Crime and Policing Bill

Debate between Baroness Fox of Buckley and Lord Pannick

Report stage
Monday 9th March 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I know a young man who has just got his driving licence. He is very excited and sees it as a rite of passage; he is now a grown-up. He has joined the club of drivers and he shows his driving licence with pride. I can assure noble Lords he has no idea that applying for a driving licence means that he is joining a vast biometric police database, a club of police surveillance, and his mugshot will be treated like one of those Most Wanted gallery of rogues images.

This is a corruption of public trust. The public apply for one thing, only for it to be subverted and used for something else. It seems to me to be duplicitous and behind the backs of the public. Currently, police forces can directly access and search DVLA data only in relation to road traffic offences and must phone the DVLA in relation to other offences. I note that the amendment from the noble Baroness, Lady Doocey, would not prevent police forces accessing DVLA data for law enforcement purposes, but it should not be the default position. It is important to create this safeguard to prevent such data being used to conduct, in effect, phishing exercises of facial recognition. Therefore, we need this amendment to be taken seriously and I will be interested in what the Minister has to say.

This is not some paranoid dystopian vision. In a recent submission to the Home Affairs Committee, the National Police Chiefs’ Council stated that police chiefs were indeed seeking access to the DVLA database for facial recognition. That would be a huge expansion of police surveillance powers, granting them access, as we have heard, to the biometric data of tens of millions of citizens. We cannot overestimate how important it is that we do not just nod this through but take seriously the risk to civil liberties. It is why the noble Baroness’s Amendment 380, which creates a safeguard, is so important: to protect the civil liberties and privacy of innocent driving licence holders.

I conclude with a quote from Big Brother Watch, which says that this represents

“a disproportionate expansion of police powers to track and identify citizens across time and locations for low-level policing needs”.

In a way, it is an abuse of the police to ask them to use these underhand methods, and it is therefore vital that there are safeguards in law to prevent this happening, particularly because it is happening behind the backs of ordinary people.

[Lord Pannick (CB)]

There is no question, as I understand Clause 154, of a blank cheque, and there is no question here of underhand methods. What the clause requires is that the Secretary of State produces regulations, and the regulations must specify the circumstances in which information may be made available under this section. I am assuming that in due course, the Government are going to bring forward regulations to implement this provision. Those regulations will have to be laid before Parliament, and there will be an opportunity, if any noble Lord wishes to do so, to debate those regulations. I suggest that that is the time to assess whether the regulations contain a fair balance between the rights of the individual and the public interest.

Crime and Policing Bill

Debate between Baroness Fox of Buckley and Lord Pannick

Wednesday 4th March 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Pannick (CB)]

I am grateful to the noble Lord, but he is running two inconsistent arguments. He is saying first that the law already allows this, and secondly that this amendment to make the position clear is fundamentally objectionable on grounds of principle. He cannot run both arguments, nor say that it is objectionable for one of the factors that the court should take into account to be whether the hostility is based on sex. Why should we exclude sex? Why does the law currently allow the victim’s membership, or presumed membership, of a racial or religious group to be a factor that the court can take into account, but not sex or transgender status? That makes no sense whatever when the Equality Act deals with all these protected characteristics.

I emphasise that whether it is right or appropriate for the judge to take these factors into account in the circumstances of a particular case, and to what extent, will depend on the discretion of the sentencing judge, which will inevitably depend on the circumstances of the crime. Therefore, to exclude entirely the factor of the victim being, or being presumed to be, transgender, as the amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Young of Acton, seeks to do, seems arbitrary.

Of course, I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Young of Acton, that we must be very careful indeed to ensure that people are not punished for the exercise of free speech, but the law protects that exercise. It protects it by reference to Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which the sentencing judge must take into account in all cases. I do not know the circumstances of the case that the noble Lord referred to, where there was an acquittal at the appeal stage, but I strongly suspect that Article 10 had something to do with it. I support the Government’s amendment.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I have serious reservations about the Government’s amendments on aggravated offences. I appreciate that this puts me at odds with the Minister, but I knew that long before today, because in Committee he made a passionate speech, as he has today, telling us how proud he would be to move these amendments and claiming that they show a Government prepared to protect LGBT and disabled people.

If this is such an important change in the law for the Government, and a principled flagship for progressive Labour that appeared in its manifesto, we have to ask why the Government waited until Report in the Lords—so late in the Bill’s passage—to table the amendments. They must have thought that they were principled and important before, so why are we seeing them only now? I am afraid that, as the noble Baroness, Lady Cash, explained, this denies this House the constitutional right to properly scrutinise and mull over the complex details of the amendments—let alone the fact that that was denied to the elected Chamber.

In the limited space that we have here, I will start by raising some general concerns I have with aggravated offences. Some people might say that this is a Second Reading speech; if it is, it is because the Government did not bring the amendments forward until now, so I will say it anyway. In my view, the state’s job, via criminal justice, is to prosecute material, clearly defined offences. When the authorities attempt to either infer or impute motivation for a crime, seemingly to signal its particular gravity, that is a dangerous move towards punishing ideas, beliefs or attitudes. Some of those ideas, of course, might be bigoted or abhorrent, but they are none the less ideas and opinions. We need to be wary of inadvertently stepping towards thought-crime solutions just to signal our moral virtue, and I am worried about expanding that regime.

This has consequences. Offences such as these carry higher maximum penalties when offenders demonstrate hostility, and this can mean prison. But hostility can be interpreted broadly in the law as ill will, antagonism or prejudice. Let me be clear: violence, harassment, assault or whatever against a disabled person, a trans person, a woman or anyone should be punished appropriately—severely, if that is your take—and certainly uniformly, regardless of motive. But aggravated sentencing can lead to some perverse outcomes.

On hate crime aggravators, in Committee I used an example from the CPS report Our Recent Hate Crime Prosecutions. A man was put in jail for 20 weeks for

“assaulting his father, sister and a police officer, and using racist slurs against his sister’s partner”.

But the CPS notes that, without the racist slurs, he would have only received a community order. So for the assault he would have retained his freedom but, with the racist words, he got 20 weeks in jail. What is more problematic is that many of the offences we are talking about are not actually those kinds of aggressions but often speech that is promiscuously criminalised.

This sentencing anomaly really hits home when it comes to the much boasted-of addition of sex into the aggregation. “At last”, people will say; “misogyny taken seriously”. But, during the Sentencing Bill, the Government refused to accept a perfectly reasonable amendment exempting sexual assault offences and domestic violence offences from the early release scheme. Surely, a real, material commitment to women would be to have accepted that amendment, not increased sentences for offences deemed driven by hostility to women.

Instead, my view is that we should prosecute actual offences committed against any woman. When those offences involve, for example, sexual violence or domestic abuse, we should give appropriate sentences to perpetrators and then not let the offenders out early to free up prison places. That would help women far more than this amendment, the wording of which says that the aggravators must be announced in “open court” to declare an offence aggravated—if ever there were an indication of the performative nature of this, that is it.

One worry is that many of the offences to which “aggravated” will be attached will be the tangled plethora of hate speech crimes, already leading to the scandal of Britain’s declining free speech reputation internationally, with so many arrested for speech crimes, as we have heard about. So many of these offences are wholly subjective, because hostility can be defined by the victim. We have seen the recent weaponisation of speech against those who do not share the same views, the whole cancel culture and toxicity that has proliferated, and identity groups and those with protective characteristics pitched against each other in grievance complaints.

Although it was not in the criminal law, we saw a gross example of this when John Davidson, a man with Tourette’s and the subject of an award-winning sympathetic film, involuntarily ticked and shouted out the N-word. Subsequent commentary refused to accept that there was no intent to offend. Race and disability were put at odds, rather than empathetically understanding the issues, and that is one of the problems with playing the identity politics issue. Increasing aggravated offences will just add to this toxic mix, and that, combined with public order and communications arrests—if not prosecutions for speech crimes, as described by the noble Lord, Lord Young of Acton—will make this issue really difficult.

The issue of hostility to transgender identity is likely to stir up further tensions. I want to ask: what is transgender identity? At best, it is a subjective category. It is a self-defined description. That is not a criticism; it is just an observation. Transgender identity does not require a gender recognition certificate or surgery. By the way, the wording in the amendment is confusing here: it gives credence to the fact that surgery might be a key, but then it says “proposing to undergo” gender reassignment, which is a very odd phrase. That is why the amendments of the noble Lords, Lord Davies of Gower and Lord Cameron of Lochiel, are right to query and probe it, which is what we should be doing, even though it is so late in the day. How transgender people are defined will matter to how these amendments will be understood.

The clarification of the noble Lords from the Official Opposition, in Amendments 337, 350, 351 and 352, establishing what sex means in the Bill, is also helpful. Emphasising biological sex—sex at birth—is necessary to ensure that the cultural clash between gender identity and sex is not muddled up in this Bill or in these amendments. The noble Lord, Lord Young of Acton, in his Amendment 334A, also hopes to ensure that the proposed changes do not criminalise misgendering.

I just note that I hate the word “misgendering”. If a male identifies as a female, even if he has a certificate or has had surgery, he is still a man. Saying that is not misgendering; it is factually accurate. Asking me to call him a woman is compelled speech, asking me to repeat misinformation. But would that statement, which I am very nervous about making, be seen as evidence of hostility to someone based on their gender identity? Guess what: too often, those accused of, and punished for, so-called misgendering offences are women. Police criminalised Sex Matters’ Helen Joyce for some tweets referring to Freda Wallace by his former name Fred and using he/him pronouns, and the police recorded that as “criminal harassment” with “transgender aggravators”.

What about the young lesbian who says that she is not attracted to a male—a man who thinks that, by wearing stilettos and a dress, he is a woman and should be allowed into a lesbian-only group at a workplace—

Crime and Policing Bill

Debate between Baroness Fox of Buckley and Lord Pannick

Report stage
Wednesday 25th February 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Pannick (CB)]

My Lords, I agree with everything said by the noble Baroness, Lady Doocey. As I understand the Government’s position, they accept that it would not be appropriate to impose such an order unless it is necessary and proportionate, and indeed that is the test applied by the European Convention on Human Rights, so the only question is whether the language of the Bill, and the Act that it will become, should reflect the true test. It seems to me, as it seems to the noble Baroness, Lady Doocey, highly appropriate that what is in the legislation should set out the true test. This has to be applied not just by judges but by police officers, local authorities, communities and everyone who is responsible for considering and enforcing this legislation. Let us put the true and proper test on the face of the Bill.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, there is a lot in this group. The Government are undoubtedly sincere in wanting to use the Bill to further tackle anti-social behaviour, and such moves to take on this blight on communities will certainly be popular. However, we have to pause a moment and say that there is already a plethora of tools on the statute book designed to tackle anti-social behaviour, and yet it does not seem to be improving. This is the group in which we need to ask why. Perhaps anti-social behaviour orders and injunctions in all their various guises, from community penalty notices to public spaces protection orders, are just not fit for purpose.

I fear that, instead of tackling this, the Government are taking an easy and performative route and affording the state even more of the same—with more draconian powers—under a different label, that of respect orders. They are doing all this with little clarity or evidence of efficacy. That is what the amendments in this group are designed to tackle. By and large, I support them all.

I tabled Amendment 6, which calls for an independent —I stress the word “independent”—review of existing powers under the Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act 2014, which should be published prior to the commencement of Sections 1 and 2 of the Act. As legislators, we have an obligation to take responsibility for assessing the impact of, and the evidence about, laws that we made in the past before we duplicate their weaknesses. We need to understand the pros and cons.

This review would look at solving the evidence gap. It is extraordinary that there is significant variation in data captured across relative authorities. Because ASBIs are locally administered in a patchwork of varied use, there is a worrying variation in the types and quality of data collected, the location of that data and the ability of that data to be extrapolated and shared internally or with relevant agencies where appropriate. This is surely a slap across the face of evidence-based policy-making, because without data it is not possible to adequately assess the effectiveness of behaviour orders and to fully understand any trends arising out of their imposition, enforcement or breach, including disproportionate impacts.

That is why Amendment 24 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, who is not in her place, which would require the Home Office to publish quarterly data, is so important, as well as Amendment 12 from the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, and the noble Baroness, Lady Doocey, which calls for an annual report. Both amendments positively try to tackle the limits of the availability of the evidence base, without which I do not know how we can make informed policy decisions.

At present, all the critiques of present behaviour orders are invaluably brought to us from sporadic academic research, FoI-based research led by the likes of Josie Appleton and her team at the Campaign for Freedom in Everyday Life, and the excellent campaign group Justice. They want their work to be made redundant by the Government; they want the Government and officialdom to do their work instead. If the Home Office does not understand its own legislative tools because it does not have the data, the misery of anti-social behaviour will remain untouched while the statute book grows.

I hope the Minister will listen to the front-line workers who have to implement and use these orders and who, reasonably, bemoan the lack of proper consultation with those who understand the ASBI regime in real life. I note the government amendment on consultation, which is welcome.

The majority of practitioners who Justice consulted believe that the new respect orders are unnecessary and replicate flawed laws already available. Only 6% conclude that they will improve outcomes for victims; 82% of respondents to the practitioners survey have called for the review of the existing 2014 Act and of existing powers prior to respect orders being introduced. There was unanimous agreement that the Government should address problems inherent in existing injunctions and orders before creating more, and that failure to properly consult has meant that opportunities to resolve problems with the way orders operate in practice, not on paper, and to increase their effectiveness have been missed. Surely the Minister will want and feel the need to understand why research shows that a significant proportion of CPNs and PSPOs are, for example, being overused for trivial activities, such as feeding the birds, honking horns, gathering in groups or idling in your car, or imposed in inappropriate circumstances against, too often, the homeless and the mentally ill, where the behaviour complained of falls far below the threshold of antisocial behaviour that the public are concerned about and that the 2014 Act was envisaged to tackle.

All that we are asking in these amendments is for the Minister to look at what has gone wrong so that we can improve it. Surely the Government are worried about the vastly varied use of existing orders, which creates a postcode lottery for victims and means that British citizens do not know what is allowed from one town to another. Conduct that is totally lawful in Lincoln might be subject to state sanction in Leeds. Surely such a differential variation in the volume of orders imposed, the type of orders imposed, the conditions imposed, and so on, undermines the rule of law that I know this Government strongly support. It makes enforcement dependent on the victim’s location, rather than circumstances, or on the perpetrator’s location, rather than precisely how they are behaving badly. This makes a mockery of the notion of all of us being equal under the law. A review would look at these problems and recommend practical solutions.

Amendments 1 and 3, especially, are important in relation to ensuring that respect orders are used only when necessary and in a proportionate way. We have already heard about that. I think this is very helpful, particularly in creating a right to appeal. I am worried that the statutory test and the language used for imposing these new respect orders are so broad that, rather than capturing behaviour that is serious and persistent in nature, they will criminalise more trivial behaviour. That these orders can be imposed on individuals without their knowledge and, most egregiously, for an indefinite duration—for example, until further notice—is why we need this appeals process. How is it fair or proportionate that an individual who has never been found guilty of an offence is required to comply with serious restrictions on their liberty and personal life indefinitely, yet someone convicted of an offence by the criminal justice system is at liberty and free of prohibitions once they reach the end of their defined term of sentence, or even sometimes before that these days? This is reminiscent of that stain on our justice system, the abolished and abominable IPP indefinite sentence, which caused such a scandal. Why would the Government now create these new, oppressive orders that flout the important principle that if individual lives are subject to state interference, they need to know how long the interference will last and when it will end?

Finally, I have added my name to Amendment 7, an excellent contribution from the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, and the noble Baroness, Lady Doocey, on fixed-term penalty notices, based on the work of the Campaign for Freedom in Everyday Life. This, I hope, will ring true with any Labour Government, because ensuring that private companies dishing out on-the-spot fines for antisocial behaviour, and doing so to profit financially, is surely something that offends the Government’s values. There are concerns that antisocial behaviour orders have been corrupted for income generation and commercial purposes. With fines increasing so much under this Bill, surely that tendency will be turbocharged. I think it is something that the Government will want to tackle, because all the orders in Clause 4 being issued at such a low benchmark are likely to result in fines going up. I am worried that this will encourage councils to become trigger-happy with orders and so on.

I am sure that the noble Lord, Lord Hanson of Flint, will remember, as I do, the scandal of Kingdom Security in north Wales in, I think, 2019, when councils including Conwy, Denbighshire, Flintshire, Gwynedd and Anglesey outsourced the collection of their on-the-spot fines to a private security group, Kingdom, which illustrated that the behaviour of the enforcers could well be seen as being far more anti-social than any of the behaviour of local residents for which they were supposed to be fining them. A grass-roots campaign attracted 8,000-plus members to its Facebook page and led to numerous protests all over north Wales, with the security group’s wardens accused of threatening, bullying and even stalking north Walians, following dog walkers and smokers at a distance just so they could catch them out and fine them. They expressly targeted the elderly and women and children; the tissue of one 95 year-old lady blew from her wheelchair to the ground, and she was fined.

Equality and Human Rights Commission: Draft Updated Code of Practice

Debate between Baroness Fox of Buckley and Lord Pannick

Wednesday 5th November 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords—

[Lord Pannick (CB)]

My Lords—

Terrorism Act 2000 (Proscribed Organisations) (Amendment) Order 2025

Debate between Baroness Fox of Buckley and Lord Pannick

Thursday 3rd July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Pannick (CB)]

My Lords, I have a few short points. I entirely agree with what the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, has just said.

First, I hope that when we vote, if we vote, we will entirely put out of our minds whether we sympathise with the Palestinian cause, as most of us do, and whether we regret what Israel has done in various respects. We are concerned with a violent group. It really does not matter whether the cause it articulates and supports is justified. The law in a civilised country simply cannot accept people using violence against people and property in support of a cause they believe to be right. No such law can survive in a civilised society.

Secondly, if I understood him correctly, the Minister has explained why it is not sufficient for the law simply to prosecute people who commit criminal acts of the sort that are alleged—I agree that we have to be very careful here, for sub judice reasons—against members of Palestine Action. The point, if I have understood the Minister correctly—and he will say if I have not—is that there is a vital public need to prevent these people organising and recruiting, and the only way in which the law can do that is to take the action that the Minister is proposing today, which I strongly support.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I am a little concerned about how the sides are being laid out in this discussion. I have some serious worries about proscribing Palestine Action and have a lot of sympathy with the regret amendment, but not because I consider Palestine Action to be some idealised, cuddly, heroic campaign for peace. I have no sympathy with its destructive, wanton, often violent and nihilistic assaults on factories, air bases and so on. The individuals deserve criminal prosecution and punishment. God knows, we have enough draconian laws on the statute book to throw the book at them.

What we are challenging here is whether the concept of them being proscribed as a terrorist organisation is appropriate, not whether they are nice, peace-loving, wonderful Greenham Common types. That is the wrong way to look at it. In an earlier intervention, the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, asked whether these could indeed be terrorist acts. I think that they could well be assessed as acts of terrorism without proscribing a whole organisation.

These are my reservations. I am worried about criminalising the vocalising of support for this organisation. Vocalising support for a reprehensible law-breaking protest group is one thing, but once it is proscribed, we are talking about the possibility of prison sentences of up to 14 years. All of this was brilliantly explained legally by the noble Lord, Lord Anderson. You could, even if you only say that you support them, end up in prison.

The problem we have is that it is true that Palestine Action’s cause and its broader support are very popular —we have heard it here today. I do not mean that it is populist; I mean that many young people support that outlook. I do not. I spend a lot of time at the moment going around arguing with those young people about what I consider to be the growth of casual antisemitism and an intense hatred of Israel that seeps into Jew hatred. I talk a lot about that wherever I go, but it is certainly the case that I am not on the winning side on this one. If you go into universities and sixth forms, many support them. I am worried about the consequences of proscribing this organisation because it can threaten free speech. There are also going to be a lot of people who could be classified as in breach of it.

We should note that, for the first time since records began, this week the UK is no longer classified as an open country in the global expression rankings, which is shameful. In case noble Lords think the global expression rankings are some JD Vance-like prejudice or something, it is actually an annual report by Article 19, which noticed that free speech is seriously deteriorating in this country, so I put that warning out. We have to be very careful that this proscription does not have a chilling effect or, even worse, give some credibility to the idea that supporters of Palestine Action are some kind of free speech heroes and martyrs along with, undoubtedly Bobby—what is his name?

Football Governance Bill [HL]

Debate between Baroness Fox of Buckley and Lord Pannick

Committee stage
Wednesday 15th January 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Pannick (CB)]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, and other noble Lords have made a powerful presentation of concern, which I understand, about the financial costs of regulation. It is a short point. It really is. The question is whether the amendment is a sensible way in which to address this matter. I suggest that if there is to be a review of the financial impact on regulated clubs of complying with the provisions of the Act, the best people to conduct that review are the clubs themselves and the leagues to which they belong. They can collate the material, assess the costs and provide a report to the Government, which they can publish. Everybody will be able to debate it. It is all transparent. There is absolutely no need, so far as I can see, to have a specific provision in the Bill that addresses this matter.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, there stands a contribution that does not know how tedious, time-consuming and expensive it is to write reports. Now we are putting on the same people, whom we have just said are going to be drowning in bureaucracy, another report for which they have to compile all the information and write. That was my view.

Although that is a simple point, it should be in the Bill because it is an underestimated threat of the Bill. I have no doubt that the Minister and the Government do not intend—