Victims and Courts Act 2026: what changed for victims

If you tried to read the Victims and Courts Act 2026 straight from legislation.gov.uk, you probably hit a wall of clauses, cross-references and schedules. The text published on 29 April 2026 is legally precise, but it hides the main point: this is a criminal justice Act about who gets heard, who gets protected and who gets told what happens next. Read in plain English, the Act does four big things. It gives courts more power to make convicted offenders attend sentencing. It tightens child protection where offenders with parental responsibility commit serious sexual offences or rape. It strengthens some victims’ information and representation rights. And it makes clear that agreements cannot simply gag victims from reporting criminal conduct.

One of the clearest changes is about defendants who have already been convicted but try to dodge the final moment of accountability by refusing to come to court for sentence. The Act lets the Crown Court order attendance where an offender is in custody awaiting sentence and has refused, or is reasonably suspected of planning to refuse, to attend the hearing. For offenders aged 18 or over, prison officers, young offender institution officers and prisoner custody officers may use reasonable force to get the person to the courtroom if that is necessary and proportionate. If the offender refuses without a reasonable excuse, that can amount to contempt of court. **What this means:** sentencing is treated as something the court can require, not an optional appearance the offender can frustrate.

The Act goes further than getting people through the door. If an adult offender disobeys an attendance order or is removed from a sentencing hearing for misbehaving, the court may make a prison sanctions order as well as using other contempt powers. The exact sanctions still depend on later regulations, and those sanctions must match punishments already recognised in prison discipline rules. So this is a framework, not a blank cheque. A parallel set of rules now sits in military justice too. The Court Martial and Service Civilian Court can order attendance at sentencing hearings, with extra safeguards for under-18s, including consultation with the relevant youth offending team and attention to welfare. The broad message is the same in both civilian and service courts: sentencing should happen in open court, with fewer opportunities for convicted offenders to absent themselves from it.

Another major part of the Act sits far away from courtroom behaviour and goes straight to child protection. Where the Crown Court sentences someone to life imprisonment, or at least four years’ custody, for a serious sexual offence against a child, and that offender has parental responsibility, the court must make a prohibited steps order for each child concerned unless a narrow exception applies. The schedule covers offences such as rape, sexual assault against children and indecent images offences. The order stops the offender from taking parental decisions without the permission of the High Court or family court. The Act also creates a specific route for rape cases. If the Crown Court is satisfied that a child was conceived through rape by a person who has parental responsibility, it must make the same kind of prohibited steps order when sentencing. If the court thinks a child may have been conceived through rape but cannot make that finding for the automatic order, the relevant local authority must make enquiries and, with the right consent, apply to court. **What this means:** the law is trying to stop a convicted rapist or serious child sex offender from continuing to exercise parental power as if nothing has happened.

These family court protections do not always fall away automatically if the criminal case changes on appeal. Where the Act says an acquittal or sentence reduction triggers review, the local authority must apply to the court within 30 days. That keeps a child’s position from changing overnight and leaves the final call to a judge. It is a reminder that child safety and adult appeal rights are being balanced, not treated as the same question. The Act also rewrites the rule on agreements that try to silence victims. In plain terms, a contract cannot lawfully stop a victim, or someone who reasonably believes they are a victim, from disclosing relevant criminal conduct or talking about how another party responded to that conduct or to the disclosure itself. There are carve-outs for some national security and special forces arrangements, and ministers can set limited exceptions by regulation. Even so, the direction is clear: a private agreement should not be used to bury a crime.

Schedule 2 does a lot of the quiet but important work. It reshapes victims’ rights to make representations and to receive information about offenders, including release, consideration for release, licence conditions, discharge from hospital, community treatment orders and leave from hospital. In many places the law now speaks more consistently about the provider of probation services being responsible for making contact and passing on information. That matters because victims often say the hardest part is not only the offence itself but the silence afterwards. The new scheme reaches across ordinary prison cases, cases involving domestic abuse, and a range of cases involving mentally disordered offenders or patients. It also opens a route in some cases with shorter prison terms, especially where the offence sits on the Act’s listed schedules. In some tribunal cases, victims can be given the chance to submit a victim impact statement and ask to read it aloud, unless the tribunal has good reasons not to.

The Commissioner for Victims and Witnesses also comes out of this Act with a broader brief. Until now, there have been tighter limits on stepping into individual cases. The new law allows the Commissioner to act where one person’s case raises public policy issues that matter to other victims or witnesses too. That does not turn the Commissioner into a personal lawyer, but it does create more room to use a single case to expose a wider problem. There is a second, less dramatic but still useful change here. The Commissioner can request co-operation from local authorities and some social housing providers when dealing with victims and witnesses of anti-social behaviour, and the Commissioner must publish reports on compliance with the victims’ code. The Secretary of State and Attorney General must then have regard to those reports. **Why this matters:** the Act is not only about new rights on paper; it is also about checking whether public bodies actually follow them.

Some parts of the Act are technical, but they still matter. There are changes to who may be appointed within the Crown Prosecution Service, new rules on costs in private prosecutions, revised time limits for some Attorney General sentencing reviews, a new duty in the victims’ code to tell victims about the chance to ask for an unduly lenient sentence review, and wording changes that replace a fixed six-month limit with the general magistrates’ court time limit for some offences. Those are not the headline reforms, but they change how the system runs day to day. Some legal housekeeping provisions started immediately on 29 April 2026, another group of procedural changes is due two months later, and much of the rest depends on commencement regulations made by the Secretary of State. So if you are tracking what has changed in practice, the important question is not only what is in the Act, but which parts have actually been brought into force. Still, the overall message is easy to read: more compulsion at sentencing, more protection for children, and a stronger expectation that victims should be informed rather than sidelined.