Crime and Policing Bill

Debate between Lord Young of Acton and Baroness Lawrence of Clarendon

Report stage
Monday 9th March 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Lawrence of Clarendon (Lab)]

My Lords, I did not intend to speak. I spoke in Committee, and I listened to what the Minister put forward and what the noble Lord on the opposite Bench said about the recording of non-crime hate. It depends on how you see non-crime hate and on who is at the receiving end of it. For me, it led to the murder of my son. For individuals who think they have the right to walk around and talk about especially young black men in a certain way, what starts off as just verbal leads to violence. This is what I tried put across in Committee: people see the verbal as a playground, but it is not necessarily that. After the inquiry, when that was put into a recommendation, it was said that, if those who are on the receiving end—or people around them—perceive it to be something, that is what it is.

If you take that away and do not record it, how do you move forward, if it then moves from something verbal into violence and you have no way of tracking back to where it started from? Okay, so within the report here, it could be said in a way so it comes across to make sure that you do not lose that part of it, because some of it leads to violence and that is what happened to my son. Hence, I take offence when people say that it is just playground talk, because it does not necessarily mean that. So noble Lords should please consider what they are saying here and what implications it has outside, and our children.

[Lord Young of Acton (Con)]

Perhaps I could briefly add something to what the noble Baroness has just said. Just to clarify, I think that the kinds of remarks that she is talking about that were made about her son would be recorded and would meet the new criteria under the anti-social behaviour incident regime, which, as I understand it, is going to replace the NCHI regime. They would remain on a police database in a way that could then be used to detect and prevent a crime: they would meet the new recording threshold. I have no objection to that kind of thing being recorded: I think that it would serve a useful policing purpose. So just to be clear, I am not in any way suggesting that those kinds of remarks should not be included in future—I think that they should be—but I want to exclude the more trivial things from being recorded and having the police waste so much time on them.

[Baroness Lawrence of Clarendon (Lab)]

But you would not know until it gets to that point: to violence. If you do not start off with where it starts from, you will never get to the end, whether that is from trivial chat or whatever you want to call it, or playground. Later on, if that same individual or whoever carries on, that leads to violence, and if you have no way of going back to check where that started from, how do you know to be able to prosecute that individual for what he said, going back further to where we are now? That is what we need to be very careful about.