Crime and Policing Bill

Lord Birt Excerpts

2nd reading
Thursday 16th October 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Birt (CB)]

My Lords, Tony Blair had a pronounced interest in reducing crime. Two decades ago, as his strategy advisor, I spent two and a half years working with gifted teams of officials, looking at patterns of crime and offending, and how the many organisations within the criminal justice system were responding. Two decades on, however, the crime picture has changed fundamentally. On the plus side, a combination of forensic science, the extraordinary ubiquity of street cameras, including in doorbells, and the data obtainable from suspects’ mobile phones has seen highly professional police clinically solve the worst crimes, particularly murder.

We are, however, failing miserably to organise effectively in countering other types of offences, which each of us now experiences either directly or through friends and family, all the time and to an unprecedented extent, and which mostly go unrecorded. Staff at my local supermarket tell me they witness shoplifting with impunity at least once every hour. Watch thieves stalk the streets of Soho. A visitor to a fifth-floor flat in my apartment block had his £5,000 bike stolen, all captured clearly on CCTV and shared with the police. Two days later he saw his bike for sale on eBay, but they refused to help him reclaim it.

The BBC’s “Scam Interceptors” programme scams the scammers: listening in, catching them in the act, chiefly frightening older people unversed in technology into parting with some or all of their life savings. The scammers operate with impunity on an industrial scale out of identified buildings in India. The BBC recently tracked down a scammer facility in Nigeria which tricks naive British teenagers into selling sex pics, then blackmails them. In one instance, tragically, this triggered a suicide.

We should be ashamed—sitting here in the nation’s Parliament, in the Borough of Westminster—that we are cited as the street crime capital of the UK, with mobile and other theft rampant. Yes, the police have finally mounted an ambitious operation, but each of us will know someone who has had their mobile snatched, who has immediately located it at a specific house in Hackney or elsewhere using the “find my phone” facility, only to be told by police that no action will be taken.

In our city centres, warrior e-bikers bomb along, some at souped-up speeds, sometimes at night without lights, ignoring red lights and zebra crossings and going the wrong way up one-way streets—all with impunity, confident that they will never be stopped. I thought the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell, tellingly identified other forms of wholly unwelcome and ever-increasing anti-social behaviour on our streets.

Knife crime has doubled in a decade with over 50,000 annual offences and 200-plus deaths; it is now the most common method of murder. The current inquiry into the horrific Southport massacre by a 17 year-old has produced chilling evidence of just how easy it was for him to purchase outrageous weaponry online—in his case, a black panther kukri machete with a 16.5 inch blade.

I do not dispute the value of most measures in this Bill, but I suggest that nothing in it addresses the need for the police and other agencies massively to raise their game and to attack every kind of crime that has a material impact on our everyday lives, whether on the internet or on the streets. I conclude by asking the Minister if the Government will step back and frame a bold and transformative strategy to tackle head on the plague of everyday crime that we are living with today.

Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

Lord Birt Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 12th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Birt (CB)]

My Lords, I strongly support this Bill. Overall, it is well considered. Importantly, it benefits from the experiences of many other countries that started this journey well before us. In no sense would we be pioneers.

The carefully designed process that the Bill sets out should address the possible risks—for instance, severe coercion—that have, reasonably, been identified. We know from surveys that there is overwhelming public support for assisted dying. All of us have received heart-rending letters pleading for the passage of this Bill from individuals who have had the harrowing experience of witnessing loved ones slowly dying in extreme pain or in utterly debilitating circumstances. This Bill confers the right for such an individual facing imminent death not just to avoid intense anguish and pain—as well as the prospect of their condition progressing intolerably—but to die at a moment of their choosing, in the circumstances of their choosing, and with dignity. I want that right, and anyone who wants it should have it, too.

No doubt the Bill can be improved further. The Delegated Powers Committee makes many persuasive points which we should take on board. However, the Explanatory Notes remind us of decades of attempts to introduce assisted dying legislation that have simply failed. It is highly unlikely that any Government in the foreseeable future will seize the baton. We must therefore make this Bill work, then pass it.

I have only one personal reservation, which I share with others, including the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth. Although I entirely see the value of a process setting out two independent medical assessments, two periods of reflection and an independent review panel, in a world of constrained resources where it is hard these days even to see your GP, there may be the risk of unwelcome slippage and a prolonged delay—perhaps in August or over the Christmas period—that intensifies suffering. Should we build into this process, on the one hand, greater certainty on the total time normally taken; or, on the other, some flexibility on telescoping time when circumstances demand it, particularly for those who may enter the process at a later stage?

Finally, I strongly advise anyone who is uncertain and harbouring doubts about the Bill to watch the one-hour discussion, hosted by the Healthcare Professionals for Assisted Dying, with four Australian practitioners working in this field. Without exception, they come across as people of enormous integrity and humanity, caring, truly dedicated to their work, and entirely convincing about the necessity and effectiveness of a carefully considered assisted dying process. It is well worth watching. I have no doubt whatever that our medical professionals who volunteer—and you have to volunteer—for a role in the assisted dying process will equally rise to the challenge.

Let us further improve, but then pass, this critically important Bill.

Operation Conifer

Lord Birt Excerpts

Tuesday 8th October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

I hope that I do not ruin the noble Lord’s reputation when I say that I agree with him, in the sense that it is appropriate, potentially, for the chief constable of Wiltshire Police to examine the issues in the first instance. I am not aware of what happened in the previous Administration, because I am not party to that, but, equally, it could be a course of action for the noble Lord, Lord Lexden, to take forward to write to the new chief constable and ask her for her opinion on the issues that have driven the Question today.

[Lord Birt (CB)]

My Lords, I greatly welcome the Minister’s response and his declaration of an open mind. When I was a working television producer, I spent a very great deal of time—many days—in the company of Edward Heath and all those around him. As far as I am aware, no one who ever worked with him believes that he was a paedophile. We have a poor record in this country of speedily resolving perceived injustice, so I strongly encourage the Minister to adopt the suggestion of the noble Lord, Lord Lexden.

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Birt, for his comments. I must again say to the House that no inference of guilt should be drawn from the fact that Sir Edward Heath would have been interviewed under caution had he been alive. It is unfortunate that Operation Conifer ended without resolution. I personally feel, although I will reflect on the issues raised today, that the first port of call should be going back to the chief constable of Wiltshire for an investigation into the concerns that have been raised. I hope that that will potentially be undertaken by the noble Lord. I will certainly follow up on the Opposition Front Bench’s suggestion as to what happened to any previous letter.

Rural Crime: NFU Mutual Report

Lord Birt Excerpts

Thursday 12th September 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

I am grateful to the noble and learned gentleman. I have been tasked by both the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary to be the Minister responsible for fraud. This week, I met with officials and I will be meeting with stakeholders. We have a potential examination of a future fraud strategy based on the work of the previous Government. The points that the noble and learned Lord makes are a part of our reflection on that strategy. I will certainly go away and inform myself of what happened under the previous Government in relation to that delay, and how I can expedite this as a matter of some urgency.

[Lord Birt (CB)]

My Lords, I served with the noble Lord, Lord Faulkner, on the APPG on metal theft. From the evidence we gathered, it was clear that metal theft is widespread in rural areas. Whatever the picture was when the Minister was last involved in 2013, I think when he returns to the subject he will see that it remains pernicious, widespread and extensive. We are all clear what some of the targets are: church roofs, which have a deadly impact on the villages affected; and, relatively recently, the theft of literally kilometres of copper cable from both the telecoms and rail networks. As the noble Lord, Lord Faulkner, said, these crimes are committed by organised criminal gangs and, from the evidence we took, frankly there is no cause to think that the police are operating effectively to counter these organised criminal groups.

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

I am grateful to the noble Lord. The metal theft issue is extremely serious. It is something that the previous Government, with Opposition support, tried to address and reduced by some 50%— but 50% is still there and we need to look at how we can take action on that. He is absolutely right that organised criminal gangs are very often behind this. There has been action from the National Rural Crime Unit and police forces to try to make arrests from those organised criminal gangs. Again, we need to have intelligence-led policing, co-ordination of PCCs feeding in intelligence and a national crime strategy that looks at how we can tackle that still further. That will be on the agenda of the Home Office and I hope that, when I am held to account by the noble Lord in due course, I will have made progress on reducing the 50% still further.