Crime and Policing Bill (Second sitting)

Alex Davies-Jones Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 27th March 2025 Public Bill Committees

[The Chair]

I am afraid that I am going to have to ask for concise answers. It is important that we get the evidence on the record, so at the expense of some brevity, perhaps, if there are matters that in hindsight you wish to put on the record, feel free to write to us. I hope that, in that way, we may be able to have our cake and eat it.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (Alex Davies-Jones)]

Q Suky, why do you feel that stalking protection orders would be more beneficial and effective and provide better protection to victims than restraining orders, which are currently given in these circumstances?

Suky Bhaker: Restraining orders are often given at the end of a criminal case, so again you do not get protection through the whole journey, and we know how long the backlogs are in getting cases to court. Stalking protection orders can also apply positive obligations, which you cannot have in a restraining order.

[Alex Davies-Jones]

Q I have a quick question for you, Baroness Newlove, on the measures in the Bill around the offence of taking intimate images. Do you agree that the base offence, which has no requirement to prove intent, will allow better protection of victims who have intimate images taken of them without their consent?

Baroness Newlove: Yes, I do. I think it is a really big issue. I was working on the Online Safety Act 2023 and heard about other social media problems. I agree on intent; that is important, because it means people cannot then just skew-whiff it the other way. I welcome what is in the Bill for this. We could do more, but at least it is a start. I agree.

[Harriet Cross]

Q This question is probably best for Suky to answer. Do you consider that the provisions in the Bill and the Acts to which it relates, such as the Protection from Harassment Act 1997, are sufficient to cover all forms of stalking? For example, are they sufficient to cover online stalking, which is obviously becoming more prevalent? In 1997, the internet was a very different beast from what it is now.

Suky Bhaker: There are certainly elements within the current legislation that do not draw enough attention to the impact, the alarm and distress that victims experience. There are challenges when victims themselves do not know that they are being stalked and might not see the extent of what is online; that is not captured to its full extent in the legislation. There is certainly room for development, but I think it is important that we are not too prescriptive with the behaviours, because we do not want to allow perpetrators to work outside that. By allowing it to be vague to some extent, we future-proof the legislation.

--- Later in debate ---

[Matt Vickers]

Q Are there any gaps that you can see in the legislation, or anything that needs tightening up to hit that need and that objective?

Dan Sexton: There are many, many things that we could do to improve online safety, and many things that could be done to improve the safer use of AI tools. However, in the context of this Bill and the criminalisation of things, we think that it has done a good job of blocking these particular loopholes. I think the other stuff is better suited to things like a future iteration of the Online Safety Act and AI safety Bills. So we are very much content with these clauses.

Sharon Maciver: In terms of inclusion and what we would want to see in the Bill, we would like to see greater protections for children. We feel that in order to have an end-to-end response to tackling the criminal exploitation, we need to have not only measures that sanction exploiters, but measures that protect children, recognising that children who are criminally exploited will be victims of abuse while also being in conflict with the law. In terms of building trust in the system, as I reference in terms of children’s trust, there is also a requirement for agencies working in this space to feel confident that the system can respond to the issue. Often we see children, as I have described, being significantly harmed. Also as a result of exploitation they cause significant harm to others, and that is a really complex dilemma for agencies to try to manage. So we feel that having increased protection orders that specifically address the duality of a child being a victim as well as in conflict with the law would be helpful, as well as ensuring that children have access to a statutory defence.

We also believe that a definition of criminal exploitation would be helpful in understanding the scale and extent of the problem and how many victims there are across the UK. Of course, the new offence will ensure that data is captured on the number of perpetrators. Equally, we would want to make sure that we understand how many victims there are, and ensure that the response we have is that agencies feel confident in what that system does for children.

[Alex Davies-Jones]

Q Mr Sexton, the Bill introduces a number of new offences banning child sexual abuse imagery. One of the new offences is a specific offence targeting the administrators and moderators of CSA sites and groups. How prevalent are those groups,? Will the new criminal offence actually deter offenders from even establishing those sites?

Dan Sexton: We see sites coming up frequently. At any given time, we have around 200 websites dedicated to sharing and hosting child sexual abuse material on our list, and that rotates. We often see those sites moving. It is the same administrators and the same site, and every time they get taken down in one place, they move to another, which suggests that the administrators and the people behind them are not getting caught or being prosecuted. I am unsure of the effect the Bill will have, considering that those administrators are already clearly committing crimes based in this country, and in many countries, and are not getting caught.

I would like to see whether the new clauses extend beyond just the site administrator to everyone else in the chain. A website does not just appear out of nowhere. It is not just the administrator; a lot of parts are required for a site to appear. If there are greater obligations on everyone else in that chain, those administrators may find it much harder to create and run their sites in the first place. A lot of our work is about introducing friction and making it harder to create and share child sexual abuse material. One part of that is arresting people, but there is a lot of other stuff that could be done to make it harder for the crime to happen.

[Alex Davies-Jones]

Q One issue that has been raised with us is the idea that AI imagery of child sexual abuse does not impact real-world victims. Could you speak to that point? I think it is an important one to make and get on the record.

Dan Sexton: Yes—that is something that comes up frequently. There are a couple of bits of evidence that I can offer to show where that is untrue. For instance —I think clause 36, which is on AI models, is tailored towards this—we see models that have been trained specifically on child sexual abuse, often on particular victims. Offenders collect images of a particular victim, and these tools have given them the ability to not just complete their collections, but create more content of children who have already been abused, sometimes many years ago. They are victims, or survivors now, and not only is their abuse not finished, but more content of them is being created. In one instance, we found 128 individual models, each trained on a specific victim with the intention of creating more imagery of those victims. It is not a victimless crime. That is 128 victims just there.

[Anna Sabine (Frome and East Somerset) (LD)]

Q This question is probably best aimed at Action for Children. It is on a point that was raised in some of our written evidence about the proposed sentencing under the proposed child criminal exploitation offence compared with the Modern Slavery Act 2015. The proposed sentencing for child criminal exploitation is 10 years, which is much shorter than the penalty of up to life imprisonment under the Modern Slavery Act. That might create a perverse situation where you can be sentenced for child criminal exploitation and get much less than you would under the Modern Slavery Act. Do you have any views on that?

Sharon Maciver: As I mentioned in my introduction, the harms caused to children are lifelong and traumatic and devastate children, young people and their communities. On the length of the sentence, I do not suppose there is any length of sentence that would be justifiable in terms of the harms that are caused by exploitation. I share the concerns on what you described—the length of time in the Modern Slavery Act versus what is described in the Bill. We would want to see that increased.