Public Order Act 2023 (Interference With Use or Operation of Key National Infrastructure) Regulations 2025

Lord Davies of Gower Excerpts

Wednesday 4th February 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Davies of Gower (Con)]

My Lords, this has been a passionate debate, which we on these Benches welcome. Dealing with the statutory instrument before us gives us the opportunity to recognise the importance of our life sciences sector to public health, national resilience and the wider economy. It is therefore right that they should work and operate without sustained disruption, intimidation or obstruction.

The regulations, as outlined in the debate, extend the definition of “key national infrastructure” to include the life sciences sector. In doing so, they ensure that the police have access to a clear and consistent set of powers where protest activity moves beyond lawful expression and into serious interference with the use or operation of critical facilities.

It is important to be clear about what this instrument does and does not do. It does not prohibit peaceful protest, nor does it seek to suppress legitimate debate, including on matters that attract strong and sincerely held views. The right to protest remains a fundamental one. What these regulations address is conduct that is deliberately disruptive, sustained or targeted in a way that prevents lawful activity from taking place and places staff, researchers and patients at risk. Life sciences facilities have in the past been subject to precisely that kind of activity. Existing public order powers can be complex, reactive and fragmented. By bringing the life sciences sector within the framework established by the 2023 Act, the regulations provide greater legal clarity, earlier intervention where appropriate and a more proportionate and effective response to serious disruption.

We also note that the instrument is tightly focused. It does not create new categories of protest offence but applies an existing regime to a sector whose importance to the national interest is clear. The offences remain subject to established thresholds, safeguards and oversight, and their application must continue to respect the principles of necessity and proportionality.

For those reasons, we on these Benches are satisfied that the case for this instrument has been made. It strikes an appropriate balance between protecting critical national infrastructure and safeguarding the right to peaceful protest. We therefore support the regulations and believe that the House should approve them.

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

My Lords, before the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, responds on her amendment, it is important that I respond on behalf of the Government to some of the points that have been raised. I do not intend to repeat the discussion points in my opening speech, but some of them may be referred to because they have generated debate. This debate has generated a lot of interesting and important points of principle, and I am grateful for the contributions. I shall respond to four broad points: the right to protest, the SI provision use, the use of animals in science and—the big question—why now? I will address those in turn.

The right to protest was raised by a number of noble Lords, including the noble Baronesses, Lady Grender and Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, my noble friend Lord Sikka and the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Gower, speaking just now from the Front Bench. I want to be clear right now in front of this House: as I said in my opening statement, this is not about the rightful, peaceful protest which is a fundamental part of our democratic society. This measure does not prohibit or restrict peaceful protest. However, peaceful expression does not extend to causing serious disruption to the hard-working majority in the businesses in question.

Shamima Begum

Lord Davies of Gower Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd February 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

The original decision was made by the previous Administration, and it happens to be one that this Government upheld and support. I say again to the House that there are ongoing proceedings about her status, and the decisions were very clear. Under legislation which the previous Government took, we have examined this matter and are now in discussions in the European Court of Human Rights. I think it is best left to be determined in the way in which it will ultimately be determined.

[Lord Davies of Gower (Con)]

I have said it before and I will say it again: we on these Benches are unequivocal in our view that Shamima Begum should never be allowed to return to Britain. However, the noble Lord is right to note the increase in fighting in northern Syria. One of the issues this raises is that British-born Islamic State fighters and sympathisers may be freed and then attempt to make the journey back to Britain, potentially by small boat crossings. In the interests of the security of the British people, what are the Government doing to ensure that no one who has fought for or assisted a terrorist group in that region is able to return to Britain?

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

The noble Lord makes a very valid point, and it is one that I support. The Foreign Secretary has already spoken to the Syrian Foreign Minister about the situation of those who have been and are being detained. We want to ensure that we continue to monitor the security situation in northern Syria, but the noble Lord makes a very valid point that the Government will bear in mind.

Crime and Policing Bill

Lord Davies of Gower Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 27th January 2026 Lords Chamber

From these Benches we look forward to the new law enforcement data service when it is introduced, and to the police, like other public bodies, ensuring that the data they collect comes from the individuals self-identifying.

[Lord Davies of Gower (Con)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lady Cash for tabling this important amendment, allowing for a debate on this matter. The link between ethnicity and crime has, for far too long, been a taboo subject, but the fact is that it always has been and remains to be a significant factor in explaining certain trends.

When ethnicity is ignored and underreported, observers are reduced to relying on conjecture based upon unverified connections. It does an injustice to the victims of crimes that go either unresolved or underreported because their causal factors are refused to be acknowledged. When the facts are obscured, it opens the door for accusations from both sides in bad faith. People are derided as racist, and uninvolved communities are implicated. The result, again, is that the focus is directed away from the victims.

Grooming gangs have been the case study most often referenced when discussing this topic, and I apologise for repeating the same argument, but we do so because they offer the best example of the consequences of ignoring this link. For decades, tens of thousands of white working-class girls were systematically groomed, trafficked and raped by gangs of predominantly Pakistani men. This is a fact that has only recently been accepted by mainstream politicians and media, despite years of campaigning and research conducted outside of Westminster.

We should not have arrived at this point where, after more than 30 years, Westminster is only just waking up to the scale of the tragedy. We should not have had to wait for the review from the noble Baroness, Lady Casey, which was commissioned only after the Government faced significant pressure, both in Parliament and online, for politicians to act on an overtly racialised crime. I understand that the failings surrounding the inability to bring these gangs to justice have been many, but a consistent factor is authorities overlooking the crimes for fear of being racist. In turn, the police have done nothing to allay their fears by providing accurate ethnicity figures.

The words of Denis MacShane, the former MP for Rochdale, a grooming hotspot, aptly demonstrate this. By his own words in 2014, he avoided the industrial-scale rape of working-class girls in his constituency out of fear of “rocking the multicultural boat” and offending his own sensibilities as a

“true Guardian reader and liberal Leftie”.

Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends than that good men should look on and do nothing. Good men, in the narrow sense that they were not the ones committing evil crimes, were permitted to adopt Denis MacShane’s acquiescent attitude for decades, because there was no official empirical pushback for campaigners to draw from. If ethnicity data had been collected and released, the fact that these crimes were disproportionately committed by the Pakistani community —as we know from the fragmented picture that we now possess—would have been transformed from a racist trope derided as an inconvenience into a proven fact to be used by police forces for action.

We must learn from our failings. It is not enough simply to commission a review into grooming gangs and hope that acknowledging past crimes will put a stop to future crimes being committed. Crimes are still happening, and they are still happening along ethnic lines. Mandating the recording of ethnicity is a necessity for any Government claiming to want to reduce violence against women and girls.

Past the recommendation from the noble Baroness, Lady Casey, and past grooming gangs, there is a great practical reason to introduce a requirement to record ethnicity. Crime trends differ from community to community, and identifying exactly what these are will help the police direct resources more effectively. This data—and I hope that many noble Lords opposite will support me here—would even reduce officers’ unconscious biases, as decisions would be based upon empirical evidence and not assumptions drawn from shaky data.

The administrative burden that would come with this change would be negligible. It is an extra tick in the box in an arrest report. The benefits, as explained, are numerous. If we are serious about organising a victim-orientated system that is empirically based, this amendment is absolutely necessary. I hope that the Minister will agree, and I very much look forward to hearing from him.

[Lord in Waiting/Government Whip (Lord Katz) (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Cash, for her amendment, which seeks to mandate the collection of ethnicity data in respect of the perpetrators of crime. I also thank all those who contributed to this debate: my noble friend Lady Chakrabarti and the noble Baroness, Lady Fox of Buckley, and, for the Opposition, the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, and the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Gower.

I will not repeat the point that I made in the last group—admittedly, this is a bit further away than I thought we were going to be—but I stress that the content of the annual data requirement on police is reviewed annually. We have also announced plans in the police White Paper, which we have already discussed in a previous group, to bring forward legislation, when parliamentary time allows, on mandating the collection of suspect ethnicity data.

There has been a lot of discussion and debate on this amendment around the recent National Audit on Group-Based Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse from the noble Baroness, Lady Casey. For the avoidance of any doubt, I want to be absolutely clear that these abhorrent crimes must be pursued wherever they are found, without cultural or political sensitivities getting in the way.

I will just pause to correct the record. While I am not at all defending his comments, I believe that I am right in saying that Denis MacShane used to be MP for Rotherham rather than Rochdale—I am referring to what the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Gower, said—which is obviously where one of the gangs that the noble Baroness, Lady Casey, looked into operated. I just want to put that out there. However, as I said, that does not undermine the abhorrence of these crimes; they must be pursued, irrespective of any cultural or political sensitivities getting in the way.

The previous Home Secretary wrote to all chief constables to make it clear that we expect that ethnicity data will be collected from all suspects in child sexual abuse and criminal exploitation cases. As previously set out by the Home Secretary, we will be legislating to mandate the collection of ethnicity data in such cases. To be very clear, I quote directly from the police White Paper, which was published yesterday:

“we will work with policing to create a framework for mandating clear national data standards in a timely way, to improve how data is collected, recorded and used across England and Wales, and make sure these standards are applied across all forces and the systems they use. This will further support existing legal and ethical frameworks, ensuring data is managed responsibly and proportionately, and maintaining public confidence”.

The noble Baroness, Lady Cash, referred to the importance of self-defined ethnicity, and this is how the ONS recommends that ethnicity be recorded in line with the census, which does ultimately provide the benchmark versus which all public service data should be collected. In light of this and our commitment to bring forward legislation in the context of our wider reforms to policing, I ask that the noble Baroness, Lady Cash, withdraw her amendment.

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Moved by

[Lord Davies of Gower]

438D: After Clause 166, insert the following new Clause—
“Exception of the police from the public sector equality dutyIn Schedule 18 (public sector equality duty: exceptions) of the Equality Act 2010, after paragraph 3 insert—“The police
3A (1) Section 149 does not apply to any police force when exercising policing or law enforcement functions.(2) For the purposes of this paragraph, “police force” includes—(a) a police force maintained by a local policing body,(b) the British Transport Police,(c) the Civil Nuclear Constabulary, and(d) the Ministry of Defence Police.””Member's explanatory statement
This amendment would exempt the police from the public sector equality duty under the Equality Act 2010, so as to ensure they are solely committed to effectively carrying out their policing functions.

[Lord Davies of Gower (Con)]

My Lords, Amendment 438D, in my name and that of my noble friend Lord Cameron of Lochiel, seeks to exempt the police from the public sector equality duty under Section 149 of the Equality Act 2010 when they are exercising core policing and law enforcement functions. The public sector equality duty requires public authorities, in the exercise of their functions, to

“have due regard to the need to … eliminate discrimination, harassment, victimisation … advance equality of opportunity between persons who share a relevant protected characteristic and persons who do not share it … foster good relations between persons who share a relevant protected characteristic and persons who do not share it”.

The purpose of the amendment is simple, and it comes from what should be a fundamental truism: the police should focus unambiguously on preventing crime, protecting the public and upholding the law.

Police forces already operate within one of the most extensive frameworks of legal accountability in public life. Their powers are constrained by statutes such as the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984, regulations, ethics codes, common law and detailed operational safeguards. Despite this, operational decisions of police officers are being second-guessed not through the lens of legality or effectiveness but through compliance with equality impact assessments, diversity metrics and institutional diversity, equality, and inclusion priorities that were never designed for split-second operational judgments.

There is a practical application here. The police are often hampered in their ability to stop and search people because of their duties under the Equality Act. For example, the Police and Criminal Evidence Act Code A, which governs the operation of police powers to stop and search, states that

“when police officers are carrying out their functions, they also have a duty to have due regard to the need to eliminate unlawful discrimination, harassment and victimisation, to advance equality of opportunity between people who share a relevant protected characteristic and people who do not share it, and to take steps to foster good relations between those persons”.

I think it would be quite widely accepted by the public that it is not the police’s role to advance equality of opportunity. They are not activists.

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[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

If the noble Baroness looks at aspects of the Bill before us today and earlier in Committee, and at what we said in the policing White Paper yesterday, she will know that the Government do not accept that standards do not need to be raised. We want raised standards, better vetting of police officers, better performance and speedy dismissal if police officers have done wrong. We want to improve those standards. However, the Equality Act is about basic principles underpinning how public services interact with people in our community. In the policing sense, I argue, as I did a moment ago, that those Equality Act provisions underpin what the police want to do, which is to police with the consent of the community. I cannot agree with her; that is an honest disagreement between us. I ask the noble Lord to withdraw his amendment.

[Lord Davies of Gower (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to all noble Lords who have spoken in this debate; it has been short but stimulating. In particular, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Jackson of Peterborough, and the noble Baroness, Lady Fox of Buckley, for their support.

When considering this matter, there is a question that I would like all noble Lords to keep in mind: what do we want the police to prioritise? Surely the answer is public safety, crime prevention, and the fair and firm enforcement of the law. As I have said, and as the legal framework makes clear, policing is already tightly regulated. The Police and Criminal Evidence Act, codes of practice, judicial review, the Independent Office for Police Conduct and the courts all ensure that police powers are exercised lawfully and proportionately. None of those protections would be removed by this amendment. The entire purpose of the amendment is to remove a layer of bureaucratic obligation that is ill suited to operational policing and increasingly counterproductive. It would allow officers to make decisions based on intelligence, behaviour and risk, rather than the fear of breaching abstract equality issues—but perhaps I am guilty of looking at this from an operational perspective.

If we want the police to be active on our streets rather than passive observers and to intervene early rather than apologise later, and if we want public confidence rebuilt through effectiveness rather than process then we must give them the clarity and confidence to do their job. We must recognise that effective policing is itself a public good and that the most equal outcome of all is a society in which the law is enforced without fear or favour. With that, for now, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 438D withdrawn.

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[Lord Davies of Gower (Con)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Goodman of Wycombe for his recent group of amendments. Extremism in its worst form of course becomes terrorism. This is often, if not always, the product of idle inaction or, at worst, encouragement from surrounding communities and influencers. The propounding of extremist views, even if not necessarily violent, has slowly seated itself in public discourse and is gaining influence in local communities throughout the country. It is clearly something that needs to be addressed, so I welcome the chance to hear from the Government.

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[Baroness Doocey (LD)]

My Lords, Amendment 438EB is inspired by the 999 Injured and Forgotten campaign, led by Tom Curry, a detective forced to retire after suffering a life-changing injury on duty, weeks before reaching 22 years of service. In 2023, Tom launched a petition calling for a new medal for police injured on duty and discharged from the service, and it has since expanded to include all public servants.

Every day, emergency responders put their lives on the line to protect the public. Tragically, within policing alone, more than 16,000 officers have suffered catastrophic injuries in the course of their service and have had to give up their careers as a result. Yet there is currently no formal means of recognising their sacrifice. Like Tom, many injured officers miss out on long service and good conduct medals, which now require 20 years of sustained service. Gallantry awards elude most assault victims, who are typically ambushed from behind, depriving them of the opportunity to show valour.

The Elizabeth Emblem was created in 2024 to rightly honour public servants killed in the line of duty. On these Benches, we believe it is wrong that those whose lives have been changed irrevocably through injury are overlooked. This is a modest amendment. It simply asks the Government to consider the merits of such an award and to lay a report on it before Parliament. Although the Bill’s scope does not allow me to include all those we believe should be eligible, this would be an important step towards formal recognition of injured survivors and to honour the brave work of our emergency services. I beg to move.

[Lord Davies of Gower (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Doocey, for this amendment and the case she put forward. It is absolutely axiomatic that we must honour and recognise those brave police officers who put their safety at risk to protect the public. During my police service, I saw many acts whereby officers placed themselves in the most dangerous of situations with little recognition. If I had time, I would be keen to relate some of those instances to noble Lords; some of them, of course, had consequences. There is certainly some merit in the proposal. I look forward to hearing from the Minister what the Home Office might suggest on this.

[Lord Katz (Lab)]

My Lords, I wholeheartedly agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Doocey, that we owe our emergency service workers a massive debt of thanks for the work they do to keep us safe and for always answering the call when we need help. When dedicated public servants suffer serious injuries in the course of their duties, it is incumbent on us, as a state and as a society, to wrap our arms around them, so to speak, and ensure that they are given all the support they need.

I am sure we all agree that the list of public servants who risk and suffer injuries during the course of their duties is not limited to police officers; this was reflected in the noble Baroness’s comments. Other emergency services, such as our brave firefighters, ambulance workers and other emergency service workers, also face great risk of injury on duty. Any consideration will have to include them alongside police staff—I think the whole Chamber would agree on that—though I note that the text of the amendment refers to police officers alone. I hope the noble Baroness takes that in the spirit in which it is intended.

Noble Lords will be aware that the police are already eligible for a number of medals, including for long or exemplary service, for specific celebrations such as a Coronation or jubilee, and for gallantry. Individuals who suffer injury as a result of their efforts to prevent loss of life can and have been successfully put forward for formal gallantry awards. This includes Sergeant Timothy Ansell of Greater Manchester Police, who was injured coming to the aid of a colleague and received a King’s Commendation for Bravery in October.

Although I recognise that the threshold for these awards is high, and rightly so, there are many incidents which can and should be put forward but which currently fall below the radar. The Home Office has been driving work to increase the number of gallantry nominations for the police, and I encourage any noble Lords who have cases to put forward to do so via the Cabinet Office website.

Work to identify whether a medal is the best method of recognising emergency service workers who are injured as a result of their duties and whether it is viable is ongoing. However, I point out that in this country, all medals are a gift from the Government on behalf of the monarch. They are instituted by royal warrant and sit firmly under royal prerogative powers. It would therefore be inappropriate to legislate for such a medal, potentially cutting across the powers that rightly rest with His Majesty the King. On the understanding that this is a matter that is actively under consideration, I hope the noble Baroness will be content to withdraw her amendment.

Crime and Policing Bill

Lord Davies of Gower Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 27th January 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Doocey (LD)]

My Lords, from these Benches there is strong support for Amendments 435 and 438A, which would finally shine a light on one of the most sensitive and least discussed aspects of police welfare: suicide and attempted suicide among officers and staff. This is not about apportioning blame; it is about creating conditions in which people can seek help early and leaders cannot look away. Nearly two years ago I sought this very information and was assured that work was happening to collate it. Yet no figures have emerged, leaving families, colleagues and policymakers in the dark, still awaiting clarity and transparency. These amendments would ensure that bereaved families do not feel that their loss has been silently absorbed and they would confront the lingering stigma around mental ill health in policing.

Policing demands a particular duty of care that transcends the ordinary employer-employee relationship, as the state requires officers to face repeated trauma that is unparalleled in any other walk of life. We are now operating in what many describe as a crisis policing model, where officers spend most of their time dealing with the darkest parts of human experience with far fewer opportunities to balance that with visible neighbourhood-based work. In the past, time spent on community policing would lift them out of the dark place. Today, that release valve is much weaker. Much of the informal support that once existed has disappeared. Officers used to have shared spaces where they could decompress together at the end of a shift, but those communal areas have largely gone. From staff sifting through distressing online material every day to front-line officers facing the increasing likelihood of physical assault, the psychological strain is relentless. This feeds a siege mentality in a service that still struggles to recognise emotion and is not naturally open.

Policing remains an environment where taking paternity leave can invite mockery and where the burden can fall especially heavily on women and minority officers amid unreported discrimination. In too many forces, officers still fear that admitting vulnerability will derail their career progression. If Parliament seeks people to shoulder that burden on our behalf, it must insist on collecting basic information. Tracking suicides and attempted suicides would pinpoint hotspots and high-risk groups, enabling proactive measures such as resilience training, peer support and routine psychological screening. I urge the Minister to take these amendments back to the Home Office and consider bringing forward concrete proposals on Report.

[Lord Davies of Gower (Con)]

My Lords, I pay tribute to my noble friend Lord Bailey of Paddington and the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, for bringing this matter to the attention of the Committee. The noble Lords, Lord Hogan-Howe and Lord Stevens of Kirkwhelpington, and I know all too well the stresses and strains of policing. It is vital that more is done to support our officers. I approach these amendments from the fact that it is impossible to address what we do not measure and, at this moment, policing has almost no reliable national mechanism for measuring accurately the total number of police suicides.

Data from the Police Federation of England and Wales shows that more than 100 police officers and staff have died by suicide between 2022 and 2025, with at least 70 officer deaths and over 200 attempted suicides in that period. Those figures are likely undercounts because there is no statutory requirement for forces to record such events. The federation has also revealed troubling trends in how these incidents are linked with organisational stresses—notably, that 47 of 70 suicides and 173 of 236 attempted suicides that it has identified between 2022 and 2025 involved officers under investigation for misconduct or criminal allegations. That is not simply a statistic; it is a human tragedy that echoes through families, colleagues and communities.

As has been said, police forces are not required to record suicide or attempted suicide, meaning that the true scale of the problem is hidden from view and national suicide statistics do not treat policing as a risk occupation, as they should. Without a statutory duty to record and report, we are asking police leaders to act in good faith alone, with widely inconsistent results. Two of the largest police forces in England and Wales reportedly could not provide their own figures when the federation asked. The amendments would end that inconsistency by placing responsibility for data collection and publication on a statutory footing.

The amendments are not a step taken in isolation from policing leadership. The National Police Chiefs’ Council and the College of Policing are already committed to suicide prevention across the service. They have jointly endorsed a national consensus statement on working together to prevent suicide in the police service in England and Wales, acknowledging the importance of reducing stigma and improving well-being. The College of Policing also leads on national suicide prevention guidance and professional practice, emphasising the duty of forces to recognise inherent risk factors associated with police work and to promote supportive interventions. However, guidance and consensus alone cannot ensure consistent national reporting or create the accountability that comes from an annual report, laid before Parliament, which analyses trends, contributory factors and the effectiveness of support mechanisms under the police covenant.

Requiring chief constables to certify compliance and linking non-compliance to inspection through HM Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services will ensure that this is not simply a bureaucratic exercise but a real driver for change. However, without consistent mandatory data, these efforts lack the firm foundation needed to evaluate progress and target interventions where they are most needed. We on these Benches fully support the amendments.

[The Minister of State, Home Office (Lord Hanson of Flint)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, for highlighting the amendments that he has put before the Committee today and to the noble Lord, Lord Bailey of Paddington, although he is not in his place, who tabled two of the amendments.

The importance of collecting accurate and consistent data for police officer and staff suicide is certainly relevant. I note particularly that the noble Lords, Lord Stevens and Lord Hogan-Howe, and my noble friend Lord Bach have a significant senior level of experience in these areas. I am grateful also for the comments of the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Sentamu, and I recognise and note the strong support from the noble Baroness, Lady Doocey, and the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Gower, from the Opposition Benches for the proposals in the amendments.

Every life lost to suicide is a tremendous tragedy and, when that person is part of our police workforce, that loss is even deeper because those officers, as has been said, walk towards danger and see things that everyday citizens do not see. It is only fair that we support them with the same care and commitment that they show to us.

It may help the Committee to know that last year I met the Police Federation chair, Tiff Lynch, when she raised these matters with me. I have to say that this is an issue. We must do our utmost to protect and support police officers and this Government agree that understanding the scale and nature of the problem is essential. As the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, said, it is important that we understand whether any levels of suicide are linked specifically to a policing role or linked to factors outside of policing that policing may or may not exacerbate, as well as what measures can be taken, as in any walk of life, to help to support and encourage individuals who have mental health challenges or experiences that drive them to suicide. That is why we as a Government are actively considering the best options for achieving that, both in legislation and via non-legislative routes, so that we can deliver meaningful and sustainable improvements without creating unnecessary burdens.

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[Lord Hogan-Howe (CB)]

I thank the Minister for such a constructive response and of course I thank everyone for their support. The noble Lord, Lord Bach, made a point that I had not made in my speech but that I want to amplify: in collecting the data, we should consider people for at least 12 months after retirement. He mentioned one particular case, but we can all perhaps imagine others and, if there is a link, that would be interesting to look at.

I hope we do not have to end up with legislation, because, in a way, that would be an admission of failure. There are far better ways of achieving it without that, or the bureaucracy that the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Sentamu, mentioned. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Stevens, for his usual powerful support for this and for saying it is common sense that this needs sorting out—there was no challenge on that from the Minister. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Doocey, and the noble Lord, Lord Davies, for their wholehearted support.

A couple of important things have through in the debate. First, the noble Lord, Lord Davies, mentioned the potential link to misconduct processes. If that is an issue, we need to understand why. We had an amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Bailey, on a previous Committee day about potential deadlines or timelines for how long these things take; that cannot be unconnected. Whatever it is, we need to understand what it is about.

There is a second very important HR issue: are we recruiting people who understand the nature of the job they are about to embark on? Are we sharing the nature of the challenges? Are we supporting them at the beginning if they have things that they are not sure about? It is important, for the reasons we have all talked about, to make sure that this happens. I am really reassured about the round table. It would be really helpful if, by Report, we had a definite route forward, because I can see there are various routes.

[Lord Davies of Gower (Con)]

Can I raise one point with the noble Lord? It seems to me—certainly from reflecting on my own police service—that one of the issues regarding suicide simply was the fact that police managers were unable to identify the issues when they arose. I wonder whether he, as a former commissioner and part of the inspectorate, has a view on that.

[Lord Hogan-Howe (CB)]

The noble Lord, Lord Davies, makes a really good point: are we training our managers and supervisors to recognise the signs? For good reasons, occupational health units keep all this data together privately. The noble Lord, Lord Stevens, mentioned a referral to the medical officer to see whether there was a problem; I wonder how many referrals are coming back the other way to let the manager know that this person might have an issue, not necessary to talk about suicide but to say there is a stress issue and they may need some support. Has it become a one-way valve that protects their privacy but reduces their safety? There are many facets to it that I hope the round table might address. With that, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment and thank the Government for their response.

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On Amendment 436, we agree that while the public are acutely aware of the prevalence of these offences, too often they have no sense of whether such offences are investigated, still less prosecuted in their local area. Better information on enforcement of everyday offences would support accountability and make it much harder for forces to hide behind national averages. In doing so, we must be careful to avoid imposing yet more rigid reporting duties on already overstretched officers.

[Lord Davies of Gower (Con)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe for tabling her two amendments. I begin with Amendment 436, co-signed by my noble friend Lord Jackson of Peterborough. I strongly support my noble friend’s efforts to ensure that release statistics are as rigorous and useful as possible. These releases are pivotal to both the police and the public—the police so that they are aware of the types of crimes they are likely to encounter, and the public so that they can judge the performance of police forces for themselves.

As it stands, there is not a standard, reliable measurement of crime rates and statistics. The current accredited metric used by the Office for National Statistics is the Crime Survey for England and Wales, which is helpful in giving an indication of certain crime rates but cannot be described as a foolproof operational tool. It uses an interviewer-administered face-to-face survey, which immediately makes the recounting of crime a choice on behalf of the victim, who may, for whatever reason, decide not to disclose it. It reports only crimes committed against over-16s and excludes crimes against the general public, the state, tourists and residents of institutions.

I understand that this is done so that the survey is unaffected by police reporting or recording changes, but it also creates a crime reporting system deeply affected by human discretion that can similarly not serve as a trustworthy basis. The least we can do is ask that the police are required to record data on the enforcement of offences simultaneously to the Crime Survey for England and Wales releases. It would provide a metric to judge police performance, as it would demonstrate the estimated number of crimes committed compared with those investigated by police forces.

This leads me to my noble friend’s second amendment, also signed by the noble Baroness, Lady Fox of Buckley. Investigations into committed crimes must lead to prosecutions, or else there is little point in maintaining a justice system. Between 2020 and 2024, more than 30,000 prosecutions collapsed. A large proportion of these came from the mishandling or loss of evidence by police. The storage and retention of evidence is an area in desperate need of modernising. It has been described as overwhelming by serving officers and has too often resulted in injustice for victims. The first step in solving this issue is a thorough review of the system as it currently exists before setting out a blueprint of reform. The amendment in question would provide for this, so I wholly support it and I hope the Minister does too. I look forward to his reply.

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, for her continued interest in improving transparency and accountability in policing. She will know that I am outcome-focused myself, and that I try to ensure that we get outcomes. I note the support from the noble Baroness, Lady Fox of Buckley, and the noble Lords, Lord Jackson of Peterborough and Lord Davies of Gower, for Amendment 436.

The Government have taken significant steps to improve the visibility of police performance. I draw noble Baroness’s attention to the newly established police performance framework. That framework, supported by the Home Office’s police performance unit, provides a robust mechanism for monitoring enforcement activities across all 43 current police forces in England and Wales. This includes the priority offences that the noble Baroness mentioned, such as shoplifting, knife crime and theft.

The noble Baroness mentioned the White Paper; I will respond by trailing some of the announcements that were made in the White Paper yesterday. A key one was that the Home Office will this year introduce an initial sector-facing police performance dashboard that will enable chief constables and local policing bodies to analyse the transparent, high quality and operationally significant data that all three Back-Bench speakers sought. This will empower forces to deliver improvements through strengthening their understanding of where they are performing well and where they can learn from practice in other forces to improve. The framework has been designed to be flexible, and there will be a midpoint review in middle of 2027-28 to allow for the inclusion of any new priorities that might be brought forward. The Government believe that this is an appropriate mechanism for considering additional offence categories, rather than—with due respect to the noble Baroness— mandating them in primary legislation.

I took to heart the point from the noble Baroness, Lady Doocey, that requiring police forces to publish enforcement data on a fixed list of offences might add burdens and administrative duplication, particularly when many of these offences are already captured through a range of other mechanisms, and contradict the later amendments to reduce police bureaucracy. That is an important factor to bear in mind when we consider this proposal.

Furthermore, the police and the CPS are required to comply with the Director of Public Prosecutions guidance on charging, which applies to all offences where a criminal charge may be instituted. This guidance ensures that investigations meet evidential and public interest tests before prosecution. Compliance for that is monitored through an internal assessment framework between the police and the CPS that is crime agnostic and used only for management purposes. A statutory duty to publish enforcement data for selected offences might duplicate those arrangements and divert resources from front-line policing.

In summary on Amendment 436, yes, we need to improve, but we have put in place some mechanisms. We will monitor those mechanisms and, I hope, return to them in due course, without the legislative requirement proposed by the noble Baroness.

The noble Baroness’s Amendment 437 goes to the heart of the core issue of productive use of police time. I again note the support of the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, for this amendment. The 2023 Police Activity Survey, provided by the Home Office, gave us significant insights into how police time is used. We are planning to repeat that survey this year, and I hope it will again help us to understand a bit more about the policing landscape.

The 2023 productivity review, sponsored by the College of Policing’s Centre for Police Productivity, prioritised the rollout of productivity-enhancing capabilities, such as the use of AI and robotic process automation, to reduce the time spent on administration. I know that there are concerns about AI, and I have heard them raised today in Committee. However, when properly used, AI can reduce bureaucracy. In Autumn 2024, we launched the Police Efficiency and Collaboration Programme to explore how we can improve productivity and efficiency savings.

Yesterday, the Government published the policing White Paper, From Local to National: A New Model for Policing—I have a copy to hand for ease of reference. In that White Paper is a comprehensive package of reforms that address the issues in the noble Baroness’s amendment. I refer her to paragraph 91, which says:

“Another area of extensive paperwork in policing comes from the requirements of the criminal justice system. In the months ahead we will work with the Ministry of Justice and the Crown Prosecution Service (alongside the Attorney General’s Office) to examine changes that could reduce the burden on policing. As part of this work, we will look at a number of areas including the disclosure regime and redaction, the use of out of court resolutions, charging and joint police-prosecution performance metrics. We will do this alongside consideration of any new or emerging evidence, such as the implications of the Independent Review of Disclosure and Sir Brian Leveson’s recommendations for criminal court reform”.


We therefore recognise that that is an important issue.

I also refer the noble Baroness to paragraph 293, which says:

“It is expected that in its first year Police.AI will focus on some of the biggest administrative burdens facing policing – including disclosure, analysis of CCTV footage, production of case files, crime recording and classification and translating and transcribing documents. This will free up 6 million policing hours each year”.


The Government are therefore focused on those issues, so I am not convinced that we need a legislative solution to deal with them. With this having been put in the White Paper—it is a brand-new document, and Members will want to have a chance to reflect upon it—the direction of travel is self-evidently there. I hope that the noble Baroness will understand that the core issues on which she is calling for a review are addressed in the document that I have just referred to the Committee.

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[Lord Davies of Gower (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to noble Lords who have spoken, and I am grateful to my noble friend Lady Cash both for bringing forward this amendment and for the clarity with which she set out the problem that it seeks to address. I speak in support of the amendment. It is fundamental to our safety and justice system that police data is accurate and fit for purpose.

I am grateful for the warm words that the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, spoke about me. I hope that I will not disappoint her too much when I say that sex is not an incidental characteristic in policing or criminal justice: it is a foundational variable. Patterns of offending, particularly in relation to serious violence, sexual offences, domestic abuse and repeat high-harm crime are profoundly sex-disaggregated.

I would say to the noble Baroness, Lady Donaghy, that police forces depend on this data to analyse trends, assess risk, deploy safeguarding interventions and evaluate whether strategies, including those endorsed by your Lordships’ House, are actually working. If police records cannot reliably distinguish males from females, risk assessment collapses, trend analysis becomes unreliable and the very legislation that we pass to make the public safer is frustrated.

We have already seen what happens when biological sex is replaced with self-declared gender identity. As has already been mentioned, in Scotland, Police Scotland permitted suspects’ sex to be recorded on the basis of self-identification, including in serious sexual offences. The consequences were predictable and serious: incoherent statistics, loss of public confidence and an inability to analyse male violence accurately. After sustained scrutiny, Police Scotland reversed that policy in October 2025 and confirmed that biological sex would be recorded, with transgender status noted separately where relevant. That reversal was driven by operational reality, not ideology, and it offers a clear lesson for England and Wales.

Independent expert evidence reinforces this point. The Government-commissioned review led by Professor Alice Sullivan was unequivocal: sex should mean biological sex and, where gender identity is relevant, it should be recorded separately, not substituted. Similar conclusions have been reached by independent analysis examining the consequences of degraded data across public bodies. Once sex data is compromised, statistics become contested, safeguarding weakens and public trust is eroded.

There are also real-world safeguarding implications. Ministry of Justice analysis shows that trans-identified male offenders exhibit offending patterns aligned with the male population, including for violent and sexual crimes. Recording such individuals as female underestimates male violence, artificially inflates female offending and distorts risk analysis.

We have already seen the downstream consequences in the prison estate, where serious safeguarding failures led the Government to tighten allocation rules. Biological sex is a material risk factor; police data is upstream of all this and, if it is wrong at the point of arrest or charge, the entire system is compromised.

There is a theme running through many of our debates today: good policing is inextricably linked to good data. The Government have acknowledged this. Biological sex is just one of the data variables that must be recorded for accurate policing, so I wholeheartedly support my noble friend’s amendment and I hope the Minister will, too.

Police and Criminal Evidence (Northern Ireland) Order 1989 (Application to Immigration Officers and Designated Customs Officials in Northern Ireland) and Consequential Amendments Regulations 2026

Lord Davies of Gower Excerpts

Wednesday 21st January 2026 Grand Committee

[Baroness Ritchie of Downpatrick (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend the Minister for his explanation of this draft statutory instrument. I declare an interest as an outgoing member of the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee; our clerk is presiding over our proceedings here today.

I was intrigued when I read the submission from the committee again; my noble friend the Minister referred to that. Why the delay in implementation? We had to wait until some 17 years later. The Conservatives were in government during many of those years, so perhaps this question might be better addressed to the shadow Minister on the Opposition Front Bench, who might be able to offer an explanation for the delay; it seems quite incredible that that is the situation and that we did not have a service in Northern Ireland.

I also point out that these are issues of particular relevance to the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission and the Equality Commission for Northern Ireland, because they are dealing with and have direct responsibility for issues to do with Article 2 of the Windsor Framework, which deals specifically with issues in the wider purview of the Good Friday agreement in relation to immigration and migrants to ensure that people are properly protected. Maybe some of those issues will impact on other legal judgments that have taken place, so perhaps my noble friend the Minister could outline what discussions may have taken place with those commissions. Could he also outline—because work is required with the Police Service of Northern Ireland—what work will take place with it and what work took place with it during that intervening period? Were reports made from the Home Office directly to the Northern Ireland Policing Board? Could I receive assurances that the PACE SI will adhere to the principles of equality, fairness and human rights? What discussions took place in that intervening period with An Garda Síochána and the Home Office to counter any potential for terrorism or for people to seek to avail of potential opportunities through movement on a north-south basis on the island of Ireland?

I thank my noble friend the Minister for his explanations. I look forward to the explanation for the lack of representation in those 17 years from the shadow Minister—and I support the PACE SI.

[Lord Davies of Gower (Con)]

My Lords, I shall speak briefly on these regulations. I am grateful to the Minister for introducing this SI today. The purpose of this instrument is straightforward; it extends to immigration officers and designated customs officials in Northern Ireland the powers contained in the Police and Criminal Evidence (Northern Ireland) Order 1989—powers that their counterparts in England and Wales have exercised for more than a decade under the equivalent provisions of PACE 1984.

Without this instrument, officers in Northern Ireland would continue to rely on a patchwork of powers under the immigration Acts, which the Government argue do not align with the framework used elsewhere in the United Kingdom. The intention here is therefore to ensure consistency, improve co-operation between agencies and provide officers with the tools that they need to tackle organised immigration crime effectively. We support these regulations today.

The equality impact assessment makes it clear that these changes are not expected to lead to a significant increase in arrests or prosecutions. Rather, the effect should be to strengthen cross-authority working between criminal and financial investigations, Border Force and the police, and to support the effective operation of the common travel area. On that basis, and given our long-standing support for ensuring that immigration officials have the powers necessary to implement existing law, we support the instrument and deem it totally necessary.

This is a modest and largely technical instrument, bringing Northern Ireland into alignment with powers established elsewhere in the United Kingdom. We support that objective while recognising the sensitivities that have surrounded the timing of its introduction. I look forward to the Minister’s response.

[Baroness Ritchie of Downpatrick (Lab)]

Before my noble friend the Minister makes his response, I should like to ask the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Gower, if he can provide any explanation of why, during that period, there was no implementation of this SI in Northern Ireland.

[Lord Davies of Gower (Con)]

I cannot answer those questions. I was not here at the time, so I cannot. Sorry.

[Baroness Ritchie of Downpatrick (Lab)]

I do not wish to delay proceedings. I recall that the noble Lord came into your Lordships’ House at the same time as me around October or November 2019. From my recollection, the Conservatives were in government. So, the noble Lord is bound to have had some recollection and he had Front Bench responsibilities.

[Lord Davies of Gower (Con)]

I was not the Minister. I cannot answer the question, and it is not my place to answer it now.

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

My Lords, perhaps I can assist my noble friend with some comments. Self-evidently, I was a Minister in the Labour Governments of 1997 to 2010, and the power to make these regulations came into play originally when I was in government. But self-evidently, nothing happened between 2010 and the regulations being brought forward now.

I am not party, as the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Gower, is not, to what happened in those years because for nine of them I was in opposition and, for five of them, I was not in Parliament. But I can potentially help my noble friend by saying that it was initially planned to extend the PACE powers to Northern Ireland in 2013, alongside the same processes being undertaken in England and Wales. I am advised that limited resources and/or competing priorities meant that that was not implemented. There was also the additional factor of the closure of the Belfast criminal financial investigations office between 2017 and 2022, which made it difficult to pursue those regulations until now. Questions of why those decisions on resources or legislative capacity were made and why the office was closed are beyond my capacity, but those are the facts of the assessment that has been made. That is what I have been advised.

My noble friend also asked what changes these powers make. The regulations give officers a number of powers that they do not already have. Immigration criminal investigations in Northern Ireland will now benefit from a number of provisions of PACE, notably: Section 19 in relation to powers of seizure in relation to evidence of non-immigration offences; Section 8, relating to warrants; Sections 9 and Schedule 1, which give access to excluded or special procedural material; Section 20, giving extension of seizure powers to include information on computers; Section 46A on power of arrest for failure to answer bail; and Sections 18 and 32 on simplified powers of seizure and search.

Border Force officers with customs powers will no longer have to rely on the temporary measures that were set out in Section 22 of BCIA back in the day. Therefore, officers will benefit from the following provisions not currently applied in 2007: guidance and consultation with the Director of Public Prosecutions; telephone review of custody; detention after charge, search and examination; and a number of other points.

These powers have successfully been exercised in England and Wales with no controversy over the past 13 years. When the powers come into force, agreed by Parliament, which I hope will be soon, then in late February or early March, pending parliamentary approval, they will be available to customs officers on the ground. That is important because the powers will be available also to officers from the rest of the United Kingdom undertaking in-country investigations when required. Immigration Enforcement officers currently undertake criminal investigations and have powers of arrest and detention. Border Force designated customs officers do not lead on criminal investigations, which is a point that my noble friend asked about. This is done predominantly by the police or the National Crime Agency. Again, she asked about consultation with the Northern Ireland Executive. We have had no response on those issues from the Executive, and I am taking no response in terms of no comment.

I also potentially do not have the detail of the consultation with the Human Rights Commission and the Equality Commission at this moment but, if my noble friend will allow me, I will look into that and respond to her in due course—if need be. On reflection, I think a full equality impact assessment probably has been completed and that would have included discussions in which the two bodies that my noble friend mentioned would have had an opportunity to input.

Crime and Policing Bill

Lord Davies of Gower Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 20th January 2026 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Davies of Gower]

411: After Clause 144, insert the following new Clause—
“Stop and searchIn section 60(1) of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 (powers to stop and search in anticipation of, or after, violence)— (a) in paragraph (a) omit “serious”, and(b) in paragraph (aa)(i) omit “serious”.”Member’s explanatory statement
This new clause would lower the threshold for stop and search to “violence” rather than “serious violence”.

[Lord Davies of Gower (Con)]

My Lords, Amendment 411 is in my name and that of my noble friend Lord Cameron of Lochiel and my noble and learned friend Lord Keen of Elie. The amendment was championed by my honourable friend Matt Vickers in Committee in the other place.

The amendment alters the statutory threshold for the exercise of the powers under Section 60 of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994. That section permits a police officer of at least the rank of inspector to authorise stop and search powers within a defined locality for a period of 24 hours. Where such an authorisation has been given, a police officer may stop any member of the public to search them for offensive weapons or dangerous instruments without suspicion of the commission of an offence—so, essentially, it allows for a temporary adjustment to standard stop and search powers.

The current test that must be met is for the officer of sufficient rank to reasonably believe that incidents involving serious violence may take place in any locality in his police area. Our amendment would lower the threshold so that the police would be able to use Section 60 powers where there is a reasonable likelihood of violence, not serious violence. The fundamental principle behind this amendment is that the police should be able to act where there is a threat of violence—any form of violence—without being required to weigh the seriousness of that violence. This would remove the more subjective element of the test.

We know that stop and search powers are highly effective in combating crime and preventing violent offences. In the year ending March 2025, there were a total of 528,582 stops and searches conducted by officers in England and Wales. This represented a slight decrease of 1.4% from the previous year. Of those, 5,572 were conducted under Section 60 powers, which actually represented an increase of 5.4%. This is welcome; I am pleased to see the police making good use of their powers. But, given that there were 1.1 million incidents of violence with or without injury recorded by the police in the year ending June 2025, that the figure that the ONS has given shows no statistically significant change compared with the previous year, and that there were still 51,527 knife offences, there is more work that needs to be done. Lowering the threshold for the use of Section 60 is another tool that the Government could utilise in their efforts to crack down on the use of offensive weapons and the incidence of violence. I beg to move.

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

My Lords, I support the amendment in the name of my noble friend on the Front Bench. At this juncture, I also thank the Committee for its forbearance when I was not able to move my previous amendment on mobile phone theft. I put on record my warmest thanks to my noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe for moving it so eloquently on that occasion.

This is an issue about the difference between “serious violence” and “violence”, but the wider context is the fact that the UK has a knife crime problem. In London, the number of incidents up to June 2025 was 15,639, which was an increase of nearly 72% from the data recorded in 2015-16. Unfortunately, it has to be said that the number of stop and search encounters peaked at the end of the last Labour Government and dramatically decreased under the two previous Governments. Between 2003 and 2011, stop and search numbers increased, peaking at 1.2 million, but by 2018 this had fallen by 77%. The number of arrests resulting from stop and search encounters had fallen from 120,000 to 48,000.

The fact is that there is significant evidence that stop and search does demonstrably have an impact on the incidence of knife crime, and therefore reduces crime. In a study released in 2025, the two criminologists Alexis Piquero and Lawrence Sherman analysed data between 2008 and 2023, and found that stop and search encounters were successful in reducing deaths and injuries related to weapons. The conclusion of the study was that

“increased stop and search encounters can significantly reduce knife-related injuries and homicides in public places”.

Evidence from a number of bodies and think tanks, including Policy Exchange, suggests that, while there may be a range of causal factors, a link between rates of knife crime and rates of stop and search exists. As the rate of stop and search decreases, the amount of knife crime increases. As stop and search rises, the amount of knife crime falls. The Chief Constable of Greater Manchester, Sir Stephen Watson, said last year:

“If you don’t back your officers to do stop and search, they will stop doing stop and search. And if you stop doing stop and search, you’ll see street robberies going up”.


The issue is the difference between “serious violence” and “violence” within that context. My simple point to the Committee is that, if we want to take weapons off the street and prevent incidents of knife crime and other crime, we have to increase stop and search. Therefore, you have to give warranted officers the legal underpinning and the authority to make the appropriate decisions for stop and search. In 2023, there were 5,014 occasions when a police officer found a weapon or firearm when looking for a different prohibited item. In 3,221 of those cases, they were looking for drugs. This is a case of effective policing and not just getting lucky. So, if they could stop for “violence”, they might find weapons that could have led to a more serious situation. If not, there is a potential for people to just walk away.

On that basis, it is wise for the Government to consider this amendment, because it allows flexibility in operational policing. Fundamentally, it will prevent crime and may even in the long run prevent serious injury or death. Therefore, I invite Ministers and the Committee to give this amendment their strong support.

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[Baroness Doocey (LD)]

My Lords, there is now considerable evidence about how stop and search powers are used in practice, their impact and long-term consequences, not least in building trust, which is so vital for effective community policing. Stop and search powers, especially under Section 60—suspicionless powers —already fall disproportionately on marginalised communities, particularly black and minority ethnic young men. Lowering the threshold from “serious violence” to “violence” can only increase the frequency and breadth of those powers and with it the disproportionality. This is not an abstract civil liberties concern but goes directly to trust and confidence.

It is also just 18 months since the Home Office accepted the findings of a police inspectorate report that identified serious shortcomings in the use of Section 60 powers, including low arrest and seizure rates for weapons, inadequate training and failures to adhere to statutory duties, such as PACE Code A or voluntary frameworks such as College of Policing APP guidance.

From a Liberal Democrat perspective, the test for expanding intrusive powers is a simple one. Is there a clear and compelling operational case, supported by evidence, that the existing powers are inadequate and that widening them will improve outcomes without unacceptable collateral damage to rights and community relations? We do not believe that the case has been made here. What is on offer is a lower legal bar for the most intrusive stop and search powers we have, imposed on communities that already experience it acutely, with no serious account taken of the long-term impact on policing by consent. On that basis, we cannot support the amendment.

[Lord Davies of Gower (Con)]

My Lords, this has been a very interesting short debate, and I thank my noble friends—

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[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

I did indicate that minor scuffles would not be seen as serious violence. I am not trying to determine from this Dispatch Box the use of a Section 60 power by a police officer on the ground because of the level of violence the police have witnessed and wish to act upon. If we look at the figure 16 years ago, it was significantly higher than in the 12 months prior to now, at just over 5,000. The law has not changed but, going back to the point made by the noble Viscount, Lord Goschen, police practice and police assessments have meant that they do not need to use that power. In parallel with that, the Government believe that if we wish to make an impact on knife crime, stop and search is a tool in extremis but better education, youth futures programmes and policing hot spots are more effective ways of reducing the problem overall. With that, I hope that the noble Lord can withdraw his amendment.

[Lord Davies of Gower (Con)]

My Lords, this has become an even more interesting debate, and I thank noble Lords for their contributions, particularly my noble friends Lord Jackson and Lord Blencathra.

I say to the Minister and to noble Lords that this amendment is intended to help the Government. Regardless of our politics, everyone would like to see a reduction in violent offences, and increasing police use of stop and search is an incredibly powerful tool to do just that. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Sentamu, and the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, that there is nothing wrong with stop and search. Stop and search is one of the most useful tools in the box. Having spent 32 years on front-line policing in London, I know that, as the noble Baroness, Lady Doocey, said, it is an issue of training and adherence to the codes of practice. There is no question about that in my mind. That is what police need to be concentrating on when it comes to the issues around stop and search.

Lowering the threshold to the likelihood of violence would enable officers to intervene earlier to prevent harm, protect the public and de-escalate potentially dangerous situations before they result in injury or worse, and before becoming serious violence cases. I know full well that officers often face rapidly evolving situations in which it is difficult to draw a clear line between violence and serious violence. I hope that the Government take this away and reflect, but for now I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 411 withdrawn.

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Moved by

[Lord Davies of Gower]

415: After Clause 144, insert the following new Clause—
“Prohibition on police use of digital ID(1) The Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 is amended as follows.(2) After section 6 insert—“6A Police not to require digital identity document(1) If, at any time, His Majesty’s Government introduce a digital identity document scheme, a constable may not—(a) require a person to produce a digital identity card on request,(b) ask a person to produce a digital identity document for inspection, or(c) use any information contained within, or obtained from, a digital identity card for the purposes of investigating a criminal offence.(2) In this section a “digital identity document” means a document which—(a) is issued to an individual by a relevant authority,(b) is available only digitally, and(c) contains or records information which could be used to identify the person.”.”

[Lord Davies of Gower (Con)]

My Lords, it has become a cliché to say that a week is a long time in politics, but it is an idiom that forever rings true. We began a couple of weeks ago with the Government still firmly wed to the idea that digital ID cards were going to save us all, and we ended the week with the policy relegated to a footnote in future history books. As with everything the Government touch these days, the digital ID policy had become completely toxic and incredibly unpopular, forcing them into the U-turn. It is a U-turn I am supportive of, and I am pleased that the Government have finally seen sense and ditched this policy.

I suppose I should be grateful to the Minister for somewhat negating the need for this amendment. It is quite easy being in opposition when the Government do your job for you.

The amendment is intended as a safeguard to prevent the police being able to require a person to show them a digital identity card when—or should I say if—such a scheme is ever introduced. Fundamentally, this whole debate comes down to who we are as a nation. Britain has never been a country where, in peacetime, one must have an identity card simply because the state mandates it.

I heard much Newspeak about the policy from Government Ministers soon after the announcement. Following the immediate backlash, many started claiming that it was not going to be mandatory after all, and that it was simply mandatory if you wanted to work. The Prime Minister said at the announcement of the policy:

“Let me spell that out: you will not be able to work in the United Kingdom if you do not have digital ID. It’s as simple as that”.


But requiring everyone who wants a job to have digital ID does make it mandatory—we all need to go to work to earn a living. We heard the justification change more times than we could count. First, it was needed to stop illegal migration and illegal working. That argument was soon blown out of the water by the fact that employers are already required to undertake right-to-work checks, and those who violate the law already were never going to suddenly start conducting such checks simply because of the existence of digital ID. Then we heard that it was necessary for efficiency and joined-up services. I can only wonder what the next justification would have been.

That is why I tabled this amendment. It was always a probing amendment, but we must make these arguments to stand up for the principle. The Government might have U-turned on this now, but what is to say that we do not see this pernicious policy creep back towards becoming mandatory in the future? In such a scenario, having such a legislative guardrail against potential police use of digital ID would make sense.

Fundamentally, the principle is that Britain is not a country where police officers require the presentation of mandatory ID cards. A person should be able, if they so wish, to go about their lives with as minimal interference by the state as possible. Digital ID cards were a wrong-headed and poorly thought-through policy, costing large sums of money that we do not have and coming at the expense of fundamental British values. I am glad to see the back of the mandatory element, but we must guard against any future expansions of this scheme. I beg to move.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I am, of course, also delighted that this amendment is now unnecessary and irrelevant, but it fits into some broader concerns that have been expressed in Committee, such as the planned nationwide rollout of police-operated live facial recognition cameras and a whole range of technology used to introduce a surveillance state. The use of digital ID would have not only created that very unpleasant checking of one’s papers by the police but introduced an element of technology which, without being anti-technology, could be seen as problematic.

I noted and would like the Minister’s response to an interview that the Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, did with Sir Tony Blair last week, in which she talked about AI and technology having a transformative impact on

“the whole of the law and order space”,

which would therefore mean that digital ID was not totally off the table. The Home Secretary said

“my ultimate vision for that part of the criminal justice system was to achieve, by means of AI and technology, what Jeremy Bentham tried to do with his Panopticon. That is that the eyes of the state can be on you at all times”—

a rather chilling declaration, I must say. At this stage, as we are not going to have to discuss digital ID, that broad use of technology and surveillance might be something that the Minister could reassure us on specifically. It is good to see the back of digital ID, but I am not keen on the eyes of the state being on us at all times as a justification for tackling crime and disorder.

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[Lord Katz (Lab)]

I am going to try to stay roughly on the topic of the amendment, rather than turn this into a wider debate on the introduction of digital ID, because I am not entirely sure that my briefing will cover all the points that the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, has addressed.

To be absolutely clear, we are not stepping back from the idea of introducing a digital ID. On 15 January, there was an Urgent Question on the issue in the other place that was repeated here. We have been very clear that we are introducing a digital ID programme. There are two core objectives: first, to make accessing public services easier and to make the state work better for ordinary people, and, secondly, to aid with right-to-work checks and catching those who are working illegally. To be clear, that is still happening. As I say, there is a public consultation coming that will set out the scope of the scheme, and those who wish to respond will be able to respond in those terms.

To respond directly to the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, around the use of ID by policing and enforcement agencies, there are already safeguards in place to ensure that the use of any such measures is balanced against the need to protect individual privacy rights. That will be the same for digital ID as it is for existing police access to information contained within the passport and immigration databases, for example, which is done in specific circumstances where that is lawful, necessary and proportionate. An example of a legal safeguard already in place is contained in the UK Borders Act 2007, which makes it clear that holders of e-visas cannot be required to carry them at all times.

I think I have already touched on the issue of stop and search, but I cannot quite remember because of the flow of the interventions. To be clear, the digital ID will not be used as part of stop and search, and police officers will never demand to see it as part of stop and search. However, consistent with current powers where immigration enforcement are carrying out an enforcement visit or warrant, they have powers to ensure that all those who are employed have the right to work in the UK. These powers include the ability to demand ID, take biometrics, and detain, search and seize property to assist their investigation. I hope that provides some clarity on that point.

Given the considerations that I have set out, particularly the fact that the introduction of the digital ID scheme will require its own legislation in future, I ask the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Gower, to withdraw his amendment.

[Lord Davies of Gower (Con)]

My Lords, I thank all those who have contributed to this short debate, particularly the noble Baroness, Lady Fox of Buckley.

At the time when this amendment was tabled, the Government were pressing ahead with plans that would have fundamentally altered the relationship between the citizen and the state. The prospect of compulsory digital ID, coupled with the possibility of routine police access to digital identity data, raised serious concerns about privacy and subsequent state overreach. It was precisely because of those concerns and the lack of apparent or clear safeguards that the amendment was necessary. Indeed, I am still not clear from what the Minister said in his response as to whether it will be introduced in future or whether it will be compulsory.

Since then, as we have heard, the Government have performed a U-turn, announcing that digital ID will no longer be mandatory. The amendment before us was therefore not speculative or hypothetical; it was a direct response to a live and deeply unpopular government policy. We can only hope that this sudden enthusiasm for reversing course is not confined to digital ID alone. While the U-turn means that the immediate threat that prompted it has receded, the wider issue remains unresolved. The Government’s approach to digital identity remains unclear and may change again before Report. For the time being, I will withdraw the amendment, but it is something that we will continue to consider. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 415 withdrawn.

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[Baroness Pidgeon (LD)]

My Lords, as the noble Viscount, Lord Goschen, said, this is Groundhog Day, and I fear we are rehearsing many of the points raised on earlier groups. We on these Benches do not support Amendment 416 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe. As we have heard, there are many reasons why someone might choose to wear a face covering while cycling or scooting, ranging from the practical to the health related. As we have heard, if it is cold weather, of course you are going to wear a scarf or a face covering to keep yourself warm and prevent wind burn. Quite frankly, in the recent cold weather, that might even prevent you getting frostbite while you are cycling along.

In urban areas, there are specific masks that people wear to tackle the pollution that we still have in many of our cities, to deal with and filter out pollutants, dust and exhaust fumes. How is that wrong? Why would we want to prevent people doing that? Likewise, if we have extreme heat, people sometimes wear masks because they want to block out pollen and other allergens, and also to protect themselves from UV rays. While in this Chamber we have heard often, in my experience so far, quite negative debate about cyclists, there are many cyclists here, and they will know that covering your face prevents bugs, dirt and small debris hitting their mouth or nose while they are riding. I am an occasional cyclist, and I wear sunglasses and wrap up warm when I am out cycling to protect myself from the glare and debris. It is practical. How would we make that a problem? Why is it a cause for concern? It is practical clothing for people who choose to cycle or scoot. Why are we treating those people as criminals?

There is a separate need for management of micromobility, which has come out in all these discussions. It would be good to hear from the Minister when we might expect some legislation around managing micromobility, the explosion of e-bikes and e-scooters on our streets, and the extension of trial after trial by the previous Government. But this amendment treats all cyclists and those riding scooters as criminals, rather than as individuals dressing for their mode of transport. I hope that the Government will agree with me and these Benches that it is disproportionate and not needed in the Bill.

[Lord Davies of Gower (Con)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe for tabling Amendment 416, which I entirely support. I also thank noble Lords who have contributed, particularly the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, for his contribution.

The amendment, as my noble friend ably set out, would give constables the power to stop individuals cycling while wearing a face covering. Failing to do so would constitute an offence liable to a month’s imprisonment or a fine of up to £1,000. While I know that opposition to this amendment has claimed that this means police powers encroaching into an entirely innocuous activity, it is unfortunately now a necessary measure. What previously would have been a harmless and inoffensive act has been perverted by criminals into a means by which to commit crime and escape justice. We are facing a theft epidemic in this country, largely concentrated in our cities, where youths, often in gangs, shoplift and snatch phones.

Our capital city is now the phone theft capital of Europe, where a phone is snatched every seven and a half minutes. The United Kingdom accounts for almost 40% of all phone thefts on the continent. I task any Member of the Committee to watch footage of these phone thefts and deny that there is a problem with face coverings and bikes. Face coverings mean that they are not detected by CCTV, while electric bikes, often modified, mean that the victim has no chance of chasing and retrieving the stolen property. The same is true for shoplifting. CCTV footage consistently shows offenders using face coverings to evade detection, then using bikes and scooters to flee the scene. The cost to retailers of this shoplifting inevitably is passed on to consumers, and last year amounted to £2 billion.

The police must have the power to stop these criminals, and this amendment provides the grounds for it. It is often impossible to see where a thief has a stolen item on their possession, so we must look for other pointers as to who is committing these crimes. Allowing the police to intervene when they are in public on a bike or scooter is the next necessary step. It would dramatically increase the chances of victims being returned their stolen property and allow the police to begin to tackle the epidemic that we find ourselves in.

I once again thank my noble friend for her amendment, and I look forward to hearing what the Minister has to say in response.

[Lord Katz (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, for tabling Amendment 416. I recognise the concerns that she set out, and those set out very clearly by the many noble Lords who contributed to the debate, particularly the noble Lords, Lord Blencathra and Lord Jackson of Peterborough, about the use of bicycles and scooters in facilitating crime and anti-social behaviour.

The Government have committed to the winter of action initiative, which is running from 1 December 2025 to the end of January. This initiative is intended to focus on making town centres across England and Wales safer by building on the safer streets summer initiative and continuing efforts to tackle crime and anti-social behaviour, while addressing retail crime and night-time economy offences, particularly during the darker evenings that we have in winter, when there are higher risks to public safety.

I say directly to the noble Viscount, Lord Goschen, that we are setting a framework. We always say, and I think all sides of the Committee agree, that it is for good reasons of operational independence that the police decide their priorities and how they deploy their resources, which will always be scarce however much we want to give them—there will never be enough. These initiatives give us confidence that the police are treating these sorts of offences as a priority and understand the concerns not only of this Committee but across wider society about the sorts of offences that the noble Viscount and other noble Lords set out.

The police do have powers to act here, and we heard from the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, about police powers to stop any vehicles, which is a good point. However, the powers to which I am going to refer are different, and this goes to the point raised by the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss. Section 60AA of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 requires individuals to remove face coverings in designated areas where they are being used for the purposes of concealing their identity and gives police the power to seize the face covering. Areas can be designated when an officer of the rank of at least inspector reasonably believes that crime is likely to take place there. We encourage police forces to make full use of these powers in areas they know to be crime hotspots. This includes any road users or cyclists, including those working for food delivery companies, as my noble friend Lord Shamash set out, when the police have due course, and irrespective of the type of vehicle being used, as the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, went to some lengths to describe.

In addition, local authorities have powers to make public spaces protection orders, which can prohibit specified acts in designated areas. I understand that a number of local authorities already have in place PSPOs that ban the wearing of face coverings in the area covered by the order, to deal with exactly this kind of anti-social behaviour by Balaclava-wearing cyclists.

This is probably as good a point as any to mention that the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, and the noble Lord, Lord Jackson of Peterborough, mentioned live facial recognition. I am not sure that either was in their place for the debate we had in Committee last Thursday, but I reiterate that there is a live consultation on live facial recognition, so I once again encourage noble Lords, if interested, to contribute to that and set out their views on live facial recognition.

There are of course legitimate reasons why cyclists may wear a face covering, as we heard from the noble Baroness, Lady Pidgeon, including health reasons or just to keep out the cold. That is often, but not always, seasonal. Notwithstanding the Stakhanovite efforts made, at least in London by the mayor, to tackle air quality through ULEZ and other measures, it is sometimes about protecting cyclists from inhaling particulates and the like. It would be disproportionate to introduce a blanket prohibition of the kind envisaged by Amendment 416 or, for that matter, to extend the Section 60AA powers, to which I have already referred, to situations where there are no grounds to reasonably believe that criminal activity may take place in a particular location. Given these considerations, I ask the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, to withdraw her amendment.

[Lord Davies of Gower (Con)]

We are saying here that the requirement to remove this would be accompanied by some sort of reasonable suspicion that that person had been committing a crime, so it is not just a person who has a cough or a cold.

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[Baroness Doocey (LD)]

My Lords, the amendment rightly exposes a serious weakness in our current system. As the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, points out, HMICFRS can diagnose deep-seated problems within police forces but it does not have the power to make sure these problems are fixed. There are simply too few national levers to deal with police underperformance. Labour’s manifesto included a clear commitment to give HMICFRS new powers to intervene in failing forces, and Ministers have signalled that they want to legislate to do this. We welcome that, but the Bill contains no such clause. I appreciate that a White Paper might be imminent. Even so, I urge the Government not to miss this golden opportunity to legislate now for clear, time-bound duties and proper escalation mechanisms, so that police forces are required to act on inspectorate findings.

Amendment 416A seeks to take the Government further by building this question into a wider statutory review of policing oversight. We support that intention, but we part company with the noble Baroness on the mechanism she proposes. Setting up yet another independent commission, with the terms of reference to be devised by the Secretary of State, approved by the Commons and then followed by nine months of deliberation, risks delaying change for at least another year. The evidence base is already substantial. What is missing is not diagnosis but the authority to enforce it. The noble Baroness is quite right that enforcement is a wider problem, one that extends beyond HMICFRS to the Independent Office for Police Conduct, where lessons are not always learned, to put it mildly. I agree with the spirit of co-ordination, but we must remember that the IOPC’s role is distinct—to oversee complaints and investigate the most serious misconduct. It is not, and should not become, a general performance regulator for police forces. That role properly lies with HMICFRS and, ultimately, with Ministers.

From these Benches, our preference is clear: do not commission another review and, instead, move directly and decisively to give the inspectorate the power it so clearly needs. For too long, we have had excellent reports, full of well-reasoned recommendations, almost all accepted by the police and the Government, but nothing happens. That inaction is rarely followed up. Measures that ensure that we no longer see the same failures repeated again and again would be very welcome.

[Lord Davies of Gower (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, for bringing forward Amendment 416A. While I recognise the intention to ensure that policing is subject to effective scrutiny and that regulatory bodies have the tools they need to drive improvement, I do not believe this amendment is necessary, nor do I think it would represent a proportionate or effective use of time and resources. His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services already plays a well-established role in ensuring accountability. It has extensive powers to inspect, report and make recommendations, and these reports are published and robust. They are laid before Parliament and used by the Home Office and policing bodies to drive reform. Where forces fall short, the existing framework already enables escalation, follow-up inspections and external pressure.

I was also worried that this amendment risks duplicating work already being carried out within existing structures. The policing oversight landscape includes His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services, the Independent Office for Police Conduct, police and crime commissioners and parliamentary scrutiny through Select Committees. Co-ordination between these bodies is important, and I suggest it would be more constructive to ensure the better use of these mechanisms rather than create a new independent commission.

It is also worth noting the practical burden imposed by this amendment. It would require the Government to establish a commission, set detailed terms of reference, run a comparative review across multiple regulators, and timetable parliamentary debates in both Houses within a very tight timeframe. That is a significant undertaking that may not be justified, given the absence of clear evidence that His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services lacks the necessary authority to fulfil its core function. For those reasons, while I very much respect the motivation behind the amendment, I do not believe it necessary or proportionate and therefore cannot support it.

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness for Amendment 416A. It gives me an opportunity, if nothing else, to pay tribute to His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services for the work it does; she was right to point out its professionalism. Moreover, I want to pay tribute to the current chief inspector, Sir Andy Cooke, who has announced his intention to retire in March. He has served as chief inspector with distinction, has 40 years of service to policing and was Chief Constable of Merseyside. I hope that your Lordships’ House will join me in thanking Sir Andy for his dedicated service.

The Police Act 1996 requires His Majesty’s inspectorate to publish an inspection programme and an inspection framework which, following consultation, are laid before Parliament. The latest versions of these were put before the House on 4 March 2025. As part of its work, HMICFRS inspects every police force as part of its Police Effectiveness, Efficiency and Legitimacy programme, and gives the force a grading on a series of indicators. All these findings are published and are available to chief constables, local policing bodies, the PCC, the public and, importantly, Ministers. HMICFRS also publishes a number of thematic reports covering every aspect of policing, and these form a useful tool for the policing sector to drive performance.

I agree with the noble Baroness that it is important that recommendations made by HMICFRS do not just sit on the shelf, are taken seriously and are implemented, and that those affected make sure that the public are receiving the best possible service as a whole. It is important that the three points she mentioned are examined: inspection findings, closer co-operation, and lessons learned. She quoted to the Committee the manifesto, in which we did say we would give HMICFRS new powers to intervene with failing forces. She is right to point to the fact that there is a police White Paper, which the noble Baroness, Lady Doocey, also mentioned, which is expected to be published shortly. By shortly—I know this is always a topic of interest to the Committee— I do mean shortly in this case. I encourage your Lordships to study that document carefully when it is published, because it contains a wide-ranging set of proposals for improving policing in England and Wales. I hope it will go some way toward shining a light, at least, on the three questions the noble Baroness has put to the Committee today.

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[Lord Davies of Gower (Con)]

My Lords, I thank all noble Lords who have spoken on this very important amendment tabled by my noble friend Lord Young. I particularly thank the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, and my noble friend Lord Herbert of South Downs.

The status quo is untenable. It undermines free speech, diverts police resources from real crime and risks criminalising people for behaviour that is lawful and should remain outside the criminal justice system. We on these Benches firmly support the abolition of non-crime hate incidents. Non-crime hate incidents in essence are reports of conduct perceived by someone to be motivated by hostility or prejudice against a protected characteristic which do not meet the threshold of a criminal offence. Under current law, police forces record and retain personal data about those incidents, even though no crime has occurred and no legal breach has been established. That alone is problematic but, in practice, the effects are far worse. Current figures estimate that around 13,000 non-crime hate incidents are logged annually, consuming an estimated 60,000-plus hours of police time that could be better directed to tackling burglary, serious violence, organised crime and other priority areas.

Recording an incident and retaining personal data about motives that are merely perceived rather than proven also has a detrimental and unwelcome effect on free speech. People who express lawful opinions, engage in robust debate or even make clumsy social media posts can find themselves on a police database, not because they have committed a crime but because someone has taken offence to those remarks.

This is not a hypothetical shortcoming of policy: there have been cases where almost trivial or schoolyard remarks became the subject of police records. In one high-profile instance, the arrest of a public figure over a social media post was initially associated with a non-crime hate incident, sparking national debate about policing speech and proportionality. It is no surprise, then, that police leaders and independent watchdogs are reassessing the value of non-crime hate incidents. The Chief Inspector of Constabulary has publicly stated that non-crime hate incidents should not be recorded by police because they risk conflating the offensive with the criminal, diminishing public trust and harming legitimate free expression.

Similarly, the Metropolitan Police recently announced that it will no longer investigate non-crime hate incidents, recognising the difficulty that officers face when drawn into matters that are not criminal by definition. The Government’s response to date has been to commission yet another review, with the suggestion that policy decisions should wait until later in the year. But on an issue that so directly impacts both civil liberties and police effectiveness, delay is not a defensible option.

Amendment 416E would go further than reviews. It would abolish the concept of non-crime hate incidents entirely, prohibit any police authority from recording or processing related personal data and require the deletion of existing records. In doing so, it draws a clear distinction between criminal behaviour, which it is right that the police investigate, and lawful expression or debate that should not be subject to police recording or sanction.

We cannot allow a system that treats controversial yet lawful speech as if it were a matter for the criminal justice system. This amendment is a sensible and necessary step to realign policing with its once core mission of protecting people from crime and harm, not policing speech or perceptions. Therefore, we on these Benches very much support this amendment.

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Young of Acton, for tabling this amendment. This has been a useful debate, and I hope that we can at least look at the common direction of travel on this matter: the need for reform.

I have heard from the noble Lord, Lord Young of Acton, and His Majesty’s loyal Opposition, through the noble Lord, Lord Davies. I have also heard from the noble Lords, Lord Blencathra, Lord Kempsell, Lord Jackson of Peterborough, Lord Hogan-Howe, Lord Clement-Jones, Lord Herbert of South Downs, the noble Baronesses, Lady Brinton and Lady Fox of Buckley, and the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler- Sloss. They have raised a range of issues that, in essence, point to the need for change in this system.

I think it is fair to say, and I hope that the Committee will accept, that the current Government have held office since July 2024. There has been a lot of discussion on the issues caused by, and effect of, non-crime hate incidents since the guidance was published in 2014. I do not want to lose the principle, which was mentioned by the noble Lords, Lord Hogan-Howe, Lord Clement-Jones and Lord Herbert of South Downs, that the non-crime hate incident regime had its genesis in the Macpherson report, and in trying to anticipate and examine where crimes were being committed, potentially in the future, and monitor a range of abuses that were present.

However, I say to the Committee—and I think this was recognised by Members in their contributions today —that how the police should respond to hate incidents that fall below the criminal threshold is a complex and sensitive issue. That is precisely why the then Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, the Member for Pontefract, Castleford and Normanton, and the current Home Secretary, my right honourable friend Shabana Mahmood, the Member for Ladywood, have asked the College of Policing and the National Police Chiefs’ Council to conduct a thorough review into non-crime hate incidents.

The review is examining whether the current approach is proportionate, consistent and compatible with the fundamental right to free expression—which goes to very point that was made. As the noble Lord, Lord Herbert of South Downs, said, the review is being led by policing experts and is expected to conclude, in his words, “shortly”. The publication date is one for the College of Policing. We have had the interim report, which has said that there are significant concerns in the way non-crime hate incidents are operating.

Given the points that have been made today, and given that the Government have commissioned a review, seen the interim report and, in the words of the noble Lord, Lord Herbert of South Downs, expect to receive the final report shortly, I would again ask the Committee to bear with us—I know that I have asked for this on a number of occasions—to examine what professional police officers and the College of Policing are recommending on non-crime hate incidents.

The noble Lord, Lord Young of Acton, rightly asked some significant questions. What is happening to database logging of anti-social behaviour incidents? What is happening to people who have previously had non-crime hate incidents put against their name? What is happening with regard to non-disclosure? What is happening in terms of the publication of the report and the Government’s response? Those are all fair and legitimate questions.

However, I say to the noble Lord and the Committee that the current Government have come in, recognised that there is an issue, commissioned the College of Policing to look at that issue and have received an independent report, and we expect a full report on how we can deal with those issues and tweak the regime so that we do not lose the very good things that have sometimes been brought out of non-crime hate incidents and we do not throw everything out immediately. I do not know what the final report is going to say.

At Second Reading, the noble Lord, Lord Herbert of South Downs, said:

“The review has found that the current approach and use of non-crime hate incidents is not fit for purpose, and there is a need for broad reform to ensure that policing can focus on genuine harm and risk within communities. The recording of hurt feelings and differing views should not continue”.—[Official Report, 16/10/25; col. 406.]


That is a very clear statement. However, in moving from that in the interim report to whatever the new regime might be, it is incumbent on the Government to reflect on what the final report says. I am not ducking the amendment that the noble Lord has brought forward, nor his challenge that we need to make some changes. As he says, there is an open door. If we did not want this to be reviewed, we would not have asked the College of Policing and the Police Chiefs’ Council to review the incidence of non-crime hate incidents. Self-evidently, some of the examples given today are not what the original purpose of that legislation and approach was meant to be.

Going back to the Macpherson report, there was a serious element as to how assessments have been made. In Committee today, Members have talked about anti- semitism, racism and a range of incidents where the collection of information might give a bigger intelligence picture that requires a policing response, but which may or may not be a policing response that requires individuals to have their names put against them.

The concerns of everybody, from the noble Baroness, Lady Fox of Buckley, through to the noble Lord, Lord Young of Acton, are legitimate, and the Government want to look at and address them. I hope that this can be examined. However, I hope that the noble Lord will withdraw his amendment and await the outcome of the police review, so that any reforms are grounded in both robust evidence and a consensus.

Ultimately, the Government must and will take some decisions, and we will be held to account in the House of Commons and in this House as well. In the absence of that detailed response, I am not sure that I can come to this Committee and say, “This is what we will do”, because we need to examine that in detail.

Crime and Policing Bill

Lord Davies of Gower Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 15th January 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Brinton (LD)]

I am very grateful to the noble Baroness for her intervention and her questions. I say, with great courtesy to the Government Whip, that her first question does not relate to the amendment because it is not about an offence. She was talking about the pre-banning of people and asking whether harm is so broad. However, that is a debate we need to have as society.

That leads into the noble Baroness’s second question about whether young people can distinguish. I think young people can distinguish. Part of the issue is that we as an older generation do not understand that a lot of them take a great deal of care about their colleagues because they have been brought up in a society with the rules, as opposed to having to introduce them, and they have seen exactly the concerns that I was raising. We need to continue to debate this but, bringing it back to this amendment, the point is that none of those issues is about offences.

[Lord Davies of Gower (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to noble Lords for this interesting debate. I am also grateful to my noble friend Lord Moynihan of Chelsea for moving Amendment 382F, which I support. Although it ranges across several statutes, it is in truth a coherent proposal with a clear constitutional purpose: to restore the proper limits of the criminal law so that freedom of speech is protected, while of course ensuring that genuinely threatening conduct remains criminal.

At the outset, I recognise the political sensitivity of this area. Any proposal to amend or repeal so-called hate speech provisions risks being misrepresented as indifference to racism, misogyny, homophobia or other forms of discrimination. Let me be absolutely clear: that is not the motivation behind this amendment. As my noble friend said, we on this side of the House oppose racism and discrimination in all their forms. The case for this amendment is not moral indifference but legal realism. The current framework has proved incoherent, ineffective and, in some respects, actively counterproductive.

As my noble friend Lord Moynihan of Chelsea most ably set out, the current legislative framework dealing with offensive language, hate speech and the like is a messy, tangled web of patchwork offences. We have the Malicious Communications Act 1988, Sections 4A and 5 and Parts III and 3A of the Public Order Act 1986, and Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003. These provisions criminalise speech not because it threatens direct harm but because it is deemed “abusive” or “insulting” or said to cause a person “needless anxiety”.

I am not ignorant to the fact that we have had laws in this country prohibiting the usage of threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour for almost a century. Section 5 of the Public Order Act 1936, now repealed, stated:

“Any person who in any public place or at any public meeting uses threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour with intent to provoke a breach of the peace or whereby a breach of the peace is likely to be occasioned, shall be guilty of an offence”.


But there are two crucial differences between that legislation and this. The 1936 Act was set against the background of rising fascist paramilitaries, first in Italy and then in Germany and, indeed, in Britain. Secondly, use of the language

“with intent to provoke a breach of the peace”

is very different from outlawing insulting language likely to cause a person “needless anxiety”. I think even a child could understand the difference between inciting a riot and causing a person mild offence.

Yet this is where we are. A person can claim to have been caused “annoyance” or even “inconvenience”, complain to the police and have another individual investigated and potentially arrested. That is not hyperbole; it is the truth. There is a litany of recent examples that we could trawl through, but many have been mentioned by noble Lords today so I will mention only a few, as briefly as I can.

As we have heard, the Malicious Communications Act 1988 was used to arrest Maxie Allen and Rosalind Levine, the two parents who have been referred to. The same Act was used to arrest a 17 year-old boy for comments he posted on Tom Daley’s Twitter account:

“You let your dad down i hope you know that”.


While this is obviously poor behaviour, to claim it should be a matter for the law and constitutes criminality is deeply concerning. Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 was used to prosecute a person who posted a picture online with a phallus drawn on it; Jordan Barrack was ordered to pay £400 in compensation for a post that did not cause any harm to anyone. Again, how this case ended up as a matter for the authorities is beyond me.

Of fundamental importance is the fact that the terms we are dealing with here are not precise legal concepts. They are elastic, subjective and dependent on perception rather than consequence. The result is uncertainty for the public, inconsistency in enforcement and an unhealthy transfer of quasi-judicial discretion to individual police officers who have recently taken to very liberal and, indeed, unequal enforcement of these laws.

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[Baroness Brinton (LD)]

The noble Lord said that he did not rely on Lucy Connolly in his earlier argument; he is now trying to rely on that case here. I am trying to make the point that it is more complex than he made out in his earlier contribution. I would like to make some progress, if I may.

The previous Government’s LGBT survey in 2018 showed that fewer than one in 10 LGBT people reported hate crimes or incidents. The noble Baroness, Lady Hunt, has explained one of the reasons for that. The other reason, I know from friends who have also experienced this sort of hate crime, is they do not believe that the police will do anything. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Young, that that is one of the reasons why there is concern about the police: too often, people who are targeted in this way feel that they do not get the help that they need.

As has been described, there is no single piece of hate crime legislation. It includes aggravated assault, which the noble Lord, Lord Young, was particularly concerned about. The point about hate crime is that it is not just the individual; the protected characteristic means that they and their community are also affected by it. We have spent many hours on previous groups on this Bill discussing the absolute abhorrence of antisemitism. If actions in Israel can cause people in the UK to start attacking members of our Jewish community, either verbally or against a person or their property, then that is absolutely unacceptable. That is one of the reasons why I would never want hate crimes to be removed.

Research by Professor Mark Walters of Sussex University shows that hate crimes do not affect just those individuals targeted; he describes them as having a “ripple effect” through their wider communities. Some people will avoid certain routes and places, and others will not leave home at all, particularly in our Jewish communities at the moment, but the same is true in certain areas for our Muslim communities. If laws about hate crime are weakened or repealed, it would send an appalling message to these communities of faith, as well as to LGBT and disabled people. Do the supporters of the amendment really no longer regard it as important that the state recognises the communities that have protected characteristics—their vulnerability—as warranting distinct legal recognition and criminalisation?

[Lord Davies of Gower (Con)]

My Lords, once again, this has been a very interesting debate and I thank all noble Lords who have taken part. I particularly thank my noble friend Lord Moynihan of Chelsea for tabling Amendment 382G. This amendment contains a line of argument that the Committee began to consider in the previous group: namely, whether the criminal law should concern itself with what people do or whether it should also punish what people are thought to feel or believe.

The provisions targeted by this amendment fall broadly into two categories. First, there are ordinary criminal offences—assault, criminal damage, harassment and public order offences—where existing penalties are increased if the court concludes that the offender was motivated by hostility towards a protected characteristic. Secondly, there are freestanding offences, particularly under the Public Order Act 1986 and the Crime and Disorder Act 1998, which criminalised the stirring up of hatred, even where no violence or other recognised criminal harm has occurred.

The crux of the debate comes down to this: two identical acts can result in radically different sentences depending not on the harm caused but on an inferred state of mind. That inference might be drawn from sparse or ambiguous evidence, yet it carries profound consequences for liberty. This could make prosecutions more complex, investigations longer and outcomes less predictable—hardly a recipe for clarity or fairness. These laws have grown incrementally and unevenly; they overlap, diverge, and sometimes contradict one another. The result is a body of legislation that is difficult to understand, inconsistently applied and increasingly divorced from public confidence.

This amendment offers the Committee an opportunity to step back and ask whether this approach has genuinely improved justice or whether it has instead distracted our criminal justice system from its core task of tackling real and harmful crime. This is a point that I would particularly like to emphasise. As a former police officer myself, I understand the difficulties in enforcing laws that are passed by a well-meaning Parliament but are incoherent and ill thought through. Part of this problem does indeed lie with us, the lawmakers. Successive Governments and Parliaments have not taken a coherent approach to public order and speech legislation. They have passed statute after statute, simply adding to the already long list of different defences, not thinking to consolidate or repeal existing laws.

When the Public Order Act 1986 passed, it contained seven offences of this nature. The previous Labour Government passed the Crime and Disorder Act 1998, Sections 28 to 33 of which created racially aggravated offences. They then passed the Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006, which added a new Part 3A to the 1986 Act, and the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008 added hatred on the grounds of sexual orientation to the list of hate crimes. The Sentencing Act 2020 also permits for any offence to be aggravated by hostility expressed towards any of five characteristics.

This Government are going down the same path, as we have already discussed in Committee. Clauses 107 and 108 of this very Bill contain further provisions criminalising the use of offensive language based on racial hatred aimed towards an emergency worker. If the Government think it is coherent to simply bolt new offences on to the already vast array of legislation, then I respectfully suggest that they are somewhat misguided.

Furthermore, far from promoting cohesion, these provisions have too often deepened division. They have encouraged grievance politics and fostered public mistrust. They have also placed the police in an impossible position, asking them to arbitrate not just behaviour but belief and expression.

There is a further concern about effectiveness. These laws, as my noble friend Lord Moynihan of Chelsea mentioned, are clogging the justice system with cases that pose no real threat to public safety, while doing little to address genuine hatred or violence. At the same time, they have fed a broader culture in which accusations of hate are used to silence debate, discourage inquiry and deter people—artists, teachers, academics and ordinary citizens—from speaking openly.

Freedom of speech is not an abstract luxury; it is a defining feature of our national character and a cornerstone of democratic legitimacy. I thank my noble friend for enabling this fruitful debate and hope that the Government will consider it carefully.

[Lord Hacking (Lab)]

Before my noble friend the Minister stands up, I will briefly intervene to say that at Second Reading, I counted 44 previous statutes that were being amended by the Bill. I just counted five in Amendment 382G. I do not know whether they join the 44 statutes in the Bill itself or whether they stand alone, but the Bill is extremely complex. In the word I used at Second Reading, it is, in this sense, a “monster” of a Bill, not because of the many provisions in it and the other provisions that noble Lords have brought out in it: that is not my point. My point is just on the complexity of the Bill. I beg that there may be a change of mind by Governments and parliamentary draftsmen and that they do not inflict Bills like this on the House.

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Moved by

[Lord Davies of Gower]

383: Clause 128, page 154, line 12, leave out “Electronically tracked”
Member's explanatory statement
This amendment removes the requirement for an officer to have electronically tracked information to enter and search a premises.

[Lord Davies of Gower (Con)]

My Lords, we now come to a group of amendments that seeks to improve the Government’s legislation as it currently stands. We broadly agree with the need to expand the police’s search powers, given the rise in shoplifting—that is not a term I particularly like, as it is really Section 1 theft, but I will refer to it as shoplifting for the purposes of this debate—and theft of personal property. Our only divergence is the extent to which we should extend these new powers.

The measures in the Bill are extremely necessary. We are facing an epidemic of petty theft, with phone theft and shoplifting reaching highs. One-third of adults were victims of phone theft last year, with the United Kingdom accounting for roughly 40% of all such thefts in Europe. These phones are then dismantled, deactivated and often sent abroad, with little chance of their owners getting them back.

Shoplifting gangs are terrorising high streets. Theft from shops reached over £2.2 billion last year, narrowing the margins of small independent stores and pushing up costs for the law-abiding public. Electronic stores are often targeted, with owners left helpless by the lack of power bestowed on security guards and the high costs of surveillance. The police must have the means to tackle this crime past their current capabilities. The fact that, once a criminal enters a premises, he can store the stolen goods until a search warrant is issued is not justice—it is an affront to the victim. It is not good enough to hope that officers arrive in time to arrest criminals in public for individuals to have a chance of retrieving their stolen goods. Officers must be able to enter premises without a warrant if the situation requires it.

That is why the Government’s measure is a welcome step. However, they have watered down the measures that we proposed in the Criminal Justice Bill in 2023. Where our measures would have allowed specified officers to search for stolen goods without a warrant if it is not practicable to obtain one, the Government have limited this to goods with obtainable electronic tracking data. The amendments in my name and the names of my noble friend Lord Cameron of Lochiel and my noble and learned friend Lord Keen of Elie attempt to revert this measure back to its original intent so that it does not solely pertain to electronically tracked goods.

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[Lord Katz (Lab)]

That is a point well made and well taken. I add that the powers would, of course, be exercised only within the jurisdiction of the service police, so service police would not suddenly be moving into areas of activity that you would expect the territorial police to be pursuing.

The noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, anticipated that I was winding up. I hope that my comments have reassured the noble Lord that the spirit and intention behind his amendments have been incorporated within the proposals in the Bill. In the light of my remarks, I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Davies, will withdraw his amendment.

[Lord Davies of Gower (Con)]

My Lords, I give thanks to noble Lords who have taken part in this debate. I will reiterate my opening speech by saying that I know we all have the same end goal of arresting criminals and preventing thefts. We may have different roads that we believe to be the best way of arriving at that goal, but I am confident that this debate has taken place in a productive and open-minded manner.

At the risk of repeating myself, phone theft and shoplifting, frequently targeted at electronic stores, are not just epidemics but growing ones. Crime is thriving, businesses are closing, and the public are becoming increasingly anxious. A phone is stolen every seven and a half minutes in our capital city. We cannot simply look on at the situation with the hope that it gets better.

The Government must resolve to adopt the framework from our 2023 Bill, and they must now go further. Amendments 383, 384 and 385 in my name would achieve this. They would remove the requirement that a stolen good be electronically traceable and would permit senior officers to use discretion to search premises without a warrant. These amendments answer a problem that requires immediate action. The Government must get a grip on the theft epidemic. Our measures provide them with one of many necessary solutions, and I hope the Minister takes them away for consideration.

Moving on to the amendments in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, I largely agree with his principle that the new clause that introduces new powers should be accompanied by checks and balances. Establishing a code of practice, having an independent mechanism for investigating complaints, providing mandatory training for senior officers and requiring an annual report on the use of the powers in question would act to safeguard the heightened powers officers will gain. This especially holds should the Government incorporate our amendments. We trust the judgment of our officers and believe that they will always make the judgment they think best, but I am conscious that we are entrusting them with more intrusive powers. Mechanisms must exist that counteract any tendencies for this power to be misused, and I believe that the noble Lord’s amendments would achieve that. However, for now, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 383 withdrawn.

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[Lord Clement-Jones (LD)]

My Lords, this grouping deals with the complex landscape of remotely stored electronic data, or what is commonly known as cloud access. Government amendments in this group, such as Amendments 393, 394 and 441, significantly expand the ability of the state to inspect online accounts through seized devices, including the interception of authentication codes. We acknowledge that, as evidence shifts from hardware to the cloud, the law must evolve. However, we remain deeply concerned by the widened scope for investigation, which carries an inherent risk of excessive prying.

These powers go beyond merely searching a phone. They allow law enforcement to walk through the digital doors of a person’s entire life—their private communications, financial history and medical records. As the Minister said, under Clause 169 these intrusive inspections can now be included as conditions of a youth diversion order. While the Government maintain that these are necessary to identify harmful online activity early, we must ensure that they are used only when strictly necessary and proportionate to protect the public from serious harm.

I ask the Minister to clarify the oversight mechanisms for these powers. We cannot allow the inspection of a child’s entire digital history to rest on a subjective belief, rather than a rigorous, objective assessment of risk. The digital ecosystem must not be a safe haven for perpetrators, but neither can it become a borderless opportunity for state surveillance.

[Lord Davies of Gower (Con)]

I thank the Minister for tabling, and setting out the rationale behind, this group of government amendments. Amendments 393 and 394 authorise the interception of certain communications in order to access online accounts. These amendments represent an additional measure to youth diversion orders on top of the existing powers provided to the authorities under the current drafting of the Bill.

Public safety is and should be the first priority of any Government. Youth diversion orders exist in order to curb and prevent young people from engaging in terrorist activity or associating with those affiliated to terrorist groups that seek to radicalise children. We are supportive of the measures in the Bill to increase the scope and applicability of youth diversion orders, such as Clause 167, which enables chief officers of police with the power to apply for a youth diversion order. These are necessary and proportionate measures that should be implemented in order to mitigate terrorist risk.

We on these Benches are equally supportive of the amendments in this group that are aimed at ensuring that, when youth diversion orders are made, they contain the necessary provisions to enable authorities to carry out their operations as effectively as possible. There is no point in making a youth diversion order if the provisions of that order do not sufficiently provide police with the ability to execute its objective. Terrorists and extremist groups are increasingly turning to online forums and communities in order to identify individuals for radicalisation and to spread misinformation. Therefore, where the courts deem it necessary to issue a youth diversion order, it is right that a provision of such an order can contain the inspection of any online account. Not only will that ensure that young people are kept safe from dangerous and hateful rhetoric, but it will enable authorities to understand who is targeting children and their methods of radicalisation.

It is also important that the imperative to keep the public safe is counterbalanced with appropriate regard for individual liberty. Youth diversion orders contain a number of provisions which impact on people’s daily lives, so it is right that they are sanctioned only where it is considered strictly necessary. I therefore seek assurances from the Minister that these amendments, and youth diversion orders more generally, are accompanied by having the appropriate safeguards in place to mitigate state overreach and the unnecessary deprivation of people’s freedoms and, of course, their right to privacy.

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[Lord Strasburger (LD)]

My Lords, I am absolutely astonished. Until 10 minutes ago, I had no idea that these provisions existed—that a constable without suspicion could seize a person’s devices, interrogate their data and hold on to them more or less indefinitely. Could somebody, perhaps a Minister, tell me in what circumstances suspicionless search like this is justified?

[Lord Davies of Gower (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lords, Lord Anderson of Ipswich and Lord Clement-Jones, for bringing forward the amendments in question. Amendments 390 and 391 have been well reasoned, and I am particularly happy to offer my support to the principle behind them. Objectivity should be the aim of every piece of legislation, and I welcome any measures towards that end. That is particularly the case when we are dealing with laws that provide the police with powers that can be used at the expense of people’s privacy. Clause 135 does this, allowing constables to extract online information from defendants’ devices should they need to determine whether the person has been involved in an act of terrorism.

I understand the Government’s intention behind this clause, and that it may have implications for national security. However, because of the importance, we should leave as little of its interpretation to human discretion as possible. We are all aware that, while we continue to support our forces, there are occasional instances of bad faith actors and, more generally, mistakes are a natural product of human enterprise. Allowing a constable’s belief to determine whether it is necessary to retain held information is an unnecessary risk that the Government do not need to take.

Similarly, we are not opposed to the principle behind Amendment 390. Individuals who are subjected to these new powers should not have the anxiety of an indefinite investigation hanging over their heads if the authorities do not have reasonable suspicion that a crime has been committed. For that reason, introducing a limit on the amount of time that information can be held without reasonable suspicion is sensible. That said, I am unsure whether three months is long enough for police forces to determine whether retention is necessary. This is especially the case given the heightened stress that a decrease in officer numbers will put forces under. Despite this, I hope the Minister can agree that a limit is a sensible suggestion and update the Committee on the Government’s position.

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[Lord Clement-Jones (LD)]

My Lords, I am afraid that noble Lords are going to get the full set today. I support my noble friend’s Amendment 396, which is the meat of this group of amendments. It was proposed by my noble friend Lady Doocey and signed by me, and it addresses the profound privacy implications of Clause 138. While the Government describe the clause as a technical clarification of access to DVLA records, we on these Benches and groups such as Big Brother Watch see it as the foundation for a vast national facial recognition database. It is also a massive pre-emption, in our view, of the consultation on live facial recognition which is currently being conducted by the Government.

This amendment provides a specific and essential statutory bar. Authorised persons may not use DVLA information for biometric searches using facial recognition technology. Members of the public applying for driving licences do so to drive cars, not to be placed in a permanent digital lineup without their consent—and we know that facial recognition technology is demonstrably biased, as we discussed earlier today. Expanding its use to a database of tens of millions of law-abiding citizens would be a grossly disproportionate interference with the right to privacy under Article 8 of the ECHR. The Government claim that this is not their intention, yet they have not put that promise in the Bill.

If the Minister is sincere that this power will not be used for mass biometric surveillance, he should have no objection to this amendment. We cannot allow the end of anonymity in public spaces to be achieved through a legislative back door. We are being asked to buy into a massive extension of police access to biometric information. The technology represents a monumental shift in the relationship between the citizen and the state. Such a shift must be governed by Parliament, not by secret police watch lists. As my noble friend Lady Doocey said, this can only lead to further erosion of public trust in the police unless these safeguards are installed.

[Lord Davies of Gower (Con)]

My Lords, this group of amendments raises important questions about the use of data, modern policing techniques and the appropriate safeguards that must accompany them. We are sympathetic to the principle that underpins government Amendment 394A. It respects the devolution settlement in Northern Ireland and the constitutional and operational sensitivities around policing. There is a careful balance that must be struck between maintaining consistency across the United Kingdom, respecting the powers of devolved Administrations and ensuring that law enforcement agencies have the tools they need to keep the public safe.

There is also a parallel balance that must be struck between safeguarding individual liberties and being robust in tackling crime. While we recognise the intent behind the amendment, we also acknowledge that the Government must retain sufficient flexibility to ensure effective and coherent law enforcement arrangements across all parts of the UK. I look forward to hearing the Minister’s response in addressing both these issues.

Amendment 396 would prohibit the use of the DVLA database for searches using live facial recognition technology. It will probably come as no surprise that we are firmly opposed to that restriction, as it would undermine one of the key inputs on which the success of live facial recognition hinges. Live facial recognition is an important and increasingly effective tool in modern policing. Used lawfully and proportionately, it has already demonstrated its value in identifying serious offenders, locating wanted individuals and preventing violent crime before it occurs. It is particularly effective in high-crime environments and transport hubs, where the risk of serious harm is elevated and where rapid identification can make a decisive difference.

Equally, across the DVLA, using driver licensing data for law enforcement purposes is not new: nor is it unregulated. Clause 138 ensures that the use of this is accompanied by safeguards, regulation-making powers to the Secretary of State, consultation requirements, a statutory code of practice and annual reporting to Parliament. These measures are designed to ensure proportionality and accountability. To carve out facial recognition from this framework would unnecessarily impede law enforcement’s ability to use the technology effectively. It would also deny the police the ability to use accurate and targeted technology to identify individuals suspected of serious criminality, even where strong safeguards are in place.

I therefore welcome the opportunity for the Minister to expand on how facial recognition fits within this framework and on the safeguards that will ensure that its use is proportionate and effective. But we should be clear that this technology, which can save lives, disrupt violent crime and protect the public, should not be ruled out by default.

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[Baroness Pidgeon (LD)]

My Lords, these amendments from the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, covering the safe, proportionate and fair oversight of abnormal loads, raise an important issue. It was one that I was not particularly aware of until looking into this group of amendments. Clearly, I had not appreciated that this area had been such a social media hit since Second Reading.

We have heard from the noble Lord, Lord Faulkner, about the heritage rail industry and its use of abnormal loads. I have received correspondence via Helen Morgan MP outlining the real challenges for those in the heavy transport sector working with specialist contractors who operate abnormal loads across the UK highways infrastructure. As this correspondence rightly points out, no infrastructure or major engineering project is possible without the heavy transport industry. A number of the amendments seek to address the inconsistencies in how police forces handle heavy transport, abnormal loads and mobile crane movements—issues that directly impact these businesses.

As I understand the situation, there is no national framework regulating when or how police forces charge for escorting or authorising these essential movements. This is leading to, as we have heard, arbitrary and excessive fees in some areas while others provide the service at no cost, creating uncertainty, delays and financial burdens that undermine operational efficiency and investment confidence. One example I have seen is a project to transfer a piling rig through the West Midlands, which we have heard a lot about today. It was delayed due to the unexpected police escort charges and the availability of those escort services.

These amendments, among other things, are looking for the Home Secretary to introduce clear regulations on police charging for escorts and the authorisations, ensuring that we have transparency, proportionality and national consistency. I understand that these amendments have strong industry backing from organisations, including the HTA, the Construction Plant-hire Association and the Road Haulage Association, among others.

I completely understand the thinking behind some of the amendments from the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, on the charging for special police services for abnormal loads. I also agree that there is a concern about different charging regimes and practices. I understand that this may have already been partly addressed by the National Police Chiefs’ Council guidance and a legal framework, but I would like assurance from the Minister that this is the case.

I am sure the Government will not want to change the road vehicles order 2003 without a full consultation and impact assessment, given that this is about the safe movement of abnormal loads on our highways infrastructure. However, there is clearly a need for a consistent national approach across all police forces. Given that many of these abnormal loads are supporting infrastructure and the growth agenda, I look forward to the Minister’s response.

[Lord Davies of Gower (Con)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Attlee for his long-standing commitment to this very important issue. I would venture to say that there is not another noble Lord in the Committee who cares as deeply as my noble friend does about the topic of abnormal loads.

Amendment 403 seeks to allow the police to authorise an abnormal load driver to break normal traffic rules in order to negotiate the chosen route for the load. Amendment 404 seeks to repeal the power of the police to grant certain police powers to a person escorting an abnormal load. It seems that the original intention of Schedule 5 to the Police Reform Act 2002 was that the police have the powers to direct traffic and permit regulations to be broken where necessary. However, few accreditations have made it, as it would effectively allow a self-escorter not to comply with the rules of the road.

Amendment 403 and 404, taken together, would repeal this problem and offer a more flexible solution. Instead of accreditation, Amendment 403 enables the chief constable to grant a traffic regulation dispensation order to a person escorting an abnormal load. It seems common sense to provide the Secretary of State with the flexibility needed to decide which regulations should be dispensed with. Moreover, the chief constable would have the authority to outline any conditions they consider necessary, such as the number of escort vehicles to be allowed. These amendments are well thought out, and I look forward to the Minister’s response.

Amendment 413 would require the Secretary of State to establish a regulatory framework to manage the fees charged to hauliers by police forces for escorting a vehicle or trailer carrying a load of exceptional dimensions. This amendment has industry support. A regulatory framework will ensure that the fees charged by police forces are consistent among forces across the country. I know that my noble friend has spent much time engaging with industry stakeholders, so I hope the Minister takes his remarks and amendments seriously. I look forward to the Government’s response.

On Amendment 414, I declare myself as an owner of a shotgun. I associate myself completely with the words of my noble and learned friend Lord Garnier. I will leave it there.

I support the principle behind my noble friend’s Amendments 416D and 416M. They are, in essence, clarifying amendments that ensure that the scope of the original measure in question is not used for the abuse of police services for personal gain. The provision of special services is a helpful law that chief officers should be able to draw on with discretion, but the compensation for the use of those services should not come at the expense of the police force’s integrity.

Compensation should ideally be monetary, with, if necessary, the short-term loan of items for specific use, as my noble friend’s amendment lays out, but it should not be equipment for personal use. Similarly, as my noble friend said, it should not be the officers making the decision on the use of special police services who gain financially from overtime payments; it should be those actually working overtime. My noble friend has laid out cases where both these incidents have happened and, once again, we hear of malpractice in the West Midlands Police.

My noble friend is infinitely wiser in his knowledge on this subject than I am, so I will defer to him, but I hope the Minister can address his undoubtedly well-informed points in depth, especially given the questions certain police forces currently face. I once again thank my noble friend for bringing these amendments forward, and I look forward to hearing both his and the Minister’s closing remarks.

[Lord Katz (Lab)]

My Lords, I welcome the amendments from the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, and his engagement with me and officials from the Home Office and the Department for Transport on abnormal loads. He brings huge—abnormally large, perhaps I should say—expertise to your Lordships’ House on these matters, and certainly expertise that is unique for this House. I thank him for raising his concerns.

It is good to hear from my noble friend Lord Faulkner of Worcester on this, bringing his experience, particularly as it pertains to the operation of heritage railways. Committee on a Bill is not complete, as far as I am concerned, if I have not talked to my noble friend Lord Faulkner about heritage railways. I have done so a few times—at least on the Employment Rights Act, I remember. Obviously, I note with added respect the new status of the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, as a social media influencer, so we should freight his words with even greater import.

On the broader issues raised by these amendments, I am aware that the noble Earl has previously written to the DfT with a report that highlighted specific concerns about the interactions between the West Midlands Police and the heavy haulage industry. He made comments about the chief constable, which are obviously relevant and topical. I think we know what he is talking about, and I will just leave it there; it does not really pertain to the issues in these amendments. That report was appreciated, but it will come as no surprise to the noble Earl—although it may sadden him—that I remind noble Lords that the police are operationally independent from government. Therefore, individual police forces are responsible for making decisions on vehicle escorts based on an assessment of risks to infrastructure and the safety of all road users.

As the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, acknowledged, the majority of police forces are making those decisions using their operational independence in a way that he is very satisfied with. The final decision in each case is for the relevant chief officer in discussion with interested local parties. That is set out in public guidance produced by the Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency, National Highways and the College of Policing. However, I fully recognise the importance of constructive dialogue on these operational matters. In that spirit, the policing Minister and I are pleased to have arranged a further meeting with the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, which I believe is going to happen next week, as he said, along with the national policing lead for abnormal loads, so that these concerns can be discussed in more detail. This would provide an opportunity to ensure that the guidance issued by the National Police Chiefs’ Council is being applied consistently and that any unintended consequences for the heavy haulage industry are perfectly understood.

As a further general observation on these amendments, I reassure the noble Earl that the Government keep the special types general order 2003 under regular review to ensure that it remains fit for purpose and reflects operational needs and legal requirements. Where improvements are necessary, these can be made via an amending order, using existing powers under Section 44 of the Road Traffic Act 1988. This approach ensures that any changes are subject to the established processes for regulatory scrutiny, including impact assessments and public consultation. I hope that that provides the reassurance that the noble Baroness, Lady Pidgeon, sought in her remarks.

In addition, I acknowledge the representations made by the Heavy Transport Association on this matter in support of the noble Earl’s amendments. The Government recognise the importance of the abnormal load and heavy haulage industry to the UK economy and its critical role in delivering major infrastructure projects across the country, be they in transport, civil engineering or housebuilding. We as a Government are committed to growth, and this is an important part of delivering that commitment. In recognition of this, the Government have supported the efforts made by the NPCC to standardise policing practices for abnormal loads. We strongly encourage police forces across the country to make full use of the new guidance on abnormal loads that was published by the NPCC in May 2025, to ensure that abnormal load hauliers receive a consistent service from the police, no matter where they are operating from. Given this ongoing work to support the industry by the NPCC, I contend that we should allow sufficient time for the new guidance to bed in before considering whether changes to the 2003 order are needed. The guidance is due to be reviewed in May 2027.

As to the specifics of these amendments, as the noble Earl explained, Amendment 403 seeks to confer on the police a power to make traffic regulation dispensation orders. This would allow abnormal load drivers to break normal traffic rules to negotiate their chosen route. While I understand the intention behind this proposal, the Government are not persuaded that it is necessary. Traffic authorities already have the power to make traffic regulation orders under the Road Traffic Regulation Act 1984, and these can provide for precisely the situations described. The Government’s view is that traffic management should remain the responsibility of traffic authorities, which are best placed to consider the wider implications for road safety and network efficiency. Giving this power to the police would blur responsibilities and could lead to inconsistent decision-making.

The Government are also unpersuaded of the case for repealing the provision in the Police Reform Act 2002 that allows the police to accredit certain persons with limited powers to control traffic for the purpose of escorting abnormal loads. Removing this power would mean that only police officers could direct traffic during these movements. The noble Earl has suggested that few accreditations have been made by chief officers utilising these powers. That may be the case, but where such designations have been made, it is inevitably the case that the repeal of these provisions would shift the burden back on to warranted police officers, reduce flexibility in managing abnormal load movements, and lead to delays and higher costs for the haulage industry. These movements often support major infrastructure projects and time-sensitive logistics, so any additional delays could have serious economic consequences. The current system strikes a sensible balance by allowing accredited persons to assist under police oversight, ensuring safety while avoiding unnecessary demands on police time.

I turn to the amendments relating to charges levied by the police for escorting abnormal loads. Amendments 413 and 502 seek to require the Secretary of State to establish a regulatory framework for fees charged by police forces, while Amendment 416D details how payments should be made and received, and Amendment 416M seeks to prevent individuals who could be financially impacted by a decision concerning escorting an abnormal load from being involved in that decision. While I recognise that the aim of these amendments is to improve consistency and predictability for operators moving such loads, we do not believe such a statutory framework is necessary.

Further, a national framework for charging for escorting these loads also already exists. Section 25 of the Police Act 1996 contains a power for the police to recharge the costs of policing that has been requested by an individual or organisation. Fee levels are set out in NPCC guidance on special police services and updated annually. Introducing a standardised regulatory framework as envisaged in Amendment 413 would also risk undermining the ability of forces to respond flexibly and proportionately to local needs. The operational demands placed on police forces by abnormal load movements can differ across the country, influenced by a range of local factors, including geography, road infrastructure, traffic conditions and the availability of police resources.

Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps

Lord Davies of Gower Excerpts

Tuesday 13th January 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

The noble Lord is right that both the security services and the Government have taken a very serious view of the threat of the Iranian regime at home and abroad. That is why the Government have undertaken to impose the financial sanctions and travel bans I referred to in my answer to my noble friend Lord Cryer. We keep proscription under review. That does not mean that we do not keep security issues under review at all times as well. We will take whatever action is required to protect Britain and British citizens and to ensure that we deflate the conflation that is happening now in Iran.

[Lord Davies of Gower (Con)]

The United Arab Emirates is advising its students that British academic institutions are being used to radicalise students by Islamist groups with links to Iran. How concerned are the Government about the impact on our international reputation and our universities, and what do the Government propose to do about it?

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

As I have said to the House already, the security services are very aware of the potential threat from Iranian forces and Iranian operatives. The foreign influence registration scheme has been in place and we have the Iranian regime in the first tier of that scheme, so it is a criminal offence to support foreign activity from Iran in the United Kingdom, with a severe penalty of five years’ imprisonment. As I have said, we have also sanctioned individuals so that they cannot travel to the United Kingdom when they are known to us, and their finances are frozen. We keep all matters under review; the question of proscription is one of those matters that we will continue to review.

Crime and Policing Bill

Lord Davies of Gower Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 13th January 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Marks of Henley-on-Thames (LD)]

My Lords, I too support the position of the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, that Clauses 118 to 120 should be removed altogether from the Bill.

My reasons are twofold. First, I regard it as wrong and unjustified to prohibit people from concealing their identities at demonstrations, as the noble Baroness, Lady Fox of Buckley, has said, let alone prohibiting anyone in a designated locality concealing their identity if they so wish. That is what the Bill does, as my noble friend Lord Strasburger pointed out. My second point is that the purpose of the clause can only be to enable the use of live facial recognition technology to monitor demonstrations, to enable the authorities to determine who is attending them and, frankly, to take action against them subsequently. I regard that as an offensive justification, certainly given the present state of the technology and the present lack of regulation of live facial recognition.

On the first reason, overall, the prohibition of individuals concealing their identity involves introducing a Big Brother role for the state that is unwelcome and foreign to our notions of democratic freedom. The power may not be Orwellian in scale, but it has nasty totalitarian echoes of Nineteen Eighty-Four. We should remember that the catchphrase of the dictatorship in that novel is, “Big Brother is watching you”, the justified implication being that state observation of individuals is a principal instrument in the toolkit of dictatorship.

No doubt that is the reason why the power to prohibit such concealment is hedged around in the Bill by the complicated regime of designated localities, exempted purposes and limited durations. Those limits on the prohibition of concealing identity are intended to act as a brake on the power, but, in fact, all the weaknesses—mentioned by my noble friend Lord Strasburger, the noble Baroness, Lady Fox of Buckley, and others—emphasise how far the power is a fetter on individual freedom.

I fully appreciate that the power to designate a locality under Clause 119 would arise only if a senior police officer reasonably believed that a protest was likely to involve, or has involved, the commission of offences, and that it would be expedient to exercise the power to prevent or limit the commission of offences. However, that must be measured against not only the seriousness of the offences to be avoided, as my noble friend Lord Strasburger pointed out, but the right of individuals to wear a disguise, which may be, as others have pointed out, a perfectly reasonable thing to do.

The noble Lord, Lord Pannick, spoke of protesters against the Iranian regime. What about journalists, of whatever political persuasion, who wish to report on a protest but do not want to be recognised by the protesters or the public? What about employees, who would rather not be recognised attending a protest by their employers? The employers may have a political objection to the cause that the protesters are pursuing. Any figure who may be publicly recognisable who wishes to take part in, or even just attend, a protest, and wishes not to be recognised, may legitimately have that right to conceal their identity. What about parents who do not want to be recognised at a protest by their children, or adult children who do not want to be recognised at a protest by their parents?

The noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, relied on the public protests of Emmeline Pankhurst and the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, rightly objected to that comparison. There were countless other suffragettes who did not want friends or family to know of their support for, or activity as, suffragettes in protests because they might disagree with their family, parents, husbands, wives or friends, or simply out of concern for their own safety. The noble Lord, Lord Pannick, and the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, expressed the position of ordinary citizens who wish to keep their identities private. I go further: in peacetime, it is the right of people to keep their identities private. The state would have to justify any limit on that power, and it has not done that.

We all agree that everyone has a right to protest but we must all acknowledge that protests can, and often do, involve the commission of offences by some. But the fact that protest may involve, or be likely to involve, the commission of offences by some people does not justify the police or the state in denying everybody in the designated locality the right to conceal their identities. This prohibition says to people that if you take part in or attend the protest, or are in the locality covered by the designation, you must be recognisable. I say to the Minister that that is an unjustifiable arrogation of power by the state. It must be justified by the Government if they wish to legislate for it, and they have not gone anywhere near justifying that arrogation of power.

My second reason for opposing this clause is that the prohibition on concealment of a citizen’s identity can have only the one purpose of enabling them to be monitored on camera, with a view to being identified later. Let us examine that. At its most benign, the power may be directed only against those who commit offences. Where it is for that limited purpose, it can be argued that preventing offences by the persons identified on camera may be a legitimate exercise of the power of the state, but I will repeat the points made by my noble friend Lord Strasburger on that. Just as police officers justify surveillance, so this power, if it were sufficiently defined and limited, might be justifiable, but the purposes of surveillance in the Bill go much further and unacceptably so. A dictatorial state may regard it as permissible to identify supporters of a particular view, political party or cause for the purpose of keeping them under further surveillance; worse still, branding them as trouble-makers for the future; or, at the extreme, taking action against them, ranging from pulling them in for questioning to arrest and unlawful imprisonment.

We have seen abuse of powers such as that in countries all over the world; the country that is currently under consideration is Iran, but it has happened in many others. We prevent abuse of power only by being astute to limit police powers and state infringement of individual liberties in the first place. This is not just an argument about live facial recognition technology, which my noble friend considered—we will discuss that more later—but an important argument about the legitimate limits on state power. Clauses 118 to 120 come nowhere near falling within those limits, even had they been tightly drawn—which they are not, as my noble friend and others have pointed out. For that reason, these clauses really ought to go.

[Lord Davies of Gower (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, for tabling these stand part notices. However, we on these Benches are unable to support her as we have general support for Clauses 118 to 120.

The clauses address a very real and increasingly familiar problem in modern protest policing: the deliberate concealment of identity to frustrate lawful policing and avoid accountability for criminal acts. I am sure that all noble Lords have seen videos circulating on the news and online of protests where large groups of people arrive masked or disguising their identity. Often, the only reason for that is to embolden themselves and each other to commit offences, knowing that their identification and subsequent prosecution will be next to impossible. This undermines both public confidence and the rule of law.

Clause 118 creates a relatively tightly drawn offence that would apply only where a locality has been designated by the police because there is a reasonable belief that a protest is likely to involve, or has involved, criminality. It is not a blanket ban on face coverings. Rather, the clause provides clear statutory defences for those wearing items for health reasons, religious observance or work-related purposes. I do not have concerns that these defences may be abused, and I hope the Minister will be able to provide some assurances as to how he intends that this will not be the practical reality.

Clauses 119 and 120 provide for necessary safeguards and structures relating to the powers of Clause 118. They stipulate that designation must be time limited, based on a reasonable belief and authorised at an appropriate level. There are explicit requirements to notify the public of the designation, the nature of the offence and the period for which it applies. These safeguards are consistent with other provisions of the Public Order Act that relate to police powers to impose conditions on assemblies and processions.

Removing these clauses would make policing protests even more difficult, as the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, outlined. Offenders who attend protests with the primary intent to commit crimes, whether related to the protest topic or not, will be able to evade justice more easily. The vast majority of peaceful protesters are unfairly associated with disorder that they did not cause. Effective policing protects the right to protest by isolating and deterring criminal behaviour within it. For those reasons, we cannot support the stand part notices in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Jones.

[The Minister of State, Home Office (Lord Hanson of Flint) (Lab)]

I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, for tabling her intention to remove Clauses 118 to 120. The Committee is aware of the purpose of those clauses. I am grateful for the support of the noble Lords, Lord Davies of Gower and Lord Blencathra, for the broad principle of the clauses.

I start by referring the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, to the front page of the Bill. She will see that the noble Lord, Lord Hanson of Flint—which is me—has made the statement that the provisions of the Bill are compliant with the European Convention on Human Rights, which answers the first point that she put to me.

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Moved by

[Lord Davies of Gower]

369A: Clause 121, page 149, line 32, at end insert—
“(3A) For the purposes of the defence in subsection (3), a person does not have a reasonable excuse by way of an honestly or sincerely held political belief, irrespective of the nature of the belief.” Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment would ensure that a person cannot claim a reasonable excuse for the possession of a pyrotechnic article at a protest because of a sincerely held political belief.

[Lord Davies of Gower (Con)]

My Lords, ever since the Supreme Court ruled in the DPP v Ziegler in 2021, the state of public order and protest law in this country has been nothing less than a confused mess. As Policy Exchange noted in its report, ‘Might is Right?’, we have entered an era of increasingly disruptive protests. We have seen severe disruption from the likes of Just Stop Oil, Extinction Rebellion and pro-Palestinian groups. My amendments together seek to restore clarity and proportionality to our public order law following the deeply troubling consequences of the Supreme Court’s decision in Ziegler.

The starting point must be an uncomfortable truth: the law as it now stands has tilted too far in favour of those who seek to justify criminality and serious disruption on the basis of contentious political beliefs. That tilt did not arise from legislation passed by Parliament but from judicial interpretation. It has been Parliament’s clear intention to prevent such actions occurring in the name of protest—that is evident in the legislation that has been passed in recent years—but the will of Parliament has been, to at least some degree, undermined by the judiciary, most notably in the Ziegler ruling, which has elevated protest-related rights under Articles 10 and 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights above the practical ability of the state to prevent intimidation, obstruction and damage. I argue that the proportionality analysis mandated by the Human Rights Act 1998 has migrated from being a safeguard of last resort to being a routine defence for conduct that Parliament has plainly intended to criminalise.

In effect, the courts are being invited to weigh the importance of a cause against the harm done to the public. That is not the rule of law; it is moral relativism dressed up as jurisprudence. These amendments offer a direct and refreshingly simple response.

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[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

I hope the noble Lord did not take my comments in that vein. It is completely unacceptable for individuals to have their lives disrupted by that level of protest, but it is for the police on site to determine. I was not there on the night; I did not witness the protest. I read about the concerns prior to today, and during the course of this debate I have examined again the reports that have occurred. But it is for a police officer on site to determine. Under existing legislation, there are offences of harassment, of inciting violence and other offences and, as the noble Lord knows, because we have debated this at Second Reading, there are measures in the Bill to ensure that people can, with the police, determine a protest route and the regularity of a protest as part of the proposals in this legislation. I am not ducking the question; it is important that people have the right to live their lives in freedom, and to enjoy a restaurant meal. But I cannot be the police on the night, determining whether the offences that are potentially covered currently by law are exercised by the police. I hope the noble Lord will accept the comments that I have made. With that, I invite the noble Lord not to press the proposed amendments, and to revisit them should he so wish.

[Lord Davies of Gower (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to all noble Lords who have spoken in this debate, to those who have supported my amendments and even to noble Lords who disagreed with them, because this discussion has laid down the real issue before us: who decides where the limits of protest lie —Parliament or the courts?

Much of the criticism rests on the claim that removing reasonable excuse defences is somehow draconian. I profoundly disagree. I say to the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester and indeed to the noble Lord, Lord Marks of Henley-on-Thames, that peaceful protest remains fully protected. These amendments address not expression but coercion, not persuasion but disruption, not dissent but deliberate law-breaking carried out in the expectation that the courts will excuse it after the fact.

That expectation is not hypothetical. It is precisely what flowed from the Supreme Court’s judgment in Ziegler. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, for his interpretation of the law as it stands, and the noble Lord, Lord Murray of Blidworth, for his further clarification. The Ziegler decision has encouraged protesters to view arrest as a tactical step, confident that they can later invoke proportionality, sincerity of belief and human rights arguments to defeat prosecution. We saw this with a recent case, whereby Just Stop Oil protesters threw powder paint at the historic Stonehenge. They were acquitted, of course, on all counts. The result is uncertainty for the police, frustration for the public and an erosion of respect for the law.

Noble Lords may agree that the answer lies in better guidance or more nuanced drafting, but we have been down that road. The debates on the Public Order Act 2023, particularly those led by the noble Lord, Lord Faulks, and my noble friend Lord Sharpe of Epsom, were an earnest attempt to clarify the law while retaining reasonable excuse defences, but Labour denied the opportunity to do so. The outcome has been complexity layered upon complexity, and still the courts are left to decide case by case whether obstruction, damage, or intimidation was worth it, given the cause advanced.

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Moved by

[Lord Davies of Gower]

370: After Clause 122, insert the following new Clause—
“Causing serious disruption to road transport infrastructureAfter section 8 of the Public Order Act 2023 (key national infrastructure) insert—“8A Causing serious disruption to road transport infrastructure(1) A person commits an offence if—(a) they do an act which causes, or is capable of causing, serious disruption to—(i) two or more individuals, or(ii) an organisation,in their use or operation of road transport infrastructure, and(b) they intend that act to have a consequence mentioned in paragraph (a).(3) A person who commits an offence under subsection (1) is liable on summary conviction to imprisonment for a term not exceeding the maximum term for summary offences or a fine (or both).(4) In this section—“the maximum term for summary offences” has the meaning given by section 6(4); “road transport infrastructure” has the meaning given by section 8(2);“trade dispute” has the meaning given by section 7(10).””Member’s explanatory statement
This new Clause creates a new offence of creating serious disruption to road transport infrastructure.

[Lord Davies of Gower (Con)]

My Lords, my Amendment 370 would create an offence of intentionally causing disruption to road traffic infrastructure where the action in question affects multiple individuals or organisations. The amendment originates from the growth, in recent years, of protests designed to cause maximum public disruption to further narrow ideological ends. Activist groups comprising self-aggrandizing ideologues began to realise that, by taking part in large-scale obstructions that affected the law-abiding public, they could get their causes into newspaper headlines and Twitter feeds. The consequence was that groups such as Just Stop Oil became household names through their disruptive tactics. They targeted the lives of everyday people, disrupting people’s livelihoods and hampering the functioning of society.

The most damaging of these protests has become the disruption to road traffic. Protesters sit on busy roads and grind traffic to a halt. People are late for jobs, emergency services are delayed and police time is wasted, and it is the public who, ultimately, must pay the price. In 2022, Just Stop Oil shut down the M25 for four successive days, causing more than 50,000 hours of vehicle delay to over 700,000 vehicles. This cost the public over £700,000, and the cost to the Metropolitan Police was over £1.1 million. Despite 45 people engaging in the protest, only five organisers were arrested and held in custody. If we do not punish those who cause such obscene disruption, we leave the public vulnerable to further disorder.

The Government have taken forward several measures from our previous Criminal Justice Bill, including the provisions to ban possession of pyrotechnics at protests, the new offence of concealing one’s identity at a protest and the prohibition on climbing on specified memorials. However, it is a shame they have neglected to carry forward this particular measure to prevent serious disruption on roads. Avoiding prosecuting disruptive individuals ultimately comes at the expense of the public. I hope the Government can recognise this and will reconsider the amendment.

My further two amendments in this group respond to a stark reality. We have seen successive waves of disruptive protests that have strained our communities, stretched the capacity of our police forces, and left the public questioning whether the law was operating as intended. It is abundantly clear that undue weight has too often been placed on the rights of disruptive activists at the expense of the rights, well-being and interests of the wider public.

Take, for example, the recent Palestine-related demonstrations. The Metropolitan Police has stated that the costs of policing these protests in London between October 2023 and June 2024 were £42.9 million. Some 51,799 Metropolitan Police officers’ shifts and 9,639 police officer shifts from officers usually based outside the Metropolitan Police area were required. Further, 6,339 police officers have had rest days cancelled between October 2023 and April 2024, all of which will eventually have to be repaid to those officers. Such demands on police capacity inevitably divert resources away from policing crime and protecting vulnerable communities.

It is against this backdrop that Amendment 382A seeks to empower chief officers to act decisively. By way of background, Section 13 of the Public Order Act 1986 currently permits the chief officer of a police force to apply to the local council for an order to prohibit the holding of all demonstrations in a particular area for a period of up to three months. The threshold, as it currently stands, is that the chief officer of police reasonably believes that the powers in Section 12 of the Act—that is, the power to impose conditions on protests—are insufficient to prevent serious public disorder.

However, this threshold of “serious public disorder” overlooks a number of further factors. It does not consider the potential for property damage, the impact on the rights of others not involved in those protests, or the demands placed on police resources. My amendment would replace Section 13(1) of the Public Order Act 1986 to introduce the ability for the relevant chief officer to consider the risk of

“serious public disorder … serious damage to property … serious disruption to the life of the community”

and

“undue demands on the police”.

There is precedent for this. Section 11 of the Public Processions (Northern Ireland) Act 1998 permits the police to prohibit processions if they believe that the protest would place undue demands on the police or military forces. Although I recognise the unique historical context of public processions and assemblies in Northern Ireland, there is no reason why, with modern protest tactics, police forces in England and Wales should not also be able to consider the cost and burden on the police imposed by the policing of the protest.

On Amendment 382C, the existing six-day notice period for marches under Section 11 of the Public Order Act 1986 simply is not fit for modern policing needs. When tens of thousands of officers must be mobilised at short notice to manage demonstrations that may span multiple days and locations, six days’ advance notice does not provide sufficient time for intelligence assessment, resourcing and engagement with organisers. Extending this to 28 days would acknowledge the complexity and scale of contemporary protest events. It is a proportionate adjustment that gives police forces the lead-in they need without unduly restricting peaceful protest.

I emphasise that these amendments support peaceful, lawful expression, which is a cornerstone of our democracy. They do not, and are not intended to, curtail genuine dissent. They do, however, ensure that, in protecting the ability to protest, we do not trample the rights of those affected by serious destruction.

We are often reminded that the right to protest must be balanced with the rights of others. I put it to noble Lords that these amendments deliver that balance. I beg to move.

[Earl Attlee (Con)]

My Lords, I strongly support my noble friend on the Front Bench. I think we grossly underestimate how much damage to the UK economy is caused by stopping motorways, particularly the M25. I have not seen authoritative figures for how much it costs to block a motorway, which happens with road traffic accidents. Years ago, I saw a figure of £0.75 million per hour. I do not know whether the Minister has a figure for how much it costs when the M25 or another important motorway is closed. It is not just the effect on motorists; it is the effect on industry, transport and supply chains, and the need to build in extra float in the transport system to allow for that. So, I strongly support my noble friend in everything he said.

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[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

I am grateful for that contribution from the noble Lord, Lord Harper. I add that into the mix of the debate today, but I still come to the conclusion that existing legislation, however it is interpreted, covers this. Therefore—for the last time, I hope—I ask the noble Lord to withdraw his amendment.

[Lord Davies of Gower (Con)]

My Lords, this has been a short debate, but I am grateful to those noble Lords who have contributed and to my noble friend Lord Attlee for supporting my amendments.

The police are charged not only with facilitating lawful protest but with protecting the safety and liberties of all citizens, yet the current legal framework, I suggest, often leaves officers with insufficient tools to intervene meaningfully before disruption becomes entrenched. Amendment 382A strikes at the core of this problem by allowing chief officers to seek prohibition in defined circumstances, including where marches are likely to cause serious disorder, damage or disruption or to place undue demand on limited policing resources. We align the law with operational reality and public expectations.

What do the public expect? Polling shows that large majorities support police intervention in protest scenarios that go beyond peaceful lawful conduct. They reveal a public who very much distinguish between legitimate expression and conduct that crosses into intimidation and disorder. Similarly, extending the notice period to 28 days is a common-sense enhancement that gives police and local authorities the time needed to prepare for large and potentially complex processions. This is about ensuring the responsible ordering of protest in a way that protects public safety, minimises disruption and allows ordinary citizens to go about their lives.

These amendments are a measured, evidence-based response to the challenge of protest policing in the 21st century. I hear what the Minister says, but I hope the Government can give them some serious consideration. For now, I beg leave to withdraw.

Amendment 370 withdrawn.

Defending Democracy Taskforce

Lord Davies of Gower Excerpts

Monday 12th January 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

It is not acceptable for foreign nations to threaten individuals who happen to reside in the United Kingdom, and I condemn any actions taken by foreign nations to do that. As I have said to the noble Lord on a number of occasions previously, if there are particular individuals who wish to draw concerns to the attention of the Home Office, we will examine those concerns and look at how we can protect those individuals.

[Lord Davies of Gower (Con)]

My Lords, following on from the last question, the Defending Democracy Taskforce has the explicit aim of protecting the democratic integrity of the United Kingdom. Given that Reform UK’s former leader in Wales has been sentenced for taking bribes from Russia, and that Iranian bots have been found to be behind thousands of pro-Scottish independence social media accounts, what are the Government doing—indeed, what can they do—to deal with and counter such threats to the integrity of the union by the Russian and Iranian regimes?

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

Mr Gill is in prison now because the counterterrorism police of the security services in the United Kingdom brought evidence together, sufficient for prosecution, which proved he was acting as a traitor to this country by promoting information on behalf of a foreign nation and that he had taken money to do that. That is not acceptable and should send a warning to all who would potentially undertake that type of activity in the future. We keep under constant review potential threats and misinformation. We will continue to take action through the Online Safety Act and the review that my honourable friend the Security Minister is currently undertaking. Foreign interference in our democratic process is not acceptable and Mr Gill’s jail sentence is evidence that we will take action.