Crime and Policing Bill

Lord Vaizey of Didcot Excerpts

2nd reading
Thursday 16th October 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Vaizey of Didcot (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the clerks, the Whips and the noble Lord, Lord Jackson of Peterborough, for allowing me to change my place in the running order. I declare my interest as the UK chair of Common Sense Media, a US not-for-profit that campaigns for children’s safety on the internet. I had to step out of the debate briefly because I wanted to take part in a debate on music education in the Moses Room, which allows me to continue a tradition that I have set up for myself to always shoehorn the arts into any debate that we have here.

I echo to a certain extent the excellent sentiment behind the speech of the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti. There is an interesting theme developing in this debate—an undercurrent coming from many noble Lords: do we need endless pieces of criminal legislation? Do we narrowly focus on the specifics that happen to exercise the public mind—or the political mind, perhaps—today and miss the big picture? I have long campaigned on the importance of the arts in the criminal justice system and, of course, the importance of the arts in our society in helping people to find interests and ways of expressing themselves that contribute to a harmonious society. I completely agree with the noble Baroness that this is impossible to legislate for. I know that the noble Lord, Lord Timpson, does so much incredible work as Prisons Minister and, in a previous life, in promoting the use of the arts in this way.

I was very struck by the speech of my noble and learned friend Lord Garnier, which set this tone about constant recourse to legislation. I was reminded that, when I first became the Arts Minister, I inherited the Digital Economy Act and the new legislation to prosecute people who downloaded illegal music. I thought then that going after teenagers in their bedrooms was a fool’s errand; there would be a technology solution. The music industry found a solution by using existing legislation; it used the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to prosecute the big websites that were ripping off music makers, and in that way we started to get things more on an even keel.

It has long been a slightly bizarre obsession of mine as to why we do not have a criminal code in this country—one piece of paper, as it were, that lists the criminal offences—which would allow the Government of the day to do exactly what my noble and learned friend Lord Garnier was speaking about: cross-reference whether the offences that they are now bringing into law already exist or whether there are existing offences that could cover the current passion. For example, I bow to no one in wanting to defend retail workers from attacks by increasingly aggressive shoplifters, but I want to prevent everyone being attacked in this way. Do we need a specific offence for retail workers, or does this merely clog up the system? Indeed, to a certain extent, legislation such as this misses the big picture. The noble Viscount, Lord Goschen, referred to the merger of police forces, which is long overdue, and we have referred in this debate to clogged cases.

Having said all that, of course, let me now do a complete reverse ferret—channel my inner noble Lord, Lord Walney, if you like—and say that I also wanted to speak in this debate to offer my unequivocal support to the noble Baroness, Lady Bertin. She and many other noble Baronesses and noble Lords have done incredible work in bringing the criminal statute book up to date in terms of the way that technology has fundamentally changed how pornography is used and has fundamentally impacted the lives of young people. I will support anything that can make that more coherent and allow us to have greater powers to crack down on this great technological scourge.