Crime and Policing Bill

Baroness Boycott Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 27th November 2025 Lords Chamber

I am very pleased to support this group of amendments on this very important journey.

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

My Lords, I support all the amendments in this group, and in particular I pay tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, for her endless work in this capacity. This is the first time I have spoken on any of these groups of amendments. I find everything the noble Lord, Lord Nash, the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, and others have said truly shocking. Some 55 years ago, I started a magazine called Spare Rib. If I had ever dreamed, in my wildest and worst nightmares, that I would find myself listening to what everyone has been talking about, I suppose we would not have gone on. In so many ways, this is a worse situation that women find themselves in, and certainly young girls. I carried on riding a pony till I was 15—that was my childhood—and then I found boys. This is so terrible, and I congratulate every noble Lord, and particularly the noble Baronesses, on the work that they have done.

I will be very brief, as I just want to speak in support of the amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Nash, and Amendment 266, which simply says that AI is already being used to harm children. Unless we act decisively, this harm will just escalate. The systems that everyone has been discussing today are extraordinary technological achievements—and they are very dangerous. The Internet Watch Foundation has reported an explosion in AI-generated child sexual abuse material. Offenders can now share instructions on how to manipulate the models, how to train them on illegal material and how to evade all the filters. The tools are becoming so accessible and so frictionless that a determined offender can produce in minutes material that once would have involved an entire criminal enterprise. Against that backdrop, it is quite staggering that we do not already require AI providers to assess whether their systems can be used to generate illegal child abuse. Amendment 266 would plug this gap. Quite frankly, I cannot for the life of me see why any responsible company would resist such a requirement.

Amendment 479 addresses a confusion that has gone on for too long. We cannot have a situation where some companies argue that generative AI is a search service and therefore completely in scope of the Online Safety Act, while others argue the opposite. If a model can retrieve, repackage or generate harmful content in response to a query, the public deserve clarity about precisely where that law applies.

On Amendment 480, this really is an issue that keeps me awake at night. These chatbots can be astonishingly persuasive. As the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, says, they are also addictive: they are friendly, soothing and intimate, and are a perfect confidant for a lonely child. They also generate illegal material, encourage harmful behaviour and groom children. We have already seen chatbots modelled on sex offenders and heard reports of chatbots sending sexualised messages to children, including the appalling case of a young boy who took his life after weeks of interaction with AI. We will no doubt hear of more such cases. The idea that such systems might fall through the cracks is unthinkable.

What these amendments do is simple. They say that if a system can generate illegal or harmful content for a child, it should not be allowed to do so. Quite frankly, anything that man or woman can make, man or woman can unmake—that is still just true. We have often said in this Chamber that children deserve no less protection online than they do offline. With AI, however, we should demand more, because these systems are capable of things no human predator could ever manage. They work 24/7, they target thousands simultaneously and they adapt perfectly to the vulnerabilities of every child they encounter. The noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, is right to insist that we act now, not in two years—think how different it was two years ago. We have to act now. I say to the Government that this is a real chance to close some urgent gaps, and I very much hope that they will take it.

[Baroness Owen of Alderley Edge (Con)]

My Lords, I support all the amendments in this group, but I will speak to Amendments 479 and 480 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron. I declare my interest as a guest of Google at their Future Forum, an AI policy conference.

These amendments are vital to ascertain the Government’s position on AI chatbots and where they stand in relation to the Online Safety Act, but I have to question how we can have been in a state of ambiguity for so long. We are very close to ChatGPT rolling out erotica on its platform for verified adults. Six months ago, the Wall Street Journal highlighted the deeply disturbing issue of digital companion bots engaging in sexual chat with users, which told them they were underage. Further, they willingly played out scenarios such as “submissive schoolgirl”. Another bot purporting to be a 12 year-old boy promised that it would not tell its parents about dating a user identifying himself as an adult man. Professor Clare McGlynn KC has already raised concerns about what she has coined chatbot-driven VAWG, the tech itself being designed to be sexually suggestive and to engage in grooming and coercive behaviours. Internet Matters found that 64 % of children use chatbots. The number of companion apps has rapidly developed and researchers at Bournemouth University are already warning about the addictive potential of these services.

The Government and the regulator cannot afford to be slow in clarifying the position of these services. It begs a wider question of how we can be much more agile in our response and continually horizon-scan, as legislation will always struggle to keep pace with the evolution of technology. This is the harm we are talking about now, but how will it evolve tomorrow? Where will we be next month or next year? It is vital that both the Government and the regulator become more agile and respond at pace. I look forward to the Minister’s response to the noble Baroness’s amendments.

Crime and Policing Bill

Baroness Boycott Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 9th December 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

My Lords, I support all the amendments in this group, so well put forward by the noble Baronesses, Lady Bertin, Lady Kidron, Lady Kennedy and Lady Benjamin, but I particularly want to say a few words about Amendment 298 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Bertin.

I have been really alarmed by this. I was first alerted by my friend Laura Bates talking in her book about the “nudify” apps and how young children can be when they can get targeted—as young as eight or nine—and how this can happen to them in school, where they can be completely unaware and, suddenly, there is a picture of them naked circulating around, and a lot of girls want to drop out of school because of it.

It is not an accident that this is happening. It is driven by money, commerce and capitalism. It is not in any way inevitable that it happens. Something that is made by man—probably by a man, in this case, but maybe by a woman—can certainly be put right by government and by all of us. It is the result of a design choice, a market choice and a policy choice, and we can change it.

These apps are designed to strip girls’ photos and create sexualised images of them, often in seconds. They are incredibly easy to use, quite terrifyingly. I challenge anyone in this House who has not done it just to type in, “Can I have a nudify app?” You will get it in a minute. My great niece, who I work with, did it to herself, and the super weird thing about it is that it does not give you the body of Claudia Schiffer or Kate Moss or something that you are obviously not; it gives you the kind of body that you have.

The reality of it is very stark and horrible. Girls are harassed, threatened, coerced and manipulated before they even really understand what is happening. There is one major app that produces 200,000 fake nude images every day, and we are on track for 8 million of these deepfake images every year. They are an entire industry, which is functioning somewhere, taking money and doing this to our children. The police cannot act until after the harm has occurred, and schools cannot act pre-emptively. The platforms claim that they are not responsible because this is a tool, and it is not them. It is passing off the responsibility. They exist just to facilitate sexual abuse—for which, at the moment, very few people have to pay a price.

I would also like to speak about something that has happened but has not been mentioned very much in this debate. I am an ambassador and patron of a group called The Vavengers, which seeks to stop vaginal mutilation. The person who runs it is Turkish, and she has noticed now that the primary form of cosmetic surgery in Turkey is young women—though not all of them young—going there to have their vaginas reconstructed to look like the vaginas that you see in pornography, which look like those of 13 year-old girls. They are going to Turkey to have their labia cut off. Sema, who is the child of a slave and an extraordinary woman, says you can always tell when you are on the return plane from Istanbul because there are a lot of young women fidgeting because they are in pain. It seems to me that this is an extension of the world that we have arrived in and allowed to happen. It is shocking.

My granddaughter is three. I look at her and think that, in four or five years’ time, she could be the victim of this. As those in this House know, I got into this 55 years ago. If anyone had told me then that the day would come when I would have to ask for someone not to be able to have an app that would take my granddaughter’s clothes off and make her a neurotic, unhappy young woman because she is sexually not like the things she sees in pornography, and with my grandson, who is also three, going through the kind of things that I think young men do, I would say that we should be damned ashamed of ourselves. All of us women in this House, of different ages, have fought long and hard through the years to get where we are, and we and this Government owe it back to the next generation of children. I am very grateful to all the younger women such as the noble Baronesses, Lady Bertin and Lady Owen, for the work they have done. I can only say that I wish that I was not on this journey with them and that it did not exist.

[Baroness Shawcross-Wolfson (Con)]

My Lords, I too support my noble friend Lady Bertin’s amendments and I will particularly talk about Amendment 314. There is no debate about whether certain pornography is harmful. Parliament settled that question decades ago. There is no debate about whether it is right for our Parliament to ban harmful pornography. We already do. We are merely debating whether we have the determination to apply our existing laws to the latest distribution channels.

In the early 1980s, we saw a dramatic increase in video cassette recorders in the home and the subsequent emergence of video nasties. In that era, Parliament was quick to catch up to the latest technological innovation and, as we have heard, the Video Recordings Act 1984 was passed with cross-party support. As a result, pornography released on physical formats is and has always been strictly regulated in the UK. In 2003, Parliament extended those protections through the Communications Act to ensure that UK-based video-on-demand services, including those that specialised in pornography, could not distribute content that the British Board of Film Classification would refuse to classify. Amendment 314 simply takes the definition of harmful content in the Communications Act 2003 and seeks to apply it to online pornography, with a proper framework for enforcement. Some 41 years ago, we said that harmful content could not be distributed on video cassettes, 22 years ago we said it could not be distributed through video-on-demand services, and now it is time to close the gap in the law which allows it to be legally distributed on the internet.

Amendments 291 and 290 would ensure that incest material and depictions of child sexual abuse in online pornography are made illegal. My noble friend Lady Bertin and others have already outlined the immense damage that this content does. I welcome the Government’s commitment to end the depiction of strangulation in online pornography, not least because it demonstrates their conviction that such material can be banned. All it requires is political will. I hope that the Committee will find that same political will to make pornography that mimics child sex abuse or portrays incest illegal.

I support Amendment 292, which would introduce a statutory duty for platforms to verify the age and consent of individuals who feature in pornography. It is the bare minimum we need to start tackling the rampant exploitation in the porn industry.

I conclude by returning to my starting point. In previous generations, when the technology advanced, from cinema to video and from video to streaming, Parliament acted. Today is no different. We have acted because, as the sponsor of the Video Recordings Act said 40 years ago, incredibly presciently:

“Producers and suppliers of this base and debasing material have only one aim—to supply the worst elements of human nature for profit”.—[Official Report, Commons, 11/11/1983; col. 522.]


We have acted because we have long known that violent porn—the type of pornography that depicts acts that are illegal in real life—is damaging. At no point have we as a Parliament or a society proactively debated and agreed to accept the type of abusive pornography that is now mainstream and widespread on the internet. No Minister from any Government has stood at the Dispatch Box and argued that the public have a right to watch scenes depicting incest or child sex abuse—I doubt any Minister would. No Minister has made the case that this material is harmless, and no Minister could, given the evidence we have heard today. We allow this material to proliferate not because we think it is harmless, not because we think it is a matter of free speech, but because we think it is hard to stop. It is hard, but I am hopeful. Today, we have a regulator which is beginning to make great strides in tackling illegal material online. We have a regulator with 40 years’ experience of video classification, and we have a Government who, to echo the words of the Minister, are profoundly committed to halving violence against women and girls. Today, we have an opportunity to close this unconscionable gap in the law. I very much hope that we will do so.