Crime and Policing Bill

Lord Hampton Excerpts

2nd reading
Thursday 16th October 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hampton (CB)]

My Lords, as ever, I declare my interest as a teacher in a state secondary school in Hackney—a place that my noble friend Lord Birt was rather unfair about earlier.

This is an extensive and wide-ranging Bill—you know you are in trouble when they have to treasury tag it rather than bind it—but there are many good things about it, including Clause 191. As Professor Ranee Thakar, president of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, said:

“Abortion is an essential form of healthcare and should be subject to regulatory and professional standards like other medical procedures, not criminal sanctions”.


Clause 78 is also good, as it seeks to preserve the right of child confidentiality in some circumstances. Barnardo’s and the NSPCC, among others, stress its importance for services such as Childline. Many noble Lords have talked about making illegal the AI image generators used to produce child abuse material.

But there are issues. The Children’s Society feels that the offence of child criminal exploitation does not go far enough. Any child can be at risk of exploitation. Indeed, perpetrators are now looking for so-called “clean skins”: children who are not known to the police or involved with the local authorities, so the exploitation can go undetected. Many of these young people are from affluent backgrounds. The Children’s Commissioner has concerns about parts of Clause 40. She states clearly:

“When an adult exploits any child”


to engage in criminal activity,

“that should always be a mandatory criminal offence, regardless of the child’s perceived age”.

I welcome the Government’s mission to halve knife crime and get knives off our streets, which the noble Baroness, Lady Lawrence of Clarendon, so movingly spoke about. The Ben Kinsella Trust reports an 81% increase in police-recorded offences involving a knife or sharp instrument in the 10 years to March 2025. Our school lost a child, who was killed in a knife attack last year. Do we need zombie hunting knives and other overly aggressive styles of knives? Surely some are just too dangerous.

According to the Youth Endowment Fund, in 2024, 50% of murders that were carried out with a blade used a pointed kitchen knife. The organisation calls for a ban on pointed knives altogether. The catering fraternity might object, although studies have shown that there is no culinary effect of a knife having a point. Would the Minister support such a ban?

We also get to equal protection. Does it go in this Bill or should we try to get it in the children’s well-being Bill? With over 65 countries, including Wales and Scotland, already having legislated to protect children from physical punishment, how much longer can England justify standing still? The NSPCC does not describe this as a “smacking ban” but talks about “equal protection”. This is not a call for the creation of a new offence, just for the removal of a legal defence in order to make equal the law of assault for both children and adults. This is about giving children the best possible start in life, not criminalising parents. Deliberately causing pain to a child, for whatever reason, has to belong to the last century. There are much better and safer ways to respond to a child’s behaviour than the use of physical force, and I look forward to hearing the Minister’s thoughts on that.