Crime and Policing Bill

Shockat Adam Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 18th June 2025 Commons Chamber

[Nick Timothy]

No, I think the Minister has misunderstood my point. Actually, I was about to move on to a related issue, which is that hating people and discriminating against them on the basis that they are Muslims, or indeed members of different religious groups, is already a crime. If someone were harassing Jewish people in the way that the Minister has just described, that would be a criminal offence, even if my amendment passed. However, as I was saying, Islamophobia is a made-up and nonsensical concept that elides the protection of individuals from hatred with the protection of ideas and beliefs, and—in my view—is therefore completely unacceptable in principle.

[Shockat Adam (Leicester South) (Ind)]

Can I ask the hon. Gentleman what he would like me to tell the family of Mohammed Saleem, the 80-year-old grandfather who was stabbed simply for being a Muslim?

[Nick Timothy]

That was obviously an appalling crime —I remember it very well—but I do not think it has anything to do with what I am saying in this debate.

In a free and pluralistic society, we have to be free to criticise ideas. There are laws to protect people, but we cannot have laws that protect ideas from scrutiny or criticism. However, the Government are pressing on with their work on Islamophobia. Only this week, on the very day that Baroness Casey said that the rape gangs were often not prosecuted because of the ethnicity of the perpetrators, Ministers launched a consultation on the new Islamophobia definition. That consultation is open only to carefully selected, invited organisations; it will last for only four weeks; and it allows contributors to remain anonymous. In other words, as lots of people have put it to me, it is rigged, and that is completely unacceptable. Parliament repealed blasphemy laws years ago, and trials for blasphemy had stopped many decades back in any case, but they are with us once more. Parliament must act to restore our freedom of expression.

--- Later in debate ---

[Madam Deputy Speaker]

I call Shockat Adam to make the final Back-Bench speech.

[Shockat Adam]

I would like to speak briefly to the issue of live facial recognition and new clauses 21 and 22 in my name. New clause 21 calls for a ban on live facial recognition because it is not safe, lacks legal legitimacy and is an attack on the fundamental democratic rights of the British people. It is the choice of authoritarian states and dictators and should have no place in British policing, which I remind the Minister is still by consent.

The technology is not safe. It was described by the Court of Appeal as “novel and controversial”. Academics have shown that the technology makes mistakes in the recognition of darker-skinned women in 21% to 35% of cases, yet 99% of light-skinned men were identified correctly. Caucasian females are also not safe—just ask Danielle Horan, who was escorted out of not one but two Home Bargains stores due to an apparent facial recognition mix-up. It is no wonder that the Court of Appeal, in striking down the south Wales experiment, ruled it a breach of public sector equalities duties in failing to recognise possible bias in the algorithms.

Facial recognition lacks legal legitimacy by operating under vague common law powers, unlike DNA or fingerprints. It is also an attack on hard-won democratic rights, undermining the principle that people should not be forced to identify themselves to police without suspicion. It has been used to monitor protesters, thus deterring lawful participation and threatening free assembly, which are some of our most important and enshrined civil liberties. Just ask the protesters picked up in Russia’s underground train stations or protesters and Uyghurs in China. The Government must think again.

New clause 22 calls for broader safeguards on automated decision making to ensure that law enforcement does not solely rely on AI algorithms and that there is always human review of its use. The new clause also calls for transparency, for the rights of people both to know what information is held about them and to contest decisions made by any AI, and to stop abuse by putting in the necessary checks. Those checks must meet high global standards, recommended by human rights organisations, and the best practice standards of our neighbours in the EU. Without human safeguards, the Government are ushering in a “Minority Report” world—a potential dystopia where the computer simply says no and there is nothing we as individuals can do about it.

Unamended, the Bill is dangerous and intrusive and breaks the fundamental contract between the British people and the police, along with the fundamental right to be considered innocent until proven otherwise. For those who think that that will never happen here, please take a look across the Atlantic. It certainly can happen here. It is time for the Government to admit that they have got this wrong. It is a sign of a strong, not a weak, Government if they listen to the evidence and change course as a result. Live facial recognition is not the answer and will cause more problems than it claims to solve. It needs to go.

[Madam Deputy Speaker]

I call the Liberal Democrat spokesperson.