Bethnal Green and Lady Casey of Blackstock, for supporting me, and to the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, and the Appointments Commission.

I applied to join this House because, for decades in front-line charities, I saw families beset by crisis after crisis, while policy changes were not helping. Charities working in communities know how housing, domestic abuse, child protection and criminal justice collide in real lives. I believed I could bring that experience into legislative debates that too often treat these issues in silos.

Prison is where many of our most pressing social problems collide. I will explain that in a minute through the story of a young woman who I will never forget.

I began my charity career at Action for Children, supporting families in crisis. I was stunned by the scale of domestic abuse at the heart of that damage, unrecognised or minimised as a volatile relationship rather than systematic control and victimisation.

That led me to become chief executive of Women’s Aid. There I helped achieve the criminalisation of coercive and controlling behaviour, more funding for refuges, and changes in the family courts. At Women’s Aid we heard daily from women who were staying in terror because they feared homelessness and losing their children. I came to see that insecure private renting and the shortage of social homes trapped survivors between life-threatening abuse and unliveable temporary accommodation. That is why I became CEO of Shelter.

To return to prisons, Action for Children ran the mother and baby unit at Styal prison. There I met a 20 year-old woman and her six month-old daughter, born in prison. It still chills me that she said that she herself had been born in Styal two decades before. Her mother had offended in a coercive, controlling relationship. She grew up in and out of care, was later homeless, convicted of shoplifting and pregnant when sentenced. She was likely to be homeless after release. She was parenting with confidence and love, but I knew she might well lose her baby.

You see how policies intersect to create those we label “complex needs” or “hard to reach”. But it is systems that are complex and help that is hard to reach. We blame people for the spiral of trauma and harmful or dangerous behaviour, but with comfort, resilience and support when problems first arise, things would be different.

We often talk about charities changing lives, but people’s own courage and tenacity are what change their lives, given the chance. Charities can help achieve the resilience that many of us have from childhood, which for others has been eroded. What I have learned is that policy silos do not help us find answers. Before changing policy, we must understand how lives are unravelled by the systems we create. Unintended consequences are avoidable, but it takes engagement with front-line expertise and experience.

I am not a politician. I am proud of what I have achieved in respectful partnerships with senior politicians of all parties—who trusted that my priority is people facing the hardest circumstances. I am honoured to serve both you, my Lords, and them.