Dame Vera Baird KC gave evidence.

We now hear oral evidence from Dame Vera Baird, former Solicitor General and former Victims’ Commissioner for England and Wales. For this panel we have until 3.50 pm. Could the witness please introduce herself, for the record?

Dame Vera Baird:

I am Vera Baird. As the Chair has just recited, that is my background. I am very pleased to be here; thanks for the invitation.

I just gave the very briefest background.

Dame Vera Baird:

Well, I’ve lived a long time—let’s be careful.

Q You are very welcome, Vera. I think this is the third or fourth Bill where we have taken evidence from you, when myself and Minister Philp have been in the room.

You are aware that the Victims and Prisoners Bill is still going through Parliament; it is hoped that it will be improved somewhat in the Lords. Can you offer a general comment on how you see this Bill providing additional solace for victims?

Dame Vera Baird:

I think there are some bits of it that are good and perhaps will be very helpful to victims. The real problem with the Bill, if I may be really clear about it, is that it does not really contribute to solving the key criminal justice issues of the day, which are that charging has collapsed, prosecutions are few, there is a backlog of 65,000 at the courts—which has got worse, not better, since the end of the pandemic—and the prisons are full. There is no coherent strategy or provision in the Bill that is tackling any of those issues. Fine, there is some change to sentencing, but you have to appreciate how few people get as far as sentencing these days. I wonder whether we are not starting at the wrong end.

However, having said that—and I do say that, very strongly; and in that sense, the Bill is a disappointment—there are some bits of it that are very welcome.

Q Which ones?

Dame Vera Baird:

I think that rationalising the way intimate images are dealt with is very good. The Law Commission has done a really good job of doing that. I think there are a couple of missing bits, which I could come back to later. Probably some of the aggravating sentence provisions are good, but I am worried about the fact that the Wade review has not been implemented as a whole.

There is a risk with the aggravations of sentence in domestic abuse without the mitigating factor in the Wade review. If someone strikes back after suffering coercive control for a long time, that should be a serious mitigation. I can easily see some of the aggravating provisions catching women, who will not be protected by the mitigation. Although some of the aggravations are fine, that is a real problem for women victims of coercive control—coercive control is 90-odd per cent. men on women; there is no doubt of that. That is the classic model of male-on-female, spousal domestic abuse. I am worried a little bit about that, but the basic provisions are reasonably okay.

I am pretty worried about prisoners going abroad. The problem with that is that it is permission without really knowing what permission is being given for: we do not know what kind of prisoners will go, whether it will be in the middle of their trial, whether it will be while they are still on remand or any of it. That is a little worrying. It is a bit of a mixed bag.

Q We will move on a little. Given what you have said, do clauses 23 and 24 about the aggravating factors in grooming and the end of relationship go far enough?

Dame Vera Baird:

I am not sure what the grooming one adds; I think it just broadens it. If grooming is involved, it is already taken into account as an aggravating factor in sentencing. Perhaps we can do that with a person who might have abused a groomed child directly. Perhaps this provision broadens it so that if the person who fixes up the child is also groomed—perhaps become someone has gone through him, grooming is in the environment and so it will enhance the sentence. The Bill broadens this a little; if it does, it is a good flag to wave because we want to tackle grooming and make sure it is taken into account. But I do not see it as a major change.

The problem is where there is a victim of someone abusive, and the killing is brought about by the victim’s decision to try to leave—or to leave. So we are looking at aggravating the sentence of an abusive person when the victim has said she is going to leave. That is a classic model, which Jess knows all about: the eight steps to homicide. That has been well researched. Professor Jane Monckton-Smith talks about this: when the victim says she is going to leave is the most dangerous time. That is the time when killing happens, so it is appropriate to aggravate the sentence because of that position being there—it is commonplace.

The worry is that sometimes women who have been coercively controlled for a very long time and have suffered badly are also aware that their husband is being unfaithful with someone else. He says that he is going off with the other woman, and that can trigger her to kill him. Without the protection in the Wade review—to say that if she is being coercively controlled, that is a mitigation—what you will have done is to aggravate her sentence through this change, which is not a thing that anyone intends. It could do with just another quick look at how it will work.

Q Clause 30, which addresses the assessing and managing of risk posed by coercive behaviour in offenders, refers to an “intimate or family relationship”. Is that wording of the clause clear enough? The expression “intimate” opens too wide an interpretation —or perhaps too narrow an interpretation.

Dame Vera Baird:

I am honestly not sure about that; I have not given it much thought. It sounded like what we would expect to be there, so I do not think I have much of a comment.

Q There are two other things. The first is clause 22, which compels a defendant to attend court for sentencing. I think we all realise that that will be challenging to implement, but what are the benefits and pitfalls of that proposal in relation to the victim?

Dame Vera Baird:

As I am sure the Ministers know very well, this adds absolutely nothing to the current law. A judge can order somebody to come into court. If they do not, it is a contempt of court.

Q The clause actually talks about using “reasonable force”.

Dame Vera Baird:

But you can already use reasonable force. As long as it is proportionate and necessary, the Prison Service is entitled to use reasonable force to fulfil the orders of the judge. If the judge says, “You must come” and you do not come, it is, No. 1, a contempt of court. And guess what the maximum sentence is for a contempt court? It is two years, exactly as it is in the Bill. If a person does not want to come and the officers regard it as necessary and proportionate to use force to bring them, they are entitled to do exactly that to fulfil the judge’s requirements. There is really no change here.

I well understand the sense from a victim that they want this moment—“Right, he’s going to face what he’s done now and I’m going to get some benefit from that.” But the reality is that you cannot capture somebody’s mind, can you? There are always risks that people who are dragged into court might be a nuisance. You can just imagine what could be done there. So it is a very difficult one to get right, although I understand the impulse to try to do this.

I think it was the former Lord Chief Justice John Thomas who suggested that a better way was to make sure that if the person does not come out of the cell, he is in a cell to which the sentencing can be broadcast. He cannot get away and the victims know that he has, as it were, faced his moment. Whatever he is doing—whether he is listening or he is not—they do not know, and that is the time passed.

Q That is very helpful. This is my final point. Clauses 11 and 12 address the offence of encouraging and assisting serious self-harm, and of course there are plenty of victims in that sort of category. Are those clauses fit for purpose or could they be improved?

Dame Vera Baird:

I think they probably need to be strengthened quite a lot. I do not think there is anything in there that could criminalise somebody who provided a means for doing it as opposed to encouraging it. So if someone provides—I do not know—a knife or some drugs, I am not sure there is provision for that, and I think that is a big miss. This is a really worrying area and we need to legislate, and that is one of the good things in the Bill.

Q I just wanted to clarify something. A statutory instrument is going through the Lords today on coercive control as both an aggravating factor and a mitigating factor, to deal with exactly the point that Clare Wade was driving at. Some of what we have done in relation to Clare Wade is not in this Bill. This is not the entirety of our implementation of the Clare Wade review, and I just wanted to provide that reassurance. Not all of that requires primary legislation.

In that context, coercive control is making its way through in different forms. I have a narrow question about what you thought about the use of MAPPA—multi-agency public protection arrangements—in relation to the management of a serious coercive control offence.

Dame Vera Baird:

I think it is good to state that formally. I am sure that it happens now quite a lot.

Q What difference do you think it will make when that person is out of custody?

Dame Vera Baird:

It is a strict regime and it is very carefully managed. The probation service is aware of the high level of risk. It is definitely beneficial for dangerous offenders, and the probation service has recognised domestic abusers. Even when they have not committed domestic abuse offences, it still recognised them as presenting that danger, if they are already in MAPPA. I am sure that the most coercively controlling offenders already go into MAPPA. It is not a closed box that you can only fight your way into through these five categories of offending. It is much wider than that, but let’s do it—fine.

Q In relation to that, just because it is not possible to look at domestic abuse without being a bit more holistic, how do you think domestic abuse protection orders, when they begin the pilot scheme in the spring, will interact with MAPPA management?

Dame Vera Baird:

That is a very interesting question, but they are better and they have positive bits to them, don’t they?

A DAPO does allow GPS monitoring, for example.

Dame Vera Baird:

That is an improvement on the current model. There will have to be close working between those who apply for the DAPOs and those who are running MAPPA to make sure that there is no overlap or missing bits and so forth. This cross-boundary working is going to be particularly important with that. But they are both good steps. I do think MAPPA is slightly redundant, but let us do it, and the DAPOs and those positive requirements are definitely a big step forward. What you said about the statutory instrument is really interesting—

Lord Bellamy, today in the Lords—

Dame Vera Baird:

Yes, that is really good to hear, but these are going into statute. Why is the protection for women only going into a statutory instrument, which frankly fewer people will ever get to know about? Why is it being done in that way? Why is it not in here with these?

I will have to revert to the Committee on the answer to that, because I actually do not know.

Dame Vera Baird:

Anyway, I am not supposed to ask you questions—[Laughter.]

Q No, that is fine. Just going back a bit, I am interested, as you can tell, in the combination of the MAPPA management and the DAPO scheme; we are at the brink of its inception. If you took together a wider application of DAPOs and then the MAPPA arrangements that are going to be formalised in this legislation for serious coercive control, do you think that creates a better blanket of public protection in relation to this nature of offence?

Dame Vera Baird:

I think it is bound to, yes. I have felt since their inception that DAPOs, because of those positive requirements, were likelier to be more effective than just the negative nature of whatever they were called—I forget what they are called currently.

MAPPA is an effective mechanism. You raise very interesting questions about how they will interact, and I just think it is about cross-working, really, between police and probation in particular. They have to work in IOM anyway, so they must have ways of working together that ought to be reasonably effective. But I hope that you will, as it were, as a Government draw to their attention the need for an understanding of how those mechanisms will work together, because that would be an important way to point out that it needs to be done effectively.

Thank you. That is all I had.

Q On the point about DAPOs and MAPPA, do you think that MAPPA currently covers all those who are suffering serious domestic abuse and then go on to be murdered, for example?

Dame Vera Baird:

No.

Q You have said that this legislation is good—“Yes—do it.” Do you think that it makes any real difference on the ground to the issue of domestic abuse—policing and probation monitoring?

Dame Vera Baird:

I think it is a good piece of flag waving, and it ought to be something that ups the attention of the relevant parties. A lot of people do not get protected sufficiently by MAPPA.

Q The vast majority do not get protected, would you say?

Dame Vera Baird:

I do not know about the numbers, but it is not a foolproof system. When it works, it works well, I think, and it can be quite subtly tuned for particular kinds of offender. But I do not know that it works so well with domestic abuse generally. In fact, what does?

Q You said that you were pleased with the parts about intimate images. Do you foresee that this will increase and encourage victims of that particular crime to come forward?

Dame Vera Baird:

I hope so. It is pretty straightforward. It started off with a nice private Member’s Bill, and it was good for upskirting, but it was very taken with the intention of the individual. Taking a photograph and upskirting—frankly, if you do it, it is a crime, I would have thought. Struggling to find out whether they had done it for their own sexual benefit or to sell it online or whatever: I do not think that matters. I think the Law Commission have got to, “If you do it at all—make an intimate image—it’s an offence. If you do it with that intention, it’s worse. If you do it with this intention, it’s worse,” and that looks as if it works well.

I do not know why deepfake is not banned. Everybody knows what that is. The Minister will tell me there is a Standing Order going through. You just gave me a shocked look. Deepfake is not in the Bill, is it?

No, deepfake is not in it.

Dame Vera Baird:

So that is where you could have possibly even a performative person doing deliberately provocative, maybe naked actions. You can take their face off, put mine on instead and put that online. That is dreadfully, dreadfully damaging—every bit as much, possibly more, because of the potential bravado of the act, which would then be blamed on you. That needs making unlawful, and it needs dealing with.

The other problem is that there are no orders to get rid of the stuff that is online already. I asked Penney Lewis—who is coming presently, so she will tell you—why they did not try to tackle the question of taking down stuff. She said that their terms of reference relate to criminality, not the civil orders. My view is that there should be a new look at that, because the pain of being a victim of intimate images is knowing that they are online.

There is a heroic academic at Durham called Professor Clare McGlynn who has done a huge amount of work on this. The impact on somebody of knowing that there is a naked picture of them somewhere online makes them withdraw: they cannot face anybody new, because they think that inevitably they must have seen them online and will have a poor view of them. That is how it gets internalised.

So it is urgent. If the Law Commission was not asked to look at taking stuff down, which I understand is done effectively in Canada, it should be asked to look at it again, or you must find another mechanism for it. The pain is from knowing that it is still up.

Q Turning to some of the amendments proposed to the Bill, could I ask your opinion on the issues around removing parental responsibility for men convicted of sexual offences against children? What is your view on that?

Dame Vera Baird:

Now that I understand that the mitigation relating to being coercively controlled will go into law, at least at a lower level—although I do think it should be in this statute—I am less worried. There is some possibility, isn’t there, if it is about murder or manslaughter, because a lot of victims who have been coercively controlled and strike back are convicted of manslaughter—

Losing their parental responsibility, you mean?

Dame Vera Baird:

Yes. That would be a woman who had been persecuted. You are talking about sex offences?

Yes, specifically sex offences. That bit of law is in the Victims and Prisoners Bill—the law on murder and manslaughter, which I believe has some carve-out. Not to inform the Minister of this, but that is the reason why it is going through the Lords today: the carve-out, which is in that Bill, not this one. But what I was talking about was a proposal to take parental responsibility away from men convicted of sexual offences against children.

Dame Vera Baird:

I am less convinced by that, because the definition of a sexual offence may be quite a wide one. I think it needs some reflection. I appreciate that if there is a sexual risk order, you can have a man who is banned from being in touch with all children except his own.

I think that’s the problem.

Dame Vera Baird:

That is the point, so it needs tackling. But just sex offences—does it apply to flashers or people online? I do not know. I think it probably needs tuning a bit.

Q There are two amendments on the issue of the criminalisation of women who have an abortion. Do you have any views on those?

Dame Vera Baird:

It is long overdue to be decriminalised, as it is in Northern Ireland. This Parliament decriminalised it in Northern Ireland. Why on earth is it still a criminal offence to do what is a tragic thing that nobody wants to do, and have a late abortion? The last time the offence was in play was quite recently: it was about six months ago. The Court of Appeal was amazingly benevolent towards the woman and accepted entirely that she needed support, not criminalisation. The Court of Appeal seems to be ahead of this Parliament on that at the moment. You used to have women from Northern Ireland coming over here for help with abortion; now, women from here go over to Northern Ireland to avoid the risk of criminalisation if they are a week late. It is quite odd.

Thank you.

As there are no further questions, may I thank you, Dame Vera, for your evidence? We will move on to the next panel.