Crime and Policing Bill

Baroness Whitaker Excerpts

2nd reading
Thursday 16th October 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Whitaker (Lab)]

My Lords, this comprehensive Bill, so well introduced by my noble friend, brings our treatment of crime up to date to fit new kinds of offences and some hitherto unrecognised. In the time available, as my experience in dealing with crime is limited to my time as a magistrate in the past and my current membership of the Sussex Police diversity advisory board, I will focus on two areas I am particularly concerned with: the new provisions on county lines, and the surprising omission of dealing with the High Court decision that Part 4 of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 breached human rights.

I declare interests as president of the Advisory Council for the Education of Romany and other Travellers and of Friends, Families and Travellers, to which I am grateful, as ever, for expert briefing, together with that of the Traveller Movement. The new offence of coerced internal concealment and associated provisions will enable those forgotten children or vulnerable adults who have been excluded from education or who have slipped through the net in other ways to be found, rescued and protected.

The abhorrent practice by organised criminal gangs of recruiting these young people by force or deception into carrying drugs, illicit money and SIM cards away from the centres where they were stolen or dealt with has mushroomed in recent years. It exploits many who have been virtually abandoned by society and its institutions, instilling fear which estranges them from their family and community networks. The reinforcement of the civil prevention order is helpful and further support from the £42 million county lines programme is a sensible broadening of the approach to include positive elements of safeguarding and rehabilitation. I warmly welcome this set of measures.

My other concern is that our Government have missed an obvious opportunity to end discrimination against Gypsies and Travellers created by the Conservative Government’s Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act. That small minority of Gypsies and Travellers who live in their traditional way in caravans on sites and have to make do with unauthorised ones can be imprisoned and their vehicles, which are their homes, impounded even if there are no authorised sites for them to go to—under circumstances found by the judge to be discrimination. The case followed formal recommendations by our Joint Committee on Human Rights, the Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights and UN treaty bodies to repeal these measures.

They were not welcomed by our police either. The majority of police forces and police and crime commissioners responding to the initial Home Office consultation on criminalising staying on unauthorised encampments, rather than the previous definition of trespass, opposed it. Some 93% of police bodies called for better site provision as the solution to unauthorised encampments. Of course, it is the paucity of these that is the real problem, as the judge commented, not the desperate search to find somewhere to put the caravan home.

Meanwhile, the Government are under a solemn obligation to remedy the incompatibility with our human rights law. That is, they must restore to these fellow citizens who do not live in bricks and mortar that small measure of security they had to be able to live and send their children to school without fear of being driven out unreasonably, having their mobile home impounded or being sent to prison. I trust that my noble friend the Minister will not default on this obligation. Surely this Bill is a suitable vehicle.