Victims and Courts Act 2026: what changes in practice

The Victims and Courts Act 2026 became law on 29 April 2026. If you opened the text on legislation.gov.uk, you would have seen pages of formal wording about sentencing, family law, victims’ rights and criminal procedure. Read plainly, this is a law about what happens after harm: whether a victim gets information, whether an offender can dodge sentencing, and whether courts can step in faster to protect children. It is also worth knowing that not every change starts at once. Some provisions, including parts on Crown Prosecutors, private prosecution costs, sentencing reviews, victim notification and summary conviction terms, start two months after the Act was passed. Other sections started on the day the Act was passed, while many of the biggest changes still depend on ministers bringing them into force by regulations.

One of the clearest changes is about offenders who refuse to come to court for sentence. Where someone has been convicted, is being held in custody and is refusing, or is reasonably suspected of planning to refuse, to attend the Crown Court for sentencing, the court can order them to attend. For under-18s, the court must consult the youth offending team first. For adults, the Act goes further. Prison officers, young offender institution staff and prisoner custody officers can use reasonable force to get the offender to the courtroom if that is necessary and proportionate. If the offender still fails to comply without a reasonable excuse, that can count as criminal contempt of court. **What this means:** the law is trying to stop the situation where a convicted person stays away from the hearing and avoids facing the judge, the victim or the victim’s family.

The Act also creates a new follow-on power called a prison sanctions order. If an adult offender disobeys an order to attend sentencing, or disrupts the hearing badly enough to be removed, the court can impose prison-style sanctions as part of dealing with the contempt. Those sanctions are not written out in full in the Act itself. Instead, the Secretary of State will set them out later in regulations, and they must match punishments already available under prison discipline rules. That limit matters. It means the court is not being handed an open-ended power to invent new penalties. Any sanction must sit within the same broad range used inside prisons already, and any maximum period must not go beyond the existing prison rules. Similar attendance powers are also added for the Court Martial and Service Civilian Court, with youth safeguards for under-18s and force powers for adults authorised under service law.

Another major part of the Act sits in family law, not sentencing. When the Crown Court sentences someone to life imprisonment, or to at least four years in custody, for a serious sexual offence against a child, and that offender has parental responsibility for a child, the court must make a prohibited steps order. In simple terms, that means the offender cannot make parental decisions about that child unless the High Court or family court agrees. The same kind of automatic order must be made when a person is sentenced for rape and the Crown Court is satisfied that a child for whom the offender has parental responsibility was conceived as a result of that rape. The legislation’s schedule shows how wide the definition of serious sexual offence is. It covers rape, assault by penetration, child sexual offences, grooming, sexual exploitation offences and child abuse image offences, among others. **What this means:** parental responsibility is no longer treated as something that simply sits in the background after these convictions. The court is required to act.

The Act does leave a narrow escape hatch. The Crown Court does not have to make one of these prohibited steps orders if an equivalent order is already in place, if adoption law blocks it, or if the court thinks making the order would not be in the interests of justice. Once made, the order continues unless and until the High Court or family court changes or discharges it. The Crown Court itself does not handle later enforcement disputes. There is also a second, more cautious route for cases where a child may have been conceived through rape but the court is not in the position required for the automatic order. In those cases, the Crown Court must notify the relevant local authority within 30 days of sentencing. The local authority then has up to six months to make enquiries about whether the victim, or if the victim has died another person with parental responsibility, consents to an application to court. If consent is given, the local authority must apply promptly. The Act also says that if a conviction is overturned, or a sentence is reduced below the trigger level, the local authority must ask the court to review the order within 30 days. That is a reminder that child protection and appeal rights have to be held together, not treated as rivals.

Another change will matter far beyond the courtroom. The Act rewrites the rule on agreements that try to stop victims speaking. Any term in an agreement is void so far as it claims to prevent a victim, or someone who reasonably believes they are a victim, from making an allegation or disclosure about criminal conduct, or about how another party responded to that conduct or to the disclosure itself. If you are thinking of non-disclosure agreements, settlement terms or confidentiality clauses, that is the right direction of travel. The law does still allow ministers to set conditions for some excepted agreements by regulation, and it keeps carve-outs for agreements involving the Security Service, the Secret Intelligence Service, GCHQ and certain special forces arrangements. Even so, the message is plain: contracts should not be used to silence people about crime.

Schedule 2 is dense, but it may be the part that changes daily practice most. It rebuilds the older victim information rules so that victims in a wider range of cases can ask for updates about an offender. Depending on the type of case, that can include information about release, possible release, licence conditions, supervision requirements, discharge from hospital, community treatment orders and leave from hospital. Where a condition relates to the victim or the victim’s family, the law specifically allows that detail to be shared where appropriate. The reach is wider than many readers may expect. The schedule covers not only the most serious violent and sexual offences, but also many domestic abuse, stalking, harassment and restraining order cases, and a range of situations involving mentally disordered offenders or patients. In some circumstances, probation providers can also share information where a victim would otherwise face a risk of physical or psychological harm. **What this means:** the law is moving away from the idea that only victims in a narrow set of headline cases should be kept informed.

The Act also strengthens the place of victims in mental health tribunal processes. Where the case involves a restricted patient and the provider of probation services thinks it is appropriate, a victim can be offered the chance to make a victim impact statement for the tribunal. If the statement is sent on, the tribunal must let the person ask for permission to read it at a relevant hearing, and should allow that unless there are good reasons not to. That does not mean victims decide whether someone is discharged. The tribunal still applies the legal tests. But it does mean the lived effect of the offence can be put directly in front of decision-makers when conditions on discharge or community treatment are being considered. For many families, that is a serious shift from being informed after the event to being heard before it.

The Victims’ Commissioner also gets a broader role. Under the amended rules, the Commissioner can act in relation to an individual case where that case raises wider public policy issues affecting other victims or witnesses. Local authorities and social housing providers can also be required to co-operate with the Commissioner on anti-social behaviour matters where that is necessary, appropriate and reasonably practicable. Alongside that, the Commissioner must now produce reports on compliance with the victims’ code for the same periods covered by government reporting. The Secretary of State and the Attorney General must have regard to those reports when preparing their own account of whether agencies are following the code. **What this means:** the Commissioner is being pushed a little closer to watchdog territory, with more room to spot patterns instead of treating each complaint as sealed off from the next.

Some of the Act is procedural, but it still matters. It clarifies that appointing someone under the Crown Prosecution Service rules does not automatically give them rights of audience or a right to conduct litigation if they do not have the usual legal qualification. It changes how central funds can cover the costs of private prosecutors, with regulations and consultation to follow. It also widens the window for some unduly lenient sentence referrals, especially where a victim’s request reaches the Attorney General late in the usual 28-day period, and it requires the victims’ code to tell eligible victims that this route exists. On top of that, a group of offences will now use the general limit in a magistrates’ court instead of a fixed six-month term on summary conviction. So the simplest way to read the Victims and Courts Act 2026 is this: it is not one reform but a bundle of them. Some give courts sharper tools. Some give victims more information and a stronger voice. Some protect children from an offender’s continued parental control. And some are still waiting for commencement dates and follow-up regulations. If you are reading this as a victim, a family member, a teacher or a support worker, the practical question is not only what the Act says on paper, but when each part starts and whether the agencies behind it actually follow through.