Crime and Policing Bill

Lord Farmer Excerpts

2nd reading
Thursday 16th October 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

My Lords, I also support much of this Bill. The Home Secretary introduced the Bill to drive her Government’s safer streets mission and to halve violence against women and girls in a decade, so I welcome the tightening of the law in Clauses 84 and 85 around voyeurism and criminalising exposure intended for sexual gratification or humiliation. Despite the Supreme Court disallowing biological males from using women’s changing rooms and spaces, this still happens in many contexts. Not all are motivated by voyeurism—which is already a crime—or because someone wishes to expose themselves for sexual gratification or humiliation, but we should not turn a blind eye to these possible motivations; consideration should be given to them. Can the Minister confirm that the new law will protect women and girls while everyone catches up with the Supreme Court ruling?

Clause 147, which seeks to extend polygraph testing to more offenders, including those posing a risk of committing certain sexual offences, should shore up protection against predation on women and girls. If technology helps us manage sex offenders more smartly, let us use it.

However, as we have heard much today, Clause 191 cuts across the Bill’s protections against predation. Despite risks to women, this clause, intended to transform our societal approach to abortion, was appended in a rushed, emotive way in the other House. There is a pattern here. Safe access zones around all abortion clinics were also hurriedly appended to the Public Order Act in the Commons. That was despite testimonies from women now with grown-up children whom they were very glad they decided not to terminate after talking to caring and compassionate people outside clinics. Once such measures appear in legislation, they acquire unassailability on the grounds of care and compassion for women seeking abortions.

Clause 191 repeats the same pseudo-virtuous stitch up: a short discussion in the other House on Report of a Bill that has absolutely nothing to do with abortion, with the assumption that all fair-minded people should agree to it. Those who do not can just be dismissed as reactionaries, because abortion is treated as an unlimited good in our topsy-turvy moral universe. Whatever we individually think about abortion, the laws of this land and a wide range of other considerations are being ignored or twisted out of shape to meet the insatiability of extreme bodily autonomy. Safe access zones sacrificed freedom of speech on that altar.

Clause 191 shreds a woman’s criminal responsibility and, with it, a vital protection for her against a partner or family member coercing or predating on her to have a late-term abortion. Bringing about her own late-stage termination of a baby that has been kicking, hiccupping and otherwise moving in utero will leave a long tail of effects on her life. Decriminalisation is only caring and compassionate in a very narrow and short-term way. This House will discuss ramifications of allowing terminations up to birth, but the only fit place for Clause 191 is the cutting room floor.

I apologise on behalf of the noble Baroness, Lady Goudie, for not being here today. She will table amendments against trafficking for sexual exploitation, to outlaw lucrative UK-based pimping websites which enable traffickers to advertise their victims easily and ply this vile trade.

Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

Lord Farmer Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 12th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

My Lords, I want to stand back from this Bill and call out the dangers of the wider cultural drift towards hyper-individualism it epitomises. Freedom to end life on our terms—making death accessible as a personal convenience—desacralizes and cheapens death, life and humanity itself.

Professor Louis Appleby, advisory group chair of our national suicide prevention strategy, warns that our socially remarkable consensus that it is right to try to prevent all suicides will be radically altered. He also said the phrase “assisted suicide” should not be considered offensive.

At the time of Second Reading in the Commons, two of my friends who were suffering terminal conditions—one has since died—both followed the debate and news coverage and told me that the subject’s very airing made them feel that they were a burden to their loved ones.

Assisted dying is the latest blatant promotion of personal autonomy over any obligations we owe to each other as members of a shared society, and over reverence for life itself. It flouts the important “do no harm” principle underlying classical liberalism. As well as immediate harms to the disabled, those who fear becoming a burden and those vulnerable to coercion, there are long-term harms to the Bill typical of what pollster James Kanagasooriam calls “shrouded attributes” of policies: costs and liabilities, hidden at point of sale to the public, which inflict a later tail of pain.

First, there is the inevitable extension to other groups beyond those catered for in the Bill. International examples abound of legal creep, whereby mental illness, non-terminal conditions and ever-younger sufferers become eligible. Secondly, Canada has shown how palliative care withers, yet two-thirds of the public agree that Labour should prioritise sorting out palliative, social and end-of-life care before even thinking about assisted dying; less than a fifth disagree. Two-thirds of assisted dying supporters agree that our threadbare, charitably sustained hospice movement needs strengthening first, otherwise there is no genuine choice, as we have heard already in this debate.

Hospice movement founder Dame Cicely Saunders’ philosophy of palliative care was:

“You matter because you are you, and you matter to the last moment of your life. We will do all we can not only to help you die peacefully, but also to live until you die”.


Helping patients live until they die is what very many doctors want to keep offering, or to offer more reliably. Fear of missing out drives calls for assisted dying: supporters are significantly more likely than opponents to believe they will be unable to fund their own end-of-life care, and that the Government will not pay for it.

Thirdly, the cheapening of life and disregard for relationships flow from outlawing physical and mental suffering, despite these being part of our universal human condition. Although those should of course be alleviated whenever possible, actively taking the escape route of death is intensely painful for many years for close family members and friends when they have had no say in the matter. When personal autonomy trumps everything, we end up, dare I say it, deifying selfishness.

A former Chief Rabbi, the late Lord Sacks—we have heard his name already today—wrote this in his last book, Morality:

“Western society has all too often been insensitive to the dimension of time. Thinking through the long-term, unintended consequences of policy changes is imperative. Beware short-term fixes to individuals’ pain which will inflict life-long pain on those near to them—and sow seeds of destruction into our society”.

King’s Speech

Lord Farmer Excerpts

Wednesday 24th July 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

My Lords, I warmly welcome the noble Lord, Lord Timpson, to his new role. Frankly, when I heard of the appointment, I was shocked—and delighted, actually. I thought, “Well, this is a good start”. We hope it will continue. I also welcome the experienced noble Lord, Lord Hanson of Flint, to his role and congratulate my noble friend Lord Goodman on his excellent maiden speech.

Standing back, as we need to do at the start of a completely new Parliament with new Ministers, there is no doubt that a new approach to prisons is needed. My first question to the Minister is this: can he confirm that the prisoner-to-prisoner mentoring being pioneered, particularly in our north-eastern cluster of prisons—last week, I was at Deerbolt, which continues the good relationships revolution to reduce reoffending—will continue?

Ministers also need to address the contribution that father absence makes to the level of crime and imprisonment in our society. In 2018, the US National Institutes of Health reported that research consistently finds that children raised in homes where at least one biological parent is absent are more likely to be young offenders. Fatherless children are three times more likely to be imprisoned than children raised by both parents. It is not just about money: senior police officers say that absent fathers are a major risk factor across the socioeconomic spectrum and that we do not talk enough about this issue. Criminal justice reform that ignores this is doomed to under-deliver. Adults not being responsible for their biological children is part of the deeper problem of the demoralisation of our society. The sense of right and wrong in our cultural zeitgeist has given way to expressive individualism—the socially validated priority that the great “I” must be able to express itself freely without any regard to wider social impact.

Decreasing the number of women and girls who are subject to violence and abuse, and who receive prison sentences because of their vulnerability, is an admirable policy goal. However, we treat violence towards men and boys and male incarceration completely differently. Few argue that the many men who have also been victims, as well as perpetrators, should be spared prison. The figures speak for themselves: there are fewer than 4,000 women in prison but around 85,000 men in prison, of which 25% are care experienced. We also need to hold this Government to account for their manifesto promise to ensure that young people whose parents were in prison are identified and offered support to prevent them being drawn into crime and to break the cycle.

The Government emphasise prevention in health policy. Again, UK and international research has established that safe, stable and nurturing relationships are a health asset—hence the need to do more to prevent family breakdown and to strengthen families by continuing with family hubs. As these were pioneered by many Labour-controlled local authorities, can the Minister confirm ongoing support for family hubs?

Finally, His Majesty’s gracious Speech refers to a draft Bill to ban conversion practices, yet Ministers should be aware of the danger that this can be inherently anti-family and persecutory, particularly of Christians. Activists pushing for this want to haul loving parents before the courts and social services for expressing reservations at their child’s demand for puberty blockers. They want to criminalise church leaders for discussing or praying about Christian sexual ethics with a member of their church family. The Government need to listen carefully and respectfully to voices on all sides of the debate on this issue.

A letter to the Prime Minister on his first day in office from church leaders representing hundreds of Bible-believing churches lamented

“the lack of religious literacy in British public life and the unwarranted hostility this can breed towards those in Bible-believing churches”.

They said:

“One of the major presenting issues is the way people talk about a legislative ban on so-called conversion therapy. Campaigners often imply that expressing mainstream, traditional Christian beliefs on sexuality or gender identity in pastoral conversations is, inherently, a form of ‘conversion therapy’”.


Banning conversion therapy is, for activists, a way of attacking biblically based Christianity. The Ban Conversion Therapy campaign has said that

“‘spiritual guidance’ is really just religious speak for conversion therapy”.

This is inaccurate and reveals a worrying drift towards persecuting Christians through our legal system, work- places, education, social services and other key institutions.