Crime and Policing Bill

Debate between Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb and Lord Hogan-Howe

Committee stage
Thursday 15th January 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hogan-Howe (CB)]

My Lords, I agree and disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Strasburger, in equal measure, which may surprise him. On the protest point, he reaffirmed what I tried to say the other day, which is that the ECHR does not give the term “facilitation of protest”, but the police have given that term and put that sobriquet over the articles. The danger is—and I am afraid it is what materialised—that it has been interpreted as almost arranging some of the protests rather than the simplistic expression of “facilitation”. I do not think that we are a mile apart on it, but I come at it from a slightly different angle.

I think that facial recognition is an incredibly good thing. People during the debate have agreed that it has a value. It has two purposes: one is to try retrospectively to match a crime scene suspect with the database that the police hold of convicted people; and the other one, which has caused more concern and on which there may be common ground, is about the live use of it.

One thing that I think needs to be amplified—the Minister may mention it when he responds—is that the Court of Appeal has decided that the police use of facial recognition is legal. However, it did raise concerns—this is where I certainly agree with the noble Baronesses, Lady Jones and Lady Doocey, who already made this point—that it needs to treat all people equally. It is not okay to have a high failure rate against one group by race and a different success rate against another race. That is not acceptable. I was surprised, as I know the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, was, when this had not been made public and was discovered in whatever way it was discovered. That needs to be got right. There is no justification for that error rate, and it must be resolved.

Secondly, this may surprise the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, but I agree that there should be more regulation of its use, and that it should be regulation by Parliament, not by the police. Where I disagree is on whether this Act, and this proposed amendment, is the right way to do it. We are going to have to learn, first, how the technology works, how it is applied by the police, where its benefits are and where its risks are. I also agree that there ought to be independent oversight of it and that anybody who is offended by its use should have the opportunity to get someone to check into it to see whether it has been misused. They should also be provided with a remedy. A remedy may be financial compensation, but I would argue that it is probably better that something happens to the database to make it less likely to be ineffective in the future. There needs to be some reassurance that somebody is improving this system rather than not. I am for facial recognition, but there should be regulation and I do not think that this Act is the right time. As has already been said, the consultation that started just before Christmas and concludes, I think, in February will give us a good way forward, but it will need a bit more thought than this Bill, when it becomes an Act, might offer us.

Finally, there are an awful lot of regulators out there, and we all pay for them. There are surveillance commissioners, intrusive surveillance commissioners and biometric commissioners. They are all examining the same area—if they ever get together and decide to have one commissioner to look at the lot, we would probably save quite a lot of money. This is an area in which the existing commissioners probably could do two things. One is to regulate and the other, potentially, is to approve, either in retrospect or prospectively depending on the emergency or the urgency with which it should be used. There is therefore some need for help but, for me, I do not think that this Bill is the right opportunity.

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, I have signed this amendment because I think it is very sensible and covers some ground that really needs tackling. It would ensure that the police could not use live facial recognition technology when imposing conditions on public assemblies or processions under Sections 12 or 14 unless a new specific code of practice governing its use in public spaces has first been formally approved by both Houses of Parliament—that sounds quite democratic, does it not? It is intended to safeguard public privacy and civil liberties by requiring democratic oversight before this surveillance technology is deployed in such contexts.

It is always interesting to hear the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, former Met Commissioner, on the tiny little areas where we do overlap in agreement; I think it is very healthy. However, I disagree deeply when he says this is not the legislation and it should be something else. We keep hearing that. I cannot tell noble Lords how many times I, and indeed the noble Baroness, Lady Doocey, and the noble Lord, Lord Strasburger, have raised this issue here in Parliament and in other places. The noble Lord, Lord Strasburger, asked a quite interesting question: why should we care? Quite honestly, I care because I believe in justice and in fairness, and I want those in society. As I pointed out yesterday, I am a highly privileged white female; I have been arrested, but I was de-arrested almost immediately by the Met Police when all the surrounding people started saying, “Do you know who she is?” and they immediately took the handcuffs off.

At some point we have to accept that this needs regulation. We cannot accept that the police constantly mark their own homework. We were reassured that all the flaws in the algorithm and so on had been fixed, but clearly we cannot be sure of that because we do not have any way of knowing exactly what the flaws were and who has fixed them. Live facial recognition represents a huge departure from long-established principles of British policing. In this country, people are not required to identify themselves to the police unless they are suspected of wrongdoing. Live facial recognition turns that principle on its head by subjecting everyone in range of a camera to an automated identity check. It treats innocent members of the public as potential suspects and undermines the presumption of innocence.

I disagree deeply with the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, when he says that it is not a blanket surveillance tool—of course it is. It is a blanket surveillance tool and is highly dangerous from that point of view. It is a mass biometric surveillance tool. It scans faces in real time, retains images of those flagged by the system and does so without individuals’ knowledge or consent.

If the police randomly stopped people in the street to check their fingerprints against a database, for example, we would rightly be alarmed. Live facial recognition performs the same function, only invisibly and at scale. Its use in the context of protest is a dangerous crossing of a constitutional line. We already have evidence that facial recognition has been deployed at demos and major public events, with a chilling effect on lawful protest. People will not go to these protests because they feel vulnerable. They are deterred from exercising their rights to freedom of expression and assembly because they fear being identified, tracked or wrongly stopped. While this amendment proposes a safeguard through parliamentary approval of a statutory code, we should not allow that to imply acceptance of live facial recognition at protests in principle. In my view, this technology has absolutely no place in the policing of democratic dissent.

We should reflect on the broader direction of travel. Live facial recognition is most enthusiastically embraced by authoritarian regimes, while a number of democratic countries have moved to restrict or even prohibit its use. That alone should surely give this Government pause to reflect on whether this is the right legislation to bring in. Independent observers have witnessed cases in which live facial recognition has misidentified children in school uniform, leading to lengthy and very distressing police stops. In some instances, those wrongly flagged were young black children, subjected to aggressive questioning and fingerprinting despite having done nothing wrong. What safeguards are in place to prevent misidentification, particularly of children and people from UK minority-ethnic communities? That is a basic question that we should be asking before we pass this legislation. I support the amendment as an essential check, but I hope that this debate sends a wider message that Parliament will not allow the routine use of intrusive biometric surveillance to become the price of exercising fundamental democratic rights.

I want to pick up something that the Minister said on Tuesday. He directed the Committee to the front page of the Bill and said that, in his view, the Bill was compliant with the ECHR. As the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, pointed out, that is his belief and his view. It is absolutely not a certificate of accuracy. I am not suggesting for one moment that there is any intent to deceive; I am merely saying that it is not a certificate of truth. With claims about seemingly authoritarian laws being compliant with human rights, that assessment can be challenged and should be challenged as much as possible. It remains subjective and is challenged by the organisation Justice, for example. We are clearly going to disagree about a lot in this Bill, but we are trying our best over here to make the law fair and representative of a justice that we think should exist here in Britain.

Public Order Bill

Debate between Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb and Lord Hogan-Howe

Report stage
Tuesday 7th February 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, I disagree very strongly with the noble Lord, because I think he is wrong. Once you give the police the idea that it is okay to arrest a journalist, why would we expect them to understand—you cannot deny that the police quite often misuse the law because they do not understand it—that they can do so only if they are gluing their hands or something like that? In any case, what journalist would do that? I cannot think that they would want to.

[Lord Hogan-Howe (CB)]

Mistakes are made; people are arrested wrongly. The police find acute problem-solving solutions when everyone else talks about “in six months’ time”. Someone has to make a decision; sometimes they make the wrong one—they happen to be human beings—and that is a problem. There is no general defence of being a journalist to any criminal offence. There is protection of legally privileged material, including journalistic material, and the Police and Criminal Evidence Act provides quite proper protection for that. However, that is not the same as providing a general defence for criminal behaviour to a journalist. In my view, that is what this proposes.

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

I speak as the mother of a journalist, so I have a vested interest here, but journalists do not go along to protests to join them but to watch and report on them. The Hertfordshire police and crime commissioner, David Lloyd, with whom I had the displeasure of sharing a panel the day after this all happened, said that protesters should not have the oxygen of publicity. That was his attitude: “Freedom of the press is fine, but not for protesters.” That is utterly unreasonable, as are the noble Lord’s comments. I support this very strongly. I do not see why anyone here would have a problem with it, except the Government. What are they frightened of? What do they think journalists will report that would look so bad for them? Obviously, almost anything.

Public Order Bill

Debate between Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb and Lord Hogan-Howe

Report stage
Monday 30th January 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hogan-Howe (CB)]

That is what the amendment says: “prolonged”.

Who is going to decide? The noble Lord, Lord Paddick, made this point: people may have lost confidence in the police, for reasons that we understand. However, the alternative appears to be that we leave it in the hands of the protesters to decide how long they will stay. That is unacceptable. If the state is going to have a view on these matters, it is for the state to decide, not the protesters. Of course they will have a view, which may be different, but they have to take the consequences if they get that line wrong. That is not happening at the moment.

The noble Baroness, Lady Jones, said that we could all be disrupted. She has often made that point and I have often disagreed with her. She says that we are always disrupted every day, certainly in London—not the rest of country, frankly—by congestion and, therefore, why should we criminalise protest that only does the same thing? I hope that I am fairly representing her argument.

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

Nearly.

[Lord Hogan-Howe (CB)]

Nearly. Pollution kills people but we are not trying to legalise unlawful killing. One could pursue that argument to its logical extent, but I do not accept that someone intentionally blocking someone else’s path is the same thing as someone suffering the consequences of congestion. I expect that the noble Baroness is going to say something.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

In a disruption, people can turn off their engines. In traffic, they keep them running.

[Lord Hogan-Howe (CB)]

I am sorry—I was looking at my notes and missed that. Would it be terrible if the noble Baroness repeated it, so that I can properly respond?

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

The noble Lord is so profound. I said that when there is disruption, people know that it is going to last some time, so they can turn off their engines. What happens in traffic is that people leave their engines running, which is, of course, highly polluting, as he said.

[Lord Hogan-Howe (CB)]

But the protesters could leave. It is in their gift—I think.

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

The Met Police, after the disruption on motorways into London, put out a tweet asking people to report instances of being unable to get their children to school, medical emergencies or whatever. The stream of replies after the tweet was nothing to do with people objecting to the disruption; they were supporting the action. So the Met Police might have got that slightly wrong.

[Lord Hogan-Howe (CB)]

My final point is that although I cannot support the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, for the reasons I have explained, I support the amendment of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope. However, the challenge made by the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, is that “minor” sounds intuitively contentious when referring to something serious, and it is an unusual bar by which to define something. The noble and learned Lord I think acknowledged that there may be more work to do on that.

Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill

Debate between Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb and Lord Hogan-Howe

Lords Hansard - part one & Committee stage
Wednesday 27th October 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, I support Amendment 58 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe, but I think all of the amendments in this group are extremely worthwhile. The noble Baroness, Lady Bertin, gave a thoroughly well-argued pitch for her amendment, to which the Government have to listen. The noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, also argued very comprehensively for the inclusion of stalking, and I agree with that very strongly.

I wanted to sign every single amendment to this Bill, so I have ended up signing a sort of weird collection, and I apologise for that; I care about it all because I am so distressed about the Bill in general.

On Amendment 58, we need to know exactly what the Government intend with their duty to reduce serious violence. We talked earlier about intrusions, particularly relating to confidentiality, so it is quite important to have a redefined definition of serious violence. Because we have identified those intrusions, without safeguards, we must be sure that Parliament is clear and precise about the situations to which we intend this duty to apply; otherwise, we are left with a vague duty that interferes with people’s right to privacy in arbitrary and unfair ways. I very much hope that the Minister is listening and agreeing.

[Lord Hogan-Howe (CB)]

My Lords, I support Amendments 55 and 56, principally because, apart from their justice, it is naturally the right thing to do. As importantly, the amendments move the police into the preventive area more than they are now. I keep urging the Government and the Home Office in particular to make statutory the preventive duties. I am afraid that that is not yet taking shape, and this is a way in which it could do so.

There is a consequence of this. People have talked about the inconsistent approach around the country. That will generally tend to happen: with 43 organisations, we will always end up with an inconsistent approach. For me, 43 is at least 42 too many. That is my view; others will have different views but having so many organisations will lead to inconsistency.

More importantly, we are asking for officers to be more specialist in their investigative capacity. If it is left to the front-line officers, often they do not always have the time, or, frankly, the skills, to investigate these serious types of crime. The natural consequence of that is that more people will be moved out of uniform and into specialist areas. We all need to keep in mind that although part of the public will urge being able to see officers more often, officers are more effective when they are more specialist. How we get that balance right is difficult. This is not a plea for another 20,000 cops; it is about getting the balance right between the specialist who can be more effective and the uniformed officer who is more visible. That debate continues, and the amendments support that.

I rose to talk in particular about Amendments 57 and 58, which I support. Professor Shepherd has achieved some incredible things from his base in Cardiff. There are two big reasons why I support those amendments. The first is the constant bid for consistency. They provide a further test on the definition of serious violence, such as the requirement for hospital attendance, particularly at A&E. There is a danger, of course, that some people will attend A&E who do not really deserve to go there—they believe that they are seriously ill, when in fact they are not—but that risk is fairly low. Most importantly, as the noble Lord, Lord Brooke, said, the amendments will urge the health service to share the data it has to better inform the police and the Home Office on the strategies for the future. I am afraid that if the police can be inconsistent, so can the health service in sharing data that is vital to understanding the nature of serous violence around the country. Without that information, neither the Government nor the police, nor others, can take action.

For those reasons, I support these amendments, which are sensible conclusions.

Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill

Debate between Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb and Lord Hogan-Howe

Committee stage & Lords Hansard part one
Wednesday 20th October 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, it has been fascinating and very moving to listen to the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, but I am coming at this from a completely different direction. Although I am partly thinking about the police officers involved, I am also thinking about people who bring complaints against police officers. I have seen the police complaints system at first hand. At some point in the past, a Met Police sergeant came to me and told me that he had seen a few officers deleting files that the Met held on me. These were files that I had asked to see and had been told did not exist—so I saw the police complaints system at first hand. I took a complaint to the Independent Office for Police Conduct, a vastly underresourced organisation trying to do its best on very difficult work. This was not an emotional issue for me—it was a professional, work issue—but that Met Police sergeant suffered PTSD and was essentially hounded out of the Met Police because he had come to me as somebody who wanted the truth exposed, and so was in a whistleblowing situation. I could not do anything for him, but I persisted with my complaint.

There is a saying that justice delayed is justice denied, and it is true on both sides—perhaps more when people are emotionally involved in the complaint they are making, which as I say did not really apply to me. In a way it is doubly true for complaints against the police, because there is a power imbalance. The police are seen to retain their positions, authority, power and legitimacy while complaints are ongoing, and this can be extremely upsetting.

This issue has come to light because of the allegations against the murderer of Sarah Everard. It is staggering, and truly terrifying, that the police had within their ranks somebody they knew, jokingly perhaps, as “The Rapist”. A noble Lord from this House, a previous Metropolitan Police Commissioner, who is not in his place today, said in an interview on the radio that it was not true that he was called “The Rapist”—but he is the only person I have heard saying that was not true. Perhaps another ex-Metropolitan Police Commissioner here might know better.

So it is time to cut the delays that everybody on both sides experiences in police complaints and disciplinary hearings and, most importantly, to give the independent watchdog the resources it needs to do the job. I have complained in the past about the number of police officers it employs, because it seems to me that you do not necessarily set a police officer to catch a police officer—but in fact it is so underresourced that I feel it would benefit from almost anybody if it increased its staff. So this is something that the Government have to deal with.

[Lord Hogan-Howe (CB)]

My Lords, I support this amendment. The basic problem around IOPC investigations is one of timeliness and quality. I am afraid it has gone on an awful long time. To be fair, from time to time it concerns police investigations under other bodies, but it has persisted, despite the fact that the organisation has changed over the years from the IPCC to now the IOPC. This particularly affected groups of officers such as firearms officers, some of whom have been under investigation for in excess of 10 years. That cannot be for anyone’s good.

We talked earlier about the trauma suffered by individual officers, and that is one of the major causes of such trauma. I therefore think that some time kind of time limit would be helpful. Even in a criminal case such as murder, the point from commitment to arriving at Crown Court is expected to be of the order of 100 days. If such a complex case can be taken so quickly, it seems to me that these cases are surely susceptible to travelling far more quickly and then being decided in the hearing far more quickly, too.

There are some peculiarities around the police misconduct process which have to be understood and, I think, given some sympathy—but these things can be changed. For example, when a complaint is made, particularly where a criminal allegation is alleged, there is a transmission of the case, first from the force to the IOPC, then it may go to the CPS, and then it may go back to the IOPC and then it may go to the force. This merry-go-round goes on for months. It is not at all unusual for these cases to go for at least one year and usually more, and for there still to be no outcome.

There is a further level of complication when, for example, special evidence needs to be given in a court case. It is difficult to talk about this in public, but essentially, when intelligence is gathered by the police that cannot be shared in court and cannot be shared in a coroner’s court, a public inquiry has to be held in front of a qualified judge. All this does is lengthen the whole process. It particularly affects firearms officers when they have to justify why they shot someone and they are unable to explain the intelligence they received. It means that the whole process goes round this rigmarole again.

There are various remedies to try to resolve this. One is a simple time limit. The difficulty with a time limit is that it can be hard-line and does not fit every case. Sometimes you need some discretion. I would argue that the decision-making between the IOPC, the CPS and the force should be done in parallel and not in sequence. The consequence of it being done in sequence is that it keeps going on and on and they keep referring it back to each other. Surely, they could consider the same case in parallel and therefore reduce the time. It would be a good idea to have a legally qualified chair seriously examining the timeline and whether or not it is justified. If it is not justified, the chair should be able to intervene. If it is justified, of course the case should continue.

My final point may be to one side of the amendment, but it is important because it goes to the point about timeliness and quality. One of the challenges faced by the IOPC is that it does not always send its most experienced investigators to deal with the most complex cases. The equivalent for the police service would be that you never send your shoplifting squad to deal with a murder—that would not be very sensible. Officers build their experience in the shoplifting squad and may go on to do more complex things.

The reason may be, as the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, said, that the IOPC has insufficient resources. I think it also has insufficient specialism and does not build up its expertise. When a serious case comes in—someone loses their life or it is a serious allegation—they should dispatch the A team, not the people who happen to be available. I do not think that does anyone any good when they have to deal with serious matters which the families want straight answers to and the officers want to believe that the investigators have some maturity of judgment. It is not a matter of age but a matter of experience. For those reasons, the IOPC should consider this. It is not exactly pertinent to the amendment, but it is relevant to the discussion about quality that we can fairly have about IOPC investigations at the moment.