Crime and Policing Bill

Lord Anderson of Ipswich Excerpts

2nd reading
Thursday 16th October 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Anderson of Ipswich (CB)]

I very much appreciated the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, although I see more value in this this Bill than the noble and learned Lord, Lord Garnier, was prepared to admit. I agree with what they each said about hard topics that this Bill might usefully have tackled but did not.

The Joint Committee on Human Rights has produced another of its helpful and focused reports. I agree with the committee that the difficult issue of concealing identity at protests may need to be better calibrated. I agree with it also on the issue of universal jurisdiction, which was debated in the Moses Room on 9 September. To bring our law into line with our neighbours and allow perpetrators of the gravest international crimes to be prosecuted here would involve nothing more complicated than removing the requirement of citizenship or residency in the International Criminal Court Act 2001. I look forward to supporting proposed amendments along those lines.

The Constitution Committee raised two issues in addition to that referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Gower: the widening by Clause 4 of the categories of people who can issue on-the-spot fixed penalty notices—now of up to £500—and the need for parliamentary scrutiny of statutory guidance to the police on the child sex offender disclosure scheme, Sarah’s law. Like many constitutional issues, they may seem mundane, but I hope they will not escape our attention.

Turning to national security, I support the youth diversion orders, which will be used to disrupt, at an early stage, young people who are believed to be involved in low-level terrorist offending, such as the possession and dissemination of material, often online. The idea is to divert them from the criminal justice system for their benefit and for ours. As noted in my recent report, Lessons for Prevent, their availability might also help to increase the rate of consent to Channel interventions, which is currently running at about 75%.

Polygraph testing is to be extended: I should like to know more about how rigorously the use of this technology has been assessed, and with what result, since it was rolled out for sex offenders in 2014 and terrorist offenders in 2021.

Finally, Clauses 130 to 137 of the Bill extend police powers following the seizure of electronic devices to access information accessible from such devices but stored on the cloud. The logic of that extension is not hard to understand, but its sheer scale requires us to think about safeguards. That is so particularly in relation to Clause 135, which concerns the no-suspicion powers to search and to question that are exercised by counterterrorism police in ports and airports under the Terrorism Act 2000 and the National Security Act 2023. The utility of those powers has not been doubted by any of those who have been tasked with the close examination of their use, but the latest of them, Jonathan Hall KC, was moved to ask this week what will prevent excessive data from being extracted and copied, how journalistic and legally privileged material on an online account will be protected, and—given the quantity of personal data that members of the public hold on the cloud—whether merely travelling through a port or border should be considered a sufficient reason to surrender so much private data. Senior courts have expressed a degree of disquiet about the existing power, and a further case is under way. Nobody wants a regime of pointless box-ticking, but we need to rise to the independent reviewers’ challenge and satisfy ourselves that, if this strong and intrusive power is to be further extended, it is accompanied by the right safeguards.