Crime and Policing Bill

Lord Russell of Liverpool Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 17th December 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Smith of Llanfaes (PC)]

My Lords, I rise to speak to Amendments 348 and 349, in my name. I thank the noble Lords, Lord Russell of Liverpool and Lord Hendy, for adding their names. These amendments seek to tackle one of the most pressing issues in our society, gender-based violence and harassment, with a clear focus on workplaces. As I open this debate, I look forward to hearing contributions from across the Committee on how we can strengthen protections for workers and make our workplaces truly safe.

Amendments 348 and 349 would establish a health and safety framework to address violence against women and girls in the workplace and create a new duty on employers to prevent violence and harassment by amending Section 2 of the Health and Safety at Work Act. This is not the first time I have brought this proposal before noble Lords. During the passage of the Employment Rights Bill, we had a constructive debate on the proposal. Since then, support has grown both inside and outside Parliament. Just last month, the End Not Defend campaign held an event here in Parliament attended by Peers and Members of the other place. Survivors shared harrowing experiences of how the law is failing them. Trade unions, specialist organisations and survivors themselves are calling for action. Their courage in sharing their experiences demands a response from us.

This Bill already introduces a new offence to protect retail workers. It is a welcome step, but why stop there? Violence and harassment affect workers across all sectors. If we are serious about halving violence against women and girls within the next decade, as His Majesty’s Government have pledged, we need a cross-departmental approach that moves beyond a sole focus on criminalisation to prevention and tackling the root causes. Leveraging health and safety law is one way to achieve this. It would make VAWG prevention everybody’s business. These amendments were co-written with the Suzy Lamplugh Trust and Rights of Women—organisations with decades of experience in supporting victims. The amendments’ aims are also supported by several workers unions.

Current legislation falls short. The Worker Protection (Amendment of Equality Act 2010) Act 2023 introduced a preventive duty on sexual harassment, but in practice enforcement occurs only after harm has happened. The Employment Rights Bill will strengthen this requirement when it introduces protections around third-party harassment. However, enforcement can occur only after sexual harassment has been experienced, limiting its preventive function. It also excludes other forms of violence against women and girls in the workplace, such as other forms of harassment and all forms of violence, including physical, psychological and emotional abuse.

The UK ratified ILO Convention No. 190, which requires a gender-responsive approach to workplace safety, yet our laws do not reflect this obligation. Recent cases show the urgency of this, including the tragic murder of Gracie Spinks by a colleague who stalked her, despite repeated reports. Female NHS surgeons report harassment and even rape in operating theatres, described as “surgery’s open secret”. Royal Artillery Gunner Jaysley Beck took her own life after relentless harassment by her superior. There have been reports of sexual assault and rape at Harrods, the CBI, the BBC and McDonald’s.

The Harrods case was not a failure of individual courage; it was a failure of structural responsibility. Multiple institutions had sight of risk, but none had a duty to prevent it. Harrods looked like a modern employer, but it functioned as a closed environment in which power went unchecked and young women were left unprotected. These amendments would have required the risk assessments that never happened. Survivors of al-Fayed’s abuse, represented by no one above, say the same thing again and again: no one stopped him. Legislators must ensure that no workplace in the UK can ever operate with that level of impunity again. Where accountability is optional, exploitation becomes operational. The Harrods redress scheme shows exactly why voluntary arrangements cannot substitute for enforceable duties on employers.

These are not isolated incidents. Rights of Women reports that 56% of calls to its advice line involve harassment or violence from colleagues. The Suzy Lamplugh Trust found that women are eight times more likely than men to experience sexual misconduct at work, yet there is no government data collection, no reporting requirement, and outdated attitudes persist that VAWG is a private matter.

I would like to illustrate the lack of regulation for VAWG in the workplace and why these amendments are necessary. The Equality Act addresses sexual harassment as discrimination but excludes other forms of VAWG, leaving significant safety issues unregulated by the Equality and Human Rights Commission. Employers can adopt domestic abuse policies voluntarily, as recommended by the EHRC in guidance to employers on domestic abuse—although the Welsh version is actually over a decade old. However, much of the currently available guidance assumes domestic abuse occurs outside the workplace and outside the remit of the employer’s liability. This does not align with the statutory guidance to employers in the Domestic Abuse Act, which states that employers should consider the impact of domestic abuse on their employees as part of their duty of care under health and safety law, as regulated by the Health and Safety Executive.

Despite the growing evidence that gender-based violence and harassment harm workers’ health and safety, the Health and Safety Executive does not recognise gender-based violence as a workplace hazard. In its evidence to the Women and Equalities Select Committee 2018 inquiry on sexual harassment, the Health and Safety Executive stated clearly that it has a policy of not applying the Health and Safety at Work Act when it deems that other agencies or regulators have more specific responsibilities. The Health and Safety Executive is currently advising workers to report harassment to bodies that lack enforcement powers. This must change, and harassment and violence in the workplace should be recognised as a health and safety at work matter.

Health and safety frameworks provide a structured, enforceable approach. Updating them to include VAWG would ensure employers have a positive duty to prevent harm, not just to respond after an incident. As with existing health and safety duties, this would be proportionate. These amendments are practical and scalable. They would require risk assessment, clear policies, training, and confidential reporting mechanisms—all proportionate to the size and risk profile of the workplace and consistent with the existing health and safety frameworks.

Amendments 348 and 349 prioritise prevention and victim protection. They reflect expert advice and growing public demand. They align with the Government’s own commitment to halving violence against women and girls within the next decade. Tomorrow, the VAWG strategy will be published. The Safeguarding Minister in the other place said on Monday that

“the strategy has to be for everybody … It has to be for employers as well. It is for businesses, charities—everybody in society”.—[Official Report, Commons, 15/12/25; col. 651.]

I hope that these amendments are viewed as one way to make that vision a reality.

We know what happens when accountability is optional. We have seen it in shops, in hospitals, in the Armed Forces, and we owe it to those who have spoken up and to those who still feel unable to, to act. I look forward to the Minister’s response and hope His Majesty’s Government will consider these arguments as the Crime and Policing Bill progresses through this House. I beg to move.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I was happy once again to add my name to these two amendments from the noble Baroness, because we had a very similar debate on 21 May during the passage of the Employment Rights Bill. On 11 July, the noble Baroness followed up with a letter to the then Minister—the noble Baroness, Lady Jones—laying out the case very clearly.

The Government have the laudable intention of trying to reduce violence against women and girls by 50%, but there is a strange incongruence in respect of that ambition. I wonder if noble Lords are aware of how much time people, if they are fortunate enough to be employed, spend in the workplace during an average year? It is 52% of the year. In a year, more than half of an average employee’s time is spent in and around the workplace. Therefore, when one is putting together a comprehensive strategy to try and reduce violence against women and girls, excluding the workplace from close scrutiny and oversight seems somewhat of an oversight. What the noble Baroness is suggesting in these two amendments therefore seems eminently sensible. Without looking at this very carefully and ensuring that it is effectively included within the strategy in some way, shape or form, the strategy will be fundamentally flawed from the start.

The Health and Safety at Work etc. Act, which is often cited by Governments of whatever persuasion as being the bedrock of trying to ensure rights in the workplace, is now exactly 51 years old. I am sure the Government will wheel out, as they have on previous occasions, the many other Acts and regulations that have been put on the statute book at various points over the past 51 years. However, during the last 51 years, for better or worse—I think for worse—the situation in the workplace, for women and girls in particular but also for men, has fundamentally changed, and the regulations and legislation have not kept up. There is clearly an imbalance.

One need only look at the range of organisations that have suffered quite a lot of reputational damage as a result of not trying to put in place regulations and rules and of not instilling, primarily through leadership, a culture to ensure that the sort of behaviour that we are talking about and trying to stop is called out. I could go through an exhaustive list, but we can look at the embarrassment that various police forces have had to endure in the last few years. We can also look at the embarrassment that the Church of England has had to face and is still facing; that is an institution that not only finds it extraordinarily difficult to acknowledge the existence of that sort of behaviour within its ranks but has the strange anomaly that it is an organisation part of whose purpose in life is to forgive. However, it is not enough to forgive things going wrong if you are not prioritising the needs of those who are being wronged, and that is unfortunately the case in the Church of England and, of course, in the Roman Catholic Church throughout the world, as is very well known.

The military is also an embarrassing example. To have lost a First Sea Lord through impropriety at work is not exactly an example of stellar leadership. It makes one wonder how it was possible for an individual to reach that level of rank—with fundamental and comprehensive reviews and training taking place, in theory, right the way through their career—and to arrive at the pinnacle of their military profession only then to be publicly found very wanting. Clearly, there was something fundamentally wrong with the culture there. We have also had Cabinet Ministers who have had to resign on the basis of inappropriate behaviour in the workplace, particularly harassment and bullying. This is a problem that is endemic; to ignore it is simply not acceptable.

I hope and expect that the Minister’s reply will not be a carbon copy of the answer that the noble Lord, Lord Leong, gave in the debate on the 21 May. That answer was, in effect, a list of all the various regulations and legislation that, in theory, are meant to enable one to address and stop this, but which clearly are not working. To try and defend it, when clearly it is not working, makes one feel that the Minister, if he does do that, is unfortunately taking King Canute as a role model. It is simply not acceptable.

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[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

My Lords, I first seek clarification from the noble Lord, Lord Russell of Liverpool, on his sums. I do not do sums either but, if I heard him correctly, he said that a worker spends 50% of his life at work. If that is what I heard correctly, that is 84 hours a week.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

What I said was that a person fortunate enough to be employed spends on average 52% of one year in and around the workplace.

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They talked about one of their members, Jennifer Melle, a 40 year-old NHS nurse with 12 years of unblemished service in a hospital in Surrey. I thought it was worth using this illustration because the Minister was very passionate earlier, and rightly so, about emergency workers who have to suffer racial abuse. Jennifer Melle’s story is important because she is a black nurse who was dealing with a patient who happened to be a convicted male paedophile in a hospital in Surrey. Nurse Melle phoned the neurologist and referred to this patient as “he” and “Mr” while talking to the neurologist on the phone. The patient became very aggressive, started shouting racist abuse, used the most vile racial slurs and lunged at nurse Jennifer Melle, which was a terrible thing to happen. You would have expected her employers to protect her from that. It was racial, in that instance, towards a female front-line worker. What actually happened—

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

The noble Baroness, Lady Fox, is repeating, to some extent, some of the perfectly sensible points that she made in the debate earlier in the year. I just point out that, in Committee, these are probing amendments: no more, no less. It is accepted from the get-go that they could be improved, and what I think would be helpful for the Committee is not a long list of the things that are wrong with the amendment—we accept that there may be some things that are wrong with it—but some suggestions, if the noble Baroness is unhappy with the wording, as to what might be put in its place if, as I think is the case, she acknowledges that there is a problem that needs to be dealt with.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

That is a fair comment. The point that I was going on to make was that she was suspended for misgendering using a gender-inclusive policy similar to that advocated in this amendment.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

What would the noble Baroness use instead?

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

I suggested then that I was not happy with the wording of an amendment, and it has simply been repeated. I made a speech that I thought was reasonable at the time. This is actually not the same speech, but I am raising some of the issues. I ask, as I asked earlier, why would we use that approach to protecting women and girls when women in the workplace are at present actually the victims of some of these gender-related policies? Therefore, if the amendment comes back as a more straightforward, narrowly defined amendment about sexual harassment at work, I would be much more interested in hearing about it. It is the amendment that is repeated, not just my speech. It is exactly the same wording that I objected to before. No account has been taken of any of the criticisms made in Committee, at the probing stage, so I think I can reasonably say that I would like us all to not repeat ourselves, including with this amendment.