Victims and Courts Bill

Baroness Lawrence of Clarendon Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 11th February 2026 Lords Chamber

When I say we need to remove this as a thing the police do, I cannot express how important it will be because you will be making sure that almost an entire generation of young people cannot join our system, cannot become part of what it is to be British, just because of a cultural relationship they have and from which, in the mind of someone who does not understand it, they have no way of disassociating themselves. Bearing that in mind, I believe this is something we should get behind and support. If anybody doubts me, find a 16 or 15 year-old Black boy and ask him to tell you about Parliament in the way he would speak to his friends. It will sound like a gunfight. I do not know whether you have ever been to Parliament, but I have never witnessed a gunfight. The point I am trying to make is that young people live in a separate world, this music is another separate world, and we must be very careful about demonising and villainising them before we have any real evidence.

[Baroness Lawrence of Clarendon (Lab)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as an anti-racism adviser to the Labour leadership. I added my name to Amendment 62 tabled by my noble friend Lady Chakrabarti. I hope noble Lords understand why I have done this, given my years of campaigning for race equality, in the criminal justice space in particular. Our amendment is essential but also modest and proportionate. We do not say that creative expression can never be admissible in criminal trials. We just say that there must be a strict rule against racial prejudice in particular. It is not new in our system to try to ensure that prejudice associated with criminal evidence should not outweigh its probative value, nor, unfortunately, is it new to find the police and the prosecution system working against people of colour when they should be protecting everyone from all our diverse communities equally. As my noble friend said, we would not dream of prosecuting a middle-class, middle-aged, white person for crimes on the basis of them writing or enjoying crime fiction. Why then are we happily prosecuting young Black men and boys on the basis of rap and drill music? I think we all know why. We talk about equality before the law, but 28 years after the Lawrence inquiry, we know the principle is still not a reality.

My noble friend Lady Chakrabarti mentioned a young Mancunian man, a model student, a head boy aspiring to be a law student who had an unconditional offer to study law at the University of Birmingham—until the police and the prosecutors wrongly mistook him for a youngster in a nine-second video in which drill music was playing in the background. Through reliance on this ridiculous evidence, he was convicted of violent conspiracy. His conviction was overturned, but only after he served three years in prison. I urge the Committee to support our amendment and my noble friends in the Government to accept it.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I rise briefly to speak to Amendment 61. In doing a little background on this, I looked at the Law Society’s response to the MoJ call for evidence, which it produced last April. I wish to read two brief excerpts, because I think they are both particularly pertinent to what we are talking about. The first says:

“But given the increasing complexity of computational systems, computers should not be assumed to be operating correctly. Instead”—


this is important, because this is what other jurisdictions outside the UK systematically do—

“it should be evidenced and demonstrated through assurance, regular review, and disclosure of the technical standards applied by the system”.

That is what happens in Germany. That is what happens in France. That is what mostly happens in the United States.

Secondly, returning to the issue of artificial intelligence, the Law Society has been thinking about this and is clearly very worried about it. I quote again:

“Careful consideration needs to be given to emerging AI technologies that overlap with but go beyond the scope of this call for evidence. For AI, an additional layer of certification for meeting internationally recognised standards is important to ensure accountability and transparency, especially if they were designed and developed”—


which they mostly are—

“outside of the jurisdiction … Attention must be given to the ability for domestic regulation and requirements to be adhered to for computer systems and AI tools that are built outside of the jurisdiction”.