Crime and Policing Bill

Debate between Baroness Brinton and Lord Jackson of Peterborough

Committee stage
Thursday 5th February 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

My Lords, I oppose this amendment. I have to concede that, as usual, the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, made a beguilingly attractive case for the amendment, but in essence this would be a legislative overreach. This activity is not being undertaken with impunity. We have checks and balances, although I accept they can be improved. I say to the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, that children are used because of county lines, where children are used to move weapons and drugs.

[Baroness Brinton (LD)]

Will the noble Lord give way?

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

I will give way a little later as I want to develop my point, if the noble Baroness will be so kind as to allow me.

I think there are two sides to every story. When I was first a candidate and then Member of Parliament for Peterborough, I remember the sight every week of animal rights activists at Huntingdon Life Sciences. I do not support the activities of rogue police officers, as enunciated in what the noble Baroness said about spy cops, but we must not conflate separate phenomena: a full public inquiry—albeit in camera, which I do not agree with, as there should be openness and transparency—and specific criminal cases. One can also make the case that those police officers and others who were doxed by animal rights activists have suffered a huge degree of harassment and violent intimidation since the allegations arose, without having the opportunity to clear their names in a court of law. I give way to the noble Baroness.

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

I give way.

[Baroness Brinton (LD)]

I am grateful. The noble Lord referred earlier to children and county lines. The problem with this case is that relationships were formed under lies by police officers and children were born of those relationships, whose fathers then disappeared. It is nothing to do with the criminalised activity of children. Will he please reconsider his comments with that relevance?

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

The noble Baroness makes a very fair point. I was referring to the issue of county lines and why children may be used. I deprecate the unacceptable activity to which she refers; none of us would support the fathering of children in a pretended relationship, so she makes a very fair point.

I was talking about Huntingdon Life Sciences and animal rights activists. That violence escalated to a significant level over a number of years, which culminated in the violent attack on and near-death experience of the then chief executive of Huntingdon Life Sciences. It was a very unpleasant period. Therefore, there was a reasonable case to be made that the Metropolitan Police, Cambridgeshire Constabulary and others needed to embed officers and intelligence assets within the animal rights movement to alleviate the risk of further serious criminal activity. That was an animal rights issue, but it could easily not have been.

The noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, concedes very fairly that she does not want to circumscribe cases where you have to do long-term surveillance of, say, a terrorist plot which might be carried out were it not for police activity and long-term embedding of people. That is separate to cases where there has not been an operational rationale for preventing criminal activity, so I accept that there is a difference.

That is why this amendment is rather heavy-handed. No doubt the Minister will refer to the commissioner, who will look at whether these activities are timely and appropriate, but words matter. Incidentally, when the noble Baroness mentioned the Covert Human Intelligence Sources (Criminal Conduct) Act 2021, I think she made an unusual inference that it was to facilitate criminal activity. I may have been mistaken in hearing that and she may want to intervene.

Crime and Policing Bill

Debate between Baroness Brinton and Lord Jackson of Peterborough

Committee stage
Tuesday 27th January 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Brinton (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, for outlining the core, essential use of the public sector equality duty. I note that the Government’s website says:

“The Public Sector Equality Duty … requires public authorities to have due regard … when exercising their functions, like making decisions … It is intended to help decision-makers, including Government ministers, to comply with the duty”.


It does not talk about Pride marches or the detail of training.

Section 149 of the Equality Act says:

“A public authority must … eliminate discrimination, harassment, victimisation and any other conduct that is prohibited by or under this Act”.


I do not think the police could argue with anything there. It must also

“advance equality of opportunity between persons who share a relevant protected characteristic and persons who do not share it”.

That speaks to the point raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, about some of the very poor, racist behaviour we have seen from a few individuals. It must also

“foster good relations between persons who share a relevant protected characteristic and persons who do not share it … A person who is not a public authority but who exercises public functions must, in the exercise of those functions, have due regard to the matters mentioned in subsection (1)”.

I have quoted that very short section because the descriptions by some previous speakers in this short debate have made it sound like something completely different. I would be very worried if the police no longer had to follow the public sector equality duty as set out in the Equality Act. We can all argue about whether we do or do not like going on training days, or about a certain amount of money being well spent or not, but we really want to see discrimination eliminated, and that is particularly important in the police.

The noble Baroness, Lady Cash, said on the last group that we all need common sense and practicality. The PSED is the tool that does that, and I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Gower, for outlining the detail. He is right that the police should follow the law; the point is that the PSED and the impact assessments also fit within that. Getting rid of the PSED would mean that unlawful discrimination might well be missed, and that would be dreadful. He also said that it is not down to the police to deliver equality. I think the Equality Act differs on that and, given the work the police do, we would be pretty horrified if they suddenly said they did not have to deliver equality.

One of the ways that racism can be eliminated from the police is by ensuring compliance with the PSED. It is not the PSED itself at fault, but what is going on inside police authorities. That is why, for the third group today, we are talking about the importance of the White Paper on policing that has just been published, which will change the culture and ensure that that stops. We on these Benches believe that the PSED is a vital tool for the police to deliver that.

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

My Lords, the noble Baronesses, Lady Brinton and Lady Thornton, cannot both be right. The noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, is making the case that the public sector equality duty is a tool to tackle racism. Yet, as the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, made clear, the appalling, racist events at Charing Cross took place a year ago, 14 years after the PSED came into being. Surely it has not worked and a cultural change has to happen from within the organisation, as well as complementary legislation being imposed. On this occasion, it does not seem to have worked in that part of the Metropolitan Police.

Crime and Policing Bill

Debate between Baroness Brinton and Lord Jackson of Peterborough

Committee stage
Tuesday 20th January 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Brinton (LD)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Herbert, for his contribution because he set out the balance between non-crime hate incidents and non-crime incidents and the difference between the two. One of our concerns on these Benches is that—I am going to use the phrase he used, for which I apologise, but I had already written it down—in looking at this amendment, we must not throw the baby out with the bathwater. That is really important, and I will explain why in some detail later.

I remind the Committee that, in considering our two amendments about hate crime last week, I referred to the recommendation Combating Hate Crime by the Council of Europe, which says that

“hate can be manifested with different degrees of severity, ranging from everyday stigmatisation and discrimination, microaggressions and verbal abuse, to violence, terrorism, war crimes and genocide”,

which is an enormous spectrum. The reason why non-crime incidents, whether hate-related or not, need to be recorded is that often, the perpetrators go on to escalate their behaviour.

I have referred before in this House to being stalked by a political opponent for three years. Before we could get the police to take it seriously, we had recorded some 75 incidents, probably half of which were crimes but half were not. As things escalated, it went from minor crimes to the perpetrator using a very large knife on tyres. The police psychologist said, “If we don’t get him now, it will be people next”. It is that entire spectrum of behaviour, with some incidents ending up being part of a crime, that means we cannot just throw out all non-crime incidents.

I am afraid that the same is also true for non-crime hate incidents. I am grateful that the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, referred to the appalling case of the antisemitic attacks, because those would go as well if this amendment were accepted, since there would be no capacity for the police to start monitoring and recording such things until they tipped the balance into a crime, even though the damage was done in those earlier incidents, repeatedly to the same group of people. I think of friends of mine who go to synagogue in one town, and of young Muslim friends in my home town of Watford who are shouted at on their way to worship every single week by the same small group of people. Probably neither of those would even get to the first bar of being recorded as a non-crime hate incident; but, if their behaviour follows the typical course and escalates, and the police have not recorded anything, they have nothing to go back over. So I beg the movers of this amendment to—

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

What the noble Baroness has described is a crime. Those people shouting racist abuse at Jewish people or Muslims on the way to a mosque are committing a crime under the existing legislation that has been in place for many years. It has nothing to do with the recording of police intelligence, which is unfettered by this amendment, and it is certainly the case that what she has described is de facto a criminal offence.

[Baroness Brinton (LD)]

I referred to the comments made by previous speakers on this group who talked about police wasting their time recording. The two groups of people I have just referred to have tried to report these incidents and have not been able to get them taken particularly seriously. Therein lies the problem. I absolutely agree with the noble Lord, Lord Herbert, that there has to be new, revised, clear guidance about how the police need to process these things. It may be that there will be many that are not now processed, but we cannot just say that we should get rid of non-crime hate incidents in their entirety.

A lot of the other speeches during this debate have talked about the polarisation in our society being because people are now saying things to others, with people becoming offended. We discussed this briefly last week. The things being said to people on the street would not have been said five or six years ago. People might have thought them as they walked past, but it was quite rare. We are deeply offended if it targets us. We often do not recognise when we are being offensive to other people. I say again: there is something about the way our society is working at the moment that means we have to learn to look at ourselves, not just at the others we do not like. The police, who are literally trying to police all this, are in a very invidious position. They need tools to record information because it helps them to assess and understand when other things happen. It is much broader than non-crime hate incidents, as I have alluded to already.

Paul Giannasi OBE, the national hate crime lead for the police, has been reviewing the current protocols and his recommendations for a new code of practice will be very welcome. I am sure, from what the noble Lord, Lord Herbert, has said and from what I have heard elsewhere, that there certainly will be changes. We have to understand that the key issue here is balancing those individual rights: the absolute freedom of expression as expressed by the noble Lord, Lord Young of Acton—he and I had a debate about JS Mill last week—alongside the state’s obligation to protect citizens against targeted victimisation. The police must be able to gather intelligence and evidence and log symbolic messaging to targeted groups. All the other things—about whether those end up on DBS—can be looked at as part of this review, and I am sure they will be. But the police need to see that bigger, wider picture.

One of the problems about the Lawrence murder was that the police were not watching what was happening in that community in the months and years running up to it. That institutional blindness was certainly one of the things that came out of the inquiry. As others have said, the monitoring of such incidents was the result of the recommendations by Sir William Macpherson as part of his public inquiry in response to Stephen Lawrence’s murder.

I come back to this point: in terms of practical value, the police must be able to record incidents that do not in and of themselves amount to criminal offence, because many crimes, such as I described with harassment, and indeed with stalking, require evidence of a course of conduct. People say to me, “Oh, but stalking is always about relationships; that’s not about a hate crime”. Quite a lot of stalking is actually non-domestic, and it is targeted at somebody because of a particular characteristic.

I finish on the point I made right at the start about the evidence that police need for this course of conduct if behaviour escalates. If a group of people go out and do things again and again, there is a point at which it is going to tip over. I was party to and a survivor of something that ended up as 132 crimes; once the police saw all the evidence that we had been holding of the earlier non-crime hate, it was extremely helpful when things started to escalate. Reform is absolutely needed. We hope that the review will have recommendations for a new regime. But I also hope that it will not leave victims vulnerable, either from perpetrators whose behaviour escalates or from police who are not quite clear about the role they have in recording non-crime incidents.

Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill

Debate between Baroness Brinton and Lord Jackson of Peterborough

Committee stage
Wednesday 3rd September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Brinton (LD)]

I am very grateful for the noble Lord’s intervention. One of the problems is that social workers are using exactly those techniques—perhaps not in full, but they are. What is more, the NNAB social workers are paid through the NNAB by the Home Office. They are not independent, which is the other key point we wanted to make. I am very grateful for what the noble Lord, Lord Jackson, said at the start. He said that the public had moved on. But, as a former trustee of UNICEF, I say that my priority has to be the protection of young people who are under 18, and an arrangement for those where it may not be possible to decide that exactly—and we have had many debates about all that.

The issue is not just one of public satisfaction. The public may be very irritated by the young men who are clearly over 18 who are doing this, and that is fine for the system. Those of us who are bringing back amendments, probably on Monday, want to make sure that it is not happening the other way round: that people under 18 are being deemed to be adult. We know that this has happened and I hope that the Minister will be able to reassure me that we might finally see some data on this. Every time I have asked over the last three or four years, there has been no data about those who are deemed to be 18 and over who were under, and, indeed, the other way around. That is important for the Home Office, because it needs to understand about provision for those who are in this very small group, who need to be looked after in a slightly more special way.

By the way, not every young person who is under 18 who goes to a school is going to have special needs. They may need some language support, but not necessarily special needs. They may need emotional support if they have come from a war zone such as Sudan but, if we are saying that they are awaiting assessment as asylum seekers, that is something that this country really ought to be prepared to look at. So I am much more cynical about the NNAB being as truly independent and clear as the noble Lord, Lord Murray, was making out. Those of us who have amendments will go over this in detail next week.

I want to go back to Amendments 114 and 115. Young people having no right of appeal contravenes the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of the Child. They absolutely must have support in complex issues, particularly in a country where they may not speak the language. When the official Opposition were in power, they also refused to let young people who were having age assessments carried over have any access to legal or advisory support during that process. They said it was not necessary. But I have to say that those European countries that use age assessments all have independent support for these young people from that Government’s own process. I particularly pray in aid the Netherlands, because it was cited by the noble Lord, Lord Murray, when he was at the Dispatch Box in the past.

These protections are built in because we have a formal duty to look after those under 18 and, yes, it may be difficult to work out if some are, but we will know about most of them. I really think that the first two amendments need to be reviewed, and I do not think we can support them. I can remember when I read the first full report: it is not as clear as the noble Lord, Lord Murray, said. There is always talk about ranges. I do not know about noble Lords, but I have a son of six foot four and he was certainly sprouting a beard by 16 or 17 and was already over six foot. We make mistakes, and I absolutely support what the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, was saying. You cannot just assume that that is right and, if we get it wrong, you have a young man—they usually are young men—who is put into an adult centre. They then are at risk, and that is on us as a country.

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

I absolutely applaud the laudable work of UNICEF. The point that I was attempting to make was that we must focus our efforts on weeding out those who are clearly, as she concedes, not reaching the age criteria, so that we can focus on those in most need, who have suffered terror, despotism, trauma et cetera.

Taking the noble Baroness back to the appeals, what is the alternative? If you have an open-ended, liberal, permissive appeals system, it will be gamed by many people. She might want to think about this before she tables an amendment: can you have an appeals system that pays due regard to the universal human rights of children but does not allow the system to be gamed by endless appeals that take months and years?

[Baroness Brinton (LD)]

The problem is that Amendment 114 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Gower, says there is no appeal—full stop, end. None. Therefore, that young person, who probably has English as a second language, whichever side they are and who will be arguing that they are under 18, does not even have the right that the noble Lord, Lord Jackson, was talking about, and that worries me. I have argued this for some time, as the noble Lord, Lord Murray, knows, to his cost. I agree that the public are concerned. I have no doubt about that. However, are we only concerned with what the public are concerned about? Do we not need to focus on children who are seeking asylum in this country and can get some help? If we go by, “Well, actually the public don’t want it”, it will all start going the wrong way.