Crime and Policing Bill

Lord Young of Acton Excerpts

Tuesday 20th January 2026 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Young of Acton]

416E: After Clause 144, insert the following new Clause—
“Abolition of non-crime hate incidents(1) Sections 60 and 61 of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 (code of practice relating to non-crime hate incidents and related procedural requirements) are repealed.(2) Non-crime hate incidents shall not be recognised as a category of incident by any police authority in the United Kingdom.(3) No police authority or police officer may record, retain or otherwise process any personal data relating to a non-crime hate incident.(4) Subsection (3) does not mean a police authority or police officer cannot record information they regard as relevant about a suspect’s motives in the course of an ongoing criminal investigation or prosecution.(5) Within three months of the coming into force of this section, any police authority which has retained any record of a non-crime hate incident, save in accordance with the provisions of subsection (4), must delete such record.(6) For the purposes of this section—“non-crime hate incident” means any incident or alleged incident which does not constitute a criminal offence, but is perceived, by any person, to have been motivated (wholly or partly) by hostility or prejudice towards a person or group on the grounds of race, religion, sexual orientation, disability or transgender identity;“police authority” means a person specified in sub-section 158(1);“police officer” means any person acting under the authority a police authority.”

[Lord Young of Acton (Con)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as the director of the Free Speech Union, which has been campaigning against non-crime hate incidents for at least five years.

I thought it might be helpful to begin with a definition of what an NCHI is. The amendment itself says that it is

“any incident or alleged incident which does not constitute a criminal offence, but is perceived, by any person, to have been motivated (wholly or partly) by hostility or prejudice towards a person or group on the grounds of race, religion, sexual orientation, disability or transgender identity”.

How many of these incidents have been recorded by the police since the concept of NCHIs was introduced by the College of Policing in 2014? The Telegraph submitted an FoI request to all 43 police forces in England and Wales in early 2020, and 34 of the 43 —about three-quarters of the police forces in England and Wales—responded and disclosed that 119,934 NCHIs had been recorded in England and Wales in the five years from 2014 to 2019. By my calculation, that is an average of 65 a day—and remember, that that is just in England and Wales, and just three-quarters of the real total. There is no reason to think that the number being recorded every day by police forces in England and Wales has declined from that average of 65 since then, in the subsequent six years.

How long does it take the police? How many police hours are spent recording NCHIs? Policy Exchange published a report last November in which it concluded that the police spend 60,000 hours a year—again, that is just the police in England and Wales—investigating and recording non-crime hate incidents. If you factor in that they have been around since 2014, that means the police have spent at least 660,000 hours investigating and recording non-crimes since 2014.

What sort of incidents are we talking about? “Non-crime hate incident” sounds quite serious. I will give just a handful of examples. A man had an NCHI recorded against him after a neighbour complained that his whistling the theme tune to “Bob the Builder” was racist. A woman had an NCHI recorded against her name because she posted on X that she thought her cat was a Methodist. A nine year-old girl had an NCHI recorded against her because she called another girl in the school playground a “retard”. Two secondary school pupils had NCHIs recorded against them for saying about another girl, again in the school playground, that she smelled like fish. This is the kind of thing that the police have been spending 660,000 hours investigating and recording since 2014.

Incidentally, I know of at least one Member of this House who has had an NCHI recorded against her, and a Conservative Home Secretary, Amber Rudd, had an NCHI recorded against her because of a complaint made about the contents of her speech at a Conservative Party conference that she was addressed in her capacity as Home Secretary.

So it seems that it is not terribly difficult to make the argument that the police have been wasting a huge amount of time investigating and recording relatively trivial incidents. Again, I stress that the definition says that if it is merely “perceived”, not just by the “victim” but by any person, as being motivated by hostility or prejudice towards the “victim’s” protected characteristics, it can be recorded as an NCHI. Sometimes, when NCHIs are recorded, the person against whom the NCHI is recorded is not informed—so you might well have an NCHI recorded against you without knowing it.

All this sounds quite trivial, but having an NCHI recorded against your name can be quite serious, because chief constables, at their discretion, can disclose the fact that an NCHI has been recorded against a person when they apply for a job that requires them to do an enhanced DBS check. So, you can end up not getting a job as a teacher or a carer, or a voluntary position with a charity such as the Samaritans, because you have an NCHI recorded against your name.

I will just point out one more, I think unintended, consequence of the NCHI regime, which is that records are deleted after six years. So if you have an NCHI recorded against you at the age of 17, it remains on what is in effect your criminal record until you are 23, whereas quite serious criminal offences, if you are convicted, are spent when you reach the age of majority. The fact that you have committed a non-crime can hang about your neck like a bad smell long after you have reached the age of majority, even if it was recorded against you when you were a child. So, in some senses, not committing a crime and having that recorded against you can have more serious consequences than committing quite a serious crime and being convicted of it.

I believe that I am pushing at an open door. A report on NCHIs has been commissioned by the College of Policing and the National Police Chiefs’ Council. They have published a provisional version of the report, in which they declare the NCHI regime unfit for purpose. I do not think that they have submitted the final report to the Home Secretary yet, but I know that, when they do, the Home Secretary is likely to take up the recommendations, and I think we will see the end of the NCHI regime.

I have four issues on which I hope the Minister can provide some reassurance. The first is that, as I understand it, the new regime will be that incidents are no longer recorded as non-crime hate incidents; some cases will be recorded as anti-social behaviour incidents, but they will not be logged on the police national database. I ask for the Minister’s assurance that anti-social behaviour incidents that would have been recorded as NCHIs under the old regime will not, unlike NCHIs, be recorded on the police national database.

I also ask for the Minister’s assurance that, once the new regime is in place, previous NCHIs recorded under the old regime will be deleted and will not hang around for six years as they do currently, given that there is acceptance that the regime is not fit for purpose. If the regime is not fit for purpose, I hope the Minister can assure us that existing NCHIs—it is not inconceivable that they number in the hundreds of thousands—will be deleted. Finally, I seek reassurance that these anti-social behaviour incidents will not be disclosed in enhanced DBS checks.

I hope that the review by the College of Policing and the National Police Chiefs’ Council will be submitted and digested in time for the new regime to be put in place on Report. I beg to move.

[Lord Hogan-Howe (CB)]

My Lords, I have added my name to this amendment because we need to move on from the recording of non-crime hate incidents by removing them altogether from police systems.

Non-crime hate recording had an honourable start, following on from the Macpherson inquiry. There were two problems at the time. The first was that recordable crime was lower than it should have been because it was not being recorded accurately, due to misrecording and it sometimes not being recorded at all. This was linked to police performance being measured by the amount of crime in society. Therefore, the police service was incentivised to record less rather than more crime, thereby, ironically, undermining its own bid for more resourcing.

The murder of Stephen Lawrence showed us that, sometimes, before a crime is committed, there are signals that someone may be a racist, for example, and that, if we take the right action, we could prevent those crimes occurring and someone getting hurt or any other crime being committed. That system worked well at the start, because it allowed the police to collect intelligence and spot patterns—for example, by geography, suspect or victims. That relied on the basic repeat offender victim location theory, which shows that 10% of repeat offenders can account for over half of some crimes.

The problem is that the same system is now being used to police the social harms caused by causing offence. Causing offence is not a crime. The internet amplifies the problem—first, because it has a permanent record of the offensive but not criminal behaviour, and, secondly, because it allows millions of people, sometimes worldwide, to see the communication. For everybody involved, it is then very hard to ignore. This has led to some bizarre police interventions—the noble Lord, Lord Young, has already mentioned some—on issues that are not crimes or even non-crime hate. The public have juxtaposed these with significant complaints—such as shoplifting, car theft and other serious crimes—that, meanwhile, the police say they are too busy to deal with, even when a suspect is available to arrest. The two issues do not sit well together.

There is a need to record intelligence about incidents that may later become significant if crimes are committed. This can be on the police command and control log, where the incident can be given an anti-social behaviour coding, or on the criminal intelligence system. The problem arises if the name of a person who is said to have caused offence is recorded. In my view, if the police say that they will record what is being alleged because someone has called the control room and they need to log all calls—the police later denying that a call had come in would not be sensible—then it is necessary to record those incidents in the control room. However, if, on the face of what a person tells the police, they see no crime or incident, they will not investigate and will not record the name of the person the caller says has offended them.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

The noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, brings great experience to this. In his initial contribution, and in these comments, he gives food for thought as to how we implement the decisions of any review and how Ministers ultimately give guidance to police, which chief constables then put in place for police officers on the ground to deal with. We will look at that. The whole purpose of the review is to simplify this procedure, looking at what is necessary and helpful, and to get the police to focus on the things that really matter. Some of the examples that have been given today are things that the police should not be focusing on because they do not matter at all.

To answer the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, it is important that we look at what the regulations and the review say. We can act administratively on much of what happens. I have no doubt that the Government will do so, once we receive the final review.

I simply ask the noble Lord, Lord Young of Acton, for the moment, to withdraw the amendment. He has the right to bring his amendments back on Report. We will have a clearer picture at some point in the very near future. I hope this has been a helpful debate.

[Lord Young of Acton (Con)]

I thank the Minister for his gracious response. I particularly thank the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, for co-sponsoring the amendment and for his excellent contributions to this debate. I thank the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, and the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, for their contributions. I wish the noble Lord, Lord Strasburger, a speedy recovery. I thank my noble friends Lord Kempsell, Lord Jackson and Lord Blencathra.

I agree with my noble friend Lord Blencathra that the police, under very difficult circumstances, do an excellent job on the whole and I admire what they do. But I think he is right that having to record and investigate non-crime hate incidents is as unpopular with ordinary police officers on the front line as it is with free speech campaigners. They do not want to be wasting their time in this way. Many of them have reached out to me to tell me that and to support this amendment. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, for her contribution.

If you look at proposed new subsection (4), you will find that nothing in the amendment would prevent the police recording information they regard as relevant about a suspect’s motive in the course of an ongoing criminal investigation or prosecution. I am sceptical whether the police should be allowed to record incidents that clearly do not meet the threshold of being crimes for intelligence-gathering purposes, not least because there is very little persuasive evidence that that is helpful when it comes to preventing crimes, and I am generally suspicious of the concept of pre-crime—of trying to nip potential crimes in the bud by monitoring carefully incidents that do not quite meet the threshold of criminal offences. However, I am not going to die in a ditch and say that the police should never, under any circumstances, be able to record incidents that do not meet the threshold of being a criminal offence for intelligence-gathering purposes, provided that the recording of those incidents has no adverse consequences for the people they are recorded against.

That brings me to the remarks of my noble friend Lord Herbert of South Downs, which, on the whole, were very welcome. I am pleased that the College of Policing and the National Police Chiefs’ Council recognise that NCHIs are not fit for purpose and that the regime should be scrapped and replaced with something much better, but I want to respond briefly to two points made by my noble friend.

First, my noble friend acknowledged, I think, that the recording threshold for NCHIs is currently too low, and that when the regime is replaced by another, such as the anti-social behaviour incident regime, the threshold as to what incidents should be recorded will be higher. The implicit acknowledgement that the threshold has hitherto been too low strikes me as a persuasive argument for scrapping those incidents that have been recorded under the lower threshold. If the threshold was too low, that is an acknowledgement that the incidents should not have been recorded. That is a good argument for why they should be deleted once this system has been overhauled.

Secondly, my noble friend Lord Herbert maintains that, even though chief constables have the discretion to disclose NCHIs when responding to enhanced DBS checks, the College of Policing could not find a single example of chief constables having done that. If that is the case then there is no cost to the Home Office agreeing that, henceforth, under the new regime, anti-social behaviour incidents—if that is what we are going to call them—should not be disclosed in enhanced DBS checks. The fear that they might be—that, not having committed a crime, that is recorded against your name and could stop you getting a job or volunteering at a school or for a charity—is why the current regime has had such a chilling effect on free speech. If none has been disclosed, why not go that one small step further and say that, henceforth, they will not be disclosed?

[Lord Katz (Lab)]

I hope the noble Lord is coming to the end of his remarks. When responding on amendments, you are meant to be relatively brief. He has had five and a half minutes now.

[Lord Young of Acton (Con)]

I apologise to the Committee for taking up its time. On that note, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.

Amendment 416E withdrawn.