Crime and Policing Bill

Lord Garnier Excerpts

Tuesday 20th January 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kempsell (Con)]

My Lords, I support Amendment 417, from the noble Lord, Lord Banner, to which I have attached my name. I think there is very little I can add to the technical, financial and legal arguments in support that have already been made from all sides of the Committee. I will simply confine myself to a diagonal point on the effectiveness of the UK sanctions regime, which is funded by taxpayers’ money. A huge amount of work and official time goes into ensuring that it is effectively implemented, but the funds and the proceeds remain largely in the UK. It would be a better return on the intention of that public time and effort if those funds ultimately reached victims. That is what the public expect when they support a sanctions regime.

I attach to that the recent debate over the effectiveness of sanctions in general. Surely the measures in these amendments would increase public confidence in the overall sanctions policy of the Government, if the public are able to see that victims themselves are truly the beneficiaries of funds sequestered by their use. I consider the current position to be a rationing of justice and, as Sophocles said, there is no justice if it is rationed.

[Lord Garnier (Con)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Banner for introducing this series of amendments and congratulate those who supported him. This is an important public policy question that can, from time to time, raise its ugly head—although it is then ignored. I hope that, as my noble friend has so attractively argued for his amendments just now, we will gain some momentum.

I turn to a related but not exactly identical subject: compensation for overseas victims of crimes committed by British defendants. I raised that question during Second Reading of the Victims and Courts Bill on 16 December, just before Christmas. The Minister there, who is in her place—I think it is the noble Lord, Lord Hanson of Flint, who will kindly respond to this group, and I am, as always, grateful to him for bearing that burden—recognised that the question of compensation for overseas victims was a matter of some importance that she would think about. Indeed, she suggested that she might like to meet me to discuss it further. I am open to that invitation, as I am sure would be my noble friend Lord Banner.

My noble friend has opened up a discussion about a lacuna in our law, in that we fail adequately to compensate victims. The victims could be those who have suffered at the hands of the Russians or of those that we, the European Union or the United States have sanctioned. I say in parenthesis that part of my practice at the Bar involves sanctions law, so anything that legislates to increase the size of my practice is to be welcomed. More to the point, it seems to me that we have two parallel streams, which demonstrate that the way we treat victims is insufficient and inadequate.

I thank my noble friend for bringing this to the attention of the Committee and the Government more directly. I trust that, when the Minister comes to respond, he will do so positively. If he is unable to do so, I invite my noble friend to reintroduce his amendment to the Victims and Courts Bill when it comes back to us in Committee at some as yet unannounced date.

[Lord Cameron of Lochiel (Con)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Banner and the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, for their amendments in this group, and all noble Lords who spoke.

Amendments 417 and 419, tabled by my noble friend Lord Banner, would provide courts with the power to make public interest compensation orders during the sentencing of certain offences. He made a typically eloquent and compelling case for these amendments. He has consistently and powerfully campaigned, especially on Ukraine and the proceeds of sanctions, and I pay tribute to him for that.

Public interest compensation orders would grant the courts the ability to compel offenders to pay money to approved international or public interest bodies that support victims of serious human rights violations, such as torture or aggression. The courts would have to consider relevant factors, such as the broader human rights impact of the crime and the need to prioritise direct victims where relevant.

The amendment also lists relevant eligible recipient organisations with powers for the Secretary of State to update them, creating a structured mechanism for using the proceeds of sanctions-related crime in reparative funding for victims in the wider public interest. The amendment proposes a reasonable and practical process through which courts could divert illegally obtained funds to support victims, and I hope that the Government consider it very carefully. I look forward to the Minister’s response.

Amendment 418 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, similarly proposes a mechanism through which the courts could direct a portion of confiscated proceeds for public interest or social purposes. It is very similar in nature to Amendment 417; it differs slightly in that it specifically requires the courts to consider whether the crime in question

“involved serious human rights violations, mass atrocity crimes, or grand corruption”.

But like Amendment 417, it raises very important issues as well as a broader question: if we are to make public compensation orders, what crimes should they apply to? I look forward to the Minister’s thoughts on that matter too.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Spellar (Lab)]

My Lords, I support the amendments standing in the name of my noble friend Lord Ponsonby and the noble Lord, Lord Marks. I have been arguing for some years in the House of Commons that the DBS scheme has, frankly, run out of control. I can quote from June 2020, when I said to the then Prime Minister Boris Johnson that it was

“a major obstacle to people turning their lives around. It is inefficient, unfair and, frankly, discriminatory. The Lammy report dealt with this in some depth nearly two years ago, so we do not need any more … inquiries. We need action”.

Reference has been made to the impact in different parts of the country. In smaller police forces, not only are cases often not taken to court but cautions are not issued, and instead people are very informally told to mend their ways. In cities, it can often be very different, and this also still lies on the record. The then Prime Minister Boris Johnson said in his reply to me:

“Any MP will have had very hard cases caused by the DBS system”.—[Official Report, Commons, 24/6/20; col. 1309.]


I think there is a general recognition at the political level that this is a problem. I have to say from all my experience that there is deep inertial resistance inside the Civil Service to changing this, and I urge Ministers vigorously to overcome it, particularly given the report done by David Lammy, who was commissioned by the then Conservative Government to look into this area.

We also saw similar problems with the first elections for police and crime commissioners. Unwisely, a requirement was put in that someone should have no criminal conviction. We had a candidate who had to stand down as he had been convicted for possessing an offensive weapon when he was 13. We had another candidate who had committed a minor offence 22 years previously. These are people with long records of public service, and in no way should that have been held against them.

Whatever steps we take should also relate to proportionality and relevance. When I was a Transport Minister, there were proposals to introduce DBS checks at airports—I fully understood that—but if somebody had a conviction for an assault outside a nightclub in Southall on a Saturday night, I was not really worried if he was throwing my bags around in the luggage section. I would have been concerned if he had had a conviction for theft or for dealing in stolen goods. That also needs to be taken into account and be put right.

As a constituency Member of Parliament, I also had a woman who had been given a suspended sentence for an assault, age 18, in an argument with another girl over a partner. In her 40s, this was still preventing her. This does not just affect young people; it blights people right the way through their lives—and not just their lives but their children’s lives, as they are not able to provide support for them and have all the frustration of not developing their skills of life. It does not let people move on but also deprives the workforce of talent.

We are told sometimes that DBS checks and the ongoing system are fine, and that employers will look at them and take proportional action. They do not. Once a DBS check comes back with anything on the record, the fact is that people automatically get dropped. What is even more outrageous is that those same employers then go bleating to government, saying, “We can’t get workers here”, and so we have to bring them in from abroad. That was one factor that led to the huge surge of care workers being brought into this country in recent years—a considerable amount of exploitation and fraud accompanied it, by the way. At the same time, people were being kept off work, on benefits, not able to provide for themselves or their families.

My plea to the Committee is to support change and give people hope that they can turn their lives around, to take the opportunity to reinstate what I would argue were the principles of the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act when it was first brought forward, and to make some progress. We may need to make further changes in the future, but these amendments provide a very good start.

[Lord Garnier (Con)]

My Lords, I am very glad that I waited for the noble Lord, Lord Spellar, to contribute to the debate, as I agree with just about everything that he has said. Noble Lords may say that that is not terribly difficult, given that I have co-signed the amendments that he has signed. I share his view that —I am paraphrasing what he said and will probably get it wrong—reviews can sometimes go nowhere. Having listened to him and to the noble Lord, Lord Ponsonby, I am much attracted to our amendment.

Equally, having heard the noble Lord, Lord Marks, introducing his amendment, and having studied it a little more closely, I am attracted by his idea that the review should look into what I think we all admit is a quite complicated area, in public policy terms, of discussion. I am attracted to the proposal from the noble Lord, Lord Marks. If this amendment is accepted by the Government, we would have a report within a year of the Bill’s enactment—we could be talking about, say, June 2027, by the time the review has taken place and the Government have reported. Further, subsection (2) of the proposed new clause in Amendment 420 begins by saying:

“The report must consider at least”,


and then identifies three broad subject areas. It would be able to take on board the points that the noble Lords, Lord Ponsonby and Lord Spellar, have so far outlined.

A combination of these four separate proposals need to grip the Government’s attention, so that we can come back with a coherent, thought-through and workable set of policies that recognise the need for these two public interests to be borne in mind; that is to say, the protection of the public and employers and so forth, set against the need to allow youngsters who may have made some terrible mistakes to get on and live their lives.

I will finish with an anecdote. I used to make a habit of visiting prisons and so forth, when I was shadow Minister of Prisons—before the ark was set afloat. The adult male prison population was once largely aged between 21 and 30. It was an unscientific approach but I noticed that, since around the first decade of this century, the average age of the adult male prison population has risen, largely because of the conviction of historic sex offenders. People have been convicted in, say, the 2010s, in their 60s or 70s, for offences committed when they were youngsters, so the average age of the prison population has to some extent risen. It is a generalisation, and something that the review could look into, but, by and large, people grow out of criminal behaviour. Once they have found a partner and somewhere to live, and got a job—as long as they have not been ruined by Rehabilitation of Offenders Act antipathy—they will get on, earn a living and live their lives. The stupidity of their teenage years falls away behind them, and it should be allowed to stay there.