The enacted text published on legislation.gov.uk shows that the Victims and Courts Act 2026 is not a narrow victims’ measure. Receiving Royal Assent on 29 April 2026, it combines reforms on sentencing attendance, parental responsibility, disclosure restrictions, prosecutorial rules, appeal procedure and the machinery used to deliver information to victims across courts, prisons, probation and mental health services. That breadth matters because the Act mostly works by amending existing statutes rather than by creating a single new code. The Sentencing Code, the Children Act 1989, the Domestic Violence, Crime and Victims Act 2004, the Victims and Prisoners Act 2024 and the Prosecution of Offences Act 1985 all receive substantial changes. The result is a cross-system package aimed less at symbolism than at day-to-day administration.
One of the clearest operational changes sits in the Sentencing Code. New sections 41A and 41B allow the Crown Court to order a convicted offender in custody to attend sentencing where the offender has refused, or is reasonably suspected of refusing, to come to court. The court may act on its own initiative or on the prosecutor’s application. For offenders aged 18 or over, prison officers, young offender institution officers and prisoner custody officers may use reasonable force where that is necessary and proportionate to deliver the offender to the courtroom. For those under 18, the court must consult the relevant youth offending team before making the order. The Act also creates a specific contempt route for offenders who fail without reasonable excuse to comply, or who disrupt the hearing and are removed, and it enables prison sanctions orders linked to sanctions already familiar from prison discipline rules. Equivalent amendments are made to the Armed Forces Act 2006 for the Court Martial and Service Civilian Court. According to the enacted text on legislation.gov.uk, the policy choice is to give courts a clearer statutory route to secure attendance at the point when sentence is pronounced, while keeping youth cases subject to additional safeguards.
The Children Act 1989 changes are among the most far-reaching. New section 10C requires the Crown Court to make a prohibited steps order when it sentences an offender to life imprisonment or detention, or to four years or more, for a serious sexual offence committed against a child and the offender has parental responsibility for a child. New Schedule ZA1 lists the qualifying offences, spanning child sexual offences, indecent images offences and inchoate offences. The order blocks any parental step unless the High Court or family court consents, and it stays in force until varied or discharged. New sections 10E to 10G take the same model into rape cases. Where the Crown Court is satisfied that a child was conceived as a result of rape and the offender has parental responsibility, a prohibited steps order becomes mandatory at sentence, subject to existing-order and interests-of-justice exceptions. Where the court considers only that a child may have been conceived through the rape, section 10F requires notification to the relevant local authority within 30 days, a six-month period of enquiries about consent, and then an application to the family court if consent is obtained. Even where an offender is later acquitted on appeal, the order does not simply fall away; the local authority must apply for a review within the statutory deadline. That design shifts immediate child protection into the sentencing stage while leaving longer-term supervision with the family courts.
The Act also rewrites section 17 of the Victims and Prisoners Act 2024 on disclosures that cannot be blocked by agreement. Under the new provision, any term is void so far as it seeks to prevent a victim, or a person who reasonably believes they are a victim, from making an allegation or disclosing information about relevant criminal conduct. The same protection applies to allegations or disclosures about how another party responded to that conduct or to the making of an allegation. That is broader than a narrow ban on non-disclosure agreements in one category of case; it creates a statutory floor across relevant criminal conduct more generally. The protection is not absolute. The Secretary of State may define excepted agreements by regulations and may also specify circumstances, purposes or recipients for which even an excepted agreement cannot lawfully prevent disclosure. The section binds the Crown, but legislation.gov.uk shows express carve-outs for agreements made by the Crown in the intelligence services context, by His Majesty in a private capacity, and for certain special forces confidentiality arrangements. For employers, universities and public bodies, the immediate point is that settlement drafting will need to be tested against a clearer statutory limit.
Schedule 2 is the largest single block of text in the Act and the one most likely to reshape front-line victim contact. It reorganises the Domestic Violence, Crime and Victims Act 2004 so that rights to make representations and receive information sit in a new Part 3A, with interpretation provisions updated around the provider of probation services as the key administrative actor. The Act also inserts a new Schedule 6A, grouping offences for the purpose of victim notification schemes. In broad terms, Part 1 covers serious offences where a life sentence or a custodial term of at least the specified sentence length applies, Part 2 covers offences where any custodial sentence is enough, and Part 3 captures additional cases, including domestic abuse related offending, on a request basis. The specified sentence length is set at 12 months, with power for ministers to change it by regulations. The practical change is a wider and more standardised flow of information. Victims may be told about release or possible release, licence conditions, discharge from hospital, community treatment orders, leave from hospital and conditions that relate to the victim or the victim’s family. In many places the statute replaces older references to local probation boards or other bodies with the provider of probation services, making that provider the main administrative route for contact. The enacted text on legislation.gov.uk also creates a discretionary route for information-sharing where probation considers a victim of similar criminal conduct would otherwise face a risk of physical or psychological harm.
The mental health provisions are detailed and consequential. Where offenders or patients are subject to hospital orders, restriction orders, hospital directions, limitation directions or transfer directions, the Act revises who must pass information to whom and on what basis. Hospital managers, responsible clinicians, probation providers, the Secretary of State and mental health tribunals are all brought into a more explicit notification chain. The statute repeatedly distinguishes between mandatory steps, such as taking all reasonable steps to notify or provide information, and areas where disclosure depends on whether the provider or managers consider it appropriate. A notable addition is the route for victim impact statements in certain tribunal cases. Where an application or reference is before the First-tier Tribunal or the Mental Health Review Tribunal for Wales, probation providers may invite a victim to submit a statement and must forward it if provided. The tribunal must allow a request to read the statement at a relevant hearing unless there are good reasons not to. The Act is equally clear about the limit of that evidence: the statement may be used when deciding discharge conditions or community treatment order conditions, not for wider purposes. That gives victims a defined route into a part of the justice system that has often been procedurally difficult to follow.
The Commissioner for Victims and Witnesses receives a narrower but important extension of role. Amendments to the Domestic Violence, Crime and Victims Act 2004 permit the Commissioner to act in relation to an individual case where the case raises issues of public policy relevant to other victims or witnesses and where intervention is likely to promote their interests. That does not turn the office into a general casework service, but it does allow a single case to be used as a route into a broader systemic question. The Act also creates a new co-operation power in anti-social behaviour matters. A local authority or relevant provider of social housing must comply with a request from the Commissioner, so far as it is appropriate and reasonably practicable, when the Commissioner is exercising functions in respect of victims and witnesses of anti-social behaviour, although requests to social landlords are limited to matters relating to social housing. On top of that, the Commissioner must publish code compliance reports for each period covered by the reporting duty in section 11 of the Victims and Prisoners Act 2024, and existing duties to respond to recommendations are applied where recommendations are made to bodies within remit. The Secretary of State and Attorney General must have regard to those reports. In administrative terms, the office moves closer to a standing performance monitor across victim-facing services.
Less visible provisions in the Act still matter for court administration. Amendments to the Prosecution of Offences Act 1985 remove the old requirement that certain designated or appointed prosecutors must hold a general qualification before appointment, but they then state expressly that an unqualified appointee does not acquire rights of audience or rights to conduct litigation for the purposes of reserved legal activities under the Legal Services Act 2007. The change gives the Crown Prosecution Service and others more room over staffing and designation while preserving the boundary around regulated legal work. The 1985 Act is also amended on private prosecution costs. The new starting point is that an order from central funds should provide an amount the court considers reasonably sufficient to compensate the prosecutor for expenses properly incurred, subject to existing statutory controls and any future regulations. Before making regulations on these costs, the Lord Chancellor must consult the Law Society, the General Council of the Bar and any other persons considered appropriate, and must publish an impact assessment. Read together, those clauses point to closer control of procedural staffing on one side and a more transparent rule-making route on private prosecution funding on the other.
The appeal and commencement provisions show the same administrative emphasis. For unduly lenient sentence references, the Criminal Justice Act 1988 is amended so that a request reaching the Attorney General in the last 14 days of the usual 28-day window can extend the notice period by 14 days. The Court of Appeal may also permit late notice, including following a victim request, up to six months after sentence where the interests of justice test is met. Matching changes to the Victims and Prisoners Act 2024 mean the victims’ code must tell eligible victims about the opportunity to ask the Attorney General to consider a reference. The Act also replaces fixed references to six months with the general limit in a magistrates’ court for a series of summary offences, aligning older drafting with the current summary sentencing model. Commencement is staggered. According to section 18 in the enacted text on legislation.gov.uk, sections 11 to 15 come into force two months after Royal Assent, while the consequential powers, extent, commencement machinery and short title provisions came into force on 29 April 2026. The Act extends across the United Kingdom, although many of its operative duties run through England and Wales legislation and separate service justice provisions. Everything else awaits commencement regulations. For practitioners, the main lesson is that the Victims and Courts Act 2026 is not a single reform but a set of linked operational duties. Its success will depend less on headline rights than on whether courts, probation providers, prisons, local authorities and hospitals can build workable processes around them.