The noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, as always, made a very pertinent point: we must have up-to-date training. Both learning and knowledge in this area are developing very quickly. That is quite a challenge for the authorities, but we should meet it— I fully accept that. Of course, under the compliance framework, there are powers to issue non-compliance notices and to understand why agencies are falling down. Almost certainly, a lack of training will be an explanatory factor in underperformance, so that will be overseen by Ministers, the criminal justice agencies and the Victims’ Commissioner.
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The annual report is also a useful vehicle for focusing on areas for improvement, and it may well be that training will be one of them. If training is not mentioned, noble Lords will ask why and demand to know what is going on. We have a framework for testing and improving the system as we go along. I hope that what I have said so far will enable the various amendments that I have dealt with—in essence, those of the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, and the noble Lord, Lord Russell—not to be pressed.
That takes me to the important Amendment 16, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Gohir, for which I thank her. We have discussed the issue that arises. The question here is whether the victims’ right to review scheme strikes the right balance. I was not sure, but
I have just received a message that confirms my understanding: I do not think that it is a gap caused by our exit from the EU. The EU directive on victims provided for that scheme, but a Court of Appeal decision—R (Chaudhry) v DPP [2016]—found the present scheme to be compliant with the directive. I know that the noble Baroness, Lady Gohir, did not raise the EU point directly—I think the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, did—but it is something of a red herring.
It is worth saying that, in that case, which is one that influences the Lord Chancellor, the Court of Appeal said that a requirement to halt the prosecution process, while the position of several individuals who might have been charged was reviewed, risks slowing down the whole thing. You have to go up through a process, and the whole time you are balancing whether you want to slow down the prosecution process by having internal reviews of who should be charged or whether you get on with prosecuting the person who is charged. The Government’s overall position is that that balance—the way that it should work—is broadly right. There are some difficult trade-offs here: time spent by independent prosecutors reviewing the evidence in cases involving multiple suspects is time that they would no longer spend charging someone else or pursuing the prosecution. You are making a trade-off in all these cases.
The point that I do accept, which is a fair point made by the noble Baroness, is that the present situation under the right to review scheme and the accompanying ability to lodge a complaint is not very well communicated. I can commit to making it clear in the victims’ code what the options are for victims in cases where the prosecution proceeds against one but not all suspects. I am not sure that I can go so far as to define in advance what the exceptional circumstances might be, because, by their very nature, we do not quite know what they are until they have happened. The approach of a case-by-case basis is, in the Government’s view, the right one to take in this matter.
However, to address the wider issues of making sure that victims understand why decisions are taken in cases, this is an important issue, and we have seen it highlighted in the recent Nottingham case, for example. Therefore, there have been conversations and there will be further conversations between the Attorney-General and the Director of Public Prosecutions about encouraging prosecutors to initiate further discussion with victims when decisions are made not to proceed in those types of cases. I cannot mention Nottingham because there are ongoing proceedings, but that was a decision to make one charge rather than another.
This whole area of communicating to victims is under the microscope at the moment. There is no reason why the matter we are on, rightly raised by the noble Baroness, should not be part of those conversations, and to align this aspect with the CPS work ongoing through the victim transformation programme should introduce a more proactive policy of communication from the CPS with the victims. I think the Attorney-General believes that this will go at least some way forward to addressing the point raised by the noble Baroness without creating additional pressures on the criminal justice system through diverting resources from the most important job of pressing on with the prosecutions that we have.
Therefore, while completely understanding the points made, I hope the noble Baroness will not feel the need to press the amendments.