Crime and Policing Bill

Lord Farmer Excerpts

2nd reading
Thursday 16th October 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

My Lords, I also support much of this Bill. The Home Secretary introduced the Bill to drive her Government’s safer streets mission and to halve violence against women and girls in a decade, so I welcome the tightening of the law in Clauses 84 and 85 around voyeurism and criminalising exposure intended for sexual gratification or humiliation. Despite the Supreme Court disallowing biological males from using women’s changing rooms and spaces, this still happens in many contexts. Not all are motivated by voyeurism—which is already a crime—or because someone wishes to expose themselves for sexual gratification or humiliation, but we should not turn a blind eye to these possible motivations; consideration should be given to them. Can the Minister confirm that the new law will protect women and girls while everyone catches up with the Supreme Court ruling?

Clause 147, which seeks to extend polygraph testing to more offenders, including those posing a risk of committing certain sexual offences, should shore up protection against predation on women and girls. If technology helps us manage sex offenders more smartly, let us use it.

However, as we have heard much today, Clause 191 cuts across the Bill’s protections against predation. Despite risks to women, this clause, intended to transform our societal approach to abortion, was appended in a rushed, emotive way in the other House. There is a pattern here. Safe access zones around all abortion clinics were also hurriedly appended to the Public Order Act in the Commons. That was despite testimonies from women now with grown-up children whom they were very glad they decided not to terminate after talking to caring and compassionate people outside clinics. Once such measures appear in legislation, they acquire unassailability on the grounds of care and compassion for women seeking abortions.

Clause 191 repeats the same pseudo-virtuous stitch up: a short discussion in the other House on Report of a Bill that has absolutely nothing to do with abortion, with the assumption that all fair-minded people should agree to it. Those who do not can just be dismissed as reactionaries, because abortion is treated as an unlimited good in our topsy-turvy moral universe. Whatever we individually think about abortion, the laws of this land and a wide range of other considerations are being ignored or twisted out of shape to meet the insatiability of extreme bodily autonomy. Safe access zones sacrificed freedom of speech on that altar.

Clause 191 shreds a woman’s criminal responsibility and, with it, a vital protection for her against a partner or family member coercing or predating on her to have a late-term abortion. Bringing about her own late-stage termination of a baby that has been kicking, hiccupping and otherwise moving in utero will leave a long tail of effects on her life. Decriminalisation is only caring and compassionate in a very narrow and short-term way. This House will discuss ramifications of allowing terminations up to birth, but the only fit place for Clause 191 is the cutting room floor.

I apologise on behalf of the noble Baroness, Lady Goudie, for not being here today. She will table amendments against trafficking for sexual exploitation, to outlaw lucrative UK-based pimping websites which enable traffickers to advertise their victims easily and ply this vile trade.