Let me start by thanking my right hon. Friend the Minister for the constructive way in which he has engaged with the Bill since its Second Reading. In the interests of time, I will confine my comments to the two amendments that I have tabled, which have cross-party support and to which I think the Government are listening intently.
Amendment 1 would recognise as victims people who have been silenced by non-disclosure agreements. Those people are victims by virtue of the very fact they have been silenced, not knowing if they can talk to anyone without incurring legal consequences. The Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act 2023 already deems the use of NDAs to be unlawful when there are allegations of bullying, harassment or sexual misconduct in publicly funded universities, and my amendment is intended to do the same in other spheres. Some individuals making such allegations are already treated by the Government as needing protection in law; my amendment would merely apply what is seen as essential legal protection in universities to everyone.
Unfortunately, despite two warning notices issued by the Solicitors Regulation Authority alerting solicitors to NDA misuse, one in three solicitors’ firms are still apparently unaware of the issues. I therefore think it is time to act through legislation to change a culture which, seven years on from #MeToo, continues to see it as acceptable for those in the legal and human resources professions to use devices that are so destructive to the individuals concerned. The United States, Canada and Ireland have already legislated in this regard. I listened carefully to the Minister’s opening remarks, and I definitely heard a door being left wide open to a change in the Bill. I hope we will see measures to outlaw this bad practice sooner rather than later, because the time to leave it to the regulators is past; that has not worked.
I thank Rape Crisis for helping me to draft new clause 19, which concerns access to counselling records. Rape and sexual abuse are traumatic crimes and survivors need to gain access to therapy, but frontline services are reporting that survivors are being deterred from accessing support because records are routinely requested by the police and trawled through, often unnecessarily. A recent review showed that nearly a third of 342 requests for survivors’ records contained requests for counselling records,
and nearly a third of those requests related to victims’ reliability or credibility rather than aiming to establish the facts of the incident involved.