King’s Speech

Lord Dholakia Excerpts

Monday 18th May 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Dholakia (LD)]

My Lords, I welcome the gracious Speech. It sets out some of the new measures announced by the Government. To some extent, following the municipal elections, these claims are overshadowed by the recent goings-on in the Labour Party, and we cannot be certain that we will be able to see the final outcome of much of the legislation. This will depend on who finally leads the Labour Government. What we are seeing is a new brand of politics emerging from different political opinions in the country.

The main point which caught my eye was the improving of and continuing to invest in the renewal of public services. The Government will push forward with significant reforms to the police service. It is important to bear in mind that we should stop playing the snakes and ladders game with our police services. We had the most golden opportunity to introduce a royal commission on the criminal justice system. This was in the Labour Party manifesto but was put into the long grass in the last Session of Parliament—what a golden opportunity missed.

We have a crisis not just in policing issues but within the overall criminal justice system. Simply looking at policing reform is not going to resolve our problems. Why have we so many children in our care homes? Why have so many family structures broken down? How much has poverty and deprivation added to this problem? Do we need to criminalise our children at the age of 10 years or more? Look at the overrepresentation of Black and minority people in our penal institutions. Compared with the general population, they are not overrepresented in crime as against their numbers in the community. We should be investing more in their welfare within their family structures.

Are we sure that supervision is available for at least the first year when inmates leave prison? It is important to provide through-the-gate services so that young people can have a place to live as well as continuity of training and treatment between prison and the community. We should not lose sight of the fact that, when the state incarcerates prisoners, it takes full responsibility for each individual. We would do well, in very difficult times, to say to ourselves that if we lose that responsibility, we will lose control of our criminal justice system.

Let me come to some matters quite specific to the gracious Speech. The Government are to introduce legislation to restructure the police in England and Wales. This includes creating one big national force to tackle organised crime by merging the National Crime Agency with counterterrorism, currently led by the Metropolitan Police, and other elements of national policing.

We welcome the abolition of PCCs: we have called for this and claim some success in achieving this aim. A properly constituted structure, including local councillors and local representatives, will bring more effectiveness to our policing and save funds that have been wasted so far.

The last few months have seen a lot of focus on the role of technology in policing, including the involvement of companies such as Palantir. Amnesty International points out that three-quarters of police forces in the United Kingdom use a predictive policing system, a form of technology that is notoriously unregulated. Research has found that these systems lead to the targeting of already overpoliced communities such as Black people, ethnic minorities and working-class people. What steps are the Government taking through legislation to introduce rigorous oversight of these systems? Will they commit to a publicly available and accessible register on which police forces must register the predictive system they are developing or using? If we fail here, we will face incidents of conflict for generations and years to come.