Data (Use and Access) Bill [HL]

Viscount Hailsham Excerpts

Consideration of Commons amendments and / or reasons
Monday 12th May 2025 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Hailsham (Con)]

My Lords, I am a latecomer to this debate; I have not participated heretofore. I am doing so only because of conversations I had over the weekend. They related to the amendment from my noble friend under Motion 32A. I am not going to oppose my noble friend’s amendment—it may well be right—but I do want to express my anxieties because they were anxieties expressed by my friend who came to see me.

On the judgment of the Supreme Court, I am pretty much in favour of it. I think it was wholly right and I am very glad that the Government are accepting its finality, but it raises problems which I do not think have yet been fully considered, and that is what makes me reluctant to support my noble friend. The friend who came to see me is someone who I have known for a number of years and was born a male. In fact, she married and had a child, and she then transitioned—and transitioned fully—to the female gender and she is fully certificated. We discussed the implications of the judgement for her, and although I strongly support the judgment of the Supreme Court, a number of the points that she made were very troubling, most particularly as regards people who have not fully transitioned and how they are going to be dealt with; for example, in prisons, in hospital wards and so forth.

She then came to a very specific point—which has been touched on by a number of your Lordships—regarding passports. This is a woman whom I have known for 10 or so years. In every material respect, she passes as a woman and that is what I have always treated her as being; she is a friend of mine. Her passport at the moment shows “female”, but where there is the requirement “sex”, she is deeply concerned that the passport may have to be altered to state “male” because that is her natal gender. She raises the question very clearly as to what happens when she goes to immigration control or passport control, either in this country or somewhere else, where there will be a manifest divergence of appearance. On the one hand, there is the passport, which says that she is male; on the other hand, there is what she appears for all purposes. The point that I took away from that is that there are still lots of things that we are going to have to address.

My suggestion to your Lordships’ House is that we should set up a Select Committee in due time—and this House is well versed to do that—to consider what the implications of the Supreme Court judgment are across a broad spectrum of consideration. Therefore, returning to Motion 32A, if my noble friend will forgive me, I am not going to support him today, not because I think he is wrong but because I think it is premature to come to statutory interventions when there is still a lot to be considered. I would be fearful that, if this House accepted my noble friend’s amendments—and they may be right—they would be treated as a precedent that it is at least conceivable we would come to regret.

[Baroness Butler-Sloss (CB)]

My Lords, I wonder if I could go back to the wording proposed under Motion 52A. The whole purpose of it is limited. From a very practical and basic point of view, once the Supreme Court has told us that biological sex is to rule, the points that the noble Viscount, Lord Hailsham, makes, which I entirely understand and sympathise with, really do not arise in this issue. If we are to have data, the data must be accurate. The only point that I am asking your Lordships’ House to consider—this is what the noble Viscount, Lord Camrose, is asking—is:

“For the purposes of this section, sex data must be collected in accordance with the following category terms and definitions”.


That seems eminently sensible. If we do not have it, I see real problems of a different sort from those that the noble Viscount, Lord Hailsham, has raised.