Crime and Policing Bill

Baroness Levitt Excerpts

2nd reading
Thursday 16th October 2025 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Baroness Levitt]

That the Bill be now read a second time.

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

My Lords, I do not want to disappoint anybody, but I am not my noble friend Lord Hanson of Flint; it would not be a very convincing impersonation, not least because he is sitting next to me. Noble Lords will all have the pleasure of hearing from him later on.

This Bill reflects not only our manifesto commitments but demonstrates the careful stocktake we have made of the important parts of our criminal justice system and our determination to improve the law where needed. It aims to keep citizens safer and more confident in the daily lives of all of us and I am proud of our proposals. They are fair, proportionate and add to the law where needed.

As part of the Bill’s driving force, which is to make people and communities safer, it will build on what we have done already in the past year to rebuild neighbourhood policing. We are restoring public trust in the criminal justice system through the delivery of our safer streets mission and aim to halve—yes, halve—knife crime and violence against women and girls in a decade.

For too long, neighbourhood policing has been neglected and downgraded. That has ended. We are already delivering on our commitments, with 13,000 additional neighbourhood policing personnel by the end of the Parliament, backed by £200 million in new funding this year. Alongside this investment, the Bill brings in new respect orders to tackle persistent offenders who engage in the anti-social behaviour that blights our town centres. There are also enhanced powers to tackle the anti-social use of cars and off-road bikes. The police will now be able to seize these without first having to give a warning.

Everyone should feel safe when they are at work. This Bill delivers stronger action to protect shop workers. Assaulting a shop worker will be a bespoke criminal offence with a presumption that the courts will, on conviction, impose a criminal behaviour order on offenders. We are also repealing the provision that treats low-value shop theft as a minor offence. Shoplifting is not minor, and we are sending a clear message that all shop theft should be taken seriously. I know both these measures will be particularly welcomed by the Justice and Home Affairs Committee.

Part 2 of the Bill brings in Ronan’s law. We are clamping down on dangerous knives and weapons on our streets by introducing a duty on retailers to report bulk sales of knives and offensive weapons, increasing the maximum penalty for offences relating to the sale of knives to children and strengthening the age-verification requirements for the online sale and delivery of bladed products and crossbows. We are also delivering on our manifesto commitment to hold senior managers of online platforms personally liable for failure to take action to remove illegal content relating to knives and offensive weapons.

I turn now to violence against women and children. The prevalence of violence and abuse against women and children defiles our society. We need more effective enforcement action against perpetrators and better protection for victims. To this end, the Bill strengthens stalking protection orders and the management of registered sex offenders, including preventing them changing their names on official identity documents where they pose a risk of sexual harm.

The Bill also creates a new offence of administering a harmful substance, including by spiking, to make it absolutely clear that such behaviour is illegal and encourage victims to report such incidents.

Recognising how dangerous online material is in perpetuating the growing epidemic of violence against women and girls, we will bring forward amendments in your Lordships’ House to criminalise pornography that depicts acts of strangulation and suffocation. I take this opportunity to pay tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Bertin, for her tireless work culminating in the pornography review which recommended that action be taken in this area.

Child sexual abuse and exploitation are among the most despicable crimes imaginable. It is estimated that half a million children every year experience some form of child sexual abuse. Alongside the new national inquiry recommended by the noble Baroness, Lady Casey, we are pleased to be pressing ahead with the implementation of some of the key recommendations of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse.

As a result, the Bill creates a new duty to report child sexual abuse, backed up by strong criminal sanctions for those who seek to cover up such abuse by preventing or deterring a person from carrying out the duty. It makes grooming a statutory aggravating factor when sentencing and removes the three-year time limit for civil personal injury claims brought by victims and survivors of child sexual abuse.

Part 5 of the Bill also helps to tackle the rising levels of online child sexual abuse. In particular, the Bill provides for new criminal offences to stop—and we mean stop—AI-facilitated child sexual abuse and hold accountable those who commit or enable these vile crimes. I commend the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, for her earlier advocacy of the new child sexual abuse image-generator offence.

The Bill also provides enhanced protections for children and vulnerable adults against their exploitation for criminal purposes. First, it provides for a new offence of child criminal exploitation, where an adult intentionally uses a child to commit criminal activity. To complement this new offence, the Bill also provides for child criminal exploitation prevention orders to help prevent the criminal exploitation of children occurring. Secondly, the Bill introduces a new offence to tackle the practice of cuckooing, where criminals take over the home of a vulnerable person for the purpose of illegal activity, such as drug dealing. Thirdly, the Bill creates a new offence to combat coerced internal concealment, or plugging, where children or vulnerable adults are coerced into concealing drugs or other items in their body for criminal purposes, typically as part of a county lines operation.

We also recognise how dangerous online material is in perpetuating the growing epidemic of violence against women and girls. We committed in the other place to criminalising pornography that depicts acts of strangulation and suffocation in this Bill, and we will shortly bring forward an amendment to that effect.

I turn now to children who are victims of child sexual abuse. As noble Lords will be aware, 10 years ago the Street Offences Act 1959 was amended so that the offences of persistent loitering or soliciting in a public place for the purposes of prostitution no longer applied to children. Parliament was right to do that because it recognised that children, because they are children, involved in such conduct are not criminals but the victims of sexual exploitation. I am pleased to say that we will bring forward amendments in this House to introduce a new disregards and pardons scheme for anyone convicted or cautioned as a child for these offences.

I now turn to policing. We will address the need to rebuild trust in policing. In some serious and worrying cases, public confidence has been undermined by atrocious criminality and misconduct by a very small minority of officers. Deterrence and punishment of such misconduct is a priority for this Government, as it is for the police. A key strand of the Government’s safer streets mission is to increase public confidence in policing and the wider criminal justice system.

Since 2017, the College of Policing has operated a police barred list—an advisory list which ensure that those officers who are dismissed by a police force in England and Wales are prevented from just joining another force. Such individuals have no place in policing. The Bill extends this approach, ensuring that officers dismissed at disciplinary proceedings from the National Crime Agency and other specialist police forces cannot be re-employed by another force.

It is vital that the system of police accountability commands the confidence of both the public and the police. As a society we rely on the professionalism and bravery of firearms officers who put their own lives at risk to keep us all safe. Thankfully, the occasions where the police have to use lethal force in this country are few and far between. When they do so, it is entirely right that officers are accountable for their actions. But those accountability arrangements must be proportionate, timely and fair to all concerned. Regrettably, this is not currently the case. Measures proposed in the Bill will improve the timeliness and appropriateness of investigations by the Independent Office for Police Conduct and the rights of victims. That said, if firearms officers are charged with offences relating to and committed during their duties, the Bill will protect them from violent reprisals by establishing a presumption of anonymity in criminal proceedings up to the point of sentence.

The public rightly want to see crimes solved and offenders brought to justice. To do this, the police must have the necessary tools to do their job. If someone has their mobile phone stolen and the victim can trace its whereabouts, the Bill ensures that the police have the powers to enter premises quickly and, if necessary, without a warrant, to recover electronically tracked stolen goods.

It is also vital that police powers keep in step with the march of technology in other respects. Evidence of criminality is no longer routinely stored on a computer hard drive; it is instead held remotely in the cloud. The Bill clarifies the circumstances in which law enforcement agencies can access such information, subject to strong safeguards, as they investigate offences ranging from child sexual abuse to fraud and terrorism, thereby protecting the public and our borders.

The Bill also ensures that law enforcement agencies have the necessary powers to combat other forms of technology-enabled crime. We are banning the possession and supply of SIM farms, save where there are legitimate uses such as in broadcasting. We are giving the police and others the power to suspend IP addresses and domain names used to commit fraud or other serious crimes, such as the so-called pimping websites involved in commercial sexual exploitation.

I turn to protests. The right to peaceful protest is fundamental to our vibrant democracy, but in facilitating peaceful protest, the police also have a duty to uphold the rights of others not to be harassed or intimidated and to go about their daily lives without serious disruption. The Bill ensures that the police have the powers they need to protect places of worship from intimidatory protests and protects specified war and other memorials, including the Cenotaph and the statue of Winston Churchill in Parliament Square, that have been the target of protest action. A new targeted offence of concealing identity at designated protests will strengthen police powers to require the removal of face coverings at protests where violence or other criminality either has occurred or is likely to occur.

The precious right to engage in peaceful protest and the equally precious entitlement to freedom of speech do not extend to threatening or abusing others, all the more so where those threatened or abused are emergency workers. The law already recognises that racially or religiously motivated threats and abuse should attract tougher penalties, but these currently do not apply where the behaviour takes place in a person’s private home. When the police, firefighters and ambulance staff attend someone’s home— for example, in response to a 999 call—they have no choice but to remain and to act. The Bill closes the loophole in the law so that anyone who threatens or abuses an emergency worker because of their race or religion within a private dwelling will be liable for the higher maximum penalties such hate crimes would attract where the conduct took place in a public place.

I now turn to counterterrorism. We must also make sure that counterterrorism powers reflect evolving threats, ensuring that operational partners have the tools they need to keep the public safe. Part 14 of the Bill delivers on several recommendations made by the Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation, Jonathan Hall KC. He has identified the need for a new diversion order in response to the increasing number of young people who are the subject of counterterrorism investigations. The youth diversion order provided for in Part 14 will be a new civil order that will enable the police to intervene earlier to prevent young people engaging in terrorism and divert them from the criminal justice system.

Finally, in addition to the three new measures that the Government will seek to add to the Bill to which I have already referred, we will table amendments to apply various further provisions in the Bill to Scotland and/or Northern Ireland. These amendments are being brought forward at the request of the Scottish Government and the relevant Northern Ireland departments.

This Government were elected to deliver change: change that will reverse the decline in neighbourhood policing; change that will tackle the epidemic of violence against women and girls and the epidemic of knife crime. The Bill will help deliver that change by cracking down on anti-social behaviour, making our town centres safer, building trust in the police, clearing our streets of knives, protecting our children from sexual abuse, criminal exploitation and online harms, and safeguarding women and girls from stalkers and sexual predators. These are the purposes behind this Bill. I beg to move.