Online Communication Offence Arrests
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Lord Lebedev
To ask His Majesty’s Government what estimate they have made of the number of people arrested daily for non-threatening, online communication offences, and what assessment they have made of the implications of such arrests for freedom of speech.
Lord Lebedev (CB)
My Lords, I am grateful to have the opportunity to discuss the question of free speech this afternoon and look forward to hearing from the Minister in due course. I know how seriously he takes concerns that have been expressed across parties in this House and the other place, and I hope that we can find consensus.
Free speech is the foundational freedom, the freedom on which all our liberties depend. We recognise that parliamentarians in both Houses cannot do their jobs of checking abuses of power and upholding freedoms without having their right to free speech protected, and parliamentary privilege has long existed to defend just that right. But free speech—the ability to provoke, challenge, argue and dissent—should not be a privilege extended to a few; it is the essential right of all citizens. There is no cause so noble, no argument so sound, that it does not deserve to be challenged. Beliefs we now regard as antique, ridiculous or pernicious were once orthodoxies, which were overturned only because dissident voices challenged them. Restricting the vote solely to men who held property, maintaining a legal ban on homosexual acts and believing that prices and incomes should be controlled by legislation are all now seen as past follies. All were once the present wisdom, all discarded only because of brave dissidents.
For me, the word “dissident” has a special resonance. I grew up in Soviet Russia, a regime in which expressing the wrong opinion led to imprisonment. A famous house on Granovsky Street, where I grew up, had once been home to the likes of Khrushchev, Molotov and Trotsky. During my childhood, the presence of secret policemen, there ostensibly to protect us, was a constant reminder that a word out of place could mean cancellation in its most brutal form. In that environment of oppression, I came to admire those who were the dissidents, who spoke out so that others might live free—the Sakharovs, Brodskys and Solzhenitsyns. I have sought to honour their memory in my work as a media proprietor, always seeking to champion voices that challenge. Sadly, today, my motherland is not much better.
Comparisons with the Soviet era may seem overwrought to some. In the England of my boyhood, they would certainly have been misplaced. But consider this: in November last year a journalist, Allison Pearson, had the police at her door for a single tweet. In January this year, two parents were arrested by eight officers and detained in a cell for six hours for private messages on a WhatsApp group. In May this year, the heroic human rights campaigner Peter Tatchell was arrested for displaying a placard criticising the terrorist organisation Hamas. Last month, the Turkish human rights campaigner Hamit Coskun was found guilty of a criminal offence in court for burning a Koran. This month there have been reports of a police investigation into what a musical act at Glastonbury said on stage, and also calls from elected representatives for the arrest of a columnist, Rod Liddle, for what he said about that music festival. These are all examples of criminal justice, the system that is there to defend our freedoms, being deployed to investigate, intimidate and punish those with dissident positions.
You do not need to admire any of the people I mentioned above to find this deeply concerning. You can think them rude, mistaken or offensive, but the right to free speech means nothing if it does not mean the right to offend. I dislike the symbolism and reality of book burning but, to make a man a criminal—to find him guilty of the crime of racially or religiously aggravated hatred—for the expression of an opinion is to bring back blasphemy laws by the back door. I find calls from a public stage for soldiers to die sickening but, once we start telling artists what they can and cannot say—no matter how offensive it is—we strangle art in its cradle.
The tendency to police—literally—what people are saying has been encouraged and enabled by not just this Government but their predecessors. The Malicious Communications Act 1988 and the Communications Act 2003, specifically Sections 1 and 127, give the police the power to arrest individuals for what they say online. On average, 30 people are arrested daily. In 2014, under the coalition Government, something called non-crime hate incidents were introduced—words uttered that are not yet criminal in themselves but which the police should officially record none the less and hold against people. Since 2014, more than 133,000 such incidents have been recorded; that is more than 13,000 each year. Some of those who have had their names recorded in police files are children whose words were taken down when they were below the age of criminal responsibility and may be held against them for the rest of their lives. The innocence of youth has been replaced with the presumption of guilt.
The think tank Policy Exchange has estimated that investigating these incidents has taken up to 666,000 hours of police time. Every hour devoted to policing speech is an hour not spent investigating phone theft, shoplifting, burglary or assault. When this is juxtaposed with 90% of all crime going unsolved in 2023 and 89% of violent or sexual offences going unsolved in 2024, it is hard to conceive of a worse waste of police time. It is perhaps no surprise that Britain’s most effective police chief— Sir Stephen Watson, the chief constable of Greater Manchester—has stated that this policy is now “past its sell-by date”. He knows that Manchester is safer when his officers are chasing violent muggers rather than egregious tweeters. Sir Stephen enjoys the support of Manchester’s Labour mayor, the commonsensical Andy Burnham. I hope the Minister will follow his lead.
I had hoped that this Government, with a Prime Minister and an Attorney-General who are distinguished human rights lawyers who have represented unfashionable causes and unpopular defendants, would understand how important it is to allow dissent. But there has been no move to get rid of non-crime hate incidents and no clear message in defence of free expression. Indeed, as this House learned only last week, former Attorney-General Dominic Grieve has been asked by this Government to further restrict free speech by introducing a new definition of Islamophobia, designed to punish those who dare to question certain beliefs. What impact does the Minister believe Government-sanctioned restrictions on free speech, on Islamophobia grounds, would have had on reporting into the grooming gangs scandals? Would it have made the work of brave reporters such as Andrew Norfolk on uncovering the Rotherham scandal easier or more difficult? I think we know the answer.
I hope the Minister will give those of us who wish him well reason to believe that Labour—the party of George Orwell, Michael Foot and Tessa Jowell—still understands how precious free expression is and how important it is that we defend it.
Lord Frost (Con)
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Lebedev, for securing this important debate and for his powerful opening speech. We now live in a world in which everyone, if they wish to, can make their views known to everybody else. It is a world where political debate is not the preserve of a small establishment group but is open to all. Yet not everyone seems comfortable with this, and rather than welcoming this uniquely open debating environment, we find many politicians talking of disinformation and misinformation and even of putting outright bans on certain kinds of speech.
Unfortunately, the British legislative framework gives them plenty of power to make these words reality. Our legal framework potentially criminalises wide categories of speech and messaging. The noble Lord mentioned a couple of them. We have the Communications Act 2003, criminalising “grossly offensive” messages. We have the Malicious Communications Act 1988, criminalising “indecent or grossly offensive” communications. We have the Public Order Act, which criminalises causing harm or distress, including the notoriously broad “stirring up” offences. All these are aggravated if motivated by “hate”. Of course, we also have the Online Safety Act 2023, which criminalises false communication by an individual; it makes fake news literally illegal.
These laws raise a number of problems. First, there is definition creep, with “grossly offensive”, “abusive”, “insulting” and “false”—says who? What these mean, in fact, depends ultimately not on law but on CPS guidance, which can easily be changed in line with prevailing fashion and fashionable beliefs. Secondly, there is the chilling effect. In a country where, clearly, there are problems of immigration and integration, one person’s fair commentary is another’s abuse or insult. For example, is commenting on different characteristics of migrant communities in the UK and crime levels among such communities fair political comment or is it “stirring up” racial hatred? The risk of drifting over that border and committing an offence creates a chilling effect that means that people are frightened to comment.
Thirdly, all these laws were written either well before this great democratisation in political debate or by legislators who had not caught up. They are written for a world of green ink letters and shouting in the street; they are not written for the very punchy, sharp, meme-based, satirical social media world. In my view, these laws should mostly be abolished or at least focus much more clearly on genuine incitement. Until that happens—and I am not exactly holding my breath about it—our only protection is a Government, an establishment or a wider climate of opinion supporting free speech. Unfortunately, of course, we have no such thing.
We know from the Covid era that the commitment to free speech is thin to start with. Politicians of all parties muse about controlling social media further; they often believe that, in this new world, the ill-informed populace is easy prey to false beliefs and conspiracies. The Government are particularly well placed to do that because most misinformation actually comes from Governments. Trump’s supposed collusion with Russia and the Covid lab-leak theory are two outstanding examples of that. On most political issues there is simply no authoritative interpretation of the facts. Instead, what a fact tells you depends on the interpretation you bring to it, what you see as the goals of a policy. The same fact or number can be used to support very different arguments, depending on your prior beliefs, your interpretative framework and what you are trying to achieve. Thus, the only way to reach an outcome is to have a free debate and see who wins the argument.
I worry that we are heading towards a real crisis. There has always been some censorship in Britain—more’s the pity—but, until recently, it was more artistic and cultural, rather than political. We prided ourselves on being a free country in which we could speak freely. We simply cannot say that now. We are, in fact, all vulnerable. Say the wrong thing in the wrong way at the wrong moment, and any of us might find the police at our door. I hope that the Minister will be able to reassure us when he responds.
Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)
My Lords, I too congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Lebedev, on securing this short but crucial debate on free speech. Usually, when I talk about the concerns that my organisation, the Academy of Ideas, has about the erosion of free speech as a key factor in the public’s distrust of state institutions and fury at feeling that their views are not just ignored but silenced, or when others, such as the noble Lord, Lord Young of Acton, talk about the work of the Free Speech Union, we get a groan in the House. “There they go again” they say, “scaremongering”, “hyperbolic”, and all the rest of it, so it is great that the issue is being taken seriously today. When, as in May, the Economist headlines with “Europe’s free speech problem” and identifies the UK as one of the most censorious countries, we should all be worried, and I hope that the Government are.
The figures for arrests tell their own story. As we have already heard, there are 12,000 arrests a year, a 58% increase since 2019. I note that the Library briefing for this debate stresses that convictions and sentencing for relevant offences are decreasing dramatically and tells us not to worry, but I find that even more worrying, because it suggests that arrest is being used promiscuously to set an example, a warning to others that if they post or say the wrong thing, the police will turn up at their door, enforcers of conformism and suppressers of dissent, regardless of the law.
The journalist Fraser Myers recently asked:
“So what are we allowed to say in Britain that won’t get us arrested?”
Something certainly seems to have gone awry in the police and criminal justice system. Every force in the country has a team of officers sifting through people’s posts, trying to determine whether they cross some undefined line. The Economist, discussing this special zealotry, concludes:
“It is much easier to catch Instagram posters then thieves; the evidence is only a mouse-click away.”
Does the Minister worry that the police indeed seem to have become distracted?
Some of the detail in recent high-profile cases suggest skewed priorities. The noble Lord, Lord Lebedev, has already referred to the Times Radio producer Maxie Allen and his partner, who were arrested for the crime of posting disparaging messages about their daughter’s school in a private WhatsApp group, but the detail that I noticed was that Mr Allen’s partner asked the police officer for an example of malicious communication. The detective stared blankly and then had to google the crime.
There is the case of the Met Police intelligence unit, which usually deals with terrorism and extremism, sending Kent Police to investigate tweets from Julian Foulkes, a former police officer, about the rise of antisemitism since the 7 October pogrom. The body-cam footage from that raid showed a police officer rifling through Mr Foulkes’s book collection and expressing alarm at some of the “very Brexity” things on his shelf. Does the Minister, like me, wince when he hears that and wonder whether the police have become politicised in their actions and what they are up to? I am worried that the police will lose credibility over this.
On Saturday 29 June, 20 year-old Montgomery Toms, known as Monty, was arrested while standing alone quietly at the side of the London Pride march. His crime was wearing a handmade cardboard sandwich board showing a “trans flag = mental illness” message. Monty left the scene when approached by two officers but, two streets away, he was surrounded by 11 officers, handcuffed, held in solitary confinement for nine hours at Charing Cross police station and, while not charged with a crime, placed on pre-charge bail conditions. Such ludicrous overreach led Douglas Murray to write in the Spectator that if Monty had wanted to avoid being arrested, he should have worn a pro-jihad sign; or, even better, have indulged in a bout of phone thefts, and then he would not have seen a police officer for miles.
I do not want to just blame the police here: they take their direction from the top. The message is clear: speech crimes are on a par with or even more dangerous then real crimes. The UK Government’s public information campaign in relation to the riots was menacing. “Think before you post”, was their meme. The public fury about the excessive 31-month sentence for Lucy Connolly’s offensive Facebook message about setting fire to hotels was partly because Philip Prescott, an actual rioter who physically attacked a mosque, was sentenced to only 28 months. No wonder the police see online communication as on a par with violent actions.
Finally on the data, we need to note that communications offences are not the only gauge of attacks on free speech. Criminal lawyer Luke Gittos warns us that public order legislation, especially stirring up hatred, as we have heard, is being defined too broadly and making people feel too
“scared to speak out about important topics in case they face criminal prosecution”.
Mr Gittos recently successfully defended an ex-Royal Marine, Jamie Michael, charged with that offence simply for posting a video of himself ranting about illegal migration. He was held for 17 days, but acquitted in 17 minutes by a jury, and Mr Gittos reminds us that the jury system often acts at a curb on the worst excesses of the state. Now even that is under attack. Can the Minister assure us that it will be protected?
Lord Sarfraz (Con)
My Lords, I, too, congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Lebedev, on securing this timely debate. I know that he has been a great champion of the media and free speech for many years.
At the heart of this debate lies the matter of ensuring that the police have the resources, tools and training to arrest the right people, without compromising freedom of speech or privacy online. We cannot expect the 45 territorial police forces in this country suddenly to get it right. There are more than 33 social platforms with over 100 million monthly active users. Each is very different, with different interfaces, community rules and approaches to content monitoring. To expect police officers to do their offline jobs while monitoring online non-threatening communication is very difficult. To meet the challenges of the future, the police need the tools of the future. I look forward to hearing what the Minister has to say about that.
What might it look like? First, we need to get the basic tech right. The police national database has not been upgraded since 2019. That is a lifetime in tech; their systems are pretty much obsolete. That is the database that records data on arrests that have not led to conviction, which goes to the very heart of the Question from the noble Lord, Lord Lebedev. If the police are not able to efficiently collect and manage data, they can hardly use it in a useful way.
One promising area is predictive policing. A number of trials are happening around the country, and the focus is on crime prevention—for example, trying to predict where a discussion in a group is heading before it escalates. Like all tech, it has great potential but must be deployed ethically to avoid overpolicing. Like all these things, the platforms have and will continue to have an important role to play.
Let us take, for example, basic content filtering. If you turn on Google’s SafeSearch, there is a pretty decent chance that you will not receive harmful content when you do a search, but that is really difficult to do on a messaging platform, for example. There is no setting on WhatsApp to block explicit unwanted photographs from coming in. The tech exists and is being trialled on a number of platforms, but these tools are still optional and require users to opt in. Perhaps they should be the defaults, requiring users to opt out instead of using opt-in filters.
One other big area of potential is AI-powered content moderation. This is real-time monitoring of content, analysing text, images and videos to identify non-threatening but potentially very harmful content. Several platforms are trialling this but we do not yet have the standards for deployment around transparency, accuracy and bias mitigation. Just as we are putting technology at the heart of our defence and national security strategy, we must facilitate innovation across all forces, not just within specialist units. Only then will we have arrests that lead to conviction and only then can we do a better job of ensuring a free and open internet.
Lord Strathcarron (Non-Afl)
My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Lord, Lord Lebedev, for this debate. I declare an interest as an author and publisher. With the noble Lord’s blessing, I should like to extend the Question from freedom of speech to freedom of expression, as non-crime hate incidents, which I believe are in scope of the Question, affect the written word just as much as the spoken word. I am talking about authors rather than journalists or users of social media.
Apart from targeting high-profile authors such as JK Rowling, the mere existence of non-crime hate incidents has a deterring effect on all authors’ freedom of expression, not because they have committed a crime—after all, we are talking specifically about a non-crime—but because non-crimes nevertheless affect authors through the three first cousins of non-crime hate incidents: cancel culture, which can ruin an author’s career; the empowering of the Twitter mob, who can endanger an author’s physical safety and mental well-being; and mealy-mouthed publishers employing sensitivity readers to scour texts for anything that someone somewhere might find offensive and use non-crime hate incidents and its first cousins in retaliation, thus stifling freedom of expression.
Fortunately for those of us who believe in free markets, although the censors may have the first word, the readers often have the last word. After Puffin Books sanitised Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, there was outrage from not just literary figures of all persuasions but even politicians, such as the generational smoking ban enthusiast Rishi Sunak. Customers voted with their bookmarks and, consequently, the rereleased original version by Penguin Classics continues to outsell the neutered Puffin version by three to one—but still it persists.
As a publisher, I have a worrying example in front of me now: a title called The History of Islamic Art, written by an Oxford University postgraduate. The work includes a study of images depicting the Prophet Mohammed. As the book points out, and as is well known by Islamic scholars—including the Koranic scholar who addressed the Islamophobia meeting that many of us here were at yesterday—the banning of such images is a fairly recent Sunni phenomenon. The fact is that such portrayals continue to this day among the Shia and other sects. However, such is the febrile atmosphere created by non-crime hate incidents and its cousins that Oxford University Press turned the book down purely in fear of a reaction to it by the student mob. I am pleased to say that we are going to publish it—and with an American co-edition, so the book will enjoy a far wider circulation than it would otherwise have had. Again, this is proof that censorship is counterproductive for those who propose it.
Talking of counterproductivity, I agree with Sir Andy Marsh, the chief constable of the College of Policing, who addressed many of those of us who are here, as members of the free speech Peers’ group, about three months ago. Last month, he said that non-crime hate incidents should be scrapped and that police officers should refocus on crime rather than non-crime. It is not as though non-crime hate incidents actually do any good. As freedom of information requests have shown, there is no evidence at all that, nationally, they are even logged properly or prevent crime.
Scrapping them would also help the police recover their reputation as they become a laughing stock in their overreaction to thought crime while leaving real crime more or less completely undetected. It has got to the stage where, if you have been burgled, the police will not come round unless you also tweet that the burglar was in some way being dishonest, in which case half the force will descend on you. The problem that the Minister might address—apart from encouraging the Home Secretary, who seems worryingly keen on non-crime hate incidents—is that different forces completely ignore the College of Policing’s guidance. This begs the question, “What is the point of the College of Policing in the first place?”, but that is a question for another day.
Lord Kempsell (Con)
I declare my interest as a freelance journalist and publisher and, therefore, as somebody who makes his living from freedom of speech. I join noble Lords in thanking the noble Lord, Lord Lebedev, for securing today’s timely and important debate. As I find myself the last Back-Bencher on the speakers’ list, perhaps I might venture to sum up the situation.
Anybody listening to the debate in this Committee today will have concluded that, in 2025, the United Kingdom is in a state of free speech emergency. As we have heard, the police are now making more than 30 arrests a day for online offensive messages—an increase of 121% from 2017. As the noble Baroness, Lady Fox of Buckley, adumbrated so well, every police force in this country has a dedicated team monitoring social media. My noble friend Lord Frost’s point deserves further weight, to emphasise that, in the modern online world, communication has changed. It is the internet of 2025 that authorities are observing, with memes and rapid forms of communication, when the legislative framework feels as though it was built for the internet of 20 years ago.
I turn to another topic that we are yet to cover in the debate, which is the free speech of parliamentarians. I am now not the only media publisher or journalist in your Lordships’ House; in fact, our number is ever increasing. However, as a publisher, I found myself in January served with the super-injunction—now lifted—that precluded and prevented the reporting of the scandal of the Afghan response route being exposed. I was served with that super-injunction in my capacity as a journalist and reporter. I had no knowledge of the scheme or the policy while in government, but it of course prevented me reporting the facts of this enormous debacle, which is of huge public concern.
Could I have made those points in your Lordships’ House? Well, I took advice, and there are limits to parliamentary privilege in both the other place and your Lordships’ House. There are a large number of Ministers and parliamentarians who were also effectively gagged from exposing the truth of this scandal to the public, even in Parliament. In a rare note of congratulation, I note that the Government have, in my view, done completely the right thing in supporting the lifting of this super-injunction. It gives me some regret—and, I am afraid to say, shame—that my own party, the Conservative Party, instituted this super-injunction and supported it while in government. I note, though, that the current Labour Government chose to extend its application until recently.
As I said, there are limits to parliamentary privilege, but there was also a moral dichotomy in this case. Those who were served with the super-injunction were told that breaking it would constitute an immediate and real threat to life but, lo and behold, we now learn from the Government’s own recent review that the basis for that assumption may well have been faulty. That review has cast considerable doubt on the notion that those whose data was subject to the leak were in fact at imminent and real risk. The reviewer wrote:
“There is little evidence of intent by the Taliban to conduct a campaign of retribution against”
former officials. Indeed,
“the wealth of data inherited”
by the Taliban would have already enabled that, notwithstanding the leak of the spreadsheet. That claim has also been repeated by the Talban themselves.
Why was it, then, that parliamentarians were even gagged, let alone the media prevented from reporting this outrageous scandal of high and real public interest? As a parliamentarian, I find it deeply troubling that that was the case. I urge the Government, in their response to the wash-up of these issues, to adumbrate what they will do to ensure that the privilege of parliamentarians is protected and that never again can a scandal on this scale be concealed from the public.
Baroness Meyer (Con)
My Lords, like the noble Lord, Lord Lebedev, I too consider freedom of speech very close to my heart for personal reasons. My mother was born the day before the Russian Revolution, in February 1917. I can only imagine my grandmother, having just given birth, hearing the chants of over 100,000 women marching through Petrograd demanding bread. They were soon joined by peasants, workers and soldiers, exhausted by war. The Tsar was forced to abdicate and a provisional Government was formed, but Soviet committees quickly sprang up. By March, the revolution had spread across all of Russia.
Amid the chaos, Germany saw its chance and transported Lenin from exile in Switzerland to Petrograd. He called for
“All power to the Soviets”
and the overthrow of Kerensky’s fragile Government. In October, Lenin seized power. One of his first acts was to establish the Cheka, his secret police. Anyone deemed a threat was arrested, deported or executed. That is how most of my grandparents’ family disappeared.
Once in power, Lenin built a one-party state, starting with the restriction of any political opposition and the arrest and deportation of anyone who did not support communism. Titles and ranks were abolished. Land was confiscated from landowners and farmers. All schools were brought under state control to include ideological teaching. Newspapers were censored. Political opposition was suppressed. Workers’ rights increased, and there was a reduction of working hours. A state planning body—Gosplan—was established. Does it all sound very familiar?
These policies devastated Russia. Industrial output fell by 40%. Some 6 million people died of famine. Then came Stalin’s purges, the reign of terror, where more of my family were arrested and executed, and another 1.2 million people perished. These events destroyed a civilisation and replaced it with a regime built on fear and silence. We must not assume it could never happen again.
Today, in Britain, we face a quieter, but troubling, assault on freedom of expression. This is not the mark of a confident democracy. Once the state begins to police thought and language, the line between protection and repression vanishes. Freedom of speech is not a luxury. It is the foundation of all liberties. Let us not ignore the lessons of history. If we allow fear or ideology to override our freedoms, history may not just echo, it may repeat itself, and on our own soil. Will the Minister agree to revise and scrap the non-hate crimes that make our freedom of speech practically impossible?
Baroness Doocey (LD)
My Lords, as I understand it, this debate was not about non-crime hate incidents; it was about non-threatening online communication offences, so I shall confine my remarks to that.
Many of the points I would have made have already been made and it has been a very interesting debate. Those arrested under these laws are considered to have communicated something that has been deemed grossly offensive, indecent, obscene or menacing, or to have said something false, intending to cause distress, annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety.
I want to highlight two issues, which I think are very important, which have not yet been covered. In some cases, this will not be a difficult call for the police to make, but in others, the judgment call will inevitably be much harder. In practice, these cases are often very complex. Arrests for malicious communications are rarely made in isolation; they frequently overlap with sexual offending, harassment, or hate crime. We also know that some police forces include serious domestic abuse-related crimes within this category. This complexity makes it difficult to isolate online offences in the data, or to calculate how many might rightly be classified as “non-threatening”.
Nevertheless, as other noble Lords have mentioned, arrests for malicious communication have risen sharply—up by nearly 60% between 2019 and 2023. But although the police are making more arrests, many of these cases never get to court. Some of this will be because of huge court backlogs—some cases are now being listed for 2029, which almost beggars belief—but the falling conviction rate also raises legitimate questions about how the police are enforcing these laws, with genuine concern that, in some cases, their approach may be too heavy-handed, with implications for freedom of speech.
We can change laws and update guidance, but fundamentally we must ensure that our front-line police officers receive the training necessary to respond proportionately and effectively in these often sensitive situations. Yet the police workforce is now less experienced than at any time since records began. As of last year, more than one in three officers had fewer than five years of service. Despite this, there has been no independent review of police training since 2018, which I find frankly disgraceful. The Minister will be aware that HMICFRS has linked inexperienced officers and inadequate training and support to poor investigation standards. It has also repeatedly recommended independent evaluation processes and better feedback mechanisms. What steps are the Government taking to address this serious issue?
Secondly, improved accountability for social media platforms is long overdue. This is not universally popular. Indeed, whenever this is raised, the big tech companies and even some high-profile international figures express concern. Can the Minister assure us that the Government will not water down vital protections under pressure from either industry or abroad? Protections against online harm must not come at the expense of free speech, but neither is free speech absolute. Online abuse can have a devastating impact on lives. Criminal sanctions must be applied proportionately, with appropriate safeguards in place.
In conclusion, we must strike a careful balance. The Government must ensure that police officers receive the training and support they need to make difficult judgment calls. Police powers must be exercised wisely, and online platforms must be held accountable. More than anything else, victims must have confidence that the law is on their side.
Lord Sandhurst (Con)
My Lords, I too thank the noble Lord, Lord Lebedev, for securing this debate and for his compelling opening speech.
Freedom of expression is a fundamental right for us. Recently, the future of free speech on the internet has become a contentious topic in the United Kingdom. It is right that we examine the implications of this trend for our society and democracy. The noble Lord, Lord Kempsell, has also raised interesting questions regarding the Afghan super-injunction. I cannot go there today.
In 2023 alone, the police made 12,183 arrests under Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 and Section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act 1988. Of those arrested, fewer than 10%—some 1,119—have been convicted and sentenced. The criteria for arrest appear seriously flawed. Police are wasting their own time.
Freedom of speech is a right of the utmost importance, but I acknowledge that it is not unqualified. Under the previous Conservative Government, the Online Safety Act created new offences for false and threatening communications online. Its prohibitions, if properly and sensibly applied, are sensible. They include content relating to child sexual abuse, extreme sexual violence, extreme pornography, the promotion or facilitation of suicide, sexual exploitation and promoting terrorism. All of that is obviously right. Our concern should be to criminalise violence and words leading to acts which harm our citizens, but not merely what offends some people. That includes blasphemy or so-called blasphemy. At a meeting with President Trump and Vice-President Vance, the Prime Minister defended the United Kingdom’s stance on freedom of speech. He promised to protect this right for a very long time, but is that being done?
The noble Lord, Lord Strathcarron, made compelling observations about non-crime hate speech. As I have shown, thousands have been arrested and questioned for messages that have somehow upset others but have not ended in conviction. Our police must be getting too many things badly wrong; that must cease. Let me give an example. Earlier this year, Maxie Allen and Rosalind Levine were arrested by at least six police officers. They had expressed concerns on a WhatsApp group about their daughter’s primary school. The chief constable later conceded:
“With the benefit of hindsight, we could have achieved the same ends in a different way”.
Did they really need hindsight to see that sending six police officers to a suburban house was unnecessary? This case raises serious concerns around the treatment of those arrested. It raises questions about the thoughtless interpretation of legislation. In that case, and in many others, did no senior officer ask: “Is this really criminal activity? Do we need to send six officers?”
We on this side of the Committee are clear that free speech is being mispoliced. This is serious. Those in authority must cease intrusive bullying and we, as legislators, must act to prevent this continuing. As I have explained, the intentions behind the current legislation are worthy and legitimate, but let us all remember that the way to hell is paved with good intentions. We must be free to provoke, to challenge, to dissent and, within reason, to offend. We rightly pursue the removal of harmful and dangerous content online, but the ability to speak freely is a defining pillar of our democratic society. In common law, everything is permitted that is not forbidden by law; that truism goes back to the 19th century and Dicey.
Is the Minister confident that police resources are being directed properly in this field? Will the Government issue guidance to ensure that, while probable online offences are properly examined, freedom of expression is robustly protected for all United Kingdom citizens? I hope that the Minister will set out what the Government intend to do to restore public confidence, to uphold the law as it was intended and to ensure that freedom of expression is protected in the United Kingdom.
The Minister of State, Home Office (Lord Hanson of Flint) (Lab)
My Lords, I welcome this debate. As of this week, I have been in your Lordships’ House just over a year and today is the first opportunity I have had to exchange views with the noble Lord, Lord Lebedev. I appreciate the opportunity to do so and thank him for the powerful case that he made and the arguments he has put forward. I thank noble Lords from across the House—though mostly not from my side of it—for their contributions to this debate.
I want to make an initial statement which, I hope, will resonate with noble Lords across the Committee. The Government are clear that freedom of speech is a fundamental right and underpins our democratic society. I stood at the Dispatch Box in the wake of the offences committed in the August riots last year, after three young girls were murdered, and set out clear boundaries on those issues. However, I also said that there was an important point around protest and people expressing a view on political issues.
I have said things that are controversial. I have stood in open debate as a Member of Parliament, as a Member of this House and as a person outside both Houses. I have undertaken protests against causes that I felt were unjust. I have ensured that, within the legal framework, individuals are allowed to express their views freely. That is sometimes controversial and unpopular but, as even the noble Lord, Lord Sandhurst, just echoed, freedom of speech comes with responsibilities and is rightly qualified by legislation from Governments of my party and of other political parties.
The law rightly sets proportional limitations where necessary to protect public safety, to prevent crime, and to safeguard the rights of others, particularly minorities. That legal framework also ensures that individuals are protected from criminal conduct, including threatening, harassing and abusive behaviour. The Government are clear that there is freedom of speech, but that freedom of speech cannot be used as a justification for breaking the law. That means that that speech must not incite criminal activity that this House—and the House of Commons—have deemed to be a line in the sand. Non-threatening communication offences are captured across multiple pieces of legislation to which noble Lords have referred to today.
Section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act 1988, passed under the Government of Mrs Thatcher—who I spoke out and protested against in a free and open society—was passed in 1988. That concerns messages of an
“indecent or grossly offensive nature”
and I hope that there is a shared understanding across this House that messages that are indecent or grossly offensive do cross a line. Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003—passed by the Government of Tony Blair, in which I served as a Minister—again looked at messages which are obscene or menacing, or persistently making use of public electronic communication networks in a way that encourages those offences. I do not know whether noble Lords want to see that repealed. Let us discuss it and we will see where the line in the sand is drawn.
The Online Safety Act 2023, passed by the Government of Rishi Sunak, which the noble Lord, Lord Sandhurst, mentioned, includes new communication offences—including false communication offences—and deals with a range of issues, including issues of sexual abuse and exploitation. That is a line that both Houses have drawn, and I reference those three Acts because they are from three different political parties from even within, dare I say, several different shades of blue within the Conservative Party. That is a complex area, but it has been agreed to be a line in the sand. But again, if Members wish to challenge, let us discuss where that line is drawn.
Under our legislation,—and I hope this reassures the noble Lord, Lord Lebedev, and others who have spoken—arrests by the police are manifestations of what the public expect them to do, which is to enforce the law as passed by both these Houses, without fear or favour, based on the information they have—or is put before them—at the time. The police are operationally independent. Noble Lords would not wish me to be directing the chief constable of Greater Manchester to make arrests, or indeed to not make arrests. That is not the job of a Policing Minister, nor does it come under policing responsibilities in the Home Office.
We do expect the police, who are operationally independent, to fully investigate potential alleged offences, to work with the Crown Prosecution Service—which will test whether the police have acted fairly—and, if they both believe that there is a case to answer, to put it before a jury of 12 good and true peers, who will determine, rightly or wrongly, whether an offence has been committed. That is the basis of where we are today. In response to the Noble Lord’s initial headline for this debate, we do not collect or publish data on the number of arrests by police forces for communication offences as such. However, it is not unlawful to be arrested—it does not mean you have committed the crime. Many of those arrests do not lead to crimes which go before the court, because the CPS has tested them and/or the police themselves have determined that it is not appropriate to do so. Importantly, however, through freedom of information requests to police forces, arrest data under the offences can be gathered and the findings have suggested that the number of arrests has broadly doubled in the past seven or so years.
In response to a couple of the points that have been made, first to the noble Lord, Lord Sarfraz, there has been £1 billion in extra investment in policing this year: £1 billion over last year’s investment that is being put to local police forces, 43 across the country. It is important they look at modernising the equipment that they have and making sure that they are fit for purpose.
The noble Baroness, Lady Fox, and others asked where the boundary will be drawn. We have talked about challenges with AI and there will be further challenges in future. It is important that we reflect on those issues in a positive way and that this legislation is enforced, but at the moment our police focus as a Government is on neighbourhood policing, tackling knife crime and violence against women and girls, increasing the number of neighbourhood police officers and putting 13,000 more police on the street to give community resilience and support. The legislation is there—if Members do not like it, in this democracy they can put forward amendments to try to change it—for the police to operate in a fair and appropriate way.
The noble Lords, Lord Lebedev, Lord Strathcarron and Lord Kempsell, and the noble Baronesses, Lady Meyer and Lady Doocey, raised non-crime hate incidents. The noble Baroness, Lady Doocey, made an important point about training standards for national police, so that they understand the remit and limit of the current legislation. That is for chief constables, but there is a need for guidance, training and support.
Importantly, the National Police Chiefs’ Council and the College of Policing, at the request of the Home Secretary, are currently undertaking a review of how non-crime hate incidents are dealt with. We expect to see some information from the police on that. It is self-evidently important that some of those incidents help us gather intelligence on potential future crime, but, equally, we do not want the police to do things that waste their time and not focus on the type of crime that the noble Lord rightly mentioned in his introduction. Violent crime, knife crime and sexual grooming are really important issues.
However, that does not get away from the fact that, if someone incites racial hatred or hatred against an individual for their sexuality, that needs to be considered in the framework of the law of the land. If noble Lords have concerns—and a number of views have been expressed today about the operation of this—the bedrock is the legislation currently on the statute book. That has been passed by different Governments of different political parties and it is meant to ensure that we take action to stop harassment, malicious information or potential activity that leads to physical or mental violence. That is what it is designed to do. If noble Lords want to tighten or change that, they should put their proposals before both Houses and let us debate them. I believe in freedom of speech, tempered by the freedom to enjoy life without harassment, attacks or information online that says, “Let’s take action against this individual for what they are doing”, which is beyond their responsibility.
The noble Lord, Lord Kempsell, mentioned the very complex Afghan issue. We in the Home Office have been subject to those injunctions as well. They were passed by the court, not the current Government, who set out their position clearly in a Statement made in the House of Commons earlier in the week and repeated in our House yesterday. I refer him to that, because it sets out the justification for the original injunction, the super-injunction and the Government revising that procedure to date.
I am conscious that I have about one minute left. This has been a useful debate that has surfaced issues that I am trying to respond to in a way that sets out my and the Government’s view in a positive way, but recognises that there will be opportunities for Members to address further the concerns they have expressed. We must remember that online abuse is neither a trivial nor an inconsequential matter. At the heart of each instance that I have mentioned under the legislation is a victim—a person or group of persons—who has been potentially subjected to vile, dreadful abuse. We must also remember that it is a complex area where no data held by the Home Office can draw sufficient conclusions. The police are continually negotiating a difficult balance between freedom of speech and enforcing our laws on malicious communications to make them fair and proportionate. We must support them in doing so. I commend the debate to the Committee. If I have not covered all the points, at least in part, I will reflect on them once Hansard has been read.