Crime and Policing Bill

Lord Strasburger Excerpts

2nd reading
Thursday 16th October 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Strasburger (LD) [V]]

My Lords, I declare my interest as chair of Big Brother Watch. I welcome the earlier comment by the noble Lord, Lord Herbert, that the non-crime hate incident regime is not fit for purpose. This Bill has much to recommend it, but four minutes is nowhere near enough to do it justice, so I will focus on just two concerning aspects.

Until recently, our country was an exemplar of how government and other institutions could be held to account by citizens through peaceful protest. However, in 2022, the previous Government gave us the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act, which handed senior police officers and Ministers powers to impose extensive constraints on protests. Then, in 2023, the Public Order Act further enhanced police powers to restrict and criminalise protest activity. As a result, in just two years, 712 protests in England and Wales were subject to police conditions, 95% of them in London.

Now it seems the Government want even more powers to restrict protests. Clause 124 will enable police to ban protests in the vicinity of a place of worship. Whatever “in the vicinity of” means, it will certainly include Parliament Square and most urban centres. Clause 118 will have a chilling effect on some people’s willingness to engage in protest. Furthermore, the Government are promising additional clauses to enable the police to ban repeating protests—which is, of course, most protests.

Protecting the right to protest is vital to maintaining a healthy, vibrant democracy where power is questioned and balanced by the collective will of citizens. The cumulative effect of more and more restrictions on protest is one of the reasons why our country is sliding down the world’s free speech league, and this trend needs to be reversed.

I turn to an astonishing omission from the Bill. The collection of DNA, how it is retained, examined and used as evidence, and its eventual destruction, are quite rightly controlled by several Acts of Parliament and detailed regulations, all overseen by a statutory regulator. However, when it comes to the relatively new facial recognition technology, none of these protections and none of this oversight exists—nothing at all. Facial recognition is far more intrusive than DNA; it is as if citizens are walking around the streets with a barcode on their foreheads that police can read from a distance to identify them. It drives a coach and horses through our time-honoured right—with limited exceptions—to withhold our identity from the police. When this technology is incorporated into this country’s vast network of CCTV cameras, as it surely will be, it will be possible to track us wherever we are, going about our lawful business. Since the technology was first used in south Wales in 2017, police forces have reluctantly had to cobble together their own rules and mark their own homework, falling foul of the courts in the process.

So we would assume that the new Government would seize the opportunity of a major Bill on policing to introduce the long-overdue statutory regulation of facial recognition technology. But if you thought that, you would be wrong. The Bill does nothing to urgently fill the black hole where the essential regulation should be—the black hole that is crushing our privacy. Instead, the Government are presenting a Bill that says nothing about facial recognition, other than in Clause 138, which seeks to make the technology even more intrusive by linking it to the DVLA database. This extraordinary regulatory vacuum must be filled by amendments during the passage of the Bill.