Online Communication Offence Arrests

Lord Kempsell Excerpts

Thursday 17th July 2025 Grand Committee

[Lord Kempsell (Con)]

I declare my interest as a freelance journalist and publisher and, therefore, as somebody who makes his living from freedom of speech. I join noble Lords in thanking the noble Lord, Lord Lebedev, for securing today’s timely and important debate. As I find myself the last Back-Bencher on the speakers’ list, perhaps I might venture to sum up the situation.

Anybody listening to the debate in this Committee today will have concluded that, in 2025, the United Kingdom is in a state of free speech emergency. As we have heard, the police are now making more than 30 arrests a day for online offensive messages—an increase of 121% from 2017. As the noble Baroness, Lady Fox of Buckley, adumbrated so well, every police force in this country has a dedicated team monitoring social media. My noble friend Lord Frost’s point deserves further weight, to emphasise that, in the modern online world, communication has changed. It is the internet of 2025 that authorities are observing, with memes and rapid forms of communication, when the legislative framework feels as though it was built for the internet of 20 years ago.

I turn to another topic that we are yet to cover in the debate, which is the free speech of parliamentarians. I am now not the only media publisher or journalist in your Lordships’ House; in fact, our number is ever increasing. However, as a publisher, I found myself in January served with the super-injunction—now lifted—that precluded and prevented the reporting of the scandal of the Afghan response route being exposed. I was served with that super-injunction in my capacity as a journalist and reporter. I had no knowledge of the scheme or the policy while in government, but it of course prevented me reporting the facts of this enormous debacle, which is of huge public concern.

Could I have made those points in your Lordships’ House? Well, I took advice, and there are limits to parliamentary privilege in both the other place and your Lordships’ House. There are a large number of Ministers and parliamentarians who were also effectively gagged from exposing the truth of this scandal to the public, even in Parliament. In a rare note of congratulation, I note that the Government have, in my view, done completely the right thing in supporting the lifting of this super-injunction. It gives me some regret—and, I am afraid to say, shame—that my own party, the Conservative Party, instituted this super-injunction and supported it while in government. I note, though, that the current Labour Government chose to extend its application until recently.

As I said, there are limits to parliamentary privilege, but there was also a moral dichotomy in this case. Those who were served with the super-injunction were told that breaking it would constitute an immediate and real threat to life but, lo and behold, we now learn from the Government’s own recent review that the basis for that assumption may well have been faulty. That review has cast considerable doubt on the notion that those whose data was subject to the leak were in fact at imminent and real risk. The reviewer wrote:

“There is little evidence of intent by the Taliban to conduct a campaign of retribution against”


former officials. Indeed,

“the wealth of data inherited”

by the Taliban would have already enabled that, notwithstanding the leak of the spreadsheet. That claim has also been repeated by the Talban themselves.

Why was it, then, that parliamentarians were even gagged, let alone the media prevented from reporting this outrageous scandal of high and real public interest? As a parliamentarian, I find it deeply troubling that that was the case. I urge the Government, in their response to the wash-up of these issues, to adumbrate what they will do to ensure that the privilege of parliamentarians is protected and that never again can a scandal on this scale be concealed from the public.

Inheritance Tax, National Insurance and VAT

Lord Kempsell Excerpts

Monday 27th January 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kempsell (Con)]

My Lords, I too thank the noble Lord, Lord Morrow, for securing this important and timely debate. Given the time constraints, I intend to confine my comments to the impact of VAT on independent schools in the nations and regions.

I suppose I could not do any better than to associate myself with the noble Lord’s introduction to this Question for Short Debate, because he adumbrated so brilliantly the unintended consequences that Ministers have unleashed with this nonsensical and ill-formed policy. I think that the Government thought they were targeting a certain class demographic and a certain income demographic with their decision to impose VAT on independent school fees, but in fact they have unleashed a mess of unintended consequences across the country.

One that I have been focusing on is the impact of this decision on Armed Forces families, who have been particularly badly hit. Many of them have to send their children to boarding schools so that they are available to be active on operations. They are, of course, based across the whole of the United Kingdom and abroad. I thank Ministers for their concessions on that issue at the Budget, although there is more to be done.

Let me focus the attention of your Lordships’ House on just where this impact is being felt most. It is across the nations and regions, because there have been school closures in the south-east, the West Midlands, the east of England, Scotland—all over the country. The disproportionate degree of closures of independent schools that we see in rural and semi-rural areas is another example of the ill-thought-out consequences of this policy. When the Minister sums up, will he assess that and allow us to have an understanding of the Government’s thoughts on the disproportionate impact across the nations and regions of the decision to impose VAT on independent school fees?

Public Sector Productivity

Lord Kempsell Excerpts

Wednesday 9th October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kempsell (Con)]

My Lords, I join in the thanks expressed to my noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe for securing this important and timely debate, especially before the Budget. I will also, in the spirit expressed by the noble Lord, Lord Londesborough, keep my remarks productive, efficient and brief, even as a humble life Peer.

A significant essay was circulated recently online among the policy nerd community. It was entitled Foundations: Why Britain Has Stagnated. The piece was co-authored by Sam Bowman, Ben Southwood and Samuel Hughes. The essay highlights the difficulties that the UK is experiencing with productivity in general— a significant component of which is, of course, our sluggish public sector productivity. The authors note that, according to OECD figures, productivity growth between 2019 and 2023 was 7.6% in the United States and just 1.5% in Britain. They go on to explain:

“This is not a general Western European problem: the French and Germans are 15 percent and 18 percent more productive than us respectively”.


Of course, that is productivity across the whole economy. The point about infrastructure investment, capital investment and public investment was made by the noble Lord, Lord Teverson.

Although the essay highlights the litany of infrastructure failures and lack of capital investment, we must also acknowledge the particular productivity issues which we all know are specific to the culture in the public sector. For example, I was recently amazed to discover that, while the private sector and business do everything they can to embrace the AI revolution, a recent National Audit Office study found that just 37% of government bodies had deployed any artificial intelligence at all. Across the entire scope of government, it had identified in its study just 74 individual AI use cases.

I remember being similarly horrified to discover a few years ago when I was a special adviser trying to tackle a failing programme in the Department for Work and Pensions that an entire satellite office was employed outside London just to process paperwork manually, with the most basic online solutions and digital efficiencies not yet deployed. We should be unashamed to call this out for what it is: the UK public sector is behind the curve. There is a cultural issue that is preventing the public sector using the tools or deploying the technology and structures that underpin productivity. Those points were ably made by my noble friends Lord Patten, Lord Hannan and Lord Elliott.

It is no surprise that public sector productivity is failing to return to pre-pandemic levels. Since we are in the realm of suggesting ideas to the Minister, might I touch on a piece of work that I tried to set in train in government, focusing particularly on gathering better and more scientifically based evidence for productivity and more scientific evaluation of government programmes? Unless we have the evidence, we will not be able to judge productivity improvement successfully. In establishing the Evaluation Task Force, I put together a team across the Cabinet Office and the Treasury to keep that eye on public sector productivity and to ask whether government interventions are bringing about the outcomes that they are intended to achieve and how we know. Do we have the evidence to confidently say that effort and public expenditure are productive?

We cannot get to the roots of our public sector productivity problem without good data and that significant store of evidence. I therefore urge Ministers, as they are rightly keen to drive public sector productivity, to take that radical approach, starting with so many lessons heard in the debate this evening.