Crime and Policing Bill

Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay Excerpts

Wednesday 4th March 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Paddick (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as a paid adviser to the Metropolitan Police. My understanding is that the Government’s amendments simply create a legal level playing field, with deterrents currently available on the grounds of race and religion being extended to other protected characteristics. It is far more serious if you are targeted for attack because you are a member of a vulnerable group than if you are attacked at random, and the law should reflect that.

There has been debate today about free speech and non-crime hate incidents, but these provisions are about actual crimes targeted at vulnerable people. I completely agree with the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, and those of the Minister.

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for the way he introduced these amendments. As he said, this is a government manifesto commitment, and it was evident in the pride with which he moved this amendment. However, I agree with concern raised by the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, and others—that it is regrettable that we are seeing the drafting of this provision at this late stage in this House. We have had long debates on the principle as the Bill has gone through, but in this particularly vexed area of the law, the devil really is in the detail, so it is regrettable that we are coming to it fairly late.

In his introduction, the Minister said with clear passion that he wants to level up the protections afforded to people under the law when it comes to hate crime. My concerns are slightly different from some that have been expressed so far in the paused debate: that this amendment as drafted in fact treats some groups of people differently from others and leaves a bit of levelling up still to do.

In part, that is because of the slightly uneasy settlement that we have because of the Equality Act 2010, which, as a Bill, went through Parliament in wash-up. I think it is ripe for a bit of post-legislative scrutiny; it is often prayed in aid in all directions without people fully understanding it. It used to be a bugbear of mine in government when people came to me with a submission talking about people with protected characteristics. I would say, “But that’s everybody”—anyone with an age, a race or a sex has protected characteristics. There is no such person as a person with no protected characteristics. But the way the Equality Act 2010 describes and applies them is not wholly equal, and when it comes to this area of the law, that causes some problems.

We all have a sexual orientation. Section 12 of the Equality Act defines that for us. We may choose different terms ourselves, but it tells us that we are attracted to “the opposite sex”, “the same sex” or members “of either sex”. Accordingly, that is reflected in the amendments that the Government have brought forward vis-à-vis hate crime and hostility on the basis of sexual orientation.

We all have a race or a religion. Again, the descriptions in proposed new subsection (6) talk about

“references to a racial group”,

which could apply to Black people, white people, Asian people, Welsh people—everybody is covered by that provision. In proposed new subsection (6)(b), the

“references to a religious group”

talk explicitly of a “lack of religious belief”. It does not matter whether you are an adherent to a certain religion, you are covered by that. The difficulty in this area comes when we start to apply it to disability or to people’s gender reassignment status, and that is where we start to see the problem in the descriptions in the government amendment. Proposed new subsection (3)(b) talks about

“hostility towards persons who have a disability or … hostility towards persons who are transgender”.

Does that mean that an offence committed against somebody on the basis that they are, for instance, deaf, could be treated as an aggravated offence, but that an offence committed against somebody on the basis that they were a hearing person could not be? I would be grateful if the Minister could explain whether that is the case and whether that is really what the Government are seeking to achieve here.

Similarly, when proposed new subsection 3(b)(v) specifies

“hostility towards persons who are transgender”,

and we have seen many horrible examples of crimes that are aggravated on that basis, does that mean that an offence committed against somebody on the basis that they are transgender, or presumed to be so, could be treated as aggravated, but an offence committed against somebody on the basis that they are cisgender—that they are not transgender—could not be? Again, it would be useful to have the clarification.

I am aware that both of those examples are less numerous and, arguably, far less likely to occur, but they are not implausible, and they should not be neglected by laws that we pass in the name of equality. I know this is a difficult area of the law when it comes to drafting—I think that lies behind some of the delay that the Government have had in bringing forward this amendment—but surely it would be possible to avoid these lacunae by stating, for instance, “a disability or lack of disability” or “a person who is transgender or who is not”. Surely that would allow this to be applied in other ways.

[Lord Pannick (CB)]

I am very grateful to the noble Lord. Can he give a practical example of when there has ever been a relevant criminal offence committed against a person because they are not deaf?

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

I cannot—not as a lawyer; I cannot refer to case law on this—but I would not rely on past example alone. If we are passing laws that seek to apply equality, we should seek to apply it on the basis of somebody’s disability status, whether they are disabled or not. It is not implausible—though I accept it is far less likely and far less numerous in past occurrence—for that to be the case. In some of the other areas in the heated debates that we see, it is not as implausible as many of us would like to assume. If it is possible to tighten this up in the drafting, I think it would do the job the Government are seeking to do in a complete way.

That would not prevent the Government fulfilling their manifesto commitment for delivering protections to trans people and disabled people; it would simply ensure that everybody was treated in this area of the law on the basis of protected characteristics in the same way. At the moment, there are greater protections for everybody of every conceivable sexual orientation and people of either sex, but there are not on each of the areas set out in the Equality Act. More pertinently, it would avoid fuelling what is already a very unhelpful public discourse about two-tier policing and laws, or some of the more charged debates that we have in the darker corners of the internet or from the more far-fetched foreign critics who have been mentioned previously.

On Amendment 336 from my noble friends Lord Davies of Gower and Lord Cameron of Lochiel, while it is understandable that they are probing this area, I do not think that their amendment is warranted. It probes the question of whether protections for transgender people should apply to people who are “proposing to undergo” a process of gender reassignment. In fact, Section 2 of the Gender Recognition Act 2004, which has been the law of the land for 22 years, requires somebody applying for a gender recognition certificate to undergo that process to have

“lived in the acquired gender throughout the period of two years”

preceding their application. Signalling an intention to propose to go through that process is an important part of the law as it stands, and therefore Amendment 336 is not needed.

[Baroness Brinton (LD)]

My Lords, I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Parkinson, for raising the issue about someone who was not deaf. Unfortunately, he has forgotten that the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 set out exactly why people with disabilities were disadvantaged in society—and, frankly, still are. That is why some people—whether we are talking about someone who is deaf, someone who is in a wheelchair, someone without sight or someone with severe autism—need some support to have equality. That is not what these amendments seek to do. What these amendments seek to do is to say that someone who is disabled should now be included with other people as someone who can be targeted simply because of their disability. I want to give two brief illustrations to explain why it is important.

Two years ago, a man launched a racist tirade at passengers on a packed London train. He started shouting extreme racist abuse at a woman in her 70s, using language that I could not possibly repeat in your Lordships’ House. When passengers tried to intervene and support this elderly lady, they were then shouted at and attacked and became scared. Indeed, one person left the train. The police were able to use aggravated charges because the words he used to describe her were clearly racist. She was chosen because of the colour of her skin. It was not because she was just sitting there.

Contrast that with last autumn when comedian Rosie Jones was attacked on a train from Brighton to London Victoria. She was hit with a wine bottle—luckily, it was only plastic; she said that only a comedian could do that. She was hit only because of her cerebral palsy and probably, she thinks, because she is well known to be LGBT. At the moment, those people could not be considered for an aggravated sentence—and that is what these amendments seek to do. That is the point. Therefore, I have no problem whatever in saying that we should support these amendments.

I have reported in your Lordships’ House before that people have said to me on a train, when I have been commuting in the rush hour, “Why are you taking up space? People like you don’t work”. That is not an aggravated offence. But when someone tried to kick me on a platform because they felt I should not be there because I was in a wheelchair and in her way, that would have been an aggravated offence if they had caught her.

I am really struggling with all these debates going on at the moment. Yesterday, the leader of the Conservative Party made a big announcement about getting rid of equalities, and everyone is talking about identifiers. I do not have an identifier; I am disabled—and sometimes people take it out on me. I can live with most of it, but sometimes it goes beyond the right place. Frankly, members of our judicial system should be able to make up their minds about whether it is an aggravated offence. That is the subject of the amendments we are debating today.