My Lords, I support the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, in this amendment. I pay tribute to her and to Sarah Olney, who has been meticulous in her pursuit of clarity on this issue.
At a trial, the judge’s summing-up and sentencing remarks in particular are of obvious and great importance to victims. As the noble Lord, Lord Marks, said in the debate on the previous group, for many victims the experience of being in court is highly stressful and often quite traumatic, and one would not exactly have total recall of what was going on. Indeed, I suspect that most of your Lordships would not have total recall of many of our proceedings here. The ability to read and review the summing up and sentencing and ensure that they are taken fully on board is surely a fundamental right.
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Imagine the proceedings of Parliament without the record in Hansard. What is said in both Houses, particularly at the Dispatch Box, is often used to interpret the intent of particular elements of policy or legislation. What is said matters—and what is said by a judge in court is of equal importance, particularly to the victim, and particularly when it comes to parole hearings.
We are asking His Majesty’s Government to provide all Crown Court sentencing remarks to victims upon request, at no cost; for all Crown Court sentencing remarks in due course to be published as a matter of public record and interest, like Hansard; and, also in due course, for the transcripts or audio of hearings to be provided to victims upon request, again at no cost. As the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, said, technology is advancing at such a pace that it is really not that difficult for simultaneous transcriptions to be made in real time.
This is not a new issue. In 2011 a fellow Cross-Bencher, the noble Baroness, Lady Casey, led a review into the needs of families bereaved by homicide. She pointed out the imbalance between the established rights of defendants and appellants to access transcripts and the great difficulties experienced by victims and their families. Recommendation 13 of the Lammy Review in 2017 came to a similar conclusion, and in 2022 the Commons Justice Committee’s report, Open Justice: Court Reporting in the Digital Age, made a similar recommendation.
As the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, mentioned, the Minister in the Commons who has been dealing with this, Mike Freer, has inadvertently demonstrated the inadequacies of the current arrangements during his interactions with Sarah Olney, such as in his suggestion that victims should be allowed to listen to the audio of a trial or hearing but only while physically in the courthouse, being supervised by an employee of that court. That is wholly impractical, not least because some trials go on for several days or even weeks.
We would welcome a crystal clear statement from the Front Bench of the rights of victims currently to access transcripts, especially summing up and sentencing, such that all the authorities and bodies involved, reading what is said at the Dispatch Box, would understand exactly what the situation is. That is manifestly not so today. As a senior official in one of the commissioner’s offices wrote to me in an email yesterday, at the moment trying to get clarity on this issue is
“like nailing jelly to the ceiling”.