Crime and Policing Bill

Lord Moynihan of Chelsea Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 27th January 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Brinton (LD)]

My Lords, I am grateful for all the contributions to this, as usual, heated debate about recording data. I will focus mainly on data in my response from these Benches.

I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Cash, for starting by quoting some data sources, but neither she nor the amendment acknowledges the existing police guidance about capturing demographic data and annual data requirement 153, all the work already being done by the National Police Chiefs’ Council to review these policies following the April 2025 Supreme Court judgment, and its desire to develop a national standard for recording protected characteristics. In November last year, an equality impact assessment for the Law Enforcement Data Service noted:

“There is no legal obligation on any person with a GRC to inform the police that they have changed their name or gender”.


It is vital that data collection by public bodies has a clearly defined purpose and scope, and that staff have the right training and guidance to deliver services that support and accommodate all service users.

In addition, the Home Office produces the annual data requirement, which sets out requests and requirements for data that police forces should collect and report to the Home Office. Some are mandatory, some are voluntary. Requirement 153, which I referred to earlier, is voluntary and details how forces should capture demographic data

“in a consistent way by aligning it to ONS census 2021”.

This sets out that data about sex

“should be recorded in line with information on … birth certificate or gender recognition certificate”.

At the moment, it is not clear how widely this has been adopted.

Since 1974, the police national computer has been the main database of criminal records and is used by front-line officers from all police forces in the UK to understand who they are interacting with. In 2016, the Home Office established the national law enforcement data programme to replace the PNC and PND with the Law Enforcement Data Service or LEDS—sorry, another acronym. That will replace the existing PNC capability across all police forces this coming March.

The equality impact assessment for LEDS was published in November 2025 and considered how the programme would impact on those with the protected characteristic of gender reassignment. The EIA states:

“There is no legal obligation on any person with a GRC to inform the police that they have changed their name or gender. Where a person does wish this to be acknowledged then LEDS user can add an Information Marker”.


The EIA notes that the NPCC is undertaking a policy review following the April 2025 Supreme Court judgment, which

“aims to strike a balance that is both lawful and respectful of all individuals involved”—

that is a quote from the judgment—and that

“LEDS is being built to configure new policies as they take effect”.

The EIA also notes that a working group on national protected characteristics data recording standards was established by the Diversity, Equality and Inclusion Coordination Committee and the NPCC diversity, equality and inclusion lead. It is important to note, as has been mentioned by others, that the Supreme Court judgment in the case of For Women Scotland v the Scottish Ministers considered the definition of “woman” only for the purposes of the Equality Act 2010.

In addition to that, I have found an FoI dated May 2025 and the ONS response on a question about the collection of data. It gives a somewhat detailed response to about 10 different questions on how many people who have undertaken gender reassignment have been convicted of certain offences or groups of offences. Under the category of collection of data for gender identity, which is different from the sex registered at birth category, it says:

“We have to be robust enough to provide reliable estimates”.


It cannot provide reliable estimates. Why? Because the numbers are so low. As I am sure the noble Baroness, Lady Cash, knows, as she has been quoting data quite a bit, if you cannot rely on the data because it is low compared with the millions of women across the country, it becomes a problem to be able to include it. Why? Because the data will not show, or, if it is pulled out separately, individuals will become identifiable to the public. That is the fundamental problem.

So, I hope the noble Baroness will withdraw her amendment. The National Police Chiefs’ Council is already undertaking work to review policies in light of the Supreme Court judgment. The Supreme Court judgment was limited in considering the meaning of “sex” for the purposes of the Equality Act, not for wider legislation or policy. Frankly, it is unclear how this amendment would be practically workable; front-line police forces would be asked to challenge information provided about an individual’s sex. It is also unclear how the amendment would be consistent with data protection legislation, the Gender Recognition Act, and, indeed, Article 8 rights to a private life.

[Lord Moynihan of Chelsea (Con)]

My Lords, I rise very briefly to speak.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord in Waiting/Government Whip (Lord Katz) (Lab)]

The noble Lord has the right to speak in Committee, of course. Conventionally, we tend not to hear from Back-Benchers after the Front Benches have started winding, but of course he has the right.

[Lord Moynihan of Chelsea (Con)]

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Katz. I will make three very brief points. The first is that the Supreme Court judgment had a logic behind it, and it is very difficult to see how that logic does not roll out across a whole bunch of issues such as this one. So this amendment relates very strongly to that Supreme Court judgment.

The second point is that the three noble Baronesses talking against the amendment were trying to say, “Well, what point would it have?” Yet the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, stated that there had been reports that the amount of crime, including violent crime, committed by females had increased, and that this had caused some kind of minor moral panic in society. Now, we know that women—biological women—have far lower rates of offending than men, whether non-violent or violent. Our understanding of the role of women in society is very much driven by that understanding of the civilising impact of womanhood on society. It is fundamental to our ideas of how society works.

If we are persuaded by false data that the role of women is changing—that women are becoming more violent, that women are becoming more criminal—our view of society will be very different. That would be unfortunate, if it is false.

Finally, the objections made by the noble Baronesses to this amendment, other than those of the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, did not fundamentally dispute the premises but merely argued about the practicability—indeed, as did some of the remarks of the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton. If we are to talk about practicability, first, we have the evidence that Scotland has already implemented this, so arguments against practicability fall away.

The point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti —that you are putting an onus on a policeman to respond to somebody claiming a particular sex or gender, when in fact that may not be correct—was given the lie by her own statement that there are lots of people who are happy to come to a police station and confuse things by deliberately giving the wrong information. Basically, she is saying that, when a policeman is confronted by a six-foot bloke who says that he is a woman, it is difficult to confront that person. This is set against the very correct concern she had about a woman with short hair or whatever who looks a bit man-like, as many do, being challenged on saying that she is a woman.

If they can sort that out in Scotland, they can sort that out in the UK. But, in the meantime, which would you prefer: that data is falsified and moral panics emerge, or that police have a slightly bigger onus to try to ascertain the true biological sex of an individual?