Issue 410  9th August 2025

Under plans outlined today (Friday 8 August), offenders will be pinned down to certain areas with tough monitoring supported by proven technology – with the possibility of time behind bars for those who breach restrictions. This will provide an additional tool to protect victims from the most serious offenders. Whilst existing “exclusion zones” are a valuable tool to stop offenders from entering a location where their victim lives, new “restriction zones” go further and instead limit the movement of offenders, who are confined to an agreed area, allowing victims to travel anywhere else without fear of meeting their offender. Probation Officers will conduct a detailed risk assessment and work hand-in-hand with victims on the creation of restriction zones, making sure zones prevent contact while giving survivors the maximum freedom to rebuild their lives...

In addition, at least 1,300 new trainee probation officers will be brought in next year to increase capacity and new technology will lighten the administrative burden and free up time for workers to effectively supervise the most dangerous offenders and keep the public safe...

In order to further protect victims and ensure they see justice done, there will be further changes to:

• Increase tagging for domestic perpetrators – enabling the closer monitoring of cowardly abusers to reassure victims and remove the onus from them to prove breaches have occurred.
• Identify perpetrators of domestic abuse at sentencing – requiring judges to flag domestic abuse at sentencing so prisons, probation and police can better identify and manage abusers.
• Expand Specialist Domestic Abuse Courts – bolstering support for victims and ensuring their abusers are properly supervised and rehabilitated.
• Bolster transparency for victims at sentencing – including the provision of free copies of judges’ sentencing remarks for victims of rape and other sexual offences, and ensuring they receive the information and support they need to navigate the criminal justice system.

The criminal justice system was within days of collapse on three occasions before being bailed out by “last-minute emergency measures”, an independent review by a former prisons watchdog has found. Dame Anne Owers said the prison system, under pressure from overcrowding, was “in crisis” between autumn 2023 and the summer of 2024, but No 10 under Rishi Sunak refused to cut the numbers in jail until “the next predictable cliff edge”. Former ministers and officials interviewed by Owers “expressed frustration and sometimes anger” at the failure to endorse a plan to avert crises and suspected that this was a deliberate move by Downing Street, she said. “Many believed that the default position was to do as little as possible as late as possible, with the consequence that the system repeatedly reached the brink of collapse,” she said...

The Department for Work and Pensions will launch an independent review into its handling of prosecutions against Post Office staff, Sky News has learned. About 100 prosecutions were carried out by the DWP between 2001 and 2006 during the Horizon IT scandal. The "independent assurance review", however, is yet to be commissioned and will not look at individual cases. It comes more than a year after Sky News discovered joint investigations between the Post Office and the DWP during the scandal - leading to suggestions some may be "tainted". Hundreds of subpostmasters were wrongfully convicted of stealing by the Post Office between 1999 and 2015, due to the faulty Horizon IT system...

The review will look at a period of time spanning 20 years covered by the Post Office (Horizon System) Offences Act 2024, from September 1996 to December 2018. The Horizon Act was effectively blanket exoneration legislation which automatically quashed Post Office convictions but did not include DWP or Capture-related prosecutions...

Children, young people and vulnerable adults across England and Wales will be better protected from grooming gangs and other vile organised exploitation, as all police forces gain access to leading-edge investigative technology. The government is injecting £426,000 of new funding into the Tackling Organised Exploitation (TOEX) Programme so it can extend access to its Capabilities Environment, a suite of state-of-the-art investigative apps and tools, to every police force in England and Wales, building on the 13 which currently have access.

The TOEX Capabilities Environment expansion supports the first phase of Operation Beaconport, the new national policing operation announced following Baroness Casey’s National Audit on Group-based Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse. Police officers will be able to access the tools to assist with any criminal investigation in their force. To date, these tools have been used 12,500 times by the 13 forces which have access to them, saving over £20 million and 16,000 investigator hours. This is expected to increase exponentially with the funded expansion...

Most solicitors do not believe an additional court tier will help cut criminal court backlogs, the Law Society revealed today. Chancery Lane carried out research, in collaboration with Sky News, asking solicitors for their views on potential reforms of the criminal courts recommended by Sir Brian Leveson. Proposals include introducing an intermediate court, which would be known as the Crown Court Bench Division. The research revealed that:

• Solicitors felt a broad range of measures would be required for an additional court tier to be effective, including additional court staff who are fully trained, and increased public funding for legal defence.
• Most solicitors think the introduction of an additional court tier would make the justice system worse (56%) and is unlikely to reduce the backlogs (60%).
• Almost three-quarters (73%) of the solicitors surveyed were concerned about jury trials being removed as part of the proposals.

Law Society president Richard Atkinson said: 'Our criminal justice system - a vital public service - has been starved of resources for decades with inevitable dire consequences. These include the massive criminal court backlogs which result in unacceptable delays for victims, witnesses and defendants, with cases listed for 2029...