Crime and Policing Bill

Baroness Bertin Excerpts

Consideration of Commons amendments and / or reasons
Thursday 16th April 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Owen of Alderley Edge (Con)]

My Lords, I will also speak to Motions H and J. In doing so, I declare an interest, as having received pro bono legal advice on intimate image abuse from Mishcon de Reya.

Amendments 257C and 257E in Motion G1 seek to ensure that internet services record, collect and publish data on the proportion of content they remove in 48 hours. I am aware that Ofcom has transparency powers under Schedule 8 to the Online Safety Act to gather information from internet services and that these regulations can be developed further. I am keen that the Government address any remaining gaps to ensure that all internet services that Ofcom defines as being high-risk or medium-risk of sharing intimate image content, as Ofcom will outline in its hashing measures, are required to publicly report their takedown times.

I was disappointed by the Government’s removal of the fine per day per account of £39,000 that noble Lords so overwhelmingly voted to support. While I acknowledge that Ofcom has the power to issue daily fines, I still believe that we must be more agile in our approach to ensure that no victim is left behind. I am keen to return to this issue in future legislation, when we have further information on how regularly Ofcom is issuing daily fines in response to this.

I am very grateful for the vast movement the Government have made by introducing their amendments under Motions G, H and J in response to my amendments at Report and Third Reading. We have made huge progress on the deletion of content after conviction and on the hashing of intimate content to prevent re-upload. I very much look forward to working with the Government and the charities as the centralised hash registry is developed.

I do not intend to test my Motion today. I am grateful to the Government, particularly to the Minister, and to the noble Lords across this House who have worked with me so constructively on these issues. I also wish to thank the survivors who have worked alongside me, Professor Clare McGlynn KC, and Sophie Mortimer from the Revenge Porn Helpline, for their steadfast support. We have made huge strides towards protecting victims from this appalling form of abuse. I beg to move.

[Baroness Bertin (Con)]

Very briefly, I welcome the Government’s Amendments 263A to 263G, 264A to 264F, and 265A to 265C. I put on record how grateful I am to the Government for the constructive conversations that we have had to get to this place. I also put on record my view that these amendments mark the beginning of a new era in the regulation of harmful pornographic content in this country.

I welcome the Government’s commitment to act swiftly on the outcome of this work, particularly the online/offline parity sprint, and I assure Ministers that we will hold them to account on that commitment. In reaching this point, I also echo my noble friend Lady Owen’s point about thanking the cross-party and team effort there has been to get to this point. In particular, I thank my team, Gemma Kelly in particular, and Clare McGlynn, who have been at the helm of these reforms and pushing this work through for a lot longer than I have.

I quickly turn to Amendments 264A and 264F, which address duties on pornographic providers to ensure age and consent verification, and enable performers to withdraw consent. This process must not be about revisiting whether action is needed. The case for action has been made conclusively and the focus must now be on effective delivery, enforcement and regulation. Although I am wary of “review”—allergic to it, even—I accept that a tightly timed statutory process with a clear duty to return to Parliament and the power to act strikes the right balance between urgency and rigour. We know that this industry is rife with coercion and trafficking, and falling short here would be a grave failure to victims.

Amendments 265A and 265C address adults role-playing children in pornography. The purpose of this offence is clear: to ensure that material which simulates, normalises or encourages an interest in child sexual abuse is illegal to host online. This is not theoretical harm; this content acts as a gateway to a very real and dangerous interest, and it is right that the law intervenes decisively. I am very grateful that the Government are moving on that.

Very briefly, though, I offer reassurance to communities that have raised concerns. This offence is carefully and deliberately drawn—I thank officials for doing that—with clear exclusions for genuinely fanciful depictions involving unambiguously adult participants. This is not about criminalising benign fantasy but about drawing a firm line at the point where content begins to replicate the dynamics, power imbalance and harms of child sexual abuse.

I also welcome Amendments 263A to 263G, which extend offences to include step-incest and foster relationship pornography involving children. For far too long, pornography has been allowed to normalise and incite sexual abuse within the household, and these amendments begin to close a deeply troubling gap in the law. However, I appreciate the Minister saying that this is only the beginning.

On nudification tools, criminalising their creation and supply and bringing them within the scope of the Online Safety Act is a proportionate and necessary step, but we must emphasise that platforms and search engines must not be allowed to direct users or to profit from this software. We saw just today reports from Bloomberg that Apple and Google have profited heavily from nudifying apps, which only underlies the need for urgent action and how specific it must be to stop search engines allowing these kind of apps to remain possible to find.

This work matters far beyond this Chamber. Harmful pornography is a global problem requiring a global response. Regulation and law change are not an end in themselves but, used properly, can raise awareness, disrupt profit and accelerate change. These amendments are not the final word but they are a decisive and long overdue step forward. I welcome them.

[Baroness Thornton (Lab)]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend the Minister on the work that she has done on the issues that have been raised in the House about pornography and online harm. I add my thanks to my noble friend and her honourable friend the Minister in the other place for the very competent amendment they have made in Motion W to the pardons on the decriminalisation of abortion.

Crime and Policing Bill

Baroness Bertin Excerpts

3rd reading
Wednesday 25th March 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd (CB)]

My Lords, can I add one word? In my experience in dealing with a large number of offences where corporations were responsible, it is only fines—and fines of a substantial amount—that have any real effect. The fines in this Bill are modest, in my view. I hope everyone will realise that unless we put something by way of a fine in, we are making law without effect.

[Baroness Bertin (Con)]

My Lords, I support the amendment from the noble Baroness, Lady Owen. I will not repeat what others have said eloquently. I will just speak quickly to my amendments, which are procedural. I have tabled Amendments 15 to 17, which I should have formally moved on Report—human error there, apologies. They were agreed by the Government to be consequential on my original Amendment 297AA, which passed with the support of this House, regarding the banning of depictions of step-incest in pornography. I shall simply move them formally and will not revisit the arguments, apart from to say I am pleased that the conversations I am having with the Government are positive. I am hopeful that we will be able to reach an agreement that sees this appalling and abusive content made illegal, as it should be.

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, I really wish this Government would listen to common sense sometimes. Can the Minister please go back to No. 10 and explain that this is urgent?

--- Later in debate ---

Moved by

[Baroness Bertin]

15: Clause 107, page 145, leave out lines 20 to 27

Crime and Policing Bill

Baroness Bertin Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 27th November 2025 Lords Chamber

I hope very much indeed that the Government will look seriously at this group of amendments.

[Baroness Bertin (Con)]

My Lords, I support this group of amendments. What a speech my friend, the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, made; I commend all the speeches that have been made. If the Government only do one thing with this Bill, it should be to take on this group of amendments.

It is utterly terrifying. I addressed a teaching conference this week, with the safeguarding leads of many schools around the country, and they are tearing their hair out about it. The kids are on this stuff 100%, as we have seen from the statistics. The other thing they said to me, which the noble Baroness mentioned, is that parents either know about it and are terrified about how to address it, or they do not know about it, and I am not sure which is worse.

I reiterate that we have to get ahead of this, as the noble Baroness said. The Government must get ahead of this; otherwise, the dangers are just too huge to think about. I will keep this brief because I will speak about it more in due course, but my team and I went on a chatbot and we were “Lily”, and within about three seconds we were having an incestuous conversation with our father. It was absolutely crackers—terrible—so I ask the Government to please take on board these recommendations.

[Baroness Royall of Blaisdon (Lab)]

My Lords, I was not intending to speak and I have nothing to add to all the brilliant speeches that have been made. I did not participate in the debates on the Online Safety Act. I feel horribly naive; I find this debate utterly terrifying and the more that parents know about these things, the better. I very much hope that my noble friend will be able to take this back and discuss these issues with people in this Chamber and the House of Commons. We cannot be behind the curve all the time; we have got to grip this to protect our children and our grandchildren.

Crime and Policing Bill

Baroness Bertin Excerpts

2nd reading
Thursday 16th October 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bertin (Con)]

My Lords, hers is never an easy act to follow but I want to thank the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, so much for her work. I say to her: “Back at you”, as I will be supporting her work in this Bill as well. I also welcome the Minister to this House—what an asset she will be to it and the Government. I graciously thank her and this Government for the announcement around the criminalisation of depictions of strangulation. However, the law has to be well drafted, because the industry will find every loophole it possibly can. It is like water dripping through the cracks. It will already be thinking about it, because it is a very popular and profitable genre, so I would appreciate some back and forth on that to make sure we absolutely get it right. This is a big Bill, so we do not want to spend time arguing over things that we basically agree on.

Pornography has long existed, and it is not going anywhere anytime soon, but its scale, nature and impact have changed dramatically. As many noble Lords have already said, today, free and easily accessible content is increasingly violent, degrading and misogynistic. This is not a niche issue. Over a quarter of the UK population regularly accesses online pornography, a third of men say they watch it weekly, and the average age of first exposure is just 13. Technology such as nudification apps designed to sexually humiliate are still legal and very prolific.

This is not confined to pornography sites. Violent sexual content is now present on social media, X being the worst offender, and mainstream platforms. Homepages of major porn sites display material with titles including words like “attack”, “kidnap”, “force” and “violate”. Mainstream search engines very quickly get you to thousands of videos with harmful titles such as: “He overdid it and now she is dead” and “Lawyer strangled, bound and gagged in a van”—these are just the ones I can read out. I am pleased the little ones have gone from the Chamber. Content involving themes of incest and child abuse are also disturbingly prevalent. The free-to-view porn business model has driven this extremity. This is rewiring how young people think about sex, gender and relationships. We know that toxic masculinity is rising, and experts warn of links between viewing extreme pornography and committing sexual violence. Indeed, online porn has been described by one expert as

“the largest unregulated social experiment in human history”.

We discovered this during the review. The impact is far-reaching. Choking has now become a sexual norm. That is why the law needs to be changed, but it will take a while to reverse this. Some 38% of women under 40 say they have been strangled during sex. Nurses reported to us that they deal with sexually inflicted injuries on a very regular basis. Teachers reported pupils’ confusion over what constitutes sexual assault. Increasingly, there are reports of sexual dysfunction among men who find real-life intimacy less stimulating than online extremes, leading to many relationship breakdowns. When I met with Gisèle Pelicot’s daughter last month, she was adamant that online pornography played a role in her father’s crimes, and Dame Angiolini, in her inquiry, highlighted that Sarah Everard’s murderer had a history of viewing violent pornography.

Yet, despite the harm and the pace at which extreme online content has proliferated, legislation has lagged far behind. There is no external moderation nor proactive monitoring. There is no one government department with overall accountability or responsibility. Laws are patchy and rarely enforced. I am delighted that one recommendation out of 32 has been taken forward, but there is a lot more to do. In stark contrast, the world of offline pornography, such as DVDs, is regulated by the British Board of Film Classification, which my noble friend Lady Benjamin spoke about.

These amendments will absolutely do just that and will seek to reduce this imbalance in the law. It cannot be right that offline law refuses to classify material that promotes or depicts child sexual abuse, incest, trafficking, torture and harmful sexual acts. This has to change. These recommendations and amendments would ensure that not only the act of incest but also its depiction is banned along with material that encourages an interest in child sexual abuse. They would bring parity between material prohibited online and offline. They would also compel sites and platforms to verify the age and consent of anyone appearing on them.

This is not about ending pornography; it is about putting proportionate and necessary guard-rails back in place. I do not stand here naively and think that these amendments will solve everything overnight, but I believe these changes could bring good, workable and enforceable law that, at long last, is in step with technological developments and growing national sentiment.

To our daughters, it would say there is no industry or subculture that condones or excuses violence against them. To the porn industry and the ecosystem it supports, it would say that they can no longer avoid accountability or scrutiny. To our sons—who are also damaged in all this—regulating online pornography says to them that what they see on their screens is not normal, it is not acceptable and it is not inevitable. When we come to later stages, I urge noble Lords and the Government to support these amendments. I apologise for overrunning.