Crime and Policing Bill

Lord Kennedy of Southwark Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 18th March 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Blackstone (Lab)]

Let me just finish, I am just about to complete what I was going to say. I am happy to take the question.

The evidence is clear that telemedicine has reduced waiting times; enabled earlier treatment, which is a huge advantage; maintained high safety and effectiveness rates; improved privacy, which is something that most women in these circumstances really appreciate; and increased safeguarding disclosures. It expands choice and keeps women within a regulated clinical framework. That in itself is exceedingly important too.

To weaken or remove telemedical abortion would not improve safety; it would instead reduce access, delay care and create barriers for the most vulnerable women. The system works. It is safe, effective and must be maintained.

[Captain of the Honourable Corps of Gentlemen-at-Arms and Chief Whip (Lord Kennedy of Southwark) (Lab Co-op)]

My Lords, views on both sides of the debate are sincerely held. We should all respect each other for that. We had a long debate in Committee. This is Report. Members should make their points. Repeated interventions do not help us at this stage. We need to take the temperature down. The House can make its decision known in the Division Lobbies later on.

[Baroness D’Souza (CB)]

My Lords, I strongly support abortion on demand but, as we have heard, the danger continues to exist that an almost full-term foetus could be aborted by means of a pill ordered by telephone and delivered by post. I am struck by the extraordinary efforts that this House has gone to in order to provide safeguards for those who are terminally ill and who demand assisted dying, yet we do not afford the unborn foetus or near-term foetus any kind of safeguard at all. The amendment in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Stroud, would introduce some kind of safeguard, which perhaps we all owe to that unborn child.

The experience of other countries suggests that late-term abortions are uncommon, and an in-person consultation to determine the stage of pregnancy would ensure that they remain so. We know, too, that women who abort at later stages of pregnancy are more likely to have birthing complications. This, surely, is a further reason for some medical oversight.

As I said, I strongly support abortion on demand. I think that introducing a safeguard such as this to avoid the actual death of a near-term foetus is acceptable, and I hope very much that the noble Baroness will put this to the House.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Berridge (Con)]

My Lords—

[Captain of the Honourable Corps of Gentlemen-at-Arms and Chief Whip (Lord Kennedy of Southwark) (Lab Co-op)]

My Lords, can we please take the temperature down and respect the Clock? There are 10 minutes for Back-Bench contributions. Of course, many people want to get in, but please take the temperature down—there is no need to constantly interrupt others. Everyone can speak. We will come to the Cross Benches first and then go to the noble Baroness opposite.

[Baroness Gerada (CB)]

My Lords, I would like to pick up some of the safeguarding issues around telemedicine that have been mentioned in the House. To put things in context briefly, I have been a GP now for nearly 40 years, and over the past five years I have been conducting many remote consultations.

First, you can assess safeguarding issues remotely. A paper was published in 2025—very recently—on young girls under 16. More than 600 young girls were involved in the study. It found that 100% of the safeguarding issues—some of these girls then had to be seen face to face—were identified remotely. The conclusion, which is very short, states:

“Requiring in-person adolescent consultation is associated with reduced access to medication abortion without enhancing safeguarding”.


We do want to work with evidence. You might think it is safer to consult face to face, but the evidence shows that it is not safer: it can actually make it more harmful.

--- Later in debate ---

That is why, as someone who broadly supports current abortion law, I am none the less appalled by this clause. If it stands, I believe that the mitigations offered by Amendments 422E, 425, 426, 426C and 426D would represent the bare minimum of a framework of sensible control. I would add that decriminalisation and telemedicine simply should not coexist. As the noble Baroness, Lady Wolf, explained so clearly, the case for Clause 208 simply has not been made, and by far the best solution today will be to leave it out entirely.

[Lord Kennedy of Southwark (Lab Co-op)]

My Lords, I say to my noble friends who will try to come in shortly that we have had a reasonably long debate on this group and we had a very long debate in Committee. I have begun to hear calls for the Front Benches. I offer the House a reminder that this is Report: the stage when we vote to make decisions. I hope that we can quickly begin to move on to hear from the Front Benches.

[Lord Winston (Lab)]

My Lords, I am grateful that the Chief Whip will offer me the chance to speak for a couple of minutes. We have always agreed that this is an expert House, and it helps to make sure that legislation is best addressed by expertise where it can be. One of the things we might want to consider in this debate is that there are at least two Members of this House who have given at least 100 years in total to the management of people having terminations of pregnancy —so we do know quite a lot about it. There is also a large number of people who have not spoken who are fellows of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, who I think have been rather insulted by some of the things they have heard today because they do not represent the views of most members.

Having said that, I just want to say two things very simply. I firmly believe in decriminalisation. There is a great deal of misapprehension, as was just shown by the noble Baroness, Lady Spielman. The fact of the matter is that you cannot induce a pregnancy close to term. In fact, I am sure the noble Lord, Lord Patel, will agree with me that it is virtually impossible to induce labour in a woman who does not have ruptured membranes at term with drugs. It just does not work. In fact, both he and I—numerous times, if I am not wrong—have been faced with caesarean sections that we did not want to do as the only way we could get a baby out of the womb when it was in danger. We could not use drugs to induce labour, because they do not work. That certainly applies to pills but even to drugs given intravenously. It is therefore important to understand that a termination of a pregnancy conducted by a woman herself will be an extremely rare event. It would be very difficult, and the idea that pills will work is nonsensical.

Moreover, we have heard a lot about pills, but nobody has told us yet what pills they are talking about. That is very important. The hormones that are usually used in early pregnancy would not work in late pregnancy. The other thing I have already mentioned is that pretty well all late terminations of pregnancy are done for very serious medical conditions. One of the commonest ones is where there is an extremely deformed baby in the womb. I described this during the earlier stages of the Bill, and I will not go through it again. The indications of these late pregnancies are always very carefully and scrupulously observed. They are not done lightly.

I should also add that, sadly, babies born much after 24 weeks still are very likely to be highly abnormal. Even though people often miscarry them when they do not want to, sometimes it can be the very best thing that can happen because these babies will eventually die early with very severe abnormalities.

Recently, the noble Lord, Lord Patel, chaired a committee on this very issue to see how we could reduce the number of premature births. It is a big problem in medicine because of the risks to the babies when they are born after 28 weeks. I shall say no more except that I firmly believe we should really try to understand this from the woman’s point of view. No woman tries to interrupt her pregnancy except with the deepest grief and the deepest unhappiness.

--- Later in debate ---

[Noble Lords]

Front Bench!

[Lord Kennedy of Southwark (Lab Co-op)]

We will have a short intervention, but we need to move on shortly to the Front Benches. That is what the House wants, I believe.

[Lord McCrea of Magherafelt and Cookstown (DUP)]

My Lords, throughout this debate Northern Ireland has been mentioned, yet not one Member from Northern Ireland has been allowed to speak until now. We have had to force the issue to be allowed to speak in this debate. When the new abortion laws, the most liberal and extreme laws in the United Kingdom, were forced on Northern Ireland, few across this House really cared. The lobby for abortion in Northern Ireland was on the basis that women there had fewer rights than in England and Wales. Now that same lobby is using the same arguments for a change in the law in England and Wales. In the previous debate, it was suggested that this would bring England and Wales into line with Northern Ireland, but that is misleading as, crucially, Northern Ireland does not have pills by post.

I genuinely believe that even many of those who support abortion know in their hearts that this is not the way to go about things. This hurried parliamentary process, the rewriting of one of the most sensitive and serious areas of criminal law, is surely unworthy of our democracy. A clause passed in the other House last summer was passed after 46 minutes of Back-Bench debate. Is that what our democracy has come to? If noble Lords think that this is a good idea, why are they not prepared to allow public consultation and pre-legislative scrutiny, instead of rushing it through?

Clause 208 means no justice for the death of a full-term unborn child, even in the most grotesque circumstances. I ask supporters of Clause 208: what would you do if a woman told you that she was taking abortion pills, perhaps obtained from an NHS provider via telemedicine, in the 39th week of pregnancy because she had changed her mind about having a child? What would your conscience say to you, knowing that you made that possible through the support of this legislation?

We heard a great deal about unwelcome investigations, but what do supporters of Clause 208 think the police should do if they discover the dead body of a 39 week-old baby in a rubbish bin? The noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, explained in Committee that investigations would often still be required even if Clause 208 passes, as police would need to investigate the circumstances if a deceased full-term baby body is found away from a clinical setting. Is that the option that supporters of Clause 208 really believe in?

To conclude, I could give many reasons why I support Amendments 425 and 426 but, because of time, I am not able to do so. Let us remember that when we are talking about the life of an unborn child, we are talking about not an it but a real, living person with the expectation of being born, being protected by a caring and loving society, and being held in loving arms. I do not think that is too much for a child to ask or expect.

[Lord Kennedy of Southwark (Lab Co-op)]

We need to move on to the Front Benches.

[Baroness Barker (LD)]

My Lords, I am the first speaker from these Benches. For us, this is a matter of conscience. My noble friend Lady Smith of Newnham has not had the opportunity to speak. She disagrees with me. She is supportive of the other side. She wished for me to mention that she has been contacted by a young student called Lily, who has contacted a number of other Peers to say that they share her point of view. I hope that Lily and my noble friend will hear that we have acknowledged their sincerely held views, which are very different from mine.

--- Later in debate ---

Amendment 426 not moved.

[Lord Kennedy of Southwark (Lab Co-op)]

My Lords, let me assist the House by saying that we should now be moving on to Amendment 426A on assisted dying, in the name of my noble and learned friend Lord Falconer of Thoroton. I understand my noble and learned friend tabled the amendment only to get a particular response from the Government and he has no intention of dividing the House tonight. I suggest that we allow his contribution but do not have a prolonged debate on assisted dying tonight—we have had a number of days on that. Then, when we have had the Minister’s response, we can get back to the other amendments because potentially there are three more votes in this group. I think the House will want to vote on those and this is a way forward for everybody.

Amendment 426A

Moved by