Data (Use and Access) Bill [HL]

Lord Sandhurst Excerpts

Report stage
Tuesday 28th January 2025 Lords Chamber

The noble Baroness has done us a good service, but this is not an issue on which we can celebrate. Like the other amendments in my name on AI child sexual abuse that were in this group in Committee—which I have not tabled because they will also be subject to announcements by the Home Office in the next few days—these issues are urgent and obvious and, frankly, we should not have to battle this hard to get laws on to the statute book that enshrine basic legal protections for women and children. I am really glad that the Government have chosen to act on these two issues and commend them for doing so.

[Lord Sandhurst (Con)]

My Lords, I will be brief. I congratulate my noble friend Lady Owen on these three splendid amendments. She has done a tremendous service to the criminal law and the women of this country—and young men, who I understand are abused in this way too. It is really important. I shall not add anything to the speeches that have been made, other than to say that I endorse everything said by the noble Lords, Lord Browne of Ladyton and Lord Pannick, and the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron. We must act now, and we must have a Bill that is complete at Third Reading and which includes everything that the noble Baroness has asked for; there cannot be any excuse for quibbling about solicitation. We have to act now, it has got to be done and I am sure the criminal courts will endorse and adopt it. This is a terrible mischief that causes great harm, and we would be doing a great disservice if we did not act on it.

[Baroness Morgan of Cotes (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I will speak briefly on this group. Like other noble Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Owen, on her tenacity. As the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, said, she has learned the lessons of how to change the law in this House very early on—it takes the rest of us quite a while to catch up. I am very grateful that the Government Front Bench have listened, and it demonstrates the value of this House.

The noble Baroness has outlined why her version of the amendment is right: in victims not having to prove the intent of those who have created or solicited the creation of the image, and also the importance of that solicitation. She is in a difficult position tonight. It is a difficult choice to have to make. I fully appreciate that this is part of the Government’s overall commitment to halve violence against women and girls, I think in the course of this Parliament, and that is extremely noble. But we debated this on 13 December, when we debated the noble Baroness’s Private Member’s Bill; we are now at the end of January and, for everything that is welcome in what the Minister said, he also said that he is unable to give the assurance that the amendment will be tabled at Third Reading. He wants the noble Baroness, Lady Owen, to accept that, if she does not see the amendment then, it will appear in the Commons. I have no reason to think that that will not be the case, but, of course, if it does not appear at Third Reading, and if the noble Baroness does not put down her amendment at Third Reading and push it to a vote, then she is very reliant on it coming back in the Commons.

The broader point that I want to make is that, although we are all committed to ending violence against women and girls and next month we will see the Online Safety Act guidance on that very issue being published by Ofcom, the lesson from the Online Safety Act is that—and it was a Government of which I was a supporter and at the time I was taking the Whip—it took the Government an awfully long time to catch up to the fact that there was a group of Members of this House who just wanted the right thing to be done. The Government took far too long. If the Government had actually been engaging by drafting their own amendment to capture the points made by the noble Baroness between 13 December and today, we would have an amendment that we could all unite around and be even more congratulatory to both the noble Baroness and the Government Front Bench in having tackled these images. As it is, we are in a deeply unsatisfactory place. While I am sure that the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, is right that, perhaps, we should not have a vote tonight, the noble Baroness is taking that on an enormous amount of trust.

Therefore, I say to Government Ministers that, when we come to tackle these issues of violence against women and girls in the rest of this Parliament, it should not matter where the proposals come from; if they are right, if they reflect the reality of women’s and girls’ experiences online or offline, then I would hope that Ministers would listen and that the Opposition would obviously help support and secure those changes. As the online world develops, and as technology gets faster and faster, we need to be nimble in this Parliament in addressing those images. If the noble Baroness pushes Amendment 69 to a vote, I would support it tonight. We will all listen very carefully—no pressure—to what the Minister says, and we shall be guided by the noble Baroness and her decisions as we reach the conclusion of this debate.