Crime and Policing Bill

Debate between Baroness Doocey and Lord Young of Cookham

Committee stage
Wednesday 7th January 2026 Lords Chamber

[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.