Crime and Policing Bill

Baroness Finlay of Llandaff Excerpts

2nd reading
Thursday 16th October 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Finlay of Llandaff (CB)]

I welcome the Minister to her role. She introduced this large Bill with admirable clarity.

The need to address the mandatory reporting of abuse of children is urgent, but the Bill should go wider than sexual abuse, because the criminal exploitation of children is associated with all types of abuse. As physical abuse occurs, the abuser initially tends to use the loophole to claim it is “reasonable chastisement” and avoid action being taken, yet this is linked to increasing violence, sexual abuse and emotional exploitation.

Such abuse and the driving of children to crime can happen within the home. The perpetrator grooming and using and abusing a child is not always from outside the home. The child, deeply disturbed, is pushed into criminal activity that escalates with frightening speed from relatively minor offences to very serious crime. There is an urgent need to ensure that children are protected from ongoing exploitation.

These children are subject to significant threats, such as them or their family being killed. Some have acid or heat burns and some are scolded or stabbed—all as ways of intimidating. Some 90% of these children do not disclose who is abusing them. The child is terrified; they cannot protect themselves.

Many struggle with the idea that the child is both a victim and a perpetrator at the same time. When it comes to the use, earlier on, of this loophole of claiming “reasonable chastisement”, it is important to remember that bruises do not show on skin of colour. Children need equal protection from assault and battery, just as adults have. That loophole needs to be closed.

The prevention of the exploitation of children with the criminal exploitation of children protection orders is long overdue. These will provide protection of the child, allowing services to intervene earlier and disrupt the business model of criminal gangs that control these children, at times even operating from inside prison. The perpetrator’s defence of reasonably assuming that the young person is over 18 leaves the door open to victimising teenagers without protection. We must not think that we will be adequately protecting children by only requiring the mandatory reporting of child sexual abuse.

On a completely different subject, if we are to protect all on our streets, we must lower the drink drive limit to 20 milligrams per hundred millilitres of blood. To leave it as high as it is leaves lives endangered every day.