Criminal Justice Bill 2023-24

The Criminal Justice Bill was introduced to the House of Commons on 14 November 2023. The Bill’s second reading is scheduled for 28 November 2023.

The Bill contains various measures which the Government says will protect the public, give the police the powers they need to cut crime and anti-social behaviour, improve public confidence in the police, introduce tougher sentencing for sexual and violent criminals and strengthen the supervision of offenders on release from prison.

These measures include:

• New criminal offences relating to items used in serious crime, theft or fraud, including 3D printer firearms templates and tablet presses, electronic devices for use in theft, SIM farms, knives and offensive weapons
• The introduction of a broader offence of encouraging or assisting serious self-harm and new offences relating to the taking of intimate images without consent
• Changes to the law on corporate criminal liability to extend criminal liability from individual senior managers, to include their organisation
• The expansion of existing police powers to test suspects in police detention for drugs, to seize bladed articles, to search for and seize stolen goods
• Provisions for IP address and domain name suspension orders allowing law enforcement agencies to apply for a court order to prevent access to IP addresses and domain names that are being used for criminal purposes
• Extending and clarifying the existing law allowing police and law enforcement officers to access driver licence records
• Powers for courts to order the attendance of offenders at sentencing hearings and punish them if they do not attend
• New aggravating factors increasing the seriousness of child sex offences where there is grooming, and of murder where it took place in connection with the end of a relationship with the victim
• Provisions to allow for the transfer of prisoners from England and Wales to cells rented in prisons in foreign countries
• Provisions to make certain offenders convicted of coercive or controlling behaviour automatically subject to multi-agency public protection arrangements
• Changes to the confiscation regime in England and Wales giving effect to the Government’s acceptance of a number of Law Commission recommendations and provisions to allow the creation of a Suspended Accounts Scheme
• Changes to the law on serious crime prevention orders to expand the circumstances in which orders can be applied for and made, and by enabling the use of electronic monitoring and standardised notification requirements to improve compliance and enforcement
• A new framework of nuisance begging directions, prevention notices and prevention orders, together with broadly identical nuisance rough sleeping directions, notices and orders and an offence of trespassing with intent to commit a criminal offence
• Amended powers to tackle anti-social behaviour (ASB), including expanding the timeframe for which a dispersal order can be put in place, lowering the minimum age at which a Community Protection Notice (CPN) can be imposed to 10 years old, extending powers to apply for a Public Space Protection Order (PSPO), extending Community Safety Accreditation Scheme powers to breaches of PSPOs and CPNs, increasing the upper limit of fixed penalty notices for breaches of CPNs and PSPOs to £500 and creating a duty for local policing bodies to raise awareness of ASB case reviews in their police areas
• A duty on the College of Policing to issue a Code of Practice about ethical policing and a power for the Secretary of State to make certain regulations about appeals by chief officers of police and local policing bodies to the Police Appeals Tribunals.