Dame Vera Baird and Claire Waxman.

Q1 The Chair: Good morning everyone and welcome to the House of Lords Justice and Home Affairs Committee. I am delighted that, this morning, we have with us Dame Vera Baird, who was, amongst other things, Victims’ Commissioner for England and Wales, and Claire Waxman, Victims’ Commissioner for London. Our remit does not include legislative scrutiny, but we are glad to have the opportunity to talk a little about matters that are relevant to the Victims and Prisoners Bill, which we expect to have at our end in the next Session—it is a carryover Bill—and to have background to issues that we all want to be better informed about, not only because we are getting legislation but because they are intrinsically important.

I will start by asking you, Vera, if you could reflect on your role, almost a year after stepping down. Then, Claire, perhaps you can tell us how your role has evolved in London.

Dame Vera Baird: My reflections would be, first, that the Victims’ Commissioner can be a very influential role with a listening Secretary of State. They appoint you to give that advice, and we had a massive circle of victims' organisations so that we could inform the Secretary of State about practically any aspect. The contact was very good and close for a very long time. The Domestic Abuse Commissioner and I got Sir Robert Buckland to set up the Wade review, for example, which has just reported on the worrying inequity between the sentencing of male domestic abuse killers and female domestic abuse killers.

Because that closeness was known about and was inherent in the role, I was able also to work with the police, who had, in the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act, a piece of legislation to allow access to phones by consent for a purpose. The problem is that access by consent to a phone by our police and the CPS for victims of rape who are making complaints is all too readily given on the basis that, if you do not consent, the CPS will not even think about charging. It was a worry that they were going to legitimise that, which should never have happened. Understanding why the police wanted it and what we did not want, we worked up an amendment which, together, we were easily able to persuade the Government to take on. It was taken on in this House and was excellent, so it can do a lot.

My second reflection is that victims are still treated very badly by the criminal justice system. They are obviously sympathised about in the public arena, but the existence of the adversarial system, with which I have absolutely no complaint, means that the focus is on the defendant. The state is investigating and prosecuting him with me defending him, the court deciding whether they are guilty or not and the judge keeping the trial right. The witnesses—the victim is often a witness—are really just fodder, and because they are not central to that trial arena they are not given a lot of support. No one deliberately leaves them out, but it is not central to the role and it means that they do not get anything much, except some leftovers. They need very simple stuff that does not interfere with defendants’ rights: they want procedural justice and to be treated with decency, they want to be kept up to date, they want to understand the criminal justice system, and they want to be allowed a voice in decisions.

In other words, it is a big thing for victims if they are involved with the criminal justice system, because it is highly symbolic and very highly regarded as a kind of public arena in which they are unlikely ever to appear again. If it were not already occupied by a different kind of thing, I would call what they need restorative justice. Having been demeaned by being a victim of crime—somewhere between demeaned and traumatised for life, but certainly demeaned in every case—they need to be restored and told that they are a valuable citizen and that the nation cares about them. That is all it requires.

What should be their rights are captured very well in the Victims’ Code, but I can tell you that a survey from when I was Victims’ Commissioner showed that only 20% of victims who had been right through the criminal justice system had ever heard of the Victims’ Code, and they do not habitually get their rights.

There is a massive amount of work to do, not least because another bit of research we did, looking back on a CPS survey, showed that 67% of people who had been victim witnesses in 2009-10 would have come back again and done that again if required. By the time we did our research during my three-year term of office, the figure was below 50% in not much over a decade.

People will not support a criminal justice system that does not look after them. You will know that the Victims’ Strategy, which this Government produced when Theresa May was Home Secretary, made it very clear that they accepted that this kind of treatment in the criminal justice system retraumatises people, so my second reflection is that there is a lot of work still to do for someone in that job.

The Chair: You mentioned certain relationships, but what about the relationship with central government?

Dame Vera Baird: Yes, it depends very much on the attitude of the Minister and the interest in taking advice from the Victims’ Commissioner. That changed radically during my term of office, with very little that a Victims’ Commissioner could do. I appreciate that you said I stepped down. You obviously know quite well that I jumped before I was pushed, so it was not so successful for a while—although, setting central government aside, there was still stuff that we could do in co-ordinating victims’ services and so on.

Claire Waxman: My role is obviously focused very much on London. I was first appointed in 2017 as the Victims’ Commissioner for London when it was a new role, but that role has evolved very much over the last few years in some of the work that I have undertaken. In 2018, I did the first comprehensive review of the Victims’ Code of Practice, which identified a number of failings with that code and the need to strengthen it. Many of the criminal justice partners were not aware of how to deliver those rights and entitlements properly to victims, and victims were not aware of their rights either. That work, although it started in London and was very much focused on London, helped the Government to reform the Victims’ Code, and it has fed into their Victims’ Strategy and the Victims and Prisoners Bill, which is currently going through Parliament. So I work very closely with central government, including the Ministry of Justice.

I have published two London rape reviews, one in 2019 and one in 2021. The 2019 rape review actually led to Operation Bluestone, the pilot in Avon and Somerset that led to Operation Soteria, which the Government adopted in their end-to-end review. It was very much about making investigations by the police suspect-focused, as opposed to what they were doing. That came out of my London rape review, which focused very much on victims and their credibility and on a misunderstanding of the impact of trauma on rape victims and why there might be inconsistencies in their accounts. Vera and I worked closely together on the work on the extraction code in the policing Act, which she just talked about, to ensure that material from mobile phones that was being requested was strictly necessary and that victims were giving consent and understanding what they were consenting to, which was critical.

I continue to work closely with central government, the Ministry of Justice in particular. We are working in light of the fact that there is no national Victims’ Commissioner. Unfortunately, that role is still vacant a year on, which has put a huge amount of pressure on me and my little office to try to work with the Ministry of Justice, and with Peers and MPs, on the victims’ Bill, which is a landmark opportunity to strengthen victims’ rights. It is a key piece of legislation for victims in this country, yet we do not have a national Victims’ Commissioner in post to help to deliver the Bill and make sure that it has a meaningful impact for victims. My role at the moment is very much focused on that Bill and ensuring that it delivers for victims, and it needs to be radically strengthened in its current form.

I also work very closely with partners in London, especially the Met Police. That keeps me very busy, as many of you will be aware. Obviously, in light of the Casey review, there is a huge amount of work under way to really transform the Met and improve standards and culture.

The Chair: We will come on to that in a minute.

Claire Waxman: I am sure we will. Another big focus of my role, which is more national than just London, is the record Crown Court backlogs. London is disproportionately impacted, but those record backlogs are really impacting victims, witnesses and defendants, and delaying justice, and, as we know, justice delayed is justice denied. There is a huge impact on victims’ lives. I deal with victims in London whose cases are adjourned repeatedly. Some wait six, even seven, years from the time they report to the police to the time they get into a courtroom. Again, although we are trying to deal with those issues in London, it is very much a national issue that I continue to take to government, because we need to see more ambition in trying to tackle this court backlog.

Q2 Baroness Chakrabarti: I declare an interest as a council member of Justice, the all-party law reform group. I want to begin by thanking you both and congratulating you on such outstanding service to victims in general and perhaps rape victims in particular, for the reasons that you set out.

Claire, you mentioned the Casey review. It would be fair to suggest that public trust in policing is at a pretty low ebb. I want to ask both of you, but beginning with Claire, what you would do if it were down to you. Where would you begin to try to restore victims’ trust in the police? I mean victims in general, but perhaps women and minority-ethnic victims in particular.

Claire Waxman: The Baroness Casey report highlighted a number of key recommendations that I very much support, want to see and know that the Met Police is now working hard to implement.

Some of the key issues that came out—this relates to public trust and confidence—were about improving vetting standards: that is, looking at police officers in police forces. We know that, unfortunately, far too many abuse their position, which has an impact on public confidence but also on victims’ confidence. In the light of the terrible Carrick case, we were inundated with victims coming to us and saying, “Why should I report rape or domestic abuse to a Met Police officer when I don’t know who I’m reporting to? Who is the officer? They may well be an abuser themselves”.

I know the Met is working at speed to tackle by looking at its vetting procedures, but I also support the Met Commissioner’s calls on government because the Met does not have the ability to sack these officers. This is critical, because when these officers have been identified, the Met knows that they are abusing their position and it wants to get rid of them in order to restore public trust and confidence and make sure that victims have confidence; it needs to be supported to do that. I know that that report is sitting with the Home Secretary, and I believe that there are some delays with it. It is critical to listen to the Commissioner’s calls in that space.

We prioritise front-line policing, which came out in the Casey report. That is really important. We hear a lot on this. You talk about women and ethnic-minority communities needing that trust and confidence. Who can they relate to in the community in front-line policing? Who can they go to? Who do they know it is safe to report something to or take their concerns to? This reprioritisation of front-line policing is key.

It is clear that the police cannot restore the trust and confidence of women and girls in particular on their own. They need to recognise that and work with specialists from the violence against women and girls sector. We have pushed this with them a lot. We say, “Have them come in and work alongside you to help you, the police, to identify these perpetrators”. Time and again, especially in my work, we see cases being missed and victims’ cases not being picked up properly. The police are not joining the dots. They are not recognising coercive control, stalking, harassment or lower-level offences that can escalate. They are not recognising the risks posed to women. They need independent specialists from the violence against women and girls sector to come in and support them.

A big focus for me is the fact that, once victims have the confidence to come in and report, they lose trust and confidence very quickly because they get a poor response from the police and the criminal justice agencies. A concept that I have been pushing for a number of years is something like a victim care hub, so that, when a victim comes in to report, someone who is independent of the police and their criminal justice partners but works alongside them is there to support that victim and help them to navigate the complex, fragmented and lengthy justice process. They would ensure that the victim’s rights and entitlements from the Victims’ Code, such as the victim’s personal statement being taken and special measures being arrived at for court—in short, all the basic things that victims need—are being delivered at the right time.

Vera talked about procedural justice, which is critical to a victim not being retraumatised and getting good support and response from the justice system. We need to look at delivering this in a different way. I think that a victim care hub model will really help to restore trust and confidence for those who have come in but are losing trust and confidence in navigating their way through the criminal justice system. This is critical.

Baroness Chakrabarti mentioned women and ethnic-minority communities. We hear a lot from victims of domestic violence and sexual violence who have insecure immigration status. They are being told by the perpetrators that, if they report to the police, their information will be shared with immigration enforcement and they will be at risk of arrest, deportation or losing their children. That fear is enough to deter very vulnerable people from coming forward and reporting. This means that we have offenders acting with impunity, which puts the rest of the public at risk.

I, Vera, the Domestic Abuse Commissioner and even the Justice Committee have all called for a firewall to be implemented to protect victims when they come forward and report—that is, to assure them that their information will not be shared with immigration enforcement. That has not been brought forward, which is an absolute oversight of government. It has to be brought forward in the Victims and Prisoners Bill, because not only are victims not reporting because they cannot safely report as victims with insecure immigration status but they are being deterred from accessing the critical support they need out of fear. We have had some cases in London where the victim has gone to really good support services and those services have encouraged them to report, but, when they have reported, the Met Police has shared their data with immigration, and the victim, who desperately needed support, has gone on the run. This is a really big area where we continue to push and where we urgently need to see measures implemented.

Dame Vera Baird: To add to Claire’s central point about race, I completely agree. There was a super-complaint in which the IOPC, the College of Policing and HMIC also thought that the only way to solve this issue was to have a firewall. But none of it has happened.

I agree with Claire. I see a toxic core of male police officers coming out now who have deliberately recruited themselves into the police because they know that it is a tool they can use to abuse women, or have realised that it is a valuable platform from which to do exactly that, because they often come across vulnerable women who have been raped already or are in dire straits and who open their door and let them into their house.

Of course, the problem that has followed is that the other officers around them, who may not know the entirety but may sense something, find it easier, or maybe safer, in their chosen career to stay quiet about it. It is hard to overestimate the impact on people of belonging to a hierarchical, command-led, basically white male-dominated organisation in which you proceed by doing what your seniors have done. It is often dynastic: people’s fathers and brothers are police. It is often a segregated social community, because they are not sure how the fact that they have these extra powers or them being known to be police will necessarily aid them in social connection.

As Claire said, the solution is introducing a more open-weave outsider to the police’s approach. They are in fact quite a closed community. Of course, when they are recruited, they are trained to stand by each other in a quasi-military way when it comes to public order and so on, so it is actually encouraged that they should have that solidarity. It is very difficult to change. They clearly know that they are cleverer, they have more power and they know more about the reality—or believe they do—than the ordinary population.

Make no mistake: there are a lot of good police officers—that has to be said—and they just carry on doing what they can, but the culture is very problematic. I see Sir Mark Rowley as having made a good start in some ways, as Claire said. I believe there was a direct instruction to ‘reverse’ and to put ethics before solidarity, and to say that it is not acceptable for people not to report. What must happen is thatpeople report if they see something that they do not like. I feel that that is quite a strong thing.

However, I agree that there needs to be outside influence here. Sir Mark is doing his best, but how do we break this solidarity of the club so that stuff that is unacceptable carries on being unacceptable? I think neighbourhood policing is a very important step for that. On the face of it, that is remote from what we have talked about in connection with rape, but, as a Police and Crime Commissioner, I saw neighbourhood policing before it was knocked on the head by the cuts during austerity.

In neighbourhood policing, officers engage with the same community for a long time. Officers, as Sir Peter Fahy said to me once, often do not see people who are normally happy and so on. They see someone who has done something and they have to arrest them, the person is very excited and has probably done wrong, or they see a distressed victim. Here, officers just move among the community and get split loyalties between the hierarchy they belong to and the community they want to serve and do well for, and they get a large amount of intelligence that helps with crime detection. There is no doubt of that. That is certainly one way in which the pores of the police were more open and can be opened now.

To make a bit of an analogy with what Claire said, I think they should be recruiting people to do the modern job, not the job that policing used to be, which was chasing burglars over rooftops and driving fast cars. Now, at least 40% of it is about vulnerable people who are victims of rape, domestic abuse, stalking or child sexual exploitation, and people need to be brought in to deal with that. I do not think they need to be trained in how to carry a shield or a club. That may be a minor point, but that builds up that solidarity. Recruits probably need to come in certainly from specialist services but from all walks of life. In connection with rape, they definitely need to be trained for specialisms at a very early stage. The police need to recruit people for the particular function that they have now, but I do not think they do. I think that young men still go into the police force thinking that they should be dashing and chasing around.

Baroness Chakrabarti: You have both made some powerful and specific suggestions about improving culture and so on. I would like to go back to the concerns about recruitment, vetting, discipline and even dismissal. Some of us are very concerned that year on year we legislate for police powers without legislating for those particular standards. Do you think it is time to have a piece of national legislation governing all those standards of vetting, recruitment—possibly even with some affirmative action, dare I say it?—and then discipline as well?

Dame Vera Baird: Some kind of regulatory code would be a direct reference that everyone could use to appreciate what they have to do, so you are probably right.

I am not sure that we are not in the last-chance saloon with policing, quite honestly. That is what Louise Casey said. There is Sir Mark and, differently, Stephen Watson in Manchester, where there has been a different kind of collapse of respect for policing. You have to respect what Louise said. She was there for a whole year looking at it while we were sitting in our armchairs, so she is right to say that they need a further chance, but if it does not break up, I am not sure that we will not need a deep, serious, heavyweight inquiry into the future of policing soon.

For women, Operation Soteria is very important. Claire has definitely given it a boost. Sarah Crew, the chief constable of Avon and Somerset, is the heroine. She saw that they were the worst on conviction rates, so she invited academics in and said, “What are we getting wrong?” They told her in no uncertain terms what it is. With their assistance, she has turned it into a package that shifts the focus on to the defendant and away from inquiring into the credibility of the complainant. She has managed to drive that despite a dearth of funding and the fact that Soteria has been made limp by removing the academics completely. That is a very bad mistake, because the academics policed how it was being implemented, but now it is a self-assessment document. I do not know how you would do it, Baroness Chakrabarti, but if I had to self-assess myself, I think I would do quite well, really, and I am afraid that may be where we end up.

Still, Soteria, properly implemented, is good. I am told by Maggie Blyth, who is leading the police attack on failures in violence against women, that there is a similar adaptation towards domestic abuse. With those two introduced together, if we started to get victims of abuse and rape saying, “My goodness, the police were good”, we would be in a fundamentally good position. Those are my brief recipes.

Q3 Baroness Shackleton of Belgravia: Thank you both. That is very illuminating. Claire, I practise as a lawyer and I still find court very unpredictable. Most of my clients—I do divorce—are first-time users of a court, so they find it terrifying too. When they have been through the process, they can be very helpful to other people who go through it in order to give them support, having experienced it themselves. Quite a lot of victims are first-time victims and would need that sort of support. Are you able to recruit from that cohort people to support other people going through the process? I think that the people who have actually experienced it are the most empathetic and understanding.

Claire Waxman: You are talking about peer support, which is critical in victim support.

Baroness Shackleton of Belgravia: Yes. I am talking about after they have been through court.

Claire Waxman: That is interesting. We hear from victims and survivors all the way through the justice journey and after court. In response to your question, I would say that some would feel able to come and support others, but others are pretty broken from the whole experience. Remember, the criminal justice process is very lengthy, so it will have taken a very long time. Also, if you are a rape survivor, you are deterred from accessing counselling for fear that your therapy notes may be requested by the police and the CPS, and there is a risk that they might be shared with the defence. That is a deterrent for rape survivors when it comes to accessing counselling safely through the process. So some people are very damaged after the process and would not be able to give that support.

We would also need to be quite mindful because of the issue, which I think we will come to later in the session, that victims receiving support from other victims who have been to court is sometimes seen as coaching. We have to be very careful. Support services are told to not to allow victims to engage with other victims who have been to court due to issues of coaching. So there will be concerns, not from me but from others, about vulnerable victims.

Baroness Shackleton of Belgravia: There is a very narrow line between witness training and acclimatising someone to the horrendous experience of being alone in a witness box. That is a fine line to tread. However, someone who has been through the process is in a much better empathetic position to encourage people not to give up, to have the strength to continue and not to fear. That is all I would suggest.

Claire Waxman: It would depend on what their experience was like. Unfortunately, I hear from too many who have had such a negative experience that it would actually deter some victims from coming in, because of the brutal cross-examination they had faced.

Baroness Shackleton of Belgravia: You would only get the people who were positive. You would not get the negatives.

Claire Waxman: The issue we have is that there are not a lot in the positive pool. That is the reality of the criminal justice system. It would be a very small pool.

Baroness Shackleton of Belgravia: A bad idea, then.

Claire Waxman: No, not a bad idea. Peer support is an excellent idea, but the court experience is so damaging for victims and survivors who have gone through it. We will come to that shortly. That is the bottom line: that it could dissuade other victims.

Dame Vera Baird: One is that peer support works extremely well for anti-social behaviour victims coping with it in the neighbourhood. We certainly funded local authorities to provide that and to recruit people who had gone through anti-social behaviour and come out the other side. Anti-social behaviour is greatly underestimated. It is very traumatising, particularly if it is in your own home and you are chosen because you are a vulnerable person in the first place.

The police do not really take it seriously, because they think it is a kind of sub-crime. If my spade has been stolen out of the garden, it is a crime and I am a victim, but that is nothing like having people pestering me all around my house every day and generally making me feel persecuted, so it very much works there. A lot of people going to court who have been victims of crime that has made them vulnerable need specialist support by trained specialists rather than the help of peers.

Q4 Lord Blunkett: Good morning, Claire and Dame Vera. Thank you for being with us. I thought my question would be a bit left field, but it clearly is not. Two years ago, the committee—a few of us were on that committee at the time—undertook an investigation into the dangers and the genuine possibilities of technology in the criminal justice system.

You have already shed light this morning on some of the dangers: the lack of proportionality and the downloading of social media history, and the work that is going on in Avon and Somerset to counteract that; and the inappropriate sharing of technology of people’s information, which then puts them at risk.

Could both of you reflect on some of the positives, such as where we could use technology for the real-time updating of information to victims, who are often left completely at sea as to what is happening to their case, and the much more appropriate retention and protection of data and material? Again, Dame Louise Casey raised the issue of forensics, but it applies equally to technology. Can you think of ways in which this committee might recommend a positive way forward rather than just the fear of the misuse of it?

Claire Waxman: Focusing on the positives, victims get such an inconsistent response through the criminal justice system partly because the police, the CPS and the courts are all on different platforms—I know we have Common Platform, but a lot of issues have come with it—so victims’ cases are not gripped through the criminal justice system. When we look at the concept of the victim care hub, it is important that we look at the technology we need to ensure that when a victim comes into the process their information is held and can be accessed by anyone who is supporting them in order to give them timely and effective updates through the justice process.

That piece of work really needs to take place. We could look at technologies in witness care units, for example, which, especially in London, are very under-resourced and are struggling to deliver the right information and support to victims and witnesses going to court. If we had the technology in place to automate it and to inform those who are less vulnerable—police witnesses or professional witnesses, for example, because we know that they spend a lot of time communicating with them—they could then focus on the vulnerable victims and witnesses and make sure that they can give them that more personal, face-to-face time.

There are ways in which we could use technology far more beneficially than we are at the moment to support victims. However, we need to be careful. A few years ago, Track My Crime was trialled. It was supposed to be a data tool to improve communication to victims and update them when going through the process, but it became a sort of tick box. Victims complained to me that they would get information that there had been no progress, so although that information came to them quickly, online and in a way that they could easily access, they were not satisfied with it. They found it really upsetting, because what sat behind that information was that nothing was really happening on their case.

There is a lot of opportunity to use data and systems better to support victims, but we are not doing that properly at the moment. There are ways of looking at this positively, but there is obviously the negative side, which we have talked about. We need to make sure that all the data is secure and shared only with those the victim is aware it will be shared with, that the information is correct, and that it will not be exploited to undermine the victim in the way we have seen over the years in relation to rape victim cases, by attacking their credibility, casting aspersions about them and pushing them out of the justice process. We need to be very mindful of that.

Lord Blunkett: That is very helpful. I think you will agree, Chair, that part of our problem is finding out what is going on and whether anybody has actually monitored and taken notice of what is working and what is not. Dame Vera, what would you like to add to that?

Dame Vera Baird: Thank you, Lord Blunkett. Following on from what Claire said, when I was a Police and Crime Commissioner we tried to get updates. The problem with updates, of course, is that the police officer has to put them into the machinery in the first place, and if they are not going to do it that way it is hard to get them to do it in a different way. It all depends on the police officer. However, they devised a system that did not allow them to go any further with their investigative process unless they had updated. You had to tick that you had updated and show that you had updated. Technology came to our rescue exactly there: they could get no further unless they did that.

We found that a lot of people who were coming to court, and who had sometimes already accessed our victims’ services but left them because they are relatively short term, dropped out when they got the witness summons to attend, because it is all very well if it is months away, but if it is next Friday at 11 o’clock it is a different proposition. So we tried to link our victims’ services to the police, who delivered the summons, and to the CPS to say that they had been charged and to re-invite the victims’ services in to try to hold on to the people around the crisis of getting their summons.

That produced an enormous amount of GDPR and technological issues, because we wanted to offer this vulnerable person a service, pick them up again and take them right through the trial with an IDVA or victim support-type person. In the end, we made some progress on that and that vulnerable person system worked, but it was quite a job to do it.

There are other things that technology can help victims with. There is Section 28, under which vulnerable or intimated people can record their evidence at the beginning and have the tape served on the defence, who then cross-examines within a relatively short period of time, with two barristers, the defendant and the judge in the court and the victim at a distance across a television link. All that is filmed together, which makes a second video, and the two videos are then the evidence of a vulnerable victim at court. The victim need not attend, pre-trial therapy is free, and there is no worry that it will be required because it is no longer pre-trial.

Lord Blunkett: As a northerner, I know that, in Northumbria, Northumberland and Durham are not coterminous, but when you were the PCC and, later, the Victims’ Commissioner, did you get any sense that there was real sharing? Durham did a lot of work on the technology issues, as you will be aware. Were you able to share between the two police services?

Dame Vera Baird: We did not on technology as such. They had something called Red something. I cannot remember the technology system they had. It had a peculiar name. They certainly tried to sell it to us, but we did not take it in the end. I think the police in Northumbria now have Niche, which is one of the fairly widespread systems and is so so. But we shared in lots of other ways. Their Chief Constable, who is currently moving on to Police Scotland, was our Deputy Chief Constable, and there was quite a lot of interaction.

They were quite different, in the sense that Durham is small but Northumbria is the fifth largest because it covers the whole of Newcastle, Gateshead and Sunderland, so there were differences, but they worked together. When there was a domestic abuse allegation against an officer in Northumbria, I tried to get them to refer it to be investigated by Durham because it is hopeless for a victim to think that the accused will be investigated by his mates in his own force, but Northumbria police would not agree to do that and Durham would not agree to do the same for one of their number. So there were limits. That is a good idea, and if you want to make recommendations, that is a good one. People should not have their issue of domestic abuse by a police officer investigated by people he is likely to know. Durham has about 1,200 officers and they all know each other. Quite a lot of them are related.

Lord Blunkett: On the back of those remarks, I can only say, “No further questions, your worship”.

Baroness Shackleton of Belgravia: This is presupposing that, if you are a victim of crime, you want to have some sort of retribution against the person who has perpetrated that crime. What attitude do victims take away about community sentences? How do they feel about the perpetrators of crime serving their time in the community?

Supplemental to that, as you answer that question, if it were proven by some sort of evidential inquiry that community sentencing was less likely to lead to reoffending, do you think that would influence the answer that the victims would give?

Claire Waxman: That is an interesting one, because we talk to victims a lot about justice outcomes and what happens in their case. There is a misconception that all victims want really long sentences for their offenders and that is all they are calling for. Actually, many just want the offenders to stop, and to be reassured that no one else will be harmed by that individual.

If community sentences are used, the victim needs to understand that they have been safeguarded and will be safe—obviously, issues of risk and safety are critical—that the sentence will work to reduce reoffending and that there will be a positive benefit. If you manage victims’ expectations, they will accept and understand it, but that is often what is lacking in the dialogue with victims and the information that is given to them.

Where community sentences pose real alarm and distress is to victims where there is ongoing risk. They would not be appropriate for victims of domestic abuse, stalking or harassment where they fear that there is ongoing risk and we see breaches of bail conditions or protective orders such as restraining orders. One would need to understand that they just would not be applicable in that situation.

However, we have to address the fact that, for community sentences to be effective, we must look at probation and the way in which it can manage risk. Obviously, we have had two high-profile serious further offences, with the McSweeney and Bendall cases highlighting multiple failings in probation that put the public at risk and led to tragic outcomes. That impacts on trust and confidence for victims and the public in managing offenders in the community. We need to address those issues in probation, which is understaffed, does not have enough resources and is really struggling with being supported in training.

Dame Vera Baird: Victims vary, just like the rest of us, even though they are marked by crime. Some want revenge or really grim punishment, but many do not. Poorer victims, by and large—this is a huge generalisation, but victims tend to be poorer people; that is my experience as an MP in a poorer area—are not that amenable to the sort of mitigation of adverse childhood experiences. If they are told, “His father left home at the age of 12”, they are likely to say, “So did mine, but I am not a criminal”. It is a different approach.

My experience tells me that what victims want most of all is for it not to happen to anyone else. People turn their tragedies into campaigns for that very purpose—to try to turn the bad into the good. If one works on that assumption, and if you can say that these community sentences bring change and rehabilitation, there is leverage that helps it to be approved of.

They want things like their money back, if it has been stolen. They want the bike they saved all year for and bought for their kid and which was stolen on New Year’s Day back in some way. The courts do not play much of a role in that. Compensation is very thin, and poorly implemented if it is ordered. Clearly it has to reflect the poverty or whatever of the defendant. That seems to be a big miss. There should be some responsibility on the courts to mitigate the loss when making orders of that kind.

More broadly, people are readier for more positive sentences if, referring to what was said earlier, they are treated well by the criminal justice system in the first place. If they feel they have had a good service—which, as Claire said, just does not happen—they can afford to let the rehabilitation sentence go forward.

Q5 Lord McInnes of Kilwinning: My question follows on from that. We were all clear that we wanted to hear the views of victims when we were looking into community sentencing and the effect on offenders. The big tension for us is the balance between the rights of the victims and the rehabilitation that is necessary for the offenders. To go back to Baroness Shackleton’s question—removing, as far as we can, victims’ views of what they would think—given your knowledge of the system, how do you think the balance currently is between victims and the rehabilitation of offenders in the sentencing being handed down by courts?

Dame Vera Baird: It may be a slightly odd concept to look for a balance between those two. The explanation I gave of what victims need—namely, the rights in the Victims’ Code—is right. That is not part of the adversarial sentencing process. However, they need to have sentences explained to them, which never happens. There are cases, right up to today, I should not doubt—Claire will be able to reflect this—where someone pleads guilty to an offence that has a maximum sentence of five years, so the victim thinks they are safe for five years, but, of course, the defendant pleads guilty, so they will get a third off automatically, they may have been in custody for a few months, so they will get that deducted, and, if they have been on bail on a tag, they will get a day for every two days they were on the tag and so six months later they meet the victim in the Tesco down the road, which is shocking.

There was a plan for the MoJ to do what it does with some high-powered sentencing exercises now, which is to film them all and put them on a particular YouTube channel so that victims could look at them and understand it. They are rarely there. Even if they have been a witness, they will probably have gone by then, but they may not be a witness. Even if they are there, with all due respect to our learned judiciary, they obviously have to talk in technical terms to work their way through the guidelines, and it is not obvious to the public what that means. You really need an opportunity, when you are not keyed up, even if you are there, to look at what has been said and to get someone to help you to understand it. At particular levels of sentence, there should be probation officers involved, along with Victim Support, who could explain it. The CPS could certainly explain it if they are at court, but if you can go back to it again and again, you can at least understand it and feel however you do. At the moment, it is a big mystery, which is very unfortunate.

Sometimes we get things out of balance. I will give you a quick example. I do not know if anyone but me remembers the North Liverpool community court, which was introduced under the former Labour Government. I thought it was a great success, but it was scrapped. It was a problem-solving court in the sense that people looked for the criminogenic problem and tried to tackle that with a community sentence. The person had to come back every few months and explain to the judge how well they were doing. Boy, what a good process that was. Some young men who had never had any notice taken of them now had this well-dressed, intelligent, properly important figure telling them that it is important for them to stick to whatever they were doing.

To make it easy, they arranged on problem-solving court days to have all the resources around the court. So if they needed alcohol counselling, drug counselling, debt advice and so on, those resources were ready to help them to go forward. They did not have the same for victims. They came, and many of them needed alcohol-related or drug-related help, but there was nothing. We were completely wrong. It was great to have those resources there, but they needed to be open to victims as well. We can make mistakes like that.

As I say, looking strongly within the adversarial system, we say, “What’s the problem? It’s this person”, but we disregard the fact that somebody has been robbed and will remember and feel awful about it long after we professionals have left the case behind and done 5,000 others. There is care to be taken.

Claire Waxman: I do not believe that the rights of victims and the rehabilitation needs of offenders are opposed. I do not think that, by strengthening victims’ rights, we want to erode anything from defendants’ or offenders’ rights, especially around rehabilitation. It can be helpful in certain parts. I have worked in some high-profile cases with a number of bereaved families who are very upset at sentencing when the offender—we are seeing more and more instances of this—stays in the cell and refuses to come into the courtroom to hear the victim or their family read their personal statement.

This compounds the grief and trauma of the victim and their family. It is incredibly upsetting for them and they want to see something change, they want to see the offender brought into the courtroom. I work closely with the Prison Reform Trust and the Parole Board, which agree that it is really important for the offender to hear the victim’s personal statement. The mechanism of that statement is for the offender to really understand the harm and impact of their crime. They cannot start the rehabilitation process until they have fully understood that. Trying to strengthen the victim’s family’s rights in that process, which is what I am trying to do—it is called Face the Family—will also help with the rehabilitation of offenders. It is interesting sometimes to understand from victims and bereaved families where they feel failed, what the issue is and what we need to strengthen for them, because often it also helps with the rehabilitation of offenders.

We talk about restorative justice, which, if it is used in the right way with the right victims or bereaved families, is incredibly powerful. It is under-resourced. It is not well supported in the Victims’ Code, nor is it delivered. Again, in certain cases, such as in coercive control, domestic abuse or stalking cases, we do not want to see it being used because there is a danger and a risk, but when it is used in the right cases it helps with the rehabilitation of the offender but also with the recovery of victims and their families.

Q6 Lord Sandhurst: I should disclose that I practised at the Bar for 45 years and sat as a Recorder for 20 years. I am also the current chairman of research for the Society of Conservative Lawyers.

I want to ask you about the business of coaching—or not coaching—witnesses and getting them ready for court. What do you two believe is the right balance between, on the one hand, supporting victims and witnesses and, on the other, the prohibition on coaching them? Secondly, are victims and witnesses getting enough support? My focus on this is pre-court, really.

The Chair: You do not need to repeat what you have already said relating to this.

Claire Waxman: On the last question—whether they are getting enough pre-court support—my answer is no. That is a big issue for a number of victims and survivors. Going back to what I said earlier, the system is very fragmented, with lots of different agencies trying to provide support. What I see on the ground are victims and survivors who are meant to go into court but are not even aware that they are entitled to special measures. There is a lack of information being given to them and explained in a trauma-informed way so that they understand what they are entitled to. So they are going into court often without having met the prosecutor beforehand; they meet them on the morning of or just before the trial.

On the other side, defendants will obviously have met their defence team a number of times and will be prepared, so it is not a level playing field at all. We are setting victims and survivors up to fail in that environment. I was in Quebec recently and learned that they run a witness programme for victims, including child victims. It is a very interesting programme. It is not coaching; they do not talk about any part of the case. They do a mock trial and say, “Tell us what you saw when you went to the cinema”, or something like that, just to get the witness used to answering questions and speaking. They explain what is going to happen in the court environment, who everybody is and what will be expected of them. There is no discussion of the actual evidence in the trial; it is a mock trial. It is really successful in ensuring that the victim/witness has the confidence to come into a courtroom and can answer the questions as effectively as they can. They are prepared for the court experience, and no coaching is involved.

That is very much the way we need to be going here, because I see victims being put into a courtroom experience when they have absolutely no idea what is going to happen. There is often really brutal cross-examination—it is brutal for some—and they are just floored by the whole experience and unable to give good evidence, especially when they have waited so many years to get into the courtroom and there is a lack of support and information running up to it.

We need to be doing a lot more to better support victims going into a court as witnesses. Running up to the court, they should meet their prosecutors. In Quebec, they meet victims. In rape cases, they meet the victim at least three times before they go to court so that they are reassured about what is happening in the process and feel confident.

Lord Sandhurst: Two questions arise from that. The Quebec system is an adversarial system like ours. It is not like the French system; it is not inquisitorial. Is that correct?

Claire Waxman: For rape, the defendant chooses whether it is a jury trial or a judge-only trial.

Lord Sandhurst: So there would be a difference when the questioning is done by, say, three inquisitorial judges.

Claire Waxman: Yes. The witness programme applies for all. It would be different—they would tailor it slightly—but they prepare them for going into a court.

Dame Vera Baird: The weakness of the Victims and Prisoners Bill—one of many—is that there is no mechanism for complaining or enforcing the Victims’ Code. All the rights that we have decided since 2006 and which are merited by victims and should be delivered are not being delivered. There is nothing to be done about it if they are not, and this Bill will make no change.

You can get help to understand the court process from victim support—I use the broad term—across a range of resources, from Rape Crisis to specialist men’s organisations and so on. They can help a bit with that. Court familiarisation is available: Citizens Advice, which is part of the court-based Witness Service, will meet you and show you around. Special measures can also be helpful, but they are not tailored to an individual where they are automatically entitled.

The experience of the judges whom we surveyed—they were incredibly helpful in answering—was that there is little regard for personal needs, because the measures are automatic. It is whatever is at the court. Is it a case of someone sitting in a separate room and giving evidence over a television link? Is it a case of them sitting behind a screen and giving their evidence in that way? Is it whatever the court culture is? It needs to be tailored to what the person wants. Nobody really asks that question and, even when this is not automatic, it is the same again: it tends to be based on the court culture when it needs to be specific.

The more you can do under Section 28, the better. People are terrified of going to court. First, it is too pompous. It is full of suave and self-confident people—barristers, solicitors, police officers and judges—but it is also full of the defendant and their family, often. They meet them at the court door and there is no guarantee that they will have a separate entrance at all. So the more you can do under Section 28 so that they do not have to go near the place and endure that not-far-off torture, as Claire set out well, the better.

There is additional stuff about the adversarial system. You will remember that about a decade and a half ago the CPS fought to be able to speak to witnesses at court—and now requiring them to speak—so that they could explain a lot about the case. They could even tell them the nature of the defence, explaining the process and who was who, and instil some confidence by talking directly to the victim. That is done very rarely now.

The CPS, having fought for it, have really retreated from doing it. We found from inspectors’ reports that they do not want to talk to victims at all. They think their job is for the state and that they should not be contaminated by the victim, but they were able—as professionals with someone else there—to give a really good account to make the person feel better and confident in court. It is right that it is done by a professional, but it is quite risky letting IDVAs, ISVAs and so on explain it because it is hard to draw the line, as we have discussed. But if it is done by the CPS, it is pretty flawless. It is a pity that it has withdrawn from that, and it needs to start doing it again.

Lord Sandhurst: Would you like to see the victims or witnesses meet the trial advocate? The CPS lawyer—certainly if it is outside the Magistrates’ Court and in a Crown Court, where the serious ones are—will be a trial advocate.

Dame Vera Baird: As far as I know—I am obviously a year out of date—that meeting still happens. It is usually the barrister, about three minutes before they go into court, saying, “Good morning, Mrs Smith”.

Lord Sandhurst: That is what I thought you would say—three minutes.

Dame Vera Baird: There should be an earlier meeting with the CPS person in charge of it, and then a much more fundamental meeting with the barrister. Then they will be confident that they know who is who and what is happening.

Baroness Shackleton of Belgravia: Claire, where do you draw the line about coaching? I have had witnesses in the box who are subject to domestic abuse, and one way of getting out of domestic abuse is to agree. Cross-examination, by definition, wants the subject to agree with the question, so to get out of the witness box they just say, “Yes, you're right”. Somebody needs to be able to say, without coaching the witness, “You don’t have to agree with the question being put to you by the prosecutor”. Is that coaching?

Claire Waxman: At the moment, what little amount of interaction the victim will get with the advocate before they go in is just to be told, “Answer it honestly and say exactly what you feel is right”. In a way, they are told not to—

Baroness Shackleton of Belgravia: The problem is that they have been conditioned over many years to go away just to buy peace.

Claire Waxman: That is why I talked about the programme in Quebec. It was designed with prosecutors and has had judiciary oversight, so it is really important to look at that because there are those sorts of issues. They also do a particular programme for child witnesses; as you can imagine, they would also want to agree and get out of that environment. As I said when I met the Minister recently, we really should be looking at this, because it looks like good practice. It is not coaching, but it is giving them the tools and the confidence to navigate that process.

Baroness Chakrabarti: Also on coaching, a few years ago I think it was uncovered that outdated guidance was still in place saying that rape victims should be discouraged from going to therapy.

Claire Waxman: It is still there. Although it has changed under the pre-trial therapy guidance, it is still used against them if they have gone for therapy. You talked about the peer support; they are not allowed to engage with that support for fear that there will be coaching from other victims.

Baroness Chakrabarti: What is your view of that?

The Chair: I think we can read between the lines of what we have heard already.

Claire Waxman: Vera might be more diplomatic.

Dame Vera Baird: I do not know about my diplomacy skills, but the issue that Baroness Shackleton raised is a broader one. There obviously needs to be some support to get over the coercive control and its impact on a broader basis, and there needs to be the time and the skills to do that automatically. The victim support services are grossly underfunded.

It is appalling that pre-trial therapy ever comes into play. People are shocked to hear that you can just pierce a person’s confidentiality and say, “We need to see that. We will have a sort of blind, but we need to see it only if you mention the rape”. For goodness’ sake, they have to mention it, because that is what it is about. It is a very bad position: a person might get the help they need by getting their therapy, perhaps at the cost of that therapy going before the defendant. So they tell their therapist in all confidence what he did and how it makes them feel, and then the defendant—the very last person who they would ever want to know about it—gets to see it if there is any inconsistency between what is in there and what she said to the police. Of course, they are different purposes: “This is not about fact; this is about how I feel”. So you get the help you need at that risk or, as with most people, you do not get the help you need, which is appalling. That is another advantage of Section 28, because you can do it relatively quickly and get therapy after you have given your evidence. We should chew more on that.

Claire Waxman: I have one tiny point to make on the back of that, if I may. We are not saying that there should be a blanket ban on therapy notes. In a lot of other countries that we have looked at there is judicial oversight, so it will come before a judge to decide if it is needed and absolutely necessary. That is the way we need to go here in this country. I keep talking about Quebec, but when I talked about how we do it here, honestly, there was such shock from government officials, their MoJ and the prosecutors there.

Dame Vera Baird: Every state in Australia, which has exactly our adversarial process—except Queensland, which is getting it—has a complete ban on trauma therapy notes, unless a judge decides that it is appropriate on a bipartite fight in court about it.

The Chair: Of course, this applies in other situations—I am thinking particularly of modern slavery—if somebody has been exploited. But let us not go there, because I am being a party pooper and I keep on looking at my watch.

Q7 Lord Beith: Claire, I will ask you about trials abroad. This is not just someone who suffers a robbery or theft while on holiday. It also includes people while in a European country, because half of the EU countries do not extradite their own citizens, so the case has to take place under their jurisdiction. Is the Victims’ Code itself sufficiently strong to support people in those circumstances and, beyond the code, what is the reality?

Claire Waxman: Quick answer: no. Families who are bereaved by homicide abroad are not included in the Victims’ Code, which is very much for offences that take place here in England and Wales. I work very closely with the brilliant organisation Murdered Abroad, and I know Vera has worked with it as well. It supports a lot of the families and victims who are abroad and trying to fight for justice. They are very much left on their own and have been lobbying for many years to be included in the Victims’ Code, or for the current Victims and Prisoners Bill to recognise the rights and entitlements of those victims.

These are British citizens who are very much omitted from any type of support at all. They have to try to navigate language barriers on their own and it is difficult to get translation services. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office is not giving them the right information and support, or access to that, while over there. So, yes, they should be part of the code and this legislation should be addressing the needs of families who are bereaved by homicide abroad or find themselves victims abroad.

Dame Vera Baird: I agree completely. We have both said in the consultation on the Bill that a big miss is that they do not necessarily get a family liaison officer. At home, everybody in a murdered person’s family gets a family liaison officer whose role is exactly what it says: to give them support, but also to make sure they understand the investigation and what is going on. It is equally important, if not more so, that there should be such a link when the whole thing is being done abroad and you are so much more remote from it.

That not being in the code at all is a big miss. They have no real entitlement to victims’ services. Sometimes some take them on—if they even know about them—but without an FLO the police do not even necessarily regard them as a victim at all and do not engage them with victims’ services. Obviously, the police pass people to victims’ services much of the time; that is how people go there. So it depends on our diplomatic services to help people abroad, and the response to that is variable.

Lord Beith: You referred in both cases to homicide, but what about a range of other crimes that are deeply distressing, and, of course, crimes that have taken place in this country where the accused person is in a country that does not extradite to us?

Dame Vera Baird: What we said probably applies to all of those. The organisation is called Murdered Abroad, but the principles remain pretty well the same: people are remote and do not get funding for translation, as Claire said. There are complications in Murdered Abroad, which is why we take it so seriously. It might sometimes be helpful to have a coroner’s inquest, for example, but that requires you to bring the body home, and people do not know that. It is a hugely costly process, and they do not always get help with it, so they sometimes miss the opportunity to get a local declaration of justice by agreeing for the person to be buried there or to be cremated and have their ashes brought back, which does not bring an inquest; an inquest requires the body to be here. So they are at the pinnacle of it, but there are exactly the same failures from not being in the code for other serious crimes, I am afraid.

Q8 Baroness Henig: I preface my question by thanking you for giving evidence, because it is so useful that practitioners who work in the local community and have such experience across local communities are giving evidence. You know the practicalities, you have been there and you have seen the problems, which is helpful to us as a committee.

We talked earlier about the accountability—or lack of—of police to the community and victims. Vera in particular spoke about that. I know that this is probably a prejudice of mine, but I happen to believe that, since 2010, accountability has possibly weakened because of the PCC system. I dare say that Vera might think differently, but I have grave reservations about that.

Even worse in a way, some PCCs share the sort of characteristics of the police that were described earlier. So I have some reservations. In other words, there is a rather uneven distribution of PCCs across the country. In a way, therefore, that is how I am framing my question to you about local victims’ commissioners at PCC level. To some extent, I am worried that, depending on who the PCC is, they might be welcomed or not, as the case might be. How do you think the idea of local victims’ commissioners at PCC level would work in practice?

Dame Vera Baird: Claire is a good example, so she can obviously talk about her own experience. We should definitely outlaw allowing police officers to stand as PCC candidates. There was a raft of them at first—they were not bad people; fine—but you are either getting the public in to supervise or you are not, and getting a retired police officer does not work. There were some stories of poor outcomes there, so you definitely have some points. At the moment, some of the PCCs are quite happy to have their own victims’ champion. Some do not want to be dictated to about how they spend their money, and there is a bit of a political division there, so one tries not to dictate.

On the point of a victims’ champion, one really wants a complaints system, or a way of enforcing your rights and making sure that you get them, that is absolutely necessary but not available to anyone. As a victim, I do not want to go into court through the same entrance as the man who mowed down my child in his car. I do not want to be face to face with him sitting in the waiting room and then be able to complain about not getting my rights under article 8 of the code; I want it stopped before it starts. In order to get that active working practice of trying to make sure that people get their rights—backed up, of course, by a complaints system—you need someone local. I cannot do it.If I were the Victims’ Commissioner there would be nothing that I could do from here, but the complaint needs to go to some body.

One would want all the victims’ services in the victims’ hubs that PCCs fund with national money to be well aware of the Victims’ Code. They are not particularly aware of it now. It cuts no ice with the agencies—the CPS, the police and the courts—because they are not particularly aware of it. You want them to be very aware of what victims are entitled to, so that when, in the best system, they are standing beside the victim at various stages, they can say, “But they are entitled to this thing”. That ought to be the first step that is taken. You cannot expect a victim, who may be very traumatised and is always demeaned, to be able to argue their own corner about their rights, but that is how victims’ support workers from victims’ hubs run: they are funded by PCCs and might be able to do that.

If they just do not manage it, they need some place of resort—ultimately for a complaint—and someone who is victim centred and has authority. In most cases, the PCCs gain authority with all the agencies around them. They obviously have to work with the courts, and they chair their local criminal justice boards, where everyone comes together to thrash out problems. So if I, victim support worker Smith, cannot get what I think my victim needs, I should contact Vera Baird, the victims’ champion in Northumbria, and say, “Look, she needs a translator and she’s not getting one. Can you help?”

It should not be that nobody is there to do that, they do not get a translator, so they do not give their best evidence, and they complain if it is at all possible to do so, if they even know that they are entitled to. What happens is that Vera Baird, victims’ champion, knows Sunderland police and knows the right chief superintendent to telephone and say, “Look, this is what I’m hearing. Will you have a look and sort this out?” That is how that victims’ champion position ought to work.

Baroness Henig: Would that person be appointed by the PCC, or would they be elected?

Dame Vera Baird: No, it is just an appointment, like how Claire and I were appointed.

Baroness Henig: Would that be by the PCC, because that would just be an expansion of patronage, if you were not careful.

Dame Vera Baird: There are things called appointments that are not patronage. The PCC has responsibility for commissioning victims’ services, and you cannot get away from that—that will not be done without a needs assessment organised from that position. So a victims’ champion clearly should be part of the PCC set-up. One PCC wants their deputy to do it. They are now compelled to have deputies, because the consequences of someone dying or resigning are huge election costs. It may not be perfect that it is a deputy, but we should not say exactly who it should be. We should say, “These are the functions you need to fulfil”.

The other part of it is that they will bring to the national Victims’ Commissioner all their local information. I do not know how well it is going in Northumbria now, but they can tell me, and they can tell me from Dorset and Durham as well, and we can then have a national picture of whether the code is working and how it is being implemented.

Over to Claire, who is one of these excellent people, appointed by patronage.

Claire Waxman: It is really important that PCCs have an independent person that they appoint, which is what I have been—I am very much independent of the Mayor’s office, although I work alongside it. I am that ear on the ground, listening to what is happening for victims, as Vera said. Victims’ organisations and victims contact me directly, and it helps for me to identify what is happening in London and the challenges and barriers. I take that to the Police and Crime Commissioner—the Mayor of London—and I sit on the London Criminal Justice Board, and I am very much there on behalf of victims. I am there not for the police, the CPS or the courts but to push the victims’ interests and that agenda and to make sure that the services that the PCCs commission meet the needs of victims in that area and that the criminal justice agencies in London deliver as they should for victims. It is an incredibly important role. There has been a lot of significant change, not just in London but nationally.

I appreciate that London has its own scale and challenge and that other, smaller forces may not necessarily think that they need someone. However, you need someone who is very much there to champion the voices and interests of victims, picking up the local and regional issues. This is where it came from; Vera and I worked together exceptionally closely, and I would always see what was happening in London and then meet Vera regularly to take up some of the critical issues I was seeing, because I believed that they were national issues that needed to be gripped. We worked together on some of them. For others, Vera championed them and delivered the work on her own through her office. It worked exceptionally well, which is why we both believe that all PCC areas should have a local victims’ commissioner or champion who is there to understand what is happening for victims in their area.

Dame Vera Baird: They should be called a champion, because otherwise they would get muddled with the Victims’ Commissioner nationally.

Q9 Baroness Prashar: I add my thanks for your very helpful evidence and your clear and comprehensive answers. My question is about parole and the Parole Board. As you know, the Victims and Prisoners Bill contains some changes to the Parole Board. I would like to hear from you what this will mean from the victims’ point of view.

Claire Waxman: The Parole Board measures that have come in through the Victims and Prisoners Bill were very much designed through the previous Justice Secretary’s eyes and agenda. There is no evidence to suggest that these measures were actually needed. Nobody looked at them from the perspective of the impact on victims and bereaved families. That is what I have done in my role, because unfortunately we do not have a national victims’ commissioner. We have worked closely with agencies that support bereaved families and heard from those families.

We also work with the Parole Board, the Prison Reform Trust and many other agencies to understand what this process means. It means that the Justice Secretary can veto a decision that the Parole Board makes, but, of course, the prisoner will then be able to appeal the process. We will see all prisoners appealing that process, which will pull victims and bereaved families into a longer process. I speak to families. Many of them have been in the Parole Board for seven and eight years. It is relentless. It comes around very quickly. After six to nine months they are pulled back into that Parole Board process. They are then given a false sense of hope, because the Justice Secretary has come in and vetoed the decision that the Parole Board made, so they believe that that is the end. It will not be: they will be pulled into an appeal process.

No consideration has been given by government as to who will support these bereaved families in that extra process. When I have asked the Government about this, the answer I got is, “The Parole Board could do that”. The Parole Board does not have victim liaison officers to do this, so it would come back to Probation. As I talked about earlier, Probation would not be able to cope with this—it cannot cope at the moment—in providing victim liaison officers to do this extra part of the process. These measures are incredibly dangerous for victims and bereaved families, giving them a false sense of hope and pulling them into a protracted and much lengthier process. It is completely unjust and unfair.

Also, it will cost more than the entire Parole Board budget to bring these measures in. This was a victims Bill. I started campaigning for a victims law—I am looking at Baroness Hamwee, because it has been many years since I have talked about this with her—but it has taken more than 10 years to bring in this victims Bill. It was there to strengthen victims’ rights to justice and support. Part 1 of the Bill is supposed to focus on doing that, but it is very light—there is not much detail in it—and no funding is allocated to deliver any meaningful change for victims on the ground. The money has been put into Part 3, where is no evidence to suggest that it is needed.

The Government’s response on why they wanted to do this was that it is because public safety is a critical issue. But if public safety is a critical issue, we need to look at sorting out the issues in probation. That is where we need to focus. So I am afraid to say that I do not agree with Part 3 of the Bill. I would like to see the money reallocated to victim support services and to agencies that need to deliver the Victims’ Code effectively. Let us train the police and the CPS. Let us ensure that they have the right resources to deliver rights and entitlements to victims through the criminal justice system.

Dame Vera Baird: Apart from it being a blight on the separation of powers and a gross interference in judicial independence that, frankly, should never be countenanced and will, I hope, be severely opposed when the Bill comes here, it does exactly what Claire said. Once punishment and retribution have been extracted from the prisoner, they are then free to apply for parole again and again.

It is a painful process, even now. People used to deliver their VPS, their victim personal statement, across a line—it was better than going to Wormwood Scrubs, quite honestly—and then they left. Then came the move to have the victims and their families there too. Okay, that cannot be stopped if that is they want, but they are unprepared for it. It is not like a rehearing of the trial in any way. It is all about the person who is the prisoner. It is about how good they are—they stroke the cat every time they pass it. It says how good they are, how they have got their sexual proclivities under control and how they are ready. Sometimes, it involves criticism of the victim and an undermining of the way the case was put. An experience like that, unprepared for and without victim support to tell people what is likely to be coming, is likely to be just hopelessly retraumatising. Then they will have to go through it again in another couple of years’ time. The combination is pretty dreadful.

It also takes away from the focus that there should be in this Bill on improving victims’ rights. I am sorry to say that we made a 93-page submission about how this Bill should be. Members, now they have heard us speak, will not be surprised to hear that it was 93 pages long, but it was to try to get a real focus on making a difference. The Bill fails completely, exceptionally so in the area of parole and because it takes away the focus on victims’ rights.

Claire Waxman: What is really disappointing with Part 3 is that, if this was a victims Bill, changes could be made in the Parole Board to improve that process. As I said, bereaved families are brought into the process every year. It starts very quickly. They have gone through it all, and then, six months later, they will come back into it again because the prisoner has a right to apply every year.

From talking to the Parole Board, I know about some of the measures that we could look at. It is also a lot of time for the Parole Board to spend on doing these processes. If nothing has changed, perhaps we should look at the prisoner coming back in two or three years’ time and putting some structures in place to prevent the impact on bereaved families that we see. You hear what they have to go through once they are in the Parole Board process and it is relentless. People forget because the crime happened so many years ago and, often, post sentencing, everyone forgets about the victim or the bereaved family but, for them, it is a life sentence.

Baroness Prashar: Initially, you said that this was conceived under the previous regime. Do you think it is likely to survive, given the strong comments you have made?

Claire Waxman: I hope not. We have a very sensible Justice Secretary, and I am sure he is aware of all the issues. Let us hope that we will see some changes here.

Dame Vera Baird: There is a stroke of optimism. I do not know whether it will change, but I have just a few sentences to add. This is a bit of a lost territory for victims. Okay, they can do a VPS, but they need support from victim liaison officers in the Probation Service, who are a little coterie on their own. They are not highly regarded. They are few, they are underfunded, and they are not there with the sort of capacity that victim support has to give appropriate advice and support. They are there to do a particular kind of job and then leave. This is a bit of a desert for victims, and we should not have opened the doors to them without making sure that support was available.

Q10 Lord Filkin: I thank both of you for your extremely helpful, if disturbing, evidence. The process will be extremely valuable for parliamentary scrutiny even though it is not parliamentary scrutiny.

I want to ask quite a technical question. As you know, Independent Public Advocates will be appointed if the Bill proceeds. What will the relationship between them and Victims’ Commissioners be? Can you give us your views on whether they should co-operate and, if so, how? Should they get involved in circumstances where an advocate has been appointed? What will be the difference between their roles, and how independent they are? There is a clutch of questions there, so pick the ones that you feel are most salient and most important, given the time.

Dame Vera Baird: I can make my contribution and then hand over to Claire.

There is a statutory bar on the national Victims’ Commissioner engaging in any individual case of any kind, so there would be no interaction except informally and on an agreed basis. Even though we were not allowed to take on any individual cases, 70 or 80 such cases came through every month that we had to deal with, so sometimes we were able to handle individual cases informally by looking at lessons to be learned and principles to take forward, but there is no question of the national Victims’ Commissioner being allowed to get involved in things like Hillsborough and so on.

The Chair: So that applies to inquiries as well as criminal cases.

Dame Vera Baird: You are just not allowed to take on any individual cases.

The Chair: No. I just wanted to be clear about that.

Dame Vera Baird: And a definition of a victim of crime would no doubt also get in the way.

Claire Waxman: The roles are very distinct, and, as Vera has highlighted, there are legislative constraints in the national role on your being involved. However, the two should work together, and there will be lessons to take from the IPA’s work that would be useful to the national Victims’ Commissioner and support that IPA role in understanding the victim support landscape. That is how we would work, probably locally, with an IPA: understanding what the victim support landscape is like and who we should be liaising and working with on the issues that are coming up for the IPA when they are dealing with victims of large-scale events.

Although my role does not have a ban on working on case studies, it is an incredibly small office that does not have the resources to work on casework, so we cannot. Again, if there is a local IPA working with us, we would support them and work with them as much as we could, but the roles are very distinct.

Baroness Chakrabarti: So you see no risk or confusion between the two roles.

Claire Waxman: No, because the IPA’s role is, and should be, very well defined in their remit.

Baroness Shackleton of Belgravia: I have a quick question for both of you, and I add my thanks to you for being here. You say, quite rightly in my view, that Sir Mark should have the power to control his own police force. Is there anything that you think this committee could do to help make that happen?

Lord Blunkett: Before you answer that, a group of former Home Secretaries are talking now about how to bring some pressure to bear to get this resolved.

Baroness Shackleton of Belgravia: Excellent. Thank you for answering that, Lord Blunkett.

Dame Vera Baird: I think we nod in the direction of Lord Blunkett’s expertise and leave it there.

Baroness Shackleton of Belgravia: We can add their names to the very many people who would support such a move.

Dame Vera Baird: We would obviously support that. He needs to be in charge of his own troops.

The Chair: Would either of you like to add anything? I am sure you could take us right through the afternoon.

Dame Vera Baird: It would take far too long. Thank you very much from hearing from us both. It was generous of you.

The Chair: I feel I have a Second Reading speech that could go on for an hour and a half on this Bill, but I am sure we will talk to you as individuals, through party groups and whatever before it comes to us, in any event.

Dame Vera Baird: We would both absolutely welcome that.

The Chair: Thank you. That concludes the public session.