Grand Committee

Thursday 30th January 2025 Grand Committee

Thursday 30 January 2025

Rape: Prosecutions

Thursday 30th January 2025 Grand Committee

Question for Short Debate

13:00

Asked by

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb]

To ask His Majesty’s Government what are the main factors that have led to decades of low levels of rape cases being prosecuted, and continue to prevent such prosecutions, and what steps are they taking to resolve this.

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, I would like to thank in advance all noble Lords who are speaking today. I will be listening very closely to the two former Met Police Commissioners here today, because they probably not only understand the problems but know exactly where the solutions lie. I hope the Government will be listening to them as closely as I will.

We all know that our country is failing rape victims, who are mainly but not exclusively women. I could stand here all day and quote figures that show how bad things are now, and how bad they were a decade ago or even three or four decades ago. Misogyny is not new, and it is the root of most rapes. There have been times when women could be priests, or even gods, but extreme misogyny arose in Assyria two and a half thousand years ago and brought it into politics and religion.

I could talk about the way that young working-class girls in Rotherham were not believed and were ignored. We could explore the allegations of police collusion and corruption, with links to local drug gangs, or I could go back a decade and talk about the failures of the police when the Yorkshire ripper was killing sex workers. There is the scandal of Jimmy Savile, operating as a sexual predator in plain sight, with powerful friends in the BBC and Downing Street; or Worboys, the taxi driver who the police believe had 100 victims, some of whom had reported being assaulted before he was finally caught.

Each of these cases has the common threads of women and girls not being believed or fearing they would not be believed. There are the half-hearted investigations of women who do report and the professional scepticism of Crown Prosecution Service staff about whether a jury is going to convict. There is the character assassination of survivors and the intrusive exploration of their personal lives by the authorities, which are meant to be supporting them in getting justice. These high-profile cases open up the public debate, but they are the merest fraction of the lived experience of hundreds of thousands of women and girls who have reported, or not reported, gone to trial, or tried to, and then given up in despair.

What is striking in reading through the library of previous reports, inquiries and ministerial speeches is the repeated themes and recommendations. They tend to broadly agree with the existing policy relating to the investigation and prosecution of rape and then state that this policy is not being properly implemented. These kinds of failures are long standing. It can feel as though the repeated commissioning of these reviews and inspections is a way for government and other authorities to indicate concern, while never following through with the action and resources needed to make change. I am absolutely positive that this Labour Government will do better than that.

From the 1980s onwards, we had a slow but positive shift in the way the police and Crown prosecutors handled rape cases—from the setting up of rape investigation rooms and the swift collection of forensic evidence, to a merit-based approach to prosecution that looked at the evidence, rather than second-guessing what a jury might or might not decide. Coming out of the scandal of grooming gangs in several northern towns, Sir Keir Starmer, the then head of the Crown Prosecution Service, argued that it was not a question of the victim’s behaviour or criminal record, but whether the crime had happened. He said:

“if the yardstick traditionally used by prosecutors for evaluating the credibility of a victim in other cases were used without adaptation in cases of sexual exploitation, the outcome would potentially be a category of vulnerable victims left unprotected by the criminal law.”

He was absolutely right.

These changes, combined with the #MeToo campaign and a series of high-profile historical scandals, led to a huge increase in the reporting of rape cases. This was a success, but it came just as austerity led to the slow collapse of the criminal justice system. The result has been a disaster for rape victims—rape survivors—who have been seriously let down by an overstretched judicial system that has responded in the worst of all possible ways. It is a system that promises justice but delivers delays and failure.

The numbers of rapes recorded by the police increased steadily from the 1980s but tripled between 2014 and 2018, reaching their highest-ever volume. The number of reported rapes being successfully prosecuted has, however, dropped from 25% in 1981 to 1% or 2% in recent years.

Instead of our society recognising the scale of a hidden scandal and putting resources into achieving justice when hundreds of thousands of people started reporting this horrendous but regular, everyday crime, what the last Government did was to cut police, lawyers and police time. The Crown Prosecution Service quietly dropped the merit-based approach and rationed cases going forwards based on a Ladbrokes betting shop analysis of the odds of a jury convicting the alleged assailant—I am going to be very careful about naming the person I believe is responsible for that, because I am not sure whether saying it in the House of Lords gives me cover from prosecution.

The solution is more resources, and that means making it a priority within the judicial system—no more delaying trials for a year or more, so that the rape survivor gives up all hope of justice and drops out from emotional exhaustion. As long as rape is a crime that people think they can get away with, they will do it. Do this Government, or any Government, want rape legalised? The year-on-year failures make that appear, near enough, the outcome of austerity.

The other thing the Government can do is education and changing the culture. This is incredibly important and I feel that this avenue of recovery has not been explored. In France, Gisèle Pelicot has done this and changed the culture of shame from being all on the survivor to the shame being directed at all the men who raped her, all those who colluded and all those who did not report to the police what was happening. We need Ministers to get behind survivors and make it clear that rape is not just about grooming gangs, spiked drinks, dodgy taxi drivers or even police officers. All those need dealing with but, distressingly, most sexual assaults are about familiar and comfortable environments and people whom you know. Therefore, education is absolutely basic to sorting out this problem. I look forward very much to hearing what the Minister will say in reply. If he could pick up that point about education, I would be very grateful.

13:07

[Baroness Wyld (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, on securing this debate and on her powerful speech. I regret very much that it is needed. During my research for this debate, my feelings were of—I do not use this word lightly—anger and incredulity that it is 2025 and we are still talking about this. I have three young daughters. My eldest is 14 and is just at the stage where she is travelling around London on the bus on her own. She asked me what I was doing today and I said I was coming to talk about this: the failure of the criminal justice system to protect victims and survivors of one of the most brutal and degrading offences.

Looking at the last Parliament, there was a recent victory for campaigners in last year’s change in the law to better protect survivors’ counselling notes. The cross-party work done by my noble friend Lady Bertin and others in the House—supported by the Minister when he was in his shadow role, as I remember—highlighted the uphill battle to ensure that survivors are treated with dignity and care.

I want to focus my remarks today on the first stage of the reporting process: the early stage, when victims and survivors of rape decide whether they are able to go to the police or, indeed, whether they are not. We can see the barriers: the ONS Crime Survey for England and Wales reported that of respondents who had told someone that they had been raped but not the police, 38% thought that the police could not help them and a quarter thought that the police would not believe them. The last Government’s rape review reported that the percentage of victims who withdraw at the police stage has never fallen below 41% and, at the time of its report, it was sitting at 61%.

I acknowledge the action taken by the previous Administration and picked up by this one to improve processes. I welcome the progress made by Operation Soteria, the College of Policing and others, but it has taken far too long for victims’ voices to be heard and longer still for this to be translated into action.

We have a strategic policing requirement, which includes requiring violence against women and girls and domestic abuse to be tackled, but it is a depressingly patchy performance at best. Operation Soteria recognised that good practice was observed but was dependent on individual officers rather than built into systems and policies. I very much welcome this Government’s commitment to establishing specialist teams and the other commitments they have made on vetting, et cetera. I urge them to continue at pace, but the fundamental issue here is one of trust. While systems and processes are core to that trust, there is a deeper issue at play.

What really drove me to sign up to today’s debate is the need to spend more time talking about the culture within police forces, specifically attitudes to women and girls. Of course, given the topic today, it is important to acknowledge that men are also victims of rape, as the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, said, and I would never seek to minimise that. As the Home Affairs Select Committee recognised, women are more likely than men to experience rape, and the majority of perpetrators are men. I feel unable to strike an optimistic tone in this debate because too many revelations—from the 2022 IOPC review and the 2023 Casey review of the Met—have highlighted sexist and misogynistic behaviours in policing.

I am aware that many police officers do an excellent job. Like everyone in this Room, I am sure, I was brought up to respect and trust the police, and I am bringing up my own daughters to do so. They do a very difficult job. I am not saying that the failures on this specific issue are directly related to misogynistic behaviour—mistakes are made and the two are not necessarily linked—but the fact that the College of Policing is, in 2025, running a strategy to tackle misogynistic behaviours within policing tells us a lot, surely, about the impact of culture on performance. If women are to come forward, trust comes first. If their experiences when they come forward are to change, then culture is at the heart of it. Surely, given that our police forces clearly want to be able to recruit the best people to tackle violence against women and girls, they need to ensure that their culture supports this without fail.

Having listened to Ministers in the previous Administration and this one at the Dispatch Box, I believe that there is the political will to end violence against women and girls. That will require commitment to supporting police leadership to drive change, but also holding them properly to account by asking what exactly they are doing to call out such behaviour when they see it and hear it.

I finish by paying tribute to the victims and survivors. I hope that we can continue to work cross-party to do better.

13:12

[Lord Hogan-Howe (CB)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, for this well-timed opportunity to debate this issue. I did not disagree with anything that the noble Baroness, Lady Wyld, just said. The problems of rape investigations, prosecutions and convictions are well known and understood; they have been there too long. What is less well developed are the solutions, and I will try to address that today.

Only one in six rapes is reported and of those reported, only one in 50 leads to a charge. Of those charged, only one in two leads to a conviction. That is a terrible pyramid, I am afraid, of failure, and a quite pathetic outcome. When we consider that crimes of violence—which these are—are crimes where the victim was present, is able to provide a description of the offender and perhaps even the name, and can say where evidence may be found, it is even more bizarre that we are not getting better outcomes from our system. The investigation is less likely to identify the suspect in a stranger attack, but less likely to see a prosecution where there is an existing relationship. The issue becomes one of proving consent, unless, of course, the victim is too young to provide that consent in law.

The whole process is hindered, in my view, by three things. First, this offence involves the most intimate and private of events: sexual activity. That makes it difficult to recount in public, to talk about to anyone else and to talk about exactly what happened. That is a challenge for anybody. Secondly, it takes a long time for an investigation to get to court, which causes obvious problems for the victim in recounting the evidence and persuading a jury that something happened. Finally, proving lack of consent requires careful collection and presentation of evidence. I believe that we must deal with these three issues in a radical way if we are to overhaul the system.

My suggested improvements are these. First, the police are most efficient and effective when they deploy in teams. We see that in counterterrorist investigations, murder investigations and complex fraud cases. However, with rape offences, single officers are often deployed. There are some great officers who can make progress, despite the challenges, which we all know about, but I am afraid that, increasingly, we need a team approach. This is a resourcing issue: you must either move them from what they are doing or give them more, but it needs to be addressed. The time for a team approach has come. We could get the same sort of outcomes that we see with murder cases. During my time and now, murder investigations in London had a detection rate of around 95%. It is entirely possible to have good detection rates—if you apply the right resources and the right skills to make sure that you have the right person and can convince a jury.

Also, rape has become a more complex crime to investigate. Far more digital evidence is now available, which is great, but you have to find it and share it with the defence. It has to be sifted, and presented in a way that a jury will understand. These are new and significant skills that the police are going to have to learn.

The police also need to investigate the history of the suspect’s prior relationships. We have a history of investigating the victim’s prior relationships. That has stopped—in a good way—but we do not do enough to check whether the suspect’s previous behaviour and relationships indicate that this incident was likely to happen. Often, obviously, we do not know who these people are, but we could investigate and discover who they might be.

As has been said, rape reporting and charging have been inhibited by the victim’s experience of reporting. Police attitudes have improved drastically over the past 20 years, but they are clearly still not good enough. People are trying to make progress, but one of the challenges for prosecutors and investigators is that they anticipate the victim’s experience in court. We have, I am afraid, an adversarial system that tries to destroy the victim and their evidence, albeit not as directly as it used to. Why cannot the adversarial system become more of a search for the truth in these cases? It is entirely possible. Iceland has a good method of dealing with child victims of crime: it carries out a search for the truth, not an attack on the person who claims they were attacked.

Sadly, juries tend to make moral judgments, even if the law says that they should not. Investigators and prosecutors overly anticipate the jury’s conclusions and therefore do not even get to the charging stage. That also infects the whole investigation process. I would argue that the adversarial legal system does not provide a good context in which these cases can go forward.

Of course, 70% of victims are vulnerable at the time of the attack. They are vulnerable because they experienced an attack, but they might also have had alcohol. They might be very young, very old, or mentally ill. That is often the reason why they are picked—because they are vulnerable. However, this does not make them a consistent witness later, I am afraid. Consistency is a test of truth. Any of us might ask, “You didn’t say that then, so why did you change your mind?” Unfortunately, some victims just do not have sufficient recollection to make them a powerful witness. The system has to acknowledge that and make sure that, if they are particularly vulnerable, the balance of the defence is put on to the suspect, so that we ask, “Was consent present or not?” We do that with children. A child below the age of 16 cannot legally consent to sex. What about somebody who is mentally ill? What about someone who is very old? What about somebody who was intoxicated because the suspect made them intoxicated? Should we look at shifting the balance of proof in those cases?

Does the CPS have the right charging threshold in these cases? At the moment, it is broadly 51%—the case is more likely to succeed than fail. Secondly, there is a public interest test: even if that is true, should we charge in this case? Perhaps we should consider whether there is a prima facie case and whether it is in the public interest to prosecute; or is there somewhere between prima facie and a reasonable chance of success? We have to look at making it easier to get these cases, which we know involve complex legal issues, to court. We should experiment with prosecutor-led investigations. People have said that that means the prosecutor is therefore less independent, but Scotland seems to manage with a procurator fiscal system. Why can we not do that here in England and Wales?

The Government are talking about dedicated rape courts. Perhaps we could arrange to have such courts, which would work quicker. In Scotland, murder cases get to court within 100 days for committal, so why can we not do that for rapes? Why can we not say that they have to be in court within 90 calendar days? It could be a different time limit, but the Committee knows the point I am making about a timely deadline. The courts could sit more often; they sit for only 220 days out of 365. Perhaps the judges could take shorter holidays, or we could have more judges. By getting more court days in these cases, we could make a real difference.

Finally, these cases might benefit from the researching of jurors. At the moment in this country, it is illegal to research jurors. Why can we not do that in these cases, in order to find out what evidence persuades a juror and what evidence does not? America can do it but for some reason, we deny the possibility of investigating jurors’ decision-making processes. Particularly in these cases, where privacy and intimacy are such big issues, perhaps we ought to consider more how a jury reaches its decision.

13:20

[Lord Stevens of Kirkwhelpington (CB)]

I too congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, on bringing this matter before the Committee. Noble Lords will not be surprised to hear that I agree with everything that my noble friend and colleague Lord Hogan-Howe has said, but I have some additional things to say.

The year 1988 was a seminal time for the investigation of rape. A television programme was produced on Thames Valley Police, much against the views and opinion of the Association of Chief Police Officers. It created absolute mayhem by showing the way police officers were approaching and tackling rape. I happen to believe that it is now time for another seminal moment. Why would I say that?

In his recent report, the Chief Inspector of Constabulary said that the loss of public trust is about the failure

“to get the basics right”.

Surely, the investigation of rape is one of the primary things the police could deliver. There have been improvements since 1923—I mean 2023; that shows you how old I am. There has been an increase in the charging rate of 51% compared to the previous year. However, the success rate does not follow, so there are some strange figures around; I could not make much of the ones I have here myself. Although the conviction rate decreased, the volume of convictions increased, which means that the quality of cases going to the CPS and the courts, and being investigated by the police, is not quite reaching the level it could.

Rape has recently been a very important issue, and how we handle it has been shown to be not up to scratch. In her 2021-22 report, the Victims’ Commissioner, Dame Vera Baird, said:

“The distressing truth is that if you are raped in Britain today, your chances of seeing justice are  slim”.


I do not believe that is quite the position now. Protections have increased but, as the Committee will hear in a minute, there are massive deficiencies in relation to the people charged with doing the job itself and, more importantly, taking these cases through the courts.

I did my own research last night and the day before, with barristers who are prosecuting and defending, as well as two solicitors who are responsible for dealing with prosecution in these cases. One of the weaknesses they identified, my noble friend and colleague Lord Hogan-Howe has already talked about: victim attrition. It is said that it takes 10 months to bring a case from arrest, through investigation and questioning, to prosecution. My short and maybe faulty investigation shows that it now takes 18 months. That is what I have been told, but it cannot possibly be right. One of the reasons for that, which my noble friend and colleague has talked about, is the expertise of the people doing these investigations. You cannot have someone with no experience of detective work, investigation and forensic science doing a complicated rape case. You have to have one of the best detectives, who we use for terrorism and organised crime.

Returning to victim attrition, last year, 77 people decided that there was no point in going forward with a prosecution. They had to wait a further three to four years after the police had taken 10 to 18 months to get to court. That is an absolute disgrace and a scandal, and I know this Government accept that. How has it come about? I could go on about what has been done to the police over the past 25 to 30 years, and produce evidence of that, but this is not the time for that.

So, in view of where we are, my noble friend and colleague is right. We need expertise in the front line in investigating rapes, in order to do it in a proper way. The forensic side is massively important, because a lot of that will be what I call first-hand evidence. That has to be done by properly trained detectives, but there is a massive shortage of them in this country at the moment, for a number of reasons. Let us get that right. Then, let us consider how long it takes to prosecute, and the fast-tracking of CPS decisions. Equally important—although it is harder to do this in the present circumstances because of the state of the courts and the lack of barristers—is rapid charging: taking a case to court quickly, so that people’s memories of the trauma and violence they have experienced are fresh.

At the end of the day, we are all here for the Minister. We are here to help, not to criticise. Of course, we know about the terrible, tragic scandals involving people such as Couzens—that monster who was stalking the streets. But on this issue, things can be taken forward. We are not going to create Rome in a day, but we want to go stage by stage, improving what we are doing for victims. My message is similar to Bernard’s—how dare I refer to him by his Christian name!—we are here, it can be done and, if I may say so, this Government have made a very good start. I know the Minister and the Home Secretary are behind it, so let us get on with it, stage by stage. Your Lordships’ House needs to keep a watching brief on this, because it is too important to fail.

13:27

[Baroness Burt of Solihull (LD)]

My Lords, I start by thanking the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, for convening this debate, which is very necessary and comes at a very appropriate time. Before we even start, however, digital research from the CSEW showed that fewer than one in six victims—16%—of sexual assault by rape or penetration had reported the incident to the police. The most common reasons given for non-reporting were embarrassment, at 40%; that they did not think the police could help, at 38%; and that they thought it would be humiliating, at 34%. All of those may well be true, but also, one-quarter of victims thought that the police would not believe them. That is something we can start working on strongly with the new Government.

I think we can safely assume that, whatever the final numbers are, the number of charges, let alone convictions, is infinitesimal compared to the number of rapes perpetrated. The number of prosecutions is increasing, although, as we have heard, conviction rates are decreasing. However, there is also an increase in what the CPS calls victim attrition, which a number of colleagues have mentioned this afternoon: prosecutions that stopped because the victim no longer supported, or was unable to support, a conviction. No wonder many perpetrators continue with impunity, given that they are never likely to be prosecuted. That is one of the most fundamental things. We know that certainty of prosecution is a big issue when it comes to perpetrators considering what they are doing.

What steps would make a difference? The causes and outcomes are very complex. First, there is the “He said, she said” argument. Police must gather enough evidence to refer a case to the Crown Prosecution Service, but there has been a great increase in the information available to consider: mobile phones, social media, et cetera. This does not always work out in the victim’s favour; it is a continuation of the “She must have been asking for it” type of argument. Being asked to hand over their mobile phone has led many victims to withdraw their complaint. In the words of Dame Vera Baird:

“They cannot face the unwarranted and unacceptable intrusion into their privacy”.


Charges for rape are as low—or nearly as low—as ever. The number of cases that have collapsed after failures in the way they were prosecuted is too high. That is totally inappropriate, and it is depressing. Then there are the time delays. According to the Home Affairs Committee, many victims say that if they had known how long it would take—we have heard that it can take 10 months, possibly now even 18 months—they would not have called the case to the attention of the police in the first place. That puts other victims in greater danger, too.

If there is enough evidence, only then can the accused perpetrator be charged. In the year to September 2021, just 1.3% of rape cases resulted in a charge, compared with 7.1% for all other recorded crime. Considering that we so frequently know the identity of the perpetrator, I am sure that everyone in this Room would agree that that is totally unacceptable. The CPS is bringing fewer rape prosecutions, often because the police do not put them forward. Why are fewer cases being put forward? In some cases, it is because the police have heard that the CPS is making fewer prosecutions. There is a self-fulfilling prophecy for noble Lords.

Then there is the funding. The Institute for Government estimated that the CPS budget was cut by 28% between 2009 and 2018. We are told that the Government have announced £40 million to support victims of crime, at least half of which is for community-based sexual violence and domestic abuse. Is that enough? I am sorry to say that I do not think it is—not by a long chalk. Cuts are still being made. RASA Merseyside, which supports victims with advice, counselling and guidance through the justice system, says that its funding has been reduced in real terms by 18%. There is more demand but fewer staff, leading to less support.

What is to be done? We have had some great suggestions this afternoon, all of which I am sure the Minister will carefully consider. The new Labour Government have described prosecution rates for rape as “shamefully low” and pledged “tougher enforcement and protection”. They said:

“The most prolific and harmful perpetrators will be relentlessly targeted, using tactics normally reserved for terrorists and organised crime”.


That is fully justified, given the amount of terror they cause.

The Government have also pledged to fast-track rape cases, with specialist courts at every Crown Court location in England and Wales, which sounds good. I would be interested to know within what timescale the Minister thinks we may get those specialist courts up and running.

I certainly welcome the Government’s announcement of plans to

“roll out free, independent legal advocates for victims and survivors of adult rape”

from 2025. They said the advocates would ensure that victims

“have support to enforce their legal rights, for example, in relation to the use of personal records during an investigation or in court”.

Many fundamental assumptions are holding us back. I am intrigued and heartened by the suggestions we have heard this afternoon. So come on, Labour, let us get on with the job. Can we not think a little bit more outside the box?

13:35

[Baroness Stedman-Scott (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, for securing this debate. It addresses a matter of profound urgency and importance, and one that speaks directly to justice, safety and equality in our society. The stark reality remains that too many victims of rape and sexual assault in the UK are being denied justice.

The figures are sobering. Although thousands of rape cases are reported every year, only a small fraction result in charges being brought. In the 12 months to July last year, the Crown Prosecution Service discontinued 496 rape cases. The proportion of rape prosecutions being dropped has also risen in recent years—up from 9.3% in 2022 to 12.8% at the end of last year. Low prosecution rates erode trust, silence survivors and result in crimes going unpunished. It is essential that we confront this issue with both urgency and compassion—a point made by all noble Lords who have contributed thus far.

Crippling court delays are thought to be a major contributing factor in why victims choose to abandon the process before a trial takes place. Victims face resource constraints in policing. In the Crown Prosecution Service, concerns have emerged that the changes to the rules about how digital evidence is handled have the potential to have adverse impacts on victims seeking justice. However, this has been disputed by representatives from Rape Crisis, who have said that the protections afforded to victims regarding digital evidence were vital in keeping them engaged—a point already raised in this debate.

Others have expressed concerns that although rape convictions have doubled over five years, the number of prosecutions that have been dropped has tripled. The importance of resource to deal with rape cases has been made very well today, and I am interested in the Minister’s thoughts on that.

The previous Government took steps to support victims, ensure justice is delivered and restore public confidence in the system. First, we made record investments in victim support services, providing survivors with more resources. We increased funding for rape crisis centres and nearly doubled the number of independent sexual violence advisers.

Secondly, under Conservative leadership, an action plan for improving the criminal justice system’s response to rape in England and Wales was published, and reports have been published every year since then to update Parliament and the public on the progress made in implementing recommendations in the action plans. It would be good to have an update on this.

Finally, we legislated to end the automatic halfway release for offenders sentenced for crimes such as rape, manslaughter and grievous bodily harm.

As a result of the implementation of these measures, progress was made in the prosecution of rape cases. Data from July to September 2023 showed that adult rape cases referred by the police to the CPS continued to increase: there were 1,470 police referrals in this period. In fact, we increased rape prosecutions by 56% since 2010 and pledged that rape victims would get the justice and support they deserve, with a new investigatory model for police forces and prosecutors, as well as pre-recorded cross examination for victims in all Crown Courts.

However, this is not enough, and we can all agree that we must go further. At present, adult rape cases take an average of two years to complete in court. I am sure everybody in this debate agrees that this is not good enough. It can leave survivors feeling as if they are in limbo, and lead to their withdrawing from the process before the cases reach trial. Statistics have been given today as evidence of this.

In their manifesto, the Government promised to appoint legal advocates to provide free legal services and support to rape survivors across England and Wales by redirecting PCC grants for victims’ services. Yet it is deeply concerning that, to date, progress has been slow. They appear to have stalled on their promise to set up dozens of specialist rape courts to deal with the court backlogs. Can the Minister confirm that they will continue to build on the efforts made by the previous Government? What attempts have the Government made to use vacant rooms and buildings on Crown Court sites to fast-track rape cases, as pledged during the election campaign? Will the Minister confirm that fast-track rape cases are indeed a priority for the Government in their commitment to tackle violence against women and girls?

I would also like to support, at this stage, the important point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, in relation to education. It would be good if the Minister was able, either today or in writing, to tell us of any progress that has been made in this.

My noble friend Lady Wyld ended her excellent contribution by saying that there is cross-party support for this. Of course, the noble Lord, Lord Stevens, made the point that we are here to help. I think this is something we can work on together, not fall out over, and make life better for the people who suffer.

13:42

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Ministry of Justice (Lord Ponsonby of Shulbrede) (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank all noble Lords who have taken part in this important debate, particularly, the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, for bringing this debate here today. One main theme in the debate has been the issue of trust: trust within the criminal justice system and, particularly, trust in women when they report rape. That underlies all the speeches made here this afternoon.

Rape and other sexual offences are among the most serious crimes that can be committed. It is right that we work hard to ensure that survivors receive the swift and compassionate response from our criminal justice system that they deserve. This Government were elected on a clear, landmark pledge to halve violence against women and girls over the next decade. Improving the criminal justice system’s response to rape is central to that pledge. Although our pledge necessarily focuses on the disproportionate impact of these crimes on women, we recognise that men and boys can also be victims of sexual offences, including rape. Noble Lords might note that I introduced the relevant amendment for male rape in the Sexual Offences Act 2003, and that has changed the perception of male victims of sexual offences.

As we have heard, if you are a victim of rape in this country today, your chances of seeing your case reach trial are low, despite the courage it takes for survivors to come forward. Only a fraction of reported cases end in prosecution and, if charges are brought, it may take years for your case to come to trial. While the number of rape prosecutions has increased over recent years—now at the highest level since 2010—they continue to fall short of what victims, and the wider public, would expect. This Government are determined to transform the response to rape in this country, so that victims are supported and perpetrators brought to justice swiftly. That is our goal. It is a simple one, even if the task itself is not.

Let me set out the factors that have led us to this point. In 2019, charges and prosecutions for rape had fallen to an historic low, prompting the previous Government to carry out an end-to-end review of the criminal justice system’s response to adult rape offences. This review found that the system had, in fact, faltered from around 2016 onwards—a year that saw a sharp decline in rape prosecutions, coupled with a decline in convictions. The reasons for this drop are varied but well documented.

The first concerns systemic issues. When this Government took office, we inherited a justice system under intense pressure and a growing backlog of cases in the courts. The volume of outstanding cases in the Crown Court now stands at over 70,000—a record high. When the justice system is under this level of strain, everyone feels the impact; it is a sad fact that this includes victims, particularly victims of sexual offences. For many victims, the wait they might face is simply too much to bear. As it stands, around 55% of rape complainants, despite coming forward, eventually withdraw from the criminal justice process. Understandably, they want to focus on their own mental health and rebuilding their lives.

Rape cases also require specialist expertise; this point was made by both previous commissioners, who gave, if I may say so, some interesting ideas. The noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, talked about group police work as the way to tackle this issue; he compared it to terrorist offences and the like, and I found it an interesting idea. Of course, this is a resource issue. These resource issues include the challenge of having enough specialist barristers, both prosecuting and defending, willing to take on these highly sensitive and difficult cases.

For prosecution volumes to improve, victims must also have the confidence to come forward and report what has happened to them, knowing that they will be taken seriously and, crucially, be given the support they need. Sadly, this is not always the experience of rape victims. This means that improvements in training, culture and local policing practices must all come together in a seamless and consistent manner. Victims will have confidence in the system only if they see it working effectively and compassionately.

I have set out some of the systemic issues. Now let me briefly highlight the challenges particular to this category of offences. First, many rapes are committed by someone known to the victim—often a current or former partner. Estimates suggest that more than 40% of adult rape victims are, or have been, in a relationship with their attacker. This complicates the investigative process.

Secondly, it is widely acknowledged that sexual offences, in particular rape, are often under-reported. Many victims fear the stigma of speaking out. Others lack confidence in the criminal justice system itself, feeling as though they are not being listened to or taken seriously—and, indeed, that they are the ones under scrutiny, not the perpetrator. During an investigation, it is not unusual for the police to request a victim’s personal records. Noble Lords will know that these requests have, at times, gone too far, causing unnecessary upset to victims, compounding their trauma and causing them to drop out of their case altogether.

I have outlined some of the challenges; now let me set out some of the commitments that this Government have made to begin addressing them. First, we have committed to ensuring swifter justice for victims and reducing the wait times that contribute to so many withdrawing from the process. One of the most vital steps in addressing this is reducing the time it takes from a charge being laid to the actual trial; we are working with the judiciary on how we can best fast-track rape cases through the courts.

More broadly, we have taken decisive action to drive the outstanding case load down, such as funding extra sitting days, which will see courts sit for a total of 108,500 days this financial year—the highest number in almost a decade. We have also increased the sentencing powers of magistrates’ courts from six months to 12 months for a single triable either-way offence. We expect this to free up around 2,000 sitting days and allow judges to deal with the more—indeed, the most—serious cases.

However, if victims are going to see justice done more swiftly in this country, we cannot simply do more of the same. We must go further. It will take once-in-a-generation reform, which is why the Lord Chancellor has commissioned Sir Brian Leveson to carry out an independent review of the criminal courts. Sir Brian will consider the merits of longer-term reform, as well as how our courts can operate more efficiently. I am sure that noble Lords will await the review’s findings with interest.

The Government’s second commitment is that every victim of adult rape should have access to a free, independent legal adviser. Later this year, we will introduce new independent legal advisers, who will offer free legal advice to victims of adult rape at any point from report to trial. These advisers will help victims understand their rights, including in relation to the use of personal information, as well as offering clarity about the court process, timelines and what to expect. These advisers will not undermine the right to a fair trial or prevent evidence coming to light. They will simply help victims understand and, if needed, take steps to protect the rights that they already have.

Our third commitment is that specialist rape and sexual offences teams will be introduced into every police force, ensuring that the right capabilities are in place properly to investigate these offences. Victims must have a positive experience when dealing with the police, which will in turn increase reporting and deliver better outcomes for victims. We are working closely with policing partners to make this a reality.

Encouragingly, the volume of rape cases being reported to the police has followed a significant upward trend in recent years despite the prevalence of rape remaining flat, as measured by the Crime Survey for England and Wales. This means more brave victims feeling confident to report their offence to the police without increases in the number of incidents of rape.

Those are just three of our commitments. They will be underpinned by a new strategy to combat violence against women and girls, to be published later this year, which will help us transform how government, and the justice system as a whole, responds to these horrific crimes.

Let me emphasise again that rape is an abhorrent crime. It has no place in our society, and far too many survivors have suffered without seeing justice or receiving the support they so desperately need. A combination of factors, including strained court capacity and inconsistent resourcing, have contributed to the level of rape prosecutions we see today, but it is not enough simply to reel off the complexities. We must act, and that is what the Government are doing. We are under no illusion about the scale of the challenge before us, and I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, for raising this issue for debate.

I shall now answer some of the specific questions asked by noble Lords. First, education is a cross-government endeavour that starts with prevention. My colleagues Ministers Davies-Jones and Phillips are leading on this issue, as are colleagues in the Department for Education. Relationship, sex and health education is now a statutory part of the curriculum, and within that, people are learning about domestic abuse and consent. So there is a cross-departmental approach to this important part of the solution to the problem.

Other noble Lords asked about attrition—women dropping out of the process. The answer to that is in the three specific promises I made: to support women through legal advice, to speed up the process, and to ensure that women understand the reality of the court process they will go through.

Other noble Lords asked about the experience in court. Trauma-informed training has already been delivered at Snaresbrook, Leeds and Newcastle Crown Courts, with over 400 professionals trained so far, including court staff, CPS staff and the police. In addition, witness waiting rooms and in-court technology have been upgraded in selected courts, and Section 28 of the Youth Justice and Criminal Evidence Act also addresses the way victims are treated as they go through these types of cases.

I might say that I have dealt with these matters myself. Very unusually, I have dealt with a youth rape. Magistrates would not normally deal with rape, but on appeals in the youth court a magistrate would sit as a winger. I dealt with one at Harrow Crown Court, and I thought it was handled as well as it possibly could be. Interestingly—I will close on this because I am being looked at by my Whip—the young woman concerned chose to be in the courtroom while the case was proceeding because she wanted to be part of the whole process. The technology was available for it to be done in a different way, but that was her choice, and I thought it was a very powerful one on her part.

If I have not answered noble Lords’ questions, I will write to them.

13:55

Sitting suspended.

Creative Industries: Rights Reservation Model

Thursday 30th January 2025 Grand Committee

Question for Short Debate

14:00

Asked by

[Lord Foster of Bath]

To ask His Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the impact on creators and the creative industries of the rights reservation model proposed in their consultation paper “Copyright and Artificial Intelligence” published on 17 December 2024.

[Lord Foster of Bath (LD)]

My Lords, I begin by thanking the Minister for meeting me earlier in the week. I accept that he wants genuine consultation, although, as I will come to in a moment, the Government appear, in some aspects of the consultation, to have predetermined the direction of travel.

I accept that it seems somewhat odd to be returning to this issue so soon after Tuesday’s debate and the passing of the amendments of the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, who deserves great praise for the work she has been doing. In my defence, I point out that I entered the ballot before the date had been set for Report stage of the Bill. Anyway, I am absolutely confident that we will need to keep returning to this issue many times, given the pace of development in AI. It is worth reflecting that on Tuesday evening, we were only just learning of the allegations by large AI firms that DeepSeek had been freeloading off their models to train its own model—an infringement, they claim, of their IP. How they have the gall to say that is beyond me, frankly, given that they have been responsible for the theft on a grand scale of the IP of UK creators.

I am not trying to join the debate retrospectively, but I must make my own position clear: the theft I have described must stop. I supported the noble Baroness’s amendments. The enormous success of our creative industries, much lauded on Tuesday, is in no small measure due to our gold standard IP regime, which has been the bedrock of growth, investment and innovation. We weaken it at our peril.

I want to make three things clear. First, this is not an IP v AI debate. The creative industries have been early adopters of AI and see the real benefits of its development. Indeed, they have been working with AI developers as fellow travellers. But if UK creators, many already poorly paid, are to earn even less because their IP is not remunerated, they will stop creating and so stop the flow of the high-class data needed for AI development. As Sir Paul McCartney said over the weekend,

“make sure you protect the creative thinkers, the creative artists, or you’re not going to have them”.

Secondly, I am unconvinced by arguments of legal uncertainty. Rather than sowing seeds of doubt, I would prefer to see the Government supporting the creative industries in upholding the law against unprecedented theft of their IP. As the noble Baroness, Lady Cavendish, said on Tuesday:

“This is not about balance”


between AI and IP,

“it is about implementing and upholding the rule of law ”.—[Official Report, 28/1/25; col. 167.]

But I also accept the need, as has frequently happened in the light of technological development, to update legislation, not least in terms of transparency and enforcement.

Thirdly, any updating should be based on detailed assessment of the implications. The question for this debate is:

“To ask His Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the impact on creators and the creative industries of the rights reservation model proposed in their”


AI consultation paper. Sadly, Tuesday’s debate made it clear that the answer is, little or none.

The creative industries’ own assessment argues that the Government’s proposed option of a text and data-mining exception will weaken our gold-standard IP regime. They argue that it could mean that AI companies, most of which are large US tech firms, can effectively take British creators’ work to train their models, profit from it and, in many cases, not repay the creator. Bizarrely, having circumvented the IP protection of others, the AI companies can get IP protection for their own creations.

But instead of rehashing the debate, I want to offer the Minister an opportunity to give reassurances to this Committee and the creative community that the Government are listening to the concerns, and to offer further comments that Members in another place will read before the Bill is debated there—where, incidentally, I hope we might see a shift in the Official Opposition’s position.

The Minister and his colleagues in the other place have been keen to reassure us that any new TDM exception with opt-out or rights reservation would be introduced only once a workable opt-out was found. He and his ministerial colleagues must therefore have some confidence that these systems are at least emerging, so what examples can he provide? To get to a stage of actively promoting a particular option for reform, one must assume that the Government have received assurances that, if that option is in place, AI developers will proactively enter licence agreements for content. Can the Minister say whether such assurances have been received?

Ministers have also accepted that different types of work will need different systems of opt-out. Is the thinking that there will be a phased approach to the introduction, as each different system is agreed? How could that possibly work? Will the Minister offer reassurance that this will not lead to different works having different levels of copyright protection?

The Government have said that any system must be workable. How will that be assessed? On Tuesday, the Minister in the other place said before the DCMS Committee that it would not be a decision just for Ministers; rather, it would be one for them and industry. Can the Minister shed some light on how such a decision on workability might be agreed, and, in particular, give a categorical assurance that rights holders will have a formal role in approval?

The Minister in the other place also talked about the need for ease and accessibility in any new system. The creative industries have argued that the Government’s preferred option would create huge bureaucratic burdens for artists, particularly independent artists and small music labels, who would end up wasting hundreds of hours on paperwork and translating legal jargon rather than, for example, making music or writing books. Can the Minister explain what “easy” and “accessible” look like?

On other areas of the consultation there is more widespread agreement about the need for updating legislation. For example, some AI developers have publicly claimed that they can use temporary copying exemptions as a legal basis for using data for model training without paying. Will the Minister confirm that this is not intended and will be clarified in law? There are strong arguments in favour of changes around metadata, with legislation prohibiting the stripping of rights reservation protocols to help better protect so-called floating content. Again, will such prohibitions be included in any changes to the law?

I know that the Minister agrees on the need for far greater transparency, and the consultation contains proposals to implement some form of transparency mechanism for AI developers to follow, but does he agree that, to be effective, it will need to be transparency that provides a granular level of detail of the works that have been ingested? Without it, there will be no way for those developers to prove compliance with any opt-out. Does he also agree that developers should be required to provide details of the crawlers they have used, coupled with an assurance that the crawlers have been designed to interpret and respect machine-readable rights reservation notices?

On enforcement, transparency will only help to provide evidence of compliance—or non-compliance—with the law. It will not offer a route for creators to receive any form of compensation for the misuse of their works. If those rights holders have to go to court to receive any compensation, how will that move us on from where we are today? Again, the Minister in the other place told the DCMS Committee that he did not think that accessing justice through the courts should be the preserve of deep-pocketed rights holders. I agree. Can the Minister suggest how the Government foresee rights holders being able to access justice, if not through the courts?

Finally, little has been said about how any new law will co-exist with the laws we have now. Will the Minister confirm that any existing infringement would have to be dealt with under existing law? There are understandable concerns among our talented UK creators. I hope that when he responds the Minister will acknowledge those concerns and, in some areas at least, provide some assurances, not least a willingness to reconsider the potentially hugely damaging proposal for a new text and data-mining exception. Without it, we risk sacrificing a known success story—the UK’s £124 billion creative industries—for a leap in the dark.

14:10

[Lord Black of Brentwood (Con)]

My Lords, I want to address the impact of the Government’s proposed rights reservation model on the media. I declare my interest as deputy chairman of the Telegraph Media Group and note my other interests in the register. I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Foster of Bath, on securing this debate and on his powerful speech. Hard on the heels of Tuesday’s vote on the data Bill, it presents another opportunity to send a powerful signal that the Government’s preferred option for an opt-out model is deeply flawed and would profoundly damage the whole creative economy.

The crushing onslaught of digital media has impacted every aspect of life but nowhere more acutely than on the media, as advertising revenues, which support quality journalism, have haemorrhaged to the giant, unaccountable tech platforms. The UK’s advertising market was worth more than £36 billion in 2023, but £14 billion of that went direct to Google’s search service alone. By contrast, less than 4% of the value of the entire ad market—yes, 4%—went to news publishers. Media businesses have therefore been in a race against time to find a new business model, but just when many are so successfully doing so, the exponential growth of AI has brought huge new challenges with it, and this proposal will turbocharge that.

The reality of the current media landscape was set out recently by the Economist, which noted that social media had transformed the market by reducing the cost of the distribution of news to zero, and now AI is going to do the same by potentially reducing the cost of generating so-called news to zero. Between the two of them, we are being led into TS Eliot’s “wilderness of mirrors”, where it is impossible to tell the difference between truth and illusion, with profound ramifications for our democracy.

In some ways, it is impossible to reach conclusions about the Government’s opt-out model, as we know so little about it. There has been no impact assessment, and there must be. It is entirely untested and unevidenced, and we cannot learn from other jurisdictions because a working rights reservation regime does not exist anywhere else on the planet. Given the enormous repercussions of this, there must be clarity—and none exists, but of some things we can be certain.

One is that were it even possible to produce a practical and effective opt-out mechanism, and I have severe doubts about that, it would place an immense administrative burden and therefore unsustainable cost on even the largest news publishers. Already, more than 40% of the top 100 English-language news websites do not block any AI crawlers, and they are the ones that have the knowledge and resources to do so. Smaller news publishers, including hard-pressed local media or a freelancer writing on their Substack, simply would not stand a chance. One other point on which we can be certain is that while these proposals may seem attractive to big tech in the short term, over the long term they could end up significantly weakening AI and, as the noble Lord said, we are all pro AI. It has enormous potential but it must be done and dealt with properly.

The problems for AI will spring because it is totally reliant on large volumes of high-quality data. It needs a sustainable and fresh supply to function—something that is especially true for search engines such as Google’s AI Overviews, which rely on retrieval-augmented generation and feed off up-to-date news content to provide accurate, relevant information. Yet researchers predict that, if current trends continue, AI developers will deplete the available stock of public, human-created text data sometime between 2026 and 2032. It will inevitably be replaced by what? By AI-generated content—in other words, it will feed off itself in a way which will degrade the quality of large language models, as they begin to rely on their own inferior data. It would become a modern-day version of the fabled Greek king Erysichthon, whose hunger—forced on him by the goddess Demeter, I am told—was so insatiable that he squandered his entire fortune and ended up eating himself. That is what could happen with AI.

It need not be like this. There is a way forward that will allow both AI and the original content creators to flourish together: simply by ensuring that the existing copyright laws we have are properly and transparently enforced, with effective mechanisms to build a dynamic licensing market. This would be in the interests not just of content creators, who are so desperate for change after years of copyright theft by the GAI firms; of the public, who overwhelmingly believe that these companies should pay to use the content that trains them; or of the media, whose quality journalism is absolutely vital for our democracy. It would, as I have said, be in the long-term interests of AI, too. If the Government really want to make the UK an AI powerhouse and protect our creative industries, which are the envy of the world and will power growth in future, they must think again. I look forward to hearing from the Minister.

14:17

[Lord Holmes of Richmond (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow my noble friend Lord Black. I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Foster, on securing this timely and excellent debate. In doing so, I declare my interests as set out in the register—in particular my technology interests, not least as an adviser to Socially Recruited, which is an AI business.

As the noble Lord, Lord Foster, has already set out, we had an excellent debate on Tuesday night. My question for this afternoon is: how much does it cost to develop and train a foundation model? Is it £500 billion or £5 million? Is it somewhere in between? I do not know, but here is what we do know. The cost of current foundational models is felt by our creatives: the musicians who make sounds where there would otherwise be silence; and the writers who fill a blank page with words that touch our human hearts and souls and, sometimes, change the course of human history. They are paying the cost of the current “model” that we have.

How can it be not only that they are currently footing the cost but that the potential, proposed approach to this issue will put the onus on them to assert their rights? There is that onus, the cost, pressure and stress and, ultimately, the impossibility of doing this with an opt-out model. My first question to the Minister is: can it ever be so that opting out could work? How could it ever bring the certainty, clarity and consistency that we require? As a helpful example, can the Minister say something about the recent LAION case and the light that that throws on this matter?

There is a real tedium to this TDM discussion. It is just that an obvious and irrefutable truth is wilfully ignored and pushed to one side. If you own a copyright or have IP rights, you hold and own those rights. If you do not, the truth is simple and unquestionable: those rights are not yours. That should be the guiding principle when considering any potential approach to IP and copyright in relation not just to AI but to the fact that we have hundreds of years of legal certainty which comes from this.

How would the Minister define a proper and workable model for the preservation of these rights? What would he say to individuals and small entities about the cost, pressure and impossibility of seeking to enforce their rights? How does he intend transparency to be an important thread that runs through this alongside the technical? What about post-ingestion and, if we get to the point of some potential change, what about all that protected material already ingested deep into the engine room of these models?

What attracts businesses, investors and innovators to the UK from a regulatory and legislative perspective? It is certainty, clarity and consistency. In no sense can we say that we have those right now in our country. That is why I believe, not only when it comes to IP and copyright, that given all the issues we are currently grappling with in these new technologies, not least AI, we should have overarching AI legislation and right-sized regulation, which is always good for all elements of our economy and society. Yes, look at IP and copyright, but we should have an AI authority with AI-responsible officers labelling sandboxes and, crucially, a complete transformation of public engagement.

It seems clear at this stage that when it comes to the Government’s plans for IP and copyright in relation to AI, we should all have serious reservations. I go back to that fundamental truth that there is no question, debate, difficulty or complexity. You either have the rights set out at law or you do not. That should inform all discussions and points around IP and copyright. We should have an approach that goes to the heart of this fundamental truth: it is our data. We decide, determine and choose and then, for citizens, consumers and creatives, we have a real opportunity to say positively, with a hashtag, “#OurAIFutures”.

14:23

[Lord Freyberg (CB)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Holmes. I, too, thank the noble Lord, Lord Foster, for initiating this timely debate following Tuesday’s vote on the Data (Use and Access) Bill. As someone with a background in the visual arts and as an artist member of DACS, the Design and Artists Copyright Society, I speak with direct knowledge of these challenges.

The overwhelming majority of creators, whether visual artists, writers, actors or filmmakers, are freelance or self-employed. Recent research from The University of Glasgow’s Centre for Regulation of the Creative Economy reveals a stark crisis: visual artists now earn a median income of just £12,500, a devastating 47% collapse since 2010. Most creators must juggle multiple jobs to survive, and even successful artists are earning only £17,500 annually.

The proposed rights reservation model fundamentally undermines the viability of visual artists’ careers across the country. It does this through a dangerous inversion of copyright principles, principles that creators have long relied upon to secure royalties and safeguard their work. Instead of protecting creators’ existing rights, it imposes costly new burdens requiring them to actively defend protections historically held by default.

As the EU’s AI Act demonstrates, this approach faces insurmountable technical and legal barriers, creating a labyrinth that benefits neither creators nor users. Consider the practical impossibility of an artist enforcing a comprehensive opt-out in our interconnected digital age. Picture a scenario where a museum visitor photographs an opted-out artist’s work and shares it on social media. These platforms routinely permit AI training on user content, inadvertently exposing the artist’s work to the very AI systems they sought to avoid. The artist’s intended opt-out becomes meaningless within seconds of a single smartphone click. This forces creators into an impossible choice: accept unwanted AI training or demand photography bans, unravelling decades of progress in democratising art access.

In today’s digital marketplace, an artist’s online visibility is not merely advantageous but is essential for survival. Their digital presence serves as a virtual gallery, portfolio and business card combined connecting them with collectors, commissioners and collaborators worldwide. Yet the proposed opt-out system creates an impossible dilemma: how can artists protect their work from AI training without simultaneously vanishing from search engines and potential clients? The distinction between beneficial visibility and unwanted AI scraping becomes a technical impossibility. This challenge is compounded by the breakneck pace of technological change in AI development. Web-crawling technologies evolve almost daily, rendering today’s opt-out mechanisms obsolete tomorrow. More troubling still is the retrospective futility of such measures: countless AI models have already ingested vast archives of artists’ works.

At the heart of the visual arts sector lies not corporations but individuals: freelance artists navigating an already complex professional landscape. The opt-out system would drown these artists in administrative complexity, forcing them to master an ever-shifting maze of technical decisions while trying to create art. This crushing burden falls heaviest on those least equipped: individual creators lacking corporate infrastructure and legal expertise. The system presents a cruel paradox. Artists would need to become experts in rapidly evolving AI technologies just to protect their existing rights. They would be forced to make critical decisions about their creative futures under intense time pressure without adequate information or support. How can we expect individual creators to navigate this labyrinth while simultaneously maintaining their artistic practice and earning a living? The answer is simple: we cannot. This system would create an unsustainable burden that disproportionately impacts the most vulnerable members of our creative community.

Consider a professional photographer capturing thousands of images daily. Each photograph represents a separate copyrighted work, yet these images reside in cloud storage vulnerable to AI scraping. Under a rights reservation system, protecting each image becomes a Sisyphean task, turning a day’s creative output into weeks of administrative burden, as the noble Lords, Lord Black and Lord Foster, rightly highlighted. This inversion of creative priorities is fundamentally flawed. Instead of forcing artists to become full-time guardians of their intellectual property, our systems should empower creation and ensure fair compensation. Responsibility for respecting copyright should rest squarely with AI companies that seek commercially to exploit artists’ work, not with the creators themselves. We must reject any framework that transforms artists from creators into perpetual copyright administrators defending their rights against technological encroachment.

The amendments to the data Bill proposed by the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, chart the only viable path forward, one that brings fair value and legal certainty to creative industries and tech sectors alike. This Government must not succumb to pressure from US-based tech companies peddling the false promise that gutting copyright protection will somehow enrich Britain.

14:29

[Lord Clement-Jones (LD)]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lord Foster of Bath on securing the debate today and on his penetrating introduction, which included a number of extremely important questions for the Minister.

AI clearly has many creative uses, as Sir Paul McCartney himself emphasised last Sunday. But it is one thing to use the tech and another to be at the mercy of it, as so many noble Lords emphasised in their thoughtful but passionate speeches, both on Tuesday and today. So many outside organisations—I thank them for their briefings—have also made that very clear in what they have said.

The use of IP-protected content for training is a key issue, which has also arisen in relation to generative AI models outside the UK. It is rather a delicious irony that Open AI is now complaining of its own IP being used to train DeepSeek, as my noble friend said. Here in the UK, the Government’s intentions are clear. The new consultation on AI and copyright, reinforced by the AI opportunities plan, has set out a preferred option—this is the key thing—to change the UK’s copyright framework by creating a text and data mining exception where rights holders have not expressly reserved their rights: in other words, an opt-out system.

We all thought this had been put to bed under the last Government, but this Government seem even more intent on creating a Singapore-on-Thames. In response, we have seen the creation of a new campaign across the creative and news industries, Creative Rights In AI Coalition, and Ed Newton-Rex has raised over 37,000 signatures from creators and creative organisations.

Frankly, the creative and news industries are in uproar. As my noble friend Lord Foster says, the proposals were not underpinned by a robust economic case, but the consultation also starts from the false premise of legal uncertainty. As we heard in the debate on the amendment in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, on Tuesday, there is no lack of clarity over how AI developers can legally access training data. UK law is clear that commercial organisations, including gen AI developers, must license the data they use to train their large language models. AI developers have already reached agreement with news publishers in a number of cases. Open AI has signed deals with publishers internationally, such as News Corp, Axel Springer, the Atlantic and Reuters. There can be no excuse of market failure. There are well-established licensing solutions administered by a variety of well-established mechanisms and collecting societies.

The consultation says:

“The government believes that the best way to achieve these objectives is through a package of interventions that can balance the needs of the two sectors”.


But what kind of balance is this when it is all take and no give on the part of creatives? The Government have stated that they will move ahead with their preferred “rights reservation” option only if the transparency and rights reservation provisions are

“effective, accessible, and widely adopted”.

However, as we have heard from across the Room today, no effective rights reservation, no system for the use of content by gen AI models, has been proposed or implemented anywhere in the world, which makes the government proposals entirely speculative. The technology does not exist.

The laws around transparency of these activities have not caught up. At present, developers can scrape content from the internet without declaring their identity, or they may use content scraped for one purpose for the completely different commercial purpose of training AI models. How can rights owners opt out of something they do not know about? Once used to train these models, the commercial value has already been extracted from IP scraped without permission, with no way to delete data from these models.

We need transparency and a clear statement about copyright. We absolutely should not expect artists to have to opt out. AI developers must be transparent about the identity and purposes of their crawlers, and have separate crawlers for distinct purposes. Unless news publishers and the broader creative industries can retain control over their data, this will not only reduce investment in creative output but will ultimately harm innovation in the AI sector and, as we have heard, tech developers will lack the high-quality data that is the essential fuel in generative AI.

Retaining the Kidron amendments to address the challenges posed by AI development, particularly in relation to copyright and transparency, is in my view, and that of those on these Benches, essential. This should apply regardless of in which country the scraping of copyright material takes place if developers market their product in the UK. It is clear that AI developers have used their lobbying clout to persuade the Government that a new exemption from copyright in their favour is required. As a result, the Government seem to have gone soft on big tech. In response, my party, creators, the creative industries and many other supporters will be vigorously opposing Government plans for a new text and data-mining exemption.

The Minister has been posed a number of key questions by my noble friend Lord Foster and many others, including the noble Lord, Lord Black of Brentwood. I put another question to him: will he now agree to withdraw the TDM with an opt-out as the preferred solution? That is one of the key requests of the creative industries; they would be dancing in the streets if the Minister said that today.

14:35

[Viscount Camrose (Con)]

I thank all noble Lords for their uniformly brilliant contributions to this important debate. I particularly thank the noble Lord, Lord Foster, for securing this debate and introducing it so powerfully. To start with a statement of the obvious: artificial intelligence can do us great good and great harm. I know we are hare mainly to avert the latter, but I open with a few thoughts on the former.

I should like to make two points in particular. First, the UK is often said to have a productivity problem and AI, even at its current level of capability, offers a great chance to fix this by automating routine tasks, improving decision-making and streamlining workflows. Secondly, it was often said, since the early days of e-commerce, that innovative use of technology was the preserve of the private sector, whereas the public sector was less nimble and consequently less productive. Those days must soon be over. Some of the best datasets, especially in this country, are public: health, education and geospatial in particular. Safely exploiting them will require close public-private collaboration, but if we are able to do so—and, I stress, do so safely—the productivity rewards will be extraordinary. This is why we, on these Benches, greatly welcome the AI action plan.

AI’s potential to revolutionise how we work and create is undeniable. In the creative industries, we have already seen its impact, with more than 38% of businesses incorporating AI technologies into their operations as of late last year. Whether in music, publishing, design or film, AI offers tools that enhance productivity, enable innovation, and open new markets. However, the key to all these prizes is public acceptance, the key to public acceptance is trustworthiness, and the key to trustworthiness is not permitting the theft of any kind of property, physical or intellectual.

This brings us to copyright and the rights of creators whose works underpin many of these advances. Copyright-protected materials are often used to train AI systems, too often without the permission, or even knowledge, of creators. Many persuasive and powerful voices push for laws, or interpretations of laws, in this country that prevent this happening. If we are able to create such laws, or such interpretations, I am all for them. I am worried, however, about creating laws we cannot enforce, because copyright can be enforced only if we know it has been infringed.

The size and the international distribution of AI training models render it extremely challenging to answer the two most fundamental questions, as I said on Tuesday. First, was a given piece of content used in a training model? Secondly, if so, in what jurisdiction did this take place? An AI lab determined to train a model on copyrighted content can do so in any jurisdiction of its choice. It may or may not choose to advise owners of scraped content, but my guess is that for a large model of 100 billion parameters, the lab might not be as assiduous in this as we would like. So, enforcement remains a significant challenge. A regulatory framework that lacks clear, enforceable protections risks being worse than ineffective in practice: it risks creating false confidence that eventually kills trust in, and public acceptance of, AI.

So, although we welcome the Government’s decision to launch a public consultation to address these challenges, it is vital that it leads to an outcome that does three things. First, needless to say, it must protect products of the mind from unlawful exploitation. Secondly, it must continue to allow AI labs to innovate, preferably in the UK. Thirdly, it must be enforceable. We all remember vividly Tuesday’s debate on Report of the DUA Bill. I worry that there is a pitfall in seeing AI and copyright policy as a zero-sum struggle between the first two of those objectives. I urge noble Lords, especially the Minister, to give equal emphasis and priority to all three of those goals.

I shall close with a few words on standards. As the Minister has rightly recognised, the key to an enforceable regime is internationally recognised technical standards, particularly, as I have argued, on digital watermarks to identify copyrighted content. A globally recognised, machine-readable watermark can alert scraping algorithms to copyrighted materials and alert rights holders to the uses of their materials. It may even allow rights holders to reserve their rights, opt out automatically or receive royalties automatically. In Tuesday’s debate, I was pleased to hear the Minister confirm that the Government will consider such standards as part of the consultation response.

Of course, the challenge here is that any such standards are—this is the bluntest possible way I can put it—either internationally observed and accepted or pointless. In this country, we have an opportunity to take the lead on creating them, just as we took the lead on setting standards for frontier AI safety in 2023 at Bletchley Park. I urge the Minister to strain every sinew to develop international standards. I say now that I and my party are most willing to support and collaborate on the development of such standards.

14:42

[The Minister of State, Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (Lord Vallance of Balham) (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Foster, for introducing this debate and everyone who contributed. Clearly, several of the amendments that we discussed earlier in the week have been touched on in one form or another in today’s debate. The fact that those amendments were voted through demonstrates the intensity of noble Lords’ passion for and interest in this topic; of course, that is recognised. I acknowledge clearly, because I was asked this question, that I recognise the importance of these issues and I absolutely understand the concerns of the creative industries and, as the noble Lord, Lord Black, mentioned, the media sector.

In some ways, what we have discussed today speaks directly to the question of whether we need a consultation. On 17 December, we published a consultation that seeks to deliver a competitive copyright regime and a package of measures that support our creative industries and the AI sector. I do not want to sound like a broken record, but the proposals aim to deliver three objectives, and I agree with the way the noble Viscount, Lord Camrose, framed objectives. The three objectives that we have put forward are: transparency about the use of copyrighted works to train AI models and AI-generated content, providing greater control for rights holders’ material so that they can be supported in protecting it and can be remunerated where it is used—again, I say that the aim here is quite the opposite of theft: it is to give more control—and enhancing lawful access to the material to be used to train world-leading AI models.

I reiterate what I said on Tuesday: this is a genuine consultation, and many people from a range of sectors are engaging to share their views and evidence. The Government continue to believe that it is important that we have the benefit of that public consultation before we act. A central issue that the noble Lord, Lord Foster, set it in his Question is how to make sure that rights holders can easily reserve their rights and control the use of their material. These are the challenges that rights holders face today. Although they may have copyright on their work, they are often unable in practice to control how it is used or to gain remuneration. This is often particularly true for new or solo artists, the very people we need to protect, a point that the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, and others made.

The rights reservation model proposed in the consultation aims to enhance rights holders’ ability to withdraw their content from being used. It would support their ability to license this content for use with AI if they wish to do that. To do this, we will need the right blend of technology and regulation, and the consultation seeks views on how this should be achieved. Importantly—many noble Lords raised this point—this model would have to be simple, effective and accessible for rights holders of all sizes, something that, frankly, is not available in the current position. The Government have been clear that we will not proceed with this model unless we are confident that these criteria will be met.

On transparency, we want to consider how to achieve this broadly, ensuring that rights holders understand how and where their content is used, while also ensuring any measures are not disproportionate for small businesses and individuals.

On our third objective, access, for all the reasons that the noble Viscount, Lord Camrose, said, we want to ensure that there is a system in place that allows AI developers to access the high-quality material they need to train world-leading models in the UK. We want that access to be without uncertainty and without legal liability slowing down investment and adoption.

These are undoubtedly complex issues, and we need to strike the right balance to ensure that we are able fully to benefit from AI and guarantee the success of our world-leading creative industries. This is why we are asking about all these elements in the consultation.

The question asked by the noble Lord, Lord Foster, raises important issues about the impacts on creators and our assessment of these impacts. This was also something mentioned in the debate earlier in the week. I reassure noble Lords that gathering further economic impact evidence is one of the main reasons for conducting a full inquiry, but it is also worth pointing out that alongside our proposed paper on this, we published a 22-page summary options assessment that set out its initial analysis of the proposals that we have put forward, so it is not correct that there has been no options impact appraisal. This options assessment received a green rating from the independent Regulatory Policy Committee. It recognises, however, that quantitative evidence is currently limited in this area and highlights areas where the Government hope to receive further data during the course of the consultation.

The options assessment sets out the expected impacts of different options and assesses them against those three objectives in the consultation: control, access and transparency. The assessment does not provide detailed data on economic impact, as publicly available evidence in this area is currently rather limited. It is important that we let the consultation run its course so that we can gather evidence of impacts on the full range of affected parties. We are particularly keen for respondents to the consultation to provide further economic evidence to inform how we achieve our objectives. To answer partially, without being able to have singing in the streets, the question from the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, depending on the evidence we receive through the consultation, we will revise, update and expand on the assessment of the options and better determine how we move forward with any potential legislative change. Acting without this would risk imposing legislation that does not have the intended effects.

Alongside our analysis, the Government of course continue to consider a broad range of external studies to assess AI’s economic impact. Modelling the potential economic impact of AI is complicated, and there are several external studies on this. We know that it is complicated, as we have seen just this week with the entry of DeepSeek and how that may change many of the things we think about, but AI adoption has the potential to drive growth across the economy, including, as many noble Lords mentioned, in the creative industries, where more than 38% of creative industry businesses have used AI technologies as of September 2024, with nearly 50% using AI to improve business operations. Earlier this week, I attended the launch of the Institute for the Future of Work’s report into the future of work and well-being, which looks at the impact of AI on work and well-being in all sectors. The Government have considered this external evidence alongside our internal analysis to inform our approach to AI and will continue to do so.

I will now move on to a few other areas. In passing, I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Black, that the question of truth in the effect of AI is crucial. We are in an era where this is increasingly difficult; it is the first wave of the AI challenge. It is crucial for everybody in society and, of course, for the media. Technology will play an important part in delivering greater rightholder control. The Government are clear that any solutions need to be effective, proportionate and accessible to all parties of all sizes, and they must be easy to use. Again, I want to reassure noble Lords that we do not intend to go forward with this approach until we are confident that this is the case.

The noble Lord, Lord Foster, asked whether anything is already available. Things are available; they are not good enough yet but coming along very fast. I know from my time as chair of the Natural History Museum, where we looked after vast amounts of data of huge potential value, that we had ways to try to block people getting hold of it. Things are available now but they need to be better; they also need to be simpler and usable by the individual.

The consultation recognises that more detailed work needs to be done, and an important function of the consultation is to help us work through this detail. A number of industry initiatives are already under way to deliver effective standards. As has been mentioned, these standards—international and national—will be crucial. These efforts, combined with careful regulation, will make it possible to deliver workable rights reservation tools, and a reimbursement mechanism that, again, should be easy to operate and not available only to the largest players or by going to court.

As noble Lords have raised it during the passage of the data Bill, I reiterate the central importance of transparency in the way that creative content is used. The use of web crawlers, metadata and watermarks as different forms of technological solutions could have a number of benefits for those who wish to control or license the use of their content with AI and could provide the very basis for a rights reservation tool.

We agree that a key issue to be addressed is the role of some web crawlers that are used to obtain content for AI training. However, it is important to recognise that web crawlers are used for different purposes, the most familiar being indexing online content so that it can be searched with a search engine. Standards on the use of web crawlers may also be important to improve the ability of rightholders to prevent the use of work against their wishes.

I spoke about workability, and several noble Lords made it clear that it must mean workability for the creative sector and creatives, as well as for others. The noble Lord, Lord Foster, asked about the temporary copy issue. We have asked about that in the consultation.

To conclude, I again thank noble Lords for contributing to this debate. They can rest assured that the Government understand the strongly held and legitimate concerns which creators and rightholders have about their content being used. We also agree that transparency is fundamental. However, it would be wrong to commit to specific legislation while the Government’s consultation is ongoing. Indeed, we should and must consider stakeholders’ responses fully and progress our package of objectives together.

We will consider all the points raised by noble Lords today and during the passage of the Bill. We will do this alongside the responses and evidence received as part of the consultation, before bringing further proposals. I end on the specific point raised by the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, on the LAION case, which is under German law. I will ask the IPO to give him a full answer on that.

14:54

Sitting suspended.

Office for Students

Thursday 30th January 2025 Grand Committee

Question for Short Debate

15:00

Asked by

[Lord Willetts]

To ask His Majesty’s Government what discussions they have had with the Office for Students about (1) its strategy for 2025 to 2030, and (2) its decision to pause applications regarding registering institutions, degree-awarding powers and university titles to allow greater focus on the financial sustainability of the sector.

[Lord Willetts (Con)]

My Lords, I am delighted to open this debate and to give a warm welcome to the Minister opposite, the noble Baroness, Lady Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent. She is the Education Whip in the Lords. I had over two years as a Whip in the other place during which time I had to remain totally silent, which was extremely frustrating. It is yet more evidence of the more liberal and tolerant approach in your Lordships’ House that we will hear directly from the Education Whip. We are all looking forward to that, especially as today is the day when she became engaged, on which many congratulations.

I declare my interests as a visiting professor at King’s College London, a member of the council of the University of Southampton, and for helping Norland College to grow in Asia.

This debate in many ways picks up from one of the very last debates of the previous Parliament. Indeed, in Grand Committee in this very Room on 21 May 2024, we debated the powerful report by the Industry and Regulators Committee on the Office for Students. In that debate there was a particularly trenchant contribution from my noble friend Lord Johnson of Marylebone. I know that he very much regrets that, because of a commitment to the British Council, he is unable to be with us today.

Since then, the Office for Students has produced its new strategy for consultation, with the priorities of quality, the student interest and resilience. Those are absolutely understandable priorities. Then, on 2 December, came its announcement of a pause in some of its key activities, including registering providers and considering new candidates for degree-awarding powers and for university status. Its argument was that focusing on those responsibilities was inconsistent with its priorities, as set out in its strategy. That is a deep misunderstanding of the implications of those priorities; it is also a regrettable failure to discharge one of its statutory obligations.

The task of registering higher education providers and considering them for degree-awarding powers and university titles is fundamental. Ironically, that is made clear by a third announcement—today’s announcement by the Government about tackling the understandable problem of franchising not always leading to high-quality provision. I completely support their engagement with that problem, which is a real problem. They say that they are—and this is out for consultation—proposing

“a requirement that franchised providers with 300 or more students should be directly regulated by the Office for Students”.

That will, of course, require yet more registration activity by the Office for Students, which then says, slightly shamefacedly, that after the pause it expects to start engaging in even more activity, registering those franchised providers. There could be dozens of those—it would be interesting if the Minister could tell us more about them—if not over 100. But my understanding is that, in the last year, it managed to register 12 new providers, so all that is happening is that the backlog of important work is getting worse and worse.

Will the Minister assure us that the OfS will return as soon as possible to its key statutory responsibilities in this regard, and explain to the Committee why it can suspend its discharge of a duty set in legislation? I remember debating this issue at considerable length when the original legislation went through in 2016-17.

Hardest hit by this pause in the process are providers which had been applying to register for degree-awarding powers. It looks as if the pause may mean that some of them have to go back to the beginning. The evidence that they are submitting will have become out of date. They will have to start all over again. This would be very regrettable. It looks from some of the OfS’s comments as if some of the existing cases under consideration will continue. Will the Minister ask the OfS at least to complete the consideration of applications that have already been submitted to it?

The OfS says that it does not have the resource to do this and that it has to focus, therefore, on financial pressures facing universities. This is yet more evidence, of course, of the financial issues that universities face, and I, for one, think there is one obvious solution to this, which is to start once again raising fees, in line with inflation as a minimum, as the previous Labour Government did with surprisingly little fuss.

However, there is a connection between financial resilience, the financial difficulties facing the sector and the registration function of the OfS, because some universities and other higher education providers that get into financial difficulties may then look at a rescue package that includes the reallocation of degree-awarding powers, a new partner entering the registry or a new entity being created, perhaps as a result of a merger or something else, which itself requires registration. The degree-awarding powers and university title are assets that a university could deploy if it were trying to avoid the total disaster of running out of money and going bankrupt, so these provisions for permitting new degree-awarding powers registration may be exactly what is needed as part of a financial rescue package for providers in difficulties. Will the Minister assure noble Lords that where a rescue package for a higher education provider in financial difficulties involves some transfer of degree-awarding powers or university title, or some other creation, perhaps of a new body on the register, that she will request the OfS as a matter of urgency to engage in the necessary process to consider that application?

Finally, as time is tight, I just want to make one wider point about how the Department for Education and the OfS see higher education. There is a big, wide world of higher education out there, which includes very substantial global chains. I am a believer in the growth of higher education, and it seems to me very likely that part of the growth of higher education is bringing in much more professional management. Access to external finance involves those types of business models in higher education. They have not so far taken off in Britain—from a global perspective, ours looks like a cottage industry—but there are global chains of higher education providers that are very keen to invest here. I hope to see British higher education providers growing to a global role.

For example, one of the bids reportedly delayed is an application by the Engineering Institute of Technology from Australia, which is a substantial provider of engineering courses and already has an engineering college of technology here. My understanding is that it was applying for degree-awarding powers, but that application has been paused. OMNES in France is a group of 12 French universities. It wanted nine further international campuses. It has been seeking to register and get degree-awarding powers for more than a year, but that is apparently paused. The IU group in Germany has a range of campuses with 150,000 students currently enrolled. It was trying to set up in Britain. We should be open to this type of high-quality provision. I completely accept that in some of the supply-side reforms that I tried to promote as a Minister, as did subsequently my noble friend Lord Johnson, sometimes the quality was not good enough, and it is right to crack down on that. I very much regret that we did not have a regulatory regime in those early days, but when we have got these big global chains coming in, surely we should welcome them. There are also some British potential candidates; the Oxford International Education Group, for example.

I have been reading the Chancellor’s excellent speech, made yesterday, about the Government’s commitment to growth and their commitment that regulators should not stand in the way of growth opportunities. I wonder what would happen if these international higher education providers that want to invest in Britain, want to come and provide higher education in Britain, were to approach the Minister’s colleague, the excellent noble Baroness, Lady Gustafsson, who is the Minister for Investment and is supposed to be attracting international investment. How will the DfE and the OfS explain that, meanwhile, they are busy refusing to consider applications for international investment in a significant British growth sector? I think that we should honour the spirit of the Chancellor’s excellent speech yesterday and not allow the OfS to stand in its way.

15:10

[Baroness Garden of Frognal (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, for his masterly introduction of this important debate. I regret that there are only four of us speaking today, but I also welcome the noble Baroness, Lady Anderson. In the glorious days of the coalition, I was appointed Minister for Olympic Sport and Media and as the Whip for Higher Education; I was never happier than when I had to stand in for the Minister because we had a number of people who transferred through that role.

We are all aware that universities are going through a very difficult time financially. Student fees have not kept up with inflation and the previous Government made a number of difficulties for overseas students; this has resulted in a large decline in those very students who make such a significant contribution to finances. Since we were stupid enough to leave the EU, there have been considerable drops in EU students, too.

I must say that, in reading this document, the mind boggles at the amount of additional administration that will be required

“to gather and analyse data to understand student experiences, enhance and protect students’ rights, and address barriers that prevent students from fully benefiting from their education”

—let alone all the financial data that will also be required. Thank goodness I was at university when we just got on with it.

I ask the Minister what impact will these demands have, particularly on the further education sector? Colleges have been the main providers of publicly funded higher education at levels 4 and 5 for 90 years. If university staff feel that they are not adequately paid, spare a thought for college lecturers, whose pay compares poorly with that of schoolteachers and university staff.

The pause in registering institutions for degree-awarding powers—DAPs—has had a dramatic effect on a number of colleges. Surely the financial sustainability of some providers should not come at the expense of limiting the possibility for others who could meet national and regional skills priorities. Collaboration between HE and FE is essential if we are to have any hope of meeting the Government’s ambitious growth strategy. Of course, HE is a relatively small part of college provision, but the regulatory costs and burdens are disproportionately high and risk limiting student choice and stifling innovation. Many students who study at higher levels in FE would not consider going away to university, yet their skills and aptitude may be just as good or even better than those of university students. Can the Minister say what consideration has been given to FE colleges in the Government’s grand plans?

Seeking financial sustainability has led to universities suspending some of their courses. As a modern linguist, I dread reading that yet another university has dropped modern languages. I declare an interest: I was a child in France and a student in Spain, and I lived in Germany with my RAF husband. I have always felt European; Brexit was for me a sort of bereavement. It is now more important than ever that we speak the languages of our near neighbours, but the global markets also call for proficiency in Mandarin, Arabic and Japanese if we wish to trade in countries further afield. As Willy Brandt put it so powerfully:

“If I’m selling to you, I speak your language; if I’m buying, dann müssen Sie Deutsch sprechen”.


I apologise for flouting the rules of the Committee to say something in a foreign language—just to translate, that means, “You must speak German”.

It is imperative that if we are trying to sell British goods and services, we must do so in the language of the buyer. The OfS is rightly concerned that on current trends 72% of providers will shortly be in deficit. Why have Governments not done more to safeguard our higher education providers, be they universities or colleges? Our UK universities regularly top the charts in international measurements. They are national stars, so what has gone wrong?

I thank the Library, the Association of Colleges and, at the last minute, the Office for Students, for their helpful briefings, and note the criticism from Mr Alex Proudfoot, who is chief executive of Independent Higher Education, that:

“The decision to suspend registration and”


degree-awarding powers

“processes until late in 2025 is a clear enough dereliction of their statutory duty. But to extend this to providers already in the process, effectively backdating this decision to the spring of 2024, is completely unjustifiable”.

He goes on,

“what the OfS is actually doing is picking winners and losers: deciding which providers are worth prioritising for financial sustainability, which students are deserving of the protection of the regulator and the funding to support their studies, and which are not”.

These are fighting words, and we all know that the losers will be the most disadvantaged.

We hear from the Office for Students that students want fair treatment from institutions that will listen to them, respond when things go wrong and set them up to succeed. They assume their education will be high quality, expect tailored learning experiences and access to academic resources and support, delivered in supportive and enriching environments. What students expect from higher education in the longer term is to acquire knowledge and develop skills that open doors to well-paid and rewarding employment and other opportunities. They expect higher education to have a positive and enduring impact on their lives and careers. The Office for Students states that it feels it is important to,

“prioritise managing risks for students already in the system, ahead of the benefits that new institutions, or institutions with the ability to award their own qualifications, bring”.

It points out that, despite the pause, it has continued with 17 DAP applications, 22 registration applications and six university title applications. So broadly its view of these measures is supportive, but they are, of course, already in the system, and we recognise that it will also need to care for those that follow them.

We are all well aware of the parlous situation of many universities and colleges. It is shameful that government has let this happen. Successive Governments have been prepared to ignore further education, partly because virtually all Parliamentarians and civil servants have been university educated. I know I was completely unaware of the richness and value of colleges until I went to work for City & Guilds and discovered people with skills vastly greater than my own. My Oxford degree enriched my love of medieval French, which has not helped me in any way later in life.

Finally, will the Minister say why there is no provision for integrating the lifelong learning entitlement funding model and what positive help the Government are prepared to offer to the beleaguered parts of this vital sector? Will they please rein in the OfS from the most damaging parts of this edict?

15:18

[Baroness Stedman-Scott (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lord Willetts on securing this debate. His two brains have been working on overtime. I add my Benches’ congratulations to the Minister on her engagement. It is good to see her so happy.

I speak in this debate on the recent report published by the Office for Students that identifies three key priority areas for the next five years: quality assurance, wider student interest and sector resilience. The Office for Students is focusing its efforts on monitoring financial sustainability to help create a secure future for our world-leading universities. This is in response to growing concerns about declining student recruitment, increasing operational costs and wider economic uncertainty. I want to explore the significant changes proposed by the Office for Students in its strategy for 2025-30, particularly its decision to close the register for new higher education providers and pause granting degree-awarding powers until August 2025. While these changes are framed as necessary to strengthen the financial sustainability of higher education, they also raise important questions about their impact on innovation, access and diversity in the sector.

The Office for Students has decided to pause new entries in the register of higher education providers and temporarily halt the granting of degree-awarding powers. This decision is in direct response to the severe financial pressures facing many universities, particularly small, medium and specialist providers. New analysis suggests that up to 72% of higher education providers could be in financial deficit by the 2025-26 academic year, prompting the Office for Students to focus its resources on stabilising existing institutions rather than admitting new ones.

I confess today that, unlike others in this Committee, I was not educated in a university. Instead, I attended the Salvation Army’s William Booth College, an international college at Denmark Hill. It is a great building, and I congratulate the Salvation Army on not selling it to some big developer to develop “Denmark Hill Village” but investing heavily in the college and its educational achievements.

William Booth started the Salvation Army—I have time, I will do it—in 1865 as he was absolutely distraught at the poor educational attainment of the people, particularly in the East End, and their attraction to alcohol. They could not work because they could not keep their feet on the floor all the time. The first thing he did was get them off alcohol, off the grog, as he called it. The second thing was to find them a job. He persuaded somebody to buy a farm near Epping Forest, and people went to live there with their families, they were educated, they worked on the farm, and they got a life together. He even went as far as to buy land in Australia, and people, if they really did well, were able to have that land as a gift and develop their own business. He really was a social entrepreneur very early on in the whole setup. The college educates Salvation Army cadets, as they are called—officers—and it has now been an international college for some time. People come from all over the world to train there, and the impact that the Salvation Army has on people’s lives can never be underestimated. I guess that it also has great plans for the place. If noble Lords want to visit, I am happy to fix that up. It would be a travesty if something such as that that is managed well, has good people and does not have government money were not allowed to start today. Let us bear that in mind.

Can the Minister explain how the Office for Students intends to balance the need for financial stability with the need for ongoing innovation in higher education, particularly in industries such as health, engineering and the creative arts, given that smaller specialist providers often cater for niche demands? Does the Office for Students risk limiting innovation and diversity of provision by closing the register to new providers? Will doing so have an impact on the economy growing? Furthermore, we must acknowledge the broader context of this financial instability, which is the growing student recruitment crisis in the face of declining recruitment numbers and rising operational costs. British universities are grappling with the challenge of attracting students. How does the Minister plan to address the issue of declining student recruitment, particularly considering the financial pressures many universities face? While stabilising the sector is necessary, what is being done to ensure that institutions are still able to offer the courses and opportunities that will meet future demand in student and workforce markets and in wider society?

In conclusion, while the Office for Students’ strategy is designed to safeguard the financial sustainability of the sector and prevent further closures or disruptions, we must remain vigilant about the potential longer-term consequences. As we move forward, it is crucial that the Office for Students balances its financial oversight with a commitment to innovation, student access and diversity. The sector needs to be able to adapt to changing demands, and a robust plan to tackle the student recruitment crisis must be a central part of that strategy.

15:25

[Baroness in Waiting/Government Whip (Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent) (Lab)]

My Lords, what a genuinely engaging debate—I am also going for “joyful” today. I thank noble Lords for their congratulations. I am having a very good day, even if my husband-to-be’s credit card is probably not.

Moving on to the debate, I begin by thanking the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, for opening the debate and, moreover, for the significant role he has played in shaping our world-class higher education. I never for a moment thought that I would ever be responding to “Two-brains” in an education debate, but I am delighted to do so. I agree with him on the joys of being a Whip at this end of the building. We are allowed to speak; the Chief Whip will decide whether that is for good or ill. The noble Lord’s ongoing contribution to the broader debate about the future of our universities is deeply valued.

I also thank the noble Lord, Lord Johnson, for requesting this debate. I know that he, having been instrumental in setting up the Office for Students, continues to have a keen interest in the future of our universities and in securing the future of our higher education system for the benefit of our students, the taxpayer and the economy. Higher education is vital to the future of our country. Our universities are revered globally for excellence and act as one of the country’s greatest enablers of two of this Government’s missions.

First, higher education is the engine for growth. It ensures that we have a highly skilled workforce and delivers world-class research that underpins long-term innovation and economic growth. In many communities, it acts as an anchor for local economic development and civic impact. It adds billions of pounds of value to our economy each year, supports hundreds of thousands of jobs and generates over three-quarters of all our education exports.

Higher education also provides opportunity. It enriches the lives of learners, regardless of their background, and how they access education—including at the Salvation Army, which, for the record, is where my mother was born. For many, it is a truly transformational experience. Graduates have better choice, better paid employment and are better able to contribute to the economy and society as whole, challenging understanding and developing new ideas. This contributes to a healthier, more cohesive society for us all. I have first-hand experience of this. I am the first person in my family to have gone to university. My grandmother, from the East End of London, would have been somewhat confused by where I ended up, but I know only too well how higher education can transform lives to ones of aspiration and achievement.

Secondly, higher education is an engine not only for the economy but for social mobility. This lies at the heart of the Government’s commitment to build skills for opportunity and growth, so that every young person can follow the pathway towards a better future that is right for them, whether at university or elsewhere. Technical education and further education are also key to ensuring that people have the right role for them and are able to find joy and happiness at work, which is what we are doing today.

The Office for Students is fundamental to all this through its effective and independent regulation of the sector. The noble Lord, Lord Willetts, touched on the fact that there was no regulator in place when some genuinely challenging elements came into being. It is vital that we now have one, making it work in a way that delivers for the sector and the country.

The primary purpose of regulators is to protect the public. At the point when most students enter higher education, through tuition fees, they make the single biggest investment that they are ever likely to make. These fees are, of course, largely underwritten by the taxpayer through the student loans system. Therefore, it is vital that our universities and colleges offer high-quality provision that ensures a good return on that investment for students and the country, and it is right that independent regulation should seek to ensure this, while protecting and promoting the student interest.

What is the need for stronger regulation and the new strategy? We need to take a step back. Noble Lords will recall the report from the Industry and Regulators Committee on the Office for Students, published in September 2023, which provided a stark assessment of the regulator’s past performance. Indeed, it was entitled Must Do Better.

Last July, the Government published the report of Sir David Behan’s review of the OfS. The review sought to be forward-looking and create a platform for change, but Sir David was very clear that the environment within which the OfS operates has changed considerably since the noble Lord, Lord Browne of Madingley, first made the case for the regulator in 2010 and, indeed, since the noble Lord, Lord Johnson, articulated his vision for higher education in the 2017 White Paper Success as a Knowledge Economy.

The current situation is volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous. Navigating this uncertain terrain will be a challenge for many providers, their students and, as it has proved, the OfS itself. Sir David found that the case for regulation was clear. He recognised the improvements the OfS had made since the publication of the Industry and Regulators Committee report but recommended that the OfS should focus on the key priorities of quality, financial sustainability, acting in the student interest and protecting public money. In short: do less but do it better.

Following the resignation of the noble Lord, Lord Wharton, as chair of the OfS, and while a permanent replacement is recruited, the Secretary of State has appointed Sir David as interim chair to oversee the implementation of his review. The OfS has begun this work, setting out a proposed road map for the next five years in the consultation currently running on its strategy, which are discussing today. However, while this important long-term work progresses, immediate priorities and risks must be assessed and addressed.

Central to Sir David’s analysis was a focus on the financial sustainability of the sector. Concerns about the sector’s finances have continued to grow, even appearing in the news this week. In November, the OfS published analysis of the higher education sector’s financial health for the 2022-23 financial year and forecasts for the next four years. It made for troubling reading, finding that both domestic and international recruitment are below the sector’s expectations; that by 2025-26, income could be £3.4 billion lower than provider forecasts; and that up to 72% of providers are expected to be in deficit if they do not take significant mitigating actions.

As a result, the OfS made the decision to temporarily pause the processing of applications regarding the OfS register, degree-awarding powers and university titles, to refocus their resources on managing the critical risk of financial sustainability in the sector. I reassure noble Lords that Education Ministers and officials meet with the OfS on a regular basis, and this specific issue was discussed with the OfS in November and again in December.

Of course, this is not the ideal decision for the OfS to make, and I do not underestimate the impact on those providers whose business models rely on achieving registration or progressing with degree-awarding powers, but it is a decision for the OfS as an independent regulator, not for Ministers. Furthermore, it is in line with the recommendations of the independent review and with expectations set out in the regulator’s code to prioritise resource to manage the greatest risk.

The pause is limited to new and early-stage applications. The OfS expects to restart the process in August, or earlier if possible, and will review every three months until then. Affected providers have been contacted individually and will be informed of progress and changes. I recognise the concerns that this stifles growth, but it is about keeping the show on the road while we deliver our long-term strategic ambitions for higher education. On that note, I will answer some of the specific questions put to me by noble Lords.

In response to the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, there are unlikely to be more than 100 applications from franchised providers. We require only those with over 300 students to register for the new franchising model, and the largest 10 unregistered providers account for 58% of all franchised students at unregistered providers. This will work quite quickly and effectively with the largest suppliers.

With regard to the “Strengthening oversight of partnership delivery in higher education” consultation, we think that it is important to make progress towards strengthening the regulation of franchised higher education. The OfS has currently paused the registration of new higher education providers in order to support the sector with financial sustainability concerns, as I said, but this is being reviewed every three months.

With regard to institutions that are already in process, which the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, touched on, the OFS has said that it will process applications that are already well advanced. If the noble Lord has knowledge of where that is not happening, I would be grateful for the information. It will also review that every three months. Given what we are talking about between now and August, that seems proportionate, but, if there are specific concerns, I would like to hear from the noble Lord.

On global chains and the pause, I think it is fair to say that education is global. The best of education, as we discuss regularly in the House, allows people’s brains to flourish. Universities are cathedrals for learning, whether they are here or elsewhere; the more exposure we have to more people, the better position we are in to move society forward.

On global change, it is for providers and universities to make decisions about business models, including international investment. However, I can reassure noble Lords that this is temporary to address a critical risk. If there are people with whom we need to engage in the interim, we will endeavour to have those relationships to reassure those institutions. The OfS will consider such applications as soon as the process restarts but will, I hope, seek to work with partners as the pause is ongoing.

I believe that I have answered on the next bit. We are getting through the questions.

All three noble Lords asked: why so much regulatory burden now? Individuals and the taxpayer have invested hugely in higher education. It is right that this should be regulated. However, regulation has to be proportionate and not stifle growth. I agree that the Chancellor’s speech yesterday was excellent. We must also make sure that we are all contributing to the delivery of growth in order to continue to invest in the public services that I, for one, care so much about.

The Office for Students must, and does, abide by the Regulators’ Code and should not impose unnecessary burdens, but students’ experience and outcomes are critical. We need to ensure that students are getting what they pay for.

With regard to further education colleges, as raised by the noble Baroness—am I okay for time, Mr Whip?

[Lord in Waiting/Government Whip (Lord Ponsonby of Shulbrede) (Lab)]

Yes.

[Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)]

Thank you. It is quite nice to be on the other side.

FE colleges form an essential part of the HE landscape. We are very aware of the burden on colleges that are regulated by a number of different bodies. That is why, for example, we are proposing to exempt FE colleges from the new proposed requirements for franchising. I emphasise again that the pause is temporary. If FE colleges wish to register, they will be able to do so from this summer.

On the wider education strategy, in answer to the noble Baroness, Lady Stedman-Scott, the Secretary of State has been clear and has announced five priorities for the reform of higher education. Given the time, I will not outline them but will write to the noble Baroness with the details.

I am very grateful for the thoughtful contributions that noble Lords have made during this debate. There is a great deal of higher education expertise in your Lordships’ House—some of which is a little terrifying—and I welcome this opportunity to benefit from it. I conclude by commending the efforts of the OfS. The Government continue to maintain their strong support for the regulator and its important work in protecting the interests of students. I also recognise the risks that universities and, by extension, students are facing. I assure noble Lords that both the Government and the OfS maintain a keen focus on overcoming these challenges to ensure that we maintain the secure, stable and world-class higher education that we are all so rightly proud of.

15:39

Sitting suspended.

Terrorism: Glorification

Thursday 30th January 2025 Grand Committee

Question for Short Debate

16:00

Asked by

[Baroness Foster of Aghadrumsee]

To ask His Majesty’s Government what steps they are taking to deal with the glorification of terrorism and terrorists in the United Kingdom.

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Russell of Liverpool) (CB)]

Before the noble Baroness starts, I remind noble Lords that this debate is time-limited. We have one speaker in the gap. If any speakers go over their time, that will eat into the time for the Minister to respond to the points made by noble Lords.

[Baroness Foster of Aghadrumsee (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, first, I thank noble Lords who have stayed to take part in this debate, late on a Thursday afternoon. It is a timely debate because, as we all know, this week sees the beginning of the Omagh bomb inquiry. As it has begun, we have heard from the families of the victims of that bomb about how terrorism has destroyed their lives. The families of the victims have always behaved with decorum and dignity; my prayer is that they finally receive the answers they have been searching for and a modicum of closure. That dreadful day in August 1998 has much been in my mind this week.

I particularly want to thank the Minister, who is very knowledgeable of the threat of terrorism. This is in no small part due to his service as a Minister in the Northern Ireland Office, and I look forward to his response later. Of course, he is not here today as an NIO Minister but rather as a Home Office Minister, because the glorification of terrorists and their organisations is certainly not confined to my part of the United Kingdom but is a threat to the security of the nation as a whole.

I want to speak principally about Sinn Féin’s continued glorification of the terrorist organisation the Provisional IRA, and the consequences of that. However, recently, on the streets of some of our major cities, we have seen other proscribed organisations, such as Hamas, being lauded. That too has its consequences, particularly around radicalisation. I am sure that other colleagues will want to speak to that issue.

As someone who has lived with and through terrorism, I am always alert to anything that would encourage it and bring back those dark days of intimidation, murder and mayhem. Unfortunately, in the years since the cessation of IRA violence, there has been a strategy to lionise terrorists, putting them and their actions on a pedestal. There are many examples of Sinn Féin politicians, many of them senior people, attending commemorations and celebrations of the lives of those who sought to murder their neighbours. In the interests of time, I bring noble Lords the most recent example of a senior Sinn Féin figure glorifying the past deeds of terrorists.

Before Christmas, Michelle O’Neill, the vice-president of Sinn Féin and the current First Minister of Northern Ireland, attended a Provisional IRA commemoration in County Londonderry. The men she was commemorating before Christmas were killed by their own bomb as they travelled through Magherafelt in December 1971—long before Michelle O’Neill was born. Their names were Jim Sheridan, John Bateson and Martin Lee, all members of the self-styled South Derry Brigade of the IRA; it was announced after their deaths that they were on “active service” at the time. Here were three young men with murder in their hearts, who had been dead for 53 years in December, and the current First Minister of Northern Ireland thought it appropriate to commemorate them.

It goes without saying that, as on every occasion when this happens, the deep offence and hurt to those who have suffered at the hands of the IRA is revisited. The retraumatisation of victims is unforgivable and needs called out on every occasion it happens, but this public act of commemoration also sends a very clear message to young republicans that what these young men did was honourable. It glamorises what they did and, to young and impressionable people who have little knowledge or life experience of the brutality of the IRA, it makes them sound like heroes, which patently they were not.

The often-chanted “Ooh ah up the Ra” is a symptom of the continuing republican glorification of dead terrorists. It is, some argue, just a bit of fun, but nothing could be further from the truth. I will never forget being at a black-tie event in Belfast and being asked for a picture by a glamorous young woman, only to have her sing “Ooh ah up the Ra” into my face as she took a video. The fact that my father had survived an IRA attempt on his life, or that as a teenager I was on a school bus that was blown up by “the Ra” because our bus driver was a member of the security forces, was irrelevant to her. She thought that it was funny. I did not.

There is the issue. If we allow people in positions of authority to glorify terrorism in the way that the current First Minister of Northern Ireland does, it normalises and sanitises terrorism, and, in a cyclical way, this will lead to young people being radicalised again. Witness the radicalisation of those currently on our streets supporting the actions of Hamas. Many of the young people doing so know little about the Middle East but think it is quite hip and trendy to support Hamas, because they hate Israel.

A little knowledge is a very dangerous thing. If all you know about the IRA is that they took on the Brits and that the First Minister said they were a “great bunch of lads”, you will think that “Ooh ah up the Ra” is a grand wee chant. These young people know little of the devastation, murder, intimidation and barbarity of the IRA, because it is not something that the current First Minister talks about.

There have been conversations in the past about making the glorification of terrorism a criminal offence. Indeed, the Terrorism Act 2006 makes provision for a person to be charged with an offence if they make a statement that encourages a person to commit, prepare or instigate acts of terrorism. There have been no prosecutions under this section, to my knowledge, in Northern Ireland to date because, when challenged about such behaviour, Sinn Féin will argue that it is just honouring its dead. But of course it is much more than that. Its senior leadership is sending a message to wider republicans that violence and terrorism can be justified and that what the IRA did was justified. Of course it was not; there was never any justification for the violence, despite what the current First Minister claims. She will continue to claim that, and indeed to support the actions of these terrorists publicly, until she is prevented from doing so under law.

On Tuesday in the other place there was an Urgent Oral Question on the Government’s extremism review. During that Question, the member for North Antrim, Jim Allister MP, asked the Minister for Security about the glorification of terrorism by the current First Minister of Northern Ireland. The response he got from the Security Minister was disappointing, as he said:

“I do not think that it would be appropriate for me to delve into matters in Northern Ireland in the context of this response”.—[Official Report, Commons, 28/1/25; col. 165.]


Why not? If the current First Minister of Northern Ireland is intent on continuing her glorification of terrorism and, at best, is reckless about the consequences, surely that should be a matter that a Security Minister should delve into. I hope the Minister here will be able to be a little clearer on that issue.

The IRA were defeated by the security services across the United Kingdom, not least the brave men and women who served in the RUC, the RUC Reserve, the PSNI, the Ulster Defence Regiment and then the Royal Irish Regiment, and of course colleagues in the mainstream Army. As the daughter of an RUC officer, I was always incredibly proud of how he served without fear or favour. For him and for many others to have their memories sullied by glorifying the terrorists who sought to murder them makes me very angry. We cannot allow the propaganda of the IRA’s political wing to rewrite what happened in Northern Ireland. That is why a change in the law is required, especially to deal with those in authority who continue to exalt and deify terrorists who have caused so much hurt and pain.

I am aware that, in 2023, the Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation considered whether the legislation on the encouragement and glorification of terrorism under the 2006 Act should be amended. He concluded that it was not possible to formulate a mere glorification offence within acceptable limits, and therefore recommended against amending Section 1 of the Terrorism Act. However, this conclusion was before the onslaught of the glorification that we have seen on our streets in respect of Hamas, and perhaps Mr Hall KC may want to review this section again. However, I acknowledge his expertise and instead propose a more nuanced approach.

I submit that the Government should consider an amendment to the legislation so that persons in authority or holding a particular office, such as a Minister in government or in the Northern Ireland Executive, should not be allowed to glorify past acts of terrorism, or terrorists, and that if they do so, they are committing an offence. This amendment is narrow in scope but would deal with the specific issue of people in authority sending skewed messages to young people about terrorism and the terrorists of the past. It falls within the counterterrorism strategy’s first principle of Prevent,

“to stop people from becoming terrorists or supporting terrorism”,

and therefore aligns with the Government’s strategy. I look forward to the Minister’s thoughts on that proposal.

I also note that there is a new interim Prevent commissioner, the noble Lord, Lord Anderson of Ipswich, who was appointed very recently, and I am more than happy to discuss this matter with him. He is here today, and I am very glad about that. I will leave my remarks there, and I look forward to hearing from noble Lords in relation to this issue.

16:10

[Lord Goodman of Wycombe (Con)]

I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Foster, on obtaining this important debate and on bringing all her expertise and incisiveness to it in her opening remarks.

I declare my interest as set out in the register as a senior fellow at Policy Exchange, although my role there is unconnected with the issues of security, law and order, cohesion, integration and extremism that we will be discussing today. However, I was MP for Wycombe for nine years where, at that time, I represented more Muslims than any other MP from my party, and for several years I spoke as my party’s spokesperson in the Commons on integration and cohesion. So, although I will not discuss Northern Ireland today, I have an interest in the other matters raised by the noble Baroness.

I want to make five points and to ask the Minister some questions in the brief time I have. First, Hamas and Hezbollah are proscribed organisations. Secondly, there can be no doubt that they have been and are being glorified, on marches, online and, I am afraid to say, in mosques throughout the UK. If the Minister has any doubts on that last point, I recommend to him the excellent account on X called habibi, where he will see some of the most egregious instances laid out. However, I hasten to add that in my view—it is important to say this—most marchers and worshippers in mosques are not supporters of Hamas or Hezbollah.

Thirdly, this glorification reflects the import into our domestic politics of foreign strife abroad, particularly in relation to Kashmir and, as we all know, the Middle East. Fourthly, there can of course be no objection to anyone seeking to march or express views online, or even discussing in a religious setting the Middle East or Kashmir. I became very interested in the Kashmir issue when I was in the Commons and have raised it myself. However, there can be no room in our domestic politics for thuggery, abuse, violence or intimidation, all of which we are now beginning to see in some of our inner-city constituencies, especially during general elections, as the Minister will be well aware. Fifthly, and finally, this glorification and the issues that arise from it are fuel for the far right and the far left, both of which seek to undermine and collapse our democratic politics.

I move on to some questions for the Minister about policing. I pay tribute to the work of the police, who have very difficult decisions and judgments to make. I introduce these questions with a quote from Matt Twist, Assistant Commissioner at the Met, who said:

“When we look back at the policing of protests over the last eight months, we know we didn’t get everything right”.


He said that while being interviewed for the Policy Exchange report, Might is Right?, by David Spencer, Sir Stephen Laws and Niamh Webb. My questions arise from recommendations in the report. I am not expecting the Minister to provide detailed answers today but if he does not have them, I would be grateful if he would write in due course.

Will the Government change the criteria to prohibit a protest march under Section 16 of the Public Order Act 1986 to prevent serious public disorder, serious damage to property or serious disruption to the life of the community, explicitly including the impact of cumulative disruption? Will the Government introduce a provision to prohibit a march if it would place any undue demands on the police or military forces, replicating Section 11 of the Public Processions (Northern Ireland) Act 1998? Will the Government amend Section 11 of the Public Order Act 1986 to increase the notification period for all protest marches to 28 days, replicating the requirements in Northern Ireland? Will the Government legislate to expressly reverse the DPP v Ziegler Supreme Court verdict to ensure that no protester has a lawful excuse for obstructing the highway and for any public order offence, if he or she intends to obstruct, harass, inconvenience or harm others? Will the Government legislate to make it unlawful for individuals at protests to wear face coverings wholly or mainly with the intention of concealing their identity? Will the Government consider introducing a parades commission in London, and perhaps elsewhere, modelled on the commission in Northern Ireland?

Our liberal democracies depend on trust in order to function, and it would appear that trust is in decreasing supply, I am afraid, in countries that maintain high migration, have low growth and have high tech. I look forward to the Minister answering questions.

16:16

[Lord Bew (CB)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Foster, for securing this important debate. I am well aware of her intense personal interest and, to be frank, at times her suffering on account of terrorism in Northern Ireland. I am very grateful to her for securing this debate. I am also delighted that the noble Lord, Lord Hanson of Flint, will be replying. He was a distinguished Minister in Northern Ireland. It is now, I think, 15 years or so since he was a Minister, and I am interested in reflecting on how he sees the evolution of this question of the public perception of the glorification of terrorism—how he thinks things have happened, whether he is surprised or whether it is pretty much what he was expecting when he was a Minister.

I was a civil rights marcher and I speak from the point of view of John Hume. There is no grievance in Northern Ireland that was worth the loss of a single life. Even more importantly, in terms of political structures, these were all clearly, essentially in place in the 1974 Sunningdale Agreement. There was absolutely no need for the thousands of lives that were lost. The largest single purveyor of death was the Provisional IRA in this period by some way, although there is a dreadful record of loyalist crime, and there were also instances where the British state forces let themselves down. But there is no question about who the largest purveyor of death was.

In recent times, there have been a number of cultural phenomena that tend to recreate and glorify that campaign. The most obvious example is the phenomena around the group Kneecap and their very successful film. The Sunday Times and the BBC—all these official organs of our culture—celebrate Kneecap and their work.

I cite the verdict of Professor Liam Kennedy from Tipperary—an old colleague of mine at Queens. What he says, and with some acuity, in his review of Kneecap’s film, is that

“in subtle ways … Kneecap serves to validate the Provisionals’ murderous assaults on their … neighbours and the British state”

and validates the idea that the decades of terror were

“inevitable and necessary, the last recourse of an historically oppressed people suffering from intergenerational trauma”.

I should say something else about my friend Professor Kennedy. More than any other academic in Belfast—I suspect that the Minister remembers this—he cared about the fate of those who were actually kneecapped in east Belfast in large numbers by the Provisional IRA. Nobody put themselves more at risk in speaking out against these crimes.

There is also the poem “The Knee” from this era by Ciaran Carson. I will read only the last section, which describes a kneecapping:

“It seems he was a hood, whatever, or the lads were just being careful.

Two and two were put together; what they added up to wasn’t five.

Visiting time: he takes his thirteen-month-old son on his other knee.

Learning to walk, he suddenly throws himself into the staggering,

Distance between his father and his father’s father, hands held up high,

His legs like the hands of a clock, one trying to catch up on the other”.

This is the cruelty which is now apparently a subject for critical acclaim in our mainstream media. This is why we are disturbed about the glorification of terrorism.

We have all made concessions, and the Minister was particularly important in defending the achievements of the Good Friday agreement when he was a Minister. But, as I say, I speak as somebody who was a civil rights marcher and who has never changed my mind on John Hume’s dictum that there is not a single political failing in Northern Ireland that justified or even began to justify the loss of a single life. But, somehow, Hume’s wisdom seems to be eroding now, and that is what is so worrying.

16:20

[Lord Morrow (DUP)]

I too congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Foster, on securing this debate. I am pleased that the noble Lord, Lord Hanson, will respond, because he comes with tons of experience of the Northern Ireland situation. I know that this debate in general is about terrorism and the glorification of it at large, but on my immediate left is a victim of terrorism in his family, and the noble Baroness, Lady Foster, was directly a victim of terrorism when she was a youngster at school. Her father escaped, thank God, but not unscathed. Of course, the noble Lord, Lord Dodds, was also a victim of terrorism, so we know this awful situation at very close hand. We do not have to run around and seek someone. People in my own family and my family circle were victims too. It seems that nearly everybody you know in Northern Ireland was in some way connected and got what I would call the sharp end of paramilitarism in Northern Ireland.

Not that this is very important, but I want to say it anyway, I come from a town in County Tyrone where I worked the best part of my life. The street I worked in was known as the most bombed street of any provincial town in Northern Ireland. In the Troubles, it had 18 500-pound car bombs planted on it. As soon as businesses were put together, another one arrived and the whole thing was blown. But, in the main, people did not turn to violence. They put their heads down, they got on with things and they rebuilt.

We now have a First Minister who tells us that there was no alternative to violence. That is an absolutely outrageous statement. Someone who holds that position should just stop and reflect on what they are saying and the impact that that has. We have lost thousands of people from both sides of the community. The IRA is responsible for 60% of those deaths, 30% are attributable to the loyalists and it is said that 10% are attributable to the forces of law and order, which is not strictly correct in this respect: that 10% figure includes where the security forces intervened or intercepted people on a mission to kill.

For example, there is a small village by the name of Coagh. The noble Lord, Lord McCrea, would know it, as he would have represented it at one time when he was the MP for Mid Ulster. Indeed, Stewartstown, where he grew up as a young fellow, is not far from it. The IRA made a mission to kill in that village on one occasion, and the security forces intercepted it. Now we have a demand asking why these IRA people have not had an inquest.

However, the story does not end there, because in that same village, Coagh, three Protestant workmen were having a conversation one day in a garage repair shop. An IRA squad arrived and just annihilated them as they were standing there having a conversation. That, of course, was designed to create as much antagonism as possible and to get a reaction, but there is no demand for an inquest into their deaths. Why is it that the terrorists are so important that they must have an inquest, but not these three unfortunate souls, who were just having a conversation on a summer’s afternoon when they were gunned down? No, they are dispensable.

In the report that the noble Baroness, Lady Foster, referred to, reference is made to the Terrorism Act 2000. That Act established several proscription offences, including addressing a meeting wearing clothing or displaying articles in public which

“arouse reasonable suspicion that he is a member or supporter of a proscribed organisation”.

That is still going on. We now have what are called the dissident republicans, who are trying to carry on where others have left off. The PSNI, which would be the enforcement body, are under-resourced and underfunded. If we are going to get on top of the situation, the PSNI has to be given the materiel and the money to ensure that it can give reliable service to the community. Otherwise, we could drift back to terrible times, and not one of us in this Room today wants that to happen.

Surely, it is time. We have a very delicate situation in Northern Ireland and sometimes, we do not fully appreciate in your Lordships’ House just how delicate things can be. If it gets to the stage where terrorism is celebrated, which does happen, and no action is taken, there will be a bad ending. The situation we are in, and where we have come from, needs to be fully appreciated. I hope the Minister will take note, and I am sure he will, because he knows the situation quite well. He has tons of experience and I welcome him to his new post. I cannot think of anybody better to do it than him.

16:27

[Lord McCrea of Magherafelt and Cookstown (DUP)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lady Foster for securing this debate asking His Majesty’s Government what steps they are taking to deal with the glorification of terrorism. Page 3 of the helpful House of Lords Library paper outlines the definition of terrorism. It says that the 2000 Act covers anyone who

“promotes or encourages terrorism, including the unlawful glorification of terrorism”.

Section 1.2 is headed “How is glorifying terrorism defined?” and says:

“Section 1 of the Terrorism Act 2006 makes the encouragement of terrorism an offence”,


including any offence that

“glorifies the commission or preparation (whether in the past, in the future or generally) of such acts or offences”.

Michelle O’Neill, who is now First Minister of Northern Ireland, stated in a BBC interview in 2022 that there was “no alternative” to the IRA campaign of violence before the 1998 Belfast agreement. I believe that the overwhelming majority of people were appalled at that sickening statement in her BBC interview. The continuing campaign by Sinn Féin to seek to justify and glorify the IRA campaign exposes what Sinn Féin leaders still believe. She said that

“the war came to Ireland”,

which is republicans’ effort to rewrite historical reality and must be strenuously challenged, not only by unionist politicians but by this Government.

There has always been an alternative to terrorism and there has never been a justification for such murderous activity. Does Michelle O’Neill believe that there was no alternative to shooting the innocent, butchering those whom the IRA interrogated, planting bombs to blow up men, women and children indiscriminately, kidnapping mothers such as Jean McConville in their own community, destroying families, targeting neighbours, terrorising communities and causing mayhem? Sinn Féin/IRA may try to sanitise itself but it must never be allowed to forget the devastating legacy of its violence, which is inflicted on the people of Northern Ireland and the mainland. Does she really think that there was no alternative to taking 10 innocent workmen off the bus at Kingsmill and shooting them like dogs along the road, simply because they were Protestant? The remarks made by Michelle O’Neill inflict further pain and suffering on the families of the victims who died as a result of the IRA’s murderous campaign.

It should also be remembered that the IRA holds the distinction of killing more Roman Catholics in the Troubles than any other protagonist in the conflict. So much for its claim that the IRA was established to defend the Catholic community from the British invaders. The IRA has a toxic legacy of murder; to suggest that there was no alternative seeks to poison future generations and to normalise terrorism, making it a legitimate way to get your way if you claim to be denied your political ambitions or aims. No wonder that, even today, across many nationalist areas, young people in clubs shout “Up the IRA” et cetera, as though what the Provos did should be glorified.

When challenged, Michelle O’Neill dismissed criticism by saying that

“we need to be mature enough … to agree to differ”,

glibly casting aside the hurt of her words. Of course, in reality, the mask slipped and exposed the heart of Sinn Féin philosophy: her shameful and arrogant defence of IRA terrorism for more than 30 years. As the noble Baroness, Lady Foster, mentioned, even as First Minister, Michelle O’Neill attended a commemoration in December to mark the deaths of three IRA men in my town, where I live, who killed themselves with their own bomb while on a murder mission more than 50 years ago. The men were said to be on a so-called active service mission at the time, but it was worthy of the First Minister of all the people of Northern Ireland to commemorate it—a further illustration of Sinn Féin being an integral part of the IRA.

Two weeks ago, I took part in a service along the roadside near Cookstown to mark the 33rd anniversary of the murder of eight innocent workmen at Teebane. I will never forget that night, for I assisted the injured in getting into the ambulance after that atrocity. I witness to this day the scars of some of those on that workmen’s bus who survived.

Never forget that I and other noble Lords here today lived through those 30 years of terror. We are not speaking about something we do not know. I know what it is to have my heart broken by the murder of my loved ones—to see them lying on a slab, with their bodies blown asunder. I know what it is to see a 16 year-old boy with only parts of his head and a few bones left because the rest of his body was blown to bits. He was not nothing; as a matter of fact, the one he was with was engaged to be married that day and was going to show her engagement ring to her aunt. I know what it is to see my children terrorised: 40 to 50 bullets were shot at our home when they were in it, and I received a real bomb packaged as missionary material.

There is nothing glorious in terrorism, irrespective of which community it comes from. We must unreservedly condemn it and ensure that our grandchildren never face that evil ever again, but we must also learn the lessons of the past. Because Governments failed to protect our people, innocent people faced the tragedy of 30 years of terrorism. May we learn the lessons of the past and never allow a generation to suffer such consequences again.

16:34

[Lord Austin of Dudley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I will speak briefly. I start by congratulating the noble Baroness, Lady Foster, not just on securing this important debate but on the powerful and moving speech that she made, as well as all other Members. It has been very moving to listen to the contributions this afternoon.

I want to pick up on the point about people chanting support for the IRA. Yesterday on the streets of Birmingham, and last night at Villa Park, where I was watching the Villa-Celtic game, there were disgraceful scenes of people chanting support for the IRA. That, in a city where 21 people were murdered in the 1974 pub bombings and hundreds more were injured, is a complete and utter disgrace.

The CPS has said that tragedy chanting about Hillsborough or the Munich air crash can be treated as a public order offence, that fans responsible should be banned and that people can be arrested. I would like the Minister to find out why the police seem to have taken no action yesterday in Birmingham. I would like him to speak to the police and the CPS to ensure that the people responsible can be identified and prosecuted. Does he agree that Celtic must deal with this? They have to condemn it—it is an absolute disgrace. They know who they sold the tickets to, they can identify them and ban them. If Celtic will not do that, does the Minister agree that they should be banned from European competition in future? They can chant what they like—well, they should not, but what they do at Parkhead is a matter for them. Coming to Birmingham and chanting support for the IRA in that city is a complete and utter disgrace, and I would like the Minister to look at this.

16:36

[Lord Davies of Gower (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Foster of Aghadrumsee, for bringing such a timely and important debate, and indeed all other noble Lords for their touching contributions.

The glorification of terrorism and terrorists in the United Kingdom is an issue that of course affects us all, but in particular the victims and survivors of these heinous acts. I start by emphatically stating that my heart goes out to those affected by terrorism, and in particular today to the Jewish community. When people march in London singing anti-Semitic slogans that glorify the terrorist atrocities of Hamas and 7 October, I consider it to be a dark day indeed. That applies equally to those who seek to glorify the appalling terrorist acts of the Troubles—as we have heard today, some of them were absolutely appalling—or indeed any other heinous acts which have happened in our nation and seek to undermine the fabric of our society. We should call out the glorification of terrorism at every opportunity.

First, under the Terrorism Act 2006 it is already an offence to glorify acts of terrorism. However, enforcement alone is not sufficient. What steps are His Majesty’s Government taking to root out the ideologies and cultural narratives that allow such glorification to thrive? Can the Minister also say whether the Government have a plan in place to ensure that all cases of glorification are treated equally, so as to protect the victims and survivors?

Secondly—this is an important point—we must ensure that our educational institutions are not unwittingly providing a platform for extremist ideologies. Schools and universities are critical places where strategies can be implemented that are hugely important in addressing radicalisation. What steps have been taken to strengthen the implementation of anti-terrorist strategies and address the growing challenges posed by online radicalisation?

Thirdly, the role of social media can hardly be overstated. Platforms that allow the dissemination of extremist propaganda must be held accountable. So, how are His Majesty’s Government working with technology companies to ensure robust enforcement of policies which ban hate speech? Are we doing enough to educate young people about the dangers of consuming and sharing such material?

Finally, we must confront this issue at the societal level. This requires more than legislation; it requires leadership. I urge His Majesty’s Government to take a stand against those who seek to manipulate grievances for the purpose of sowing division and hatred. Counterextremism efforts must be community-led, with a focus on fostering a shared understanding of our values in Britain, which unite, rather than divide, our diverse population.

We cannot, and must not, allow the glorification of terrorism to gain a foothold in our society. It is a matter of not just security but moral clarity. I call on the Government to redouble their efforts in order to address the growing menace with the urgency and determination that it demands.

16:40

[The Minister of State, Home Office (Lord Hanson of Flint) (Lab)]

My Lords, I am grateful for this debate today, which has been full of emotion and concern. It has raised issues that deserve to be respected, and I hope to be able to answer them in part.

I am particularly aware that this week, as the noble Baroness, Lady Foster, mentioned, sees the commencement of the Omagh bombing inquiry. I had the privilege of attending the Memorial Garden in Omagh some 15 years ago. I met victims there and learned of their continued pain, anger and desire for answers. The noble Baroness has herself been a victim of terrorist activity, and I understand the pain, anger and wish for answers that she brings to this debate. I have met with victims of Omagh. I have sat in a room with the widows of police officers who were murdered. I have met those who were killed by the IRA—and, indeed, those who were shot dead by loyalist paramilitaries as well. I have sat with, and looked into the eyes of, people who have undertaken those killings, both from the IRA and from the loyalist community. I did so to try to understand and resolve some of the issues that underpin this debate today.

I am grateful for the comments from a number of noble Lords and Baronesses. The noble Baroness, Lady Foster, and the noble Lord, Lord Morrow, mentioned my service in Northern Ireland. I had a fleeting period in Northern Ireland, but it left a deep impression on me and on my examination of the issues that still affect us today. Even in this Home Office job, just before Christmas, I attended the 50th anniversary of the Birmingham pub bombing. People still wanted answers and still did not understand; they were still the victims of violence that took place in the context of our discussions today. So I understand that.

The noble Baroness, Lady Foster, and the noble Lord, Lord Morrow, asked what has changed since I was there. I would be interested to see what has happened since I left. The noble Lord, Lord Bew, mentioned this as well. One thing has happened since I left. When I was in Northern Ireland, I was the First Minister; I was the Deputy First Minister; I was the Treasury Minister, for a while; and I was the Culture Minister and the Housing Minister. Now, Michelle O’Neill and Emma Little-Pengelly hold those posts in a devolved Administration salvaged from the trauma of that not occurring. They have got local decision-making back in place, as envisaged by the Good Friday/Belfast agreement—call it what you will—of 1998. So, there has been progress in many ways, but pain—it has been visible in the Room today—still exists as a result of that activity.

In a sense, I would like to look to the future as well. We have the legacy of the Troubles, which, again, is self-evidently visible in this Room today—the trauma experienced by individuals and communities, and by some noble Lords and Baronesses in this Room, some of whom have represented such individuals in Parliament or the Northern Ireland Assembly, as was referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Goodman of Wycombe.

Addressing the legacy of the Troubles is one of the aims of the Good Friday agreement. Noble Lords will be aware that the Government, through my right honourable friend Hilary Benn, the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, are looking at how we can build on that legacy in order to ensure that we understand and find a way through those difficult issues.

The noble Baroness, Lady Foster, has given a view on the First Minister, as have other noble Lords here today; that is in the Room and on the record today. I hope that we can look at some of the issues as we go forward, while recognising that there is still a very deep scar in Northern Ireland as a whole.

That brings me to two points in relation to this debate. First, there is a Section 1 Terrorism Act 2006 offence of encouraging terrorism, including unlawful glorification. The noble Lord, Lord Goodman, mentioned it. I will come to the other points he raised in a moment. For individuals who glorify acts of terrorism, whether online or offline, whether with reference to proscribed organisations or individual acts of terrorism, such behaviour has no place in our society. There is a legal definition of that act of glorification currently on the statute book. Police forces in Northern Ireland or elsewhere can seek to examine it and can bring prosecutions accordingly. It may not be satisfactory to the noble Baroness, and she may worry about the number of prosecutions made—I understand that—but that framework is there in law.

In that sense, I say to the noble Lord, Lord Austin, who I still call my noble friend, that the incidents at a football match this week, which I was not party to—I have read about them, I have not seen them personally, but I take his word for what happened—can be referred by the police if they feel a criminal act was committed under that offence. I urge him to draw it to the attention of the West Midlands Police because that is where the appropriate response lies. It is not for Ministers to determine whether criminal action has taken place, it is for Ministers to put legislation in place.

The second important area is Section 12 of the Terrorism Act 2000, which makes it an offence to support a proscribed organisation. Again, this was referred to by a number of Members. There is a whole list of proscribed organisations which the Government have determined are beyond the pale, owing to their activities. Hamas is included in that. I was not in Parliament at the time, but in 2019 the offence was widened to ensure that it captured such statements even where the speaker is reckless as to their impact. The penalty for that proscription offence is a maximum of 14 years in prison and/or an unlimited fine. Again, there is legislation on the statute book now, and it is not for Ministers to determine whether that legislation has been broken. It is for the police to make an arrest, prepare a case and put it to the Crown Prosecution Service; and it is for the CPS to determine whether charges should be made. Those charges are either made or not. If they are made, they go to court. If they go to court, they are in front of a jury and the jury determines whether the law has been broken.

So, currently, there is a mechanism in place for any of the instances noble Lords have raised concerns about today. Are those two mechanisms currently satisfactory, given the nature of the changes in the threat and the activities? Well, the Government have done two things since 4 July. We organised what we called a sprint to review counter-terrorism legislation. There was a leak of some discussion this week. That is not government policy—I put that on the record—but we have asked Jonathan Hall KC to look at current legislation and I think it is important that this debate can form part of assessment for the Government. He will make that assessment and produce a report on current terrorism legislation, by which I mean Section 12 of the Terrorism Act, Section 1 of the Terrorism Act 2006 or indeed some potential new legislation to cover any issues raised today and elsewhere. He will present that report to Ministers at a date to be determined, we will make an assessment and either accept or reject any recommendations, and we may or may not bring forward new legislation during the many opportunities we have this year.

I am pleased, again, to see the noble Lord, Lord Anderson of Ipswich, in his place because I am grateful to him as he has accepted a commission from the Government to review the current operation of Prevent. It largely does not deal with the Northern Ireland situation, I accept that, but it deals with some of the issues that the noble Lord, Lord Goodman, and other noble Lords in this Committee have mentioned. So, without wanting to influence the determination of the noble Lord, Lord Anderson of Ipswich, he has a mandate independently to review this and make recommendations, which, again, the Government can reject or accept, that will be brought to this House in due course.

I say to all noble Lords here today that I understand the pain seen by the noble Lords, Lord Morrow, Lord McCrea and Lord Bew, and referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Goodman of Wycombe, and my noble friend Lord Austin. I particularly understand the sentiments of the contribution from the noble Baroness, Lady Foster. However, those issues are, in a sense, up for review. If the legislation is not sufficient or appropriate, then that will be reviewed, and recommendations will be made. We will respond to that in due course.

I will refer to a couple of other points that have been made. The noble Lord, Lord Goodman, raised a series of questions effectively about marching, parades and determinations. There is legislation on the statute book, and I have referred to it in the Chamber of this House recently. Legislation about marches is there. It gives powers to police officers and Gold Command to determine marching routes and whether they are suitable or if they cause difficulties. It is not the Parades Commission, but it a determination.

As a Government, we are currently looking at number of issues relating to the position of legislation. We have already publicly announced that there is legislation coming this year in a police and crime Bill that will look at the issue of war memorials and people who abuse them or stand on them. That is an issue. There are a number of other challenges that are on the radar. I am not in a position to announce policy today, but I assure the noble Lord, Lord Goodman, that we are working on a number of policy options that will address some issues to do with the management of parades and marches in due course. When we are in position to announce them, we will do so in the police and crime Bill.

The Government are committed to ensuring that police have appropriate powers to maintain order. There are a range of powers already on the statute book for the police to do that. We are keeping all that public order legislation under constant review. Where there are gaps, we will identify them. I will look at the points that the noble Lord mentioned, and I will write to him in detail in response to them.

My time is up. I could add a few more points, but I want to touch on the contribution from His Majesty’s Opposition’s Front Bench. It is important that we look at the internet. It is important that we look at radicalisation on the internet. Again, that forms part of reviews that are taking place currently. Also, the Government are committed to reviewing that with the platform companies to make sure that we remove content that is encouraging terrorism or, indeed, encouraging the abuse of children or sexual abuse in other ways. That is all on the agenda as well.

Given that I am one minute over, I thank the noble Baroness for raising this issue. I may not have answered all her points, but she has a right to raise those issues. She has done in that in an effective way that has left a legacy on this Committee in terms of its discussion. If I have not picked up points made by noble Lords today, I will do so and respond according. I look forward to continuing to work with colleagues from Northern Ireland and beyond to ensure that the next generation of children has a peaceful and productive future in a society that respects differences and rejects violence.

Committee adjourned at 4.54 pm.