Computer-generated Child Sexual Abuse Material
(2 days, 19 hours ago)
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Lord Carlile of Berriew
To ask His Majesty’s Government what steps they are taking to protect children in private messaging spaces from the prevalence of computer-generated child sexual abuse material.
The Minister of State, Home Office (Lord Hanson of Flint) (Lab)
Under the Online Safety Act, all regulated services must implement proportionate safety measures across all spaces. Platform design cannot be used as an excuse to avoid detection and reporting obligations. The Crime and Policing Bill will further strengthen protections for children against computer-generated abuse by criminalising AI child sexual abuse material, banning nudify tools, outlawing AI paedophile manuals and introducing an AI model testing defence to prevent abuse at source.
Lord Carlile of Berriew (CB)
Does the Minister agree that much of the responsibility for making Section 121 of the Online Safety Act effective lies with Ofcom? Will he confirm that the Government expect Ofcom to be bold and robust in its application of the new law to online spaces in private messaging contexts, and to use its new powers quickly so that we in Parliament can recognise that we have passed an effective law to protect children from vile online abuse?
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
The simple answer to the noble Lord is yes. The Government expect Ofcom to exercise its powers under Section 121 of the Online Safety Act where needed. A consultation ran to March 2025. We expect advice to the Home Secretary by April this year, and we will act when that advice comes forward.
Lord Clement-Jones (LD)
My Lords, given the recent experience with AI platforms such as Grok generating unacceptable non-consensual sexual images and the warnings from the Internet Watch Foundation, I welcome recent comments from the Secretary of State for DSIT about Grok. However, what discussions are senior Ministers having with technology companies directly to ensure that they understand their duties under the Online Safety Act and will comply?
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
The noble Lord should know that my view is that Grok is creating degrading non-consensual images, that that is an absolute disgrace and that Grok should take action on it. It is simply not acceptable. Ofcom has powers to tackle this. I will give a similar answer to the noble Lord that I gave to the question from the noble Lord, Lord Carlile: there is a consultation on this. Ultimately, though, it is not acceptable. Ofcom will act, and if it does not the Government will.
Viscount Colville of Culross (CB)
My Lords, work is under way with the national centre for violence against women and girls to improve the police’s response to non-consensual intimate image abuse so that they can proactively report such content for removal and hashing. Does the Minister think the Government should mandate this system to ensure that it becomes more effective across the country?
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
It is vital that the police and other security forces and agencies take action on this issue as a matter of urgency. The point that the noble Viscount has made is valid and correct. From my perspective, we have to send a signal from Parliament and from the Government that this type of misuse of those apps is simply not acceptable.
Baroness Berger (Lab)
My Lords, upload prevention technology is already being used by platforms in private messaging environments to detect harmful content such as malware, and, as we have just heard, experts such as the Internet Watch Foundation have confirmed that the same approach is feasible for detecting known child sexual abuse material, yet platforms continue to falsely claim that such scanning is impossible. What steps will the Government take specifically to ensure that Ofcom is testing and challenging these claims so that such arguments cannot be used to evade compliance?
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
The legislation is clear that this type of material is illegal and punishable by offences under the law. Ofcom is now drawing up resources and an examination of priorities to be able to report back to the Home Secretary by April on how we can enforce that legislation. There are extreme penalties for providers that break that, and they need to be aware now and to prepare. It is illegal, it will be punished and Ofcom will draw up advice to the Government shortly.
Baroness Butler-Sloss (CB)
Can Ofcom work to do this now or does it have to wait for the end of the consultation?
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
The consultation has been completed and Ofcom is now drawing up a response to give to Ministers. We have set a date of April 2026 for that information and we expect to act extremely speedily once we have had the report back from Ofcom. With due respect, it is fair to have a consultation and look at its results but, across the House and across government, it is quite clear that this type of activity is simply unacceptable and we will not stand for it.
Lord Kamall (Con)
My Lords, a number of noble Lords have raised concerns about Grok and those unacceptable images. The Minister says that it is a duty of Ofcom. Is he aware whether Ofcom has actually raised the issue of these images with Grok directly yet?
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
The position is that Ofcom is the regulator for this area and that all child sexual abuse images et cetera are currently illegal. The question is about the use of powers to take them down and hold tech companies to account. That is what the consultation will be completed on and by April 2026 we will have, as a Government, the full response from Ofcom. We will act on that response when we receive it.
Lord Spellar (Lab)
My Lords, what possible confidence can we have in Ofcom to take action effectively, given its lamentable failure to stand up for customers against the mobile phone companies?
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
Ofcom has the confidence of the legislation that both Houses of Parliament passed, was commenced under the previous Government and is to be implemented in full by this Government. It has cross-party support to take action to ensure that illegal content online is taken down and if companies do not do so, there is a mechanism to ensure that significant fines are potentially levied on those companies that do not take action.
Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)
My Lords, the Minister is again experiencing what happened during the stages of the Crime and Policing Bill when we discussed this subject, because of the strength of feeling right across the House about this. What really shocked me in the briefing for this Question is the fact that while we know child sexual abuse material is increasing exponentially, largely through AI, 91% of that material is actually being produced by children themselves, astonishingly. Can I appeal to the Minister to work closely with his colleague, the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, on Report on the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, and to think about what we can do to try to face up to this unfortunate fact and do something about it?
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
The noble Lord makes a very valid point and obviously I will discuss these matters with my noble friend Lady Smith. That goes to the heart of education and confidence-building, particularly for young boys, to ensure that they do not stray into the type of activity that leads to adult misbehaviour as well. It is really important that we focus on that. I will take the noble Lord’s point and discuss it with my noble friend.
Baroness Harding of Winscombe (Con)
My Lords, I welcome the Minister’s strength in his answers. He says that if Ofcom does not act to hold X to account for Grok’s illegal activities, the Government will. Can he expand on how the Government will act, if they need to?
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
Both parties’ Governments —the previous Government and this Government—have passed legislation in the Online Safety Act to make it illegal to provide child sexual abuse material online. In the Crime and Policing Bill, which is before this House, there are four or five additional measures to strengthen that purpose and ensure that we remove child sexual abuse material online. There are significant penalty points in the current legislation. The purpose of the consultation is simply to ensure that it has been discussed. There are views on how we implement it but when we receive that report in April, the Government will take action on what is already strong legislation.
Lord Storey (LD)
Can the Minister tell us how many prosecutions, or fines, there have been so far?
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
I cannot give the noble Lord specific detail on that. I come back to the point that there has been a consultation on the use of the powers under the Online Safety Act. That consultation has been completed; Ofcom will now reporting to government before April this year. That is when the provisions in the Online Safety Act, which had cross-party support, will be implemented.
Lord Watts (Lab)
My Lords, following the earlier questions, if the regulator fails to do its duty, as it has done in the past, will the Government remove the regulator and find someone who will?
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
I hope it is helpful to say to my noble friend that it is important that we have a strong cross-party approach that supports Ofcom, looks at the results of its consultation and draws up a plan to implement closure of illegal content under our current legislation. With, I hope, cross-party support for the Crime and Policing Bill’s measures coming up shortly—and for the measures we will introduce on Report, for example, on nudifying apps—we can be proud of the fact that this country will be one of the leaders in tackling child sexual abuse online. I hope that my noble friend will give that strong support. Let us hope and pray that we can deliver this as a Government, with support from organisations such as Ofcom.
Public Sector Productivity
(2 days, 19 hours ago)
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Baroness Neville-Rolfe
To ask His Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the United Kingdom’s capacity to increase productivity, particularly in the public sector.
The Financial Secretary to the Treasury (Lord Livermore) (Lab)
My Lords, in the decade from 2010, the UK economy saw the lowest productivity growth since the Napoleonic Wars. This led to the lowest growth in living standards ever recorded. This Government inherited a situation where public sector productivity was 5.6% below pre-pandemic levels. Reversing that performance is the number one mission of this Government. As part of our growth strategy, we have set out measures to increase productivity, including reforms to planning and skills, record levels of investment in R&D, new investment in transport connectivity, and a modern industrial strategy.
Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)
My Lords, here is another statistic: the ONS has reported that total public service productivity in the UK fell by 0.7% in Q2 of 2025 compared with the previous year and that healthcare productivity fell by 1.5% over the same period. Public service productivity continues to lag behind that of the private sector, yet this Government have overseen a surge in the number of civil servants, with many still working from home; inflationary public sector pay deals, without specific and direct productivity links of the kind that are common in business; more state-controlled activity; and more regulation and taxes on business. Does the Minister agree that this is actually eroding the prospect of UK per capita growth, which is essential for the success of the Government’s ambitions?
Lord Livermore (Lab)
I do not agree with that. On a point of fact, the noble Baroness mentions NHS productivity. The latest figures from the NHS show that NHS productivity has grown by 2.4% in April to July 2025 compared to the same period last year. Once again, the noble Baroness criticises the fact that we are seeking to pay the public sector workforce properly. She will be aware that a workforce that is efficient and well rewarded is essential to increasing productivity—she always talks about the need for increased productivity, but she never backs the measures that actually go to deliver it. I hope that the noble Baroness will recognise some of the measures that this Government are taking. At the spending review, the Government established a programme of public service reform to drive greater productivity. As part of that, the Office for Value for Money worked closely with departments to identify £14 billion of efficiencies. The noble Baroness did not mention that in her question. At the Budget, the Chancellor announced that we will deliver a further £2.8 billion of efficiencies and savings in 2028-2029.
Lord Kakkar (CB)
My Lords, much of the future improvement in productivity in the NHS is predicated on the adoption of innovative technologies. Is the Minister content that there is sufficient investment in the continuing development of the NHS workforce to facilitate the adoption of that technology and deliver that improvement in productivity?
Lord Livermore (Lab)
I am. We are investing £10 billion in digital technologies within the NHS. We have introduced a 2% efficiency and productivity target in the NHS for each year of this Parliament. That is supported by the Government’s 10-year health plan for England, which will improve outcomes for patients and deliver better value for money for taxpayers. The noble Lord is absolutely right that digital technologies and their adoption is vital to that. As I say, that is why we have invested £10 billion in it. We are moving more healthcare into the community and we are focusing more on the prevention of illnesses.
Lord Woodley (Lab)
My Lords, in a recent pilot of private sector companies which were working a four-day week, over 90% chose to keep these arrangements because of seriously increased productivity. Does the Minister agree that this should be expanded to the public sector, as called for by the trade unions?
Lord Livermore (Lab)
I do not believe that that is government policy right now.
Baroness Kramer (LD)
My Lords, this Question caused me to take a look at how the Government measure productivity. It strikes me as extraordinarily quantitative, taking into consideration almost no issue of quality. I am concerned that if AI is trained on these existing models, we are going to dig ourselves into a worse hole rather than make things better. Are the Government looking at how productivity is measured to give us something far more useful and valuable?
Lord Livermore (Lab)
I agree with a great deal of what the noble Baroness said. I noticed the noble Lord, Lord Leigh, who is very interested in this point as well, was on his feet. We have discussed it before in previous debates. We recognise the challenges in measuring public sector productivity, given the diversity of inputs and outputs in public services. The ONS recently published a review of its metrics. It has done a wide-ranging review into how productivity is measured and set out improvements that are now under way in many areas, such as healthcare, education and social security administration. It has included new quality adjustments, which better account for outcomes. I will take back to the Treasury the point the noble Baroness makes about the future adoption of AI.
Lord Leigh of Hurley (Con)
It is fair to say the ONS has a particular problem measuring NHS and public sector productivity because of the difficulty in measuring the outputs and inputs. None the less, the ONS reckons that public sector productivity has dropped 4.2% since 2019 and that, if it was at the same level as private sector productivity, the UK economy would have grown by 3%. Part of the problem is the measurement and part of the problem is the employment policies in the public sector. Will the Minister recognise the OBR’s warning that the Employment Rights Act will
“likely have material, and probably net negative, economic impacts on employment, prices, and productivity”?
Lord Livermore (Lab)
No. As the noble Lord says, public sector productivity has dropped significantly since 2019. This Government inherited a situation in which public sector productivity was 5.6% below pre-pandemic levels. That is clearly unacceptable and there are far greater issues going on than those that the noble Lord raises. I hope, as I have said before, that he will acknowledge some of the things this Government are doing to drive greater productivity in the public sector. We are working with the Office for Value for Money to identify £14 billion of efficiencies. We have gone further than that and identified a further £2.8 billion of efficiencies. We are investing in digital and AI transformation, workforce reform, rationalising the Government estate and improving procurement processes.
Lord Londesborough (CB)
My Lords, there is growing support for a social media ban for all those under the age of 16. In the interests of public sector productivity, would the Minister consider a similar ban during working hours for all government officials and civil servants under the age of 60?
Lord Livermore (Lab)
I do not think I would. I suspect social media, when used correctly, can help enhance productivity.
Lord Howell of Guildford (Con)
My Lords, does the Minister recall that, under both parties at the end of the last century, we attempted to beat this problem of productivity in the public sector by developing the private finance initiative idea? For a time, it was quite successful, although it did not end happily. Is he aware—perhaps he is not—that seven or eight of the most advanced countries in the world use developed and expanded versions of PFI that are much more sophisticated than ours? As they learned from us in the first place, perhaps we can learn a bit from them.
Lord Livermore (Lab)
The noble Lord is absolutely right. Partnerships with the private sector have an important part to play in the public sector. Obviously, the public sector can learn a great deal from the private sector, and, I hope, vice versa. That is why we announced in the spending review that we will be carrying out more public/private partnerships. Clearly, there is a lot to learn from the previous experience of PFI; we must make sure that we learn those lessons, and we should also learn the lessons from other countries and their experiences in that regard.
The Earl of Devon (CB)
My Lords, productivity in rural Britain is just 82% of its urban counterpart— a number that is estimated to fall to 79% by 2040. Making up this difference would add over £40 billion to the UK’s GDP. What efforts are His Majesty’s Government taking to improve this disparity?
Lord Livermore (Lab)
We talked before about AI and digital adoption. Digital adoption is incredibly important when it comes to rural communities—ensuring that they have access to extremely fast broadband, for example, will be important. Working from home has been mentioned. There are interesting studies that show that, particularly in rural areas where it is more difficult to travel to work, working from home can significantly improve productivity.
Baroness O'Grady of Upper Holloway (Lab)
My Lords, my noble friend the Minister is absolutely right that the big impact on investment, and therefore productivity, in the UK came as a result of austerity policies, a poor Brexit deal and a failure of industrial policy. However, I want to ask about quality of management in the UK. We know that that is key to workforce engagement, health and well-being, and job design and satisfaction, which, in turn, impacts on productivity. Will my noble friend consider convening a discussion with business schools about whether our education system for managers is fit for purpose and whether we can make improvements to improve workforce engagement?
Lord Livermore (Lab)
My noble friend asks a really interesting question and I am very happy to consider the point that she raises. The quality of management makes a massive difference in both the private and the public sector. We talked before about working from home. It is well documented that the better the quality of management, the more productivity comes from working from home. I am happy to consider my noble friend’s point.
Shamima Begum
(2 days, 19 hours ago)
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The Minister of State, Home Office (Lord Hanson of Flint) (Lab)
My Lords, Shamima Begum has had her British citizenship removed, and that has been upheld by the courts in the United Kingdom. It would be inappropriate to comment further, as there are ongoing legal proceedings. However, consular support is not available from within Syria, making direct assistance to British nationals there extremely difficult. The Government consider all requests for consular assistance on a case-by-case basis, but our priority overall in such cases remains maintaining the safety and security of the United Kingdom.
Lord Dubs (Lab)
My Lords, does my noble friend agree that we are talking about a young girl who was brought up in the UK, groomed and trafficked to Syria as a 15 year-old, has lost three babies and is now, in effect, stateless? What does my noble friend think will happen to her? Is she going to stay there for ever? Is it a life sentence? Surely it is our responsibility to deal with people who were brought up and educated in this country and who are trafficked abroad. Can my noble friend not accept that she is prepared to accept the full rigours of justice in a British court? Surely that is the right way forward.
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
I am grateful to my noble friend for his comments on this case. He will know that the decision of the UK Government has been upheld by UK courts, which we support. I cannot comment further. I explained to my noble friend prior to this Question coming up that I could not do this because there is currently a court case before the European Court of Human Rights and it would be inappropriate for me to go into individual cases given the ongoing litigation in this matter. However, the Home Secretary will never hesitate to use any of the powers available to her to safeguard national security, and the Home Secretary at the time who took this decision did so for that reason.
Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)
My Lords, without asking the Minister to go into individual cases, has he had a chance to read the report from the Joint Committee on Human Rights, debated in your Lordships’ House back in September, on Daesh crimes? Has he seen the evidence that we were given that there is a distinction to be made, as the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, has said, between children and adults? To leave children in festering conditions in camps in Syria is likely to lead to their being radicalised by groups whose interests are wholly opposed to the interests of the United Kingdom. Can we contrast the generalities around young people with the failure to prosecute any one of the 400 Daesh fighters who have been returned to the United Kingdom? As the Joint Committee pointed to, not one has been prosecuted for the crime of genocide, which even the British Government now say was committed against the Yazidis and others.
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
I respect the noble Lord and his representations, but the decision in relation to the individual case was taken having considered evidence and supported by both the previous Government and this Government. With the litigation that is currently ongoing in the European court, I cannot say much from this Dispatch Box. I hope that the noble Lord understands that; I would like to be able to give him further information, but I cannot.
The noble Lord will have noticed that this very weekend the UK Government took action against Daesh and will continue to do so. The prosecution issues that he mentioned are for the courts and the legal system and not for me as a Minister.
Lord Davies of Gower (Con)
My Lords, the position of the Official Opposition is clear: it was a Conservative Government who stripped Shamima Begum of her citizenship, and it is our unequivocal view that she should never be allowed to return to Britain—I sincerely hope that that is the Government’s view as well. However, it is not just Shamima Begum who poses a risk to the British people. Given all that we know about Alaa Abd el-Fattah, do the Government regret welcoming him with open arms as well?
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
I am grateful for the noble Lord’s support for the current position. We have contested and are contesting the position with the appeal in the European Court of Human Rights now, which shows that we support the original decision.
With regard to the individual that the noble Lord mentioned, he will know that the Foreign Secretary has ordered an inquiry into why we did not have information about some of the comments that he made. The noble Lord will know that the Prime Minister has made comments on that as well, which I support, and he will know that there are many people in both Houses who gave support for that individual. Subsequently, we need to investigate the due diligence as to why the comments that were made were not considered. I await the Foreign Secretary’s report before commenting further.
Baroness Hussein-Ece (LD)
My Lords, approximately 15 women and 35 British children are being held indefinitely and unlawfully in detention facilities in north-east Syria, in appalling and inhumane conditions. More than one-third of these British children are under 10 years old. Given that the UK’s other main security partners, including the US, France and Germany, have now repatriated most of their citizens from north-east Syria, will the UK Government also consider taking responsibility for their citizens?
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
The noble Baroness will know that there are British nationals, including minors, in north-east Syria, as she referred to in her question. We are very content to consider requests for consular assistance from Syria on a case-by-case basis and to take into account all relevant circumstances, including but not limited to national security. If there are individuals whom she wishes to progress, that facility is open to access.
Lord Sahota (Lab)
My Lords, Shamima Begum was only 15 when she left the UK. The UN Commission on Human Rights expressed deep concern about the Government’s decision to deprive her of British citizenship and said that the practice may disproportionately affect people from minority communities. Can the Minister explain how the Government’s decision aligns with their obligation to protect children and the rights of the minority communities, and to uphold a human rights standard?
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
I am grateful to my noble friend, but I come back to the point that the decision to deprive Shamima Begum of her British citizenship, undertaken by the previous Government and supported by this Government, was taken because she was deemed to pose, under legislation, a national security threat at that time. That does not mean that we are not going to robustly examine and support protection of children and minority groups from the UK public more generally. However, in the individual case that my noble friend mentioned, a decision was taken to deprive her of citizenship based on information that led to national security decisions. That is currently being contested in the European court, so I cannot comment further on the Government’s position, but he can be assured that there were reasons that the decision was taken in the first place.
Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)
My Lords, previous speakers who have raised questions so far have made a big play out of the age of Shamima Begum. She was one of three Bethnal Green schoolgirls; they were either 15 or 16 at the time they went to join Daesh. Will the Minister join me in assuming that all the people campaigning on the grounds that they were children who were groomed and were not adults will be strongly against giving the vote to people of that age?
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
I can always rely on the noble Lord to take a serious issue and bring it down to a unserious point. I will ensure that we have the vote at 16. It is Labour Government policy; it was provided for at the general election. People will still choose how to vote at the age of 16. If you can join the Army, get married and do other things at 16, that is reasonable. This is a serious issue about deprivation of citizenship and the noble Lord throws the question away.
Baroness Falkner of Margravine (CB)
My Lords, in the Home Secretary’s recent Statement on a fairer pathway to settlement, she emphasised good character and conduct for the granting of citizenship. Does the Minister agree that, in the case of naturalised citizens who have had a very short period of residency in this country, their presence in the UK being conducive to the public good adds to and is in conformity with her views?
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
The position that the noble Baroness refers to is currently subject to consultation. I will take that as a representation, because I will need to look at the details of what she has said with a forensic eye after this Question Time is over. The key point is that proposals that the Home Secretary has brought forward are to ensure that we put some discipline and management into the migration system. The good character test is one that is currently open to interpretation through consultation.
Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)
My Lords, there are 60 British individuals in north-east Syria at the moment in camps of some sort. I have worked in north-east Syria, in Raqqa, and I suspect that they will not get a fair trial there—and they have not been convicted here. I have huge respect for the Minister, but I find his Answer that they have to go and get some sort of help from the embassy or wherever quite flaccid. Surely, the British Government are worried about those 60 British nationals.
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
The Government will examine and support individuals on an individual basis. It is important that those individuals who have the potential to ask for consular access do so. That is what they should be doing in this case.
Venezuela
Lord Sikka
To ask His Majesty’s Government what plans they have to impose sanctions against the United States in response to its actions in Venezuela.
The Minister of State, Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (Baroness Chapman of Darlington) (Lab)
My Lords, the US is the UK’s principal defence and security partner. We do not have plans to impose sanctions on the US. We will continue to discuss evolving situations with our US counterparts as we seek a safe and peaceful transition to a legitimate Government that reflects the will of the Venezuelan people.
Lord Sikka (Lab)
My Lords, in direct violation of Article 2(4) of the UN charter, the US has attacked Venezuela and kidnapped its President and his wife. The Prime Minister has failed to condemn the aggression and violation of international law, which will inevitably embolden Trump to annex other territories. Can the Minister explain why the Government have not imposed sanctions on the US, as they have on other gangster states, for violating the territorial integrity of a UN member state?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
The United Kingdom Government work for the benefit of the United Kingdom’s people and it would not be in the British interest to impose sanctions on our closest intelligence and security partner. This relationship goes back decades; it is deep and it is serious. My noble friend’s Question, I am afraid, is simply not serious.
Lord Callanan (Con)
My Lords, a few hours ago, the United States carried out an operation in the North Atlantic to seize a Russian-flagged oil tanker which originated in Venezuela, using military assets from UK bases. Were the UK Government consulted in advance on this and are they satisfied that this operation is indeed lawful?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
Of course, I am aware of the events in the North Atlantic. I understand that the Defence Secretary will shortly be making some remarks about this and I think it is better to allow the House to be updated properly in due course on this quickly evolving matter.
Lord Bruce of Bennachie (LD)
My Lords, before Maduro was captured, it was about drug trafficking. After he was captured, it was about oil. Now the regime is cracking down and Venezuelans are suffering, but the US threatens Colombia, Mexico and Greenland, not forgetting Canada. Are the UK Government capable of making it clear to the US that sovereignty is not just for the United States and that annexation for personal gain and commercial exploitation is not only unacceptable but incompatible with support for democracy and human rights?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
The United Kingdom’s support for international law and for human rights is unwavering and has not changed. The actions of the United States are for the United States to explain, and that includes how it sits in relation to international law.
Lord Singh of Wimbledon (CB)
My Lords, does the Minister agree that the American action against Venezuela is reminiscent of the school playground, where the leader of our gang, to whom we have pledged loyalty, begins to act like the school bully?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
No. In all of this, I think the thing that matters most and that is often lost in these exchanges is that the people of Venezuela have been badly served and abused for many years. They deserve a Government who put them first, and they have not had that. We have not had a legitimate Government in Venezuela for some time; there is the prospect of that happening. I think it is a good thing that Nicolás Maduro is no longer responsible for running Venezuela.
The Lord Bishop of Chester
My Lords, I agree with the Minister on the importance of stable government for the future of Venezuela. Could she advise the House on whether we are investing in diplomatic relationships with all legitimate partners who might form any future Government, so that we can play our part in the future stability of that sovereign nation, and on whether the UK Government have any plans to follow Canada’s fine example, as reported in today’s i newspaper, of establishing full consular provision in Nuuk, the capital of Greenland?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
I am not able to comment on the capital of Greenland, but I can confirm that our relationships with relevant parties in Venezuela have been led most impressively by our small team in Caracas. It is the only team of any Five Eyes country that has maintained its presence there in recent years. I think that was the right decision and that those relationships will prove beneficial, as the very difficult and precarious nature of the transition now to a legitimate Government in Venezuela takes place.
Lord Hamilton of Epsom (Con)
Can the Minister confirm that the British Government did not recognise the presidency of Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela and that, if it were not for the American action, he would still be there, brutalising his people and debauching the economy of a potentially very rich country?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
I think that, from a factual perspective, that is indeed correct.
Lord Beamish (Lab)
My Lords, I do not want the Minister to comment on events in the North Atlantic, but does she agree that the UK has a proud tradition of enforcing international maritime law, especially against unregistered vessels and those being used, for example, in the grey fleet, and that we should support allies who are doing the same?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
Yes, I do agree with my noble friend on that.
Lord Purvis of Tweed (LD)
My Lords, the Minister has repeated today that we have been the only Five Eyes country to have a diplomatic presence in Caracas. The Minister told me last night in the House that the British Government were not informed prior to the US bombing Caracas, where our diplomatic presence is very close to where those bombs landed. Have we complained diplomatically to our ally, the United States, about this?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
Our team in Caracas is now out of crisis mode. They are back working; I have received updates from them today and I will continue to do so. They are safe and well and doing their jobs ably, as they have been able to do for the last few years.
Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)
My Lords, President Trump is displaying total disrespect for international law in his actions in Venezuela, and threatening the right of self-determination for the people of Greenland and the sovereignty of Denmark. Is the idea of the West as a geopolitical unit linking the US, Europe and other nations in a set of shared values and principles, now dead?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
No, clearly not. Our position on Greenland has been expressed very forcefully by the Prime Minister and our allies. It is for the people of Greenland and the kingdom of Denmark to determine the future of Greenland.
Lord Bellingham (Con)
My Lords, I entirely agree with what the Minister had to say about the unpleasantness of President Maduro; we are well rid of him. She mentioned international law. Can she expand on that? For example, if China launched a military operation on Taiwan and abducted Lai Ching-te, or if Putin launched a raid on Warsaw and abducted Donald Tusk, she would say that both actions were gross abuses of international law and would demand multiple sanctions and the immediate recall of the Security Council. Can she give a legal explanation of why those two examples would be obvious breaches of international law but the American raid and abduction are not?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
It is not for me to say whether it is or not. My point is that it is for the United States to explain its actions and where it feels they sit within the context of international law. That is the position of our Government and of many of our allies in the European Union.
Lord Robertson of Port Ellen (Lab)
I refer to the statement made the other night by European leaders in defence of the territorial integrity of Greenland. Clearly, NATO and its own integrity are of huge importance for the stability of the western hemisphere as a whole and, therefore, we must welcome the way in which European allies stood firm and were quite clear in the message that they gave.
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
I completely agree with my noble friend. The premise of the original Question encourages the Government to sanction the United States. Nobody would be more pleased than Vladimir Putin if the United Kingdom and the United States had that kind of fracture in our relationship. Sometimes we need to remind ourselves who stands for what in the world. We stand for international law and we condemn utterly what has happened in Ukraine. We know the difference; there is not a moral equivalence between what has happened in Caracas and what has been happening with the theft of children from Ukraine to Russia, the relentless bombing of infrastructure and civilians, and the destruction of energy infrastructure in the depths of winter in Ukraine.
Crime and Policing Bill
Wednesday 7th January 2026
(2 days, 19 hours ago)
Lords ChamberCrime and Policing Bill 2024-26 View all Crime and Policing Bill 2024-26 Debates Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: HL Bill 111(Corrected)-VIII(a) Amendment for Committee (Supplementary to the Eighth Marshalled List) - (6 Jan 2026)
Baroness Morgan of Cotes
“Duty to prevent violence against women and girls on trains(1) The British Transport Police must take all reasonable steps to prevent violence against women and girls on trains.(2) In subsection (1), “violence against women and girls” means abuse aimed at women and girls including, but not limited to—(a) rape and sexual offences;(b) stalking;(c) upskirting;(d) domestic abuse.(3) “Reasonable steps” in accordance with subsection (1) must include—(a) data sharing arrangements with rolling stock companies in relation to cases of violence against women and girls, and(b) participation in rolling stock design to ensure trains are designed to minimise incidences of violence against women and girls.”
Baroness Morgan of Cotes (Non-Afl)
My Lords, I had hoped, as the Minister knows, that we might have reached this amendment last month, in the same week the Government published their long-awaited violence against women and girls strategy—which would have been appropriate—but I left him to debate another extremely important issue. It is a pleasure to open the proceedings on the Bill in 2026 with this amendment.
I am sure all noble Lords support the Government’s ambition of halving violence against women and girls. The challenge with any such strategy is of course in its delivery. Securing safer public spaces for women and girls is essential, and safer streets was of course a key demand, and continues to be, following the terrible murder of Sarah Everard. But there are of course many places where women and girls feel unsafe, and that includes trains and public transport.
I noted this paragraph, on page 65 of the Government’s December strategy, which is headed “Every corner of public life will be safe”:
“Women and girls must both feel safe and be safe in every aspect of public life. … Safety is not just about reducing risk, it is about creating environments that foster confidence, dignity, and freedom of movement. Design and planning are critical tools in achieving this. Well-lit streets, accessible transport, and thoughtful urban design can deter violence, reduce opportunities for harm, and send a clear message that public spaces belong to everyone. By embedding considerations of VAWG into planning and transport guidance, we can ensure that safety is built into the fabric of our communities, making public spaces welcoming and secure for all. To support this, we”,
the Government,
“will update national design guidance to reflect a VAWG perspective, ensuring that safety considerations inform how public spaces are designed”.
Turning to this amendment, I think that the Committee should be aware that, since 2021, there has been an alarming rise in violence against women and girls on our railways—it is up 59%. Sexual offences specifically have risen by 10% and harassment is up 6%. To put this in actual numbers, in 2022-23, there were 2,475 sexual offences; that was up from 2,246 the year before. In 2021, 7,561 crimes against women and girls on railways were recorded by British Transport Police; that had risen by 2023-24 to 11,357.
It is therefore no surprise that these crimes are now classed as a national emergency by the National Police Chiefs’ Council. Due to this, nearly two thirds—63%—of women say they avoid travelling alone, and even women who continue to use public transport often undertake what is called “normalised behaviour”, like being very choosy as to where they sit or assiduously avoiding making eye contact with any fellow passengers.
Of course, numbers tell only half the story. For each survivor of an offence or an attempted offence, their experience stays with them, as we heard just in the last couple of weeks in the powerful testimony given by Her Majesty the Queen. But there are of course many others who have bravely shared their experiences of vulnerability in a place that they should not feel vulnerable at all. It is clear from the numbers I have just given to the Committee that action is needed to ensure measures can be put in place to reduce this level of crime against women and girls on our national rail network, and the Government need to take a lead on this.
This is, of course, a probing amendment. The wording in subsection (1) would place a clear duty:
“The British Transport Police must take all reasonable steps to prevent violence against women and girls on trains”.
Subsection (2) sets out what such abuse could entail but is not limited to those offences. Subsection (3) sets out what “reasonable steps” must include. The reason that this is a probing amendment is that I suspect that the Minister will tell me shortly that this is not the right Bill for such an amendment, so I want to take this opportunity to say that, while I might have some limited sympathy for his argument—
He is looking slightly surprised, so perhaps I have pre-empted his argument or that is not the argument that he is going to make, in which case I will be delighted. But if it is, Ministers will not be able to use the same argument in the forthcoming Railways Bill, where the Government will be accepting a clear responsibility for what happens on trains operating as part of their newly nationalised services.
The reason for subsection (3) is that enforcement after the event for perpetrators is not sufficient if the Government are to stand any chance of cutting violence against women and girls by 50%. Prevention is key to achieving anything like that goal. The suggestion in subsection (3) about what could constitute “reasonable steps” is vital if we are to move to a preventative and safety-by-design model. A crucial first step would be, as the amendment suggests, the sharing of data about cases and levels of violence against women and girls between the British Transport Police and the rolling stock companies. Of course, this is not just about violence against and women and girls in relation to passengers but is highly relevant to female staff operating on the rail network.
Following Royal Assent of the Passenger Railway Services (Public Ownership) Bill 2024, the Department for Transport instructed DfT Operator to assume responsibility for train operators’ ownership in England and provide
“safe, secure and sustainable transport”.
However, since then, there has been no clarification as to how this will occur. These amendments provide a way in which there can be a review of safety issues and standards on trains.
Better and more synchronised technology, subject to government standards and fitted at the point that a train is manufactured, would truly create that safe, secure and sustainable transport. It would also ensure that the Government could have true oversight of this issue and that all modern technology and innovation used by rail operating companies to help drive confidence in passengers, especially women, that are used by manufacturers subject to a gold standard. In addition, as long as manufacturers have the option not to include extra specifications that cost them money but do not seem to bring them monetary benefit, and merely bring societal benefit, they are less likely to install such measures, especially in the current economic environment, where every penny will count.
It is worth remembering that the previous Government created the secure stations scheme, which emphasised collaborative working and station design that deters crime and aids the safeguarding of vulnerable individuals. Using advanced technologies created by innovative companies that provide rolling stock with custom-made parts and technology, these amendments would allow the extension of this scheme to further improve passenger confidence. Just including more CCTV is insufficient. Design features such as improved lighting deployed by companies such as Belvoir Rail are very relevant here.
This amendment is an early opportunity for the Government to show that they are ready to stand behind their December violence against women and girls strategy. It would also demonstrate that delivery of the strategy is a priority across all government departments and is not just being left to the Home Office. I beg to move Amendment 356A.
Lord Hendy (Lab)
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan of Cotes. My proposed Amendment 356F is complementary, in a sense, to hers. My amendment would create a specific offence of assaulting a transport worker at work. It would be an equivalent protection to that given to retail workers by Clause 37 of the Bill, and there is of course existing legislation protecting emergency workers. I confess to a certain unease in proposing specific offences for specific groups of workers, but in the case of transport workers there are particular circumstances which justify an offence to protect them.
There has been a marked increase in violence against transport workers. Of course, the situation was highlighted by the multiple stabbings at Huntington on 1 November 2025. But violent offences against rail staff increased by 35% in 2024, according to the British Transport Police Authority. The overall increase in both incidents and the severity of violence against transport workers is to be noted. Of course, it is not just railway workers; transport workers protected would include those on the Underground, the Metro, trams, ferries and buses, and all other transport workers.
Baroness McIntosh of Pickering (Con)
My Lords, I speak particularly in support of Amendment 356A in the name of my noble friend Lady Morgan of Cotes. I hope that the Minister might see fit to include this in the Bill, as the noble Lord opposite argued for his amendment. It is difficult to find the right Bill. The Railways Bill is one possibility; I have tried to put some aspects into the Crime and Policing Bill but was told that it was not the right place; and now I am told that the English devolution Bill is not the right place—but we will keep seeking it.
I am particularly supportive of the comments that my noble friend made in moving her amendment on protecting public spaces, and not just on the tragic case of Sarah Everard but on one that is closer to home for me: that of Claudia Lawrence. As I mentioned briefly before the House rose in December, Claudia Lawrence disappeared in the most bizarre circumstances, walking from her flat to work as a chef at York University, and has never been seen since. The police inquiries have been intermittent, partly ongoing and partly not, and obviously this is causing extreme regret and anxiety to her family, not least to her mother, who I remain in contact with.
I should declare an interest: I was not the MP when Claudia disappeared, but I tried to help her family subsequently when, for five years, I was the MP for Malton. I believe that this Bill could be the right opportunity to address these issues; in particular, serious and aggravated attacks on women on public transport. It affects every age group—younger women perhaps feel more vulnerable, but as one gets older one thinks about what time of day or night one should be travelling. Elderly men are also affected, but attacks on women are a particular problem that my noble friend is right to address. Might she or the Government seek to expand this to public spaces to make sure that, where there are incidents, there can be closure for families—such as in the case of Claudia Lawrence, so that her mother, Joan, can find some settlement and closure?
The Lord Bishop of Manchester
My Lords, I am grateful for this short debate. I would like to widen it a little beyond railways. I am blessed in living in Greater Manchester at the heart of a major Metrolink tram network, which has many similarities to the railways. There are often very few staff late at night, particularly on the trams, and women and girls are especially vulnerable on those occasions. This Bill, if it is not just about the rail network, may be the better Bill to cover these issues and ensure that women and girls are safe and protected from violence on our whole public transport network.
Baroness Stowell of Beeston (Con)
My Lords, it is Amendment 356F from the noble Lord, Lord Hendy, that attracts me to the Chamber, although I do not necessarily share his arguments or reasoning. The main purpose of my speaking, the Minister will not be surprised to hear, is that it affords an opportunity for me to highlight again that the Government’s decision to introduce in Clause 37 a new offence of assault against a retail worker—and only a retail worker—risks creating a new problem.
As I have said before, I know that the Government’s intentions are good and I have no desire to mount a campaign against Clause 37, but the fact that a new offence of assault against a retailer is otiose does not mean that it will have no negative effects if it causes other public-facing workers to believe they are not protected if assaulted. As I have argued before, the workers referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Hendy, clearly will be protected without his amendment—because they will be—but I worry about people fearing that they will not be, deterring employees from exercising the delegated authority that we need them to exercise to uphold good order when in charge of a public place or space.
It is because of this that I urge the Minister—he and I will continue to have this discussion, which he knows I look forward to very much—to think again. I find it hard to understand how the Government can legislate for some and not others in this way. While it is not where I would start, we have to be very conscious of the unintended consequences of Clause 37, which the noble Lord, Lord Hendy, has highlighted today.
Lord Goddard of Stockport (LD)
My Lords, I speak to Amendment 399 in the names of my noble friend Lady Pidgeon, who cannot attend today, and my noble friend Lady Doocey. This amendment would enable CCTV systems on the railways to be quickly available to the police and continuously for 30 days, alongside defining the technical standards to support this access. It is about ensuring that investigations on the railways can be carried out efficiently.
The amendment was first tabled by our colleague Daisy Cooper following a spate of bike thefts at St Albans station. In trying to resolve this issue, the correspondence from the British Transport Police was quite revealing. The CCTV system at St Albans station is operated by Govia Thameslink Railway—GTR—as part of a commercial franchise agreement. GTR manages CCTV across 238 stations, with over 6,000 cameras. Although British Transport Police and other forces have established information-sharing agreements with GTR and similar operators, these agreements are designed to govern data management, including storage and access protocols. They do not constitute contracts with commitments to supply CCTV footage within specific timeframes or of specific volumes.
Currently, there are no provisions for rail franchise agreements that mandate specific service levels for supplying CCTV footage—it is not established in law yet. While this may change over coming years, as the franchises may be nationalised, this remains an issue. Unlike council-owned CCTV systems, which often feature integrated platforms allowing direct access, many rail CCTV systems are standalone, not remotely connected. Retrieval often requires physical visits to stations, which can delay access, and sometimes operators impose limits on the duration and length of footage they can supply.
While I acknowledge that these are challenges resulting from the current franchise arrangements, which will gradually be resolved, other constraints are rooted in the operational systems. I am aware that in September, the Government announced that they will be providing funding of almost £70 million so that Network Rail can make some improvements to CCTV. Although this is welcome, Amendment 399 would ensure that a legal obligation exists, and I hope the Minister will look carefully at the issues we are raising today.
Amendment 356A from the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, would put a duty on British Transport Police to take steps to prevent violence against women and girls on trains. This is a national emergency: one in four women have experienced domestic abuse, and a woman is killed by a man once every three days. Given that fewer than one in six victims of rape or attempted rape report their assault to the police—the reasons cited including that the police would not believe them or could not help them, or that they would not be understood—and given that only 2.6% of rape offences result in a charge or summons, it is crucial we do everything we can to assist in this process.
We fully support specialised teams tackling violence against women and girls in every police station, including British Transport Police stations, and we welcome the Government’s overall work in this important area.
The amendment also raises the issue of rolling stock design. As the railway comes under public ownership, there is a real opportunity for the Government to lead on the right design of the interior of their new fleets of trains; procedures to cut out crime and ensure safety and accessibility for everybody should be the heart of that design. However, it should be noted that the rolling stock would not be publicly owned; rather, it would continue to be leased, as now. That issue may need to be looked at again.
Amendment 356F from the noble Lord, Lord Hendy, would create the offence of assaulting a public transport worker, which is similar to the offences of assaulting retail workers and emergency workers. We are sympathetic to this amendment but as the noble Lord himself indicated, the wording may need refining. However, the principle behind it is clear, and it is obvious that protection is needed.
This is an important group of amendments that addresses the safety of our railway networks, systems and travelling public. I look forward to the Minister’s response to the many serious points that have been raised.
Lord Blencathra (Con)
In rising to support Amendment 356A in the name of my noble friend, I recognise that the problem will probably be enforcement, and the answer may have to be a lot more British Transport Police routinely patrolling certain trains.
I also want to raise another issue which affects women. The amendment deals with the big crimes—rape and other sexual offences, stalking, upskirting and domestic abuse—but women and girls also suffer bad behaviour on trains. For example, if a woman or girl gets on to a train and the only seat left has some yob’s rucksack on it, how many would say, “Could you move your rucksack, please?” They would probably stay silent, afraid that if they did speak up, they would be attacked.
The same things happen late at night, when groups of youths have been drinking and are making a noise or playing their music loudly, causing a complete disturbance. A few weeks ago, I had the guts to tell someone to take his feet off the seats, and he did. But I wonder how many women and girls would actually take that action, asking people to turn the music down, behave themselves, stop the swearing and loutish behaviour, and stop throwing their empty beer cans about. Women will not do that sort of thing—they will not take action—and are therefore suffering.
I do not have an answer to this problem, but it has to involve improving behaviour on trains generally. Perhaps, like the US Transportation Secretary, who told people to dress properly on planes and not like scruffs just off the beach, we should say similar about Great British Railways: when you are on trains in future, behave yourselves, because women and girls are suffering.
Lord Davies of Gower (Con)
My Lords, this has been an interesting short debate. I thank all noble Lords who have contributed to this group of amendments, each of which addresses the issue of safety on our public transport networks, whether of passengers, workers or those tasked with policing them. The amendments before us reflect genuine concern about how effectively our current frameworks protect people from violence, intimidation and abuse in transport settings, and they deserve careful consideration from the Minister.
I begin with Amendment 356A, tabled by my noble friend Lady Morgan, which would place a duty on the British Transport Police to
“take all reasonable steps to prevent violence against women and girls on trains”.
Violence against women and girls remains an appalling and persistent problem. Just yesterday, the Government and Liberal Democrats joined together to defeat a Conservative amendment to the Sentencing Bill that would have exempted sexual offenders and domestic abusers from the automatic presumption of a suspended sentence. For victims of sexual assault or domestic abuse, the distinction between a custodial sentence and a suspended sentence is not an abstract policy question; it is the difference between knowing that their abuser has been removed from the community, and knowing that they remain at liberty.
That point is reinforced by the Government’s recent recognition of the scale of the problem. Violence against women and girls has been described by the Home Secretary as a “national emergency”. The Government have trialled domestic abuse protection orders to track domestic abusers. But the most effective way to protect victims is to ensure that offenders face custodial sentences for their crimes. A Government who oppose that principle are not a Government who can claim to hold violence against women and girls as a priority.
In the year ending 2024, police recorded more than 106,000 sexual offences in England and Wales—an increase of around 10% on the previous year. Women continue to report feeling unsafe on public transport, particularly during off-peak hours and at night. This amendment recognises that prevention must go beyond enforcement alone. Its emphasis on data sharing and engagement with train design reflects the reality that safety is shaped by visibility and co-ordination. These are practical, forward-looking measures that deserve serious engagement from the Government. I hope the Minister considers them carefully.
Amendment 356F, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Hendy, proposes a new offence of assaulting a public transport worker. Abuse and violence directed at front-line transport staff has increased markedly in recent years, with British Transport Police data showing a significant rise in assaults on railway employees. Public transport workers perform an essential public service, often in challenging circumstances, and they should be able to do so without fear of violence or intimidation.
Amendment 399, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Pidgeon, addresses a long-standing operational problem: inconsistent and delayed access to railway CCTV footage. Timely access to high-quality CCTV is often critical to identifying suspects, supporting victims and securing prosecutions. Establishing clear legal requirements for accessibility and technical standards would help to remove the barriers that currently frustrate investigations and undermine confidence.
Taken together, these amendments highlight a broader concern. Although the Government have articulated ambitions around tackling violence against women and girls and improving safety on public transport, there remains a gap between aspiration and implementation. Too often, victims, police and front-line workers encounter fragmented responsibilities, inconsistent standards and slow operational responses. What is needed is clear leadership, stronger co-ordination between agencies and a willingness to embed prevention into the everyday operation of our transport networks.
We on these Benches are clear that public transport must be safe and accessible for all, and that violence, whether against women passengers or workers, must be actively prevented, not merely responded to after the fact. I look forward to hearing from the Minister how the Government intend to ensure that the objectives reflected in these amendments are delivered in practice and how they will translate stated commitments into real-world safety improvements.
The Minister of State, Home Office (Lord Hanson of Flint) (Lab)
I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan of Cotes, for Amendment 356A, and I am glad we have reached it today. We hoped to reach it prior to Christmas, but time did not permit. I know that she has championed this issue in the House before, and I welcome her contribution pressing the Government today. I also welcome the slight widening of the debate by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester to look at metro services.
I note the comments of the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Pickering, and the terrible case of Claudia Lawrence. She has written to me separately on that. I have already instigated with my colleagues in the Home Office a response to the issues that she has raised. I hope she will forgive me if I concentrate on other matters today, but that is not off my agenda.
I know the whole Committee will support the fact that the Government have taken action on violence against women and girls, which is intolerable anywhere, including on the railway. The noble Baroness referenced the Government’s strategy on halving violence against women and girls, which was published in the House of Commons on the last day before Christmas. The Statement repeat has not happened in this House because the Opposition did not want it. That is fine—I understand that—but the commitment from the Government is very clear, and the recently published strategy to halve violence against women and girls is vital.
I also take the points on behaviour made by the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, which is an encouraging comment as part of that because the points he made are valid, and I accept them. The British Transport Police is essential in helping us to deliver that objective of halving violence against women and girls, alongside police counterparts in Home Office forces. It may be helpful to the Committee to say that the British Transport Police, as the police force for the railway, is already required to prevent crime, and that includes the offences set out in the amendment. The British Transport Police undertakes activities across the railway to encourage victims and bystanders to report offences, and indeed poor behaviour, and will relentlessly pursue offenders. In BTP Policing Plan 2025-27, it has given specific commitments to prevent violence against women and girls through:
“Effective and sensitive investigation and robust offender management”,
and:
“Targeted activity to identify and apprehend those intent on offending”.
If it helps the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan of Cotes, I am very happy to provide, through my colleagues in the Department for Transport, a further meeting for her to look at that work and understand it at first hand.
The noble Baroness also mentioned rolling stock companies and the manufacture and leasing of trains to train operating companies. The design of trains is defined not by the rolling stock company but by the train operating company. Therefore, the proposal that the British Transport Police shares data on violence against women and girls with rolling stock companies would not lead to improvements in the design of train carriages, but I take her point. The British Transport Police already shares crime data with train operating companies, which can feed into the British Transport Police policing plans.
The noble Baroness will also, I hope, be aware that the Rail Safety and Standards Board already publishes key train requirement guidance that is used by train operating companies when ordering new trains. This helps detail the features that are to be included in the specification. The content of the document is prepared by a group of rolling stock experts representing train operating companies, manufacturers, leasing companies, industry bodies and the Department for Transport. Following input from security experts in the Department for Transport and BTP, new content has recently been prepared that includes additional measures to do exactly what the noble Baroness wishes, to enhance personal security, including those that seek to reduce violence against women and girls. The content has been included in a draft of the document that will be submitted for consultation with the rail industry. The intention— I hope this is helpful for the noble Baroness—is that it will be published in spring 2026. While it is not the legislative back-up that she is seeking in the amendment, I hope it meets the objective of the very valid points she has made today.
The noble Lord, Lord Davies of Gower, mentioned sentencing. We had a full debate yesterday on the Sentencing Bill and the House made its decisions on it. There is a difference between us on that, but I want to see offenders brought to justice and people caught. That is an important part of our proposals regarding the prevention measures and the performance of the British Transport Police on these issues.
Amendment 356F in the name of my noble friend Lord Hendy includes the introduction of a stand-alone offence of assaulting a public transport worker. Before I refer to what he has said, I will address the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell. First, I confirm that we are having a meeting. It is in the plan; it will be sorted and is coming down the line very quickly. She referred to Clause 37 and the stand-alone offence on retail workers. We have taken the view that there should be a stand-alone offence because retail workers are upholding the law for the state on sales of alcohol, drugs, knives, cigarettes and a range of other matters. But I agree with her that it is essential that transport workers feel safe going about their job. There is no place for abuse and assault of any worker, and I know we will all agree with that.
The attack in Huntingdon in early November shocked and horrified us all. Tributes were paid at the time to the railway staff who stood in the way of alleged attackers and did their duty, and those matters will come to court in due course. But I must stress the important point—this goes to the heart of what my noble friend said—that if a public transport worker suffers violence or abuse at work, it is essential that they report it to the police so it can be investigated. We take that seriously in the police, the transport police and the railway, and elsewhere in the Home Office. As the dedicated police service for the railway, the British Transport Police is able to provide further reassurance to rail staff that it is there to protect them and will arrest offenders quickly.
The key point I want to make to my noble friend is that transport workers are already protected in legislation, as the noble Baroness touched on. The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 makes offences against public-facing workers, in which transport workers would be included, an aggravating factor that the courts must consider in sentencing. As I said earlier in Committee, everybody is protected from assault. It is criminalised under the Criminal Justice Act 1988 and that long-standing piece of legislation, the Offences against the Person Act 1861. The key point in this case is that transport workers are covered by that legislation, whereas—to return to Clause 37—retail workers were not covered in the way that public-facing workers are in relation to police and others. They are still covered by the main offences of the Criminal Justice Act, but the aggravating factor that we are introducing under Clause 37 deals with retail workers specifically. I am happy to discuss Clause 37 with the noble Baroness when we have the opportunity to meet very shortly regarding her concerns about the legislation.
Baroness Stowell of Beeston (Con)
I am grateful to the Minister and I look forward to us discussing that at that time. I am not an expert in the law in this area, but I am genuinely surprised by what he has just said about the current legal provisions and protections for retail workers and the need for that which has been included in the Bill on the grounds that he has argued. If, as a result of this short debate, there is any need for him to clarify that further, that would be really helpful.
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
We are in danger of the Committee revisiting Clause 37. I have an opportunity to meet the noble Baroness, and we can discuss those issues then. I am saying to my noble friend, in relation to his amendment, that the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 makes offences against public-facing workers an aggravating offence. We are strengthening that for retail workers in the context of Clause 37, but we will revisit that when we have our further discussion.
Amendment 399, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Pidgeon, but spoken to by the noble Lord, Lord Goddard of Stockport, would introduce a requirement that all CCTV camera images on the railway are made immediately accessible to BTP and to the relevant Home Office police force. I say to the noble Lord and the noble Baroness that I welcome the aims of the amendment, as historically the lack of immediate access to railway CCTV images has been a significant issue for BTP that can reduce its ability to investigate crimes quickly.
However, and this is where we may differ, I do not believe that legislation is necessary to address this issue. The noble Lord rightly said in his contribution that the Department for Transport has secured £17 million in funding to implement a system to provide more remote immediate access to station CCTV to the British Transport Police and the railway industry, and he welcomed that. I can say to him today that the Department for Transport will be funding Network Rail on behalf of the rail industry to deliver the project, which will cover the whole of the railway in England, Scotland and Wales, and prioritise stations where there are most passenger journeys.
Lord Blencathra (Con)
Will the Minister take this idea to the British Transport Police? By the time one has done a three-hour journey, one is heartily sick of hearing, for the 20th time, “See it. Say it. Sorted”. Could it possibly intersperse between those announcements something like: “This coach has video recording. We will take action against any passengers who harass or cause trouble for others”? That may not be the right wording, but something warning about that might be helpful.
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
I will give consideration to that with my colleagues in the Department for Transport. As somebody who travels every week on the train to this House, “See it. Say it. Sorted” appears on my journey on a number of occasions—in my case, in both English and Welsh. The noble Lord makes a valid point: there should be an acceptance and acknowledgment that the type of antisocial behaviour which he has referred to, at a low level, can be intimidating for individuals. The ability to undertake physical violence in the extreme form that allegedly took place in Huntingdon—I have to use the word “allegedly”—and the low-level abuse that might occur are significant issues. Transport staff on railways, from whichever railway company, and the teams that are operating require the support of the state to give them that back-up.
Under the current legislation, I believe that my noble friend’s amendment is not necessary. However, the general principle that we have heard from the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, and other speakers, including my noble friend and the noble Baroness, Lady Pidgeon, via the noble Lord, Lord Goddard of Stockport, is absolutely valid and was well worth raising. I hope that I have been able to give assurances on that and that the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, will withdraw her amendment.
Lord Hendy (Lab)
My Lords, I wonder whether my noble friend the Minister could find time in his busy timetable to see me and the RMT about this, because I did not quite understand what the distinction was between the creation of an offence of assaulting a retail worker at work, in Clause 37, and assaulting a transport worker at work, as in my amendment. I take the point about an aggravating factor in sentencing but the question is really about the creation of an offence. It seemed that there might be room for further discussion outside the Chamber.
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
My noble friend mentioned his noble kinsman, my noble friend Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill, who is the Transport Minister. The British Transport Police are the responsibility of and answer to the Department for Transport. My other noble friend Lord Hendy is the Minister responsible for transport. If I may, I will refer that request to the Minister directly responsible for that policy in this Bill, so that they can consider what my noble friend has just said.
There is a distinction between the existing legislation that I have mentioned, which provides security against attack for public-facing workers, and the Clause 37 issue, which we have already debated. We may undoubtedly return to this on Report in several forms but, in the meantime, I would be grateful if the noble Baroness would withdraw her amendment.
Baroness Morgan of Cotes (Non-Afl)
I thank all noble Lords who have taken part in this short debate. It is one of those that shows the Chamber at its finest, when there is a genuine discussion of some important issues. This was a deliberately narrow amendment, but I welcome the comments that have been made across the Committee on how it could be widened. I particularly welcome that of my noble friend Lady McIntosh about public spaces more broadly, but also the suggestion relating to other forms of public transport, especially trams. I expect that we could apply this to the Underground, not just in London but in other cities too.
I welcome the comments from the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, about behaviour on trains. The list of offences in proposed new subsection (2) is not exhaustive, and I fully take his point. There is an irony to debating this amendment at a rather more civilised time of the day than we might otherwise have done, had we reached it in December. One reason why I wanted to know whether we were going to reach the debate was that, because we sat late previously, I had to get a 10.30 pm train home to Leicestershire. I would describe myself as being rather robust, but I do not want to travel at half past 10 at night and get home to a deserted car park at nearly midnight. I do not think that anybody wants to do that, nor should we ask members of the House staff to do so. However, I will leave that debate about sitting hours for a very different set of noble Lords to consider.
I thank the Minister for his very helpful and constructive comments on my amendment. The Committee has identified that this is an issue about prevention of violence against women and girls, not just enforcement after the event. He rightly took the point that it is not just about British Transport Police but about working with the train operating companies, as he mentioned. I would very much like to take up his offer of a meeting, whether with Department for Transport officials or with the Rail Safety and Standards Board; he mentioned its forthcoming consultation. I think that we will return to this issue in the Railways Bill, so he can let the other noble Lord, Lord Hendy, know to expect such a debate. For now, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Lord Davies of Gower
“(2A) It is an offence for a person—(a) to have in their possession with intent to supply, or(b) be concerned in the supplying of, or the making of an offer to supply,an electronic device in circumstances which give rise to a reasonable suspicion that the device will be used in connection with a relevant offence.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment would include a person concerned in the supplying of an electric device for use in vehicle offences within the scope of the offence in clause 110.
Lord Davies of Gower (Con)
My Lords, Amendment 356H is in my name and that of my noble friend Lord Cameron of Lochiel. It seeks to strengthen Clause 110 by ensuring that those who are concerned in the supplying of electronic devices used in vehicle theft are brought within the scope of the new offence.
Vehicle crime remains a persistent and evolving challenge. Organised criminal networks are increasingly turning to sophisticated electronic devices—such as signal jammers, key programmers, and relay attack tools—to bypass modern vehicle security systems. These devices are not sold in back alleys alone: they are traded online, often under the guise of legitimate diagnostic equipment, and then misused to facilitate theft. The law must keep pace with this reality. Clause 110 rightly takes some steps towards addressing this growing problem, and I welcome the new provisions.
However, I have one particular question for the Minister. What is the difference between this new offence and the offence of going equipped for stealing under Section 25 of the Theft Act 1968? I note the different maximum penalties, being three years’ imprisonment for the Section 25 offence and five years’ imprisonment for the new offence in Clause 110, but is that the only difference? I ask this not to be overly critical but simply to understand the rationale behind the inclusion of this new offence.
I recognise that electronic devices for stealing vehicles are a new and evolving problem, and, as such, the new offence must be watertight. That is why I have tabled my amendment. I am sure the Minister will have a sense of déjà vu when speaking to this amendment. It is similar in nature to the amendment we tabled in Committee to Clause 13 of the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill last year. In that Bill, our amendment sought to add possession with the intent to supply to the new criminal offence of supplying an article for use in immigration crime. The Government listened to us and tabled their own amendment on Report to widen the scope of that offence to include being concerned in the supply of a relevant article. Amendment 356H is intended to close the same possible loophole in Clause 110 as existed in the original drafting of Clause 13 of the border security Bill.
Clause 110 contains two separate offences. Subsection (1) states:
“It is an offence to possess an electronic device in circumstances which give rise to a reasonable suspicion that the device will be used in connection with a relevant offence”.
Subsection (2) states:
“It is an offence to import, make, adapt, supply or offer to supply”
such a device. That captures quite a wide range of activities, but what is missing from this aspect of the offence is possession with intent to supply such a device, or any other activity relating to the supply of these devices.
My amendment would address this gap by including two further offences. It explicitly includes possession with intent to supply an electronic device in circumstances which give rise to a reasonable suspicion that the device would be used in connection with the theft offence. It contains the same language that the Government brought forward for the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill. Proposed new paragraph (b) in the amendment therefore states that a person commits an offence if they are
“concerned in the supplying of, or the making of an offer to supply”
such an electronic device. This would, I believe, capture those who are knowingly involved in the chain of supply: those who broker deals, advertise devices or otherwise facilitate their distribution.
Without this amendment, there is a risk that individuals who play a crucial role in enabling vehicle theft will escape liability simply because they are not the final supplier. That is a loophole we cannot afford to leave open. Given that the Government accepted that this was a gap in what is now the Section 13 offence in the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Act, I hope the Minister will agree that it is a loophole in this offence that should be closed. I beg to move.
Lord Goddard of Stockport (LD)
My Lords, we support the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Gower. He has hit the nail on the head with this amendment about the intent to supply electronic devices for car theft, which has become an epidemic in this country. Data assessed by colleagues in the other House revealed that, in 2024, 75% of vehicle thefts were unsolved and only 2% resulted in a suspect being charged or summonsed, with 95,000 cases being unsolved. In November 2025, a BBC report showed that keyless car theft devices used by criminals can be found online and retail for around £20,000. According to that report, video guides and devices can be easily found online, allowing access to high-end cars such as Jaguars and Range Rovers and upwards. The Bill provides an offence for owning such a device. This amendment would address the potential loophole for those supplying the device.
I wait with interest to hear the Minister’s response. Motorists are taxed to the hilt, and pay road charges and congestion charges. I do not think it is unreasonable that the Government try to do something to protect motorists’ vehicles. All the money goes in—we pay our road taxes and our insurance. The numbers are staggering, with 95,000 cases last year unsolved. If you own a reasonably priced car, after working hard, there should be something to protect you from the people supplying the equipment rather just than the person using the equipment. I will be interested to hear the Minister’s response.
Viscount Goschen (Con)
My Lords, briefly, I support my noble friend’s amendment, which seeks to fill a lacuna in Bill. It seems that the Government and my noble friend will be very close in what they trying to achieve, which is to remove these devices from sale and use and to make it more difficult for the criminals.
When the Minister responds, can he take the opportunity to say a word or two about enforcement? As the noble Lord, Lord Goddard, said, these devices are advertised for sale online. I think the Committee would like to know what efforts the authorities will take to try to pursue proactively those suppliers—we heard an awful lot in another Bill about smashing the gangs. The Committee would benefit from some explanation of how this provision will be used. Clearly, if a criminal in a stolen motor vehicle has a device on them when they are arrested, that is pretty straightforward: they are on their way to do that. However, I am interested in tackling the root of the problem and the pursuit of the individuals who are supplying these devices. What measures can be taken to prevent that at source? I would be very grateful to know.
Lord in Waiting/Government Whip (Lord Katz) (Lab)
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Davies, for explaining the purpose of this amendment. He is right to highlight the importance of the issue that it raises. The Met estimates that electronic devices are used in approximately 60% of vehicle theft, so I am glad that we have the opportunity to debate Clause 110 and the important measures it takes in relation to vehicle theft.
I certainly understand the desire of the noble Lord, Lord Davies, to make the offence in Clause 110 as tight as possible, but I hope to persuade him, and your Lordships’ Committee, that the amendment is unnecessary. In particular, I do not believe that there is a gap in the offences provided for in Clause 110. Further, the amendment would require the police and prosecution to prove intent, rather than the burden being on the defendant to do so. This would have the effect of weakening the offence, as it would place a higher bar on the prosecution to secure a conviction.
By way of background, Clause 110 provides for two new criminal offences in relation to electronic devices used in vehicle theft. The first will criminalise the possession of such devices and the second will criminalise the importing, making, adapting, supplying or offering to supply these devices. Both offences require a reasonable suspicion that the device will be used in connection with the theft of a vehicle or the theft of anything in a vehicle.
This amendment seeks to extend those offences to include a person concerned in the supplying of an electronic device for use in vehicle offences. However, Clause 110 already makes provision for it to be an offence to possess a device where it appears that there could be an intention to supply. It outlines that the court may assume that the defendant possessed the relevant article where it was on the premises at the same time as the accused, or on the premises of which the accused was the occupier or a habitual user other than as a member of the public. I point out that the amendment would require the prosecution to prove intent to use the device to commit theft. As I have already said, this is a higher bar than the clause as drafted.
Clause 110 outlines:
“It is a defence for a person charged with an offence … to show that the person did not intend or suspect that the device would be used in connection”
with the theft of a vehicle or anything in a vehicle. A court can therefore infer that the articles in question are intended for use in vehicle theft. This reflects the fact that there are likely to be few legitimate uses for those specified articles. It is appropriate to expect that those who are involved with such articles should be alert to the possible use of the articles for criminal purposes. The amendment states that it would be
“an offence for a person to … be concerned in the supplying of, or the making of an offer to supply, an electronic device”.
I am not sure that such wording materially expands the scope of the offence. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine who may be captured by such wording who will not already be captured by the existing wording in the Bill.
The noble Lord, Lord Davies, asked a specific question around whether offenders could be charged with going equipped to commit theft under Section 25 of the Theft Act 1968. These existing offences put the burden on the prosecution to prove the defendant’s intention to steal a vehicle or something from inside the vehicle. This new offence places the burden on the defendant to prove that they were not intending to steal a vehicle, or that the device would not be used to steal a vehicle or commit vehicle crime.
I note that, in his contribution, the noble Viscount, Lord Goschen, asked about the online sale of devices. Under the Online Safety Act 2023, there is a new duty placed on social media and tech companies to prevent the advertisement of stolen goods and devices that facilitate crime. Online sales platforms will block adverts and listings for items that are illegal to sell; sales platforms already do this for other illegal items.
On the point raised by the noble Lord, Lord Davies, with respect to the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Act, it is fair to say the offence deals with a different set of circumstances from the offences in that Act. However, we will take away the comments and ensure that there are no gaps in the offence. I appreciate him raising the point.
For all these reasons, I am not persuaded that the amendment is required, and I hope that the noble Lord will be content to withdraw it.
Lord Davies of Gower (Con)
My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Goschen and to the Liberal Democrats for their support for this amendment. The purpose of the amendment is not to widen the offence indiscriminately but to ensure that Clause 110 operates as Parliament clearly intends. Without explicitly including those who are concerned in supplying these devices, the offence risks capturing only the least sophisticated actors, while leaving untouched those who organise, promote and enable the trade from behind the scenes.
The reality of modern vehicle crime is that it is technologically advanced and often commercially organised, and those involved in supply chains are frequently well aware of the criminal end use of the devices they help distribute. Yet they structure their involvement precisely to avoid possession, and that is a gap that criminals will exploit if we allow it to remain. I hope that the Minister will reflect on the constructive nature of this proposal, given that the Government are aware of and have acknowledged the potential gap in the legislation. But for now, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Baroness Doocey
“Prevention of resale of stolen GPS products(1) The Equipment Theft (Prevention) Act 2023 is amended as follows.(2) In Section 1(2)(b), after “commercial activities” insert, “including GPS equipment”.”Member’s explanatory statement
This new clause extends the Equipment Theft Act 2023 to specifically include the theft of GPS equipment.
Baroness Doocey (LD)
My Lords, Amendment 357, first tabled by my party in the other place last year, would extend the operation of the Equipment Theft (Prevention) Act by making explicit reference to GPS equipment or, as the industry now prefers, global navigation satellite systems.
For several years, Liberal Democrats have highlighted the sharp rise in rural crime, with organised gangs systematically targeting farms and rural businesses. Their focus has been on stealing high-value GPS drones, receivers and in-cab screens from tractors and harvesters. This equipment is worth thousands of pounds and is essential for modern precision farming. The loss of these units leaves farmers facing costly delays and crop losses at critical times of the year. These thefts have formed part of a well-organised international trade whereby equipment is stripped, containerised and shipped overseas, often beyond recovery. Crucially, offences spiked as rural policing came under ever-increasing strain. Local stations were closed and experienced neighbourhood teams hollowed out, taking with them the deep local knowledge that underpins effective intelligence gathering.
Organised gangs stepped into that vacuum, criss-crossing county boundaries with little deterrence. We recognise that real progress has been made over the last year, with insurance claims for GPS theft now starting to fall, thanks to greater collaboration between farmers, insurers, police and the National Rural Crime Network, whose invaluable work is now rightly benefiting from strengthened national funding and support. The Equipment Theft (Prevention) Act should build on that work, offering a strong framework for prevention, giving the Secretary of State powers to require immobilisers and the marking and registration of agricultural machinery, and to extend these measures to other equipment by regulation.
Amendment 357 would strengthen that framework by naming GPS units explicitly in the primary legislation. This would give a clear signal of intent, ensure momentum and guard against any further delay in bringing the provisions into effect. We welcome the Government’s recent commitment to include removable GPS units in future regulations and I am pleased that Ministers have listened to evidence presented from these Benches and others. The reality, however, is that the key provisions of the Act have not yet been brought into force and the secondary legislation required to implement them is still pending. Our amendment would ensure timely and decisive action, so that farmers and rural businesses see the benefits on the ground sooner rather than later. This is a simple, practical step that would support the Government’s aims and help stop the theft and resale of vital agricultural technology. I beg to move.
Lord Blencathra (Con)
My Lords, I start with a simple question: where on earth are the regulations that we were promised way back in 2023 when we passed the Equipment Theft (Prevention) Act? I took that Bill through this House with all-party support, getting Royal Assent in July 2023. The Home Office promised that it would consult urgently on the necessary regulations and started that consultation immediately.
The consultation closed in July 2024, but the Government announced their conclusions only on 17 October 2025 and have dumped some of the most important provisions of the Act. It will now apply only to new all-terrain vehicles with forensic marking and registration, and to removable GPS units. Dumped are the proposals for immobilisers and extending it to other agricultural machinery. A £5,000 quad bike is protected, but not the £500,000 combine harvester. If someone breaks into the £300,000 John Deere tractor and steals the £10,000 GPS unit, that is covered, but not the John Deere itself. I saw one advert for a GPS that said, “Put this in your tractor, and you will be able to track it if the tractor is stolen”. Well, that is only if a farmer makes it impossible to remove and the thief has to steal the tractor as well as the GPS unit.
Dumping the proposals covering hand tools may be a wise measure, even though an incredible number are stolen. I accept that a forensic marking and registration scheme for power tools needs more time if it is ever to happen. It is estimated that the power tools market may have reached £1.5 billion in 2025. Professional power tools average about £200 each; a DeWalt combi kit of six tools sharing the same battery will come in at about £1,000. Therefore, if tradesmen are spending about £1.5 billion on £200 per item tools, that is over 7 million new tools bought per annum—I think I have half of them in my own garage, actually, but that is another matter. It would be a massive logistical task to register those 7 million tools, but large machinery is different.
Last year, 10,241 tractors, worth £1.6 billion, and 400 combine harvesters, worth £160 million, were registered in the UK. Some 34,000 excavators, diggers and earth-moving machines were sold, worth £1.5 billion, while 8,000 ATVs were sold with a total value of just £80 million. We will therefore have 44,000 big machines worth £3.4 billion with no forensic marking or isolator scheme, but we will have one for just 8,000 ATVs worth a mere £80 million. I do not understand the sense or wisdom of that. If it is possible to devise a forensic marking registration scheme for 8,000 vehicles, it should not be rocket science to devise one for 44,000 vehicles worth 42 times more. I therefore urge the Home Office to lay the ATV and GPS regulations immediately and then get on with drafting the next phase of those regulations to apply them to big farm machinery and construction equipment.
Lord Davies of Gower (Con)
My Lords, this group of amendments addresses an issue that will be immediately recognisable to many people across the country: the theft of essential equipment from those who rely on it for their living. Turning first to Amendment 357, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Doocey, we broadly support the intention behind extending the Equipment Theft (Prevention) Act 2023. This was an Act brought in by the Conservative Government to protect businessmen and tradespeople, and the noble Baroness’s amendment would ensure that it explicitly includes GPS equipment. Technology becomes ever more central to commercial activity, particularly in agriculture, construction and logistics. It is therefore right that the law keeps pace with the evolving nature of equipment theft. GPS units are high-value, easily resold and frequently targeted. Bringing them clearly within scope of the Act is a sensible and proportionate step to help disrupt illicit resale markets.
Lord Katz (Lab)
My Lords, I thank all noble Lords for speaking in this debate and raising these important issues. Turning first to Amendment 357, moved by the noble Baroness, Lady Doocey, I can confirm that the Government remain committed to the implementation of the Equipment Theft (Prevention) Act 2023 and fully support the intentions behind its introduction. Informed by responses to the call for evidence and direct consultation with industry, the Act will cover the forensic marking and registration on a database of new all-terrain vehicles, quad bikes and, I am pleased to say, removable GPS systems.
The NFU Mutual Rural Crime Report 2025 highlights that GPS theft cost an estimated £1.2 million in 2024. GPS units are particularly vulnerable to theft and their theft massively disrupts day-to-day farming operations, which is exactly why we have included them in the legislation. I am pleased to echo the acknowledgement by the noble Baroness, Lady Doocey, of the progress that has been made in this important area, with, as she said, falling insurance claims thanks to the concerted efforts of the police and other parties.
The Act requires secondary legislation before it can come into effect and we intend to bring this forward as soon as possible. As the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, said, the Government’s response to the call for evidence was published quite recently, in October 2025. We are very grateful to all those who took the time to respond, and we carefully considered the views and evidence provided in those responses. Significant technical concerns were raised and we needed to assess the impact before we committed to introducing secondary legislation. We did not want to introduce regulations that were not fit for purpose or, more importantly, that would adversely impact vehicle safety.
The noble Lord talked about the comparison between smaller vehicles and larger, more expensive farming machinery, such as tractors. We have carefully considered the benefits and implications of including other agricultural equipment in the regulations. The installation of immobilisers into other large pieces of machinery post manufacture poses a similar risk to ATVs, so there is a delicate balance to be struck between the costs to businesses and the achievability of the ends of the regulations.
Should the Act become more effective in tackling rural theft, the legislation would be widened in the future by introducing other large agricultural machinery in a further tranche of regulations. We are looking at the situation and the way the regulations operate, and will see whether we can apply them further.
Lord Blencathra (Con)
Can the Minister give a rough timescale for a consultation on extending this to include heavy agricultural machinery or contracting equipment?
Lord Katz (Lab)
I do not want to commit to any particular timescale. It probably ill behoves me to do so, but I will point out that, having published our response to the call for evidence a couple of months before Christmas, we are obviously trying to motor ahead with it, if noble Lords will forgive the pun.
I turn now to Amendment 368, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Gower, which proposes two changes: first, to expand enforcement provisions under the 2023 Act and, secondly, to introduce a statutory aggravating factor for theft of tools from tradesmen under the Sentencing Act 2020. The Government recognise the distress caused by tool theft and its impact on tradespeople and small businesses, which the noble Lord, Lord Davies, spoke to. As he said, these tools are essential to livelihoods, and their loss can cause real financial and emotional harm. That is why we are already taking action through the National Vehicle Crime Working Group, which brings together specialists from every police force to share intelligence and tackle emerging trends in vehicle-related crime, including tool theft.
On sentencing, the current framework is sufficient and robust. Courts must follow guidelines issued by the Sentencing Council, which already require consideration of harm, culpability and aggravating factors such as financial loss, business impact and emotional distress. Courts also have powers to impose compensation orders to ensure that victims receive financial compensation. Introducing a statutory aggravating factor, as this amendment calls for, would duplicate existing provisions unnecessarily and have limited impact on outcomes. Indeed, I am reminded that a wise man once said,
“I am sceptical of the need for more aggravating factors”.—[Official Report, 15/12/25; col. 585.]
That was of course the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Gower, speaking just three weeks ago, on 15 December, in response to an amendment moved by the noble Baroness, Lady Doocey, to Clause 102 on self-harm. I could not have put it better myself.
I hope I have been able to reassure the noble Baroness, Lady Doocey, that we accept the spirit of her Amendment 357 and we are working to give effect to this issue. I hope too that the noble Lord, Lord Davies, will understand why we do not consider his Amendment 368 to be necessary, and forgive my light ribbing a moment ago. For all these reasons, I invite the noble Baroness to withdraw her amendment.
Baroness Doocey (LD)
My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for his response and to the noble Lords, Lord Blencathra and Lord Davies of Gower, for their support. We all want this legislation to be effective, but we want swift implementation of the Act, not in the fullness of time, and stronger rural crime prevention, including forensic marking, to deter the theft and resale of tradespeople’s tools.
GPS theft cost farmers over £1 million last year. Frankly, this just cannot be allowed to continue. There is legislation ready to go—there is an Act of Parliament—and it needs to be implemented now. For now, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Lord Vaux of Harrowden
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment is intended to ensure that SIM farms would also include devices capable of using virtual SIM cards rather than only physical SIM cards.
Lord Vaux of Harrowden (CB)
My Lords, as this is the first time I have spoken on the Bill, I apologise that I was unable to take part in the Second Reading debate due to a clash with other House business.
Amendment 358 is a very simple extension to what the Bill already does, and I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan of Cotes, and the noble Lords, Lord Young of Cookham and Lord Holmes of Richmond, for adding their support to it.
I was a member of the Fraud Act 2006 and Digital Fraud Committee, chaired brilliantly by the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, which reported in November 2022. It was a lengthy report—fraud is a huge subject—with many recommendations. One area we raised was the use of SIM farms by fraudsters to send out bulk texts and make bulk calls, so I am very pleased that we are at last bringing in restrictions on the use and supply of SIM farms in Clauses 112 to 117. I am glad that the Bill allows other articles to be added to this. Both technology and the ways in which fraudsters use that technology to make contact with potential victims are constantly changing, so having the flexibility to react is important. It is also important to recognise, as the Bill does, that there are some legitimate reasons for the use of a SIM farm.
Unfortunately, however, the world has moved on since we reported in 2022. Clause 114 defines a SIM farm as
“a device which is capable of using five or more SIM cards simultaneously or interchangeably”.
It then goes on to define a SIM card as being
“a removable physical subscriber identity module”.
The problem is that physical SIMs are being overtaken by virtual SIMs, or eSIMs. A number of the latest phones no longer even have slots for physical SIM cards, and the trend is accelerating. The SIM farm restrictions that the Bill introduces are already at risk of being redundant before the Bill is even passed.
Amendment 358 simply attempts to fix this by including virtual SIMs in the definition, so that SIM farms that utilise eSIMs will also be covered from day one. If we do not make this change, the SIM farm restrictions will quickly be pointless. I realise that this might be a little more complicated, as a number of newer phones can store more than five eSIMs—although most only allow two to be active at any one time—so we might need to make some tweaks to the wording of Clause 114 a little further than this amendment does. But the point remains: we know that physical SIM cards are being phased out over time, to be replaced by eSIMs, so we should act now to ensure that this part of the Bill is not redundant as soon as it comes into force. That is the point of this amendment.
However, the use of SIM farms raises a wider issue, on which I would be interested to hear the Minister’s views. We can ban the sale and use of SIM farms in this country, and we should, but fraud increasingly comes from overseas, where a UK ban will have little or no impact. The real problem is that fraudsters are able to acquire an apparently limitless supply of UK mobile phone numbers. I do not know about other noble Lords, but I am currently receiving almost daily calls from UK mobile numbers, where someone who speaks poor English tells me they are calling from O2 and there is a problem with my SIM card. It does not matter how many I block; they just keep coming, each time on a different number, and I am sure I am not alone in that.
In November 2022, Ofcom issued guidance to telecoms companies about the allocation and supply of UK phone numbers. The guide set out the steps that Ofcom expects providers to take when suballocating and assigning numbers. Numbers can be suballocated an unlimited number of times, which makes controlling who ultimately acquires them difficult, and the guidance is only as good as the final link in that chain.
The guide covers three areas: due diligence checks before suballocating or assigning numbers; ensuring continued compliance and reassessing risk after the transfer of the numbers; and responding to incidents of misuse. But despite this guide, it remains almost comically easy to acquire pay-as-you-go SIM cards in bulk. A quick Google search shows myriad websites of varying legitimacy selling bulk SIMs, both physical and eSIMs. The very first listing on an eBay search for bulk SIMs is a package of 1,000 EE pay-as-you-go SIM cards for £999 or best offer. Many of the websites have reseller arrangements where anyone can earn commission by selling SIMs on to further end-users.
There are legitimate reasons why someone might buy SIMs in bulk: internet of things connectivity, company travel or legitimate mass marketing, for example. But they can also be used for mass scam phishing messages or calls, identity theft, SIM swapping, money laundering and creating bulk social media accounts, to list just a few.
It is too easy for fraudsters to acquire large numbers of genuine UK numbers under the current system. This is not about spoofing numbers; these are real numbers. KYC checks on end-users of bulk SIMS appear to be laughably weak and do not appear to be policed in any meaningful way. When was a telco last fined for this? What meaningful monitoring actually takes place of where these numbers end up and how they are used?
The new voluntary UK Telecommunications Fraud Sector Charter, published in November, says only that signatories will:
“Continue to implement existing CCUK guidance on preventing misuse of sub-allocated and assigned numbers and monitoring for fraudulent calling patterns”.
That is clearly not working at present. We need to do more.
In addition to his response to the specific amendment on eSIMS, I would be grateful to hear the thoughts of the Minister on how we might make life more difficult for the fraudsters who are able to operate easily on an industrial scale from foreign countries using real UK phone numbers. Does he agree that it is time to strengthen, monitor and enforce KYC rules on the bulk sale of phone numbers? I beg to move.
Lord Young of Cookham (Con)
My Lords, I added my name to the amendment moved by the noble Lord, Lord Vaux. Like him, I served on the Select Committee on fraud, ably chaired by my noble friend Lady Morgan of Cotes, that produced a very substantial document indeed. After we produced our report, the Government published a consultation document headed Preventing the Use of SIM Farms for Fraud. In December 2023, the Government published their response to that document. I want to quote briefly from three paragraphs of that response.
Referring to the responses they got, the Government said:
“A few responses noted that banning physical SIM farms alone is likely to result in displacement to eSIM farms”,
which is the point that has just been made. They went on:
“However they acknowledged that if eSIMs were included to the proposed ban, the Government’s definition of SIM farms should be adapted to ensure it excludes smartphones that can hold more than four eSIMs”.
The Government’s response to that section was:
“Responses noted that the definition could also include eSIMs and mobile apps. However, we did not receive sufficient evidence at consultation to include them in a proposed ban, due to their complexity and ongoing pace of development. This could be further addressed by the proposed powers to extend the ban to other forms of telecommunications equipment and articles used to perpetrate fraud”.
They referred to a further final paragraph headed “Government response”:
“The Government considers it important to ensure that the ban is flexible and can be used to rapidly prohibit other types of technology where these are identified in the future. Some such technologies are mentioned above, whilst others may emerge in future and the Government will continue to review fraud methodologies closely for changing patterns and new technologies being used, such as eSIM farms and others. However, the Government agrees with respondents that any powers to ban through secondary legislation ought to have clear parameters for their use”.
That was the last Administration, of course, and it would be helpful to know whether the Government agree with that line.
The question I want to ask the Minister is this. Referring to the clauses on SIM farms, Clause 114(4) says:
“The Secretary of State may by regulations amend this section (other than this subsection)”.
Is that in effect giving the Secretary of State powers to introduce by secondary legislation something that the previous Government said should not be done by secondary legislation? I leave that question hanging in the air while the Government seek advice from the Bench to see what the answer is.
Baroness Morgan of Cotes (Non-Afl)
My Lords, I will briefly speak to Amendment 358. It is a pleasure to follow the noble Lords, Lord Vaux and Lord Young of Cookham. Because we are going to be discussing this and a later amendment on fraud, I declare my interest as a director of Santander UK.
It was a huge pleasure and privilege to chair the Lords inquiry into online and digital fraud, which reported in 2022, and I would like to think that we had some impact in raising the issues, which are of huge importance to the public. Fraud is one of the crimes that people are most likely to be victims of. I know the Minister knows that because he is the Anti-Fraud Minister in the department.
Noble Lords have already spoken about the importance of this amendment, the need for the law to be kept up to date as the technology develops, and the fact that allowing as much flexibility in legislation as possible to enable that to happen is important. The reason we talked about the “fraud chain” in the report is that, obviously, people encounter fraud in myriad ways. Fraudsters are, as we have heard, incredibly flexible, and entrepreneurial—for all the wrong reasons. Of course, telecoms—people’s smartphones or phones—is where many people will first encounter the fraudster, who will then try, as we heard in our evidence, to get them away from technology and strike up some kind of relationship which unfortunately ends in people often losing life-changing amounts of money.
I do not want to pre-empt the debate on Amendment 367, which I hope we will also reach today, but the question, perhaps now or for later, is whether the Minister is confident that the previous Government’s and this current Government’s ask of the telecoms industry is strong enough given the frequency with which the public encounter fraud via their telephones. I will ask the question now, but I am sure we will come back to it. We are all waiting for the forthcoming fraud strategy from the Government, which we understand is—I hope—close. Can the Minister give us a little precursor of whether that will impose tougher asks and potential penalties on the telecoms companies for the reasons that we have already heard?
Lord Clement-Jones (LD)
My Lords, we strongly support Amendment 358 in the names of the noble Lords, Lord Vaux, Lord Young of Cookham and Lord Holmes of Richmond, and the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan of Cotes, who have made the case extremely well today. I pay tribute to the Fraud Act committee chaired by the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, and I shall quote from it extensively in the next group.
This amendment would rightly ensure that the definition of a specified article included devices capable of using virtual subscriber identity modules, not just physical SIM cards. As we have heard, the criminal landscape evolves rapidly. If we legislate only for plastic SIMs, criminals will simply pivot to readily available virtual SIM technology. By incorporating virtual SIMs into the definition now, we will help to future-proof these provisions and make them genuinely effective against highly scalable, technology-enabled fraud.
Clauses 112 to 117 quite rightly seek to address the serious and growing problem of SIM farms being used at scale to perpetrate fraud and other abuses—it was very interesting to hear the quotes of the noble Lord, Lord Young, from the Select Committee’s report, which demonstrates that the problem has been with us for several years now—but, as drafted, Clause 114 risks being a technological step behind the criminals. As we have heard, it refers to devices capable of using physical SIM cards, but the market is already rapidly moving towards virtual or embedded SIMs. Indeed, I have an iPad in my hand that has a virtual SIM inside it—no physical SIM card at all. If the Bill focuses only on the plastic card and not the underlying functionality, it will leave an obvious loophole that organised criminals will quickly exploit.
The noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, spoke of “entrepreneurial” but not in a good way. We know that fraudsters are highly adaptive. As mobile operators deploy more robust controls on physical SIMs—I suspect not enough for the noble Lord, Lord Vaux—and as handsets and routers increasingly use eSIMs or other virtual identities, those intent on running industrial-scale smishing and scam operations will migrate to those platforms. If we legislate today for yesterday’s technology, we will simply displace the problem from one category of device to another and be back here in a few years’ time having the same debate. I hope the Minister will be able either to accept the amendment or to confirm that the Government will bring forward their own wording—there is always a bit of “not invented here” with these things. Without that assurance, there is a real risk that this part of the Bill will be lacking in force from the day it comes into effect.
Lord Davies of Gower (Con)
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Vaux of Harrowden, for speaking to this group. On his Amendment 358, I agree that the Government should look to make provisions that account for all forms of SIM cards used in SIM farms. As the noble Lord stated, the current drafting of Clause 114 does not encompass eSIM cards in the devices used for SIM farming. Given the number of mobile phones that now use eSIMs, this really should be amended.
This speaks to the larger issue of defining provisions ahead of legislation coming into force. When changes are being made to the legality of certain products, suppliers and consumers should be made aware well in advance; behaviours will have to change with reform. This is a case of not just courtesy but constitutional propriety. That is the reasoning behind my Amendments 358A and 538A.
Legislating for the criminalisation of specific devices and software related to fraud should not be done on a whim. Individuals should not wake up one day and possess an illegal device or software that was considered legal a day before, with no warning of the coming change. Some notice must be given. Currently, the Bill simply permits Ministers to specify a device whenever they wish. There is no requirement for those regulations to come into force before the new offences of possession and supply come into force. My amendments would ensure, in the interests of fairness and the rule of law, that the new offences could not come into force until at least three months had passed from the making of the regulations defining the articles.
I believe that a period of three months before the possession and supply of certain articles becomes illegal is sufficient for people to change their habits and businesses to change their models. We in this House would be doing the public a disservice if we did not provide them with the necessary time to adapt. I hope the Minister agrees with this reasoning. I hope he will consider the amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Vaux of Harrowden, and, as always, I look forward very much to hearing his reply.
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
My Lords, I first give my appreciation to the work of the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan of Cotes, and the noble Lords, Lord Young of Cookham and Lord Vaux of Harrowden, in producing their report on this matter. It was during my enforced sabbatical from Parliament, so I was not party to the discussions at that stage. It is useful to have that continuum of discussion, and the previous Government’s initial intentions have been carried forward by this Government as a whole.
Amendment 358, as the noble Lord, Lord Vaux of Harrowden, mentioned, would expand the definition of SIM cards. To be clear, the Government’s consultation and evidence gathering as part of the preparation for this Bill focused on physical SIM cards, which are where the current and most significant threats arise and what these clauses seek to address. The provisions in the Bill are designed to tackle the misuse of physical SIM farms, which are widely used for criminal purposes such as fraud and spam. We are all aware of how that manifests on our phones and those of people we know and work with.
Virtual SIM technology is developing, but it is not currently presenting the same scale of risk, and the evidence we have from the consultation does not support extending the ban at this time. Physical SIM farms pose a significant and immediate threat because they enable large-scale criminal activity. Unlike virtual SIMs, physical SIM cards are harder to trace, as they are not inherently linked to a specific handset or verified identity. Their anonymity makes them ideal for fraud, phishing and mass spam campaigns.
Furthermore, the trade in physical SIM cards creates a black market where thousands of cards can be bought and sold with minimal or no oversight. This flow of unregistered SIMs fuels organised crime, facilitates money laundering and undermines law enforcement efforts. Virtual SIM technology, by contrast, is generally more secure and traceable because it requires integration with the device software and often involves stronger identity checks. At present, I say again, there is no evidence of virtual SIMs being exploited at scale for criminal purposes. Our focus therefore remains on the tangible and proven harm caused by physical SIM cards.
Lord Vaux of Harrowden (CB)
My Lords, I thank all noble Lords who have taken part in this short but important debate. I am grateful to the Minister for his detailed response. I think I speak for all of us in saying that we look forward enormously to seeing the long-awaited fraud strategy. I think it will be the third one since I have been in this House. Anyway, a lot of what the Minister said definitely moves in the right direction.
On the amendment, I am a little disappointed because, although I hear what the Minister says about the evidence base, which is obviously backward-looking, we know that the situation is changing. Physical SIMs are being replaced by eSIMs at a fairly rapid rate. This is something that we know is changing and it would be better to future-proof the Bill at this stage if we can. I take on board his point that eSIMs are more traceable than physical SIMs. But part of the problem is that that is not always the case in a lot of countries, and eSIMs can be from anywhere. So, I take only a certain amount of comfort from that.
That said, and given the Minister’s assurances that this will continue to be looked at and, if the evidence base supports it, changed, at this stage I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.
Lord Clement-Jones
“Digital identity theft(1) A person commits an offence of digital identity theft if—(a) the person obtains, or attempts to obtain, personal or sensitive information relating to an individual, including but not limited to passwords, identification numbers, credit card numbers, national insurance numbers, biometric data, or other unique digital identifiers, and(b) the person intends to use this personal or sensitive information to impersonate that individual, or to enable another person to impersonate that individual, with the purpose of carrying out any transaction, activity, or communication in their name without their consent or lawful authority.(2) For the purposes of subsection (1)—(a) “personal or sensitive information” refers to any data, whether digital, physical, or otherwise, that can be used to identify, authenticate, or impersonate an individual;(b) “obtains” includes acquiring, accessing, collecting, or otherwise coming into possession of such information.(3) A person guilty of an offence under this section is liable—(a) on summary conviction in England and Wales, to imprisonment for a term not exceeding 12 months or to a fine, or both;(b) on conviction on indictment in England and Wales, to imprisonment for a term not exceeding five years or to a fine, or both.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment creates an offence of digital identity theft.
Lord Clement-Jones (LD)
My Lords, my Amendment 359 would create a new offence of digital identity theft. I am very pleased that the noble Lord, Lord Holmes of Richmond, has signed and supports it.
The amendment is deliberately tightly framed. It targets the foundational act that underpins so much modern fraud and serious criminality: the deliberate harvesting of someone else’s personal and sensitive information with the intent to impersonate them and conduct transactions, activities or communications in their name without their knowledge or consent. It is about criminalising the act of stealing and weaponising a digital identity before the fraud or other downstream offending takes place.
As things stand—and I hope the Minister will confirm this and, indeed, that the promised fraud strategy will recognise—the act of identity theft is not recognised in our law as a criminal offence in its own right. The Fraud Act 2006, the Computer Misuse Act 1990, the Data Protection Act 2018 and subsequent data protection Acts all play an important role, but they are concerned primarily with what happens after the identity has been stolen—after the account has been opened, the loan has been taken out or the money has been moved. They address the fraud, the unauthorised access or the misuse of data. What they do not do is grapple squarely with the initial acquisition of personal and sensitive information with the purpose of impersonation.
Indeed, as the House of Lords Fraud Act 2006 and Digital Fraud Committee, chaired by the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, heard in evidence, identity theft is still formally regarded in much official material as a social rather than a legal concept. That might have been tolerable in a predominantly analogue world, but it is simply not credible in the age of data breaches, credential stuffing, deepfakes and synthetic identities. Treating identity theft as a mere background condition rather than as a legal wrong in itself leaves people’s most intimate identifiers—biometric data, passwords, national insurance numbers and digital credentials—fundamentally underprotected.
The effect in practice is that law enforcement may feel it has limited tools to intervene at an early stage, even where there is clear evidence that large quantities of personal data have been harvested and traded with a view to impersonation. Instead, the system waits for the fraud, money laundering or other downstream crime to crystallise. By then, the victim’s credit record may be shredded, their bank accounts compromised and their reputation damaged. Yet the initial act of stealing their identity remains conceptually elusive.
The scale and nature of digital identity theft make this gap increasingly untenable. We now know that organised criminals and fraudsters operate, in effect, industrial-scale harvesting operations, feeding on the constant stream of data breaches and leaks from both public and private sector systems. Those databases of stolen credentials are then traded, refined and recombined, very often on the dark web, to facilitate mass impersonation and fraud. This activity is not just an adjunct to fraud. It is, as the Fraud Act 2006 and Digital Fraud Committee rightly described it, a “predicate action”—a necessary precursor to a great deal of online financial crime and, in some cases, to other serious and organised criminality, including terrorism financing.
The threat is being turbocharged by new technologies. Large language models enable highly convincing phishing and social engineering communications at scale and with very low cost. Deepfake audio and video systems allow criminals to mimic a person’s voice or image in ways that can be all but indistinguishable from the real thing. When those tools are combined with rich stolen identity data, criminals can construct synthetic identities or impersonate genuine individuals to open bank accounts, obtain credit cards, register mobile phones and pass remote know your customer checks with alarming ease. In that ecosystem, the act of stealing and collating identity data is itself a sophisticated, harmful criminal enterprise, not simply background noise.
The Bill is rightly concerned with modernising a range of policing and crime powers for the digital age. It updates police powers in relation to electronic devices and remotely stored data and seeks to equip the criminal justice system to deal with contemporary threats, yet it does not deal with this most basic of digital harms: the theft of a person’s identity. That is why this amendment would define a clear, free-standing offence of digital identity theft.
The test that the amendment proposes is straight- forward and proportionate. A person would commit the offence if
“the person intends to use this personal or sensitive information to impersonate that individual, or to enable another person to impersonate that individual, with the purpose of carrying out any transaction, activity, or communication in their name without their consent or lawful authority”.
Lord Holmes of Richmond (Con)
My Lords, it is a pleasure to speak in this Committee and to follow my friend the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, who perfectly and proportionately set out the principles in this amendment, which I support to every last sentence. We are now discussing a number of amendments on areas where the existing law, and this Bill as drafted, are clearly out of date and full of gaps—not least when we consider how our nation, our economy and the state itself are seeking to move to digitisation, which has such benefits for citizens and communities, our cities and our entire country. But one key element which enables, empowers and underpins almost every element of that digital transformation is effective digital ID.
There are a number of arguments that could be made at another time about the correct approach to digital ID. I would suggest that the principles around self-sovereign ID should strongly be considered. Mandation is clearly problematic, while the reasons for introducing a digital ID should be clearly made and the benefits set out. But the specifics of this amendment are clear, proportionate and timely, because a digital ID is critical and essential to availing oneself of the opportunities—and, indeed, to protecting oneself against many of the harms. To not have a digital ID protected by the criminal law would be a huge, inexplicable and indefensible gap.
If the Government want digital ID to be the means of accessing government services and to see greater digital inclusion—and, through that, the attendant and very necessary financial inclusion—action to protect our digital ID is critical. The noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones effectively set out his amendment, which is proportionate, valid, timely and necessary. I very much look forward to the Minister accepting the principle as set out.
Lord Blencathra (Con)
My Lords, identity theft, as my noble friend Lord Holmes of Richmond said, is no longer a niche crime; it is the dominant fraud type in the UK and getting worse. In 2024, over 421,000 fraud cases were filed to the national fraud database and almost 250,000 were identity fraud filings, making identity theft the single largest category recorded by industry partners. CIFAS, the credit industry fraud avoidance system, recorded a record number of cases on the national fraud database in 2024. The organisations themselves prevented more than £2.1 billion of attempted loss, yet criminals are shifting tactics. Account takeovers rose by 76% and unauthorised SIM swaps surged, driven by the rapid adoption of AI and generative tools that let fraudsters create convincing fake documents and synthetic identities at scale.
We have all read of some of the high-profile examples: celebrity impersonation via deepfakes and cloned voices has been widely reported; manipulated videos and voice clones purporting to show public figures from Elon Musk to Martin Lewis, Holly Willoughby and others, have been used to generate investment scams and phishing campaigns. Documented victim losses include large individual losses linked to celebrity impersonation scams. One NatWest customer is reported to have lost £150,000 after responding to a scam impersonating Martin Lewis.
However, I think we are all more concerned with the tens of thousands of ordinary people who are not celebrities and who lose all their savings to these crooks. They are the victims who suffer real financial loss and damage, with long and costly recovery processes, while businesses face rising prevention costs and operational strain. I therefore strongly support the concept of the draft clause and the need for it. While it is well intentioned, I fear that it has some technical difficulties. It is a bit broad and vague about what “obtains” and “impersonate” mean. It also risks overlap with the Fraud Act, the Computer Misuse Act and the Data Protection Act, and lacks some clear defences for legitimate security research and lawful investigations. It also needs to address AI and the deepfake-specific methods, and set out what we can do about extraterritorial reach, for example, or aggravating factors for organised, large-scale operations.
We all know that my noble friend Lord Holmes of Richmond is, as we have just heard, an absolute expert on AI; he recently addressed a top-level group of the Council of Europe on this subject. May I suggest that he and the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, get together with the Home Office or other government digital experts and bring back on Report a more tightly drafted amendment? Among other things, it should tighten the definitions of “obtain”, “impersonate” and “sensitive”; ensure that the mens rea is tied to dishonesty or intent to cause loss or gain; include recklessness in enabling others; limit the scope to unlawfully obtained data or use that bypasses authentication; and explicitly include AI/deepfake methods when used to bypass checks or cause reliance. It should also have clear defences for lawful authority and make sure that duplication is avoided, whether it be with the Fraud Act, the Computer Misuse Act or the Data Protection Act. Finally—I know this is an impossible ask, and that Governments find it almost impossible to do—something should be done about extraterritorial reach, because that is terribly important.
I say to the Minister: there is a gap in the legislation here. We should plug it, and we may have time to bring back on Report a more tightly drawn amendment that would deal with all the concerns of noble Lords and the possible problems I have just raised.
Lord Fuller (Con)
My Lords, I rise briefly to support strongly the comments of my noble friend Lord Blencathra and the principle of the amendment laid by the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones. This is a timely amendment, possibly timelier than the noble Lord anticipated, because today the Government have announced the promotion of a Minister to promulgate digital IDs among the population.
Digital IDs are going to have a huge vista and connection, not just in linking to personal data but in other areas of life: in the relationship between the state and the individual; and in the payment of parking tickets, road tolls, stamp duty and fishing licences—a different sort of fishing, as it begins with an “f”, not a “p”. So I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, on the thrust of the amendment, although I accept that some polishing is required.
If the Government are to promote digital IDs, the population at large need to have confidence not just that they will be correctly introduced but that there are safeguards against such impersonation. I strongly support the principle of this amendment and say to the noble Lord, Lord Hanson of Flint, that if the Government resist it in principle, what confidence can the man in the street have that the Government are sincere about the safeguards they intend to introduce, alongside their intention for digital IDs—to get that balance right between the state and the individual, coupled together against the criminal?
We need to bring this back on Report. I hope the Minister is prepared to meet the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, and others to address this principle, so that the Government get off on the right foot, if they intend to promote digital IDs, and not resist this, because there is a world of pain if they do.
Lord Davies of Gower (Con)
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, for tabling this amendment. I know that the creation of a specific identity offence has been a long-standing concern of his, so I appreciate the opportunity to contribute to this debate. I tentatively support the principle behind his amendment, although this issue is deserving of more scrutiny and thought than we are perhaps able to give it as an amendment in Committee.
I recognise the impetus for this amendment. Identity theft has long been the primary means by which criminals commit fraud; and, with a booming online world exacerbated by the introduction of artificial intelligence, digital identity theft is fast becoming a serious issue. CIFAS, the leading non-profit fraud prevention service, has documented the rise in identity theft. Last year, as we have heard from my noble friend Lord Blencathra, over 420,000 fraud cases were filed to the national fraud database, a 13% increase on the previous year. The main driver of this increase was identity fraud, with 250,000 filings, representing a 5% annual increase.
CIFAS cites online fraud as a primary cause of this increase; AI and generative technologies enable criminals to exploit people at speed and scale. Documents and identity cards are being forged at a more sophisticated level than before, with many now able to pass verification checks. Targets are often the elderly, as criminals target the least technologically capable and therefore most vulnerable victims.
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
I thank the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, for tabling the amendment, which would introduce a bespoke criminal offence of digital identity theft. I know that he has tabled similar amendments—he was persistent on these matters during the Data (Use and Access) Bill. I heard the support from the noble Lords, Lord Holmes of Richmond, Lord Fuller and Lord Blencathra, and note that the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, put forward a number of caveats to his broad support. These are caveats I share.
The noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, asked whether I would read out a number of amendments to previous legislation. I may disappoint him by reaffirming those issues, as he would expect. Although digital identity theft is not a stand-alone offence, there are, as he recognises, several criminal offences already in existence to cover the behaviour targeted by his amendment. The Fraud Act 2006 made it a criminal offence to gain from the use of another person’s fraud. Cases where accounts or databases are hacked into are criminalised under the Computer Misuse Act 1990. I could read him the offences captured in Sections 2 and 6 of the Fraud Act, Sections 1 and 2 of the Computer Misuse Act 1990, and Section 170 of the Data Protection Act 2018. All apply to the online sphere.
My argument, which the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Gower, might have some sympathy with, is that to create a new criminal offence could be unnecessary duplication. The Fraud Act 2006 captures cases where someone uses another person’s identity and there is an equivalent common-law offence in Scotland. The Fraud Act establishes the offence of someone having in their possession or control an article which includes data or programmes in electronic form. The Computer Misuse Act criminalises unauthorised access and Section 170 of the Data Protection Act covers the deliberate or reckless obtaining, disclosing and procuring of personal data.
That is not to downplay the issue that the noble Lord mentioned. It is important and I recognise the concerns he raised. I hope that the Government will act decisively on these matters. We are currently in the process of transitioning from the Action Fraud service to a new, upgraded platform that will provide a better reporting tool for victims, stronger intelligence flows for police forces and enhanced support for victims. We are looking at doing what the noble Lord wants and upskilling police officers. We have completed a full review of police skills and the recommendations are being delivered through updated police training on this important matter. He will know that this Government have made sure that His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services has now updated the strategic police requirement. That will be published this year and will drive forces to upskill their staff on wider police reform on fraud matters. We want to try to upscale and upskill capability, to ensure the police keep pace with the challenges that the noble Lord has rightly identified.
It is important to take on board the points that the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, mentioned in his supportive critique of the proposals in the amendment. The Home Office has commissioned an independent review into disclosure and fraud offences. Part 1 of the review, which addressed disclosure, has been conducted; part 2, with Jonathan Fisher KC leading for the Government, will examine whether the current fraud offences are fit for purpose, and specifically whether they meet the challenges of investigating and prosecuting fraud, and whether existing penalties remain proportionate. I am awaiting that report, which may cover the areas that the noble Lord has mentioned. It is important that we have proper examination of that, and that is currently ongoing.
Lord Clement-Jones (LD)
Without wishing to interrupt the Minister, could he give us an idea of the timescale? Would it be deliriously possibly to see this report before Report?
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
I should have tattooed on my forehead the words, “due course”. As ever, the commitment I can give is that it will be produced in due course. Report on the Bill will be some significant time away. We have another five days of Committee, with a gap for recess, and we will have a statutory gap before our consideration on Report after Committee has finished. It is some while away. The noble Lord is very adept at tabling further amendments on Report, should he so wish.
Part 2 of the report is being considered by the Government; we want to examine that and will publish in due course. I expect that, in the very near future, we will be producing the newly updated fraud strategy, which will address the evolving threat of fraud, including the harm caused by identity theft. Before the noble Lord intervenes, I cannot yet give him a date for that either, but I will try to help the Committee by saying that it will be soon. I will bring the fraud strategy to the House in due course, which will potentially cover some of the areas that the noble Lord has mentioned.
There is a lot going on, but there is existing legislation. I anticipate and understand that this is a genuine issue, and I very much welcome the fact that the noble Lord has brought it before us. I hope that on the basis of what I have said, he will—today, at least—withdraw the amendment.
Lord Clement-Jones (LD)
My Lords, I thank the Minister and I will respond in a second.
First, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Fuller, for agreeing with the thrust of the amendment, in his words, and the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, for his in principle support. I entirely accept the points that he made—indeed, if the additions are not there, they should be. Any amendment that is brought back on Report should definitely take heed of the reservations he raised.
For the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Gower, I was anticipating that, in a sense, there might be too much continuity. During the Data (Use and Access) Bill, his colleagues pushed back on the idea of a digital identity theft offence in rather more adamant terms than the Minister has today. I am grateful for his in principle support, with all the reservations that he had.
The noble Lord, Lord Holmes, encapsulated quite a lot of this. As we move into the world of digital ID, having your digital identity stolen is an issue of digital and financial exclusion. It is going to be increasingly important. I was very interested that the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, dug out the figures on this; the scale of digital identity theft is huge, so the number of people affected by what is effectively financial and digital exclusion is only going to grow.
However, I did take some comfort. There was a glimmer of light coming out of the Home Office, and I am not always used to that. I celebrate that, particularly in view of the fact that a review is taking place that may well report in the near future. Whatever the Minister has stamped on his forehead, I am sure he is impatient to see it, given his specific role as the Fraud Minister.
I agree with the Minister about the need for the police to have specific powers and skills. I welcome what he said about the upgraded platform in terms of understanding the evidence that is going to be under- pinning any move towards creating an offence. I think, almost inevitably, I am going to come back with something more refined on Report in the hope that the Home Office review of current fraud offences will come up with the goods. I live in hope, but often where the Home Office is concerned my hopes are only too frequently dashed. I live in hope, and I beg to withdraw Amendment 359.
Lord Clement-Jones
“Defences to charges under the Computer Misuse Act 1990(1) The Computer Misuse Act 1990 is amended as follows.(2) In section 1, after subsection (2) insert—“(2A) It is a defence to a charge under subsection (1) to prove that—(a) the person’s actions were necessary for the detection or prevention of crime, or(b) the person’s actions were justified as being in the public interest.”.(3) In section 3, after subsection (5) insert—“(5A) It is a defence to a charge under subsection (1) to prove that—(a) the person’s actions were necessary for the detection or prevention of crime, or(b) the person’s actions were justified as being in the public interest.”.”Member's explanatory statement
This amendment creates defences to charges under the Computer Misuse Act 1990.
Lord Clement-Jones (LD)
My Lords, Amendment 360 seeks to introduce statutory defences to charges under the Computer Misuse Act 1990. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, again for his support. He has tabled a number of amendments which are companions to this amendment.
The Computer Misuse Act 1990 is widely recognised as outdated. It inadvertently criminalises legitimate and beneficial cyber security research, making the UK a difficult place for cyber experts to operate in. There has been a very vigorous campaign, as I am sure the Minister is aware, the CyberUp campaign, which has made the case very clearly. This anomaly risks undermining our national cyber resilience and the ability of researchers proactively to detect vulnerabilities. This amendment would address this by inserting a statutory defence where unauthorised access was demonstrably necessary for the detection or prevention of crime or carried out in the public interest.
This reform is vital for supporting responsible cyber research and aligning our laws with the needs of the 21st century digital landscape. The CMA was passed in 1990, when cyber security, as we know it today, simply did not exist. At the time, only 0.5% of the UK population regularly used the internet. Critics, including 93% of cyber security professionals surveyed, believe the Act is no longer fit for this century. The current criminal law criminalises unauthorised access irrespective of the good intentions or defensive motivations of the professional.
This has created a perverse situation in which the UK’s cyber defenders are forced to act with one hand tied behind their back. Threat intelligence researchers investigating criminal infrastructure, for instance, are often unable to obtain the explicit consent required under the Act. This has resulted in 80% of surveyed cyber security professionals having worried about breaking the law while investigating cyber threats. This ambiguity and restriction deters a large proportion of the research needed to assess and defend against emerging threats posed by organised criminals and geopolitical actors.
It also limits the UK industry’s capability compared with foreign competitors in countries such as France, Israel and the US, which already offer more permissive legislative regimes. Consequently, the UK cyber industry is held at a competitive disadvantage. This is a clear economic issue, not merely a legal one. Reform of the CMA is essential to securing a robust digital economy. Updating the Act is estimated to unlock up to £2.4 billion in additional annual sector revenue and support the creation of thousands of highly skilled jobs.
Lord Holmes of Richmond (Con)
My Lords, it is a pleasure again to follow my friend, the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, whose amendment I agree with. I will speak to my Amendments 361 through 364, which are, as he rightly put, companions to the intent of his Amendment 360.
In simple terms we have an opportunity to change the law to benefit our cyber professionals and everything that they do to keep us safe, often—rightly and understandably—in the shadows. They deserve not only our respect but our support, and this is one small way we can support them.
I would also like to put on record my thanks and congratulations to CyberUp. It is an effective campaign because it has taken an issue, understood it at its essence and been clear, consistent and proportionate in its campaigning. It has not only been campaigning around the difficulties but offering practical and proportionate solutions. It is the very model of what a campaigning organisation should be.
We are told that 2026 is going to be the year smart glasses really take off—we will see. In 2007, the iPhone was launched. Yet the Computer Misuse Act still sits comfortably, dustily, fustily out of date on the statute book since 1990, a year when 0.5% of us UKers were online.
What has happened in the intervening 35 and a half years? Has that 0.5% doubled, trebled, increased tenfold or twentyfold? What was 0.5% in 1990 has moved on to 98.7% of the UK being online in 2025. That percentage alone should be enough to make the case for the need to urgently update the Computer Misuse Act. That Act came into being to address the issue of attacks on telephone exchanges. If the Government, or any polling organisation, went on to the streets of our country and asked anybody under the age of that of your Lordships about a telephone exchange, they might get some interesting results, but none of any benefit to the issues that we are discussing. It would be the greatest understatement to say that things have moved on since 1990.
There is a case for change, which the previous Government and this Government have largely accepted. Since 2021, work has been done on reviewing this issue, yet still we await any legislative change. What we are talking about is incredibly straightforward: giving a legal defence to legitimate cyber activities that is clear, concise, precise and proportionate.
The CMA being so chronically out of date would be a good enough reason to update it, but it is not just out of date, it is doing harm—harm to our cyber professionals, who, as I have already mentioned, do so much to keep us safe; harm to the security of our nation; and harm to the UK cyber industry.
I will share some numbers. There are 36.77 million reasons to make a change, because there have been 36.77 million cyber attacks on UK businesses and charities. There are another 27 billion reasons to make this change, because cyber attacks cost UK businesses and our economy £27 billion—not in total but year on year. Since 2021, when these various reviews began, £27 billion has been taken out of our economy year on year.
The changes in these amendments would bring the legal clarity and certainty required by our cyber professionals. If we look at other parts of the Bill, we can see where legal defences and clarity around public interest are being brought in. That would be completely analogous with what we are suggesting here with the Computer Misuse Act.
We are falling behind in terms of security, societal and economic benefits. The United States, France, Germany, Israel, Belgium and more countries already have a more appropriate regime than we do in the United Kingdom. The Government talk about growth, and quite right too. We already have a £13 billion cyber industry in this country. This change could unlock growth in the region of £3 billion, as well as in skills, training, jobs and careers, just by dint of making this very straightforward, clear, concise and proportionate change.
Dan Jarvis—partly in another place and largely at the Financial Times summit on 5 December last year—acknowledged this issue, stating that he understood the points behind it and that it was a priority for the Home Office. I therefore ask the Minister: is this a key, pressing and urgent priority? I suggest that it should be one of the Home Office’s top priorities. To that end, will the Minister agree to meet me and other colleagues across your Lordships’ House to update us on exactly where the Home Office’s thinking is, and where and when it is looking to make this change?
We have the ideal opportunity with this Bill. The time is now. In many ways, we are well overdue for the time being now. I ask the Minister: if not this Bill, what Bill? If not now, when?
Baroness Neville-Jones (Con)
My Lords, I support the amendments in this group, especially Amendments 360 and 362, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, and my noble friend Lord Holmes.
Like others, I welcome that the Government appear to have seen value in the introduction of a statutory defence for cyber security researchers. I hope that this will result in the updating of the Computer Misuse Act, for which, like others, I have been campaigning for about a decade. When it was passed, that Act was perfectly valid, but the market conditions, which have been described by colleagues, were extraordinarily different. As my noble friend Lord Holmes has rightly said, the Act is now not just neutral in the scene but actively doing damage to our national security.
The Act prevents or discourages those professionals whose work lies in researching things such as vulnerabilities in the system or threat intelligence from doing that work, because of the possibility of finding themselves in trouble with the law. It is therefore very important that we organise ourselves so that such challenges, if they exist, can be defended against as they come forward, and that the activities of our professionals can be both supported and encouraged.
I hope that, in drafting the legislation, the Government will ensure that they cover all aspects of this particular difficulty—not just vulnerabilities in the system but particularly threat intelligence, which, if we think about it for a moment, is becoming increasingly important. We need to know what is wrong with the system, and we need to know it early and before it is capable of doing real damage in each case.
This is an important amendment. When he replies, can the Minister give an assurance that the amendments that the Government will bring forward, I hope, will cover both the question of vulnerabilities and the issue of threat intelligence?
Lord Davies of Gower (Con)
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, and my noble friend Lord Holmes of Richmond for tabling the amendments in this group.
To start with Amendment 360, I welcome the noble Lord’s aims. When a crime is detected or prevented, it is a sensible principle that the individual responsible for detection or prevention should not be punished. That said, the amendment is perhaps too wide in its scope. It mentions nothing of proportionality, which leads me to worry that it could end up being used as a defence for an individual who has committed a far greater crime than that which they claim to have been preventing. Similarly, “public interest” is broad and undefined, and I would appreciate it if the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, could clarify what would fall under this defence.
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, with support from the noble Lord, Lord Holmes of Richmond, for raising this topic in the amendments today. I am grateful also to the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Jones, for bringing her vast experience in this area to the debate.
I can say genuinely to all the noble Lords that they have a point. It is a point that the Government have recognised today: that we need to ensure that we update the Act accordingly. There is no doubt that UK cyber security professionals contribute greatly to enhancing and protecting the country’s security, and supporting them is vital. The figures that the noble Lord, Lord Holmes of Richmond, gave in terms of growth since the original Act took place are absolutely valid and understood. He mentioned, rightly, that the previous Government—at ministerial or official level; I am not party to how that worked—commissioned the review in 2021. We are now in 2026, and this Government have had custody of this issue since July 2024. It is a reasonable presumption that we need to come to some conclusions on the review.
The Government have listened to the concerns raised by noble Lords. The noble Lord, Lord Holmes of Richmond, mentioned my colleague Dan Jarvis, who is the Minister directly responsible for these areas. They have listened to the concerns and have over the past year made real progress in developing a proposal for a limited defence to the offence at Section 1 of the Computer Misuse Act; namely, unauthorised access to computer material. Crucially, this includes safeguards to prevent misuse. However—and this is where my caveat comes in—this is an immensely complex area. Noble Lords, including the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Gower, have pointed to that complexity, but engagement is under way, including with the cyber security industry, to refine the approach, and I hope that we shall be able to provide an update at some point.
Further work is required to consider the safeguards that would be needed to accompany any introduction of statutory defences, and my colleagues at official level in the Home Office are working with the National Cyber Security Centre, law enforcement and the industry on this issue to try to come to some conclusions. The Home Office is actively considering wider changes to the Computer Misuse Act. As part of the review that we are undertaking, we are scoping several proposals to update the Act, including the very point that has been mentioned by a number of noble Lords, which is on the Act’s extraterritorial provisions and the maximum penalties that were introduced.
In relation to proposals to increase maximum penalties for computer misuse offences, the Act already provides for a range of penalties, including life imprisonment for offences that cause or create a significant risk of serious damage to human welfare or national security. While the Government share the noble Lord’s concern regarding appropriate sentencing and are considering this as part of the wider review of the 1990 Act, we do not consider the proposal to update the majority of offences and uplift them under the Act to 14 years to be proportionate. However—and I hope this is accepted —and as I have said in a number of areas today, this Government are still just over 18 months into office. A review is being undertaken and I hope it will come to some conclusion on those issues, but at the moment those complexities are still under consideration.
Amendment 364 would introduce personal criminal liability for directors and managers who failed to prevent or otherwise consented to offending under the Computer Misuse Act. Again, I recognise the intent to strengthen accountability. Our current view is that it is unnecessary, given the existing offences applicable to persons who enable or facilitate offending. I know that this will be entirely unsatisfactory to noble Lords, both to the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, and to the supporters who have spoken in this debate today, but while this review of the 1990 Act is ongoing, I am limited in regard to what I can say about the Government’s plans to reform the Act, but I hope that I have acknowledged that the points that have been raised are absolutely valid.
Lord Holmes of Richmond (Con)
Is the Minister able to clarify whether the review is still ongoing, or are the Government currently reviewing the review?
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
I say to the noble Lord—and I hope that he takes this in the way in which I respond—that the review commenced in 2021, and it is now 2026. That is a long time for a review, and I would want to ensure that we come to some conclusions on the 1990 Act. However, at this stage, I cannot give him a timescale for the reasons that I have mentioned, about the complexity of this matter. I along with Minister Jarvis have had custody in the Home Office of these issues since July 2024; that is still three years into a review that was commissioned in 2021. I cannot give him a definitive timescale today, but I hope that the House can accept that there is active consideration of these very important matters raised by Members and that the Home Office plans to reform the Act. I hope that I will demonstrate that we are progressing this work at pace, but we need to get it right. Sadly, we are not going to be able to legislate in this Bill, but there is scope to examine issues at a later date. With those reassurances, I hope that the noble Lord will feel able to withdraw his amendment.
Lord Clement-Jones (LD)
My Lords, unusually, light is flooding through the windows of the Home Office, and I thank the Minister, but I shall come back to what he had to say. First, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Jones, for her support. As the Minister said, her huge experience in this area is valuable, and it is really valuable to have her support in those circumstances.
I also say a big thank you to the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, who thinks these things through in a very eloquent fashion. He more or less reminded me that, back in 1990, the thing that I was using was a dial-up Apple Mac Classic—probably a Classic II—which just shows how long ago the Act was.
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
I do not wish to disturb the noble Lord in full flow, but I have just remembered that I missed an important point for the noble Lord, Lord Holmes of Richmond, who requested a meeting with either me or another appropriate Minister. I will take that request away and get back to the noble Lord in due course about a meeting with me or my colleague, Minister Dan Jarvis—or both of us—and anybody the noble Lord wishes to bring with him.
Lord Clement-Jones (LD)
That is a very useful offer for those who are involved in or have an interest in pushing this agenda forward. As the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Jones, also emphasised following the speech from the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, it is not just about being out of date; it is positively harmful. The Home Office appears to be aware of that, despite the stately progress on the review. The fact that the Minister has said there is a recognition of the need to update the Act is very helpful. He said that they have made progress in formulating a limited defence, but I am not quite so sure about that—let us see when it arrives. I am sure that he has engraved across his forehead the phrase “an update at some point”. That is not quite as good as “shortly”, but it is perhaps better than “in due course”. One has to take away the crumbs of comfort that one can.
What I take most comfort from is the fact that we have a cyber security and resilience Bill, which will come to this House after hitting the Commons, where it had its Second Reading yesterday. If the Home Office picks up a bit of pace, there might well be the opportunity to produce a clause there to provide the kind of defence that we are talking about today. I understand that the Minister has a rather Trappist vow at this point, in terms of being limited in what can be said, but we very much hope that he can be let loose at some stage in the future. We look forward to that but, in the meantime, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Lord Davies of Gower
“Increased penalties for fare dodging(1) Section 5 of the Regulations of Railways Act 1889 (penalty for avoiding payment of fare) is amended as follows.(2) In subsection (1), for “level 2” substitute “level 4”.(3) In subsection (3)—(a) for “level 3”, in each place in which it appears, substitute “level 5”, and(b) for “three months” substitute “six months”.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment seeks to increase the penalties for passengers who fail or refuse to pay railway fares and those who travel or attempt to travel without having paid for previous fares.
Lord Davies of Gower (Con)
My Lords, this group addresses two of the most significant criminal challenges facing our railways: fare dodging and freight crime. First, my Amendment 365 seeks to increase the penalties for fare dodging on the railways. It was reported towards the end of last year that one in 20 London Underground passengers was dodging fares. Transport for London has estimated its losses at around £130 million over the last year, with losses across the whole railway network potentially reaching £330 million. This is not a victimless crime. Those losses do not simply disappear into the ether. Every penny not paid in rail fare means less money for improvements to services, less money for infrastructure upgrades and higher fares for the vast majority of law-abiding passengers who do pay their fares.
Often, fare evasion is a crime committed in conjunction with other more serious offences. Some of those who have been stopped and searched by police for fare evasion have been found with knives and drugs. This amendment would increase the maximum fine that can be issued by officers of the railway operators for fare evasion from level 2 to level 4 on the standard scale, therefore bringing the maximum penalty from £500 to £2,500. Furthermore, it would increase the maximum penalties that can be handed out on summary conviction to a level 5 fine or a term of imprisonment of up to six months.
The existing penalties were fixed at the current levels through the Criminal Justice Act 1982, meaning they were set a number of decades ago. Given the scale of the problem, it is clear that these penalties do not reflect either the seriousness of persistent fare evasion or the reality that some offenders treat the current regime as a calculated risk. This amendment would also increase the maximum penalties available to the courts, particularly for repeat or aggravated offenders, while leaving full discretion with magistrates to distinguish between genuine error and deliberate fraud.
This is about not just punishment but enforcement. Railway staff, especially at Transport for London, need to be trained to confront those bumping barriers and take action. It is an all too common occurrence to see staff simply watching as people jump the barriers.
Lord Blencathra (Con)
My Lords, I support my noble friend’s Amendment 365 after Clause 117, which would increase penalties for those who deliberately avoid paying rail fares. Deliberate fare evasion undermines the integrity of our railway and costs taxpayers and passengers hundreds of millions each year. We must be firm in protecting revenue that funds services and investment.
However, there is another side to this issue that we cannot ignore. Recent reviews and watchdog recommendations show a system that is complex, inconsistent and at times unfair to passengers who make genuine mistakes. The passenger watchdog has called for a national yellow card warning for first-time errors and a central railcard database to prevent innocent people being prosecuted for technical or administrative errors. I always book advance tickets on the train; they are slightly cheaper than the full-fare ones. A few weeks ago, business here finished early, so I got to Euston early and caught an earlier train than I had booked. When I produced my ticket, I said to the manager, “I’m on an earlier train. Is that all right?” He said, “I’ll let you off on this occasion”. I think what he meant was that he would let me off paying the full fare because I was on an earlier train. But I have heard of people, with a ticket that they have paid for, being accused of fare evasion for being on the train at the wrong time. That is a perfect example of where the yellow card system should be used.
The Office of Rail and Road was asked to review revenue protection practices precisely because enforcement has been uneven and opaque. We have seen the consequences of those failures. Thousands of prosecutions were quashed after courts found that operators had used inappropriate fast-track procedures and many passengers faced the threat of criminal records for minor errors. These are not abstract concerns; they are real harms to livelihoods and trust in the system.
I support the principle of tougher penalties for deliberate evasion, but only if there are clear safeguards. Those safeguards should be: a statutory first-warning step; a consistent published test before any prosecution; improved point-of-sale information and standardised enforcement guidance for all the different train operators; and mandatory staff training and data sharing to identify repeat offenders rather than punishing honest mistakes. I understand that the Government have accepted the ORR’s recommendations and must now legislate to ensure that enforcement is proportionate and transparent.
In short, tough penalties and fairness are not mutually exclusive. We can deter deliberate evasion while protecting innocent travellers, but only if this amendment is paired with the reforms that the ORR and passenger bodies have recommended. I urge the Minister to support the amendment on that basis and to press the Government to enshrine these other safeguards in law.
Viscount Goschen (Con)
My Lords, my noble friend Lord Blencathra has made a very pragmatic speech on the difficulties of fare evasion and the extraordinary complexities of the ticketing and fares system in the UK. Of course, I note that the Government are legislating in this area as part of the broader GB Railways Bill that is coming down the tracks, as it were. I really do not believe that there is a single individual in the United Kingdom who could answer 20 questions about the cheapest fare from A to B crossing C and get it right. It is an extraordinary system, and I quite agree that many people are making inadvertent errors, which should absolutely be taken into consideration.
Equally, the Minister will have heard me talking about enforcement on many occasions throughout the passage of the Bill. The law is brought very quickly into disrepute if the laws that law-abiding people see as absolutely necessary are avoided by a determined criminal element. We have all seen it. We have all seen it on the Tube, with people barging through, tailgating and hopping over the barriers. I have seen two officials of London Underground at Green Park station late in the evening, chatting to one another—someone comes barging past and they do absolutely nothing. If that continues, then I suggest we get ourselves into a very difficult situation indeed. So, when the Minister comes to respond, I ask that he talks about enforcement and about the attitude of the police to combat this serious issue which robs the railways and London Underground of hundreds of millions of pounds and is unsustainable.
I think that, on the ticketing issue and the fare issues, the answer really lies in technology. I think that apps have made this much more straightforward. It is absolutely a task for computers to find the best ticket from A to B, but there are plenty of people who do not use those, who are not particularly computer literate and who prefer a paper ticket. So, it is perhaps more complex than it seems from the outside, but I really think we have to put more effort on enforcement in this difficult area.
Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)
My Lords, briefly, because very good points have been made, I am tempted to say, yes, we need to increase penalties or threaten people with prison, because fare dodging does drive me mad, particularly on the Tube. It is partly the brazen, quite violent and intimidatory way that it happens for ordinary people: you are pushed out of the way and you just do not know what to do. We are not all Robert Jenrick with a camera: you want to intervene, you want to say something, you want to have something happen, but it does not happen. What has occurred is a normalisation of anti-social behaviour. The difficulty is whether we can legislate against that, because it seems to me that, partly at least, this is cultural and we have a situation where members of the public look away.
But I do think there is a problem with staffing. Whether TfL staff in particular are intimidated or whether they are indifferent, it is hard to tell, but I can assure noble Lords that they are not intervening very much. Despite the fact that this has had a lot of publicity recently, I have seen that it carries on, it seems to me, all the time. Even if you talk to the staff, they look the other way. It is one of those things: you do not want to be a grass and so on—by “you” I do not mean the noble Viscount—but I can see people feeling “I don’t necessarily want to go and report on that person, and I’m not sure what to do”. In other words, the public are stymied and are not quite sure how to respond. It is ironic, because we are constantly told that we should respect public-facing staff, and that is absolutely right, but if the public-facing staff do not respect us as members of the public, it makes it difficult. So, I am not convinced, despite the good intentions of this amendment, that it is the solution, because I am fed up with laws being added to the statute book that nobody enforces—it seems to me to bring the law into disrepute.
I want to add a note about the difficulties of buying tickets on national rail and knowing whether you are using the right ticket. I can assure noble Lords that I have made mistakes, but one reason that you can make a mistake is if you have a ticket for a fixed time and the train is late and you get on another train, you can actually be reprimanded for being on the wrong train when in fact it has just arrived at the time that the train that you were going to get should have arrived or has not arrived. I will not bore noble Lords with the details, but anyone who has travelled on trains regularly will know what I am talking about—and then to be sneered at by a member of staff. It seems to me that the danger here is that the innocent could indeed find themselves at the receiving end of a more draconian enforcement, whereas the culprit, as it were, gets away with it.
I also want to draw attention to the dangers of fast-track court processes. I really hate this single justice procedure, and it is worth noting that TfL are the people who use it most to prosecute people. The noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, made the point that you can appeal to magistrates. Well, not in that instance, because you are not in the courtroom; it is all happening behind your back. I just worry about injustice occurring. On the other hand, I would like to hear from the Government what strategy they have: not relying on one person with a video camera to expose this, but a campaign about fare dodging would do no harm, because it is public money and the public get very irritated by it. I do not think we need an amendment, but I would not mind some action being taken.
Lord Goddard of Stockport (LD)
My Lords, this is an interesting group of amendments, although I think we have strayed slightly away from the intentions of the mover of the amendment. Amendment 365 is another amendment from the Conservative Benches increasing penalties for fare dodging. As other speakers have said—and I am glad that the noble Lord, Lord Davies, acknowledged this—the key to enforcement is consistency in how these regulations are applied and, currently, that is not the case. I hope that Great British Railways, when it takes over the franchises, will guarantee some common training and work in that area, which will stop the blindingly obvious things that we see. I have seen it at Westminster station here, where three people have just burst a barrier and there have been two staff members there with their arms folded almost waving them through: “It’s not my job, go”, and off they went.
I will just make one comment. I do not think the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, said it with any intention, but I have never found any staff on British railways to be sneering and offensive, but we have to understand that sometimes they are dealing with people who make a professional life of travelling on the railways without paying. I have been on a train down to London, and sitting across from me was a gentleman with a son who looked about 10 years of age with a little iPad. When we had got almost to Milton Keynes, about two miles out, a ticket collector came through and the man had a single off-peak ticket to Macclesfield, which is the next station from Stockport. He was not going buy another ticket—“I’m not buying a ticket. You can’t throw me off this train. I’ve got a child with me”. That is the dilemma that the train manager faces. It is emotional blackmail, and how often does this happen? But the train manager was very polite. He dealt with him, and just asked him to either buy a ticket with his credit card, or he would have to get off at Milton Keynes and there would be a policeman waiting for him there. That seemed impossible to do, but he made a quick phone call, we pulled into Milton Keynes and the chap had to get off, because there was some peer pressure from other passengers, I must admit, and there was a policeman waiting for him. That sends a real message about the connectivity of what guards can do without having to get into a confrontation with passengers.
Lord Blencathra (Con)
I want to comment on something the noble Lord, Lord Goddard, said and endorse it. I regularly travel to the Council of Europe in Strasbourg and I use the marvellous level-access tram system. There are no barriers or gates, but periodically four people come on in a team with their little electronic machines, go between one station and another, and check we all have our little “aller simple” travelcard. If someone does not have it, they are hauled off. It is only one team of about four people in all of Strasbourg, but everyone is terrified of not having a valid ticket. That may be the solution: check people on the trains rather than at the barriers.
Lord Katz (Lab)
I thank all noble Lords for speaking in this short but important debate, and raising these important issues. As we are discussing rail issues, I should first draw noble Lords’ attention to my interests, as declared in the register. I am former employee and current shareholder of a transport operator, FirstGroup, and a former employee and current member of a rail union, the Transport Salaried Staffs’ Association. So I am both staff side and management: it balances out.
I turn first to Amendment 365, put forward by the noble Lord, Lord Davies, which seeks to increase the fines for fare dodging. The Government are committed to ensuring that everyone who travels on the railway pays the correct fare for their journey, and train operating companies have multiple mechanisms in place to prevent passengers travelling without the correct ticket. This includes the provisions set out in the Railways Act, but also use of the civil enforcement regime for penalty fares. In 2022, the penalty was raised from £20 to £100, and this has had a positive impact on reducing fare evasion and preventing fraud on the railway, which of course we all want to see.
Issuing penalty fares is one way of tackling fare dodging, but other measures can be taken. I am pleased to say that we had quite an extensive debate on these. As the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, acknowledged, the Office of Rail and Road has been asked to consider improvements to the industry’s revenue protection practices. Last year, it published its review setting out five recommendations, which my colleague the Secretary of State for Transport accepted in full.
It is probably worth very quickly going through the recommendations, which were: make buying the right ticket simpler and easier, strengthen consistency in how passengers are treated when ticket issues arise, introduce greater consistency and fairness in the use of prosecutions, make information and revenue protection easy to access and understand, and provide greater co-ordination, oversight and transparency of revenue protection activity. I hope, to an extent, those address the very valid concerns that the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, expressed about complexity, which were shared by the noble Viscount, Lord Goschen, and the noble Baroness, Lady Fox of Buckley. We all want to encourage rail travel; we do not want to discourage it by making the system too complex, and we do not want to penalise those who are truly acting in good faith. At the same time, it is important that we prevent fare dodging and make sure that there is a proper regime to prevent it.
Fare simplification is at the heart of this, as many noble Lords said in the debate on these amendments. I can confirm that this is very much part of the Government’s plans for rail reforms as part of the creation of Great British Railways. It is probably up to individual train operators and other public transport operators to promote their own campaigns on fare dodging but, to pick up the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, it is the case that whether you are travelling on the Tube or national rail, you cannot go far without seeing posters and public information about fare dodging. This is about the balance between promoting responsible behaviour and a penalising and enforcement regime.
The noble Lord, Lord Goddard, and others talked about enforcement. On TfL, I share his experience. Maybe I use the Tube a little more than he does, but multiple times I have seen plainclothes crews both on Tube trains and at ticket barriers. I saw one at King’s Cross Tube station ticket barrier just last week. There was a large gang of enforcement officers waiting to catch people trying to get in by tailgating those who were paying fares through the automatic gates. So transport operators are very much aware of their responsibilities.
To be clear on the ORR review, a number of contributions focused not on national rail but on the Tube, and obviously that is operated by Transport for London, a devolved body that is overseen ultimately by the Mayor of London. I want to inform noble Lords that the ORR spoke to TfL as part of its review and it is of course up to TfL whether it takes on its recommendations. When it comes to national rail operators, the ORR has a full purview.
On Amendment 368A, the Government are very aware of the rising frequency of freight crime and the significant and damaging impact it can have on businesses and drivers. We are determined to crack down on it. The noble Lord, Lord Davies, talked very much in the context of rail freight, but of course this is a problem for road freight as well. The incidence of cargo theft, where criminals are ripping the sides of lorries and taking the goods inside, is frightening for dedicated HGV drivers across the UK, and the perception that this crime is low-risk and high-reward is unacceptable and one that we want to change. Whether it is on the rail or the road, we share the noble Lord’s determination to do something about it.
Working with the police, the Home Office has agreed to create a freight crime flag which will be attached to any applicable crime, whether it is on the road or on rail. It will apply across all police forces, including the British Transport Police, which of course polices the railways. The data will be collected as part of the annual data return to the Home Office. The flag is currently being piloted in a small number of forces and, following this, the intention is to roll it out across all forces. The benefit of using a flag, as opposed to creating new crime classifications, is that in a case where, for instance, a driver has their vehicle or load stolen and violence is used or threatened against them, the crime that would be recorded would be robbery, as opposed to vehicle crime. The flag, however, would identify the robbery as a freight crime.
However, we will monitor the implementation of the flag. We are about half way through the six-month pilot, so we will keep a close eye on how this is panning out and consider whether further steps are required in the future. We know that having a code or a flag would not of itself solve the problem. Victims should always report crime to the police, and we expect police to investigate. However, as noble Lords would expect me to say, it is for chief constables to allocate resources for such investigations in line with local policing priorities.
I also acknowledge the worrying involvement of serious and organised criminals in committing freight crime. These individuals are damaging this country’s global reputation and are costing us billions each year. The Government are committed to tackling serious and organised crime in all its forms and are working with policing to that end. We are working closely with the National Vehicle Crime Intelligence Service and with Opal, the police’s national intelligence unit focused on serious organised acquisitive crime, including a vehicle crime intelligence desk which covers freight crime.
I hope in my response I have been able to reassure the noble Lord, Lord, Davies, that we accept the spirit of his Amendment 368A and are working to address the issues he has raised in tabling the amendment. I hope too that the noble Lord will understand why we do not consider his Amendment 365 to be necessary. For all of these reasons, I invite him to withdraw his amendment.
Lord Davies of Gower (Con)
My Lords, I thank noble Lords for their contributions: my noble friends Lord Blencathra and Lord Goschen, the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, and indeed the noble Lord, Lord Goddard of Stockport, for his very interesting examples.
I hope we have been able to impress on the Government the importance of tackling railway crime. I have travelled for over 50 years now on the London Underground, and things have improved immensely with the new security gates, et cetera, but still we see people avoiding payment by tailgating, which is something we have to challenge and stop. I hope the Government will look at addressing these issues, but for now, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Baroness Neville-Rolfe
“Cloud service access restrictions: lost or stolen mobile phone devices(1) A provider of cloud-based services that support smartphone functionality must, upon receiving verified notification from a registered user that their device has been lost or stolen, take reasonable and timely steps to prevent that device from accessing its services, in order to discourage the resale of illegally-gained devices.(2) The provider must block access to cloud services from the identified device, including but not limited to—(a) data synchronisation services,(b) remote storage access,(c) account authentication services, and(d) app store or software update services.(3) The provider must inform, as soon as practically possible, the National Crime Agency and the police service in the area in which the theft or loss of the device was first reported.(4) Providers must, subject to appropriate safeguards, establish a process for users to appeal or reverse a block on a device in cases of error, fraud, or device recovery.(5) The Secretary of State must by regulations make provision for—(a) the technical standards required to enforce the steps outlined in subsection (1),(b) the implementation timeline for providers, and(c) sanctions for non-compliance.(6) In this section, “the provider” means a provider of cloud-based services to mobile phone users.” Member's explanatory statement
The amendment seeks to ensure that technology companies use technical measures such as cloud-based blocking and IMEI linked device locks to make the resale of stolen mobile phone devices abroad more difficult and thus reduce the incidents of phone thefts in the UK.
Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)
My Lords, I rise to move Amendment 366 and speak to Amendment 538 in the name of my noble friend Lord Jackson of Peterborough, who has commitments overseas today. I am particularly delighted to have the support of the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, with his experience as Met Commissioner and the wisdom he showed when we served together on the Cabinet Office Board, and also of the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, not a Conservative but my partner over the last decade in the defence of intellectual property.
Given its importance in cutting crime, this is rightly a cross-party amendment, and we have drawn heavily on the work of Dame Chi Onwurah MP, her Select Committee on Science, Innovation and Technology and her well known tech expertise.
There is a serious problem. Politicians, spurred on by their advisers, boast far too often that they are “world-leading”. Unfortunately, we are a world leader in the sphere of phone theft. We are the phone theft capital of Europe with a horrific 70% of UK thefts in London, many of them from tourists so important to UK growth. In 2024, around 80,000 smartphones were reported as stolen compared with just 64,000 in the previous year; just the sort of growth we do not want to see.
On the streets, the value of a phone is roughly £300 to £400, and because they are the most valuable, about 80% are iPhones, Apple’s brilliant device. According to the Met, stolen phones had a street value of around £20 million in 2024. But the replacement value of these phones—members of the public and insurance companies having to pay out to replace them—was estimated by the Met at around £50 million last year.
Commander Conway of the Met told the Select Committee in June that 65% to 70% of our knife crime is produced by our robbery problem, and that it also drives a significant chunk of our violence challenge in the capital and across the UK. In that space lies the exploitation of young children and young people, into gangs; and this is largely an international organised crime phenomenon driven by criminal economics and the difficulty of getting hold of smartphones legitimately in some parts of the world.
Analysis of data relating to an industry sample of some 4,000 Apple devices stolen in London in 2023 shows that Algeria, with 22%, is the most common internet address of connected devices, followed by China, at 16%. In total, 78% of the stolen devices were connected to overseas networks. This means that the devices are, for the most part, being sold to be used as devices in other countries—not as parts, a current focus of Apple.
Lord Clement-Jones (LD)
My Lords, I am pleased to support Amendments 366 and 538, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Jackson, and introduced so cogently by the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe. I thank her for the reference to my honourable friend Martin Wrigley, who helped to identify this particular issue, which addresses the growing problem of mobile phone and device theft, often fuelled by the profitability of reselling these stolen goods overseas.
We are currently facing an epidemic of mobile phone theft, as the noble Baroness said, with reports indicating that phone snatches have increased by as much as 150% in certain areas. Every single day, approximately 200 mobile phones are stolen across the country, with many being destined for a lucrative resale market abroad. These stolen devices remain valuable criminal assets, because, currently, they often can still be accessed or resold even after being reported.
We support Amendment 366 because it seeks to strike at the heart of this criminal profit model. The amendment would ensure that technology companies actively employ technical measures, specifically cloud-based blocking and IMEI-linked device locks, as the noble Baroness described, to deter the resale of stolen mobile phone devices. Without compulsory co-operation from cloud service providers and manufacturers, stolen data and devices will remain valuable criminal assets, even if the physical device is recovered. This is an essential step towards forcing technical solutions from technology companies to counter the incentives for theft.
Amendment 538 would provide the industry with a necessary and reasonable lead-in period, specifying that these cloud service access restrictions will come into force six months after the Act is passed. This would ensure that technology companies have the time required to implement the necessary technical standards and administrative processes.
For too long, the manufacturers and cloud providers have treated device theft as a secondary concern. It is time that they work in a much more customer-friendly manner, in the way that the noble Baroness described, and use their immense technical capabilities to simply turn these devices into mute bricks the moment they are stolen, thereby removing the incentive for the crime altogether. I very much hope that the Minister will accept these common-sense measures to protect our property and safety.
Lord Hogan-Howe (CB)
My Lords, I have added my name to the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Jackson, ably explained by the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe. I may cover some of the same ground—I was only grateful that the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, intervened, because people might have forgotten some of the points made, but if I amplify them too much I am sure that somebody will remind me. I was particularly keen to support the amendment because, in the past, I have criticised the police for a lack of enforcement and detection—but of course, they cannot do everything.
We know that organised crime, which I will come to later, is about money; it is just another form of business. Theft is driven by people trying to make a profit. The amendment is all about the commercial business of mobile phone sales—some of it legal but some of it criminal. Apparently, there are about 88 million mobile phones in this country. They can be about £1,000 each, so that is a market of about £88 billion or something of that order. It is a massive market. In 2023, the purchase of these devices totalled £5.8 billion, and there is another £2.5 billion-worth of services that they provide and that we all pay for, from data to the general use of a mobile phone. This, by any measure, is a massive business.
The value of the phones stolen, as the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, mentioned, was about £20 million, with a reinsurance value of £50 million. The number of phones stolen in the UK is about 120,000, with two-thirds of this happening in London. It is a big city, and there are an awful lot of targets for the criminals wandering about. As they leave the Tube, people take their phone out to get a signal, as we all want, and to check on the messages they have not received while they were on the Tube. That is where the criminals spot them, and they then follow them to a place where they relieve them of their phone. I suspect that is one reason why we see so much of this in London. Clearly, the business model works very well here.
These are the crimes that are reported. An awful lot of phones that are stolen are never reported. I have talked to people in this place who have not reported their phone as stolen because there has been a level of embarrassment about the fact that it has happened to them on the street—they have just got another phone. We only know about the bare minimum of the number of phones that have been stolen in the course of a year.
On many occasions, violence is used. Just the ripping of a phone from a hand can lead to somebody trying to hold on to it, and we never know where that contest might end. If somebody ends up on the floor, violence can follow and the physical consequences can be quite severe.
As far as the mobile phone industry is concerned, £20 million is a very small number compared to an £88 billion market. More importantly, as the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, pointed out, the industry benefits, because when you have your phone stolen you go back to get another one. So why would it stop this? There is no financial incentive to actually do anything about it. There might be a moral one, but I am afraid it looks as though the moral incentive is not having an awful lot of effect. Of course, none of the manufacturers or the networks tries to lead in the market by saying that if their phone is stolen then it cannot be used. There is no market incentive for one manufacturer to say that its phone is better because it cannot be stolen, or, alternatively, that if it is stolen then it has no value. There is no effect on the market that is helping to prevent the theft of phones.
It is all to do with organised crime. There are some fancy definitions—one or two people in the Chamber may know of them—of organised crime and what is it all about. It is about money. It is about being organised enough to steal things in such a volume and have somebody to buy them which means that they have been worth stealing in the first place. The market they are involved in is enforced by violence. There is no monopolies commission supervision of this market, whether it be drugs or mobile phones; it is enforced by violence to ensure that they succeed and that other people fail. It is therefore really important that we get this right.
As the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, said, the resale value of a mobile phone that has been stolen is about £300 to £400. The thief does not get £300 to £400, but, by the time it has gone through a few hands, that is the return that they are expecting. To pay everybody out, they need to get £300 to £400 to make sure that it works.
The problem is that 78% of the phones that are stolen are going abroad, as has been said, and we cannot seem to stop them at the border. This is not entirely surprising. Phones are very small items and some 90% of the world’s goods travel by sea, in containers. Without intelligence, the chance of finding mobile phones is very limited. Therefore, we are not able to physically stop the phones leaving the country and going to places such as Algeria and China. At the moment, the police are fighting a losing battle to catch the thieves, who are low down the organised crime chain, and trying to prevent the export of stolen phones. As I said, given the size of a phone, that is quite difficult: they are looking for a very small needle in a very large haystack.
Lord Blencathra (Con)
My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lord Jackson on the quality of the amendment he drafted. I also congratulate my noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe on the superb speech she made setting out why this amendment is necessary. As we know, it addresses one of the fastest-growing forms of organised crime in the UK: the theft and rapid export of mobile phones—thousands and thousands of them. These are no longer opportunistic street offences. As noble Lords have said, they are part of a highly profitable, highly mobile criminal market that depends on one thing above all else: the ability to reactivate and resell the stolen devices abroad.
A couple of years ago, I was outside Victoria station, at the end of Victoria Street, waiting to cross the road. I saw a woman waiting for the pedestrian lights to change, holding her mobile phone out—I think she was trying to read the map—almost like a Geiger counter. Then I saw two guys on a motor scooter coming around the corner and I tried to shout to her to put her phone away, but too late—it was snatched in seconds.
That was a couple of years ago, when I think there were motor scooter gangs doing it. Now, as we have seen—we were talking about the e-bike problem in our debates on the Bill before Christmas—there are lots of videos of these guys on their very fast bikes, snatching phones, and I believe the Met now has a response squad on those high-powered bikes chasing the phone thieves. So it is a big problem, particularly in London.
At present, our defences are simply not keeping pace. IMEI blocking helps, but criminals now routinely bypass it by altering identifiers or moving devices to jurisdictions where UK blacklists are ignored. What they cannot bypass is the cloud. As noble Lords have said, modern smartphones are useless without access to the cloud-based services that power authentication, updates, storage and app ecosystems.
The amendment therefore introduces a very simple, proportionate requirement. When a user reports their phone lost or stolen, cloud service providers must take reasonable steps to block that specific device from accessing their services. If a stolen phone cannot be reactivated, it cannot be resold. If it cannot be resold, it is not worth stealing. It is as simple as that.
My noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe hinted that the phone companies may possibly have a financial benefit from not co-operating here. The noble Lord, Lord Hogan- Howe, was more blatant. I will be more blatant still. I am absolutely certain that they are conspiring not to co-operate so that they can sell more phones. We were discussing all-terrain vehicles a couple of hours ago. When the Equipment Theft (Prevention) Bill was going through, the police officers who were advising us said that they had heard from some of the big manufacturers of ATVs—the ones which make motorbikes with locks you cannot penetrate—that they were deliberately putting rubbish locks on the ATVs because when the £8,000 quad bike was stolen, the farmer immediately replaced it. They saw a market in goods being stolen. I think the big phone companies see exactly the same thing: there is a market in replacement phones.
The noble Lord asked: why do the British Government not do something about it? I suspect it is mega US-UK politics. If we said we were going to restrict the ability of Apple, Google and others to sell their phones here, I think we would have Mr Trump seeking to invade us next week, so I suspect there are geopolitical problems there.
The amendment also ensures proper safeguards: verification before blocking, a clear appeals process, and a role for the Secretary of State in setting technical standards. It strengthens law enforcement by requiring timely notification to the National Crime Agency and local police, giving them valuable intelligence on organised theft. This is not about burdening industry. It is about ensuring that all providers meet a consistent baseline of responsible behaviour—one that many already follow voluntarily, but which criminals exploit when it is not universal.
I conclude by saying that we have an opportunity here to collapse the economic incentive that drives mobile phone theft. Cloud-based blocking is practical, proportionate and overdue, and I commend the amendment to the Minister.
Lord Davies of Gower (Con)
My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Jackson of Peterborough for tabling these excellent amendments, and to my noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe for moving Amendment 366 on his behalf.
This amendment is driven by a simple proposition: if we are to bear down on the scourge of phone theft, we must remove the profit motive, because it is precisely this incentive to profit that drives the vast industry behind phone theft. Too often, the criminal justice system is left trying to deal with the consequences of crime after the event, rather than addressing the incentives that fuel it in the first place. Phone theft is now a high-volume, high-impact crime, particularly in our cities, and it causes not only financial loss but real fear and disruption to victims’ lives.
What this amendment seeks to do is eminently practical. It asks cloud service providers, which already control the digital lifeline that makes a smartphone valuable, to take responsible and timely steps to deny access to those services once a device is verified as lost or stolen. A phone that cannot access cloud backups, app stores, authentication, service or updates rapidly becomes worthless on the secondary market, whether at home or abroad.
This is not a novel idea nor an untested one. As many noble Lords will know, the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee has examined this issue in detail. In its recent correspondence with Ministers and technology companies, the committee highlighted both the scale of the problem and the frustrating gap between what is technically possible and what is currently being done. The committee made it clear that voluntary action has been uneven, that existing measures are inconsistently applied across platforms, and that stronger co-ordination, potentially underpinned by legislation, may be required if we are serious about prevention. This amendment directly reflects that evidence-based work and gives effect to its central recommendations.
Importantly, the amendment builds in safeguards for users to appeal or reverse a block where a mistake has been made or a device is recovered. It leaves the detailed technical standards, timelines and sanctions to secondary legislation, allowing flexibility and proper consultation with industry, and it recognises the importance of law enforcement by requiring prompt notification to the National Crime Agency and local police, strengthening intelligence and disruption efforts. Fundamentally, if we can force cloud service providers to implement this provision, we can break the cycle of phone theft. I look forward to the Minister’s response.
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, for taking up the cudgels on behalf of the noble Lord, Lord Jackson. I thought I had got away with it when I did not see him in the Chamber, but the noble Baroness turned up at the last minute, like the cavalry, and charged in to raise this very important issue, which I appreciate her doing. She is right to do so because, self-evidently, mobile phone theft is unacceptable. It is a significant criminal operation—as the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, said, it involves overseas criminal gangs—and a great inconvenience, cost and discomfort to many people. We need collectively to take action to support the reduction of mobile phone theft.
Amendment 366, moved by the noble Baroness on behalf of the noble Lord, Lord Jackson of Peterborough, would require technology companies which offer cloud-based services to use technical measures, such as cloud-based blocking, to prevent access to cloud-based services after a device by a registered user has been lost or stolen. The noble Lords, Lord Clement-Jones, Lord Hogan-Howe and Lord Blencathra—and the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Gower, from the Front Bench of His Majesty’s Opposition—expressed support for that principle and indicated that it is one method of tackling the scourge of mobile phone theft.
I share the noble Baroness’s concern about the theft of mobile phones and other devices that host cloud-based services. The number of thefts is too high and we are determined to get it down. I agree that urgent action is required to make sure that the companies which design these devices—to take up the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe—play their part and do absolutely everything they can to ensure that a stolen mobile phone is not a valuable commodity and therefore not worth stealing.
I share the intent to reduce mobile phone theft, but I suggest to the noble Baroness that there are a number of potential practical challenges in the proposed approach that I am uncertain whether we would currently be able to overcome. Many apps on mobile phone devices have some element of cloud access, so the range of companies in scope of the provision would appear to be extremely broad. In addition, disabling all cloud services could, for example, stop tracking and recovery of mobile phones, especially if the tracking function relies on cloud connectivity. That would impede law enforcement’s ability to identify locations to which stolen devices are taken.
As noble Lords will note, there is a measure in the Bill to ensure that tracking of mobile phones is dealt with in a much speedier and more effective way without the need for warrants. The Government are working with industry and law enforcement partners on the delivery of practical and effective measures. As the noble Baroness said, there was a very productive round table in February which brought together police, technology companies and others to look at how we can do what the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, recommended: break the business model of mobile phone theft.
The summit resulted in clear commitments from attendees, including data sharing on mobile phone theft to get a comprehensive picture. There was also a range of other measures, including the police stepping up their operational response. Members will have seen this particularly in London, where the Metropolitan Police—I also pay tribute to the City of London Police—has targeted high areas of that activity as an operational response to catching criminals responsible for these crimes. As I have mentioned, the Bill gives police powers to enter premises to search for and seize stolen items, which would be negated if the tracking element was not allowed. That will help in seriously tackling this issue by enabling the tracking down of stolen mobile phones to particular properties.
As a result of the summit, technology companies and policing partners have continued to work together and there have been a number of working groups looking collectively at tech, operational issues of street action by police forces and other issues, although the main committee has not been reconvened. We have had a change of Home Secretary since the summit took place, so I will go back to the Home Secretary’s office about the potential for reconvening the major group, because it is important that that is done and seen through.
Lord Hogan-Howe (CB)
I acknowledge that the Minister is trying hard to give a positive response, but I wonder whether he wants to challenge the reasons being offered when he goes back to the Home Office.
For most of these mobile phones, if the thieves have any sense they will turn them off, because the risk of being tracked is not insignificant, although clearly they do not always. That could be managed in two ways. First, there could be a time limit before the phone is blocked, such as 48 hours—the owner will not be looking for this phone for the next six years. Secondly, and probably more importantly, this is a bit Catch-22; if we argue, as I think the Government accept, that it is valuable because it can still connect to the network, once the thief knows it will not be connected to the network there will be no need to track it when it is stolen, because nobody will be stealing it. I know this will not be perfect, but if you could reduce it by 90%, that would have a massive impact.
I accept that the point on tracking is well intended, but if we made this difference, the device would not be reconnected and there would be no need for tracking. If there is a need, perhaps we should just time-limit it. I accept the advice the Minister has been given, but there is a way round that argument.
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
I am content, with the noble Lord’s experience of how these matters can be dealt with, to reflect on what he has said, but it does not get away from the fact that the problems I have outlined with the amendment as drafted would still be present. I cannot accept the amendment today but, in principle, we are all looking for solutions to stopping mobile phones being stolen, either by effective police action on the ground or by use of neighbourhood policing targeting hotspot areas with high levels of mobile phone theft. The noble Lord mentioned Tube exits, for example.
I cannot accept the amendment in this form because the reasons I have given need to be thought through. The noble Lord’s contribution points to another area where thought can be given. In light of what I have said, I hope the noble Baroness will withdraw the amendment for now, but not the general concern of this Committee and this Government that we need to take action on this issue.
Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)
I thank the Minister for his constructive response to this important amendment, and all those who took part in the debate. The powerful combination of the noble Lords, Lord Clement-Jones and Lord Hogan-Howe, my noble friends Lord Blencathra and Lord Davies of Gower and the Minister himself represent a lot of expertise in this area and concern to tackle this criminal activity. I am very grateful for that.
The former Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, was absolutely right to convene interested parties to try to tackle the appalling damage being done to victims of this criminal activity. Theft of phones and their onward sale overseas is a very profitable business. The theft statistics probably understate the problem, as we heard from the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, and the providers do not at present have an incentive to solve it. It is highly regrettable but, as a result, not enough has been done.
I am not convinced that tracking, data sharing and hotspot enforcement, of which I am very supportive and have spoken in favour of to the Minister before, are quite enough. I am glad to hear that working groups are continuing, and the undertaking to have a further meeting of the Home Secretary’s group is very valuable.
I hope the Minister will also reflect on the debate, think what can be done and perhaps come back with a government amendment or undertakings as to what can be done. But failing that, and probably in any event, I think we will wish to return to this important issue on Report. In the meantime, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.
Middle East and North Africa
The Earl of Courtown (Con)
My Lords, I thank the Minister for giving us the opportunity to ask questions on this Statement, which covered events in Iran, Gaza, Syria and Yemen, and the case of Alaa Abd el-Fattah. That alone demonstrates the increasing instability we are facing globally. The Official Opposition are clear that the UK can and must play a full role in facing up to the challenges of our increasingly unstable world.
Beginning with Iran, we stand with those brave Iranians who have risked so much by exercising their fundamental right to free protest. Reports that at least 36 protesters have been killed during the Iran protests are extremely concerning. The violence perpetrated by the Iranian regime against protesters is appalling as well. Can the Minister say what practical steps the UK can take in looking at how we can support and bring those responsible to justice for these dreadful acts?
We know the Foreign Secretary raised the case of Craig and Lindsay Foreman with the Iranian Foreign Minister on 19 December and we welcome that. Can the Minister give the House an update on their case and set out what further steps the United Kingdom Government intend to take to secure their safe release? In such an uncertain political context, it is essential that Ministers redouble their efforts in this area.
The Official Opposition welcome the progress that is being made towards a peaceful resolution of the Israel-Gaza conflict, but we remain concerned about the breaches of the ceasefire perpetrated by Hamas. In particular, can the Minister update the House on what progress is being made to secure the return of the body of the remaining hostage?
On Monday, Minister Falconer announced that the UK will establish a Palestinian embassy. Can the Minister provide further details on this, and can she confirm where the Palestinian embassy will be established and when it is expected to be open?
I will also take this opportunity to ask about reports of terrorists infiltrating aid agencies. What assessment have His Majesty’s Government made of these reports? Can the Minister give us a sense of the scale of infiltration that the Government are aware of?
On the situation in Yemen, it is now being reported that the separatist leader is going to take a last stand after rejecting the Saudi ultimatum. Can the Minister provide an update on the fast-moving situation there?
In Syria, we welcome the Royal Air Force’s successful joint operation with France on Daesh. We know that Syria is still facing huge challenges. Specifically on the issue of sectarian violence, what practical steps can the Minister take to support the Syrian Government in their work to tackle this?
Finally, on the Alaa Abd el-Fattah case, can the Minister confirm exactly when Ministers were made aware of the horrific social media comments that have been the source of so much debate over the Recess? The Official Opposition have called for his citizenship to be stripped; can the Minister confirm whether Ministers are considering this option?
I look forward to hearing the responses from the Minister.
Lord Purvis of Tweed (LD)
I am also grateful for the Statement, but I am also slightly disappointed that, given the linkages between the Middle East and North Africa and the crisis in Sudan, there was no mention of that emergency. I will return to that in a moment and I hope the Minister might be able to give an update and respond to a couple of points that I wish to make on that.
On the ongoing low-level conflict which continues in Gaza, it is palpably obvious from the Minister’s Statement that there is not what can be described as a “humanitarian ceasefire”. I agree with the words that the Minister outlined in the House of Commons. He decried the lack of a humanitarian response as a disaster. In the Minister’s words, it is “catastrophic” and “unjustifiable”. He went on to say that the hypothermia and sewage running in the streets is “unforgivable”. I also agree with his strong words on that.
It is a very long way from October, when our Prime Minister flew in a flurry to Egypt to, in his words, give special tribute to President Trump on a so-called historic peace agreement. Four months on, there has been little progress on governance and there continues to be far too little in food and medicine assistance to civilians. Peace, proper peace, seems a very long way away, especially with Hamas and gangsterism continuing.
We had been informed that our Government were playing a leading role in the co-ordination work of governance arrangements for Gaza. But can the Minister give some concrete examples of what impact the UK is having and what role we are playing in the Board of Peace? What is the board’s current impact? What is the Minister’s assessment of how far from the crucial next phase we are, in the Government’s estimate?
On Iran, the latest repression continues to alarm, and it is worth remembering the rhetoric at the time of the US air strikes that this would have weakened the regime and potentially hastened its end. But we continue to see the dictatorial human rights abuses of the Iranian regime. We also note the continuing abuse of Lindsay and Craig Foreman, and I also endorse the question as to what actions are being taken to secure their release.
For some young Iranians, especially young women, who continue to be targeted by the regime, especially those that have some connection with the United Kingdom, there continues to be no safe and legal route for them to seek asylum in the United Kingdom. Why is this? In opposition, Labour supported my amendment to the then migration Bill for a safe and legal route that would cover Iran. This is now opposed by the Home Office. Can the Minister outline why that is the case?
With regards to the violence in Yemen and the security impact in the Red Sea, we also hope that there will be some form of response to the initiatives for peace. But it does seem far away, and a further update from the Government would be welcome.
On Syria, is it still the view of the Government that Syria is considered to be a safe country as far as migration is concerned? Advice for travel is still restricted, and we still do not have an embassy.
I also wish to ask the Minister about comments made by her colleague, and I am fully respectful of the fact he has had to go during the dinner break business because he has been occupied under the legislation this afternoon. My noble friend Lady Hussein-Ece raised the case of 35 British children, half of whom are under 10, detained indefinitely and unlawfully with 15 women in northern Syria.
My noble friend asked the noble Lord the Minister what actions the Government are taking. The Minister said that those British nationals were able to avail themselves of “requests for consular assistance” and
“that facility is open to access”.
There is no consular provision in Syria for any UK nationals or joint nationals. The advice from the FCDO on its website is perfectly clear that no consular access is available. So, will the Minister write to me with clarification as to what kind of consular access within Syria is available?
Given the restrictive nature of the regime in Syria and the fact that the Government have lifted sanctions and provided relief against the sanctions without any conditions on that, I maintain the concerns that I have raised previously about the lack of conditions placed on the regime to make improvements on human rights, especially for women, within Syria.
Finally, on Sudan, the Minister is well aware now that an estimated 75,000 civilians have been slaughtered in the atrocities in El Fasher. The Minister is well aware of my concerns about El Obeid and other areas. What are the latest actions the Government, as penholder in the UN Security Council, are taking for the protection of civilians within Sudan? Can the Minister restate the view of our Government that the future of Sudan can be in the hands only of civilians, that civilian-led governance is the only way of reconstructing towards peace and that there should be no profit for combatants in any future? Would she be willing to meet me and Sudanese civilian leaders to discuss the protection of civilians and also the necessity of having a reconstruction of that country, potentially after peace, if we can secure it, which is in the hands of civilians?
The Minister of State, Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (Baroness Chapman of Darlington) (Lab)
I am grateful to both noble Lords for their comments. I particularly thank the noble Lord, Lord Purvis, for reminding us of Sudan, which, as he said, was not part of the Statement, which was specifically about the Middle East and North Africa. He was absolutely right to say that the events in Sudan, the Horn of Africa, and Yemen are connected in many different ways, and he is right to draw that to our attention.
At the risk of spending the entire time I have on Sudan, which I could quite easily do, El Fasher is a crime scene and the sheer hell of what happened there and the darkness of that is yet to be fully appreciated by the international community. But that will happen, and access will improve. I am regularly in contact with Tom Fletcher. He sent me a note just this week about what he discovered on his recent visit to Sudan, including to RSF-controlled areas, and it is bleak. But we continue to maintain our focus on Sudan, as does the Foreign Secretary. What the noble Lord said about how vital it is to have a civilian-led future is absolutely right. I agree with him and will of course be happy to meet him and those civilian leaders from Sudan whenever that is possible. I am very happy to agree to do that.
I turn now to the substance of the Statement made by my honourable friend Mr Falconer in the other place. On Iran, it is right, as the noble Earl said, that those who wish to protest, make their points and air their views about the regime under which they live, should be free to do so. They should be free to gather, protest, speak and make their case as they see fit, and it is wrong that they are being treated in the way they are. We are sometimes cautious about what we say about this because it is part of the regime’s position that these are events being facilitated and encouraged by foreign powers. That is absolutely not the case. We know that, but we do not want to say things that could enable the regime to make that incorrect assertion and cause harm to those protesters who are doing what they have an absolute right to do.
It is wrong that the Foremans are being held and have been charged with espionage. My honourable friend the Minister for the Middle East and North Africa, has met the family, and I believe the Foreign Secretary has been in contact as well. We will continue to work for their release, as both noble Lords have encouraged us to do.
As the noble Earl said, the remaining body of the hostage in Gaza needs to be returned to the family so that they can mourn and grieve, as they should be able to do, with dignity. It is outrageous that this has been going on for 820 days now. It is wrong and should be brought to an end as soon as possible.
On the issue of the embassy, I do not have anything further to add to what Minister Falconer said in the Statement. But it is a logical next step following our decision to recognise the State of Palestine.
The noble Earl asked about the infiltration of aid agencies. We are of course concerned about that, but our biggest concern when it comes to aid is that—this is in response to the question by the noble Lord, Lord Purvis—although we have been able to work to increase the amount of aid reaching Gaza, they are still around 100 or so trucks short of what is estimated to be needed. The restrictions on access still persist to too great an extent. Not all the crossings are open. Some commercial goods are allowed in, such as cigarettes and luxury goods, whereas some shelter kits and medical supplies are not being permitted. This needs to stop. We need to get the appropriate goods in to where they are desperately needed, and that needs to happen urgently.
Both noble Lords asked for an update on Yemen. We are pleased to see that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the UAE are talking about de-escalation and that that is what they both wish to see. The Saudis have offered to host a conference. This is welcome and we will encourage it, because de-escalation and an end to the violence there are urgently needed. The situation is really quite desperate. Access for aid workers is difficult in some parts of Yemen, and the only way forward is for the fighting to stop. It is good that both the UAE and Saudi Arabia are saying the same things at the moment.
On Syria, clearly, as we have discussed many times, Syria is in a very precarious situation. This is an early stage of a new regime. It is not straightforward by any means. We are co-ordinating with other donors and providing technical assistance. We were one of the first countries to lift sanctions. The reason we did that was in recognition that if this opportunity that Syria now has is to come to anything at all, it needs the ability to strengthen its economy and build the security it needs.
The noble Lord asked about the return of refugees. Of the Syrian refugees I have spoken to—those here in the UK, some who have returned, and others who have been in Jordan—not everybody wants to return. Some feel that their children saw things they never want them to be retraumatised by. But many do want to return, and are desperate to, but not until they are sure that they and their families can be safe, their children can be educated and they can have access to healthcare. That is a completely understandable position to take. It matters to the UK because we want to enable the return of refugees who have been welcomed here. Refugees want that, and it is vital for the future of Syria that people who want to go home, and are able to, can do so and can contribute and take part in the rebuilding of their country. They tell us that that is what they want too.
I was asked to comment on the remarks of my honourable friend regarding the return of refugees in Syria who are in camps. There are a small number of UK nationals in those camps. The noble Lord will appreciate that there are serious security considerations around their status. Those are considerations that I am not privy to. He asked me to write to him and I am very happy to do that and to provide any further detail, particularly around the kind of access to assistance that might be possible. I agree with him that is incredibly difficult to imagine how that is at all straightforward in the circumstances, but I am happy to write to him with more detail on that.
Lord Reid of Cardowan (Lab)
My Lords, the conflict in Yemen has now been going on for, I think, more than 12 years, with tragic consequences. Those of us who have observed this over the past decade or so have always regarded it as both a tragedy and a very complicated issue, all the more so because of the recent clashes between the UAE-backed forces and the Saudi forces. I was glad to hear the Minister say that initial contact has been made with a view to de-escalation, because the last thing we need in that area is a further complication, with two external powers contributing towards the tragedy. Is she in a position to tell me whether UK Ministers have had contact with their Emirati and Saudi counterparts and, much more difficult I know, whether they assess those initial contacts as mere superficial politics or they are convinced of the depth of understanding of the danger and the sincerity to de-escalate on the part of both of them?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
I can confirm that there is regular contact between UK Ministers and their counterparts in the UAE and KSA specifically about Yemen. They are substantial and meaningful, and they are not, as my noble friend described it, going through the political motions. This is serious. We want to see progress and de-escalation, and that is what we are hearing from the UAE and KSA as well. We need to keep up those contacts and try to make sure that we see the results of them on the ground.
Baroness Foster of Oxton (Con)
My Lords, on Iran, refusing to proscribe the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which is the regime’s primary tool of repression and terror, sends a dangerous signal of weakness. At this critical moment, more than 10 days into the uprising, there has been no public statement of support for the people of Iran from the Prime Minister at a time when protesters are being killed, hospitals are being attacked and a nation is demanding freedom. Recent statements from the President of the United States warning the regime against mass killings and expressing support for the Iranian people have resonated strongly inside Iran. They offer hope, not because of rhetoric but because the people of Iran can finally express their protests, knowing full well that they have forces on the ground in their support. Can the Minister tell us when the Prime Minister is planning to stand up and condemn the atrocities being heaped upon civilians in Iran and, at the same time, when he will proscribe the IRGC as a terrorist organisation?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
We do not talk about proscription before we do it. As I explained in my response to the Front Benches earlier, we are careful of what we say. That is not because we think that people should not have the right to protest and be free to do so—and we do not agree with many of the things that they say when they do—but because we want to make sure that nothing this Government say puts at risk the lives of people protesting and making their case as they should. We do not want to do anything that would make their predicament even worse, because it is the position of the regime in Iran that we are somehow encouraging, facilitating, enabling and encouraging those protests. Clearly, we are not. These are very firmly the views of the people of Iran, who are choosing to take the steps that they are taking. We are mindful of what we say, and I think it is right that we are.
Baroness O’Loan (CB)
My Lords, I thank Minister for the condemnation of the activities of the current regime in Iran. Despite what she has just said, will His Majesty’s Government condemn attacks by the regime on the hospital in Ilam and, yesterday, on Sina Hospital in Tehran, and the abduction of wounded people seeking help in those hospitals? Can they consider again the policy and perhaps demand the immediate release of all those arrested during the protests? How will His Majesty’s Government support the Iranian people and their organised resistance in the ongoing struggle for justice, human rights and freedom? Do His Majesty’s Government recognise the right of Iranians to bring about real change by establishing a democratic republic, as articulated in the NCRI President-elect Maryam Rajavi’s 10-point plan? In the light of the fact that there have been some 2,500 executions in Iran in recent times, is it not time for a change of policy and a more assertive and condemnatory policy?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
It is right that the people of Iran should be free to live their lives as they wish and to have a Government who reflect their wishes, and that women, in particular, in Iran should be free to live and to conduct their lives in the way that they want. There is no ambiguity about the UK Government’s position on any of these things. We support the people of Iran in their endeavours to bring about the open, free society that we would all wish to see.
Lord Teverson (LD)
My Lords, we primarily think about Russian aggression in Ukraine, quite rightly, but if we think of north Africa, despite the death of the Wagner Group, the so-called Russian Africa Corps is still very active in the Sahel and Libya and supports rather ugly regimes. It is there capturing important resources for Russia, and it fights in a way that is contrary to the rules of war and human rights. This seems to me to be rather understated and not seen enough, but it is quite dangerous to us and to Europe. I wonder how the Foreign Office see this and how its threats can be contained.
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
The noble Lord is absolutely right. One of the reasons that I feel quite so strongly that the UK needs to be outward-facing and strong diplomatically, defensively and in our development work is that if we neglect areas of the world, such as the Sahel, then the conditions allowed to grow in Africa, and in that region especially, will make it a breeding ground for extremism, dangerous Islamism, and activities of states that do not wish us any good and certainly do not wish the people of the Sahel any good either. It is vital that the UK maintains its leadership role globally in fighting these things. We work as closely as we ever have with our allies and partners, especially in places where it is the most difficult, such as those that he describes.
Baroness Foster of Aghadrumsee (Non-Afl)
My Lords, I welcome the Minister back to her usual position this week—I know it has been a long week, and it is only Wednesday—and I very much welcome the update on a wide range of issues. I want to ask her a question on Iran. I recognise that she, speaking on behalf of the Government, wants to be careful in her wording. However, those of us who are not in government, and are therefore free to say so, want to stand in strong solidarity with the protests in Iran, particularly about the repression that women and girls have faced in Iran over this past number of years. Given that the New York Times, citing Iranian officials, has said that Iran is operating under “survival mode”, will the Minister say whether our Government, the Foreign Office and the Ministry of Defence are ready for the potential collapse of the Iranian regime and the consequences that will bring, not just for that state but for regional security and UK interests?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
We consider all eventualities and work these things through carefully, because some things seem imminently likely while others seem less likely but would have wide-ranging consequences should they occur, so we do the kind of work the noble Baroness has asked me about. I am not in a position to give a detailed analysis right now of what that looks like, but the Government’s position is that we support people who want to see an open society in Iran. We think that the repression that they have lived under is wrong, and they have tolerated it for far too long.
Lord Kempsell (Con)
I thank the Minister for all her valiant efforts on these intractable issues. Specifically on the fallout from the case of Mr el-Fattah, which dominated the agenda for so many days and now seems no longer to do so, the department is reviewing the process around such cases. Can the Minister throw light on whether that review will include a review of extant outstanding real-world consular cases that may throw up similar issues, or is the department only looking in scope at the process?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
There is going to be a review, and I hope it is very quick. I do not know about anyone else, but I would certainly like to draw a line under this. We need to understand what went wrong here. Mr el-Fattah was given British citizenship under the previous Government. The noble Earl, Lord Courtown, asked me about this and I did not give him an answer, so I will do that now. It takes a lot for us to remove someone’s citizenship. I was asked whether we look at the previous social media of everyone we provide consular assistance to. No, we do not do that routinely. There may be occasions where that is appropriate. Some of our fellow citizens—how shall I put this diplomatically?—have views that we do not particularly appreciate, but that does not mean that we do not try to help them. We do not make a judgment in all cases about why they went somewhere we told them not to go to, or got themselves in a situation we would prefer they had not got into. We provide assistance judgment free, if you like.
This situation is slightly different because of its high-profile nature and because of ministerial involvement over successive Governments from all parties, so it is right that we look at exactly what went wrong here and why we did not know, because we may have made slightly different judgments at different points along the way. That is what this review is about. I hope it is quick so that we can share the findings and perhaps avoid this sort of situation in future.
Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)
My Lords, on Gaza, I very much associate myself with the comments made by the noble Lord, Lord Purvis of Tweed, about the lack of progress on the peace process. The Statement talks about NGOs being banned, aid being stuck at the borders and the huge continuing humanitarian crisis that is contributing to. With that in mind, I note that the Foreign Press Association has expressed profound disappointment that the ban on free and unfettered access for foreign journalists in Gaza has continued. In the last year, Gaza was the deadliest place to work as a journalist; 56 Palestinian media professionals were killed in the last year there. Clearly, getting international eyes on the ground is important for the world to understand what is happening. Are the British Government pushing for that to happen so the situation can open up to media scrutiny?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
Yes, that needs to happen, and it should happen. The world needs to have proper journalists able to report to a high standard about what is happening now and what has happened previously.
The 20-point plan is something we are going to stick with. It is all there is. There is no alternative peace plan: this is it, imperfect though it surely is. There has been a dramatic increase in the amount of aid getting into Gaza. It is not enough. We do not agree at all with the registration requirements and the disclosure of names of personnel; we are fundamentally against that. It goes against the principles by which we work. We have said so, and we will continue to make that point.
Lord Massey of Hampstead (Con)
My Lords, the Statement contains the usual highly condemnatory statements on Israel’s behaviour, using very emotive terms such as unjustifiable and unforgivable. It spends eight paragraphs on Israel’s conduct but only 10 words on the other side of the issue, which are, “Hamas should disarm and allow a path to lasting security”—no emotive language and no criticism of Hamas. The Statement describes the ban on the 37 NGOs as “unjustifiable” but does not mention the actuality that the ban will take place in March if those NGOs do not disclose details of their staff and operations. Given that we know that UNWRA and other NGOs have been infiltrated by Hamas, why is it so unjustifiable that Israel requires this information, especially in the context of Hamas’s refusal to disarm and honour its side of the agreement? I ask the Minister whether she thinks there is a natural connection between Israel’s conduct and Hamas’s refusal to honour its side of the agreement.
I have an additional question, on the matter of Alaa el-Fattah’s tweet. If the Government had done their due diligence, would he still have been welcomed back to the UK?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
What he said was wrong. As to whether different decisions would have been made at an earlier point, I cannot answer. Maybe the point at which to have made a different decision would have been the point at which he was awarded citizenship, but this Government were not responsible for that choice. Once citizenship has been given, to remove citizenship—abhorrent though the things he said clearly were, and he has rightly apologised for them, I am not clear that they would have been sufficient cause to deprive someone of their citizenship, even though we fundamentally disagree with what was said. I think the noble Lord can appreciate the complexities around that.
On the issue of aid agencies and personnel, the Israeli Government are requiring the disclosure of the names of individuals working for aid agencies. We disagree with that. Other people will agree with it, but we do not. We think that is the wrong way to conduct access for aid agencies. We just think the Government of Israel are wrong on this point, and we will continue to make that case to them and explain why. These agencies are very effective at getting aid to people who need it desperately. The depth of need is still there. Things have improved somewhat—the latest IPC assessments of hunger show that things have improved a bit—but an awful lot more still needs to happen. Thousands of traumatised children are having difficulty with speech and language at school, accessing education and healthcare, and getting sufficient quality food. These are all things that I know everyone in this Chamber would want to see resolved, and we think the best way to do that is to allow the agencies to do their job.
Lord Goodman of Wycombe (Con)
Returning to Alaa Abd el-Fattah, Paul Ovenden, who was until recently the Prime Minister’s own director of strategy, wrote the following remarkable paragraph:
“What I knew of his plight during my time in government was largely down to his status as a cause célèbre beloved of Whitehall’s sturdy, clean-shirted diplomats and their scurrying auxiliaries. They mentioned him with such regularity that it became a running joke among my colleagues: a totem of the ceaseless sapping of time and energy by people obsessed with fringe issues”.
He went on to complain of a stakeholder state that has gripped Governments of both parties. Does the Minister agree with the Prime Minister’s former director of strategy and, if so, what does she think should be done?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
Paul is a very good friend of mine. I have worked with him for many years and I enjoyed reading his assessment of his time working in Downing Street. I think he was using that case to illustrate the point—and I think he is right—that there are often certain issues that are of concern to people who work in the Diplomatic Service, and who may have cause to be interested in human rights and other such issues, that may not be the concern of members of my family in the north-east or many others. That does not mean that diplomats should not care about them. Paul expresses his views in a characteristically straightforward and colourful way. I respect very much his right to do that. He makes a very good point, one that many of us in government can recognise, but does that mean that we should not do our jobs when it comes to British nationals being held overseas? Of course not.
Crime and Policing Bill
Wednesday 7th January 2026
(2 days, 19 hours ago)
Lords ChamberCrime and Policing Bill 2024-26 View all Crime and Policing Bill 2024-26 Debates Read Hansard Text Watch Debate Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: HL Bill 111(Corrected)-VIII(a) Amendment for Committee (Supplementary to the Eighth Marshalled List) - (6 Jan 2026)
Lord Vaux of Harrowden
“Technology and telecommunications companies’ liability for APP fraud reimbursementWithin six months of the day on which this Act is passed, the Secretary of State must prepare and publish a report, and lay it before Parliament, setting out proposals for ensuring that technology and telecommunications companies—(a) owe a duty of care to their customers to prevent fraud being originated on platforms or services that they provide, and(b) contribute to the costs of reimbursing victims of Authorised Push Payment fraud, where such fraud has originated on services or platforms provided by the relevant company.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment would require the Secretary of State to bring forward proposals to ensure that technology and telecommunications companies have a duty of care to prevent fraud and meet a share of the costs of reimbursing APP fraud victims.
Lord Vaux of Harrowden (CB)
My Lords, we come back to fraud. As the Minister will be well aware, this is not the first time I have raised the issue of ensuring that the technology and telecoms companies take their share of responsibility for the use of their services or platforms by fraudsters and are made to contribute to the costs of reimbursing victims. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan of Cotes, and the noble Lords, Lord Young of Cookham and Lord Holmes of Richmond, for their support on this amendment.
On a previous group I mentioned the Fraud Act 2006 and Digital Fraud Committee, on which I was privileged to sit. Our report, Fighting Fraud: Breaking the Chain, which was published in November 2022, made the very clear conclusion:
“Until all fraud-enabling industries fear significant financial, legal and reputational risk for their failure to prevent fraud, they will not act”.
That has been borne out over the three years since. There has been no significant improvement, despite the voluntary charters that have been agreed. Only the banks are on the hook for the costs of fraud under the mandatory APP reimbursement rules that were brought in by the Financial Services and Markets Act 2023. The banks must now pick up 100% of the reimbursement liability, and there is evidence to suggest that this is having a positive impact on the efforts that the banks are making to identify and prevent fraud.
Similarly, the Payment Systems Regulator’s six-monthly reports on the performance of the banks has provided welcome transparency as to which banks and payment services are doing most, and least, to combat fraud. As an aside, it would be good to have confirmation from the Minister that the subsuming of the PSR into the FCA will not reduce the important reporting and oversight of APP fraud that the PSR has been providing.
The banks are picking up the liability, but they are not where the fraud originates. According to UK Finance statistics, around 70% by volume and 30% by value arises from online platforms, and 16% by volume and 36% by value arises from telecoms—calls and texts. Let us name names. According to the PSR, over half of APP scams originate on Meta platforms—Facebook and so on.
Nothing has changed that would change the conclusion of the committee that these industries will not take the issue seriously until they face liability for what they allow to happen on their platforms or services. The banks have sharpened up their acts, in part because of the mandatory reimbursement requirement that we have imposed on them. The banks face real liabilities for the fraud that goes through their accounts.
The Online Safety Act includes some important measures to prevent fraudulent content and scam advertising, but it does not make the companies liable for the losses. We have mandated that the banks should reimburse victims of APP scams after we decided that the voluntary code was not working, and it is now time that those who enable the frauds should pick up their share on a compulsory, not voluntary, basis. There are many possible ways to achieve this, so I have not been prescriptive in the amendment. It could be as simple as bringing the telcos and tech companies into the reimbursement requirements, or we could look at extending the new failure to prevent fraud offence so that it covers the use by third parties of services provided by a company. The failure to prevent offence currently covers only actions by employees or associates, so it would not cover scams in this situation.
Amendment 67 would simply require the Government to bring forward proposals for how to do this within six months of this Bill passing. It is not enough to keep publishing more fraud strategies. The one that is due to be published shortly, which I am sure the Minister will refer to, will be the third fraud strategy since I have been a Member of this House. The Minister said earlier that the fraud strategy would be published soon—I think he said, “in very short order”. I know that he cannot give a date, but it would be helpful to know whether that will be before Report. The content of the strategy might make this amendment unnecessary, so it would be very helpful if we could see it before Report.
Fraud and scam figures are not falling; they still make up around 40% of all crime in the UK. It really is time that we make those who allow their services to be used by the fraudsters, and those who enable the fraud, liable for their actions—or, rather, lack of action. It is the only way to make them take the issue seriously. I beg to move.
Baroness Doocey (LD)
We are very happy on these Benches to support this amendment. We all know the grim scale of fraud, now our most common crime. Authorised push payment scams are driven by online platforms, adverts on social media fuelling shopping and investment frauds, and hacked accounts enabling ticket scams. Yet, as has been said by the noble Lord, Lord Vaux, platforms such as Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, can still take six weeks to remove illegal content, allowing scammers to resurface again and again—so-called “life-boating”.
This amendment is designed to cut through that inertia. It would provide a clear statutory duty of care on tech and telecom firms to prevent scams at source, using their own AI and tools. It would also require them to share the financial burden with payment providers, which must already imburse many victims of authorised push payment fraud. That seems a fair step, given that the platforms host most of the scams and profit from the engagement that keeps users scrolling. Weak voluntary charters, non-binding Ofcom guidance and even the Online Safety Act’s proportionate measures have let these firms do the bare minimum—reacting to reports rather than proactively detecting fraud through verification, AI-driven scans and systematic audits. Big tech has unparalleled know-how—the AI, software and manpower to spot fraudster patterns and take them down. Banks cannot fight this alone and nor can the police. This amendment would compel these companies to protect their users, stopping scams upstream.
We hope that the Government’s fraud strategy follows the example of this amendment and goes even further with a failure to prevent fraud offence, backed by strong fines and tougher binding Ofcom standards. Meanwhile, Amendment 367 would provide some timely backbone, giving tech and telecom firms a real incentive to act swiftly before yet more victims lose potentially everything.
Lord Young of Cookham (Con)
My Lords, I put my name to the amendment moved by the noble Lord, Lord Vaux. I want to add a brief footnote to the speech that he made in support. In an earlier debate, the Minister was very complimentary about the work of the fraud committee on which we both served, and he can convert that praise into action by accepting one of the recommendations which we made in our report.
It is worth quoting the relevant sections of the report that led up to that recommendation. On page 162, paragraph 57 states:
“However, banks are the last link in the fraud chain and cannot be expected to foot the fraud bill alone”.
Then we come on to our recommendation:
“To incentivise companies to act on fraud and more accurately reflect the balance of responsibility for fraud, the Government must establish a mechanism by which fraud-enabling sectors—in addition to the outgoing and recipient PSP—are required to contribute to the costs of reimbursement in cases where their platforms and services helped to facilitate the fraud”.
That is a very clear recommendation. We came to that conclusion after taking evidence from, for example, TSB and academics. They all made the point that there was absolutely no incentive on the part of the telecommunications companies to do anything, because their business case rested on generating revenue and they faced no penalties. That was our recommendation.
Lord Davies of Gower (Con)
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Vaux of Harrowden, for bringing forward this amendment, which addresses a very important issue. According to UK Finance, authorised push payment fraud accounted for almost 41% of fraud losses in the first half of last year, while unauthorised fraud decreased by 3% on the year. APP increased by 12%. It is clearly a pressing issue, and I am grateful that we have the opportunity to debate it.
The proposition in question would require technology and telecommunications companies, first, to owe a duty of care to their customers to prevent fraud occurring on their platforms and services in general. I do not see an issue with this in principle. Companies should attempt to protect their customers from fraud by implementing general safeguarding measures that prevent against common tactics such as impersonation. I would rather that this did not come from government intervention but was instead the product of a competitive industry, but I recognise that there is only so much that the market can achieve in the short term. I look forward to hearing the Government’s position on this.
I am a little more hesitant to offer support to the second condition of the noble Lord’s amendment, which would require technology and telecommunications companies to contribute to the costs of reimbursing victims of APP fraud that has occurred on their platforms or services. While I acknowledge that there is already an existing framework for company reimbursement in the form of the PSR’s mandatory reimbursement measures of October 2024, I am not certain that the policy is transferable to technology and communications companies.
The PSR requires banks and payment firms to split reimbursement costs evenly between the sending and receiving institutions, and it is very easy to discern which companies are responsible and therefore liable for payment. Adding technology and communication companies into that framework is not so straightforward. These companies are essentially a third party in the actual fraud occurring: they are neither the sender nor the recipient of the defrauded money; they are the medium through which fraud is made possible but not through which it actually occurs. Responsibility for the fraud and subsequent reimbursement does not seem to me to be as clear cut with technology companies as it is with banks and payment firms.
Secondly, the second measure in the noble Lord’s amendment is not thorough enough to support, even if my worries were addressed. The PSR mandatory reimbursement policy, enacted a year and a half ago, was the product of almost seven years of deliberation and policy-making; extending this measure to a whole new industry should face more scrutiny than that which can be achieved for a single amendment. The amendment itself raises questions as to which companies will qualify, what will their contributions be, and how these will fit within the existing requirements placed upon banks and payment firms. These are just a few questions, but there are many more that will need answering if we are seriously to consider this measure as a law.
That is not to say that APP reimbursement has not proved an effective tool in mitigating the harmful effects of fraud. According to the 12 months of available data since the PSR introduced mandatory reimbursement for APP fraud victims by banks and payment firms, 88% of lost money in scope has been returned to victims. Nor is it to say that technology and communication companies will not in future be the vehicle by which APP is committed—ever-popular social media and the ever-increasing AI industry will make sure of that. It is simply to say that we do not know enough about the implementation of this measure to support it. I appreciate its aim, and I agree that something must be done to tackle this specific type of APP, but at the moment I am not sure that the amendment adequately achieves that, so I look forward to hearing what the noble Lord has to say in closing.
Lord in Waiting/Government Whip (Lord Katz) (Lab)
My Lords, this Government are deeply concerned by the devastating impact online fraud can have on individual victims, both financially and emotionally. I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Vaux of Harrowden, for tabling this amendment, to the noble Lord, Lord Young, and to the noble Baroness, Lady Doocey, for helping us to understand and acknowledge the importance of this issue. The Government recognise the importance of preserving trust in digital communications and online spaces in order that all our hard-working businesses operating in the UK can grow and prosper. We recognise that incentives are important for accountability for all stakeholders.
The Government have seen a significant contribution from the banking sector in preventing fraud and supporting victims in response to the Payment Systems Regulator’s new authorised push payment scams reimbursement requirement. In the first nine months of the APP reimbursement scheme, 88% of eligible losses were reimbursed, with £112 million returned to victims. These figures reflect a strong and sustained commitment to protecting consumers—a positive trajectory that deserves recognition. While we are on the PSR scheme, the noble Lord, Lord Vaux, asked about the transition of PSR into the FCA. It is worth noting that we consulted on that planned merger of PSR into the FCA in September and October last year. We are currently considering the responses to that consultation and will bring forward further proposals in due course. He would expect me to say that we want to manage this process in a way that very much does not undermine the work that the Payment Systems Regulator is already doing to ensure that this system works well.
However, every part of an ecosystem must play a meaningful role in fraud prevention, including the telecommunications and tech sector. The Government have already taken steps to ensure that the tech and telecommunications sectors are rightly incentivised to proactively tackle fraud on their networks. The Online Safety Act requires in-scope companies to take proactive steps to stop fraudulent content appearing on the platform and to remove fraudulent material quickly when they become aware of it. If they do not, they risk facing the full regulatory costs of failing to comply, which can extend to 10% of their global revenue.
Ofcom’s duties on user-generated content are now in force in relation to several online harms, including fraud, and the regulator is already assessing platforms’ compliance. Further duties concerning action against fraudulent advertising will be consulted on this year and are likely to come into effect in 2027.
The telecoms sector is subject to regulation that requires providers to block calls that appear to be from scammers and to prevent scammers from using telephone numbers. It is fair to point out that there has been a fair amount of success already in that effort. Voluntary action has proved effective, and under the first telecoms charter operators have introduced firewalls that have stopped more than 1 billion scam text messages since January 2022, so that indicates the scale of both the problem and the progress that has been made.
We are also working with the sector and Ofcom on a number of innovative further actions to tackle the criminal abuse of telecoms networks. The Government launched the second Telecoms Fraud Charter in November 2025. This is an ambitious charter that covers 50 actions the telecoms industry will implement to tackle fraud within the sector. It includes developing new AI systems to detect and prevent fraud, building a new call-tracing system to track down fraudulent communications and upgrading the UK’s networks to enable new features to protect customers from spoof calls. This is a voluntary commitment from the telecoms sector that aims to strengthen efforts to further identify, block and disrupt telecoms fraud through enhanced industry collaboration and robust duty of care towards UK consumers and smaller telecoms businesses that have themselves been victims of fraud. The previous Telecoms Fraud Charter helped UK mobile network operators to block over 1 billion scam messages through the implementation of firewalls. We want to go further than that, which is what the new telecoms charter seeks to achieve.
In addition, Ofcom launched a consultation in October, outlining new rules on how mobile providers must stop scammers sending mobile messages. These proposals draw on existing best practice in the mobile sector and are intended to both prevent scammers accessing mobile messaging services and stop their activities where they have gained access. Last July, Ofcom also published a consultation on new rules to stop scammers outside the UK reaching people and businesses with calls that imitate UK mobile numbers, and these are likely to be introduced this year. We expect these measures to address gaps in the industry’s existing counterscam measures, and to significantly reduce the risk of individuals and businesses receiving scam messages.
Furthermore, in the upcoming fraud strategy, which we discussed earlier in Committee, and which was mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Vaux, the Government will explore options to make it harder for criminals to exploit UK telecoms networks to commit fraud. The noble Lord tempted me to stray off the primrose path of prudence when it comes to timing; I am afraid I cannot do any better than repeat what my noble friend the Minister said: it will be coming in due course. Obviously, we have some time left even in Committee, let alone further stages of this Bill, so I am afraid I can make no commitments there.
The Government will continue monitoring developments in this area to ensure the telecommunications and tech industries remain accountable for delivering on their commitments to tackle fraud and the criminal abuse of their services, in line with the plan we will set out in our soon-to-be-published fraud strategy. However, where insufficient progress is being made in reducing abuse of telecoms networks or tech platforms for the purposes of fraud, the Government, and regulators, will not hesitate to take necessary measures to compel further action. I am on common ground with the noble Lord, Lord Davies, who critiqued the amendment, describing the concern it shows for the intermediary nature of the liability some telecoms platforms would be under. It is a fact that a tech sector reimbursement scheme would undermine the UK’s long-standing intermediary liability regime, which means that platforms are not liable for illegal content posted by users provided they are unaware of the unlawful activity, and which underpins the interactive internet and is a cornerstone of digital innovation. I share his concern that a departure from intermediary liability would leave the UK out of sync with our international partners and potentially threaten growth of the UK’s digital economy.
Therefore, in view of the clear plan we are putting in place to tackle fraud, it is the Government’s assessment that the measures set out in this amendment are not necessary at this time, and I invite the noble Lord to withdraw his amendment.
Lord Vaux of Harrowden (CB)
My Lords, I thank every noble Lord who has taken part in this short debate, in particular the noble Baroness, Lady Doocey, and the noble Lord, Lord Young, who both pointed out the question of incentivisation, which is core to this. We need to incentivise the people who are facilitating or enabling fraud, or enabling the fraudsters to make contact with the victims, to do the right thing.
“The right to protestBefore section 11 of the Public Order Act 1986 (advance notice of public processions), insert—“10A The right to protest(1) Everyone has the right to engage in peaceful protest, both alone and with others.(2) Public authorities have a duty to—(a) respect the right to protest,(b) protect the right to protest, and(c) facilitate the right to protest.(3) A public authority may only interfere with the right to protest, including by placing restrictions upon its exercise, when it is necessary and proportionate to do so to—(a) protect national security or public safety,(b) prevent disorder or crime, or(c) protect public health, or the rights and freedoms of others.(4) For the purposes of this section “public authority” has the same meaning as in section 6 of the Human Rights Act 1998 (acts of public authorities).”.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment would introduce an express statutory right to protest, imposing both negative and positive obligations on public authorities while recognising that the right to protest may need to be limited to protect other legitimate public interests.
Lord Marks of Henley-on-Thames (LD)
My Lords, in this group I have Amendments 369 and 371. Amendment 369 is co-signed by my noble friend Lady Doocey and the noble Baronesses, Lady Fox of Buckley and Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, and is itself subject to two amendments by the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra—Amendments 369ZA and 369ZB. Our other Amendment 371 is co-signed by my noble friends Lady Doocey and Lord Strasburger, and by the noble Baroness, Lady Fox of Buckley. I am grateful to them all for their support.
Amendment 369 seeks to enshrine in statute the right to protest as it has long been enjoyed in this country. The right to protest is, of course, enshrined in the ECHR. Article 10 concerns the right to freedom of expression and Article 11 concerns the right to freedom of assembly and association. The right to protest is, and always has been, circumscribed in English law, just as Articles 10 and 11 rights are circumscribed in the convention.
It is worth reminding ourselves reasonably briefly of the limits placed on the two freedoms by the convention. The right to freedom of expression under Article 10 expressly includes the
“freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority”,
but it is limited, as it may be
“subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society”,
and, most relevantly,
“in the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals”,
or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others. The Article 11 right to freedom of association and assembly accords to everyone
“the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and to freedom of association with others, including the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests”.
It limits the restrictions that may be placed on those rights to those that are
“prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society in the interests of national security or public safety”,
and the list goes on in the same way as Article 10.
I repeat the words of the two convention articles not because they are in any sense new but because they demonstrate the balancing exercise that the state must carry out when considering how far it may or may not be legitimate to restrict the exercise of the convention freedoms in this country, not as a matter simply of compliance with the convention but as a matter of sound public policy.
The right to protest has never been explicitly enshrined in English or UK legislation, although the restrictions on it have been. Considerable changes were made by the Conservative Government in the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022, with new statutory offences of public nuisance, more police powers to impose conditions on demonstrations that were deemed likely to be noisy or disruptive, and harsher penalties for obstructing highways.
The Bill now proposes further restrictions. For example, Clauses 118 to 121, to be considered in the next group, would create a new offence of concealing identity at protests in localities designated by the police. In the light of the development of live facial recognition technology, that looks and sounds ominous. Clause 121 will ban the use of pyrotechnic articles at protests, which I take to include any type of firework, unless exempted by the regulations. Collectively, the new restrictions on liberty and the further police powers, particularly taken with the new powers and conditions legislated for in the 2022 Act, mean that the right to protest is being progressively restricted. That highlights, we say, the need for a very public statement in domestic law of the right to protest and of the criteria to be applied when limiting it.
Our amendments seek to provide that in a way that is proportionate and balanced, but firm. We start Amendment 369 with the statement:
“Everyone has the right to engage in peaceful protest, both alone and with others”.
Our amendment then imposes on public authorities three-pronged duties to respect, protect and facilitate the right to protest. We appreciate that there are or can be significant resource implications for police and public authorities in policing protests. It can be an expensive exercise. We also appreciate that there is a difficult balance for the police to draw between overpolicing protests and underpolicing them, and that it is very often difficult to predict what is the right level of policing to maintain the balance between protecting the right to protest and risking disturbance if things go wrong. But the right to protest is a very valuable right, and it is extremely important to freedom and democracy that public authorities appreciate that they have the legal duty to respect, protect and facilitate it that our amendment describes. That legal duty must be backed by resources for the police and local authorities to ensure that this duty can be effectively performed.
The Government have appointed the noble Lord, Lord Macdonald of River Glaven, to carry out a review of public order and hate crime legislation. Its terms of reference were published last month, and the final report is expected next month, February 2026. In spite of the tight timescale, the noble Lord will, no doubt, carry out a thorough review of the law in this area, guided by the three principles that are set out in his terms of reference. The review will consider, first,
“whether the legislation is fit for purpose”,
secondly,
“whether it adequately protects communities from intimidation and hate”,
and thirdly,
“whether it strikes a fair balance between freedom of expression and the right to protest with the need to prevent disorder and keep communities safe”.
We maintain that proposed new subsections (2) and (3) in our amendment set out succinctly and clearly that balance. In order to be permissible, interference with or restriction of the right to protest must be necessary and proportionate and for the purpose of protecting national security or public safety, preventing disorder or crime, or protecting public health or the rights and freedoms of others. Those, we say, are the public interests that justify restriction of the right to protest.
In many ways, it is a pity that the Macdonald review was not commissioned before the Bill was introduced, given that deferring this legislation until after the report might have given the Government and Parliament a better opportunity to look afresh at some of the provisions in the 2022 Act and consider the proposals in the Bill. But we are where we are, and it is for Parliament to set out the policy objectives. So I suggest that it is more important than ever that we set out in statute the balance that is to be struck, even if this Bill will not be passed in its final form before the Macdonald review is published.
Our Amendment 371 seeks a review of the existing legal framework of protest and its interaction with Article 9, which covers freedom of thought, conscience and religion, as well as Articles 10 and 11, which I have considered above. If our Amendment 371 is accepted, that review will no doubt build on the work of the Macdonald review in the light of the passage of the Bill.
I turn to the two amendments proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, with the balance between the right to protest and justifiable restrictions thereon as the touchstone. Amendment 369ZA would put public authorities under a duty to
“ensure that all other members of the public … are not hindered in any way from going about their daily business”,
and 369ZB would say that public authorities could interfere with the right to protest by restriction to
“prevent inconvenience to any member of the public”
or to
“permit any persons from going about their daily business”—
I suspect that the noble Lord must mean to “permit any persons to go about their daily business”.
The implication of both amendments is that it could be legitimately seen as necessary and proportionate to interfere with or restrict the right to protest for such a reason. Yet there is no requirement in either amendment that a significant number of people have to be inconvenienced or troubled in their daily business for a restriction to be justified. Far from it: Amendment 369ZA talks about any member of the public and Amendment 369ZB talks about permitting “any persons”. Those amendments are far too draconian.
Lord Blencathra
“(d) ensure that all other members of the public who are not protesting are not hindered in any way from going about their daily business.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment to Amendment 369 seeks to ensure that members of the public who are not protesting are able to go about their daily business.
Lord Blencathra (Con)
My Lords, I support the proposed new clause establishing an express statutory right to protest and will speak to my amendments which, I believe, would make that right workable, balanced and fair to all members of the public. I begin by saying that the right to protest is a cornerstone of any free society. It is a mark of confidence, not weakness, when a nation allows its citizens to gather, speak, dissent and challenge those in authority.
I support that principle wholeheartedly, but rights do not exist in isolation. They exist in a framework of mutual respect, where the rights of one group cannot simply extinguish the rights of another. That is why I have tabled these amendments: to ensure that alongside the duty to respect, protect and facilitate protest, public authorities must also ensure that those who are not protesting are not hindered in going about their daily business.
My amendment proposes a new subsection (2)(d), which makes that duty explicit. I have proposed two further subsections in Amendment 369ZB, (3)(d) and (3)(e), to make it clear that preventing inconvenience to any member of the public and permitting people to go about their daily lives are legitimate grounds for proportionate restrictions on protest.
This is not an attempt to water down the right to protest; it is an attempt to anchor it in the real world. As the noble Lord, Lord Marks, said, in the words of the convention, it is to protect the rights and freedoms of others as well. In the real world, “the public” is not an abstract; the public are individuals: it is a nurse trying to reach her shift on time; it is a carer who must get to an elderly relative; it is a parent taking their child to school; it is a worker who risks losing wages, even a job, because the road has been blocked; it is a small business owner whose customers cannot reach them; it is the disabled Peer in this wheelchair who could not get across Westminster Bridge three years ago because Just Stop Oil were blocking me getting across—I should have borrowed one of their banners and then the police would have helped me across.
All these people matter every bit as much as those who are protesting. Their rights are not secondary. Their needs are not trivial, and their lives should not be treated as collateral damage in someone else’s political campaign.
Some argue—I think the noble Lord, Lord Marks, said so—that inconvenience is a part of protest, but inconvenience is not a theoretical concept. Inconvenience has consequences—missed medical appointments, missed exams, missed care visits, missed wages, missed opportunities. For many people, what is dismissed as mere inconvenience is in fact material harm.
I want to be absolutely clear that a legitimate public interest does not need to be a crowd of thousands. It does not need to be a major national event. It does not need to be a threat to infrastructure. Sometimes a legitimate public interest is one person, one individual, who simply needs to get to work or go to school or go to hospital. A democracy protects minorities, and sometimes the minority is a minority of one.
My amendments recognise that reality. They would ensure that the right to protest was balanced with the right of everyone else to live their lives. They would give public authorities clarity rather than ambiguity, because at present the police are often placed in an impossible position. If they intervene, they are accused of supporting protests. If they do not intervene, they are accused of failing to protect the public. My amendments would give them a clear statutory duty: protect protests, yes, but protect the public and ensure that daily life can continue.
This is not about silencing anyone; it is about ensuring that protest remains peaceful, proportionate and legitimate. If protests routinely prevent ordinary people going about their lives, public support for them will erode. When public support erodes, the right itself becomes more fragile. I think we all saw on television recently motorists getting out of their cars and dragging people off the road. That should not happen. They had to become vigilantes to clear the road. That was because they felt the authorities were not doing their duty in keeping the roads clear.
My amendments would strengthen the right to protest by ensuring that it was exercised responsibly, in a way that commands public respect rather than public resentment. The proposed new clause before them is well intentioned, but without my amendments it risks creating a one-sided right that elevates the interests of protesters above the interests of everyone else. That is not balance, that is not fairness, and it is not how rights should operate in a democratic society. My amendments would restore that balance. They recognise that the right to protest is vital but not absolute. They recognise that the rights of protesters must coexist with the rights of those who are not protesting. They recognise that sometimes the legitimate public interest is not a grand principle but a simple human need—the need to get to work, to keep an appointment, to reach a hospital or simply to go about one’s daily business without obstruction. I commend my amendments to the Committee. I beg to move.
Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)
My Lords, it was quite difficult to sit here and listen to that, but I will come to that. I very strongly support Amendment 369, and I do so with a real sense of fury that we are in this position, that we actually have to do this, and that it is not obvious to any Government that in a democracy we need the right to protest to be protected. To engage in peaceful protest means irritating other people. I apologise to the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, but, unfortunately, what he said just now was complete and utter nonsense.
Over recent years, we have seen a real erosion of protest rights through one Bill after another. I sat here and watched it all and protested at every single move. Each was justified on a narrow, technical or operational point but, taken together, they amounted to a clear political direction—making protests harder, riskier and much easier to shut down.
Amendment 369 does not invent new rights. It states in clear and accessible language that peaceful protest is a fundamental democratic right and that public authorities have a duty to respect, protect and facilitate that right.
Amendments 369ZA and 369ZB seek to qualify that right by reference to whether members of the public are “hindered”, experience “inconvenience” or are able to go about “their daily business”. These amendments fundamentally misunderstand the nature of protest. Almost all meaningful protest causes some degree of hindrance or inconvenience. If it does not, it is very easy to ignore. From the suffragettes to trade unionists to civil rights campaigners, protest has always disrupted business as usual, precisely because that is how attention is drawn to injustice. For example, proscribing Palestine Action was such a stupid move by the Government and has caused more problems for them and the police than if they had just left it alone and arrested its members for criminal damage and similar.
I come back to these embarrassing amendments. It is not just the problem of their intent, which I disagree very strongly with, but their vagueness. Terms such as “hindered” and “inconvenience” are entirely undefined. Being delayed by five minutes could be an inconvenience. Noise could be an inconvenience. Simply being reminded of a cause that one disagrees with could, for some, be considered an inconvenience. If those concepts become legal thresholds for restricting protest, the right itself becomes meaningless.
The noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, used the phrase “in the real world”. I live in the real world, and I understand what protest does and why it is needed. Under these amendments, any protest that is visible, noisy or effective could be banned on the basis that someone somewhere was inconvenienced. Democracy is by its nature sometimes noisy, disruptive and inconvenient. It is very inconvenient being here at night debating these issues, quite honestly, in a moderately cold Chamber.
The Minister of State, Home Office (Lord Hanson of Flint) (Lab)
Moderately?
Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)
All right, in a cold Chamber.
If we prioritise convenience over conscience, we should not be surprised when people feel shut out of political decision-making altogether. For those reasons, I support Amendments 369 and 371. In essence, protest law is a terrible mess, and we have got here by a long series of government decisions and government weirdnesses. The whole thing is confusing for the police, as we have been told by senior police officers. It means that police officers make mistakes based on their own judgment. That is a terrible thing to happen in a democracy. Let us get this into the Bill to make clear exactly what a democracy looks like.
Lord Pannick (CB)
My Lords, the right to protest, like most of the rights under the European Convention on Human Rights, requires a balance. A balance is required here between the rights of protesters and the rights of others.
The noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, is absolutely right. The noble Baroness, Lady Jones, may not wish to recognise that, but there are other rights that need to be balanced against the rights of protesters. For her to dismiss as “nonsense” the noble Lord’s concerns will trouble many people here in this Committee, because the protester has to accept that there are other rights and interests that need to be taken into account. So, I am with the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, on this issue.
I am also unpersuaded that we need Amendment 369, which the noble Lord, Lord Marks, has eloquently advanced today. I doubt it because, as he rightly says, it echoes almost word for word what is in Article 11, read with Article 10, of the European Convention on Human Rights, which is already part of our law under the Human Rights Act. I am very doubtful that we need an express statutory provision that repeats what is already part of the law of this land.
Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)
My Lords, I have added my name to Amendment 369 because I like the fact that it creates a duty on public authorities to respect, protect and facilitate the right to protest so that:
“A public authority may only interfere with the right to protest, including by placing restrictions upon its exercise, when it is necessary and proportionate”.
That is the balancing that the noble Lord, Lord Marks of Henley-on-Thames, explained so well in his introduction. It is undoubtedly the case that there is a balancing act.
I am pleased to support the amendment because I feel it has never been more necessary to reassert why the right to protest matters. Despite the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, advising us to not panic—I did not mean that to be quite the pun that it came out as—I feel there is a danger of complacency here. I think that restating this in this amendment is essential. The fact that we need to restate the importance of the right to protest as a fundamental right in a healthy democracy gives us an urgency in championing and guarding carefully and closely what I think is under threat. It allows protest that, as the UN notes,
“enables individuals to express themselves collectively and to participate in shaping their societies”.
It is
“a system of participatory governance”.
I worry that if people believe that that right to protest is being eroded consistently, that leads them to take more dangerous, extreme measures. The right to protest is political free expression. We have all watched over the last week or so the protests in Iran and the absolute bravery of those protesters; it strikes me that we are happy to cheer them on and say how important it is. Closer to home, we have to carry on and expressly say that political ideas expressed on the streets that challenge the status quo allow people to express anger and their dissidence and opposition. That is worth restating.
I think there has been a relentless attempt at curbing such democratic expression. Since I have been in this House, which is for more than five years, there seems to have been a relentless stream of laws threatening the right to protest. As the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, just explained, the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 and the Public Order Act 2023 have substantially expanded police powers to impose restrictions on protests and to arrest people for breach of these restrictions, as well as increasing sentences for peaceful protest offences and lowering the threshold for what would constitute serious disruption to the life of the community.
Those laws have been passed and are ongoing, and they have led to legislative crackdowns on peaceful protests—but here we are again, because it is never enough. It seems to me, as I have argued before, that every time the law is changed those laws are not enforced, or the police or people in authority say, “We can’t do anything. We need more laws and more restrictions”, and so it goes on and on. As this has been the third piece of primary legislation in less than five years to chip away at the right to protest, we should be worried.
That is why I put my name to Amendment 371 looking for a review of the existing protest framework. There is an awful lot of legislation now that can control and curb one’s right to protest. I am delighted about the Macdonald review, by the way, but we need to make sure that the law is fit for purpose. We should not just keep adding on laws all the time. I fear the impact of the Acts on freedom of association, freedom of expression and so on, so I support both amendments.
I want to admit something, though. I do not want to be naive. Despite what I have just said, I know that protests have changed in many ways. This is the balancing act. As we enter into a new discussion now on all aspects of protest, I am aware that I also need to be open-minded. I am completely principled on the right to protest, but I understand that we have to take certain things into account. I have watched demonstrations and protests over the last few years in which intimidation, antisemitic slogans and toxic, intimidating behaviour have happened. I have seen that myself; I cannot deny it. It is also true that there is a more violent vibe around some protests. I genuinely could not believe that pro-Palestinian protests happened after the Manchester synagogue murders; I just could not get over that.
It is not just on that question—I do not want to obsess on that question. There is a whole range of issues in which I am interested. When I have been to events, I have been approached, or rather screamed at, by masked-up, unpleasant, scary protesters. I do not want to deny that. I am also aware of the fact that, as the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, pointed out—he was using the examples of the likes of Just Stop Oil in the past—in some protests it is almost as though disruption has been used to bully people into adherence rather than persuading the public to agree, and that has made me feel uncomfortable. But that is all the more reason why we need to review what is on the statute book. Is it fit for purpose? We cannot just keep adding laws, becoming more repressive and more draconian, and hoping that we are going to sort it all out. That is what I fear.
By the way, in response to the amendments from the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, which I do not support, I remind him of the kind of disruptions that one gets at modern demonstrations. You have a situation where, for example, a protest outside an asylum hotel organised by the Pink Ladies—for those who know who they are—is met with Stand Up to Racism protesters, who are protesting against the protesters, and there is a clash. It is then argued that it is disrupting the local community and that both protests should be banned.
It strikes me that that is not very helpful, because it is perfectly legitimate, for example, to say that you are worried about people being put into local hotels as asylum seekers. I cannot just say that, because I support those concerns, I then want to ban the Stand Up to Racism protesters who are worried about them.
We also have to be aware of the fact that, as the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, has explained, protest does disrupt communities. Somebody—I cannot remember who now—talked about the farmers. I was actually outside Downing Street on a protest with farmers on Budget Day. What was shocking was that the farmers had been banned from driving their tractors even though, until the day before, it had been long agreed that they would be allowed to have a protest of tractors on that stretch. The night before, the tractors were banned and farmers were arrested for trying to drive them in the vicinity. I am aware that the argument that it is too disruptive and would disrupt people can be used in ways that are very unhelpful.
I would remind people as well about the terrible scandal that is emerging in relation to what happened at the Aston Villa match, from which Israeli fans were banned. I know people who went to that match. When protesters went in solidarity with the action of people who were fighting antisemitism, they organised a vigil at that football match in Birmingham. They were fenced in by the police and treated almost as criminals, even though in fact they were showing solidarity with Jewish people in the local area.
The reason I am giving those examples is that we have to admit that it is a bit complex. Therefore, just saying that protests that are disruptive of everyday life will be banned would be a very dangerous precedent, and I disagree with it. But I concede that it is a hard argument and we should therefore take it seriously, not just keep passing laws to ban protesting even more.
Lord Strasburger (LD)
My Lords, I draw the Committee’s attention to my interest as chair of Big Brother Watch. I will speak about Amendments 369 and 371 in the name of my colleague and noble friend Lord Marks.
Protest is the lifeblood of any vibrant democracy, and in the United Kingdom it is one of the most powerful ways for ordinary citizens to make their voices heard. Our democratic system depends not only on elections but on the active participation of the people between elections. Protest is essential because it allows us to challenge decisions, hold leaders accountable and demand change when systems seem slow or unresponsive.
Throughout our history, protest has driven meaningful progress. Universal male suffrage in Britain was pushed forward by mass movements such as the Chartists and later reform campaigns which used strikes, mass meetings and demonstrations to pressure Parliament into extending the franchise and paying MPs so that working-class men could serve. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, that I imagine those were quite inconvenient to a few people. Women’s suffrage in the UK was won by the suffragettes only after decades of marches, processions, civil disobedience and hunger strikes, culminating in the Representation of the People Act.
Peaceful protest educates the public, sparks debate and creates the pressure necessary for reform. In a healthy democracy, disagreement is not a threat but a sign that citizens care deeply about their society. However, our right to protest is, as has already been said, under relentless attack. Through the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 and the Public Order Act 2023, the previous Government introduced multiple restrictions on our precious right to protest. Then last year, the current Government found a way to further suppress peaceful demonstrations by misusing terrorism legislation to stop protests. This led to 2,700 arrests of mostly elderly people who were protesting about what was happening in Gaza. We had the bizarre sight, week after week, of police arresting vicars and old ladies in Parliament Square when they posed no threat whatever to anyone.
Lord Pannick (CB)
Can I just point out to the noble Lord, if he will allow me to, that these people were not arrested for expressing a view about Gaza? They were arrested for supporting Palestine Action, which is a violent terrorist group.
Lord Strasburger (LD)
Not so far as I know.
It was absolutely farcical, but not very funny, when you consider that the hundreds of police officers involved had far more useful things that they could have been doing. But it seems even that was not enough for the Government. Through this Bill, they are attempting to introduce a raft of further constraints on the right of the British people to express themselves via peaceful street demonstrations.
The law surrounding protest is in a complete mess. Recent legislation has been knee-jerk and reactionary, leaving the legal landscape a complete muddle. Police often struggle to know how to police demonstrations properly, which usually leads to excessive heavy-handed policing and people being charged with all sorts of offences when they may not have been. This has also made the law extremely unpredictable: the mission creep of legislation and case law over recent years has meant that there is now a raft of serious criminal offences —that is, indictable offences—tried in the Crown Court that are no doubt adding to the unacceptable backlog in the courts. It is very easy for someone to attend a peaceful demonstration and inadvertently commit an offence or a more serious offence than they would have reasonably expected their conduct to amount to.
For example, a protester who temporarily blocks a road—as many do—would historically have been charged with wilful obstruction of the highway under Section 137 of the Highways Act. This was a summary-only offence, which used to have a maximum sentence of a fine, although this was increased to six months’ custody in the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022. Section 7 of the Public Order Act 2023 introduced a new offence of interfering with national infrastructure, which includes all A and B roads, with a maximum sentence of 12 months’ custody. Section 78 of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 also created a new statutory offence of public nuisance, which only requires the doing of an act that obstructs a public right. This is far wider than the old common-law offence that required the obstruction to be “significant”. The effect of all the above, as an illustration, is that someone who stands or sits in a road, as part of a protest, could be charged with any of the four offences that I have just mentioned. There is no real consistency in the charging decisions between different police forces or different CPS regions, meaning that people are often charged with very serious offences for minor conduct. There have even been cases in which different people are charged with different offences arising from identical conduct at the same protest.
The various laws about protest overlap with each other and have not been developed as a coherent framework. Protesters and police are unsure about which laws apply in particular situations. This results in inadvertently heavy-handed policing, inconsistent prosecution, miscarriages of justice, waste of the public purse and clogging up the courts. More importantly, it results in a cumulative chilling effect on our democracy and a stifling of debate. It is high time that the disorganised and disjointed framework of statutes covering the democratically vital activity of protest is subject to a root-and-branch review—one that is truly independent and thorough—and that is precisely what Amendment 371 calls for.
However, since Amendment 371 was laid, the Government have announced a review of public order and hate crime legislation. It is being chaired by the noble Lord, Macdonald of River Glaven, for whom I have the greatest respect. But the terms of reference for the review seem to be focused rather narrowly and do not appear to cover the matters I have just raised—namely, the unco-ordinated and overlapping legislation on protests. I doubt that, in the short period until the review reports next month, the noble Lord will be able to examine the different approaches to arresting and charging between the different police forces. Perhaps the Minister can reassure the Committee that the current review will be broad enough to cover all the shortfalls in the existing regime I have outlined. If he cannot give that assurance, Amendment 371 will need to be passed on Report to generate the full review that is needed.
Amendment 369, if passed, will hopefully prevent future Governments cumulatively eroding protest rights, as has been customary for the last few years.
Lord Hogan-Howe (CB)
My Lords, I would vote against Amendment 371. It is a difficult area and there has to be balance. The noble Lord, Lord Pannick, put it very well. We get more disruption from Remembrance Day every year across the country because roads are closed and people cannot do what they want to do. There are many times in society when we do things which cause disruption to others, but, if pushed, I would be more towards the position of the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, than I would Amendment 371.
I have three points to make on Amendment 371. First, as the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, said, it duplicates what is already in the convention rights, and I cannot see the purpose of that. Secondly, it says nothing about the basic dilemma, which the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, demonstrated very well: most protest is intended to cause disruption in order to attract attention. People say that causing disruption is a right in a democracy, and I agree with that entirely, but I have to say that it is one of the most inefficient mechanisms for getting an argument over. A guy shouted about Brexit outside my office for about three years. All I could hear was one word about not liking Brexit; I never heard what his argument was. I am not sure a protest ever does any of that. It just attracts attention.
Disruption does cause that attention, but making Amendment 371 the only reason why the police would have to decide whether a march went ahead and if conditions were to be imposed would not address that basic dilemma. Nor would it address the dilemma that mass disobedience has, as the noble Lord, Lord Strasburger, said, achieved far more in the way of democratic change than many forms of parliamentary intervention. It is a mechanism, but a balance has to be struck. Individuals have a right, in addition to the police allowing them to do so, to make sure they can get to a hospital or that a fire engine can get through when it needs to, rather than simply when someone concludes that they will let it through.
Thirdly, the criminal law is the wrong place to state convention rights. If you are going to state them, there may be a place in law, but the criminal law is for declaring offences. If you want to start declaring rights, you might want to start declaring human responsibilities. The start of the Human Rights Act talks about human responsibilities but never got around to providing any enforcement mechanisms. All those things we ought to have as duties towards each other are articulated nowhere. Protestors can have their right to protest, but they do not have to worry about the rights of the poor child who cannot get to school or people who are trying to attend a place of worship. They have rights too, but the protestor apparently does not have to balance their rights when considering exercising his or her own.
My final point is a direct challenge to the noble Lord, Lord Marks, who I really like and respect, and the noble Lord, Lord Strasburger. The noble Lord, Lord Pannick, was quite right: it is quite unfair to criticise the police for arresting people at marches who are supporting a proscribed terrorist organisation. You may not like the proscription, but this place passed the legislation. We also passed legislation saying that it is an offence to support a proscribed organisation. Therefore, if you start waving banners about and saying you support these organisations, there will be a consequence. I do not see how it is okay to argue that the police, in taking action on the laws we passed, are doing something wrong. You may not agree with the law, but it is not right to blame the police for exercising it. That is a confusion that has arisen over the last few months, and it is one we can put right.
Lord Strasburger (LD)
The objection was to the way that terrorism legislation was misused to, in effect, suppress protest. It was misused by combining as a group Palestine Action with two other desperately terrorist organisations, so that MPs and Peers had no opportunity to decide on one and not the other two. It was a bit of a fix.
Lord Hogan-Howe (CB)
I understand the point from the noble Lord, Lord Strasburger. My only challenge is that I do not think it is fair or accurate to blame the police for that confusion. I would stand up for the police, of course, but it would be better of this place to acknowledge that dilemma without blaming them for exercising the powers that we gave them.
Lord Walney (CB)
My Lords, the hour is late, so I will resist the temptation to go further into the rights and wrongs and logical inconsistencies of some noble Lords’ views on the proscription of Palestine Action.
I hope that I offer the noble Lords, Lord Marks and Lords Strasburger, and the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, some reassurance that, in my view, they do not necessarily need to put Amendment 371 on the statute book or even wait for the review lead by the noble Lord, Lord Macdonald. There is an excellent review into protest law, Protecting our Democracy from Coercion, which I was privileged to lay before the House in my then role as the Government’s independent adviser on political violence and disruption. The review covers this whole area. I am pleased that the last Government enacted some of its recommendations, and I am still urging this Government to go somewhat further. It may not strike quite the same chord, but it is there, and it has been done. Some of the recommendations from that review are related to this topic, but they will come in later groupings, so we will get to them when we do.
I will offer a couple of brief thoughts on these fascinating amendments. Many noble Lords have mentioned the balance here, and clearly there is one. It is probably true that the amendments from noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, take a maximalist approach. I am not sure that even I would go that far, and it might well prove to be unworkable. However, it is important for any legislator looking at this area to understand where the public are on this. If we talk about defending democracy, but so gratuitously ignore and act against the very strongly held views of the public on this, then we are getting ourselves into a very difficult place.
None of this detracts from the right to protest. I mentioned my own review, which was published last year. In that review there is polling, which accords with a great deal of polling done by other sources, that shows just how strongly the public object to and oppose disruptive protests. Big majorities of the public are in favour of the right to protest, which is reassuring, but, as soon as it becomes disruptive, they oppose it by a margin of about nine to one.
The proposed new clause in Amendment 369 raises an interesting challenge by explicitly stating the right to protest. The noble Lord, Lord Pannick, is, of course, right that this is unnecessary, in the sense that the right is already enshrined in other areas. Further, where the proposers of this amendment seek to draw the balance glaringly omits the issue of disruption—it completely omits it.
The prospect of avoiding all disruption in protests is clearly not realistic and would go against the point. But we are in an era when much protest is increasingly organised and designed to cause significant economic damage through the disruption of people’s daily lives, often preventing working people from getting to work. I am seeing senior trade unionists scowl at me for making this point, but I would just ask those who have been in trade unions to consider what it feels like for working people to be stopped from being able to go to their workplace and contribute fairly, and being intimidated and shouted at as they go through the doors of their factory or try to go through them and are blocked.
Any attempt to place a balance, whether it is on the statute book, or in an attempt to create new laws, or to shift that balance, which does not acknowledge the harmful effect of disruptive protests on the economy or acknowledge that these things need to be properly balanced, is destined to make very bad law and be intensely unpopular with the public.
Lord Goodman of Wycombe (Con)
My Lords, I strongly commend the report of the noble Lord, Lord Walney, which I have read. My purpose in speaking, very briefly, is to interrogate Amendment 369, in the light of what we already have.
What we already have was very well put in a report by David Spencer of Policy Exchange, the director of which is my noble friend Lord Godson. David Spencer put the current balance very well, I think in his report A Long, Long Way to Go. He wrote:
“The Human Rights Act 1998 does not refer to a ‘Right to Protest’ – the relevant rights are the ‘Right to freedom of expression’ (Article 10) and ‘Right to freedom of peaceful assembly’ (Article 11). However, the sense that many of the recent wave of protests have been ‘peaceful’ by any ordinary understanding of the word – particularly when filled with antisemitic chanting through mobile sound amplifiers, calls for ‘jihad’ on the streets of London, or the use of criminal damage as a tactic – is clearly false. Further, Articles 10 and 11 are qualified rights”—
and this is the point about balance that other noble Lords have made—
“in that they can be restricted where it is necessary and proportionate to protect public safety, prevent crime and protect the rights and freedoms of others”.
I myself think that the balance in the Human Rights Act really puts the matter rather well when it refers to this right of peaceful assembly. Peaceful assembly surely does not mean that the protest must be meek and mild. One must expect protests to be noisy, turbulent, robust and, up to a point, disruptive. But the right of protests to be disruptive, as the noble Lord, Lord Walney, said a few moments ago, must be balanced against the right of others not to have their lives disrupted. That is the balance of the thing.
Furthermore, just in closing, there is a very difficult issue here that David Spencer raises very profoundly about some of the language that has been used in demonstrations that is very close to—trembling on the verge of—incitement. In a country where we have seen what happened in the synagogue in Manchester, and where attacks are carried out on other institutions, we have to bear that in mind.
In short, it seems to me this amendment is either reproducing what is already in the Human Rights Act, in which case it is unnecessary, or it is complicating it, in which case it should not really be there. My own sense is that it is complicating it, and that it makes no sense at all to scatter different rights willy-nilly in different pieces of legislation, rather than—if one is going to set positive rights out in statute—putting them in one place in the Human Rights Act, which is what has been done. So I think that the balance we have got is satisfactory and that the amendment does not really stand up to robust interrogation.
Lord Davies of Gower (Con)
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Marks, for bringing forward these amendments. The importance of peaceful protest in a free and democratic society is of course a principle supported by all noble Lords. I want to be clear at the outset that no one on the Benches on this side questions either the legitimacy or the constitutional right to protest.
I first turn to Amendment 369, which seeks to place an express statutory right to protest into the Public Order Act 1986. This amendment risks solving a problem that does not exist. That is our belief. The right to protest is already deeply embedded in our constitutional and legal framework, as the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, has so carefully explained. It is recognised in common law, it long predates our membership of the European Convention on Human Rights and it has been repeatedly affirmed by the courts as a fundamental freedom in our democratic tradition. Crucially, this right has never been absolute. Historically, it has always existed alongside the equally important duties of the state to maintain public order, protect public safety and safeguard the rights and freedoms of others. That careful balance has evolved over centuries through common law and legislation. It is not at all clear that reinstating the right to protest in statutory form would add meaningful protection beyond what already exists.
There is a real risk that codifying such a broad and long-standing right in statue could have unintended consequences. By setting out open-ended duties on public authorities to respect, protect and facilitate protest, the amendment would inevitably invite further litigation and judicial interpretation. Decisions about the proper balance between protest rights and competing public interests, such as disruption to essential services or public safety, could increasingly be determined in the courts rather than by Parliament or accountable Ministers. That risks further frustrating the will of the Executive and of Parliament. I do not believe that placing an express right to protest into statute is either necessary or desirable. Our system has functioned for generations without such a provision and it is not evident that this long-standing settlement is now deficient.
I turn to Amendment 371, which would require an independent review of the existing legislative framework governing protest. We on these Benches are unconvinced of the case for such a review. The Acts listed have been subject to extensive parliamentary scrutiny and their compatibility with the European Convention on Human Rights has been debated at length in both Houses. We do not support proposed new subsection (5) in this amendment, which would require the review to have regard to the impacts of legislation on the exercise of rights under the ECHR. The ECHR is already subject to unwelcome litigation which brings about perverse outcomes that were never intended at its commencement: there are plenty of examples of that. An additional independent review would be unnecessarily burdensome and duplicative, consuming time and public resources without a clear or compelling purpose. For these reasons, we on these Benches do not support either amendment. I look forward to hearing the Minister’s response and to further discussion of how best to uphold both the right to protest and the rule of law in a balanced and proportionate way.
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
I hope it does not surprise noble Lords if I confess that I have been on the odd protest in my time. I have quite enjoyed the freedom to have a protest. I have protested against the apartheid Government, against the National Front and, if the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, will bear with me, against his Government when he served as a Minister.
The right to peaceful protest is an important part of our democratic society. It is a long-standing tradition in this country that people are free to gather together and demonstrate their views, provided they do so within the law. This Government are committed to protecting and preserving that right. I hope that that gives some succour to the noble Lords, Lord Marks and Lord Strasburger, the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, and indeed others who have spoken in favour.
The noble Lord, Lord Marks, set out his case for the two amendments on public order. Amendment 369 seeks to introduce a statutory right to protest into the Public Order Act 1986, along with a duty on public authorities to respect, protect and facilitate that right. I understand the concerns that he has put and I accept and appreciate those concerns, but, as has been said, not least by the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, these protections are already firmly established in UK law. Public authorities are required under the Human Rights Act 1998, passed by a previous Government in which I was pleased to serve, to act in accordance with the rights to freedom of expression and assembly set out in Articles 10 and 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights.
However, as has been said by a number of noble Lords today, including the noble Lords, Lord Hogan-Howe and Lord Davies of Gower, and as set out in the amendments from the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, these rights are qualified. This point is illustrated by Amendments 369ZA and 369ZB, put forward by the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra. On that qualification, I am not going to get into the argument between the noble Lords, Lord Marks and Lord Blencathra, but for the noble Baroness, Lady Fox of Buckley, and others who have argued for the amendment today, the key point is that that right, as has been said, can be restricted only where restriction is lawful, proportionate and justified. The right to peaceful protest is also recognised under the common law and creating a separate statutory provision risks duplicating existing protections, which could lead to confusion in how the law is interpreted and applied. It might also complicate operational policing without offering any additional legal safeguards.
I have to say that I agreed with the noble Lord, Lord Goodman of Wycombe, that there is a fundamental right to protest. But I respectfully submit, as I think he argued in his contribution, that the amendment would not strengthen that commitments and might indeed introduce uncertainty into the law. That is a very valid and important point, because existing legislation under the Human Rights Act 1998 and Articles 10 and 11, qualified rights under the European Convention on Human Rights, set out the issues that again were ably outlined by the noble Lord, Lord Pannick. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Marks, that the right to protest exists: it is one that I cherish and have exercised myself and may even exercise myself again in the future, who knows? It is an important right, but his amendment would cause confusion and water down the ability to provide that security of protest under the existing legislation. Therefore, I ask him ultimately to not press it further.
I turn to Amendment 371, which would require the Government to commission an independent review of the existing protest legislation within 12 months of the Bill receiving Royal Assent. The noble Lord, Lord Strasburger, said that the Government called the review post the tabling of this amendment. We proposed the review on 5 October last year. The Home Secretary announced an independent review of public order and hate crime legislation on 5 October last year and I suggest that Amendment 371, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Marks, would essentially be what the Government have already ordered and would, if agreed today, negate the purpose of what the Government have already ordered and extend the review that we have already ordered still further by establishing that review in law.
We announced the review on 5 October because of the very issues that all noble Lords have mentioned about balancing the right to peaceful protest and the right to enjoy non-harassment, the right to potentially go to a synagogue, or the right to go about your daily business. Those issues are extremely important, which is why the Home Secretary has appointed the noble Lord, Lord Macdonald of River Glaven, KC, a former Director of Public Prosecutions, as one of the people to undertake the review. His independence and expertise will ensure a rigorous, impartial review. He will have the help and support of former assistant chief constable Owen Weatherill, who brings operational experience from his role with the National Police Chiefs’ Council as lead for civil contingencies and national mobilisation. That independent review reaffirms this Government’s ongoing commitment to keep public order legislation under review.
Lord Strasburger (LD)
I am sorry to intervene so late. Could the Minister please confirm whether the review led by the noble Lord, Lord Macdonald, will consider the issue I was raising, which was the incoherence and overlap between the various pieces of legislation on protest?
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
The terms of the noble Lord’s review have been published and they are available to the Committee now. The review will examine whether current public order legislation is fit for purpose in the light of contemporary protest tactics, community impacts and the need to safeguard democracy. It will examine how effectively police are using the powers available to them. It will consider whether further measures are needed to reassure the communities who are most affected by current tensions, while respecting the right to protest. Those are all important issues. The noble Lord, Lord Macdonald, expects to submit the review to the Home Secretary by spring 2026 and, in doing so, will give an overview of all the legislation that is in place.
The noble Lord, Lord Strasburger, commented on Palestine Action and the right to protest of Palestine Action. I want to reaffirm that both the House of Commons and this House had an opportunity to vote in favour or against that legislation. Both the House of Commons and this House voted in favour of the legislation, which is why, as the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, said, police officers are implementing the legislation that was passed by both Houses. As I recall, although I cannot remember the exact figures, a number of Members of this House voted against that order, including Members from my own side. It was a difficult debate in July. It was a free vote; many Members voted against it in the Commons and this House, but both measures were passed in both Houses.
It is not illegal for anybody to go outside now and campaign against the Israeli Government or any actions by the Israeli Government, or to campaign in favour of the Palestine organisations that are seeking to change the status quo in that part of the Middle East. What is illegal is to show support for an organisation that I, Ministers and the Government, on advice from the security services and others, determined was engaged in activities that crossed the threshold of the Terrorism Act. The noble Lord, Lord Walney, is well aware of the complexities of that, as a former adviser, but that was the advice we got.
If an organisation is breaching the threshold for terrorism, it is the duty of this Government to act, and that is what we did in those circumstances. So I want to place on record again, for clarity, that the noble Lord, Lord Strasburger, can go outside tonight and campaign for a Palestine state and against the Israeli Government, and no police will arrest him or, as he mentioned, any grandparent, teacher or professional. But if he goes out and supports Palestine Action, which has been determined to have crossed the threshold of the Terrorism Act, he will face the full force of the law. If he does not like the law, he can try to change it, but that is the law passed by both Houses and therefore the police have a duty to uphold it. It does not stop peaceful protest.
Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)
I would love to reopen the Palestine Action debate, because I was the person who pushed for the vote and, as we exited the Chamber, several Peers said to me, “This is going to cause trouble”. So people knew.
However, on the review led by the noble Lord, Lord Macdonald, can the Minister say whether the noble Lord set the time limit or whether the Government did, because it seems a lot of work for such a short time?
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
I always try to be helpful to the House. I was not directly party to the issue with the Home Secretary and the noble Lord, Lord Macdonald, about the time limit, so I cannot say with any certainty whether the Home Secretary said to the noble Lord, Lord Macdonald, to do it by April, or the noble Lord, Lord Macdonald, said that he will deliver it by April. If the noble Baroness wants me to write to her to make that point, I will do so.
The key thing at the heart of Amendment 371 tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Marks, is that it provides for the review to be undertaken within 12 months of the Bill receiving Royal Assent. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Marks, that the review we are doing currently will have been completed by April 2026.
Lord Walney (CB)
Many of us in this Committee would be absolutely amazed if the noble Lord, Lord Macdonald, stuck to his timetable of being able to publish something next month. He does not need to take four years, as I did, but it is a ferociously tight timetable.
If you follow the logic of those arguing that people who were protesting in support of Palestine Action should not face legal charge, is it not the case that they would then have to say that support for any terrorist organisation, if it was so-called peaceful, should be allowed—so you should be able to peacefully give your support for Hamas or any violent organisation? If that is their argument they need to properly say it, because many people would have problems with that.
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Walney, on that point. The right to free speech is extremely important, and there is no stopping the right to free speech about the issue of Palestine in any way, shape or form. If a determination is made under the Terrorism Act 2000 that an organisation has crossed that threshold, the Government have a duty to act on that, which is what we have done in this case. With due respect to the noble Lord, Lord Strasburger, I just did not want to allow the comments he made to colour the position on a protest around Palestine. He can protest around that, but he cannot support an organisation that still has some outstanding court cases and has undertaken some severe action to date.
Lord Marks of Henley-on-Thames (LD)
May I press the Minister on that? I quite understand his analysis of the law: that the Palestine Action group became a proscribed organisation when Parliament said it should and, as a result of that, it follows from the terms of the Terrorism Act that there were and are continuing to be prosecutions of people who express support by perhaps sitting wearing a placard, or by wearing an item of clothing that expresses such support.
The proscription is of course the subject of challenge in the courts here and may well be the subject of challenge in the European Court of Human Rights, so I will say nothing further about that. But subject to that, have the Government not had any concern about the fact that because of the way the Terrorism Act works, the proscription of any organisation means that any expression of support, as the noble Lord said —however peaceable or however others might regard it as simply peaceable protest—renders it illegal and renders the person expressing such support liable to being prosecuted? Do the Government not feel that this is a reason for having a review of the validity and sense of the law in this area, where the Terrorism Act carries, as it stands, that unfortunate consequence?
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
We have strayed, with due respect to all noble Lords, slightly wider than the amendment. I just wanted to make the point about Palestine Action because the noble Lord, Lord Strasburger, mentioned it.
The noble Lord, Lord Macdonald of River Glaven, is looking at all aspects of prosecution and all aspects relating to legislation. We keep all matters under review at all times.
The 2000 Act sets down certain criteria. That threshold was passed and crossed in this case. I defended that in this House, and the House supported it on a cross-party basis. That is political life. The noble Lord can move an amendment at any time to strike that legislation down, if he wishes to.
I hope that the noble Lords will not press the amendments before us today. The right to peaceful protest is vital. The Government support it. The Government are making changes still to allow that right but also to try to get a fair balance so that communities and others can also enjoy life when a protest occurs. We have the wider review from the noble Lord, Lord Macdonald of River Glaven, which will report in due course and which will colour, no doubt, further discussions. I hope that the noble Lord will withdraw his amendment.
Lord Marks of Henley-on-Thames (LD)
My Lords, I will be as brief as I can. On the amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, I welcome his support for the principle of Amendment 369, but our amendment does fully respect the rights and freedoms of others and does so expressly in proposed new subsection (3)(c). That does not mean that any inconvenience to citizens should be accepted as a reason for restricting the right to protest. I make the point that the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, and others have made: that nearly all protests cause some inconvenience and noise without unduly infringing the rights of others. I suggest to the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, that, certainly as they are framed, his amendments smack of intolerance in their failure to countenance any inconvenience.
All noble Lords have accepted that the rights of neither side of the argument are absolute—the noble Lords, Lord Walney and Lord Goodman, made the same point. I believe, along with others, that the toleration of some inconvenience is the price of the democratic right to protest.
The noble Lord, Lord Pannick, is absolutely right that we have the ECHR rights, and he knows that I regard them as of critical importance. He makes the point—supported by the others, and it would be echoed by me—that Amendment 369, in part, duplicates the ECHR rights; I am bound to say that I do not regard it as likely that there will be satellite litigation about the difference between the two sets of rights. One point that bears on his argument is that the statement in domestic legislation that directly bears on the right to protest—whereas the Article 10 and Article 11 rights do bear on it but not as directly as our amendment —is of great importance. But that is only part of the picture.
I am also absolutely clear that I am not criticising and have at no stage criticised the police for enforcing the law. Indeed, as it happens, I take the contrary view. I do not believe that the police should have discretion not to enforce the law except on quite serious grounds of convenience.
I criticise the fact—I say it is relevant, when the Minister said it was not relevant—that the need for reconsideration of the Terrorism Act in the light of what has happened, and it has left us in the position that peaceful protest can lead to prosecutions that are unintended, means that a full review is necessary. I, of course, welcome the review of noble Lord, Lord Macdonald of River Glaven, and I welcome the fact that the Government have put that in train, but a further full review over a longer period is necessary.
However, the absolutely crucial point about the need for Amendment 369 is the one the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, made: it would impose an express statutory duty on public authorities to respect, protect and facilitate the right to protest, which is not anywhere in the ECHR. There may be resource implications to that, but it only reflects the importance we place on preserving democracy and the right to protest along with it.
For the time being, I will of course seek leave to withdraw the amendment, but I will reconsider the position between now and Report, having regard to the support I have received from some quarters around the House, but not universally.
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Viscount Stansgate) (Lab)
My Lords, the noble Lord is slightly premature. Technically, we are debating Amendment 369ZA, to which the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, is entitled to reply.
Lord Blencathra (Con)
Yes, my Lords, procedurally I have to be the tail-end Charlie here and seek leave to withdraw the amendment. However, I am so pleased that the noble Lord, Lord Marks, was able to get in and do a summing up of his amendment.
As soon as I saw Amendment 369, I thought, “This is too extreme; it is unbalanced, and I’ve got to rebalance it”. But I could not rebalance it by tweaking it, so I adopted the maximalist approach of the noble Lord, Lord Walney, and that approach, which I agree is also slightly unbalanced, managed to provoke an important debate on the balance of rights and the right to protest. Of course, it provoked the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, but if one is to be beaten up in this House, there is no one better to beat me up than the noble Baroness, because she does it with a smile on her face. I know that, deep down, she does not mean it.
I was delighted to be defended by the noble Lord, Lord Pannick. He was right: we already have all the law we need here—we do not need a new statute. I was interested in one of the points the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, made, which I have seen too. Protests have changed. She said that they have become more violent and toxic and that she was screamed at by nasty protesters. That is not very good. I like what the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, said: that disruption does not often work but persuasion does. He said that disruption is a mechanism for change, but people have rights as well, and that the criminal law is not the place to put in a new law on rights.
I am also grateful for the wise contribution of the noble Lord, Lord Walney. You cannot ignore the public’s views on the disruption protesters cause, and if the protesters go too far, the public will take their own action and will rebel. I mentioned seeing motorists getting out of their cars and dragging protesters off the roads. The noble Lord also mentioned the damage to the economy, and I agree with him on that.
I agree with my noble friend Lord Goodman, who gave an excellent exposition of the balance of rights and duties. I thank my noble friend Lord Davies of Gower. I agree with him and welcome his view that the amendments are not essential.
Finally, I say again to the noble Lord, Lord Marks, that I profoundly disagree with his amendment and what he said, but he had a very powerful and persuasive case, and I congratulate him on the way he set it out.
In his usual courteous way, the Minister took all our points of view into account, and he agreed with the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, that we already have all the rights we need and do not need a new law. So with that, and at this wonderful hour of the night, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Viscount Stansgate) (Lab)
It is now appropriate for the noble Lord, Lord Marks, to tell the Committee whether he wishes to withdraw Amendment 369.
Lord Marks of Henley-on-Thames (LD)
I apologise for intervening too early, and I seek leave to withdraw my amendment.