Voyeurism (Offences) (No. 2) Bill

Baroness Chakrabarti Excerpts

Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 26th November 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Burt of Solihull (LD)]

My Lords, I will add briefly to the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss and my noble friend Lord Marks. As the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, will already have gathered, we welcome Amendment 1, which would widen the offence to include,

“invading the privacy of B, whether or not by”,

humiliating, alarming or distressing them, for the reasons he has given.

Amendment 2 would widen the motivations to include financial gain by the person who took the photo or whoever has distributed it. Upskirting images are freely and easily available on the internet; this amendment spells out that anyone profiting from their distribution is committing a criminal offence.

Amendment 3 cuts off the defence that a group of “lads”—however old they may be—were bonding, having a laugh and did not mean any harm. It is not okay, whatever the motivation of the perpetrator or perpetrators, if the person has not consented. I believe that it is worth spelling that out. These points deserve to be made even if they do not make it into the Bill.

[Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)]

My Lords, once more I rise in support of the Bill, and I know that it is rightly supported by Members on all sides of the House. After a lot of thought and some discussion, including with the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, I will stick to my Second Reading position that the Bill should pass through this House swiftly and completely unamended. I have two reasons for sticking to that position, the first pragmatic, but no worse for it, and the second a legal policy reason.

I will take the amendments in reverse order. I am very glad to hear that the noble Lord, Lord Marks, has abandoned his earlier preference for strict liability sex offences, which would be a very illiberal innovation in our criminal law. I take his point about accidental occurrences and so on, but I do not find either Amendment 2 or Amendment 3 to be particularly attractive or to add anything to the Bill.