Crime and Policing Bill

Debate between Baroness Ludford and Lord Clement-Jones

Committee stage
Thursday 22nd January 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Ludford (LD)]

My Lords, I want to make a very brief contribution—cheekily, because I have not taken any role in this Bill. My noble friend’s amendment, what she said in support of it and the words of the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, are highly pertinent to the debate on the Government’s proposal to restrict jury trials. On the Tube in, I read an account of the report from the Institute for Government, which has looked at the Government’s proposals and concluded that the time savings from judge-only trials would be marginal at best, amounting to less than 2% of Crown Court time. It suggests, pertinently, that the Government

“should instead focus on how to drive up productivity across the criminal courts, investing in the workforce and technology required for the courts to operate more efficiently”.

As others who know the situation much better than I do have said, it sounds dire. One is used to all these problems of legacy systems—lack of interoperability and so on. I remember all that being debated at EU level. It is difficult and probably capital-intensive work—at least, initially—but instead of promoting these headline-grabbing gestures about abolishing jury trials, the Government need to fix the terrible lack of efficiency in the criminal justice system. I am not sure that the civil justice system is any better. Having, unfortunately, had a modest involvement in a case in the county court, I found that it was impossible to phone any staff. You might be lucky to get a response to an email after a week.

Making the system work efficiently, with all bits interacting with each other, would do a great deal more to increase productivity and save the time of all those people who are running around. One hears accounts from people who work in the criminal courts of reports not being available, files being lost and staff being absent, let alone the decrepit state of court buildings. All this investment needs to go in before the Government resort to gesture politics and things such as abolishing jury trials.

[Lord Clement-Jones (LD)]

My Lords, Amendment 432 was so well introduced by my noble friend Lady Doocey. This lack of appropriate technology and how it is handicapping our police services is something that she feels very strongly about. I was delighted to hear what the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, and my noble friend Lady Ludford had to say, because this lack of the appropriate technology extends beyond the police services into the wider criminal justice system. This proposed new clause would address the desperate state of police data infrastructure by requiring the Secretary of State to publish a national plan to modernise police data and intelligence systems within 12 months.

As mentioned in the explanatory statement, this is not an abstract bureaucratic request. It is a direct response to, among other things, recommendation 7 of the National Audit on Group-based Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse by the noble Baroness, Lady Casey. The audit painted a damning picture of the current landscape: intelligence systems that do not talk to one another, vital information trapped in silos and officers unable to join the dots to protect vulnerable children. It is unacceptable that, in 2025, we still rely on fragmented, obsolete IT systems to fight sophisticated networked criminality. This amendment seeks to mandate a coherent national strategy to ensure that antiquated police technology is replaced, that intelligence regarding predatory behaviour is shared effectively across police borders in real time and that we finally close the capability gaps that allow perpetrators of group-based child sexual exploitation to slip through the net.

Amendment 432 would ensure that, when the police hold vital intelligence, they have the systems to use it effectively. We cannot claim to be serious about tackling child exploitation if we do not fix the digital infrastructure that underpins our investigations.