New commencement regulations under the Victims and Prisoners Act 2024 set 18 December 2026 as the start date for section 18. The instrument is identified as the twelfth commencement set made under the 2024 Act, while legislation.gov.uk records section 18 as an England and Wales provision on restricting parental responsibility where one parent kills the other. (cloud.filesys.net)
What changes in substance is not the creation of a new criminal offence, but the activation of a Children Act mechanism. Section 18 amends the Children Act 1989 by inserting new sections 10A and 10B, with the main immediate effect being a duty on the Crown Court to make a prohibited steps order when the statutory conditions are met and sentence is passed. (legislation.gov.uk)
The duty applies where a child has two parents, at least one of whom has parental responsibility, and a parent with parental responsibility is convicted of the murder of the other parent or of manslaughter in the limited cases specified by the Act. Those manslaughter cases are the ones in which, but for loss of control or diminished responsibility, the offender would have been liable to be convicted of murder. The order must prevent the offender from taking any step that a parent could otherwise take in exercising parental responsibility unless the High Court or the family court gives permission. (legislation.gov.uk)
The drafting is firm but not unconditional. The Crown Court must not make the order if that would be barred by section 29(3) of the Adoption and Children Act 2002, if an equivalent prohibited steps order is already in force, or, in a manslaughter case, if the court considers that making the order would not be in the interests of justice. The Crown Court also has no jurisdiction over enforcement proceedings for these orders, which keeps later case management within the family justice structure. (legislation.gov.uk)
Section 10B provides the second stage. The relevant local authority must apply for a review of the order as soon as reasonably practicable and, in any event, within 14 days after the order is made; the same duty arises if the offender is later acquitted on appeal. The Act's Explanatory Notes state that this review process is where the court considers whether the order should remain in force, be varied or be discharged. (legislation.gov.uk)
The transitional provision is likely to be the point practitioners check first. The new rules apply only to offences committed on or after 18 December 2026, so the scheme is prospective rather than retrospective. Where an offence is found to have been committed over two or more days, or at some point within a period of two or more days, it is treated as committed on the last day of that period. (trackedchanges.co.uk)
In plain terms, the December commencement gives criminal courts a mandatory first-step restriction on an offending parent's use of parental responsibility in the cases covered by section 18, followed by a rapid family court review. For professionals and affected families in England and Wales, the decisive questions will be whether the case falls within the statutory homicide categories and whether the offence date is on or after 18 December 2026. Cases tied to earlier offending do not move into the new regime simply because sentence is passed after commencement. (legislation.gov.uk)