My Lords, although this amendment has been put down rather late, I hope that once the Committee has heard about it, it will realise that it has some potential importance in this debate. I want to thank publicly the Public Bill Office of this House, which is superb in the way in which it deals with each of us in turn so ably. For it to be able, on Friday afternoon with an hour to go before closing, to deal so satisfactorily with the issue that I now raise is a real compliment to it, and I do not think you would see that in every part of the public or private services.
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The Bill was introduced with the express aim to
“put victims at the heart of the criminal justice system”.—[Official Report, Commons, 15/5/23; col. 666.]
That this legislation is necessary is an acknowledgement of the fact that, for far too long, the processes and systems adopted by our criminal justice agencies have failed to prioritise victims and have, inadvertently perhaps, rendered their existence and experience sometimes invisible.
To give just one example to the Committee, during Covid, at a time when the case backlogs were skyrocketing, the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime here in London convened partners to try to understand what might be done to better support victims. Despite the very best efforts, the mayor’s office found that the information collected across agencies rendered it unable to assess the true extent of the problem, let alone devise measures to resolve it. It was unable to tell how many victims were in the backlog, how many were vulnerable, how many were eligible for special measures, what stage their case was at or how long they had waited, because all the information held was structured around the case, not the victim, and none of it was joined up.
Putting the point simply, the police count crimes, the Crown Prosecution Service counts defendants and the courts count cases, but no one is counting the people who rely on the justice system to protect them. We cannot understand victims’ journeys through the system, their experiences, the outcomes they secure or how to improve them. Clause 6 has been drafted to guarantee that information in compliance with the victims’ code, but no one is counting the people who rely on the justice system to protect them. We cannot understand their journeys through the system and how to improve them. Therefore, Clause 6 shows the need for that, and that the present system is inadequate to ensure that the Bill delivers on its aim of placing victims at the very heart of the system.
My Amendment 34A would require information on compliance with the victims’ code to be linked to a “consistent victim identifier”, like an NHS number. This would enable code compliance information to be linked to a person, not a case, and would support criminal justice bodies to perhaps understand victims’ journeys within and across services. Without this amendment, it is argued, criminal justice leaders will be unable to routinely assess what proportion of all victims receive their rights, whether there are disparities in the experience of victims from different backgrounds, or to measure the impact of code compliance on vital outcomes, such as—as happens too often—victim withdrawal from prosecutions.
In some sections of government, such as education and social care, IDs are increasingly seen as a crucial way to better services. In the justice system, however, the idea of unique IDs for victims is still just an idea. The Government have confirmed—I believe in this House—that the new digital systems they have invested in make the introduction of personal level identifiers possible. This is, therefore, a problem of vision and of ambition, not of technical feasibility.
I look forward to hearing the Minister’s response to that in due course, but I would like to end as follows. Natalie Byrom, a distinguished expert in this area, wrote an article in the Financial Times on 14 January, which I know a number of noble Lords have read. She
sits on the Civil Justice Council and the Ministry of Justice senior data governance panel. At the end of that article she says:
“Creating robust data governance is vital to maintaining public trust, and making changes will require investment. But in a context where the criminal justice system is at breaking point, and victim trust and confidence is low, politicians must weigh the cost of allowing the status quo to persist, against that of taking action.”
I beg to move.