Crime and Policing Bill

Lord Hampton Excerpts

Thursday 27th November 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Royall of Blaisdon (Lab)]

My Lords, I was not intending to speak and I have nothing to add to all the brilliant speeches that have been made. I did not participate in the debates on the Online Safety Act. I feel horribly naive; I find this debate utterly terrifying and the more that parents know about these things, the better. I very much hope that my noble friend will be able to take this back and discuss these issues with people in this Chamber and the House of Commons. We cannot be behind the curve all the time; we have got to grip this to protect our children and our grandchildren.

[Lord Hampton (CB)]

My Lords, I briefly add my support to all these amendments, particularly the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Nash, which is fascinating. If we can get the software to do this, then why would we not? I offer a challenge to Ofcom, the Government and tech firms. If they can produce such sophisticated software that it can persuade children to kill themselves, why are BT and eBay’s chatbots so rubbish? We have to make AI a force for good, not for evil.

[Lord Hacking (Lab)]

My Lords, having arrived in this House a very long time ago—53 years ago—I know this House works best if it treats legislation as an evolutionary process. The Online Safety Act seemed to be a very good Act when we passed it two years ago, but now we have further, drastic evidence, which we have heard in this debate. I am confident my noble friend the Minister will treat the speeches made in this debate as part of the evolutionary process which, I emphasise again, this House does best.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Lord Bishop of Manchester]

My Lords, I am grateful for the chance to speak in this debate. Probably the most harrowing date in my life as a bishop was when I had to give evidence in person to IICSA as the Church of England’s lead bishop on religious communities— we knew that some of the horrific abuse that had taken place was in religious communities. Ever since then, I have worked really hard on these matters. I sought to add my name to Amendments 286A and 287, but I missed the deadline, sadly, so I am grateful for the chance to support them now.

I was going to say quite a bit about Amendment 286A, but the noble Lord, Lord Bethell, said just about everything I wanted to say, so I will not detain the Committee any further on it. On Amendment 287 on training, I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Polak, and others. It is important that the Bill will apply not only to already knowledgeable professionals but to volunteers, who will have a whole variety of levels of funding, of safeguarding experience and of experience in dealing with child sexual abuse. We cannot assume that mandated reporters will already have the necessary understanding to fulfil these new legal obligations, so I think this is an appropriate probing amendment to see what support there can be to ensure that those who will have a duty are equipped to discharge that duty properly. Without that, I think we will fail to hit what we are trying to do.

I am sorry that it has taken us this long to get this far with the IICSA report. I think we have made a bit more progress implementing its recommendations in the Church of England than we have in this House, but I am glad that we got this opportunity today. I am grateful to the many noble Lords who have proposed amendments.

I want to say a few words about Amendment 273, as the noble Baroness, Lady Miller, invited me to do so. On the seal of the confessional, if it is possible for a churchman to say this, I remain a bit agnostic. I am interested in what will actually produce good safeguarding. I have heard people say, including survivors sometimes, that the chance to go and talk to a priest, and know it would not go beyond that priest, was what gave them the courage—often with a priest going with them—to make a disclosure to the relevant authorities. I can see that if we change that, some disclosures would happen but some would not, so I am keen to hear a bit more about that.

The other part of the amendment talks about extending it to all those who volunteer. I am not quite sure how wide that needs to go. Certainly, I am happy for it to apply to Church leaders, lay or ordained, paid or unpaid, but it should not be the person who cleans the coffee cups in the church hall on a Sunday morning, or who puts out the “No parking” cones, or who photocopies the parish magazine or arranges the church flowers once a month. Let us be clear exactly what categories we are going to extend any duty to, and whether that is dealt with best in the Bill or in some sort of secondary advice, guidance, legislation or other instrument. I am keen to explore that more. I am very grateful for these matters being raised, and not before time.

[Lord Hampton (CB)]

My Lords, I too support Amendment 286A, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Polak, to which I also would have added my name if I had been slightly more efficient. The right reverend Prelate and I need to do better from now on. I acknowledge and thank the NSPCC and declare my interest as a teacher. To quote Keeping Children Safe in Education, which we have to read every year, child protection is everybody’s responsibility.

I was surprised to hear that this issue was not already completely covered. As we have heard now and in previous groups, it is essential that if someone acts purposefully to stop child sexual abuse being properly investigated, they should face strong criminal penalties. Actions like these can delay, and sometimes outright deny, victims their access to justice and the vital support needed to help them recover from such abuse.

The much-quoted Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse uncovered instances in which teachers were transferred to another school with no police referral, after a student was told: “You must not tell the police. We will handle it in-house”. Priests were moved from parish to parish, and there were examples of local authorities destroying files relating to allegations, which survivors perceived as part of a cover-up.

These are actions that can and do continue to happen across our society. While Clause 79 introduces a new criminal offence of preventing or deterring someone under the mandatory reporting duty from making a report, this provision does not go far enough to cover the multitude of ways that reports of abuse can be concealed. This is because Clause 79 is built on the mandatory reporting duty and requires the act of concealment directly to involve someone under that duty. This proposal is separate from applying criminal sanctions directly to the mandatory duty to report child sexual abuse in Clause 72, which I fear could create a defensive fear and blame-based child protection sector that criminalises those who lack the knowledge and training to report effectively. However, intentionally taking actions to cover up child sexual abuse cannot be tolerated and should be criminalised. I believe that this amendment strikes the balance.

[The Earl of Lytton (CB)]

My Lords, this is the first time I have spoken at this stage of the Bill. I must say that, in the presence of such expertise, I find myself entirely inadequate for the purpose. At Second Reading, I raised a question about the interaction of Clause 80 with the clauses that precede it. I profess no track record on matters of child protection, but I thoroughly subscribe to the principle of the duty to report contained in this section of the Bill. Because of its profound significance, it certainly has my full support.

However, I have come to the matter through a rather different route: the way in which crimes are recorded and, in particular, why they may not be recorded accurately or at all. My point is quite simple and revolves around the reliable translation of the definition in Clause 72(1)—namely, a reason to believe that

“a child sex offence may have been committed (at any time)”—

into some sort of recording and/or further action. We cannot know what those reasons to believe might be, so variable is the range of circumstances, as we heard earlier. I note that “reasonable belief” has no definable limit, and nor should it have. However, it may very likely be based on the reporter’s knowledge, training, experience, powers of observation and so on, rather than hard evidence. Here is the point: otherwise, were that not the case, Clause 72 would surely have been differently worded.

I certainly expect that all such professionals involved with safeguarding in mind would have acute sensitivity in this area and, in reporting their beliefs, would themselves be believed as an evidential source. My concern is that their belief alone may still not be enough to generate action without further and better evidence. I think in particular of a situation where the child who is the subject of their belief is uncommunicative, if the information is partly second-hand, if it is about a child not in their immediate charge, and the myriad ways in which this information of relevance can come about. Then, the only purpose of reporting would be to get the matters into some sort of system for follow-up monitoring and investigations which necessarily involve the devotion of resources to confirm the commission of an offence or ultimately dispose of it on the basis that nothing sinister has actually occurred.

Therefore, reporting gets us only so far. What then? What is the follow-up process to be? Clause 80 does not actually tell us but makes a leap to police crime recording, in accordance with “applicable policy and procedure”—presumably meaning the Home Office guidance and the practices within the particular force concerned, attuned to local circumstances, resources and priorities within its area. This, as far as I can see, is the only backstop follow-up from the reporting of reasonable belief under the Bill. As such, its commendable aims are yoked to a general crime reporting principle that applies some way further down the line.

I hope I do not suffer from some sort of hallucinatory process in all of this, but I seek to plug a gap in which reasonable belief in any given instance is not guaranteed to pass the evidential standard for the purposes of police or, for that matter, any other recording of suspected crime. This is because the balance of probabilities test underlying the crime reporting guidance embodies a clear tendency towards such an evidential base. Home Office guidance places the duty on the reporting officer as to what they think has happened in the commission of a crime, not necessarily what the person reporting thinks. Any different approach, especially one involving time and energy in instances of hazy information in the circumstances described, might be difficult to get across the line.

My concern, notwithstanding the current focus on child sexual abuse in the press and everywhere else, is that things might easily erode over the long run and default to standard practices consistent with available finances, manpower and, not least, political pressures to show effective reduction in crime. This was highlighted by the Public Administration Select Committee in its June 2014 report, Caught Red-handed. Its findings were also associated with the demotion of police crime recordings and their removal for national statistics purposes.

The gap I see in the legislative architecture before us matters because of the special attention needed to protect young people. If we are now moving on to a situation where previous failings to protect the vulnerable from things too awful to contemplate are really a thing of the past, with better outcomes going forward, then, as I pointed out at Second Reading, Clause 80 risks merely undoing the policy objectives of Clauses 72 to 79.

Rather than tinker around with the detail, it seemed more appropriate to remove Clause 80 altogether—hence my intention for us to debate whether Clause 80 stands part—and simply leave in place the duty to report and the penalty for obstructing this duty. That would lead, I hope, to the establishment by the relevant duty holders, via their multi agency safeguarding processes, of other follow-up protocols to manage and monitor concerns falling outside police crime recording parameters, but on a structured basis. Otherwise, I cannot conceive of any route to ensure follow-up measures and resources being devoted to mere reasonable belief that does not require an evidential test for crime recording. Therefore, this needs a framework.