Victims and Courts Bill

Pam Cox Excerpts

Consideration of Lords amendments
Wednesday 25th March 2026 Commons Chamber

[Ben Maguire (North Cornwall) (LD)]

This Bill returns to us from the other place, where my Liberal Democrat colleagues tabled a number of crucial amendments that come before us today, which concern changes to the unduly lenient sentence scheme, the victims code, access to free court transcripts and more. I am really pleased to hear the Minister support those amendments in principle, and to hear her commitment that she will take them away with her team to make sure that they are workable before bringing them back to this place. Of course, the Liberal Democrats will hold the Government to account on all those amendments and make sure that they are implemented as quickly as possible for the sake of victims.

On Lords amendment 1, I am proud that my colleagues in the other place have been building on the successes of my hon. Friend the Member for Richmond Park (Sarah Olney), who has fought a long-running campaign for free court transcripts for victims. The amendment would give victims a right to receive court transcripts of the route to verdict, and of bail decisions relating to their particular case, free of charge. At present, such transcripts are available to victims only where a defendant has been convicted of an offence. We Liberal Democrats will vote for the amendment in order to build on this Bill and to make further much-needed progress by extending the current scheme. I urge all colleagues from across the House to join us in doing so.

On Lords amendments 5 and 7, we Liberal Democrats, led by Baroness Brinton in the other place, have sought to clarify and amend the unduly lenient sentence scheme. The scheme ensures that victims who feel that an offender’s sentence is unduly lenient can appeal to the court. However, in practice, many victims are completely unaware that this mechanism exists, and are often told about it after their short 28-day appeal window has closed. Some of these cases involve families of victims who have faced some of the most horrific crimes, including brutal murder cases, with harrowing details about what has happened to them or to members of their family laid out before them in court, in full, for the first time. Understandably, this can put them through severe emotional strain and trauma, and have other distressing effects.

For many families of victims, the last thing on their mind are procedures such as appeals. Once they reach a stage where they have processed their grief, the short 28-day window has sometimes already passed—and they may not have even been aware that they could appeal. To address this issue, the new clauses tabled by the Liberal Democrats seek to make allowances for the 28-day timeframe to be extended in exceptional circumstances, and to place much greater responsibility on criminal justice agencies to ensure that victims are fully aware of their rights to appeal and of how quickly they must do so. For example, greater awareness of victims’ rights in relation to the unduly lenient sentence scheme could form part of a judge’s sentencing remarks following a trial, rather than being left as an afterthought that might not be covered at all.

Lords amendment 2 relates to changes to the victims code. It would require the Secretary of State to outline how the rights in the victims code apply to the families of those killed as a result of murder, manslaughter or infanticide outside the UK. The amendment follows the outstanding work of my hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead (Mr Reynolds), who pushed for these changes at an earlier stage of the Bill’s passage. Although I understand that it would be unreasonable for us to mandate other countries to enforce the UK’s victims code, we are seeking to afford the families of such victims the same rights and to treat them as victims under the code. I am therefore very pleased that our colleagues in the other place have given this sensible and much-needed amendment a chance in this place once again.

I urge all colleagues to vote for all these excellent Lords amendments, which are incredibly important to victims and their families. I hope the Minister will come back to the House to confirm precisely when they can be brought forward by the Government in workable legislation. For the record, I commend the work of our colleagues, both in this House and in the other place, on these issues, which are so vital to victims’ rights and to our justice system as a whole.

[Pam Cox (Colchester) (Lab)]

The Victims and Courts Bill is part of the Government’s wider reforms of our justice system that will, in the round, better protect victims and improve their access to justice, as well as that of defendants. I really welcome its measures to improve communications with victims, to reform non-disclosure agreements, to ensure that defendants appear at sentencing hearings and to restrict the parental rights of child sex offenders. Today, I will focus my remarks on Lords amendments 4 and 7, which are on the financing of private prosecutions.

The Bill amends the Prosecution of Offences Act 1985 to provide a new power for the Lord Chancellor to prescribe the rates at which prosecutors acting in private prosecutions can recover expenses properly incurred by them from central funds. This proposal draws on a related recommendation of the Justice Committee, on which I serve. The rates would not be set by the Lord Chancellor, but would instead be consulted on and implemented through secondary legislation, so it is very important that the Government, through the Lord Chancellor, have the power to control the rates that can be claimed and paid. Lords amendment 4 seeks to leave out clause 12, thereby preventing that power from being accorded to the Lord Chancellor. In my view, the Lord Chancellor needs that power. After all, ours is a public justice system, albeit one that has long accommodated private prosecutions.

The current arrangements contribute to inequity in our justice system, which this Bill seeks to address more broadly. In recent decades, we have seen some landmark private prosecutions, such as the case brought by the parents of Stephen Lawrence, the cases brought by the RSPCA and other charities, and the cases brought by the Cyclists’ Defence Fund and others. Although we might argue that, in a properly functioning justice system, we would no longer need private prosecutions, we clearly do need them, and if we do still need them, we need to be able to exert proper control over the resources expended on them.

[Steve Barclay]

It would be easy for anyone watching the proceedings, with not many Members in the Chamber to discuss these Lords amendments, to think this is about some technical issue or minor point of debate, but the votes today really do matter. They matter to victims, who are currently charged often thousands of pounds for the transcripts of the court hearings in which they were involved. They matter for the transparency and openness of our legal system. They also matter to the public, because on this very issue over 200,000 people signed a public petition, which was debated in Westminster Hall on Monday this week. Although people may think these are just Lords amendments, this is an important set of votes.

I gently say to the Minister that her speech did sound a bit like an episode of “Yes Minister” in that her remarks were, “I fully support giving victims more rights, and that is why today I’m going to vote against every one of the amendments to do so.” As she was speaking, I wrote down some of her phrases. She said that this is “a Bill for victims”, as if the amendments made in the Lords are not meant to empower victims, when they clearly are. She said that she wants to “go further”. It is no wonder her own colleague, the hon. Member for Rotherham (Sarah Champion), said she was “confused”, and she was not the only one confused by a Minister saying that she wants to go further by voting against amendments that would enable us to go further.

The Minister justifies that inconsistency by saying she needs to consult more, including with the judiciary, as if the Government have been ambushed by their own legislation. They control the timing of this Bill and they brought it to the House, but then they say, “Oh, actually, the timing’s not right, and we need more time to consult.” They themselves are legislating and they control the time, so if they needed to consult, they could have done that in a timely fashion.

The Minister said she accepts the challenge of the pressure that the 14-day period puts people under, especially given the interplay with the 28-day window for the unduly lenient sentence scheme. Just to explain that in lay terms, if people want to appeal a sentence that they feel is unduly lenient, they have to do so within 28 days. However, if they cannot get access to the transcript in a timely fashion, their ability to do that is severely constrained. The Government control the legislation and its timing of its introduction, yet they are going to ask Labour Members to vote against these amendments. Is it any wonder they keep U-turning, because they are saying one thing and then they are going to vote to do the opposite today on the basis that at some point in the future they may come round to doing what they say they want to do at the moment?

The Minister says that more cannot be done now, pointing to reasons of technical issues and constraints, while also saying that the Government are overcoming those constraints in relation to sentencing remarks. Again, there is no “can do”. There are lots of things in a court bundle ahead of a court hearing—witness statements, and a huge amount of other documentation—and vastly more information could be shared with victims in a timely way, yet such discussions do not seem to have taken place. It is no wonder that my hon. Friend the Member for Bridgwater (Sir Ashley Fox) called what we are getting instead “waffle”. We have been told we are going to have guidance, work on awareness and—that Government catch-all—a code, as if that is a replacement for actually giving victims access to the transcripts they want.

The crux of the issue is that the Government are introducing this legislation, but those in the Lords have quite rightly scrutinised it and seen that there are constraints on the timescales. The Government do not dispute that; they accept that there is a good case for victims to have more access to transcripts. Indeed, on Monday in Westminster Hall, the Under-Secretary of State for Justice, the hon. Member for Rother Valley (Jake Richards), said:

“There is an issue of transparency regarding court transcripts”.—[Official Report, 23 March 2026; Vol. 783, c. 39WH.]

Is it not therefore bizarre that the Government will ask their own Back Benchers to vote against doing something about what they accept is a real issue for victims of crime?