Victims and Courts Bill: motion to disagree with Lords Amendment 6

What happened: On 25 March 2026, the House of Commons voted to reject Lords Amendment 6 to the Victims and Courts Bill, by 290 votes to 163. The amendment had been inserted by the House of Lords and concerned additional protections or rights for victims in the criminal justice process. The government moved a motion to disagree with the Lords' change, and that motion passed along broadly partisan lines.

Why it matters: The vote means Lords Amendment 6 does not become part of the Victims and Courts Bill, and the Commons version of the relevant provision is preserved. The bill as a whole is designed to strengthen the position of victims in the criminal justice system, including compelling offenders to attend their own sentencing hearings, restricting parental rights of serious offenders, and improving communications with victims. The government argued that while it supported the aims behind the Lords amendments, they were not workable in their current form, and that it would seek to bring forward its own alternative measures in due course.

The politics: The vote divided almost entirely along party lines. All 288 Labour and Labour and Co-operative Party MPs who voted supported the government's position, while Conservatives, Liberal Democrats, Greens, Plaid Cymru, the Democratic Unionist Party, and Reform UK all voted against. There were no notable cross-party rebels. This division was one of six held on the same day on related Lords amendments to the same bill, all of which the government defeated by similar margins. The broader context is a "ping-pong" (the process by which a bill passes back and forth between the two Houses until both agree) in which the Lords sought to push the government further and faster on victims' rights, particularly on free court transcripts, while the government insisted it needed more time to implement changes in a workable way.