Contribution
I thought long and hard about speaking today. I will allow right hon. and hon. Members from the legal profession to make the legal arguments better than I can, and will allow Members who rightly have procedural or rights-based concerns for defendants, which I share, to raise them. I trust that those points will be satisfactorily covered. I want to focus my remarks on a particular perspective that I feel has been too often ventriloquised in this debate, and I hope that the House will be gentle with me as I do so.
I have spoken before in this place about having post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of being the victim of a crime, but I have never specified the nature of that crime, and in doing so now I am aware that I am waiving my right to anonymity, and aware of the personal consequences that come along with that.
I care profoundly about rape victims facing intolerable delays for their day in court. I know only too well what that feels like, because, after being raped at an event that I attended in my capacity as a Member of Parliament, I waited 1,088 days to go to court. Every single one of those days was agony, made worse by having a role in public life that meant that the mental health consequences of my trauma were played out in public, with the event that led to my eventual sectioning for my own safety still being something that I receive regular social media abuse about from strangers to this day.
But here is the kicker. In this debate, it feels as if experiences like mine have been weaponised and are being used for rhetorical misdirection in relation to what this Bill actually is. The violence against women and girls sector has not had the opportunity to come together to discuss it, and the Government’s framing and narrative has been to pit survivors and defendants against each other in a way that I think is deeply damaging.
We have been told that if we have concerns about the Bill, it is because we have not been raped, or because we do not care enough for rape victims. The opposite is true in my case; it is because I have been raped that I am as passionate as I am about what it means for a justice system to be truly victim-focused. It is because I have endured every indignity that our broken criminal justice system could mete out that I care about what kind of reform will actually deliver justice for survivors and victims of crime more widely. In our manifesto, we promised specialist rape courts. This Bill is not that.
The transition away from jury trials in certain cases might itself take up operational time, with changes to an already overstretched system entrenching issues and delays. The timeline for these changes to take effect is 2028-29. We know what works because it is already happening in a few key areas, including pioneering work in Liverpool and Preston Crown courts in the north-west. This is a bearing down on waiting lists that could be taking place in months, not years—proven, meaningful and significant reductions in waiting times for complainants and defendants, rather than speculative, unevidenced reductions that the Institute for Government says could be as little as 1% to 2%, and coming years down the track. It is worth saying that the Bar Council believes that even that 1% to 2% reduction is wishful thinking, so we risk offering false hope to rape victims, rather than real change.
We know that juries are more diverse than the judiciary, and an unintended consequence of these changes could be that women from minoritised backgrounds are less likely to come forward, not more. Juries do not make perfect decisions, but neither do judges. An unintended consequence of measures that enabled pre-recorded evidence has been significant slippage in case handling, which is where the most significant procedural delays are. A clear re-prioritisation is needed here, alongside the expansion of recorders in cases involving rape and serious sexual offences.
The second thing to say is that the Bill does little for instances in which a rape victim actually comes to court. I still have almost as many nightmares about my experience on the witness stand as I do about my rape. The defence barrister, who had previously faced investigation after a witness took her own life following cross- examination in a different rape case, does not seem to have learnt much from that experience, and went for me in a way that undermined all the progress I had made in therapy and led me to blame myself for the eventual acquittal. We need far greater safeguards for those giving evidence. Actually, we need a reframing of the fact that legally you are a “witness” at your own trial. It is wild to me that we are still arguing, after many years, about a person’s right to a free transcript of their own trial, particularly as the recent move to allow access to sentencing remarks does nothing to help with closure for those whose cases sadly do not end in a conviction.