Crime and Policing Bill

Baroness Maclean of Redditch Excerpts

Tuesday 9th December 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Shawcross-Wolfson (Con)]

My Lords, I also support the amendments tabled by my noble friend Lady Owen and will try to keep my remarks as brief as possible. As we have heard today, technology continues to provide new avenues for abuse, in particular for the abuse of women. Abusers use technology in ever more inventive ways to harm, harass and try to humiliate their victims. Thanks to the work of my noble friend Lady Owen and others in this House, the law has made huge strides in recent years; however, more needs to be done.

Broadly, these amendments fall into two categories: those that seek to update the law to ensure that it addresses new and growing forms of tech-enabled abuse, and those that seek to provide more effective support to the victims of non-consensual intimate image abuse. We need action on both fronts. I will not go into detail here, as it has already been covered, but I will just reiterate that some of the gaps that need to be closed are: updating our definition of what constitutes taking an image; including audio recordings in the framework for tackling non-consensual intimate images; ensuring that images which may have been innocuous when they were taken but are then transformed into something sexual or degrading are also captured by the law; and, finally, recognising the practice of doxing as an aggregating factor.

Unfortunately, we know that, however the law changes, abuse will not be eliminated any time soon, so we must also ensure that the law supports victims in the aftermath of their abuse. As it stands, there is no proper framework to ensure that intimate images that the courts have found to be taken or shared illegally are then removed and destroyed. Instead, survivors see their images being repeatedly uploaded, posted on to pornography sites, shared in anonymous chat forums and even allowed to remain untouched on their abusers’ devices or cloud accounts. It cannot be right; the law must change. Between them, Amendments 295BA, 295BB, 295BC and 295BD would create a proper mechanism for victims to ensure that images are promptly removed from online platforms, deleted and then hashed to prevent them from resurfacing elsewhere.

Making progress on this issue is crucial. We know the trauma caused to victims who have to live with their images remaining online or live with the knowledge that they could be re-uploaded at any point. As one survivor told the Women and Equalities Committee:

“I am terrified of applying for jobs for fear that the prospective employer will google my name and see. I am terrified when meeting new people that they will google my name and see. I am terrified that every person I meet has seen”.


We cannot allow this situation to continue. The amendments from my noble friend Lady Owen would make the law more effective, more enforceable and more protective to victims, and I hope that we will be able to make progress on them in this House.

[Baroness Maclean of Redditch (Con)]

My Lords, I add my voice to the support for my noble friend Lady Owen from across the Committee. She has done a great service to victims of these crimes all across the country, most of whom we know are women and girls, but men and boys can be affected too.

I will focus on Amendment 334 which, as my noble friend Lady Coffey has mentioned, would add the word “reckless” in relation to the spiking offence. This is very important. I remember being the Home Office Minister when the phenomenon of needle spiking first hit the headlines. It focused a lot of attention on spiking in general as a phenomenon and meant the Home Office had to put its focus and resources behind it. We found it was very difficult to prosecute these crimes. Often, the substance had left the body. Often, victims were blamed for their behaviour, for putting themselves in those situations.

When I went to talk to the victims, I often heard that they thought that people were just doing it for a laugh, and a lot of the hospitality industry—bars, clubs and festivals—said the same thing. They said that it was really inadequate to have the requirement to prove harm or a sexual motive. That was part of the reason, though not the whole reason, why we have seen such a woefully low level of prosecutions for this. It is my belief that we need to make sure we include this recklessness element, and that is also the belief of most of the campaigners that I have worked with, including Stamp Out Spiking and, of course, Richard Graham, who did a tremendous job. I hope that the Government will adopt this amendment and all the others.

[Lord Clement-Jones (LD)]

My Lords, it has been a privilege to take part in today’s Committee. I think anyone reading Hansard subsequently will get a much better insight than they ever had before of the risks and experience of young women and girls in today’s world, sadly. It has been a privilege listening to all the speeches, particularly on these amendments.

Like others, started by the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, I pay tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Owen of Alderley Edge, for the forensic way she has identified the digital loopholes that currently allow abusers to evade justice. As we have been reminded, she has been a doughty campaigner on the Data (Use and Access) Act, with a winning streak that I hope will continue.

At the same time, I welcome the government amendments in this group, which at least signal a positive direction of travel. For far too long, victims of intimate image abuse have been timed out of justice by the six-month limit on summary offences. The noble Baroness, Lady Owen, identified this injustice, and I am delighted that the Government have listened with their Amendment 300. Then, of course, we have a number of other amendments. The noble Baroness’s amendments go further than time limits; they address harms that the Bill completely misses.

In particular, I highlight Amendment 298B, which addresses the malicious practice known as doxing. It is a terrifying reality for survivors that perpetrators often do not just share an intimate image; they weaponise it by publishing the victim’s address, employer or educational details alongside it. This is calculated to maximise distress, vulnerability and real-world danger. This amendment would rightly establish that providing such information is a statutory aggravating factor and would ensure that the court must treat this calculated destruction of a victim’s privacy with the severity it deserves.

While we welcome the government amendments regarding deprivation orders, I urge the Minister to look closely at Amendment 295BB, also in the name of the noble Baroness. Current police powers often focus on seizing the physical device—the phone or laptop—but we live in an age of cloud storage. Seizing a phone is meaningless if the image remains accessible in the cloud, ready to be downloaded the moment the offender buys a new device. Amendment 295BB would create a duty for verified deletion, including from cloud services. We must ensure that when we say an image is destroyed, it is truly gone.

I also strongly support the suite of amendments extending the law to cover audio recordings. As technology evolves, we are seeing the rise of AI-generated audio deepfakes—a new frontier of abuse highlighted by the noble Baroness, Lady Gohir, and the Revenge Porn Helpline, as we have heard today. I pay tribute to her for raising this issue. By explicitly including audio recordings in the definition of intimate image offences, these amendments could future-proof the legislation against these emerging AI threats.

Finally in this area, Amendment 295BD offers a systematic solution: a non-consensual intimate image register using hashing technology, which was so clearly described by the noble Baroness, Lady Owen. We cannot rely on a game of whack-a-mole, where victims must report the same image to platform after platform. A hash registry that identifies the unique digital fingerprint of an image to block its upload across providers is the only scalable technical solution to this problem.

Like the noble Baroness, Lady Coffey, we also welcome the new offence of administering harmful substances in Clause 101, but the current drafting requires specific intent to “injure, aggrieve or annoy”. Perpetrators of spiking often hide behind the defence that it was just a prank or done to liven up a friend. This leaves prosecutors struggling to prove specific intent. Amendment 334 would close this gap by introducing recklessness into the offence. If you spike a person’s drink, you are inherently being reckless as to the danger you pose to that person. The law should reflect that reality, and I urge the Government to accept this strengthening of the clause.

Finally, we support Amendment 356B, which would modernise domestic abuse protection orders. Abusers are innovative; they use third parties and digital platforms to bypass physical restrictions. This amendment would explicitly prohibit indirect contact and digital harassment, ensuring that a protection order actually provides protection in the 21st century.