Victims and Courts Bill

Lord Polak Excerpts

Tuesday 10th March 2026 Lords Chamber

This amendment reflects what survivors themselves have told us works. The victim navigator programme from Justice and Care has helped people to stay engaged with investigations, feel less alone and begin to recover their sense of dignity. It frees up police time and reduces costs. I urge the Minister to accept this amendment, so that compassion, trust and continuity are not dependent on postcode or on charity funding. I think that keeps me well within my 10 minutes.

[Lord Polak (Con)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 7, in my name. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Russell, and my noble friend Lord Farmer for supporting it.

The Government’s own intention with this Bill is to “strengthen support for victims” and deliver a justice system that puts the “needs of victims first”. These are crucial aims that I wholeheartedly support. However, I do not see how they can achieve such goals without addressing the concerning lack of specialist support services available to victims and survivors of abuse and exploitation across our country, something on which the Bill is notably silent. Therefore, I urge the Government to accept Amendment 7. The amendment proposes to introduce a duty on local agencies to commission specialist support services for victims of abuse, which would help put a stop to victims and survivors being denied their right to access support. It is backed by 16 charities that work every day with victims of exploitation and abuse.

This is an urgent issue. Every year, millions of victims and survivors suffer horrific abuse and exploitation, including sexual abuse, domestic abuse, stalking and many other forms of harm. These are staggering numbers. We cannot ignore them. Yet right now, the support services available do not come close to matching the scale of abuse and exploitation. Support services are vital for enabling victims and survivors to process what they have experienced and begin to move on with their lives.

The lack of provision has left victims and survivors facing a postcode lottery of access to support. Fewer than one in 10 women and one in 10 children who have experienced domestic abuse are currently receiving support from a refuge or community-based support service. Similarly, according to the Centre of Expertise on Child Sexual Abuse, an estimated 55,000 adults and children in England and Wales are currently on waiting lists for child sexual abuse support services. There are just 363 services remaining across the whole of England and Wales providing the necessary specialist support. That leaves an estimated, and frankly unworkable, 16,500 victims and survivors for each service. Additionally, the Suzy Lamplugh Trust has found that fewer than 1% of all stalking victims are supported by specialist stalking advocates due to limited capacity and funding. We cannot allow this undeniable trend of patchwork provision to go on.

While I welcome the recent announcement in the Government’s freedom from violence and abuse strategy of funding for victim services, including the rollout of child houses for victims of child sexual abuse, according to the sector this will simply not be enough to address the current gaps in provision. In addition, this kind of funding too often gets diverted from specialist care to more generic services that simply lack the knowledge to support survivors in their time of need. I must emphasise that the specialism of these services is crucial to their success. Specialist services are best placed to provide the wraparound support that survivors need. Instead of leaving victims to be passed around from service to service, having to retell their stories, often not being believed, specialist victim support understands the needs of survivors and ensures that they get the right care and support when they need it most. Support specialism is not a luxury for survivors; it is a necessity.

Without a statutory imperative to commission these services, and clarity on what organisations should be funded, specialist community-based services will continue to go undercommissioned and the support available to victims and survivors will be further diluted. Not only do we have a moral duty to ensure that victims and survivors receive these services but it is their right under the victims’ code of practice—a right that countless victims are currently being denied.

Recent activity from the Government has made it clear that they know commissioning is in desperate need of reform. With the announcement of the abolition of police and crime commissioners, the police reform White Paper, and the actions committed to for improving commissioning in the freedom from violence and abuse strategy, I argue that now is the crucial time to reshape our commissioning landscape into one that works for victims and survivors. To do this, there must be clear systems in place that guarantee victims and survivors the support they are entitled to, no matter where they live. We need to seize the opportunity that we have in front of us to ensure that we will not only preserve current provision for victims but make the system better for all.

It is a simple and harrowing fact that our commissioning system is letting victims down. We as a country have allowed this dearth in services to go on for far too long, and we owe it to victims and survivors to act with urgency to rectify our current failings. By doing so, we can work together towards ensuring that every victim of abuse and exploitation has guaranteed access to the specialist therapeutic support that they are owed. I urge the Government to incorporate that in the Bill.

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[Baroness Kidron (CB)]

My Lords, I added my name to Amendment 14, alongside that of my noble friend Lord Russell, and he has adequately explained the gap.

I started, unfortunately, looking at child sexual abuse in 2012. Unfortunately, in the period since then, I have had the misfortune to look at a great deal of child sexual abuse and I say that it is an act of violence against the person in the image.

While the noble Lord, Lord Russell, was speaking, I remembered one of the very first experiences I had. I filmed an interview with a young girl at the moment she realised that the person online, who she thought was her lover, was indeed a groomer. In the next moment, she realised that she had been recorded, and in the next moment, she realised that the recording had been shared. In those moments, I watched a heartbreak, faith-break and trust-break. That young child tried to commit suicide twice in the following summer. We were able to get her help and, thankfully, she is now a survivor and not a victim. I am standing up only to stay that what happens online does not stay online. What happens online is violence. What happens to children online must not be ignored by the law.

[Lord Polak (Con)]

My Lords, I have added my name to Amendment 14 and there is not much to add, other than to pay tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, for all the work she has done over many years in this area and to support the noble Lord, Lord Russell.

To make it very clear, this amendment is not trying to radically expand the compensation scheme. Instead, it is asking the Secretary of State to assess whether certain forms of online child sexual abuse should be recognised as crimes of violence when they involve coercion or threats, domination or control, or the compelled creation and sharing of sexual images and sexual acts directed by an offender.

The amendment is therefore targeted, proportionate and legally defensible. It recognises that violence is not always physical. As we have heard, the reality of online coercion is that, when a child is threatened with the exposure of images, blackmailed into producing further images or directed in real time to perform sexual acts online, the child is not acting freely. They are acting under coercion, fear and domination. The absence of physical proximity does not make the abuse any less real, nor does it lessen the psychological injuries suffered by the child. Therefore, I suggest that it is our duty to protect children who are subjected to such abuse, and this amendment represents an important step towards strengthening those protections.

[Lord Sandhurst (Con)]

My Lords, I will start first with Amendment 8, in the name of my noble and learned friend Lord Garnier but introduced so ably by the noble Lord, Lord Marks of Henley-on-Thames, and my noble friend Lord Murray of Blidworth. The amendment seeks to insert a new clause. It would require a review of how domestic and overseas victims of fraud, bribery and money laundering offences could be better compensated. Crucially, such a review must look into how this can be done without the need for civil proceedings, which we all know would be drawn-out, expensive and not always fruitful. I have supported this concept since my noble and learned friend Lord Garnier first started arguing for it: certainly as long as I have been in the House and since I was a member of the Select Committee inquiry into fraud four years ago. Something must be done.

We hope that the Government have given this serious consideration since Committee and I look forward to hearing from the Minister what steps the Government are taking to address the issue and whether conclusions will be reported to Parliament. Warm words—which we have heard—butter no parsnips. We on this side want to hear that something will be done. If it is true that a review has been offered that will report in 2028, that is far too long. As Mr McEnroe would say, “You cannot be serious”.

Amendment 14 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Russell of Liverpool, also addresses an important issue that we should not overlook. The amendment creates a clarification to support recognition of certain forms of online-only child abuse. It would bring them into the scope of recognition of the criminal injuries compensation scheme. We can only ask, “Why on earth not?” As I said in Committee, the scheme must keep pace with the way in which and the places in which criminal activity now takes place. We look forward to hearing an update from the Minister.