Crime and Policing Bill

Debate between Lord Blencathra and Baroness Fox of Buckley

Committee stage
Thursday 15th January 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I have added my name to Amendment 382F, an amendment that, carefully and proportionately, takes on tackling the problems of the ever-growing number of overlapping Acts and statutes that are used to limit free speech. If public order laws on protest are, to quote the Liberal Democrat Benches from the other day, a confused mess, the labyrinthine patchwork affecting free speech is an impenetrable quagmire. The noble Lord has done a real public service here by carefully going through how, inadvertently and often by mission creep, censorious laws undermine democratic speech rights and are actually damaging the UK’s reputation internationally.

I am not just talking about JD Vance or Elon Musk, who I have heard commented on in this House and dismissed sneeringly by many in Westminster as spreading just Trumpist misinformation or hyperbole. We need to recognise that even the bible of globalist liberalism, the Economist, no less, featured a cover last May proclaiming “Europe’s free-speech problem”, identified the UK as one of the most censorious on the continent and provided a lot of evidence. There has been lots of discussion all over the political spectrum in relation to the idea of 12,000 arrests a year, 30 a day, for speech offences that spring from laws that the amendment seeks to rein in, and for which this House is responsible. We are talking here about crime and policing, and the police are expected to treat speech offences as criminal acts and to police them.

Since the introduction of hate crime laws, which I remind the Committee is a relatively recent concept popularised from the mid-1980s, the legislative and regulatory implications of restricting hate and words that are said to have caused distress have proliferated, and it has grown into a real tangle of tripwires. In that tangle, many people in the police and the CPS, and even politicians, seem confused about what one can say legally and what is verboten.

I am sure that noble Lords will remember the extraordinary story of the Times Radio producer, Maxie Allen, and his partner, Rosalind Levine. They were the couple who were arrested by six uniformed officers, in front of their young children, for posting disparaging messages about their daughter’s school in a private WhatsApp group. It received a lot of publicity, and they have just been paid £20,000 for wrongful arrest, although they have not received an apology. What stood out for me about that story was that when the police officers went into her house, Ms Levine asked what malicious communication offence they were being accused of. The detective did not know, had to Google it and then read out what Google said. That strikes me as not healthy. We as legislators have a responsibility to tackle this. Too often, we just pass more and more laws, with more restrictions on freedom, and never stop to look at whether anything on the statute book can be repealed, streamlined or rolled back.

I commend the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan of Chelsea, for his detailed, well-thought out and proportionate attempt at tackling the way the law has grown and the negative impact that is having on democratic free speech. I also want to commend him for his courage in taking on this issue. As we know, and he referred to this, if anyone takes on hate speech laws, you just think, “Oh, my goodness, he’s going to be accused of all sorts of things. He’s going to be accused of being a bigot. It’s a risk”, so when he told me he was doing this, I gulped. It is horrible to be accused of being a racist, a misogynist, homophobic, a hatemonger, or whatever, but that is the very point. Being accused of being pro-hate speech, if you oppose hate speech legislation, is itself silencing of a democratic discussion on laws and we as legislators should not be bullied or silenced in that way. Ironically, the best tool for any cultural shift in relation to prejudice, in my view, is free speech. To be able to take on bigotry, we need to be able to expose it, argue against it and use the disinfectant of free speech to get rid of the hate, whereas censorship via hate speech laws does not eliminate or defeat regressive ideas; it just drives them underground to fester unchallenged.

The noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, has laid out the key legal problems in his approach to this, especially in relation to the lack of precision in terminology used across speech-restricting laws. He has raised a lot of real food for thought. Perhaps I can add a concern from a slightly different perspective, to avoid repeating the points he has made. For me, there is another cost when law fails to clearly define concepts such as abusive or insulting words, grossly offensive speech, and what causes annoyance, inconvenience and needless anxiety—these things are littered all over the law. It is that the dangerously elastic framing of what speech constitutes harm or hate has been deeply regressive in its impact on our cultural norms. There has been a sort of cultural mission creep which has especially undermined the resilience of new generations of young people. The language of hate speech legislation now trips off the tongues of sixth-formers in schools and university campus activists. When they complain that they disagree with or are made to feel uncomfortable by a speaker or a lecturer and say that they should be banned for their views, they will cite things straight out of the law such as, “That lecturer has caused me harassment, alarm and distress”. Where did they get that from? They will say that those words are perceived as harmful and that if they heard them, it would trigger anxiety—even claiming post-traumatic stress disorder is fashionable. It is because we have socialised the young into the world of believing that speech is a danger to their mental well-being, which has cultivated a grievance victimhood. It is a sort of circular firing squad, because the young, who feel frightened by words which they have picked up and been imbued with from the way the law operates, then demand even more lawfare to protect themselves and their feelings from further distress. They are even encouraged to go round taking screenshots of private messages, which they take to the police, or they scroll through the social media of people they do not like to see whether there is anything they can use in the law.

The law has enabled the emergence of a thin-skinned approach to speech, and this has been institutionalised via our statute book. The police do not seem immune to such interpretations of harmful words, either, and I am afraid that this can cause them to weaponise the power they have through this muddle. It wastes police resources and energy, an issue very pertinent to this Bill.

I will finish with an example. In August 2023, an autistic 16 year-old girl was arrested for reportedly telling a female police officer that she looked like her lesbian nana. The teenager’s mother explained that this was a literal observation, in that the police officer looked like her grandmother, who is a lesbian. The officer understood it as homophobic abuse, so a Section 5 public order offence kicked in on the basis of causing “alarm or distress” by using abusive language. If you witness the film of the incident, seven police officers entered the teenage girl’s home, where she was hiding in the closet, screaming in fear and punching herself in the face. You may ask who was distressed in that instance. The girl was held in custody for 20 hours and ultimately no charges were brought. But we must ask whether the statute book has created such confused laws and encouraged police overreach, and whether it encouraged that young police officer, who heard someone say the words “lesbian nana”, to immediately think, “arrest her, hold her for 20 hours and say that she is causing distress”. What has happened to the instincts of a police officer when they think that this would be the answer?

Many people to whom I speak about the problem addressed by this amendment suggest that it has been overstated. They say that, yes, the police are a bit too promiscuous in arresting people, but the numbers charged and convicted are fairly stable. In fact, a journalist recently told me that in some instances they are going down. But as legislators, should we not query whether this implies that the laws are giving too much leeway to the police to follow up malicious, trivial and politicised complaints? This creates the chilling consequence of the notion of process as punishment: you might not be charged, but you are arrested, and law-abiding citizens are humiliated and embarrassed with the cops at the door. We must take this amendment very seriously, and I hope that the Minister will give us a positive response.

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

My Lords, it is a delight to listen to the noble Baroness, Lady Fox of Buckley, who hit the nail on the head: in fact, she hit many nails on the head, and I agree with everything she said.

I support Amendment 382F because it restores the proper boundary between criminal law and free expression. Criminal sanctions must be reserved for conduct that poses a real risk of harm, threats, menaces and conduct intended to intimidate, not for speech that merely offends or causes hurt feelings. Section 127 of the Communications Act and related provisions currently include abusive and insulting material, and even communication that causes “anxiety”—a formulation that has produced inconsistent enforcement and a chilling effect on legitimate debate.

Should I have reported my MS consultant when he told me the good news and the bad news? The good news was that he knew what it was, and the bad news was that it was MS. He wanted to check how spastic I was. That word, “spastic”, can sound like a terribly insulting term, but it was a medical reference to my condition. This morning, I got a text message reminder: “Your UCLH appointment with the spasticity walk-in clinic at Queen Square will take place early tomorrow morning”. We must make sure that we do not treat all words which may seem insulting as actually being so. The law should be precise and proportionate. Vague criminal offences that hinge on subjective reactions invite over-policing in online life and risk criminalising satire, political argument and robust journalism. Recent parliamentary analysis shows that arrests under communications offences have increased, while convictions have not kept pace, suggesting that resources are being spent on low-value prosecutions rather than on genuine threats to safety. Legal commentary also suggests the difficulties courts face in applying terms like “grossly offensive” and “insulting”, and that undermines predictability and fairness.

This amendment would not leave victims without recourse. Civil remedies, harassment injunctions, platform moderation and targeted civil criminal offences for stalking, doxing and credible threats remain available and should be strengthened. That combination protects vulnerable people while ensuring that criminal law is not used as a blunt instrument against free expression.

Of course, there are trade-offs. Decriminalising insults means some distress will no longer attract criminal penalties, but the correct response is not to expand criminal law; it is to improve support for civil remedies and focus policing on genuine threats. That approach better protects both free speech and personal safety.

For these reasons, I urge the Minister to support Amendment 382F in order to defend free expression, sharpen the law so that it targets real harm, and ensure that our criminal justice system focuses on threats that endanger people rather than on words that merely offend them.

Crime and Policing Bill

Debate between Lord Blencathra and Baroness Fox of Buckley

Committee stage
Tuesday 13th January 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

My Lords, I have just one large amendment in this group but I thought I would wait until the end—or what might be close to the end, with a bit of luck—before speaking to it, because it is different from others in the group. I had considered degrouping it, and now wish that I had, to deal with it at lunchtime on Thursday.

Before dealing with that, what a privilege it was to sit here and listen to the very powerful speech by the noble Lord, Lord Mendelsohn, who is not currently in his place, the wise words of the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, and those of my noble friend Lord Polak. What struck me was something that my noble friend said: when we hear the chants of “Support the intifada” and “From the river to the sea”, those are not just catchy phrases for protest marches. What they mean is kill the Jews, destroy the State of Israel and wipe out 8 million people. You cannot get more evil a hate crime than that.

However, my amendment is different and it is a terribly important one, if I may say so, because it would impose a duty on the Metropolitan Police to ensure access to Parliament. There have been disturbing incidents in recent years where the Met has failed to do so, and MPs and Peers could not access our home of democracy or had to run the gauntlet of a mob.

I need to take noble Lords through the recent history of this problem to let the Committee see how we have got to the current state and what I think we can do about it. The minutes of our State Opening on 17 July of the 2024-2026 Session state, under the heading “Stoppages in the Streets”:

“It was ordered that the Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis do take care that the passages through the streets leading to this House be kept free and open and that no obstruction be permitted to hinder the passage of Lords to and from this House during the sitting of Parliament; or to hinder Lords in the pursuit of their parliamentary duties on the Parliamentary Estate; and that the Lady Usher of the Black Rod attending this House do communicate this Order to the Commissioner”.


That is our sessional order, which the Metropolitan Police Commissioner enforces, primarily through Section 52 of the Metropolitan Police Act 1839. It allows the police to issue directions to prevent street obstruction near Parliament during sittings.

The Commons used to pass the same Motion until 2005, but in 2003 the House of Commons Procedure Committee concluded that passing the sessional order did

“not confer any extra legal powers on the police”,

and the only way to ensure the police had the adequate powers to achieve the result intended by the sessional order was through legislation. The committee recommended that, until such legislation came into force, the House should continue with the sessional order in a modified form

“to reflect the House’s concerns and to act as a marker that it expects Members’ access to Parliament to be maintained as far as the existing law allows”.

The Government implemented that and included provisions in the Serious and Organised Crime and Police Act 2005 intended to meet the requirement identified by the committee. The House of Commons then dropped the sessional order in 2005.

In 2013, the Joint Committee on Parliamentary Privilege recommended that the practice of passing sessional orders in the House of Commons be restored. In response, the Government said that they were

“not convinced that their revival would serve any legal or practical purpose”.

The Government are legally right. The sessional orders are not statute law and have no legal effect, but they had a massive symbolic effect, and the Met used to keep access free for all Members of both Houses.

Restrictions on protests around Parliament were introduced under Sections 132 to 138 of SOCPA 2005. In those sections, it says:

“The Commissioner must give authorisation for the demonstration to which the notice relates”,


and that in giving that authorisation, the commissioner should try to ensure, as far as possible, that people were free to enter Parliament. We moved from an instruction that no hindrance must be permitted, to one where the commissioner can decide on a case by case basis to grant protest.

Sections 132 to 138 were abolished by Section 141 of the Police Reform and Social Responsibility Act 2011 and replaced with restrictions that applied only to the controlled area of Parliament Square, which was delineated for the first time. That was, and is, very sensible. Under Section 143 of the 2011 Act, it is no longer an offence for demonstrations to be held without the authorisation of the Metropolitan Police Commissioner. However, a constable or authorised officer who has reasonable grounds for believing that a person is doing, or is about to do, a prohibited activity may direct the person to cease doing that activity or not to start doing it. Noble Lords should note the term prohibited activity.

Much of the emphasis of the sections in that Act is on tents and equipment in Parliament Square, the controlled use of Whitehall and loudspeakers. Why was that? Older Members of the Committee will recall that, for 10 years, a Mr Brian Haw had an anti-war tent on the grass opposite the MPs’ entrance at Carriage Gates, and the Government and MPs were very vexed that there seemed to be nothing they could do about it and no law to remove him. That is the thrust of the parliamentary provisions in the 2011 Act, to deal with that one man and his tent. I believe he died just as the Act come into force. By accident, the need to secure access to Parliament became downgraded once again. The emphasis was on prohibiting tents, accoutrements and loudspeakers outside the Commons.

Technically, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner and his officers have full legal powers to ensure that MPs, Peers, officers and staff have free and unfettered access at all times, but the reality is that the duty to do so has been subliminally watered down over the years. We have moved from a position that protests outside Parliament had to have permission to one where they did not need permission but the Met could stop them if they thought it necessary. There is no duty for free and unfettered access. That is why my amendment is necessary, without disturbing 99% of the current controls, powers and responsibilities.

Why is it necessary? In November 2021, Insulate Britain, with more than 60 activists, blocked two main roads leading to the Parliamentary Estate, including Bridge Street and Peers’ Entrance. In April 2019, Extinction Rebellion blocked access in Parliament Square, and the police had to take action to maintain a clear route for access for MPs and Peers reaching the estate. In October 2022, Just Stop Oil activists, as part of a month-long occupation of Westminster, sat in the road surrounding Parliament Square, specifically aiming to disrupt access to the seat of government.

The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 added an offence of blocking vehicular access to the Parliamentary Estate, but it said nothing about pedestrians. The current laws are therefore slightly inadequate.

The first thing in my proposed new clause that the Metropolitan Police commissioner would see are the words:

“Duty of the Metropolitan Police to ensure access to Parliament”.


It begins:

“It is the duty of the Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis to secure that members of either House of Parliament, all parliamentary officers and staff have free and unfettered access to the Palace of Westminster controlled area on any day on which either House is sitting”.


That puts access to Parliament front and centre of the legislation, sending a very strong signal that democracy trumps protest—you can still protest if you want to, but do not block access to Parliament.

I say to the noble Lord, Lord Hain, that, under ECHR laws, there is no right to protest. The Human Rights Act 1998 does not refer to a right to protest. The relevant rights are the right to freedom of expression in Article 10 and the right to freedom of peaceful assembly in Article 11. Moreover, Articles 10 and 11 are qualified rights, in that they can be restricted where it is necessary and proportionate to protect public safety, prevent crime and protect the rights and freedoms of others. I submit that the rights and freedoms of others include Members and staff of both Houses. We should also be protected to do our job, because we are the “others”. We have allowed a myth to grow that there is a right to block access to Parliament as part of a non-existent right to protest.

I have a few other small amendments. The 2011 Act designates the controlled area around Parliament but does not stretch as far as 1 Millbank, which did not open until after the 2011 Act passed. I have included it, as well as the road from Downing Street to Parliament, since, although the current law states that Parliament Street is part of the controlled area, Downing Street may be on that no man’s land between Whitehall and Parliament.

The 2022 Act added an offence of blocking vehicular access. I have added that pedestrian access for Members and staff must be maintained, and a requirement that any protesters must be kept back at least 10 metres from pavements used by Members to access Parliament. That would not stop protests; it would just let Peers and Members get in.

Apart from these small changes, I have retained the whole structure of the existing legislation, but with a new duty requirement on the Met. Putting at the beginning of the legislation a sentence that it is the duty of the Metropolitan Police to secure access to Parliament is more than just tokenistic or symbolic. We have allowed our freedoms to access and egress Parliament without hindrance to be eroded over the past 20 years. We have permitted a belief that people protesting outside our gates have more rights and are more important than the legislators working inside.

It cannot be acceptable that the very people entrusted with the responsibility to ensure our legal rights and freedoms under the law cannot get into the building to do it. My proposed new clause would restore that balance. It would make it clear to the commissioner where his primary duty lies, and it should make it safer for all of us, as parliamentarians and staff, to carry out all our duties. I commend my proposed new clause to the Committee.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, this huge group was always going be pivotal for us to discuss, and it is full of moral dilemmas. I am genuinely torn on many of the amendments; I do not know where I stand on some of them. I therefore appreciate the debates that we have had so far. It has been very worth while to hear the different sides of the argument.

When the noble Lord, Lord Mendelsohn, spoke earlier, he stirred me up. Every time I say “stirred up” I think of stirring up hatred; it was not that, but his contribution was very important. He emphasised that a lot is at stake, which it is. On the first day in Committee, I said that I knew that simply reiterating the formal importance of the right to protest is not sufficient for the period that we are living in, because we face new types of protest. We face some vicious and abusive gatherings that call themselves protests. That leaves somebody like me in a difficult dilemma. I am a free-speecher, but I have witnessed the visceral rise of Jew hatred in public and on our streets, so I am torn.

I have a lot of sympathy with the intentions of the noble Lords, Lord Walney, Lord Polak, Lord Leigh of Hurley and Lord Pannick, and of the noble Baroness, Lady Foster, to name just some noble Lords, and I understand where they are coming from. However, as the noble Lord, Lord Mendelsohn, himself admitted, there are a lot of existing powers that are not used. That strikes me as the problem.

We have a policing crisis and powers that are not being used, for cultural or deeper political reasons, so we try to compensate by making more laws. That will not solve the problem of the culture of normalisation of antisemitism—if anything, those new laws, which might also not be enforced, could be a distraction. Despite my reservations, my fear is that the deeper problem will lead to bad lawmaking and abandoning key principles that stand up for western civilisation, democracy and so on, because we are so desperate to do something.

Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

Debate between Lord Blencathra and Baroness Fox of Buckley

Committee stage
Friday 9th January 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I have added my name to two amendments in this case.

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

My Lords, could we please first hear from those noble Lords who have tabled and signed amendments before the rest of us speak? I apologise if the noble Baroness is a signatory, but I did not think she was.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

I have my name on a number of amendments. I did not know that those rules applied—anyway, they do not.

I have added my name to a number of amendments from the noble Lord, Lord Carter of Haslemere, in this group.

In general, I am glad to support many of the amendments on palliative care in this group. The Bill asks us to accept that assisted dying is a medical intervention, albeit an irreversible life-ending one, which is something I am not entirely happy with. It seems obvious to me that there must be guaranteed input from the best-placed medical experts in end-of-life care: that is, palliative care specialists. That is essential for the informed consent of the patient.

I imagine and hope that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, is very sensitive to the importance of palliative care. I know that he is in the much-cited Demos Commission, which I will not bother quoting again, and I am hoping that he has not changed his mind. I think the noble Lord, Lord Carter, made a very important point earlier to the sponsor of the Bill about the number of amendments, for which we have all been chastised and finger-pointed at and tut-tutted at. I kept my patience last night, although my blood pressure did go up.

None the less, I genuinely think that the number of amendments could be really slimmed down if the sponsor of the Bill were to go through, for example, all the amendments on palliative care and say to us, “I accept the principle of this and I will come back with my own amendment” or what have you. We would then not have this issue. We are not an organised political grouping; people table amendments and add their names to them in good faith, which is what I have done, and they then speak in good faith. We are not trying to repeat things for the purpose of delaying the Bill but because we think that it matters and is important. That is what we are doing here.

On this group, and the concept of 10 important themes, we need an assurance that real choices will be offered to a patient with a terminal illness and they will be given the option of a palliative care assessment and, hopefully, then, possibly palliative care. That safeguard would really reassure us, and it is a key theme, and so on. One of the reasons why I say that is, under the Bill, GPs can mention palliative care to a patient. I am a great fan of GPs; they are fantastic generalists who do a good job. But very often they do not have all the expertise of a palliative care specialist in knowing how precisely medical intervention can improve a patient’s condition, or indeed change their will to live.

It is important for the Committee to note that research has shown that those who wish to hasten their own death often change their mind when they receive more information. Palliative care can mean that people who want to die then want to live, and that is important if we are going to talk about choice. It is possible that you might want to die, that you are determined you want to die in assisted death terms, having had your terminal diagnosis. But why is it that you want to die? That is the motivation behind the discussion in this group.

One of the things that happens is that many people are frightened and fearful, and one of the things they are fearful of is pain and terrible symptoms, which by the way are often graphically described by supporters of the Bill, and I think that they can scare people. It is the idea that your pain and symptoms cannot be controlled. When I talk to supporters of the Bill—some of my friends, colleagues and members of the public—they are completely compassionate in talking about how the Bill will help people who are suffering intolerably and in excruciating pain. None of us wishes that on anyone—or, indeed, on ourselves. It is a frightening prospect.

That is actually often a fear and a dread that the right kind of care can mean will not be realised. Patients are understandably frightened of being in that kind of pain, so they need to know that. Toby Porter, the CEO of Hospice UK, summed up the way I feel about this. He said:

“An outcome in which someone chose an assisted death because of a real or imagined fear that they could not get pain relief or other symptom alleviation, or because their family would not get support through their illness, would clearly be a moral and practical disgrace to any country”.


That is absolutely right.

We all know family and friends and so on who have died and who have had terminal illnesses. People will say that morphine is simply not enough to control the pain. That is the kind of thing that I would say, because I know nothing about medicine. So, it is a great relief to discover that palliative medicine resident doctors say that morphine is the tip of the iceberg for pain management. There are countless other options available, but to know this requires training and experience, which I have not got. When you are having a chat in the pub with mates—or indeed, when I was in hospital pumping in the morphine—it is good to know that somebody, somewhere, has got the experience. That is the palliative care specialist and every terminally ill patient should at least be offered the option to go to see one. This is a modest but meaningful addition to the Bill and I hope that the noble and learned Lord, in the spirit of listening, accommodating and compromise that we heard about last night, will make changes to the Bill accordingly.

There is also a question for the Government and the Minister here. The noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Newnham, explained this very well. In relation to the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Stevens, yesterday, it was a shocking revelation that the Minister responsible for palliative care said that the Government would not publish their modern framework until after the Bill had passed through Parliament. The noble Lord, Lord Stevens—

Crime and Policing Bill

Debate between Lord Blencathra and Baroness Fox of Buckley

Committee stage
Wednesday 17th December 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

I shall need to go back later and do my own sums, but that still seems to me a little bit excessive.

I am not opposed to the proposed new clauses, and I agree with the thrust of them; this is an important issue. But my concern is with turning a broad legal duty, which these two proposed clauses suggest, into concrete and repeatable workplace practice. There are some practical difficulties. First, you get hidden and underreported incidents. We all know that victims often do not report harassment or stalking—and then there are no incident logs, which may underrate the risk. The risk can come from colleagues, managers, contractors, clients, customers or the public, including online, making responsibility and control much harder to map. That might put a simply impossible obligation on employers and impose a very heavy burden on small employers, which would probably not have an HR or personnel department or the security expertise to assess all the potential risk.

Designing “gender-responsive” measures into practical and proportionate steps seems to me to be a very difficult thing to do; a lot of careful tailoring would be required to deal with different people and roles. That may be beyond the capability of many employers, particularly small ones. I know that the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, has looked at the HSE advice, already published, which I think includes detailed guidance on managing work-related stress and preventing work-related violence. That includes information on creating policies to address unacceptable behaviour. Perhaps the voluntary advice it gives could be expanded to deal with the elements at the core of these new clauses.

I also look to what ACAS does. This is what it says on its website:

“‘Vicarious liability’ is when an employer could be held responsible if one of their workers discriminates against someone … The law (Equality Act 2010) says a worker and an employer could both be held responsible if the discrimination happens ‘in the course of employment’. This means something that’s linked to work … This could be at work or outside the workplace, for example at a work party or through social media that’s linked to work”.


That is what ACAS says about discrimination, but I simply wonder whether the better course of action might be not to pass this proposed new clause into law but to get HSE and ACAS to take the thrust of the suggestions and design new guidance that delivers what the noble Baroness and the noble Lord, Lord Russell, want.

The noble Lord, Lord Stevens of Kirkwhelpington, has just left the Chamber, but when I saw him here, I assumed that he was going to speak on this matter. Had he spoken, he would probably have said, “Please do not give any more powers to the Health and Safety Executive”. He was a victim of one of the excessive criminal trials. When he was commissioner of the Met, one of his officers was pursuing a burglar. The burglar ran on to the roof of a factory, and the police officer chased him, fell through the skylight and was seriously injured. The Health and Safety Executive took the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police to court for failing to provide a safe working environment for the officer. The noble Lord, Lord Stevens, said: “I stood in No. 1 court of the Old Bailey—the court that had the trials of murderers, serious criminals and traitors—accused by the Health and Safety Executive of not taking enough care of my workers. When my lawyer asked the chap from the Health and Safety Executive, ‘What should the officer have done?’, he said, ‘Well, he should have stopped; he should have sent for a cherry-picker and scaffolding to make sure it was safe’”. The noble Lord said, “I looked at the jury, and the jury looked at the face of this idiot, and within minutes I was cleared, because a sensible jury knew that that was a ridiculous thing to say”.

That is the only danger of giving these powers to an organisation like the Health and Safety Executive. It may use the bulk of them safely most of the time, but on occasions you will get silly decisions. I should say in conclusion that that case of the noble Lord, Lord Stevens of Kirkwhelpington, is a very good reason why we should keep juries, rather than having a single judge.

I perceive difficulties in putting this proposal into law, but I hope that a solution can be found whereby the Health and Safety Executive, ACAS or others can pursue the contents of new clauses without recourse to legislation.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I have some serious reservations about Amendment 348 and the related Amendment 349. I spoke at length against them when a similar amendment was tabled to the Employment Rights Bill, and I shall not repeat everything that I said then.

The noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, talked about looking at the drafting. That was interesting, because one of my problems is with the wording of this repeated amendment. It is all over the place, quite dangerous and very broad, and it could get us into all sorts of unintended trouble. Let me illustrate.

The noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Llanfaes, spoke passionately and excellently about some the real live problems of sexual harassment at work, and many of us will recognise that. As I say, I have concerns about the language of this amendment. It refers to having a legal mandate for employers to introduce

“proactive and preventative measures to protect all persons working in their workplace from … psychological and emotional abuse”.

We heard from the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, that “psychological and emotional abuse” is a very broad term. The nature of “proactive and preventative measures” might involve stopping something that is very hard to define and could result in real overreach. It could be quite coercive and manipulative.

However, I am particularly nervous about the use of the “gender-responsive” approach that is advocated, particularly in relation to training. We are told in the amendment that

“a ‘gender-responsive approach’ means taking into account the various needs, interests, and experiences of people of different gender identities, including women and girls”.

Women and girls are not a subset of “gender identities”—whatever they are. That is insulting, and gender identities are at the very least contentious. This language confusion, for me, drags the amendment into a potential political minefield. I am familiar with the way in which gender-responsive approaches are being used in the workplace at the present time to undermine women and girls.

I was fortunate enough today to have a meeting here in Parliament with the Darlington Nurses Union. The Darlington nurses are in dispute with their NHS employer because they felt sexually unsafe in their single-sex nurses’ changing room—which, by the way, was fought for as part of health and safety at work in the past. They had a place where they could get changed and they felt unsafe when a gender-inclusive policy allowed a male who identifies as a woman to use their space. This has led to all sorts of problems in relation to what safety at work is. They felt as though there was a degree of sexual harassment going on, and so forth. I am just pointing out that this is a difficult area, so can we at least acknowledge it?