Crime and Policing Bill

Baroness Doocey Excerpts

Monday 2nd March 2026 Lords Chamber

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Ministry of Justice (Baroness Levitt) (Lab)]

My Lords, I will speak to government Amendments 234, 235, 237, 249, 250, 448 and 467, which will give effect to recommendation 1 of the National Audit on Group-based Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse by the noble Baroness, Lady Casey. She recommended that the law should be changed so that an adult who engages in penetrative sexual activity with a child who is under 16 is charged with rape. I thank the noble Baroness for the audit. She worked closely with us as we developed these offences, and it was important to us to ensure that we met her objectives. I thank her for her strong support of the Government’s proposals.

We are taking a two-stage approach, starting with the amendments being debated today. These will create new offences covering rape and other penetrative sexual activity with a child who is under 16 by an adult. The important thing to note is that the prosecution does not have to prove that the child did not consent, so ostensible or purported consent or reasonable belief in consent is completely irrelevant. This eliminates any question of whether an under-16 seemed to have consented. All that matters is the age of the child. If the child is under 13, the defendant’s belief about their age is irrelevant. If the child is aged 13 to 15, an adult who believed that the child was aged 16 or over would not be guilty, but only if that belief was reasonably held. This mirrors the existing approach to sexual offences committed against children.

The maximum penalty for these offences will be life imprisonment, and these offences will sit alongside existing ones in relation to sexual activity with and towards children. The Crown Prosecution Service will therefore retain discretion to charge the full range of child sex offences where appropriate, though we expect that the use of other offences will be very limited. As with existing offences against children under 13, the CPS will prioritise the more serious charges. We are also tabling the necessary consequential amendments, such as ensuring that where the relevant criteria are met, offenders will be eligible for extended determinate sentences.

This brings me to the second stage. The noble Baroness, Lady Casey, was clear in her audit that the law in this area needs to be changed to ensure that children are treated as children. Alongside our new offences, we are committed to doing two things. We are going to carry out a public consultation to look at how to treat what are known as “close-in-age relationships” within the cohort of relevant child sexual offences. This responds to the noble Baroness’s recommendation that the Government should consider a close-in-age exemption to prevent the criminalisation of teenagers who are in relationships with each other.

We will also conduct a post-implementation review of the new offences to test the impact they are having. We know that there are some concerns about the element of reasonable belief in age, and this review will look closely at how that works in practice. I assure the House that the Government will continue to progress this work as a matter of priority to ensure that we get the law right in the long term. I beg to move.

[Baroness Doocey (LD)]

My Lords, we believe that Amendment 235 delivers on the crucial recommendation from the noble Baroness, Lady Casey, in her national audit. By creating these strict liability offences where consent is rightly irrelevant and the offence of reasonable belief in age cannot apply, these clauses send an important signal making it unambiguously clear that no adult can claim ignorance or excuse when preying on the young and vulnerable.

The audit explained how grooming gangs repeatedly evaded rape charges for penetrative sex with 13 to 15 year-olds. Cases were downgraded or dropped because victims were misperceived as having consented or been in love with abusers, despite children under 16 being legally incapable of consent. Perpetrators avoided accountability by claiming it was reasonable to believe their victims were older than 16, perhaps due to their demeanour or because they had fake ID. These clauses strip away both loopholes for good, and on these Benches we give them our full support.

The intent of Amendment 236 to elevate penetrative offences against young teens to rape is laudable, but, as we signalled in Committee, we have several concerns. Mandating rape charges for every act of intercourse with a child under 16 may sound resolute, but it introduces unnecessary evidential hurdles and extra elements that must be proved beyond reasonable doubt, which could result in guilty offenders walking free. Forcing every case into a life sentence framework risks deterring pleas from defendants and unnerving juries, driving up acquittals on technicalities. Amendment 236 also retains the “reasonable belief in age” defence, which—as the noble Baroness, Lady Casey, highlighted—offenders have exploited to evade justice. We believe the Government’s approach offers a surer path to protecting vulnerable children, and it has our support.

[Lord Cameron of Lochiel (Con)]

My Lords, we support the Government’s approach and indeed welcome it. In Committee, my noble friend Lord Davies of Gower and I tabled an amendment in the same form, in essence, as Amendment 236 in this group. The amendment would create a specific offence of rape of a child under 16 to close the loophole in the current law whereby an adult who has sexual intercourse with a child between 13 and 15 is not automatically charged with rape. That was one of the key recommendations from the noble Baroness, Lady Casey. In Committee, these Benches were critical of the fact that, although the Government had accepted the noble Baroness’s recommendation to do this, they had not brought forward a legislative proposal to change the law. With Amendment 235, they have done exactly that.

I am also pleased that they have gone slightly further and included within the scope assault by penetration and causing a child to engage in sexual activity. Overall, this is a welcome step and, in light of it, we will not press Amendment 236 to a Division.

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For too long, women have had to chase their own abuse across the internet, never free to move on with their lives, always living in the constant shadow that it will reappear. I urge noble Lords to please vote with me and allow these victims to reclaim their lives once and for all.

[Baroness Doocey (LD)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 277, which would create a specific criminal offence of secretly filming someone without their consent for sexual gratification or in order to humiliate or distress them. In addition, it would make profiting from such footage a serious aggravating factor for sentencing, bringing clarity to a legal grey area and aligning the law with the reality of abuse in the digital age.

This amendment follows a BBC investigation which exposed the widespread practice of men covertly filming women on nights out and then monetising the footage on online platforms. The BBC identified over 65 channels across YouTube, TikTok, Facebook and Instagram posting this content. The material is being filmed in major cities worldwide, including London, and Manchester is a hotspot, with creators travelling from abroad specifically to capture surreptitious low-angle shots of fully closed women in dresses and skirts as they walk along the street. These are then uploaded as so-called “walking tours” or “nightlife content”. These posts have racked up more than 3 billion views in the last three years, with a single video generating up to £5,000 in revenue from ads and sponsorship.

Women and girls deserve to move freely in public without fearing that their bodies will be splashed across the internet without their consent. The problem is that existing voyeurism offences turn on narrow definitions of nudity and privacy. We welcome the Bill’s focus on non-consensual intimate image abuse and support the Government’s amendments and those tabled by the noble Baronesses, Lady Owen and Lady Bertin. However, these are confined to images of subjects in an intimate state. Fully clothed people generally fall outside this definition, even when filmed for sexual kicks.

Amendment 277 instead focuses on the degrading and predatory intent, which is where much of the harm lies. It centres on the victim’s humiliation and objectification, rather than on narrow definitions of body parts, clothing or location. It follows Law Commission advice to expand voyeurism legislation to non-private settings, based on intent. This amendment is carefully targeted at those with malign motivations.

In 2024, Greater Manchester Police made an arrest for this practice. However, no further action could be taken due to what the force described as “limitations in current legislation”. Harassment and stalking laws fail because they require a proven course of conduct. Abusers know that this behaviour is not currently captured by law and are exploiting this loophole. Without action, predators will continue to see this as a risk-free way of making easy money.

My honourable friend Wera Hobhouse MP has tabled a Private Member’s Bill on this issue. I echo her calls to compel platforms to remove such content. The Angiolini Inquiry recently warned that sexually motivated crimes against women in public are still not sufficiently prioritised. That is why I urge the Minister to give my amendment the serious consideration that it deserves. We need concrete action, not more rhetoric.

[Lord Pannick (CB)]

My Lords, this group covers a range of human conduct, from the objectionable to the disgusting. I thank the Minister for tabling a series of amendments which will benefit women and society at large. I particularly thank the noble Baroness, Lady Owen, for all the work that she has done, which has led us to this position, and for the amendments that she has tabled. I am sure that the whole House is very grateful to her.

I will speak specifically to Amendment 273, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Owen, to which I have added my name. I understand that the noble Baroness may, if the Minister does not accept the amendment, wish to test the opinion of the House. This amendment simply seeks to impose a duty on a court to make a deprivation and deletion order where a person is convicted of an offence involving sharing or threatening to share intimate images without the consent of the victim.

The argument in favour of this amendment is very simple. It is necessary to give comfort to the victim who knows that the perpetrator has created or distributed the intimate images without consent. Unless there is a duty to destroy this content, the victim is inevitably going to remain extremely concerned that the content will remain in circulation and in existence.

That is the first argument. The second argument is that I can think of no justification whatever why the culprit should retain such intimate images when they have been convicted of being a wrongdoer in this respect. Those two points make this amendment unanswerable, and I strongly support it.