Crime and Policing Bill

Debate between Lord Russell of Liverpool and Lord Mann

Report stage
Monday 2nd March 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I pay tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Owen, for her tenacity and the way in which she has consistently spoken up for the victims.

I will speak briefly to Amendments 273 and 274. The noble Lord, Lord Pannick, in his usual reassuringly expensive way, managed to pinpoint what this amendment is about. In effect, it would give courts an undertaking that they have a duty to see that the images that somebody has been convicted for taking and disseminating are destroyed. That seems unarguable. I hope that the Minister, with all her experience, can demonstrate why that should not be the case, because for almost everybody in the Chamber it seems to be a no-brainer.

In Amendment 274, we are revisiting some of the discussions that we had in Committee and on Report during the passage of the Online Safety Bill on the difficulty that victims have in being left to their own devices to deal with this, platform by platform, because each platform deals—or does not deal—with complaints in a different way. To have the indignity of having had something unmentionable done to you, which could happen on more than one platform, and then to have to individually pursue each platform and find that each platform has a different way of dealing with it and different hoops to go through, is piling injury upon insult.

We argued as well as we could during the passage of what became the Act that there should be much more thought given to the experience of victims as they try to confront what has happened to them and bring the organisations that have inflicted it on them, or enabled it, to book.

The way in which it has currently emerged from the Act and the way in which victims are still experiencing this huge variability and inconsistency is clearly an injustice, and I hope the Government will recognise that. Even if they are not ready and able to do something about it this evening, we would be most grateful for an undertaking that they will look at this very carefully and come back with something that the noble Baroness and the rest of us might find acceptable.

[Lord Mann (Lab)]

My Lords, I find it hard to comprehend any reason why anybody on the Labour Benches could possibly contemplate not voting for these amendments. On Amendment 273, if the argument is, “Oh, leave it with us”, that is not convincing. The Labour Party has some problems with young women voters and problems with women voters; it has problems with all voters actually at the moment. There has to be more than “Leave it with us” as a response.

I say to male Labour Party members—I am speaking to the Labour Party, but I want to emphasise the point —that I have no intention of going back to my daughters and granddaughters without this, or something equivalent or better, going through. If the Labour Party thinks that it can stop that, it is a moment of some crisis.

That is not necessarily what I am hearing from the Minister’s opening remarks, but I have no intention of doing anything that would stop this, in this form or a better one, becoming law. I think I once met the Minister in her former life, but I have not had the pleasure of meeting her since she has been a Minister here. I found it refreshing that she had already made a number of—“concessions” is the wrong word—discussed and thought-through changes, having been prepared to listen. I thought that was refreshing; we are not hearing or seeing enough of Ministers who are prepared to do that. It is a weakness in all Governments in recent times, so it is very refreshing.

I hope to hear how we are going to accept these changes, because there is not a case to answer, in relation to Amendment 273, that this should be stopped. I am looking forward to a continuity of the very welcome approach, which will make my remarks totally redundant by showing that there is a new spirit emerging in how we work to get the best possible legislation that we can all be proud of.