Crime and Policing Bill

Lord Herbert of South Downs Excerpts

2nd reading
Thursday 16th October 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Herbert of South Downs (Con)]

My Lords, I draw attention to my interest declared in the register as chair of the College of Policing.

For our police service, founded on the principle of consent, to be effective, the trust and confidence of the communities they serve is essential. But the proportion of the public who believe the police are doing a good job has fallen precipitously in the last few years. There are multiple causes, but I believe this Bill and the Government’s focus on rebuilding neighbourhood policing will be a very important step towards improving confidence.

We place immense demands on the police service. In recent years, there has been a shift of priorities and resources towards dealing with crimes of harm and important issues such as violence against women and girls—issues which simply were not on the agenda before. Combined with funding and other pressures, we have seen in some forces a failure to attend to the basic standards of service which the public expect, such as action following shoplifting, burglaries or mobile phone theft. It is, I believe, the failure to attend to these basics which exacerbates criticism of the police for overreach, for getting involved in things we do not want them to be doing and in particular in relation to police action which it is felt intrudes upon free speech.

Non-crime hate incidents have become a kind of lightning rod for criticism of the service, and a number of high-profile cases of ill-judged police intervention have undoubtedly damaged confidence. NCHIs were born out of the landmark Stephen Lawrence inquiry as a means to support police to monitor incidents linked to hate or hostility, with the purpose of preventing future crimes, supporting investigations and protecting the most vulnerable in our communities. Recent events, such as the horrific attacks on the Manchester synagogue and the Peacehaven mosque, should remind us that dealing with hate crime remains as vital in 2025 as it did over a quarter a century ago.

It is essential that policing continues to have the ability to monitor hate and hostility within our communities. What could not have been envisaged at the time of the Lawrence inquiry was the growth of the internet, the advent of smartphones and social media, and how these have transformed how people interact with each other. The rapid expansion of the online space, coupled with increasingly polarised public discourse, has resulted in forces grappling with the challenge of balancing free speech with monitoring community tension in both physical and online spaces to prevent crime and protect people from harm.

Not all perceived hate reported to police requires a police response or police incident record. The requirement to record should be shaped by necessity, proportionality and legality. There have been high-profile instances where policing has struggled with all three. That is why I called in this Chamber for a rebalancing of the system. At my instigation, the college, together with the National Police Chiefs’ Council and with the support of the Inspectorate of Constabulary and the Government, set up a review of the entire system of non-crime hate incidents. The review has found that the current approach and use of non-crime hate incidents is not fit for purpose, and there is a need for broad reform to ensure that policing can focus on genuine harm and risk within communities. The recording of hurt feelings and differing views should not continue. A report has just been sent to Ministers, and I am sure that they will respond in due course.

But while I believe change is vital to restore public confidence and ensure that free speech is protected, I would counsel against laying all the problems of policing at the door of non-crime hate incidents. The police are not spending all their time policing tweets. The Metropolitan Police Commissioner has pointed out that non-crime hate incidents account for 0.05% of the calls they respond to. A number of the high-profile and controversial cases about the policing of social media comment relate to hate crimes—offences that Parliament created for good reason. If we want to revisit those criminal offences, then that is a debate that we should have here, but in the meantime the police have a duty to uphold the law.

We can and should expect that the police will act proportionately, without fear or favour, and use common sense and professional judgment in the investigation of crimes. That judgment was obviously lacking in some recent cases. Therefore, a second key initiative that I and the college’s chief executive, Sir Andy Marsh, have instigated will be new guidance on the exercise of that discretion, so that we can ensure that common-sense decisions are taken and that confidence in the police service is not undermined.

Crime and Policing Bill

Lord Herbert of South Downs Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 20th January 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Clement-Jones (LD)]

My Lords, this is already proving to be a crucial debate in the passage of this Bill. I support Amendment 416E, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Young of Acton. Sadly, my noble friend Lord Strasburger is unable to be with us to support the amendment, which he has signed, but I hope that I reflect his views in speaking today.

Non-crime hate incidents, although born from the well-intentioned Macpherson report in 1993—which the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, called “an honourable start”—have morphed into a mechanism that frequently harasses and silences legitimate debate. In doing so, they consume prodigious quantities of police time, as we have heard—time that is desperately needed to investigate the crimes that we have discussed throughout Committee. Non-crime hate incidents, which started from benign motivations in 1993, have morphed into an ugly and frequently used technique for harassing and silencing somebody whose views the complainant does not like. In the process, prodigious quantities of police time are being wasted on non-criminal matters, meaning that real crimes that would otherwise be investigated are being ignored.

The seeds of what has gone wrong were sown by the Macpherson inquiry into the murder of Stephen Lawrence. The inquiry concluded that a racist incident should be defined as being

“any incident which is perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person”.

In essence, that means that anyone—whether involved in an incident or not, whether a reasonable person or otherwise—would be able to determine that an incident, no matter how harmless, was racist in nature. The inquiry went on to recommend that

“the term ‘racist incident’ must be understood to include crimes and non-crimes in policing terms. Both must be reported, recorded and investigated with equal commitment”.

It is remarkable that the inquiry concluded that incidents which are not criminal offences as defined by Parliament should be investigated by the police with equal vigour as those which are criminal offences. That raises fundamental questions about the purpose of the police and what their priorities should be, particularly in a world of potentially limitless demand and highly constrained resource.

Nevertheless, Macpherson’s recommendations relating to racist incidents and their recording were rapidly accepted and implemented by the police and government. Following a 2006 review by Sir Adrian Fulford, a shared definition of hate crimes and non-crime hate incidents was adopted across the criminal justice system, including by the police and the Crown Prosecution Service. This expanded the recording of NCHIs beyond purely racist incidents to cover all those characteristics that are covered by hate crime legislation in England and Wales—race, religion, disability, sexual orientation and gender identity.

Key to the expansion of alleged NCHIs was the creation, in 2014, of the College of Policing’s Hate Crime Operational Guidance for police forces. Perhaps recognising that the guidance was likely to cause grave concerns to many, the College of Policing made a pre-emptive defence of their policy, saying:

“The recording of, and response to, non-crime hate incidents does not have universal support in society. Some people use this as evidence to accuse the police of becoming ‘the thought police’, trying to control what citizens think or believe, rather than what they do”.


The guidance goes on to say, in relation to hate incidents:

“Where any person, including police personnel, reports a hate incident which would not be the primary responsibility of another agency, it must be recorded regardless of whether or not they are the victim, and irrespective of whether there is any evidence to identify the hate element”.


The use of “must” in the guidance leaves no latitude for police discretion or the balancing of rights exercise, which would be necessary in considering the subject’s right to freedom of expression under Article 10.1 of the European Convention on Human Rights.

With the advent of social media, the number of NCHIs being recorded has rocketed. Policy Exchange reported in 2024 that over 13,000 are being logged annually in England and Wales, consuming 60,000 police hours a year. Some keyboard warriors with an axe to grind have made a full-time occupation out of submitting prolific quantities of NCHI complaints with little or no justification. These include a disgraced former policeman who prodigiously exploits the system to frequently harass his political opponents. Some incidents have hit the press, such as when Graham Linehan, the co-creator of “Father Ted”, was arrested on the tarmac at Heathrow over an NCHI.

However, many victims of spurious NCHIs are not even aware that a complaint has been logged against their name. One campaigner found out only when the complainant launched a judicial review of the police’s refusal to take the matter further. As we have heard, the impact of having an unproven NCHI secretly logged against your name can be severe and mean that you are refused a visa to visit certain countries, including America, or that you fail an enhanced DBS check for a job in areas such as education or health.

Freedom of information requests to 43 police forces found zero examples of NCHIs preventing crime. The Metropolitan Police announced last October that it has stopped investigating NCHIs entirely. Last month, the National Police Chiefs’ Council and the College of Policing reported to the Government that NCHIs are “not fit for purpose”.

NCHIs must go. The Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Hanson, stated during our debates on the seventh day in Committee that the College of Policing is reviewing this guidance and that we would see this review before Report. I hope that the Minister can confirm whether that review will address the chilling effect on free speech identified in the Miller judgment and whether he accepts that the police must prioritise actual criminality over the recording of NCHIs.

I support this amendment as a necessary check on the expansion of the surveillance state. When will the Government act to abolish NCHIs? If the Minister cannot answer that question, we will have to return to this matter on Report.

[Lord Herbert of South Downs (Con)]

My Lords, I draw attention to my declaration in the register of interests that I am chair of the College of Policing.

As I said at Second Reading, we need to remember that there were benign reasons for the introduction of this regime over three decades ago; what the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, said in this regard was helpful. The purpose was to ensure that the police would pursue intelligence that could build a pattern of behaviour that would result in harm to an individual. That was the case not just in relation to the dreadful murder of Stephen Lawrence but subsequently in the case of Fiona Pilkington, where a repeated pattern of anti-social behaviour had been ignored. It was not criminal behaviour—it fell below that threshold—but it nevertheless resulted in a tragic loss of life.

Nevertheless, as has been noted, there has been considerable change over that three decades, with the advent of social media, smartphones and a much more contested policy space in many of the areas relating to hate crimes or alleged hate crimes. There is the risk of a number of consequences. Those have been drawn attention to by noble Lords, but they include the chilling effect on free speech, the tying up of resources unnecessarily —I will come to that—and, I suggest, at least as serious, damage to the reputation of the police, if it is perceived that they are prioritising the wrong things and getting themselves involved in matters that they should not be.

Crime and Policing Bill

Lord Herbert of South Downs Excerpts

Report stage
Monday 9th March 2026 Lords Chamber

I was recently reminded of the noble Lord’s words when I met one of the teachers involved with four pupils in Wakefield who, if noble Lords remember, slightly damaged a Koran in 2023. The police recorded an NCHI against them. Despite the school admitting that there was no malicious intention and one of the pupils was autistic, Inspector Thornton told concerned parents at the local mosque that the damage was being treated as a hate incident. Those young boys are now getting to an age when they will be applying for jobs. Does the Minister agree that it would be a travesty if the records of their NCHIs on the police database were used to stop them getting a foot on the work ladder? I just want to make sure that we do not forget that different type of victim.

[Lord Herbert of South Downs (Con)]

My Lords, I draw attention to my entry in the register of interests showing that I am the chair of the College of Policing. We are broadly in agreement about the way forward. There is a large measure of agreement that the current system of non-crime hate incidents is no longer fit for purpose. As the Minister said, under the new proposals in the final report into this matter that the College of Policing and the National Police Chiefs’ Council have produced, which goes to the police chiefs’ council next week for ratification, non-crime hate incidents will no longer be recorded. They will go.

I assure the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, that this will not be a mere rebranding exercise. The threshold of an incident will be significantly increased. Common-sense professional judgment will guide decisions and only where there is a genuine risk of harm and a clear policing purpose will incidents continue to be recorded. The powerful intervention by the noble Baroness, Lady Lawrence of Clarendon, reminds us of the importance of ensuring that, where there is a risk of harm, we must continue to record the incidents. That was the original reason why, as a result of the recommendation of the Macpherson review, this regime was put in place. However, for all the reasons we have discussed, it does not work properly and there is a better approach that will reduce police time.

So far, so good, and I can therefore agree with most of my noble friend Lord Young’s Amendment 387. The one problematic area is the requirement that all records must be deleted after three months. The policy on deletion is a matter for the Government, not for the College of Police or the National Police Chiefs’ Council, but the view of those bodies is that it would be disproportionately burdensome to go back and delete all the existing records.

[Lord Young of Acton (Con)]

Just to be clear, one of the differences between the amendment as originally drafted and this new version is that the new version no longer asks the police to go through all their databases and delete all historic NCHIs. It just asks them to delete those they come across. So, if a person who thinks they have an NCHI recorded against them, like my noble friend, writes to the police, fires off an SAR and discovers they have an NCHI still recorded against their name—and it does not meet the new, higher recording threshold—the police will be obliged to delete it. The amendment does not ask the police to go through records. As my noble friend says, that would be too resource-intensive; all it asks is that, when they come across them, they delete them if they do not meet the new threshold.

[Lord Herbert of South Downs (Con)]

Okay; that is helpful. I thank my noble friend, and I am sure the Government will respond to that. But if part of the purpose of this is to ensure that it meets the concern my noble friend set out—that people may, to use his words, be prevented from getting a job because of the release of a non-crime hate incident in an enhanced DBS check—I should point out that the review has not been able to find a single example of a non-crime hate incident being disclosed in an extended DBS check and preventing someone from securing employment. We therefore think the risk of that is very low. The release is a matter for the chief constable’s discretion. Of course, the risk could be made even lower if the new, higher threshold were applied to any future decision, but again, that would be within the Government’s gift to agree. What is already a negligible risk could be made even more negligible, so that would address the concern.

The final question relates to whether non-crime hate incidents will spring back into life, to use my noble friend’s expression. My response is, not so long as I am involved with this, and I am sure I could say the same for the chief executive of the college, Sir Andy Marsh. The serious point, however, is that there clearly has been a change of mood, partly because of the way in which social media has influenced this whole matter. But such action is always within the gift of any future Government, as my noble friend conceded: no Government can bind themselves to changing practice and policy. What matters now is that we put in place a robust regime that works and ensure that the police are focused on the right things.

Therefore, I am very pleased we have this broad agreement about the way forward. I do not think my noble friend’s amendment is necessary, but it is for the Government to respond to that. We must be wary of tying up the police more on this, when we are trying to release their time. We must also be aware of the injunction of the noble Baroness, Lady Lawrence: that serious incidents must continue to be recorded. We must remember why this regime was set up in the first place. Not every recorded non-crime hate incident has been trivial; they can indicate a building pattern of behaviour and that is what we have to guard against. But the new system will put in place higher thresholds to ensure that the trivial are weeded out, and that, I think, is what we all want.

[Lord Strasburger (LD)]

My Lords, given the hour I do not want to detain the House for much longer. In fact, I have deleted the first page of my speech accordingly, and I will address the comments of the noble Baroness, Lady Lawrence, in a moment.

First, this amendment insists that all future incident recording guidance must have due regard to freedom of expression—and that matters. In a liberal democracy, the test is not whether we protect only speech we agree with; it is whether we protect the space for robust, sometimes uncomfortable, debate on race, religion, sex, gender, politics and many other issues.

Police guidance should start from the principle that lawful speech is not a policing problem. Further, it deals with the past as well as the future. It should require that historic non-crime hate incident records which do not meet the proper recording threshold must not be disclosed on DBS checks and must be deleted when discovered. That is vital for natural justice. If we accept that this category has been misused and overused, we cannot leave people’s lives quietly marred by data that should never have been held in the first place. I particularly address these remarks to the noble Baroness, Lady Lawrence.

This is not about turning a blind eye to genuine hate crime. On the contrary, by scrapping a vague, perception-based non-crime category, we free up police time and attention to focus on real offences: threats, harassment, violence and criminal damage. We will make the system clearer for victims and for officers. We will be sending a simple message that if you have been the victim of a crime, the law is there to protect you, and if you have merely heard something you strongly dislike, that is not in itself a matter for the police.

At the moment, too many people are unsure where that line lies. They fear that expressing a lawful view on a controversial subject might bring a knock at the door or a mark on their record. That chilling effect is corrosive. It drives honest disagreement underground and pushes some people out of the public square altogether. We should be defending the right to argue and criticise, and to challenge within the law, not encouraging people to outsource every disagreement to the police.

The amendment would preserve the ability of the police to record information where it is genuinely necessary for crime prevention and public safety. It would hardwire respect for freedom of expression into any future guidance. In doing so, it would strengthen civil liberties and good policing. It says that the police are there to deal with crime, not to catalogue lawful opinions. This is a distinction worth defending and I urge the House to support this amendment.