Retail and Hospitality Sector

Lord Kempsell Excerpts

Thursday 22nd January 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kempsell (Con)]

My Lords, how perspicacious it was of my noble friend Lady Monckton to secure this vital business today. I join others in expressing my appreciation for her opening speech, which set the scene for this debate, replete as it was with illustrations and examples from her own experience. I congratulate newly minted noble Lords and Ladies on the Benches opposite on their maiden speeches. If they are to be treated as a pop group, they sang, if I may say so, a beautiful song in this Chamber. I hope that they continue to feel very welcome in your Lordships’ House.

George Orwell imagined his favourite public house. He called it the Moon Under Water, and stipulated, in post-war style, that it should have,

“draught stout, open fires, cheap meals, a garden, motherly barmaids and no radio”.

The prices have gone up since 1946, and I think you are more likely to hear music nowadays in hospitality establishments, but even George Orwell, that master of English dystopia, could not, even in his worst nightmares, have imagined the fate that awaits British pubs today under this Government. Indeed, his vision of the Moon Under Water has given way to the grim reality of the pub under Starmer.

There is one fact in this debate which sums up all other points—this indictment alone: that under Labour, one pub permanently closes every day in this country, and that is before all the measures from last year’s Budget are fully implemented. Noble Lords opposite spoke with high mind about public services in this country. I have to inform them that, in many places in Britain, especially in rural Britain, the pub is the only real public service that remains. Hospitality venues are safe and hospitable places, one of the few on the high street where people can meet without breaking the bank. British landlords are de facto social workers, changing lives as well as changing barrels, whether, as we have heard in this debate, by giving young people their first job and income or by healing the epidemic of loneliness that is faced by the old. How much more vividly the humblest member of hospitality establishment staff understands the daily reality of life in this country than those who sit in the Cabinet—not one of whom has run so much as a small business between them, let alone faced the scale of challenges that now confront the hospitality sector.

From April, when the minimum wage increases and the new rateable values take effect, pubs, cafes, restaurants and other venues will face what for many of them will be impossible bills. Business rates for the average hospitality business will rise by 94% over the next three years. Labour is driving publicans and hospitality entrepreneurs, like farmers, to the brink of despair. The Government already moved in the Budget last year to destroy their profits, and now they are targeting their revenues, meaning that many of them will not even be able to open. I hope that the right honourable Chancellor in the other place enjoyed a drink in Davos. How much more she could have learned had she travelled instead to the Dog and Duck.

I am old enough to remember—it was only a few weeks ago—when the Government promised not to increase taxes on working people. There are no harder-working people in this country today than those in the hospitality trades. Can the Minister, who speaks with experience and gravity on these topics, please answer the questions that have been raised in this debate? Until those questions are answered by the Government, it will be no surprise if every Labour MP continues to be routinely barred from public houses in Britain. I hope that the Prime Minister likes to use vending machines, because if he carries on with his policy he may never be served in a public house in Britain again.

Crime and Policing Bill

Lord Kempsell Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 20th January 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

My Lords, I am delighted to rise to support my noble friend Lord Young of Acton’s excellent Amendment 416E, which seeks to abolish the non-crime hate incident regime, which is long overdue. The principle at stake is quite simple and fundamental. The state must not brand people as potential wrongdoers when no criminal offence has been committed. So I congratulate my noble friend on moving the amendment and the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, whose masterful speech made an absolutely compelling case for the immediate abolition of this obnoxious regime.

I am delighted to hear the wise words of my noble friend Lord Herbert of South Downs, in his role as chair of the College of Policing. If it looks like, as the noble Lord said, the regime is not fit for purpose, and if that report gets to the Home Office before Report, we want amendments on Report to abolish it, rather than putting it out to consultation for another three months to decide whether to do it in some future criminal justice Bill. If it is not fit for purpose now, it should not be fit for purpose a moment longer than necessary.

For far too long, under all Governments, this gross abuse of our fundamental freedoms has been tolerated. I cannot count the number of times I have heard police and Ministers justify it on the basis that it is an essential intelligence-gathering tool which would be helpful in heading off future crimes. I strongly believe in intelligence-led policing and recording secretly any information on potential criminal activity. But it is not intelligence if you record it on a database and give it to prospective employers with, in the immortal words of Monty Python, a “nudge nudge, wink wink, say no more” sort of thing.

Recent reporting makes this danger painfully clear. As my noble friend said, we now have the documented cases of a nine year-old boy logged for calling another pupil a retard; two schoolgirls accused of saying someone else smelled like fish; and the extraordinary case of Harry Miller, a former police officer, who was visited at work by Humberside Police because he tweeted this joke:

“I was assigned Mammal at Birth, but my orientation is Fish”—


it is not a very funny joke, but nevertheless—which the force recorded as a non-crime hate incident until the High Court ruled its actions a “disproportionate interference” with his freedom of expression, and rightly so.

The case of Allison Pearson was mentioned by my noble friend: the national newspaper columnist had police officers knock on her door on Remembrance Sunday to accuse her of “stirring up racial hatred” over a tweet she had already deleted. It was never told what she was being investigated for, because no offence had been committed. A person who has committed no crime can be questioned, placed on a police record and left with a stain that follows them into job applications, community life and future interactions with the state.

This is not a harmless administrative note. A police record, even where no offence has been committed, can surface in enhanced checks, damage careers and stigmatise people in their communities. It creates a two-tier system of reputational punishment: one for those convicted of crimes and another, less visible but no less damaging, for those who have merely expressed opinions or made mistakes. That is a grave injustice. The state must not be in the business of branding citizens as potential wrongdoers when no criminality has been established. Recording non-criminal speech as a hate incident treats lawful expression as if it were a criminal matter.

This practice chills debate, deters whistleblowers and journalists, and discourages civic participation. It stops harmless jokes and humour. If this system had existed 30 years ago in the British Army, hundreds of thousands of sergeant-majors would have had millions of records against them, because the wonderful terms of abuse and insults they had for us when we got our marching wrong and made mistakes were absolutely astronomical. I do not think we suffered any harm because of those jokes and humour at our expense.

Amendment 416E restores the proper boundary between policing and free expression. It does not prevent the police investigating genuine criminal offences or using intelligence proportionately where there is a real threat to safety. What it does is prevent the indefinite administrative stigmatisation of people who have committed no crime. It protects employment prospects, reputations and the right to speak without fear of being treated as a suspect.

To me, the key subsection is not on stopping them doing it in future but on purging current records, as proposed new subsection (5) says:

“Within three months of the coming into force of this section, any police authority which has retained any record of a non-crime hate incident, save in accordance with the provisions of subsection (4), must delete such record”.


I agree entirely, but I warn noble Lords that the police, in many cases, will try not to do it. They will find every excuse to hang on to that database and not delete it immediately.

I have tremendous respect for the police and the brave work they do on our behalf, and I pay tribute to the 4,000 officers killed in the last 200 years, since the first salaried officers went on duty. All the police I have ever met have wanted to save lives, crack down on crime and keep the King’s peace—but if you gave them a completely free hand, they would want to collect from every person over the age of five their fingerprints, DNA and biometric data and use them to stop crime. They would succeed—it would make a tremendous difference—but I think that is not the sort of society we want to allow. Therefore, we should not permit the retention of data on individuals who have not committed any crime.

I was interested in what the noble Lord, Lord Hogan- Howe, said about recording. When I heard the Metropolitan Police commissioner say a few weeks ago that it was not going to investigate non-crime hate incidents and was just going to record them, I thought, “Hang on”. That means that if someone accuses someone else of being racist, the police will not investigate to see whether it is right or wrong but will still record it as a crime. If keeping it recorded means in the call centre, on the record, that is okay, but it should not be recorded on any other database if it is not actually a crime.

I conclude by saying that this reform is practical. As my noble friend said, police resources are finite. Recording and managing non-crime entries diverts police officers from investigating real criminality and protecting victims. If the state wants to monitor tensions, it can do so through proportionate, anonymised intelligence and community safety work, not by placing individuals on quasi-criminal registers for conduct that is lawful. I support my noble friend’s amendment, and I support what my noble friend Lord Herbert of South Downs said about the College of Policing saying it is not fit for purpose. I therefore look forward to a commitment from the Minister that we will have an amendment on Report that implements what my noble friend Lord Young has said in Amendment 416E.

[Lord Kempsell (Con)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as a freelance journalist and, therefore, somebody who has a very great care for freedom of speech. What a pleasure it is to follow the speech of my noble friend Lord Blencathra, which so brilliantly summarised all the reasons there are to support Amendment 416E in the name of my noble friend Lord Young and the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe.