The Victim and Courts Bill has received Royal Assent, becoming the Victim and Courts Act 2026.

The Act introduces a range of measures intended to benefit victims of crime and bereaved families, including requiring criminals to attend sentencing hearings, granting victims and their families additional time to challenge sentences that they feel are too lenient, and strengthening the powers of the Victims’ Commissioner.

The Act also changes the law in relation to Non-Disclosure Agreements. As we have previously discussed here, the Government announced at the end of last year that it intended to strengthen protections for victims of crime who were subject to NDAs purporting to prevent them from disclosing information relating to criminal conduct.

Currently, the Victim and Prisoners Act 2024 provides that individuals who signed an NDA on or after 1 October 2025 and are victims of crime (or reasonably believe themselves to be so) are allowed to make so-called ‘permitted disclosures’ to certain individuals for specific purposes, even if the NDA seeks to prevent them from doing so.

However, the Victim and Courts Act 2026 goes further. It removes the existing requirement that only certain disclosures can be made to certain persons in order to be permitted under the law, and replaces the existing regime with a much simpler one, providing as follows:

Any provision in an agreement is void in so far as it purports to preclude a victim, or a person who reasonably believes they are a victim, from making –

(a) an allegation of, or a disclosure of information relating to, relevant criminal conduct, or  

(b) an allegation, or a disclosure of information, relating to the response of any other 

party to the agreement to –

(i) relevant criminal conduct, or

(ii) the making of an allegation or disclosure within paragraph (a). 

As explained previously by the Government, the Act also provides for situations where both parties may “genuinely wish for confidentiality about certain cases” by empowering the Secretary of State to designate certain agreements as ‘excepted agreements’ and prescribe the criteria they must satisfy. This mirrors the NDA provisions in the Employment Rights Act 2025 relating to harassment and discrimination. In that case, a consultation on the proposed conditions for ‘excepted agreements’ is currently underway, as we discuss here.

To read more about the Victims and Courts Act 2026, click here.