Jess Brown-Fuller MP: speeches

Speeches

• 25 Mar 2026 · Courts and Tribunals Bill (First sitting) · Hansard source

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  Q Do you believe that the two parts of the review were commissioned in the right order? Sir Brian Leveson: That is an interesting question. I have long since believed that there needed to be radical change. The fact is that the backlog went up in the 12 months since I was appointed in December 2024—sorry, this will be a longish answer. You would have thought that everybody would be working like mad to demonstrate that efficiency could bring the backlog down over the year following my appointment. Not only did the backlog not go down, but it went up higher than the highest projection that the Ministry had. I have always been of the view that efficiency alone would not do it, and you were going to have to look at legislative change. If you were going to look at legislative change, it was important that you all had the chance to consider that as soon as possible, so I was perfectly content to deal with policy first and efficiency afterwards, on the basis that by the time you got around to dealing with it, you would have both reports anyway and you could look at everything together; I hope you have.

• 25 Mar 2026 · Courts and Tribunals Bill (First sitting) · Hansard source

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  Q Thank you all for being here; I am very grateful to you for coming to give evidence to the Committee. Farah, you mentioned the presumption against parental responsibility. I agree that that is a really important step that the Labour Government are taking, but the rest of the family court process is currently out of this Bill’s scope. Could anything fundamental be introduced into this Bill to make the experience better for victims, who often go down a twin-track approach through the criminal courts and family courts? Farah Nazeer: Thank you for the question. There are a few things around presumption that could make a big difference. One is training for the entirety of the court staff, because the stories that we hear and the experiences that we support women and children through are frankly appalling. The staff are not trauma-informed and there is no understanding of what a victim is going through. The courts are weaponised and survivors are brought back to the courts repeatedly. It is an appalling process. No policy area that you work on at Women’s Aid is a picnic, but this is the worst. People describe the trauma that they go through in the family courts as worse than the trauma that they endured through the abuse that they experienced. One thing is for the court system to understand domestic abuse, understand sexual violence, understand coercive control and be trauma-informed. That means having processes in which a survivor knows what is happening, understands what the next steps are and is supported through the system, and having separate places where a survivor can be. Some of it is quite basic, but it is really important to improving the survivor experience. Another thing is the regulation of experts. We often have unregulated experts coming into the family courts to provide expertise and advice to the judge on what is happening in a relationship. You would not have unregulated experts in any safeguarding context; it is absolutely wild that you would have that. One thing we really want to see is regulated experts: psychiatrists and psychologists who are regulated by the appropriate body, rather than, seemingly, people who are just not. The last thing that I want to focus on is the concept of parental alienation, which is often invoked in family courts. It is a concept that is not evidenced and is not recognised in psychiatric or medical practice, but it is often invoked as a concept to defend against claims of domestic abuse. What needs to happen is a child’s safety being put at the heart of the decision by a regulated expert, by a trained judge. If you get that right, you immediately improve the experience for survivors and children, and you improve the safeguarding around survivors and children. Those three things are absolutely critical to changing the culture and the experience and to ensuring safety.

• 25 Mar 2026 · Courts and Tribunals Bill (First sitting) · Hansard source

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  Q My question is to Morwenna, although the rest of the panel might be able to feed in. Morwenna, you spoke about the impact of the adjournment of your case. I do not underestimate how re-traumatising that is: you build yourself up to the day when you think you will be in court, only to be told that that will not happen. I think you mentioned that that happened twice. Morwenna Loughman: Yes.

• 25 Mar 2026 · Courts and Tribunals Bill (First sitting) · Hansard source

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  Q I appreciate that—thank you. It was a question for you, Charlotte, about the shock that you experienced when you tried to request the sentencing remarks. Is that correct? You were quoted £20,000 and you found that people trying to get their court transcripts generally were being quoted incredibly high prices. As you mentioned, the Government have moved on that, so sentencing remarks will be available from spring next year. We are continuing to try to push that further: we do not think that sentencing remarks often tell the entire story. There is an amendment that is going to the House of Commons today that is specifically about bail decisions and the route to verdict that juries are presented with before they go away to deliberate. Do you agree that sentencing remarks are only part of the journey that we need to be on, and that we need to be quite ambitious in ensuring victims have all the evidence in their own case, so they can start to move on and process? Charlotte Meijer: Yes, absolutely. My campaign for all transcripts to be made available very quickly was shut down, so I have gone for little bits at a time. Sentencing remarks are an amazing change. At first, that was just for rape victims; now it is for all victims, which is great. However, if we look at RASSO cases, only 2% get a guilty verdict, so only 2% will get the free sentencing remarks. There needs to be something for the 98%. The next thing that I have been campaigning for is the judge’s summing up, now the route to verdict, which is incredibly important. I am a not guilty verdict case, so I would not get my sentencing remarks either. It is about being able to understand. If we take that further, I believe the whole case should be available free, as it is in many other countries, or for a couple of pounds in administration costs. If we are taking it a bit at a time, the next bit would be, as you say, bail conditions and the route to verdict, to understand how someone got to that decision. That is all to aid people to understand what happened and process it a little better.

• 25 Mar 2026 · Courts and Tribunals Bill (First sitting) · Hansard source

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  Q In the previous panel, Sir Brian asked how we could model something that had never been trialled. As a panel, would you support a pilot of what the Government are suggesting, so we can take the qualitative data and see whether it makes a fundamental difference, or we should go now and not, for example, put a sunset clause in?

• 25 Mar 2026 · Courts and Tribunals Bill (First sitting) · Hansard source

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  Q Thank you to the panel for coming. Sorry to use your words, Claire, but I am going to quote from the letter that you sent to the Prime Minister. You said that victims “also stress important safeguards: tackling the lack of diversity on the bench, and ensuring judges are robustly trained in the dynamics of abuse and trauma.” You know that over many years many different parliamentarians have tried to legislate to ensure that everyone in the judiciary has mandatory training on those important safeguards. You also know that we are always told that, because the judiciary is independent, we cannot legislate to mandate that training. What would you like to see in the Bill to ensure the important safeguards that victims have reflected to you? Claire Waxman: I have made that point for years, regardless of these reforms. We have to improve and get reassurance around judicial training, including training on cultural competency, on understanding bias and prejudice and on the dynamics of abuse. We still see issues around coercive control, post-separation abuse and stalking. I need to be reassured that judges are being trained to the level that will give assurances to victims and to myself that they understand what is coming in front of them. We need reassurance from Government on that. I would suggest more investment in judicial training. We saw, over years—Vera will remember more than me when it happened—that the training on rape went down from three days to two days for judges. That was meant to be a temporary measure; I do not think it has gone back up. We need to make sure that we have good, robust training for judiciary and magistrates.

• 25 Mar 2026 · Courts and Tribunals Bill (Second sitting) · Hansard source

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  Q Thank you all for being here. Mr Goldstone, Liverpool is often held as a bastion of good practice in the criminal justice system, but Sir Brian Leveson said this morning that we should not necessarily use it as an example because of the very unique set-up there. Do you agree with Sir Brian’s assessment that Liverpool’s set-up cannot be emulated in other places across the country? Clement Goldstone: I think that many of the efficiencies that Liverpool has created can be replicated across the country, because many efficiencies stem from positive leadership and proactive engagement. In a way, it is much more difficult to achieve those efficiencies with a larger court centre than with a centre where there are only two judges. There really is a limit to what you can do if you are running a two-judge court, but in the larger courts I believe that there is far more room for efficiency than is perhaps readily assumed.

• 25 Mar 2026 · Courts and Tribunals Bill (Second sitting) · Hansard source

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  Q Thank you, Claire. Can I just acknowledge that children who are yet to go through the family courts are safer because of you and your tireless campaigning over many years? I hope you can hold that close as you go on. I believe that all campaigners like you, who never fight for themselves, are fighting for the next generation—the job is never done. My question to you is: what is the next step? What would you like to see in legislation going forward, especially in our family courts, to protect more children from harm? Claire Throssell: What I would like to see moving forward is an understanding of what it looks like without presumption of contact; what good practice looks like; understanding trauma; understanding what coercive control is; understanding emotional abuse. We all understand physical abuse—it is there; we see it. What we do not understand is the emotional abuse and the scars that we carry. We must always look from the position of actually seeing a child, hearing a child, believing a child, protecting a child, and we must go from this basis. We must use the legislation that we have in the Domestic Abuse Act. We know that it is not being used in courts. We must see children as victims in their own right of this crime. We must accept children as victims in their own right of this crime, and we must take away the fact that we are always trying to prove the crime that has been committed against us. Domestic abuse is a crime, so why is it that when we go into family courts we are ripped apart by barristers? Why is it that a crime has been committed against us, but we are always the ones who have to prove it has been committed, and by whom? Why do we have to go into a court, when we have committed no crime, and stand up and be humiliated in order to fight for our children? Why do we have to do that alone? With any other crime, the onus is on the police to prove that a crime has been committed and by whom, and then sentencing is carried out accordingly, but in a family court, the person who has had the crime committed against them time and again has to prove that that has happened. We are not believed automatically, and we are not supported automatically. There should be special measures in family courts to help see the child, like in the Pathfinder courts, but it is not just about seeing the child; it is about hearing them, believing them, supporting them, and letting perpetrators of abuse know that it will not be accepted and that we are going to take action, protect that child and always presume the unthinkable.

• 25 Mar 2026 · Courts and Tribunals Bill (Second sitting) · Hansard source

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  Q Finally—I will be very quick—you spoke about making the system fairer, and I think that it is shared across all parties that we would like to see that. Will you be looking to address the disparity between the legal aid provision in magistrates courts and Crown courts during the passage of this Bill? Sarah Sackman: That is a really good question, and you have asked me it in the Chamber. At the moment, 97% of applications for legal aid in the magistrates context are approved. We have to fully consider the IRCC package and see what final version of this Bill, if it passes through Parliament, receives Royal Assent, and then reassess and ensure that the availability of legal aid across both magistrates and Crown courts is not a barrier to access to justice. We have a means test in criminal legal aid, and that is important. It is important that people who can afford to pay their legal fees do but, where you do not have the means, it is important that you can access legal aid to get representation, which is why the hardship mechanism that we currently have exists. That will be a really important feature of the system to ensure that legal aid provision—

• 25 Mar 2026 · Courts and Tribunals Bill (Second sitting) · Hansard source

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  Yes. Doug Downey: We have in the Ontario Court of Justice what we call a lay bench—the justices of the peace. They do a lot of the bail hearings and a lot of the provincial offences—traffic and that sort of thing. That is where the lay bench resides, but the trials are not done by the justices of the peace when it comes to criminal matters; they are done by judges who are appointed, with a minimum of 10 years’ experience and quite often more than that.

• 25 Mar 2026 · Courts and Tribunals Bill (Second sitting) · Hansard source

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  Q I have a quick follow-up question, based on your earlier comments. Do you believe that a large part of the confidence in the Canadian model is the right to elect? Doug Downey: I think so. The right to elect is a feature, but I do not think there would be any less confidence if they were not given that right, simply because the default would probably be with jury, but that would become very inefficient for us.

• 25 Mar 2026 · Courts and Tribunals Bill (Second sitting) · Hansard source

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  Q Thank you; that is helpful. This is a question for all of you: what risks do you perceive arising from the proposed removal of the automatic right to appeal from the magistrates to the Crown? Do you believe that this right of appeal is currently being abused? Sir Richard Henriques: I see no evidence at all that it is being abused. Sir Brian thinks that there should be an application for leave to appeal, as there is between the Crown court and the Court of Appeal. It is finely balanced, in my view. With respect to the perfectly good question, I think we need to look at the bigger picture here. Sir Brian’s work is phenomenal—if anyone apart from Lord Burnett has read every word of it, they have done extremely well—but it would conceivably create more communications and more work, and it would not necessarily achieve a great deal, as I think that only 2% of cases are appealed. While it is a very interesting dilemma, I have not given it a huge amount of thought myself.

• 25 Mar 2026 · Courts and Tribunals Bill (Second sitting) · Hansard source

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  Q I have one more question. Has the IfG ever done any modelling around the efficiency savings that could be made by introducing the RASSO courts, as per as the Labour manifesto, or by other reforms to the criminal justice system, such as introducing am and pm sitting days? Cassia Rowland: We have not. Regarding the specialist RASSO courts, the principal arguments for those are about not efficiency, but the experience of the victim and the more trauma-informed and wraparound approach that that kind of set-up would allow for.

• 25 Mar 2026 · Courts and Tribunals Bill (Second sitting) · Hansard source

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  Q Thank you, Mr Downey, for your time today. I profess my ignorance of the Canadian justice system—it will stay with me forever that I do not know exactly how it works. Is the lay element in your criminal courts just 5% of all criminal cases? Doug Downey: Are you talking about the non-lawyers who are hearing—

• 25 Mar 2026 · Courts and Tribunals Bill (Second sitting) · Hansard source

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  Q Thank you for being here. Your police officers are at the coalface. They often experience these adjournments and see victims let down at the final hurdle when they are about to have their day in court. What is your assessment of why cases are so often adjourned in our Crown courts? Chief Constable Hatchett: I think there are multiple reasons. There are people who are far better qualified to give you evidence on that; undoubtedly you will have spoken to defence lawyers and the Crown Prosecution Service, who can probably give you some really good evidence. There are a whole host of reasons why cases are adjourned. Sometimes it is evidence, sometimes it is witnesses and victims, sometimes it is disclosure, sometimes it is court time—the reasons are multiple, but ultimately victims and witnesses are suffering as a consequence. My witness care units then have to pick up the conversations with those victims and witnesses to prepare them, hoping to keep them on board and confident enough in the criminal justice system to give evidence at a future date.

• 25 Mar 2026 · Courts and Tribunals Bill (Second sitting) · Hansard source

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  Q That is helpful. What sentence can a judge sitting alone give, and are there particular cases that will be heard with a jury? Doug Downey: It is a great range. Let me answer that in reverse, if I may. The most significant matters, such as murder and treason, will default to a jury, but if the Crown agrees with the accused, they can move it to judge-alone. That generally is not the case—it generally stays where it is—but they can. For the balance of matters, such as serious sexual assaults, it is not directly based on what the consequence might be; it is a class of cases that we call hybrid and I think you call either-way cases, where an individual can make an election to move into the superior court and, by consequence, get a jury, but generally they do not do that.

• 25 Mar 2026 · Courts and Tribunals Bill (Second sitting) · Hansard source

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  Q Do you share my discomfort that we have no pilot to refer to, to see if the proposed measures would work? Sarah Sackman: The difficulty is that any pilot where you are testing the sorts of measures that we are countenancing, which have taken their cue from the IRCC, would require primary legislation. We could not do this without primary legislation in the first place. Secondly, I do not feel discomfort, and I feel confident in the measures, because they are based on expertise that the independent review gave us. Thirdly, as we have heard, the time for pilots was yesterday—it was probably 10 years ago. The state of the backlogs at 80,000 and continuing to grow means that we have to pull every lever to not just reform the system but to invest in it and modernise it, to bring down those backlogs.

• 25 Mar 2026 · Courts and Tribunals Bill (Second sitting) · Hansard source

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  Q If I can ask my question again to clarify, have you as the Minister had any conversations with any officials in the MOJ about the pilot that happened in the pandemic, specifically about two cases being heard in a Crown court in a day? Why was that discounted? Sarah Sackman: On that specific example, I would have to go away and ask what was considered by officials because it has not been surfaced to my attention. I have had the blitz courts, where cases are listed very aggressively, brought to my attention, and we are doing them in London as of next month. I do not know about the specific pilot you are talking about. I have not considered that directly, but I am sure that my officials have.

• 25 Mar 2026 · Courts and Tribunals Bill (Second sitting) · Hansard source

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  Q Sir Richard Henriques, who we heard from earlier, said that if we were not facing such a huge backlog we would not be here at all. I may have bastardised his language slightly, but do you agree with him? Sarah Sackman: I think that I know where this is going, because I think that you will push me on this. Plainly, we are here, and the nature of the debate is shaped by the appalling backlog in our courts and the crisis we face—we all agree on that. There are 80,000 cases, and behind every one is a victim, and cases are being listed into 2030. This British justice system, which we will have huge pride in, is kind of indefensible. You have heard me say in the Chamber, and I am not going to resile from it, that there are certainly parts of this plan that I would be advocating for anyway, because I think that they will make the system fairer and more sustainable. You heard the police chief talk about the fact that demand pressures come into the picture not just because of the backlog but because of the changing nature and complexity of criminal trials. The system needs to reform itself. You heard Charlotte, one of the victims who spoke earlier, talk about the changes to the right to elect. I find it curious that Scotland, for example, does not have the right of election for a defendant. We know that it exists in Canada—we heard about that example—but it does not exist in Scotland, and there are lots of other jurisdictions where that does not exist. I find it strange that the defendant chooses the mode of trial, rather than the court triaging it. I use a healthcare analogy: if I go to A&E on a Saturday night, I do not get to insist that I get to see the specialist consultant if I can be treated appropriately by a resident health associate. It seems to me that the changes are normative and values-driven, and would be good for the system anyway. We probably would not be here at this time of night with this exact shape of debate if it was not for the crisis, but I stand by the principles that lie behind the reforms we are bringing forward.

• 25 Mar 2026 · Courts and Tribunals Bill (Second sitting) · Hansard source

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  Q Thank you. The victims in the previous session spoke about a necessary change in culture in the criminal system, which I think is a shared view across all the parties represented today. Can either of you see anything in the legislation before us that will provide that change in culture? Kirsty Brimelow: I am going to hand over to Riel on this. We support much of the reform from clause 8 onwards, on which I will hand over to her. We are all absolutely there to make improvements; no system is perfect, and the criminal justice system absolutely is not. We are there ready to support the reforms, and we are very experienced in bringing in reforms. Some of the issues I heard spoken of this morning included clearly terrible communication issues, where people were not informed as to what was going on, and they should be fairly easy to sort out. Also, we very much support the idea that there is a lawyer advising complainants, which is another proposal that has been put forward by the Government. We support that because complainants often get wrong information from NGOs or the police—doing their best—about what might be happening, and what might happen to them in court. That, in itself, can cause them to be anxious about what might happen, and it can contribute to the attrition rate. We have always had an issue with an attrition rate in sexual offences cases, and each time we need to look at why that is, so we welcome any proposals. I will hand over to Riel.

• 25 Mar 2026 · Courts and Tribunals Bill (Second sitting) · Hansard source

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  Q I have a quick question for Cassia. The Government proposals rely on the magistrates court taking on a significant amount of additional work and, importantly, sentencing powers. Have the Government adequately outlined how that will be mitigated in the magistrates courts? What assessment have you made about how much quicker they will be able to hear cases compared with the Crown court? Cassia Rowland: We have not done an in-depth assessment of that. If by mitigation you are thinking about the justice fairness outcome, we have been principally focused on the ability of the courts to cope with this, but there is, as Emma mentioned, an acceptance that summary justice is rapid justice and it can be a bit rough around the edges. There needs to be a clear-eyed assessment of the trade-off you are potentially making between swifter justice by hearing more cases in magistrates courts and more robust justice in the Crown court.

• 25 Mar 2026 · Courts and Tribunals Bill (Second sitting) · Hansard source

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  Q Thank you both very much for being here—we really appreciate your time. What effect could the Bill’s proposed changes to jury trials have on newly qualified legal professionals, who quite often cut their teeth on jury trials with lesser sentences? Also, at the other end of the profession, have you done any polling or modelling to see whether this could impact the number of legal professionals staying in the profession? Kirsty Brimelow: We have heard—and I agree with this—that we already have the data, and I believe some more data is coming over the next weeks. We already have the data to show that a quarter of King’s counsel have now left working in publicly funded work. As I have said, we have the retention back on our junior Bar, which is very positive after the investment in legal aid, but we need the legal aid promise to come through quickly to keep that retention, and hopefully attract back the KCs. However, if jury trials are removed for those cases where juniors are currently very much cutting their teeth—they are doing those trials in their early years of practice before a jury—it may well be a disincentive to doing criminal law. From my own experience of coming from a mixed, publicly funded chambers—we do not do private cases, but legal aid cases across all the jurisdictions—there is always that persuasion with our young barristers as to what area of law they will go into. The persuasion that lands is, “You will have the advocacy with the jury trial.” If they do not have that advocacy, my fear is that we will lose our junior practitioners, who are very important, or we could end up with very junior practitioners whose first jury trial may have a level of seriousness beyond their ability, which again impacts on the quality of justice, and there could be a potential increase in miscarriages of justice.

• 25 Mar 2026 · Courts and Tribunals Bill (Second sitting) · Hansard source

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  Q Thank you all for being here today and providing evidence to the Committee. Can any of you outline the reasons why Crown court hearing time has dropped to an average of 3.2 hours per sitting day? Is that drop anything to do with jury trials? Claire Davies: I think we would all agree that it is nothing to do with jury trials. What is happening is that, due to a lack of sitting days, judges are having to deal with more administrative matters and other hearings before they begin a trial, if of course any of those are in custody. If there is a delay—they are not always delayed, of course—that pushes matters back. A trial will take longer, and they do not have the whole day available to them. They do not have 10 am till 4.30 pm, which is a court sitting day; they get only part of that day. That is what is eating into the hours—or it is one of the reasons.

• 25 Mar 2026 · Courts and Tribunals Bill (Second sitting) · Hansard source

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  Q On pilots, I agree that something needs to be done now. A pilot ran during the pandemic that looked at dual court sitting days. That pilot showed that courtrooms were able to hear 3.5 cases in a week compared with the typical rate of 0.9. It was a short pilot that was run in seven courtrooms. Have you had conversations in the MOJ about alternative reforms to bring down the court backlogs? If you have, why was the decision taken to not look at that proposal? If you have not, why not? Sarah Sackman: We learned a huge amount through the pandemic. To give a personal example, I had a trial that was due to come on the day that we went into lockdown, and we were told that we were going to do it on video link. People had been speaking for years about the use of videos in courts. They said you couldn’t do it: you could not cross-examine a witness; you could not do your advocacy. Yet there we were. We were all told to go on video, and the sky did not fall in—it worked. We learnt and the MOJ got a lot of institutional knowledge through the pandemic. There are also a lot of piloting initiatives that the MOJ is undertaking: for example, our pilots for our new digital listing tool, where we are taking some of the lessons from Liverpool and elsewhere but doing that using data. We are piloting that in Isleworth and Preston. A lot of that evidence would have been put forward to the IRCC. Obviously, it is also held within the MOJ. This package of measures that we are bringing forward, when you model, it is what we believe is capable of bringing down the backlog, together with the investment and modernisation.

• 25 Mar 2026 · Courts and Tribunals Bill (Second sitting) · Hansard source

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  Q I have a very simple question: what are the risks of ignoring campaigners like you when we talk about fundamentally changing the way we do jury trials? Tim Crosland: The risk is to democracy and to people’s confidence in democracy in cases that explore the boundaries between public interest, the right to protest and criminal law. We lose the essence of democratic rights if people know that they will not get a trial before their peers. It is a very profound danger. It was only in 2024 after 69-year-old retired social worker Trudi Warner had been arrested and prosecuted for holding up a sign outside London Crown court that the High Court said that juries were entitled to acquit as a matter of conscience. Her case came before the High Court, which dismissed the Government’s prosecution of her and said that jury equity is a vital principle of our democracy and she was right to uphold it. It was part of her convention rights. We lose that principle if we ignore protesters when we look at this legislation.