Employment Gap for Blind and Sight-impaired People
(1 day, 19 hours ago)
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Lord Holmes of Richmond
To ask His Majesty’s Government what plans they have to close the employment gap for blind and sight-impaired people, and by when.
The Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Baroness Sherlock) (Lab)
My Lords, this Government are committed to providing high-quality support to disabled people, including those who are blind or visually impaired. This group will be supported to enter and stay in work through our pathways to work guarantee and our connect to work supported employment programme. Our progress is monitored through the Get Britain Working outcome metrics, which include indicators such as the health-related economic inactivity rate and the disability employment gap.
Lord Holmes of Richmond (Con)
My Lords, if you are blind or sight impaired, in the UK currently the employment rate is just 27%. If you are not disabled, it is 83%. Therefore, if you are sight impaired you have only around a one in four chance of being in work. This cannot continue. Will the Minister strongly consider establishing a taskforce to look at the issues and identify scalable solutions to close this pernicious gap that blights individual lives and scars our economy and society? To be clear: this is not a party-political point. No Government have gripped it. Will this one? Here is the rub: currently, if you are blind or sight impaired in the UK, talent is everywhere, opportunity is not.
Baroness Sherlock (Lab)
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord for that question and agree that it is not political. I know that his approach to this is not. I am grateful for how he approaches these issues. There are different views on the statistics. We can have a conversation elsewhere. A lot depends on how the definitions are made but, either way, the disability employment gap is far too big and needs tackling. As the noble Lord will know only too well, things got worse during the pandemic and have not really recovered.
This Government have made a real commitment to engaging, investing significant additional sums of money in supporting people with a range of disabilities and health conditions, including blind or visually impaired people, back to work; lots more tailored support; investment in supported employment programmes; and making sure that there are specialist disability employment advisers and coaches who understand how they can help people. We are also working with employers. I can talk more about that if it is helpful.
I am not in a position to announce a taskforce today, but we have announced the Independent Disability Advisory Panel. The membership will be announced shortly. The Government are taking very seriously the need to listen to the voices of disabled people, including blind and visually impaired people, as well as talking to the organisations that support them. I would welcome having further conversations with the noble Lord about how we can get this right.
Baroness Kramer (LD)
My Lords, the Minister acknowledges the sight-loss employment gap. How many full-time equivalent disability employment advisers are employed by the DWP—and do all DEAs have specific sight-loss training? Do access to work assessors and jobcentre staff have sight-loss training and, if they do not, will the Government seek to remedy this?
Baroness Sherlock (Lab)
I am not sure we have any published statistics, but my best understanding at the moment is that there are more than 800 disability employment advisers and DEA leaders. The Government’s aim and commitment is that every work coach will have access to a specialist disability employment adviser. The DWP provides particular learning for those who come into that DEA role, and that includes specific content relating to blindness and visual impairment. It is intended to give awareness of the challenges that people with sight loss who come to us may face, highlights the support we can offer, and explains what the DWP’s responsibilities are. As an organisation, we are looking specifically to improve that. The Government have recognised that we need to be investing more. We are going to put more money in over the rest of this decade, investing more money in hiring, improving the quality and the quantity of support providing help to disabled customers. We aim for it to be tailored to each individual circumstance, and that is what we ought to do. The answer is yes, we are investing in training as well as in having people on the ground who can help.
Baroness Prosser (Lab)
My Lords, I have been registered as partially sighted since December 2020. While I absolutely agree with the point of the Question regarding the need for employers to be more alert and more open to doing things differently—artificial intelligence plays a major part in helping blind and partially sighted people to see and proceed—I wonder whether the Minister will take away the point I wish to make, which is that there is a great deal of room for improvement in this House itself. There are many people who are very helpful but, overall, the system is completely dysfunctional. I thank the Lord Speaker for the work he has done in trying to bring this to the attention of leaders of various departments in the House, but there is no overall programme; there is in all the Civil Service departments but not in the political wings of our work. I hope the Minister will take that message away with her.
Baroness Sherlock (Lab)
I am grateful to my noble friend for raising that and for bringing her personal experience to the fore here. My department is responsible for disability in government, and we work very hard to be as accessible as possible. We have significant numbers of staff and colleagues who themselves have a range of disabilities, including sight impairment, and we work constantly to improve what we do and what we offer in that space. On Parliament, I think she makes a good challenge. The fact that Parliament is not subject in the same way as other employers to some of the legislative requirements does not mean that we should not do just as good a job as other people and try to make it better. I am very happy to talk to the House authorities on her behalf about how we continue to make progress in that area.
Lord Forsyth of Drumlean (Con)
My Lords, is the issue here not that the Equality Act applies to the staff in this House but not to the Members? Should that not be sorted so that Members are given the kind of support that we see in other parliaments—such as, dare I say, the European Parliament—where they are given the support to carry out their activities?
Baroness Sherlock (Lab)
I have always known the noble Lord as a good European—I am glad to hear him speaking up for the European Parliament today. To be honest, I am not sure we can use that as an excuse. We do not have to be made to do something to do it, and the House should look at it.
Baroness Watkins of Tavistock (CB)
My Lords, I had an aunt who was blind from birth, was funded to train as a physiotherapist—that was on careers advice at school—and worked for 43 years full-time. Is consideration being given to ensure that young people who have long-term permanent sight problems get the right career advice?
Baroness Sherlock (Lab)
I am grateful to the noble Baroness. Like her, I have had the benefit of a physio- therapist who is herself blind and is very good indeed. The noble Baroness makes an important point. We have been working really hard with our colleagues who work with the young people who come in. The reason we try to have tailored advice is to work out what works for that person. Just because it worked for the noble Baroness’s aunt, it might not work for her next-door neighbour in the same circumstances. It is about trying to find out what somebody is able to do, wants to do and has a passion for, and how we can give them skills and support.
One of the great joys of having my noble friend Lady Smith join us as Minister for Skills in the DWP as well as the DfE, getting the remit for adult skills, is that it is helpful to join up what we are doing to try to find opportunities for and support individuals, with them having the skills to enable them to follow through on that.
Lord Watts (Lab)
My Lords, the Conservative and Liberal coalition Government did away with Remploy. At the time that they abandoned Remploy, many of us said that it would leave the disabled exposed. Is it not the case that they did not make any provision for those people who were previously employed through Remploy?
Baroness Sherlock (Lab)
My Lords, I cannot speak to exactly what happened at the time that was abolished. What I can say is that this Government are absolutely committed to supporting people. I talk to brilliant, inspiring disability advocates in my organisation—advisers who have customers who come in and start out thinking there are not things that they can do and end up having jobs found for them and being supported into them. I want to do two things: enable people to get all the help they can, and persuade employers, many of whom want to hire disabled people but do not know how, that they can hire them and that they can thrive and be a real asset to the organisation. We should all get behind that.
Baroness Buscombe (Con)
My Lords, to the Minister’s point about employers, I remember that in government we offered all employers up to £52,500 per year for every person with disabilities to be supported into work. What has happened to that offer?
Baroness Sherlock (Lab)
I am not sure what the noble Baroness is referring to but, if I can find out, I will be very happy to write to her. We now have something called the support with employee health and disability service, which was developed with input from smaller businesses and disability organisations. It gives employers tailored step-by-step guidance as to how they can support employees in common workplace scenarios involving health and disability. It helps employers to understand their legal obligations and what reasonable adjustments may look like, and it even goes down to helping them feel confident having sometimes tricky conversations, either with a new member of staff or somebody whose health or disability may be changing. We know that lots of employers want to do the right thing; our job is to help them to do it well.
Fair Work Agency: Small and Micro Businesses
(1 day, 19 hours ago)
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Lord Sharpe of Epsom
To ask His Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the potential impact of the proposed Fair Work Agency on small and micro businesses.
Lord in Waiting/Government Whip (Lord Leong) (Lab)
My Lords, this Government recognise the vital contribution that small and micro-businesses make to our economy. The Fair Work Agency will provide better support to the majority of businesses that want to do right by their staff to help them comply with the law. Assessing how best to support small businesses will be core to the Fair Work Agency. That is why we are putting business expertise at the heart of the agency through its advisory board.
Lord Sharpe of Epsom (Con)
My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for his Answer, but small businesses continue to raise concerns about the Government’s one-size-fits-all approach to labour market policy. Can the Minister assure the House that in designing the structure of the Fair Work Agency, proper account will be taken of businesses with small or no HR departments?
Lord Leong (Lab)
The noble Lord is absolutely right to highlight this issue, and I welcome his continued engagement on it. The agency will provide straightforward, sector-specific guidance written with small and micro-businesses in mind. The requirements are not new—minimum wage, holiday pay and sick pay already apply. When changes are made, SMEs will have clearer instructions, simpler routes to advice and a single enforcement body—the Fair Work Agency—rather than several other bodies that currently exist. We will work closely with representative bodies to ensure that small employers receive the practical help they need.
Lord Carter of Haslemere (CB)
My Lords, the Fair Work Agency and the Secretary of State are legally one and the same entity. Given the extent of enforcement and police powers which the agency will enjoy, will the service level agreement, which I assume will be agreed between the Secretary of State and the agency, ensure that the agency has full operational independence from the Secretary of State?
Lord Leong (Lab)
The noble Lord is absolutely right. The Fair Work Agency will be set up as an executive agency independent of the Secretary of State. However, it will have to report to the Secretary of State for its actions and enforcement. It will bring the four current enforcement units together into a single unit that all businesses should be able to address, and it will simplify the whole issue.
Baroness O’Grady of Upper Holloway (Lab)
My Lords, many businesses of all sizes will welcome the simplification that the establishment of the Fair Work Agency represents in terms of the enforcement regime, but does the Minister share my concern about the spread of bogus self-employment through a range of sectors, from logistics to construction and retail? Does he share the view of the newly appointed chair of the Fair Work Agency that a priority must be a crackdown on sham self-employment in order that the Employment Rights Act is a success and that workers who suffer those contracts get the minimum wages and rights that they have earned?
Lord Leong (Lab)
My noble friend is right draw attention to this matter, on which she has long been a thoughtful voice. In 2024, the Low Pay Commission estimated that some 20% of workers paid at or around the wage floor were underpaid the minimum wage. Analysis conducted by the Resolution Foundation suggests that 900,000 UK workers per year have their holiday pay withheld, worth some £2.1 billion. A similar analysis published by the Trades Union Congress estimated that 2 million workers do not receive their holiday pay and entitlements amounting to more than £3 billion per year, and 1.8 million workers do not even receive a pay slip. My noble friend is absolutely right. We need to crack down on these shambolic practices, and the Fair Work Agency will address them.
Lord Fox (LD)
The Minister has already said that this new body will involve existing bodies, many pointing in opposite directions in their reporting. The Gangmasters and Labour Abuse Authority points to the Home Office, the Director of Labour Market Enforcement points elsewhere, and there will be bits of Treasury in there. This will not be a simple exercise in creating a new organisation. During the passage of the Bill, my Amendment 277 sought a full review of the process for this before the enactment of the Bill. The then Minister declined but undertook to do extensive consultation. Can the Minister confirm that that consultation will still happen? Can he give your Lordships’ House some idea of when the statutory instruments required to enact this organisation will come? When are the Government expecting it to be fully operational?
Lord Leong (Lab)
I thank the noble Lord for reminding us of his amendment in Committee. As far as I know, and I will obviously correct by way of a letter, the consultation is happening and statutory instruments—secondary legislation—will follow suit. We hope to get this up and running by April 2026.
Lord Leigh of Hurley (Con)
My Lords, the one thing one would have thought the Government had learned from the Budget is that business cannot deal with uncertainty. Most of the Fair Work Agency legislation is going to be in secondary legislation, so we need to know exactly when that is going to come out. Importantly, as my noble friend said, the SME community is very worried. SMEs employ 16 million people. Will the Government commit to set up a dedicated SME consultation panel to review the Bill’s rollout and try to avoid unintended consequences?
Lord Leong (Lab)
As I mentioned earlier, the intention is to have the secondary legislation in place and for this to be set up in April 2026. As for engagement with SMEs, we have stressed that there will be an advisory board within the Fair Work Agency made up of representatives from business organisations, big and small, trade unions and independent representatives so that they can feed in their concerns and so that the Fair Work Agency will be able to do its job.
Lord Londesborough (CB)
My Lords, the Minister just mentioned that as many as 400,000 workers are being paid under the minimum wage and another 900,000 are having their holiday pay withheld. Given the enormity of these numbers, how will the FWA be resourced to deal with the scale of its many responsibilities, particularly the delivery of an agile, fully-functioning and accurate database that has to cover more than 5 million businesses and 33 million workers to ensure that law-abiding businesses, particularly small and micro ones, are not unfairly targeted or indeed distracted from delivering growth?
Lord Leong (Lab)
The noble Lord is right to raise that concern, and I will set out the Government’s position. As I said earlier, the agency’s approach is proportionate and risk based. It does not create new obligations, and it consolidates existing rules into a clearer and simpler system. Micro-businesses up and down the country already comply with the minimum wage, holiday pay and sick pay, so there is no need for them to do anything else and they will see no changes to their day-to-day operation. Our focus is on serious or repeated abuse, not technical errors, and we will work with business groups to ensure that the transition is smooth and supportive for very small firms.
Lord Hunt of Wirral (Con)
My Lords, is the Minister aware of the words of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who said that, too often,
“regulation … acts as a boot on the neck of businesses, choking off … enterprise and innovation”?
I acknowledge that the Minister has an impressive background in small business, building up businesses. How is he going to ensure that the Fair Work Agency is structured in a way that ensures that it does not become the kind of regulator against which the Chancellor of the Exchequer spoke?
Lord Leong (Lab)
I thank the noble Lord for giving me an opportunity to set out the Government’s position. As I say, we recognise the pressures on small firms. That is precisely why the Fair Work Agency consolidates the current four enforcement agencies into one, thus setting up a simpler and clearer regime. It reduces duplication, clarifies and enforces, and it provides a single point of contact for guidance and support. We aim to simplify rather than add more layers of regulation, while ensuring that responsible employers —and I mean responsible—are protected from being undercut by those who abuse and ignore the law.
The Earl of Erroll (CB)
My Lords, should we not remember Reagan’s great stricture that
“the nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the Government, and I’m here to help”?
Lord Leong (Lab)
Well, I am from the Government, and I am here to help. I am here to help those businesses that do well and behave themselves; for them, nothing will happen. If employers abuse the system, the Government will step in and take action.
As this is my last time at the Dispatch Box for 2025, I take this opportunity to wish everyone a merry and peaceful Christmas and a prosperous New Year.
Office for the Impact Economy
(1 day, 19 hours ago)
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Lord Rook
To ask His Majesty’s Government how they monitor and measure the progress and impact of the new Office for the Impact Economy.
Baroness in Waiting/Government Whip (Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent) (Lab)
My Lords, I thank my noble friend for the work he has done to get us to this place. The office’s impact and progress will be measured against its remit, including an increase in the Government’s capacity and capability to partner with the impact economy, an increase in the number of partnerships across the country and an increase in the amount of impact capital committed to places and areas of government priority. The progress of the office against these areas will be monitored through a cross-government ministerial board chaired by the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister.
Lord Rook (Lab)
I thank my noble friend. I am sure noble Lords will join me in welcoming the creation of the Office for the Impact Economy in the Cabinet Office. Given the tendency of Governments sometimes in the past to work independently of social investment and philanthropy, I am interested in which areas and departments of His Majesty’s Government will use the new Office for the Impact Economy to foster greater investment and increase collaboration and innovation around important areas of public policy.
Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)
My Lords, the office is already building partnerships to benefit people in exactly the way my noble friend has outlined. We are working with MHCLG to secure match funding for the £5 billion Pride in Place programme, and with DHSC on the neighbourhood health implementation programme. In the early years space, we are supporting the DfE’s Blended Finance Facility and working with it on the Best Start Family Hubs match fund and of course the better futures fund, the biggest outcomes fund in the world, which will change the life chances of over 200,000 children over the next decade. This is only the beginning. The Office for the Impact Economy really will help us deliver on our promise of national renewal.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
My Lords, the Liberal Democrats are strongly in favour of a larger third sector—mutuals, non-profits and charities—rather than outsourcing, for example, special needs or care homes to the private equity sector instead. The Social Impact Investment Advisory Group’s report, which foresaw the setting up of this new office, said priority one was to establish
“visible leadership at both ministerial and senior civil service levels”.
Does the Minister agree that visibility has been rather blurred so far and that, if one wants to attract the wealthy philanthropists into partnership with the government to strengthen the third sector, a great deal more visibility is needed?
Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)
My Lords, I thought it was the season of goodwill and I genuinely thought there was going to be a positive question. In terms of visibility, let us be clear that the Office for the Impact Economy was announced by the Prime Minister—I am not sure how much more visible or committed we can be. Also, the main Minister leading this is the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister, who will be overseeing its implementation, along with my right honourable friend Lisa Nandy, the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport. This is being led at the highest level, with huge commitment. This is an excellent report, led by Dame Elizabeth Corley. We thank her for her work. We are now seeking to work with her and the wider team to co-design what happens next, to make sure that we can deliver on the promises that can come from the impact economy.
Lord Sherbourne of Didsbury (Con)
My Lords, I did not quite understand the Answer the Minister gave to the noble Lord, Lord Rook. I have gone to the website and I understand that the Office for the Impact Economy is going to act
“as a ‘front door’ for … impact economy relationships and general strategic relationships and … delivery relationships”,
all through a “huband spoke model”. Can the Minister explain in plain English what it is going to do?
Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)
My Lords, I praise the civil servants that are genuinely communicating well in this space. With regard to the hub-and-spoke model, the Office for the Impact Economy is based in the Cabinet Office, working with civil servants across the departments that will be able to help deliver it. We are trying to create a one-stop shop for philanthropists, social enterprises and social purpose-driven businesses so they know one place to come, and then it is up to government to be able to facilitate what they need. We are talking about potential investment— as was established by the report published last month— of £106 billion of assets; £42 billion is already being spent on government priorities. This is to make sure everyone is swimming in the right direction by providing a one-stop shop. I hope that provides a level of basic English for the noble Lord.
The Lord Bishop of Derby
My Lords, I am pleased to endorse the Government’s intentional investment in social impact, but may I ask the Minister how the new Office for the Impact Economy plans specifically to engage with faith-based organisations and faith-motivated individuals, including—but not exclusively—from the Christian community, to optimise the reach for common good of such faith-driven philanthropy?
Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)
I thank the right reverend Prelate. She raises a very important point, especially at this time of year when many people are considering their charitable donations. The UK has a proud tradition of charitable giving and philanthropy and I take this opportunity to thank our country’s faith communities for their generosity towards charitable causes. The Government are determined to create a more supportive environment for philanthropy and we will work to make giving as easy, compelling and impactful as possible. The new Office for the Impact Economy will work with philanthropic foundations and institutions, many of which are faith based, to explore how we can make this happen. For example, where I believe both the church and other faith communities can clearly assist is with DCMS’s efforts on place-based philanthropy. Noble Lords will appreciate that faith communities tend to have a footprint in every community and, when we are seeking to ensure impactful reach in disadvantaged communities, working with faith-based communities will be the most important way of achieving that.
Baroness Bull (CB)
My Lords, in launching this new office, Darren Jones noted:
“Change comes as much from the ground up as from the top down”.
He highlighted the crucial role of people who know their local area and communities, and know
“the problems and the opportunities inside and out”.
The issue is that these community groups may not recognise themselves in the term “impact economy”. Can the noble Baroness say how the office will tailor its approach to ensure it reaches not just people who have this kind of language available but are truly on the ground doing the work?
Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)
This is a genuinely important point from the noble Baroness. There are several parts to this: it is about empowering local communities but also ensuring that there is training undertaken, so that community groups can genuinely access some of the funds. I used to run a national charity and am very aware of how challenging it can be for local charities to access some philanthropic pots of money. There are two schemes where I think that we genuinely will be able to work with communities. The first is the Pride in Place scheme, where we are seeking to deliver over £5 billion-worth of funding in 244 areas. We are talking in this space about £2 million per year for 10 years in specific communities; I should declare that my husband is on the board of my local Pride in Place scheme in Bentilee. We will also hope to work with them to ensure match funding to expand that £2 million to up to £4 million a year, which can genuinely make a difference at the award-based community level. There is also the better futures fund, which is an outcomes-based fund. It is government saying not what needs to be done but what ultimately we need to achieve, and leaving it up to local people to determine how to get there.
Baroness Finn (Con)
My Lords, while the objectives of the Office for the Impact Economy are welcome, the creation of a new office is no guarantee of delivery. We have seen how other co-ordinating bodies, such as the Government’s newly reformed mission boards, have struggled to translate cross-government ambitions into outcomes. The Office for Value for Money has been closed down, at a cost of the taxpayer of £1.6 million. What assurances can the noble Baroness give that this office will be different, and what specific measures have the Government incorporated to ensure that it achieves tangible and measurable results?
Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)
And there was me hoping for Christmas miracles and not for the Grinch.
Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)
Thank you for the “Merry Christmas”.
My Lords, let us be clear about why this is so extraordinary and exceptional. We are working to bring together social investors, social enterprises and philanthropists to deliver, using their expertise and ours to make sure that this works. Already, a significant number of assets are delivering. Why do I think this will be so successful? Only last month, Legal & General announced an additional £2 billion of investment in this space, which is going to lead to an additional 24,000 jobs and 10,000 social and affordable homes. When we talk about what this Government are trying to do for our national renewal, it is about 1.5 million homes and homes anchored in communities. This is about delivering for every corner of society; that is what we are doing with the Office for the Impact Economy.
Special Educational Needs: Investment
(1 day, 19 hours ago)
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Lord Addington
To ask His Majesty’s Government whether the £3 billion investment in additional places for children with special educational needs will involve the construction of new settings, or adaptations of existing educational establishments.
The Minister of State, Department for Education and Department for Work and Pensions (Baroness Smith of Malvern) (Lab)
My Lords, the £3 billion in high needs capital announced last week is intended to support children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities and those who require alternative provision by creating facilities within mainstream schools that can deliver more flexible support adapted to suit people’s needs. It can also be used to adapt mainstream schools to be more accessible and create special school places for pupils with the most complex needs through expanding existing settings or stand-alone schools where this is necessary.
Lord Addington (LD)
I thank the Minister for that reply. However, can the Government give us some idea of how this will work for those who have less complicated needs and probably are more frequent in number? What will this do to support those who might just get by with a little bit of help, as opposed to those with very complicated needs who will have less of their education in the mainstream classroom?
Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
The noble Lord makes a very important point. This funding is an opportunity to support those pupils to remain in schools close to home and enable them to learn and thrive alongside their friends, in environments that support their learning, by developing safe and quiet spaces and improving the accessibility of mainstream schools. That is a large part of what we expect this additional funding to support, precisely so that children can learn and thrive alongside their friends in mainstream schools and be identified earlier in order to do that.
Baroness Watkins of Tavistock (CB)
My Lords, I fully support the strategy to increase the number of SEND pupils in mainstream schools, subject to adequate funding to provide relevant support and teaching staff. However, there remains a small proportion of pupils with very special needs who will need further help that cannot be provided in such schools. Can the Minister explain how these young people’s needs will be met in future?
Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
The noble Baroness is absolutely right: there will be a small number of children for whom the excellent special schools that we already have—or, in some cases, additional spaces in special schools—will be the most appropriate way to support them. That is why the approach that we are taking with respect to the special school pipeline of free schools is to enable local authorities, which have responsibility for providing those places, to determine whether the funding is best used in mainstream schools or whether they need additional special schools to meet those exceptional circumstances that the noble Baroness talked about.
Baroness Spielman (Con)
My Lords, this announcement was part of a bigger announcement that cancelled many long-awaited new special schools. I would like to ask the Minister: what assessment has been made of parents’ views on whether their children’s needs are likely to be as well served in mainstream schools? What assessment has been made of the kinds of SEN provision and interventions that have real value to young people beyond just comfort and reassurance? What assessment has been made of the many types of SEN provision to determine what represents real value from a stretched public purse?
Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
Actually, what happened in the special schools pipeline, as I said, was not the cancellation but a choice that was offered to local authorities over how to proceed with special and AP free schools. In making that decision, local authorities will want to ensure that the needs of parents are met. These are too often not being met in the SEND system up to this point, and that is precisely the reason why parents are so concerned since they have been struggling to get the provision that they need for their children under the previous system. In fact, 18 of the 77 projects in this pipeline were cancelled because no trust had been appointed for them and it would have taken, frankly, too long at a point at which we need more places with the specialist provision, either in mainstream or in special schools, for those pupils. We will be making quicker progress through supporting mainstream schools to provide those places so that there are more places more quickly for those children.
Baroness Blower (Lab)
My Lords, my noble friend the Minister knows that there is at least a problem, if not a crisis, in teacher recruitment and retention. Is she able to say anything positive about what the Government will do to seek more teachers who will be trained and qualified to ensure that they can work with children with special educational needs and disabilities in all settings in order to meet their needs appropriately?
Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
My noble friend is right, of course, that every teacher needs to be a teacher for children who have special needs. That is why, as part of this Government’s commitment to recruiting 6,500 new teachers, we have already seen over 2,300 new teachers for our secondary and special schools. It is why we are seeing a reduction in the turnover rate of those teachers; in other words, more are being retained in our classrooms. It is also why we are revising initial teacher training in order to provide more support and information for all teachers in how to respond to special educational needs in the classroom.
The Earl of Effingham (Con)
My Lords, the noble Baroness, Lady Blower, has raised an incredibly important point. Special educational needs pupils need new buildings, but they also need new teachers. So why has there been a decrease in the number of primary school teachers since the Government came into power? Will the Minister commit to more teachers for early years special educational needs children to give them the best start in life?
Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
As the noble Earl knows, or should know, primary numbers have been falling since 2019, which is why our additional investment—the 10% pay award for teachers, which applies across primary and secondary schools and which will bring in additional teachers—has, as I have already identified, increased the numbers of teachers in secondary and special schools, which is where they are particularly needed. It is already being effective, as is this Government’s commitment to keeping teachers in the classroom, not just attracting them in the first place.
Lord Mohammed of Tinsley (LD)
My Lords, given that one of the big challenges for local authorities has been school transport for SEND children, what assessment has been done on how quickly these school places will be delivered? More importantly, has any work been done on the potential savings for local authorities, because this is one budget that is really challenging for local councils up and down the country?
Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
The 50,000 additional places that will be funded through the £3 billion that we announced last week are on top of the 10,000 new specialist places in mainstream and special schools, supported by the £740 million that we invested this year. That goes back to the point I made earlier: this is not about saving money, but it is about saying that, for many children, they will be best served in local schools with specialist provision to care for them and help them to thrive alongside their friends. A side benefit of that is that we will no longer need to be transporting children long distances at great cost for education that they could more effectively receive closer to home.
Lord Hampton (CB)
My Lords, it is me again, and I am still a teacher. We can agree that the SEN system could do better. School action plus was a really good halfway house to an EHCP, where a lot of students could have their needs met without having to go through the EHCP. It was abolished 15 years ago, but there are rumours going around that the Government are considering bringing that back. Could the Minister comment on that?
Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
I am very pleased that the noble Lord is one of the over 2,000 teachers that we have been able to retain in the classroom, despite his busyness in this House as well—I am very glad that the pupils of Mossbourne get the benefit of his teaching. The Opposition’s previous Secretary of State for Education described the special educational needs system as a “lose, lose, lose” system, and I agree with her about that. That is why this Government are taking by the horns the requirement to reform the system. It is why my honourable friend Georgia Gould, the Minister, is at this very moment engaging in widespread conversation with parents, teachers and children about how we can reform the system so that it identifies children earlier and provides the support they need. Where necessary, it should provide that really specialist support for those with complex needs, and it should help parents and children feel more confident their needs are being met. We will have more to say about that in the White Paper that we will publish next year.
Unauthorised Entry to Football Matches Bill
Wednesday 17th December 2025
(1 day, 19 hours ago)
Lords ChamberUnauthorised Entry to Football Matches Bill 2024-26 View all Unauthorised Entry to Football Matches Bill 2024-26 Debates Read Hansard Text Watch Debate Amendment Paper: Consideration of Bill Amendments as at 11 July 2025 - (11 Jul 2025)
Lord Brennan of Canton
That the order of commitment be discharged.
Lord Brennan of Canton (Lab)
My Lords, I understand that no amendments to this Bill have been set down, and that no noble Lord has indicated a wish to move a manuscript amendment or speak in Committee. Therefore, unless any noble Lord objects, I beg to move that the order of commitment be discharged.
Violence against Women and Girls Strategy
(1 day, 19 hours ago)
Lords ChamberRead Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Davies of Gower (Con)
My Lords, we have been promised this strategy all year. It was supposed to be published before the Summer Recess, and then we were told that it would be delayed. On 27 November, the Minister said that it would be coming very soon. We were finally told this week that it will be published tomorrow. Constant delays seem to be a common occurrence. Can the Minister tell us why this has been so delayed? Secondly, there have been reports, including in The Spectator this week, from some working in the sector that they have been told about fresh cuts to services. Can the Minister tell us whether this is true?
The Minister of State, Home Office (Lord Hanson of Flint) (Lab)
I am grateful to the noble Lord. I said on 27 November that the strategy would be published soon, and I think 18 December is soon. It will be published tomorrow. I know that Members of this House have been pressing me to publish the Statement as soon as possible. The Statement will be delivered in the House of Commons tomorrow, and, if the Opposition so wish, I stand ready to deliver it in this House at the earliest opportunity—which I expect will be in the new year.
The noble Lord asks whether there will be cuts in services and why this strategy has been “delayed”. I remind the noble Lord that this is a strategy with an ambition to halve violence against women and girls over a 10-year period. That is a significant and complex but deliverable commitment. To achieve that commitment, through 12 meetings across the sector we have consulted with a range of individuals, and consulted across government and with the police and women’s organisations involved in domestic violence.
The strategy will be published tomorrow in full, and I hope it will be welcomed. It will have a series of measurable metrics to achieve that halving of violence against women and girls. The strategy is complex, but I hope the noble Lord will invite me to deliver a Statement in the new year providing more detail, which I will happily do.
The noble Lord asks about cuts in funding. We will be announcing a package of funding measures tomorrow as part of the violence against women and girls strategy. In May, the Government announced a £19.9 million investment to tackle violence against women and girls. In July, we announced a £53 million investment to fund the four-year rollout of the Drive project. This year, the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government has committed £19 million to domestic abuse safe accommodation, and local authorities will receive £500 million over the next three years to support safe accommodation. Additionally, the Ministry of Justice has committed £500 million to invest in vital support services that help domestic abuse victims navigate the justice process. That is what we have done so far. Tomorrow, the strategy will set out in more detail the funding options and deliverables that we will use to deliver on halving violence against women in girls over the next 10 years. I hope the noble Lord will welcome it when it comes.
Baroness Brinton (LD)
I am grateful that the noble Lord has outlined that he will respond to the Statement in due course, and I echo the comments of many Members of this House and the other House about its delay. But VAWG is going to be halved only when some of the key things that worry women at the moment are solved, so it is really shocking that only 2% of rape offences result in a charge or summons, and even fewer in a conviction. Can the Minister say what the Government are doing to address this problem and practice through both the police and the CPS?
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
The noble Baroness is absolutely right, and she will know that my colleagues in the Ministry of Justice, who are responsible for the prosecution element, are going to review this issue. In the strategy to be published tomorrow, she will see that there is a real commitment to up the number of prosecutions and ensure that criminal justice outcomes are achieved. It is also important that we give victims of rape, both male and female, the confidence to come forward and report their rapes in the first place, and that they will be taken seriously by the authorities. That is one of the aspects of the strategy that will be further developed in due course.
As I have said, although both opposition Front-Bench spokespeople have used the word “delayed”, there has not been a violence against women and girls strategy before. Currently, there is no such strategy to address the halving of violence against women and girls over a 10-year period. On the question of the delay of some 15 months since the manifesto commitment was given at the general election to put in place a strategy to halve VAWG over 10 years, I think that is a reasonable timescale in which to have produced a strategy. We wanted to get it right, and the document to be produced tomorrow will be available for Members from the Vote Offices of both Houses. I hope that they will look at it over Christmas and come back and challenge me on its contents in the new year.
Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top (Lab)
I thank my noble friend for coming to the House today, but I hope he shares my disappointment. Because violence against women and girls covers so many issues, one key thing is what happens in early years and in the neighbourhoods people live in, and how people understand each other and their needs. The Opposition did not ask for a Statement on the child poverty strategy or on the neighbourhood strategy, both of which are central to tackling violence against women and girls. This programme has to cover the whole of government, because every government department needs to be doing something to change the culture in this country, so that women and girls are seen as people who need decent opportunities, just as anyone else in our society does. Until we tackle those fundamentals, we will always have to look at safeguarding, rather than changing the culture so that women and girls are treated in a fairer and more decent way.
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
I am grateful to my noble friend for her question. Key to that is help and support for young men from primary school age, so that they are inculcated in respect for women and the rights of women. One aspect of the strategy, which again will become clearer tomorrow, is the investment and support we are putting in through the Department for Education in England in order to put this issue at the centre of educational opportunity. My noble friend may have noticed that my honourable friend the Policing Minister this morning announced work with the Department of Health and with neighbourhood policing to raise this issue still further. This is a cross-government strategy involving all government departments and devolved Administrations to make sure that we take action to halve this scourge over the next 10 years.
Lord in Waiting/Government Whip (Lord Katz) (Lab)
My Lords, I think it is the turn of the Cross Benches.
Baroness Gohir (CB)
My Lords, the Minister has said that it is a full strategy. Does the strategy address the disproportionately higher domestic homicide rates among black, Asian and minority ethnic women? Will there be ring-fenced funding for minoritised women’s groups?
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
I cannot comment today on the funding aspect—that will become clear over time—but let me assure the noble Baroness that the issue of domestic violence in minority ethnic groups is key. Measures will be announced in the strategy on honour-based violence, female genital mutilation and support for organisations, in order to help, in a political sense, deal with the issue she has raised.
Baroness Morgan of Cotes (Non-Afl)
My Lords, surely that fact that the strategy is being announced on the last sitting day—
Baroness McIntosh of Pickering (Con)
My Lords, Claudia Lawrence was murdered over 15 years ago, and her body has never been found. What comfort can the strategy bring to her mother, who has to spend yet another Christmas not knowing where her daughter lies?
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
If the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Pickering, will forgive me, I did not catch the first part of her question because of the competing noises. If she is saying that an individual is missing and is asking what help the state can give in trying to find them, if she puts the details in a letter to me, I will make sure that we give her a full response and put that into the system. I apologise for not hearing the start of her question, because of competing demands.
Lord Hussain (LD)
My Lords, violence against women includes forced marriages, and while the statistics show that this problem is being reduced day by day, one such incident is one too many. According to government statistics, 283 cases were reported in 2023. What are the Government doing to eradicate this problem through education? It is mostly parents and elders who are involved in educating people to stop this practice.
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
The noble Lord raises an important issue, and it goes back to the point the noble Baroness made. I cannot give too much detail today, but the issue of forced marriage that that he raised, as well as the treatment of women and honour-based abuse, will be covered in the strategy. I am sorry that the 10 minutes allowed has run out, but I give the assurance, which I know the noble Baroness wished to have, that a fuller Statement will be repeated in the House early in the new year.
Crime and Policing Bill
Wednesday 17th December 2025
(1 day, 19 hours ago)
Lords ChamberCrime and Policing Bill 2024-26 View all Crime and Policing Bill 2024-26 Debates Read Hansard Text Watch Debate Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: HL Bill 111(Corrected)-VII(b) Amendments for Committee (Supplementary to the Seventh Marshalled List) - (17 Dec 2025)
Lord Shinkwin
“Dangerous, careless or inconsiderate cycling: review(1) Within one year of the day on which section 106 comes into force, the Secretary of State must publish a review assessing the effectiveness with which operators of bicycle courier services ensure that their employees and contractors conduct themselves on the roads in such a way as to avoid committing the offences in section 106.(2) The review under subsection (1) must recommend any changes to the law which may be necessary.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment seeks to probe how the law could be changed to ensure that companies who contract the services of delivery cyclists bear some responsibility for the conduct of these cyclists on the road.
Lord Shinkwin (Con)
My Lords, in speaking to Amendment 346C, I welcome the other amendments in this group in the names of my noble friends, Lord Blencathra and Lord McColl of Dulwich.
Amendment 346C is a modest and reasonable amendment, which would do exactly what it says on the tin. It would require the Home Secretary to institute
“a review assessing the effectiveness with which operators of bicycle courier services ensure that their employees and contractors conduct themselves on the roads in such a way as to avoid committing the offences in section 106”.
The review, which must be published within a year of that section coming into force, would recommend any changes to the law which the review determines may be necessary. The rationale for this amendment is similarly simple: it seeks to probe how the law could be changed to ensure that companies which contract for the services of delivery cyclists bear some responsibility for the conduct of those cyclists on the road.
Noble Lords will not be surprised to hear that I approach this issue from the perspective of a severely disabled person, whose condition makes me extremely vulnerable to the impact—and I use the term advisedly to mean the actual physical impact—of being hit by an individual riding one of these e-bikes in, to use the legislative terminology, a “dangerous, careless or inconsiderate” way. To put it bluntly, the impact would be catastrophic; I would not expect to survive. So I completely agree with my noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe, who said on day six of Committee that you take your life in your hands when you cross some roads in central London. I do so, quite literally, every day, on my way to and from your Lordships’ House.
Now I entirely appreciate that whether I live or die is neither here nor there in the grand scheme of things. It would be a shame if I were killed, but the earth would continue to turn. I know that. Equally, I know that I am just one person. I think of all those people with visual impairments, for example, who literally risk life and limb just stepping outside their front door. So the review should consider the impact on them as well, and not just in terms of their independence, mental health and well-being, all of which will of course bring associated costs for the NHS and social care services, but of their employment prospects. For why would anyone want to risk going to work, given they could end up in hospital before they have even got to the office as a result of being hit by a courier cyclist on an e-bike while they were walking along the pavement or trying to board a bus from one of those so-called floating bus stops?
I cite this group as just one example—and of course there are people with mobility impairments like mine, or simply older people whose reflexes are not as sharp as they once were—to highlight how the dangers presented by dangerous, careless or inconsiderate cycling on e-bikes, particularly by courier and delivery cyclists, are having a far greater impact on our society than we perhaps realise. I would go so far as to say that the effect has been to airbrush out of the bigger social picture whole swathes of society. So while I am not suggesting that an assessment of impact should be disability-exclusive, I would argue that such an impact alone merits a review.
I say to the Minister that I am not laying the blame at the door of Government per se. The Member’s explanatory statement accompanying the amendment refers to the companies which contract the services of delivery cyclists bearing
“some responsibility for the conduct of these cyclists”—
the point being that the responsibility is shared. But none of us, either in Parliament or the Government, can deny that we also share responsibility for addressing the problem; in our case, by providing the most effective legislative framework to facilitate the change we all want to see—safer streets.
I am reminded of what the noble Lord, Lord Russell of Liverpool, said on day six in Committee, about us having made a “huge strategic mistake” by not factoring in the need for safety from the outset when these e-bikes were introduced. I agree with him. Sadly, some people, especially those in the Department for Transport, appear not to. They—and I dare say they are non-disabled and a bit slow on the uptake, bless them, so we need to make allowances—still do not seem to have woken up to the fact that this experiment has gone badly wrong.
That needs to be the starting point of the review. There must be a recognition—a fact which I sense the Minister implicitly acknowledges—that there is a significant and growing problem, which cannot simply be dismissed by officialdom’s obtuse obfuscation of, “Well, we are where we are”, because if we do not recognise that where we are is bad then we cannot move on.
Lime, the other e-bike hiring companies and companies such as Just Eat deserve to be in the dock and not in the saddle when it comes to this review. Yes, they will be part of the solution, but right now they are doing very nicely thank you very much from being a big part of the problem. They cannot be allowed to set or influence the review’s terms of reference or to sit on the review panel. That should be done by those most affected by dangerous, careless or inconsiderate cycling, not by those whose irresponsible indifference means they are profiting from putting people’s lives at risk.
In conclusion, I believe that the case for a review is compelling. As my noble friend Lady Stowell said on day six in Committee, courier delivery service e-bike users are “the worst perpetrators”. It is time we reviewed the situation. I beg to move.
Lord Blencathra (Con)
My Lords, my Amendment 416K supports a targeted, enforceable measure that holds delivery platforms to account where their operational model and oversight failures contribute to dangerous cycling on our streets. This is not about blame for individual riders alone; it is about closing a regulatory gap so that companies that profit from rapid, app-driven deliveries also carry responsibility for foreseeable harms linked to their business models and practices.
If noble Lords want a bit more excitement in their lives than the excitement of participating in this debate then I invite them to accompany me, when we rise tonight, to walk along Millbank, Horseferry Road and Marsham Street, past the Home Office. The excitement will come from them dodging out of the way of dozens of Deliveroo couriers belting along the pavements delivering to the thousands of flats in this area.
Even more excitement may come when I manage to confront one of these riders and we have an exchange of views, but not usually a meeting of minds. When I see them belting along the pavement, I drive straight for them. My chair is heavier than theirs, so they are the ones who are forced to dodge out of the way. When I manage to stop one on those massive, fat tyre, illegal bikes and speak to them, I can say with all honesty that every single one I have seen is a recent arrival to this country. Half do not speak English and do not know the law on riding killer bikes on the pavement. The other half do know and tell me to go away sexually, that they will do what they like, and who will stop them.
If I had said that a month ago, I might have been accused of racist comments, but on 4 December this year, the Home Office issued a press release to say that, in targeted action, it and the police had arrested 171 food delivery couriers for criminal activity, and 60 of them were illegal migrants facing deportation. The Home Office press release said:
“It comes as Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood has been targeting people working unlawfully in the ‘gig economy’. Border Security Minister Alex Norris has also met representatives from food-delivery firms to encourage them to do more to tackle the issue—such as using facial recognition checks to prevent riders sharing their identities with people who do not have permission to take up work in the UK. Norris said that November’s action ought to ‘send a clear message: if you are working illegally in this country, you will be arrested and removed’. He added: ‘We are tightening the law to clamp down on illegal working in the delivery sector to root out this criminality from our communities’”.
Good on you, Minister, and good on the Home Office—they have provided proof of what I have encountered every night for the past two years on the streets of Westminster, within hundreds of yards of this building. Good luck to you in trying to send them back to Eritrea, Somalia or wherever, because there is bound to be some immigration judge who will block you and cite bogus human rights reasons for why they cannot be deported. But that is your problem and not for today.
My amendment supplements what Minister Norris was doing. He exhorted the food delivery companies to do more to tackle the issue. My proposed new clause would give the police the power to penalise the food delivery companies financially, since money is the only thing that will make them change.
Lord McColl of Dulwich (Con)
My Lords, my Amendment 481 seeks to address the specific part that delivery services play in broader criminal activity. Delivery riders make regular deliveries to residential accommodation, which often houses vulnerable people. The identity of these riders is unknown, because they wear masks and helmets. Despite the anonymity of these riders, they can wander around inside these residential accommodations with impunity, especially because the outside door of these flats is often controlled remotely. Some of the elevators actually open into private apartments.
As has been mentioned already, a vulnerable 80 year- old lady opened the door of her flat from the lift and was confronted by one of these helmeted, masked foreigners. When she tried to shut the door, he prevented her shutting the door by putting his foot across the threshold into her apartment. You can imagine how frightened she was. Besides the fear that these riders can stoke, they can also commit crimes within the building. Some of them have put graffiti all over the place, so there is a real problem here.
Another thing we have to bear in mind is that these people are often involved in human trafficking and can be in the country illegally, as has been mentioned. This month, 171 illegal delivery riders have been arrested. My amendment is the first step in addressing all this criminal behaviour. It would enable an accurate diagnosis of the problem, the impact of which is particularly felt by the most vulnerable in our society.
Lord Hogan-Howe (CB)
My Lords, I support all three amendments, particularly the one tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Shinkwin. I have tabled amendments with general concerns about cyclists putting pedestrians at risk. The Government did not accept those. These amendments are different. It is no coincidence that the three people who tabled them have physical challenges that they overcome every day. Although as pedestrians we all face challenges with cyclists, if you cannot get out of the way, cannot see them coming and will sustain more grievous injuries should you be hit, that group in society is even more vulnerable. We should listen carefully to the case that they have made.
This Government and even the Lib Dems are a little complacent about responding to the general point about cyclists being held to account. There is almost a patting on the head: “There are not that many people dying or getting injured compared with those being hit by cars”. Well, 25 people have been killed by cyclists over the last 10 years, and it mattered to those families. It should matter to the Government to take some action.
The amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Shinkwin, merely asks for a review to gather evidence, particularly in the narrow area of commercial operations that employ cyclists, rather than just general cycling. The link between the cyclist and the employer has got more vicarious. Many of them are on zero-hour contracts and provide the cycles themselves. They do not always visit the operating centres of their employer. The employer says, “We didn’t buy the bikes; we don’t see the bikes. What has what they do when they are working for us got to do with us?”
I was out a few days ago with the City of London Police and saw that these people clearly are operating on behalf of a commercial company. There is a vicarious liability for the employer, but in no way is that link being established at the moment. The employers or companies could look at the data on the bikes. They could establish how often they were being operated. Sometimes this is beyond normal employment practice. They could establish which streets they went on. Many of them are going the wrong way down certain streets, which would be clear if they were to look at the data.
At the very least, this review might want to consider that an employer could do more positive things than just employ sanctions. They could start to educate their cyclists and reward them for better behaviour. Many employers of HGV drivers and bus drivers have schemes advertised on the rear of the vehicles: “If you don’t like how our driver is driving, please let us know”. They could do that for cyclists. You might say, “There’s no registration plate”. I argue for a registration plate. If you do not like that idea, they could have highlighters with details on the back advertising which company they were employed by and who you might report it to if you were not happy with the driving of that cycle. You are then starting to bear down on some of the accountability, which would gradually improve road safety. I am sure the Government are not blind to the problem, but people are worried about the amount of bureaucracy that would be needed and are frightened of having to establish it. I understand the administrative burden, but it is important to make incremental steps to start to have some impact in this important area.
At the very least, this review could establish some data on which we could all debate. It is insufficient for anecdotes to drive policy, but the anecdotes are so frequent and obvious that there is underpinning data that is not being collected. A review such as this would collect data, inform policy and make sure that any proposed changes were reasonable and likely to have some effect.
Viscount Hailsham (Con)
My Lords, I have a lot of sympathy with Amendments 346C and 481. I start from the premise of not seeking further reviews, but I am a bicyclist. I bicycle very regularly in London; I did so this very morning from King’s Cross to here on an electric bike, and that is my new usual means of transport when I come from Lincolnshire.
I think, in fact, that there are two quite distinct problems that need to be addressed. One is the simple behaviour of bicyclists on the road. There are already many regulations that apply, such as not to ride on pavements, to have batteries of an appropriate kind, to comply with traffic signs and all that. One thing that one sees all the time is an extraordinary denial of the law by riders. That is a matter of enforcement. I think it is very difficult to enforce, because, frankly, the police have better things to do with their time. I have some sympathy with that view. That is one discrete problem.
A much more worrying problem, which has been alluded to by my noble friends Lord Blencathra and Lord Shinkwin, is about the relationship between the delivery companies and the delivery riders. That relationship is worth looking into carefully. It is right to inquire about the following: what is the nature of the employment; by whom are the bicycles provided; what steps are taken to ensure that the riders comply with the law; and where does the liability to pay compensation arise? If the riders are regular employees, the ordinary principles of vicarious liability arise; if they are sort of independent contractors, presumably the delivery companies are not liable to pay compensation.
These are the sorts of questions that I think could sensibly be addressed by either the Department for Transport or the Home Office. I am not sure I want to see a review of a formal kind, as it takes a very long time, but I do think that there are issues seriously to be addressed about the relationship between the riders and the delivery companies.
With regard to Amendment 416K, tabled by my noble friend Lord Blencathra, while again I have sympathy with the point that he is seeking to make, I cannot support what he is proposing, for two reasons. The first is a technical one: if you look at his amendment, the liabilities ultimately on the company arise out of the bad and dangerous driving of the rider. On any ordinary view, the company itself is not directly responsible for the criminal act of the rider, so we would be taking a vicarious liability rather too far, in my opinion.
Secondly, and quite differently—and I say this with some diffidence in the presence of the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe—there are no circumstances in which I would give the police the power to levy an unlimited fine. We have had far too many anxieties about the police—on occasion, the noble Lord himself has identified some—and, for the sake of preserving civil liberties, there is no way that this House should do that.
Viscount Goschen (Con)
My Lords, I support this group of amendments, which very neatly follow on from the discussions we had on Monday, when there was a great deal of consensus around the Committee on the degree to which there is a problem, particularly with delivery riders on illegal e-bikes and delivery riders riding e-bikes illegally.
On my way back from your Lordships’ House on Monday, I saw a delivery rider riding the wrong way down Jermyn Street, about half a mile from here, doing about 20 mph. It is a one-way street and he was driving down it the wrong way. That is one anecdote, but walking here this afternoon, I saw a number of similar offences.
A number of different approaches to this problem have been suggested. The first is the major initiative that the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, would like to see—the registration of all cycles. There was some feeling that that would be difficult and perhaps a bit of a sledgehammer to crack quite a large nut.
The issue we have is that these delivery riders are flying under the flag, and are de facto commissioned contractors of, large companies whose agents, for want of a better term, are acting illegally. They are using illegal vehicles and are riding them illegally—the whole time. It is removing the incentive for those who seek to ride legal vehicles.
My noble friends are quite right to put the emphasis on those who can do something about this—the large companies that are commissioning these individuals to utilise these vehicles. They have to take responsibility for the actions of their agents. My noble friend Lord Hailsham may well have said that this goes beyond the law as it stands, but we are Parliament; we are here to change the law where we think that a change in the law will make a specific difference.
I have only one point, which is to urge the Ministers on the Government Front Bench, who have been diligent throughout the Bill and no doubt will be in the weeks to come, not to look too closely at their folders. I have not had a peep but I dare say the words are along the lines of, “Yes, isn’t it awful? There is a real problem. But it’s all very difficult to do something about”. This is the opportunity to do something about it, and I believe the Committee will listen very carefully to the Minister’s response, because we can all see illegal activity and people flouting the law.
The law is being brought into disrepute. There is almost no enforcement at all on this. Yet the Government, in the form of the Minister, say, “Well it’s very difficult but I’m not sure that any of the solutions that have been proposed will make any sort of difference”. If the Government do not like the amendments that my noble friends have proposed, fair enough, but let us hear their initiatives.
I feel that, if we do not get a satisfactory response, the House should not let this opportunity pass, when we have a Bill with clauses that deal directly with the issue of illegal cycling and sanctions. We need to do something about it. This is our moment. We look forward to a substantive response from His Majesty’s Government.
Baroness McIntosh of Pickering (Con)
My Lords, I congratulate my noble friends Lord Shinkwin, Lord Blencathra and Lord McColl on speaking to their amendments so eloquently. They take the debate one step further than the general debate that we had about dangerous and careless cycling, particularly on pavements—the main perpetrators of which are in fact delivery riders, as a number of us recorded in that debate.
What is particularly helpful about these three amendments is that they refer to the duties and responsibilities of the Home Office. The noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, has spoken about this on a number of occasions and we applaud the work of the City of London in pulling these perpetrators off the street, whether they are cyclists, e-cyclists or e-scooter riders, where they have broken the law. What is particularly appealing in my noble friend Lord McColl’s amendment is that he refers in particular to criminal activity. We know that e-scooters are heavily used in the theft of goods and telephones and the supply of illegal drugs. I almost posted a photograph of an e-bike that was mounting the pavement not far from here in Strutton Ground. I thought I would place it on Facebook. I am rather pleased that I did not, because he went on to do a drugs drop on Strutton Ground. There were schoolchildren and families there. My noble friend Lord Shinkwin’s amendment also highlights how it is particularly the disabled, the less able and the elderly, but also young people with families and those using wheelchairs, who are put at great risk. That has been highlighted by this group of amendments.
I shall put two questions to the noble Lord, Lord Katz, for when he sums up. What actions is the Home Office taking in this regard, outside the City of London and the one-off operations we have heard of, where 70 bicycles were taken off the street in one day? My husband is convinced that, every time one of these operations takes place, the word goes round the delivery drivers and they tell each other not to go out that day because enforcement is out, and therefore they evade that enforcement. What are the Government going to do to improve enforcement by the Home Office? We have moved one step further from the debate on Monday. This is a debate not just about transport and cycling but about people using e-bikes, pedal bikes and e-scooters for illegal and criminal activities.
I have a second question for the noble Lord, Lord Katz. My noble friend Lord Blencathra asked what happens to bikes that have been seized, but I have a wider question. What is the power to seize and confiscate pedal bikes, e-bikes and e-scooters? Do we as private citizens have the power to conduct a private arrest where we see an illegal activity taking place? Are we putting ourselves at undue risk in that regard? I hope that we will get a full response to these questions. Perhaps the Government might come forward with their own amendments because, where this is leading to criminal activities, as we have established it is, it is nonsensical to let it continue to its current extent. I look forward to listening to the Minister’s reply.
Baroness Pidgeon (LD)
My Lords, the amendments in this group from the noble Lords, Lord Shinkwin, Lord Blencathra and Lord McColl, are trying to probe the issue of who is responsible for dangerous cycling by cyclists working for delivery companies. While I support their aims, I do not associate myself with all the points they have raised and, indeed, the language that they have used. However, this is a real issue and one that many of us have looked at over recent years as we have seen this rise of delivery companies, whether it is for your shopping, takeaways or virtually anything you want from the click on your device.
This does not cover just pedal cyclists; it applies equally to those who provide deliveries on motorcycles and e-scooters. In the past, I worked on this at London City Hall to see whether we could work with, for example, the food delivery companies that we have heard so much about today, to see whether we could provide additional training for their cyclists and motor- cyclists, perhaps looking at some sort of charter mark to show that they had higher standards to deliver goods around the city, ensuring that we have professional riders providing this service on our streets.
However, the challenge is that most riders and scooters, as has been mentioned, are not employees of these companies, whose legal advice is that they do not want to go anywhere near that, because then they may be responsible for their cyclists’ or motorcyclists’ behaviour. In fact, you may find that some of these riders are working at the same time for a number of these companies, so it becomes even more complex to work out and identify which company would be responsible. However, the amendments raise an important safety point and I look forward to hearing from the Minister on this area about any ways forward to try to address this growing concern.
Lord Davies of Gower (Con)
My Lords, I rise to speak to the group of amendments moved by my noble friend Lord Shinkwin in what I might say was rather a poignant way.
The amendments probe the liability of courier companies, specifically for the actions of their employees who use cycling as their method of transportation. My noble friend Lord Shinkwin spoke of the threat posed by these cyclists to a disabled person, for example. Amendment 346C, tabled by my noble friend Lord Shinkwin, asks for a review looking at how the law could be changed to ensure that bicycle courier companies are held accountable for their riders.
Noble Lords will be aware of the explosive growth of bicycle delivery and courier services, and many of those courier companies are not held responsible for the dangerous manner in which their riders behave. Many of the most dangerous incidents are caused by delivery riders under pressure to meet tight deadlines and often operating fast, heavy e-bikes. Holding companies responsible, or at least requiring a public review of their practices, would help deter irresponsible riding and shift the burden back on to the companies that profit from high-speed delivery models. A review of this kind would also allow us to examine the employment models used by these companies, the incentives placed on riders and the adequacy of training, supervision and enforcement mechanisms. It would provide a valuable evidence base for any future legislative change, rather than relying on piecemeal responses to individual incidents.
I thank my noble friend Lord Blencathra for Amendment 416K and the passion with which he spoke in support of it. It would give the police power to issue fines of an unlimited amount to delivery companies for dangerous cycling offences
“under sections 27A (causing death by dangerous cycling), 27B (causing serious injury by dangerous cycling), 28B (causing death by careless, or inconsiderate, cycling) or 28C (causing serious injury by careless, or inconsiderate, cycling) of the Road Traffic Act 1988”.
We support the intention behind the amendment, whose aim is to hold companies that hire large numbers of delivery drivers to account for the actions of their hired staff. This is an important principle and touches on the important points of what frameworks and policies companies have in place to ensure that their own staff are abiding by the laws of the road. While questions would clearly need to be addressed around proportionality, enforcement and evidential thresholds, the amendment raises legitimate concerns about the status quo. I hope the amendment has made the Government reflect on whether current penalties fall too heavily on individual riders, while the companies that benefit financially from the delivery model escape meaningful consequences. I look forward to the Minister’s response.
Amendment 481, tabled by my noble friend Lord McColl of Dulwich, proposes a review into bicycle and motorcycle delivery services and their potential links to criminal activity. We are broadly supportive of the principle behind the amendment. It seeks to shine a light on a range of issues that are often raised by residents and local authorities, including concerns about organised crime, exploitation, immigration compliance and the impact of delivery riders on community safety.
Taken together, these amendments raise serious and timely questions about accountability, public safety and the responsibility of large delivery platforms. The noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, is absolutely right that the Government must acknowledge the argument and come up with answers. The words of my noble friend Lord Goschen summed it up perfectly: this is an opportunity to do something positive about a very real problem, and to do it now in this Bill. I hope the Government will engage constructively with the issues raised and set out how they intend to ensure that the rapid growth of this sector does not come at the expense of safety and public confidence.
Lord in Waiting/Government Whip (Lord Katz) (Lab)
My Lords, these amendments, in their different ways, seek to extend liability for the unlawful actions of cyclists to their employers or contractors. Amendment 346C, moved by the noble Lord, Lord Shinkwin, proposes a review of the new cycling offences provided for in Clause 106 one year after the clause comes into force. He set out its provisions with clarity, his customary humility and his personal perspective, and we are all grateful for him doing so. As I understand the noble Lord, the intention of such a review is to assess whether the new offences have impacted the standard of cycling by delivery riders, and whether further changes in the law are required to ensure that their employers or contractors take greater responsibility for the cycling standards of their workers.
To be clear, these offences apply to all cyclists regardless of the purpose of their journey or whether they are paid to do it. I, of course, recognise the very real concerns around the behaviour of delivery riders that we have discussed in this group of amendments, but I completely reject the idea from the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, that we are somehow being complacent and ignoring the issue. The noble Viscount, Lord Goschen, talked about the importance of using the opportunity to do something positive, and I will come on to that in a second. I am also grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Pidgeon, for sharing her experience from City Hall of the Greater London Authority, the mayor’s office and TfL.
We of course recognise the concerns about the behaviour of delivery riders, but it is harder to find firm evidence to suggest that their behaviour is so demonstrably worse than that of other groups that it is necessary to single them out for review—hard evidence, I would say, looking at the faces of some noble Lords opposite. Furthermore, it is not clear what such a review would achieve. The Health and Safety Executive’s guidance already makes it clear that those who drive or ride for work should have the skills and expertise required to be safe on the road. The key thing here is that the Department for Transport—we discussed this on Monday in Committee; certainly, I spoke to it on one of the later groups—is also developing a new road safety strategy, and we will set out more details shortly. That will be a holistic strategy around all elements of road safety including pedestrians, cyclists, motorcyclists, road users and public transport drivers—the whole gamut. I say to the noble Viscount, Lord Goschen, that is the opportunity for us to do something positive and take a holistic approach to improving road safety. We are not playing down these issues but just trying to find the best way of approaching them in a sense that is complete and wholescale rather than piecemeal.
Lord Hogan-Howe (CB)
My Lords, I am sorry to interrupt the Minister. In previous Bills, the Department for Transport has made exactly the point that he is making, which is that a strategy is coming. It was due in the summer of this year, we are now at Christmas and there is no date, so I am not reassured by that general point.
I was surprised to hear the Minister say that we are struggling to find evidence of the problem that we are all talking about, because you only have to walk outside. Our newspapers and broadcasters are carrying out surveys showing what we all know to be true—not to blame cyclists for everything in the world, but there is clear evidence it is happening, so I am surprised he said that.
Finally, I wonder whether the Minister would like to look into the health data. We have talked only about the police data. The health data is completely different. When people go to A&E, their GP et cetera for injuries caused by cyclists, it is not recorded in the same way as it is by the police. We have two sets of data which we are not bringing together; we only ever talk about the data collected by the police. I was surprised to hear the Minister say they could not find the data.
Lord Katz (Lab)
To be clear, I was talking about evidence of causality rather than necessarily data on incidents. Let me make some progress, and maybe the noble Lord will be a little mollified by the time I get to the end of my contribution—or maybe not.
The fundamental purpose of the new offence is to—
Lord Blencathra (Con)
I am sorry, but I am afraid that saying that there is no evidence of causality is just what the Department for Transport wants the Home Office to believe. The evidence is quite clear; there are no better words than from the Mayor of London himself, Sadiq Khan, who said it is a Wild West out there. Many other councils in London are now trying to ban bikes from their areas because of the danger they cause, and those heavy, gigantic food delivery couriers are the worst offenders of all.
Lord Katz (Lab)
Again, I say to the noble Lord that I will make some progress and then he may come back at me again before I finally sit down.
The fundamental purpose of the new offences is to appropriately punish offenders and deter dangerous cycling behaviours. There is no carve-out or special provision for delivery riders. To be clear, all road users will face equal treatment before the law under these provisions. I can also assure the noble Lord, Lord Shinkwin, that, like all new government enactments, the Crime and Policing Act will be subject to post-legislative review three to five years after Royal Assent, so there is the opportunity to review the action.
Amendment 416K from the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, would allow for food delivery companies to receive an unlimited fine should any of their riders be convicted of any offences under Clause 106. A complicating factor around this, as many noble Lords recognised, is that many such riders operate in the gig economy—the noble Viscount, Lord Hailsham, and the noble Baroness, Lady Pidgeon, set that out particularly well. We are not always talking about the relationship between an employer and an employee, so using what we would consider normal working relationship incentives and rule structures is not always the easiest thing to do.
It is worth stating, particularly as the Employment Rights Bill finally finished its passage through Parliament yesterday, that as part of that wider package of employment reforms, there will be a major consultation on employment status which will help to clarify these grey areas. Again, I cite the contribution that the noble Viscount, Lord Hailsham, made. I say in response to the noble Lord, Lord Davies, that is probably the best place to have a review of the grey areas around contractors and employers working in the gig economy. A problem has clearly been identified in the delivery driving sector, but there are many other sectors— I remember from my time spent in Committee on the Employment Rights Bill that there are lots of areas where the lack of clarity on employment status is causing all sorts of consequences.
Lord Blencathra (Con)
I am so grateful to the noble Lord for giving way again; I hope this will be the last time. If he and my noble friend Lord Hailsham are correct that the current law on vicarious liability might mean that Deliveroo and Uber Eats are not liable for the agents they are using, does he accept my noble friend Lord Goschen’s point that we are Parliament and, if the current law does not cover it, we can amend the law as we suggest to make sure that those companies are liable for the people who deliver food in their name, with a great big bag on their back advertising that?
Lord Katz (Lab)
I do not disagree with the proposition that the noble Lord makes. Of course, we are Parliament, but I suggest that we should legislate in a slightly more deliberative way than simply shooting at ducks ad hoc as they come up in the stall.
Viscount Hailsham (Con)
On that point, does the noble Lord accept that there is an essential distinction between vicarious liability in civil law, which is to pay compensation for people injured by employers or whoever, and vicarious liability for criminal actions, which is something quite different and very rarely imposed?
Lord Katz (Lab)
I am certainly happy to defer to the noble Viscount’s legal experience and expertise. It is worth the Committee noting that distinction and I am grateful to him for making that point.
To that point, the individual must bear responsibility for their actions and face consequences for them, which is fundamentally the purpose of Clause 106. There is no hard evidence to suggest that the working practices of these companies either cause or contribute to serious injuries or fatalities involving cyclists or other road users. That is a relatively rare occurrence. We understand the point that the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, made on the rareness; obviously, any death is one too many, but it is a relatively rare occurrence compared to, say, collisions involving cars and pedestrians. Where that happens, however, we are determined to ensure the individual is held fully to account.
Viscount Goschen (Con)
Before my noble friend responds to the Minister’s wind-up speech, I put a gentle challenge to the Minister that the Committee was looking for a substantive response. I believe he was supportive, in principle, of the need for enhanced road safety but was not seriously acknowledging that there is a specific problem around delivery drivers, often riding e-bikes, and that we need to do something about that. I did not note a wave of support around the Committee for his contention that there was no evidence that there was a specific problem. Frankly, that is not a credible response. There is a problem. Every Peer in this Committee and everybody outside these gates knows that there is a problem. We need to do something about it.
I very much hope that my noble friends Lord Shinkwin, Lord Blencathra and Lord McColl, when they come to give their intentions, will continue to press the Government hard. I hope that, on Report, if there is no movement—perhaps there are grounds for a discussion before then—they will bring forward amendments and see whether the Government have support or whether those who are seeking to change the law have support. Essentially, large companies are sponsoring and benefiting from law-breaking, and the Government are turning a blind eye. That is not acceptable.
Lord Katz (Lab)
In response to the noble Viscount, and perhaps anticipating what the noble Lord, Lord Shinkwin, will say, we are of course happy to do that. We have had a fair bit of engagement on many different aspects of this Bill, both before Committee and during it, and I imagine that will continue. Our collective doors remain open to discuss all the issues that the Bill raises. I would be very happy to meet all Peers interested in these issues.
Lord Shinkwin (Con)
My Lords, I am very grateful to all noble Lords who have spoken. This has been a very useful debate that has brought the Committee together on an issue that has affected and is affecting so many of us.
The Minister was very kind in his remarks to me personally. Can I reciprocate by applauding the loyalty with which he stuck to the Department for Transport’s brief? It is entirely commendable, but I do feel that that script will not wash. He will sense from across the Committee that there is real alarm at the situation that confronts us in the immediate vicinity of Westminster and beyond.
I agree with my noble friend Lord Blencathra that all these amendments, and, of course, as I would say, my own, are proportionate and necessary because, as my noble friend made clear, this is a case of our laws being flagrantly abused and broken. My noble friend Lord McColl is absolutely right, as I made clear in my speech, that this is really affecting those who are most vulnerable in our society, particularly those who, like me, have a mobility impairment or those who have a visual impairment.
I thank the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, for his remarks, because, as he said, this does matter. A review could be an incremental step to, in effect, reclaiming our streets and making them far more safe. Employers are falsely claiming wilful ignorance, and we need to stand up to them.
I thank my noble friend Lord Goschen, and I agree with him. This Bill presents the Committee with a unique opportunity to do something about this situation; this is, as he said, our moment. I also agree with my noble friend Lady McIntosh of Pickering that it is nonsensical to allow crime to continue. I simply say to the Minister that I do not think his comment that the Bill will be subject to post-legislative review in three to five years quite reflects the urgency of the situation.
In closing, my condition means that I have to be a risk management expert, whether I like it or not. I have no choice. We have a choice here, and we need to act. I am very grateful to the Minister for saying that he is happy to meet in advance of Report. I believe that cycling is a very good thing. I use my manual chair for exercise—it is crucial for pain management—but cycling or using a manual chair also has wider health benefits. Equally, this sort of cycling, predominantly by delivery service couriers who frantically break every rule of the road to deliver a takeaway, is not good for pedestrians or cyclists. I look forward to bringing this back on Report. In the meantime, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Lord Blencathra
“Dangerous, careless or inconsiderate cycling offences: supply of batteries for modification of cycles(1) Where an offence under sections 27A (causing death by dangerous cycling), 27B (causing serious injury by dangerous cycling), 28B (causing death by careless, or inconsiderate, cycling) or 28C (causing serious injury by careless, or inconsiderate, cycling) of the Road Traffic Act 1988 is committed on a cycle which has been modified since purchase with a battery, a person who supplied the battery for the modification may be charged with an offence if the battery—(a) has a maximum continuous rated power which exceeds 250 watts, or(b) does not comply with statutory guidelines on lithium-ion battery safety for e-bikes issued by the Office for Product Safety and Standards.(2) A person guilty of an offence under this section is liable on summary conviction to a fine.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment seeks to put a penalty on the suppliers and sellers of batteries used for the modification of cycles used in the committing of offences under the Road Traffic Act 1988.
Lord Blencathra (Con)
My Lords, I neglected to say at the start of my previous remarks that although it may be the case, as my noble friend Lord Shinkwin said, that the world would not stop turning if he was killed by an e-bike on the streets, my orbit would certainly be destroyed, as would that of many of us, if that were to happen to him. One possible solution might be that, when I fit a bulldozer blade to my chair, I can precede him and he can ride safely behind me.
My Amendment 346D states that if anyone is convicted of causing death or injury by dangerous or careless cycling, and if the e-bike has an illegal battery with a power rating greater than 250 watts or does not meet the approved standard, then the supplier of the battery should receive an unlimited fine imposed by the court, not the police. I think we would all agree that the concept I am trying to get at here is right. We must get at the suppliers of the batteries that do not conform to UL 2849, the US standard, or EN 15194, the European standard.
I admit that the problem here will be enforcement. Just like all the other illegal stuff we have wrestled with in this Bill—from knives to pornography—if it is sold online, it is very difficult to stop. Furthermore, illegal sellers will say that they thought the battery was for an off-road bike, which would be perfectly legal.
However, this is where the proposed new clause in my Amendment 416J might work. It would give the police a power that could be delegated to a local authority or other agents to perform. The proposed new clause says:
“If a retailer supplies batteries which do not comply with statutory guidelines on lithium-ion battery safety for e-bikes … the police may issue notices requiring the retailer to … recall relevant batteries from consumers … suspend the sale of relevant batteries, and … warn consumers about the risks of relevant batteries”.
Again, it is not perfect, and in some ways it is not nearly strong enough to cut off the illegal supply of batteries that are not compliant with either US or European construction standards.
My proposed new clause and the Bill are concerned with dangerous cycling. Recent figures show that there were 11,266 incidents involving e-bikes and e-scooters in 2023-24, and this figure is rising rapidly. Therefore, for the purposes of this Bill, we have to get at the supply of illegally doctored and excessively overpowered batteries. These are the same batteries that cause the most fires, including fatal ones. That is because the number of dangerous and non-compliant batteries in circulation is a significant and fast-growing problem.
Authorities rely on data regarding fires and product recalls to gauge the scale of the issue. The Office for Product Safety and Standards has issued 21 product recalls and published 29 product safety reports for unsafe e-bikes, e-scooters and batteries since 2022. Specific enforcement action was taken against the brand Unit Pack Power’s e-bike batteries, which were linked to several fires across England, with withdrawal notices issued to four online marketplaces, 20 sellers and the manufacturer.
The number of fires caused by lithium-ion batteries is surging rapidly. London Fire Brigade data shows that it responded to 88 e-bike fires in 2022; that figure rose to 134 in 2025, as of late September. In 2023, almost 200 fires involving e-bikes or e-scooters were reported across the UK, resulting in 10 fatalities. The rise in fires is primarily linked to unregulated conversion kits and low-cost batteries, often purchased from online marketplaces—but fires are not our concern today.
Viscount Hailsham (Con)
My Lords, I am sorry again to rather disagree with my noble friend, although I have some sympathy with the underlying problem. I declare an interest in that I have three electric bikes, all of them, I hope, with fully approved batteries. One is the Brompton, on which I go from King’s Cross to this place—very good it is too, and, I hope, wholly safe.
There is a problem with batteries—my noble friend has addressed it—and particularly with regard to fires. Personally, I try never to charge a battery in a house, even with my bikes, which were both expensive and, I hope, very good. There is a problem with them that needs to be addressed, but the real problem with the amendment is that, other than providing the occasion for inspecting the battery, there is no obvious relationship between the criminal offences specified in the proposed new clause and looking at the battery. There is no necessary or, indeed, probable connection between the battery and the offence, so I am very much against linking those criminal offences with the inspection of the battery. Moreover, as my noble friend has said, the enforcement problems are very great here, because most or many of these batteries are bought online, and trying to identify the contract of supply would be next to impossible.
However, my noble friend is right to draw attention to the danger of batteries which are inherently unsafe, and right too to draw attention to the fact that people are disconnecting the controls on their bicycles so that they can go very much faster than the law allows. Those are matters which should be addressed by the Government, but not, I think, via this particular amendment.
Lord Pannick (CB)
My Lords, it is of course a criminal offence to ride your e-bike at more than a specified rate. I am sure that the noble Viscount, Lord Hailsham, when he rides any of his e-bikes, complies with those requirements at all times. But if it is already an offence to ride a bike at more than a specified speed, it must surely already be an offence to provide a battery for the specific purpose of enabling the rider to break the law. I do not understand why that is not already a criminal offence.
Viscount Hailsham (Con)
I am afraid I disagree. On the roads, it is certainly an offence to use an e-bike beyond a certain speed—I think it is 15 miles an hour—but, of course, e-bikes are also used for off-road purposes, and at that point, the speed regulations are not in play.
Lord Pannick (CB)
Then the answer to the problem is to ensure that the speed limits apply whenever the e-bike is used. I fail to understand why it is a criminal offence to use your e-bike above a specified speed on the road, but not on the pavement. It seems ridiculous.
Viscount Hailsham (Con)
I use one of my e-bikes to go around my fields. In fact, I do not go at more than 15 mph because, first, I would fall off; secondly, it is not necessary; and thirdly, the bike cannot do so. However, I cannot see why, as a matter of principle, I should be restrained from going at more than 15 mph on my own land.
Lord Pannick (CB)
I do not want to prolong this, but the purpose of this amendment is not to regulate the speed of the noble Viscount, Lord Hailsham, on his field. The concern is e-bike riders on pavements, and I suggest that the answer is to ensure that people cannot ride more than a specified speed on the pavements, if at all. Of course, they are not allowed to ride on the pavement at all, so they should not be doing so. The point, surely, is that if there is a specified speed limit, it is already a criminal offence to conspire to provide a battery for the specific purpose of enabling e-bike riders to break the speed limit.
Lord Garnier (Con)
My Lords, we have heard some jolly clever speeches. It seems to me that the general point of this group of amendments, and indeed the previous one, is to bring this matter of great public concern to the attention of the Government during this debate. We are not now, this afternoon, looking for statutory perfection; we are looking for the Government to pay attention, and every one of us, be it my noble friend Lord Goschen walking here, or my noble friend Lord Hailsham riding at a reasonable speed from King’s Cross to this place, has our own experiences and anecdotal stories to inform the House and this debate.
I really do not think we need to get stuck in the weeds; we just need to get the Government to be a little braver. Yes, they should read out the departmental notes they have in front of them, but they should also realise that this is a matter of real and pressing public concern. The use of e-cycles by drug dealers and others, who wear the stolen uniforms of respectable companies to deliver drugs here, there and everywhere, with no lights on their bikes, wearing balaclavas and dark clothing, at night, placing themselves and other road users in danger, is a matter of deep concern. That is what we need to get across to the Government, and I hope they will take the general point on board, even if they disapprove of the niceties of the amendments tabled by my noble friends Lord Shinkwin and Lord Blencathra.
Baroness Pidgeon (LD)
My Lords, as we discussed earlier, we have seen a huge rise in fast food and other deliveries by e-bikes and e-scooters across our cities, and of course internationally too. The whole model for these deliveries is based on time— carrying out as many deliveries as possible in as short a time as possible. This constant pressure can lead to riders taking risks that endanger not only themselves but other road users and pedestrians. These risks include installing bigger batteries.
This group of amendments is timely and of the moment, given the rise in these bikes and scooters. However, kits are increasingly being bought online that are used to adapt regular cycles into e-cycles. These are causing not only serious safety issues on our streets but fire safety issues, as we have already heard. Therefore, the amendments from the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, look to tackle both the fire and road safety issues associated with non-compliant lithium-ion batteries. It does feel like there is a loophole in the law whereby unsafe batteries are being sold in the UK and are having a devastating effect. These are important issues, and I hope we hear some clear progress in this area from the Government.
Lord Davies of Gower (Con)
My Lords, as was mentioned earlier in Committee when speaking to Amendment 346, we take the issue of bike alterations very seriously. My noble friend Lord Blencathra raises a similar issue with these amendments, and, in placing the onus on suppliers, a two-pronged approach to tackling the issue is welcome.
We know that many of the most dangerous e-bikes on our roads are not the result of amateur tinkering alone. They are enabled by a market that supplies batteries far in excess of the 250-watt limit set out in law, or batteries that fail to meet even the most basic safety standards for lithium-ion technology. These batteries transform what should be a pedal-assisted cycle into something much closer to an unregistered electric motorcycle, which is often capable of significant speed and acceleration, and frequently used in dense urban areas, on pavements and in shared spaces.
There is also a wider public safety dimension. Unsafe lithium-ion batteries are not merely a road safety issue; they are a growing fire risk in homes, flats and shared accommodation. The London Fire Brigade and other services have repeatedly warned about fires caused by substandard e-bike batteries, often supplied online with little oversight and no meaningful accountability. This amendment would reinforce the message that safety standards are not optional, and that those who profit from ignoring them may—indeed, should—face consequences.
Lord Katz (Lab)
I am grateful to the nobleLord, Lord Blencathra, for his amendments on the regulation of e-bike batteries. Your Lordships’ House may recall the recent passage through this House of the Product Regulation and Metrology Act, which received Royal Assent in July and underlines the Government’s determination to take action on this point. Amendment 346D would provide for the prosecution of any person who had supplied an unsafe battery to an individual who was subsequently convicted of any of the offences in Clause 106 of the Bill.
While an unsafe battery—and by this I mean one that does not comply with existing product safety standards—could put the e-bike at risk of catching fire, particularly while placed on charge, as we have heard from many noble Lords, particularly the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Gower, this would not directly lead to a person riding their cycle carelessly or dangerously. The noble Viscount, Lord Hailsham, anticipated my argument and posited it more eloquently than I might have done. The battery is simply that which powers the e-bike: it cannot, on its own, enable the rider to overcome speed or power restrictions provided for in regulations. This would come from a broader set of modifications concerning the electric motor and other component parts, and I will come on to that in a bit. As the battery would not play a direct role in any incident leading to a prosecution of the kind provided for at Clause 106, I hope the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, will see that this amendment is not required.
In moving his amendment, the noble Lord also talked about the chips that allow bikes to be driven at frankly hair-raising speeds that make them unsafe for the user, let alone others. To be clear, those modifications are already illegal: e-bikes with those chips do not comply with the electrically assisted pedal cycle regulations. Therefore, there is already a law in place to cover this.
Lord Mawson (CB)
The Minister talked about taking action. Those are very fine words, but every day, many of us watch e-bikes and ordinary bikes going past the outside of this building, driving through red lights. Many of us have experienced driving up and down roads with people coming down one-way systems at us in the wrong direction. We have watched police at the side of these road, including here, taking no action whatever. What does “taking action” actually mean, in practice and in detail, even outside this building?
Lord Katz (Lab)
I am not sure whether the noble Lord was here for the previous group, when we talked at length on the wider issue of the use of e-bikes. As I said then, the DfT is undertaking a road safety strategy consultation, which will take a holistic view of road safety across all motor transport, including, very importantly, protecting pedestrians and those in mobility scooters and wheelchairs. That is the right way to approach this and is at the heart of the discussion we had on the previous group.
Lord Blencathra (Con)
My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for his response and all noble Lords who have spoken in this short debate. I think that noble Lords and Ministers are getting the message from nearly all sides of the Committee—apart from the noble Lord, Lord Pannick—that there is a real problem here that the Government are not addressing.
Lord Pannick (CB)
I entirely accept that there is mischief here. My comments were addressed at the specifics of the amendment—but I accept that there is a problem that needs to be addressed.
Lord Blencathra (Con)
I am grateful for the clarification from the noble Lord; I did not wish to misquote him. Following his comments, I note that, of the thousands of batteries for sale, none of them specifically say, “Buy this battery and illegally break the law. Add it to your legal bike and break the law by going on the pavement”—they are more subtle than that. The closest I came was in the example I cited in the debate on the previous group, where one company said that its bike—capable of speeds of 64 kilometres per hour—was suitable for “off-road and commuting”. The advertising is much more subtle, but everyone knows what is going on. These batteries are being sold for illegal purposes.
The problem I had with these amendments was that, to get them in scope of the Bill, I had to pull my punches and narrowly tweak them in some ways. Therefore, of course the amendments are technically flawed. I would have liked to put down an amendment on the chips, but that, I think, was not in order. To try to get at the concept of the problem, which all noble Lords support, I had to put down amendments that I accept are flawed. However, what the amendments seek to achieve is consistent with the rest of the Bill: we have had problems with knife crime, so, in addition to penalties for the carriers and users, the Bill has clauses trying to cut off and penalise the online suppliers—and the same goes for crossbows. Then we have all the sexual offences in Part 5 of the Bill, again with attempts to tackle the online supply of illegal photos, as well as lots more clauses on the online supply of illegal material.
I am grateful to my noble and learned friend Lord Garnier. He pointed out that it is easy to pick out flaws—I can pick all the flaws myself—and the technical faults in these amendments. However, what we are getting at here is that every noble Lord who has spoken feels that the Government are not doing enough on this issue. I believe that we can do a lot more. Of course, I want the police to grab every massive, overweight and overfast illegal bike out there and destroy it, but they will never keep up with the supply. We have to cut off the supply, and my amendments, in their inadequate way, were seeking to do that.
I am grateful to the Minister, because I think we have had a bit of movement over the past two days, with the Home Office now offering to discuss with colleagues how we can get this a lot better. I hope that we can, with noble Lords around the Committee, agree something on Report that tackles the specific problem, without causing great new problems of enforcement. Something needs to be done. I do not think we are prepared to wait for the Department for Transport’s strategy on safer cycling or road use, which we may never see. I suspect that, when we do see it, it will be grossly inadequate in tackling the scourge of huge, heavy, illegal e-bikes mowing down pedestrians on the pavement. Since both Ministers have been kind enough to agree to meet us before Report, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.
Lord Davies of Gower (Con)
My Lords, in opposing the proposition that Clause 107 should stand part of the Bill, I will speak also to my opposition to Clauses 108 and 109. These clauses were added by the Government without any debate on Report in the other place; therefore, they have not been subjected to the detailed scrutiny that they deserve. It is only right that, as the revising Chamber, we should fulfil our duty in that respect.
I will be clear from the outset that we on these Benches do not doubt for a moment the courage, dedication and indispensable role of our emergency workers. Indeed, the previous Conservative Government legislated to bring forward the specific offence of assaulting an emergency worker through the Assaults on Emergency Workers (Offences) Act 2018. However, we must also ensure that the criminal law remains proportionate, coherent and workable, and in our view these clauses fail that test. Clauses 107, 108 and 109 introduce a series of new offences on the racial or religiously aggravated abuse of emergency workers. The Government present these measures as necessary enhancements to the law to protect emergency workers from abuse motivated by racial or religious hostility. No one disputes the seriousness of such conduct. But these clauses do not simply strengthen existing protections; they create overlapping, confusing and potentially sweeping new offences that go beyond what is necessary or desirable in a free society.
The provisions duplicate offences that are already well established in our law. Threatening, abusive or insulting behaviour motivated by racial or religious hostility is already an offence under Sections 18 and 29B of the Public Order Act 1986. I completely understand that those offences cannot be committed inside a dwelling, while the new offences in Clauses 107 and 108 can be committed inside a person’s house. That is a key difference between these offences.
Both clauses also require the conduct to be racially or religiously hostile, but, again, that aggravation is already captured by the criminal law. Section 66 of the Sentencing Code creates a statutory aggravating factor for any offence based on racial and religious hostility. Furthermore, Section 31 of the Crime and Disorder Act 1988 creates a specific offence of using words or behaviour that cause “harassment, alarm or distress” and are religiously or racially aggravated. That offence can be committed inside a dwelling, so a person who racially abuses an emergency worker inside their home can already be prosecuted under the Crime and Disorder Act 1988. It is abundantly clear that there is absolutely no need for these new offences.
Clause 107 in particular casts an extraordinarily wide net. It includes not only threatening but insulting behaviour. This is a highly subjective term that will not create clarity or certainty—but do not take my word for it. The Constitution Committee of your Lordships’ House has criticised these clauses for this precise reason. Its 11th report states:
“Clause 107 criminalises ‘insults’ and clause 108 introduces the term ‘distress’. This potentially leaves people open to criminal sanction on a subjective basis. In addition, clause 108 includes a defence for ‘reasonable conduct’, which is not defined. As a result, the precise scope of these clauses, and the criminal offences contained within them, is uncertain”.
In Clause 108, matters become even more troubling. The clause would criminalise conduct merely likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress, again with the addition of racial or religious hostility, but with penalties that do not align with the broader public order framework. Here we see threatening or abusive behaviour that is already covered elsewhere reframed in a way that risks catching behaviour far removed from the core of criminal wrongdoing. While a defendant may raise a defence, the burden-shifting mechanism in subsection (7) is unusual and risks being applied inconsistently.
It is a long-standing principle that the criminal law should be carefully calibrated, limited to what is necessary and drafted so that ordinary citizens can understand the boundaries of acceptable behaviour. The law must be strong where it matters, not sprawling and duplicative. When Parliament repeatedly layers offence upon offence, we risk incoherence, overcriminalisation and legal uncertainty, none of which helps emergency workers or the public. If the Government believe that the existing framework is insufficient, they should amend those statutes directly and not create parallel criminal regimes that overlap and contradict one another.
In conclusion, Clauses 107 and 108 are unnecessary and duplicative and risk expanding the criminal law in ways that Parliament has previously rejected. They confuse rather than clarify. They undermine coherence rather than strengthen protection. We owe emergency workers the best possible statutory safeguards, but they must be safeguards that work. These clauses do not. For that reason, and in the interests of principled and proportionate criminal law, I urge the Committee to oppose Clauses 107 and 108.
Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)
My Lords, I will speak briefly because we have very important business in future amendments. I heartily endorse the comments of my noble friend on the Front Bench. Why were these proposals—which, after all, attract cross- party support, as indeed the 2018 legislation did—not brought forward for pre-legislative scrutiny or debate and discussion at an earlier stage in the other place? They were introduced only at a later stage. For all the reasons my noble friend gave, there would have been a proper debate about whether it is right to bring forward legislation that includes potential incarceration for up to two years for an offence. In fact, it is quite incongruent because it does not look at sexual orientation and disability, for instance, only racially biased hate crime in private dwellings. Why was it not brought forward at an earlier stage, when I think all sides of the House would have been predisposed to support it and debate it properly?
Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)
My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Gower, has explained all my reservations about these clauses very articulately, so I will not repeat them. They add an unnecessary implication that the public are a threat to emergency workers. Why are religiously and racially aggravated offences being highlighted here, as though members of the general public were somehow prone to that kind of behaviour? It is an unhelpful signposting because, as has been rightly pointed out, if emergency workers are dealt with aggressively or harassed in any way, we have laws to deal with it. To highlight this implies that there is something extra to be added, that there is a problem out there of the public going around racially abusing workers, and that there are particular offences in mind. Duplication of law ends up being virtue signalling. I am not sure that virtue is being signalled, but none the less it seems to be a box-ticking exercise rather than an effective piece of lawmaking.
I am also very worried about the notion of “insulting behaviour”. I am probably guilty of it; one does get frustrated sometimes. What on earth does it mean? It is entirely subjective. What is insulting behaviour? It would be helpful for the Minister to give us illustrations and examples of what constitutes insulting behaviour. How will people be charged with this? It immediately makes people fearful of raising complaints or of being frustrated in public. If the ambulance has not turned up for a long time and your husband is dying of a heart attack, you might be a bit fraught. Somebody might interpret that as insulting behaviour. It might be perfectly rational, reasonable behaviour and not criminal. I am worried that this is creating a toxic atmosphere where none need be there. I cannot understand why it is there.
The words “likely to cause” feel far too much like pre-crime. What is “likely to cause”? These are criminal offences. If you are charged with them, you will be seen potentially as a hate criminal. Therefore, the Government have to give us a very detailed explanation as to why they feel these clauses are needed, so that we can scrutinise it. As they are presently given, I am not happy at all. I will support any move to have them removed from the Bill.
Baroness Doocey (LD)
My Lords, on these Benches we take a very different view and strongly support Clauses 107 and 108, which recognise a simple reality. Emergency workers can face racially or religiously aggravated abuse whenever and wherever they are carrying out their duties, including in private homes. They cannot choose their environment or walk away from hostility. Their professional duty is to step into what are at times chaotic, volatile situations, and to stay there until the job is done. The law should follow them into those settings and make clear that such targeted hostility is no more acceptable in a hallway or a living room than it is on a street corner. This debate has shown that the issue is not about policing opinion or curtailing lawful expression but about drawing a firm line between free speech and deliberate acts of intimidation directed at those who protect the public.
These clauses are drafted to catch only behaviour that crosses that line in aggravated circumstances, and they sit alongside, rather than in place of, the wider framework of public order and hate crime. In our view, striking them out would send the wrong message, undermining our commitment to those who protect us. Looking ahead, it will of course be vital that their use is monitored and that guidance for police and prosecutors is kept under review, so that the balance struck here remains both proportionate and effective in practice.
Lord Blencathra (Con)
My Lords, before the Minister rises, could I ask a simple question? It would seem to me that, under the definition of emergency workers in Section 3(1)(j) of the Assaults on Emergency Workers (Offences) Act 2018, an emergency worker is
“a person employed for the purposes of providing, or engaged to provide ... NHS health services, or … services in the support of the provision of NHS health services”.
I think we all support the words of the Secretary of State for Health, but is he in danger of falling into the trap of criticising the BMJ for the action it has taken?
The Minister of State, Home Office (Lord Hanson of Flint) (Lab)
I will come back to that point in a moment. I think the noble Lord is trying to inject a slight bit of topicality into a different argument, but I respect his opportunities in trying to raise those issues.
I say at the outset that I am with the noble Baroness, Lady Doocey, on this, which is why we brought this forward. I am grateful to her for standing up and supporting the objectives of the Government in her contribution. I have to say to the noble Lords, Lord Davies and Lord Jackson, and the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, that I cannot and will not support their approach to delete these clauses from the Bill.
Emergency workers, as the noble Baroness has said, risk their safety every day to protect the public. They deserve robust protection through legislation, especially against abuse directed towards them because of their protected characteristics, which is not only harmful but erodes the principle of respect and public service, which are core values of this democracy.
As the noble Baroness rightly said, when emergency workers walk through a door of a private dwelling, they are faced with the circumstances in that private dwelling; they cannot walk away. They are there because of an emergency—perhaps medical, police or fire—and, if they face abuse in that private dwelling, then they deserve our support, just as they have our support if they face abuse on the street for a racially aggravated reason. If somebody does something at the end of their path on a street in Acacia Avenue and abuses them, they will find themselves under the course of the law on those matters.
I believe—and this is what these clauses are about—that, if the emergency worker is racially abused in the property, then they deserve that protection. It is critical for sectors such as health, fire and policing to have that legal support. We cannot leave them, as the noble Baroness rightly said, to be abused. The law must recognise this and make sure we have proper protection.
Currently, as has been mentioned, the Public Order Act 1986 and Section 31 of the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 provide important safeguards in public spaces. It is not acceptable to call somebody a racially abusive name in a public space, so why is it to call them that name in a place of a private dwelling? It is not acceptable, so we are going to bring those clauses into play.
The noble Lord asks why we do this. We do this because Sergeant Candice Gill of Surrey Police, supported by the deputy chief constable—and, may I just say, by the Conservative police and crime commissioner for Surrey—has campaigned for this change in the law, having personally experienced racial abuse in a private home. It is not a sort of technical matter that the noble Baroness or the noble Lord, Lord Jackson, have mentioned; it is a real issue of racial abuse in a private dwelling to a police officer—who is doing her job, serving and trying to protect and support the public, and is being racially abused with no consequence whatsoever. Sergeant Candice Gill, after whom I would be proud to call this legislation Candice’s law, is campaigning and has campaigned to make this an amendment to the Bill.
The noble Lord, Lord Jackson, asked why we brought it forward in the House of Commons as an amendment. I will tell him why: it was brought to our attention, it is an action we do not support, and it is an area where we think action needs to be taken. That is why we have brought it. I do not think it is fair that people are racially abused in homes. Sergeant Candice Gill has campaigned on this and has brought it to the attention of the Government; we brought an amendment forward in the House of Commons which is now before this House, and I believe it should have support.
Clauses 107 to 109 will close that legislative loophole. The removal of the dwelling exception will make racially or religiously aggravated abuse of an emergency worker in a private dwelling an offence. The change will ensure that offenders prosecuted under Clause 107 face a maximum sentence of two years’ imprisonment. The offence in Clause 108 will be liable to a fine not exceeding level 4. As I have said, Lisa Townsend, the Conservative police and crime commissioner for Surrey, said:
“This long-overdue change to the law would never have happened without Sgt Gill’s courage and determination”.
I think we owe this to Sergeant Gill and any other officer, health worker, fire service worker or police officer who has been racially abused in a home where they have gone to help support individuals. They deserve our support.
Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)
My Lords, for the avoidance of doubt, I think we need to put it on record that everyone deprecates racially aggravated abuse of hard-working, decent emergency workers—that is taken as read. But the noble Lord is asking us to consider legislation when we already have a situation, under Section 66 of the Sentencing Act 2020, which permits a court to consider any offence that has been racially or religiously aggravated. Section 31 of the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 provides for a separate offence where a person commits an offence under Sections 4, 4A or 5 of the Public Order Act.
Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)
Much as I would love to be intervened on by the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, who I believe will be supporting my amendment later on, I am intervening on the Minister, and we are not allowed to intervene on interventions.
If I may beg the Committee’s indulgence, I finally say to the Minister that the Select Committee on the Constitution specifically said:
“Clause 107 criminalises ‘insults’ and clause 108 introduces the term ‘distress’. This potentially leaves people open to criminal sanction on a subjective basis”.
Not only do we already have existing legislation, but the language in this new legislation is sufficiently loose that it will give rise, I think, to unintended consequences.
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
I hope the noble Lord will accept that I am not indicating that he or anybody else would accept that language, but the point is that we have to define and be clearer about the definition in relation to racially aggravated insults. The reason that we brought this forward is that, on the back of police representations from senior officers in Surrey Police—and from Sergeant Candice Gill, who was herself racially abused—and with the support of the Police and Crime Commissioner for Surrey, having examined this internally, we believe that the law needs to be clarified, which is why we have brought this legislation forward.
The noble Lord also asked me to examine why it is covering only race and religion, why we do not cover protected characteristics of sexual orientation, transgender identity and disability, and why the Government have not tabled such an amendment. He will know that the Law Commission is already examining its review of hate crime laws. It is a complex area, and it is important we get the changes right. I will tell him this: we are considering that and have given a manifesto commitment to do so, and, ensuring that we do that, we will bring forward conclusions at Report stage in this House to give effect to those manifesto commitments on sexual orientation, transgender identity and disability to extend the proposals still further. I give him notice of that now so that he does not accuse me of pulling a fast one on Report. We will do that, but we will have to bring forward the details of it in due course.
Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)
Briefly, the noble Lord, Lord Jackson of Peterborough, is quite right that I have long shared some concerns about the rubric and precise drafting of concepts of alarm and distress—we are coming to them later—so of course I have concerns about them being adopted into the precise drafting of the offence. But, on the basic principle, is not the answer to the noble Lord, Lord Jackson of Peterborough, that there is no point in citing provisions on racially aggravated offences if the conduct is not an offence and that the justification for taking the serious step of applying Public Order Act principles to a domestic dwelling is that these emergency workers have no choice but to be in that dwelling, sometimes putting themselves in harm’s way as part of their service to the public? On the principle of having an offence such as this, I wonder whether my noble friend agrees.
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
I do agree with my noble friend. As I said in my introductory remarks and as the noble Baroness, Lady Doocey, said, when an emergency worker turns up at a house and enters that property for a health reason concerning an individual in the property, a criminal justice reason involving activity that is causing threat and alarm and/or fire service duties, they do so to fulfil a duty. They have to stay in that property. If they are abused on the street before they enter the property, that is a punishable offence, yet unless this law change is accepted, when they enter the property that abuse is considered a principal part of the job that they have to just take on the chin. I do not accept that. That is why we included Clauses 107 to 109.
Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)
I am inordinately grateful to the Minister for giving away, but he will know, because he was a diligent and assiduous constituency MP, that many of the people who go into clinical settings—for instance, A&E—are very distressed, discombobulated and upset about their condition, do not quite know what is going on and will sometimes say things they regret. I am not saying that is right. Some of them are not culturally sensitive, for instance. That may or may not reach a criminal threshold.
My main point—if we accept the principle that we need new legislation—is that, frankly, those people are in a very difficult position, and if we have loose and opaque language in primary legislation, we will have a situation where people who are not reaching the criminal threshold, or are doing so very marginally, are criminalised and are liable to go to prison for up to two years. Surely that is not something the Government are keen to encourage.
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
The Government are keen to discourage racial abuse against individuals who are doing their job, and that is what Clauses 107 to 109 do. The clauses set out in legislation a broad thrust of definitions. Ultimately, in these cases, police and health workers usually have body-worn cameras on and the police will judge evidential material to determine whether they wish to refer it to the CPS. The CPS will review the incident that has led to the potential referral and determine whether it meets the evidential threshold and is worthy of prosecution. Then, if it comes before a court, it will be for that court to determine whether that criminal threshold has been crossed.
With all that, it is not a simple matter of us passing the legislation; it is also a matter of the judgment of police officers, CPS officials and ultimately a judge or jury in determining the outcome of those cases. As with most legislation, I want none of this to go to court. I want it to change the behaviour of people who are looking at a charge of using racially abusive language not on the street but in their home. I hope it sets a minimum standard, which is what this Parliament should be about, in saying that we will not tolerate this. That is why I support the inclusion of the clauses.
Lord Pannick (CB)
The Minister is making a very strong case as to the principle behind these clauses, as did the noble Baroness, Lady Doocey. But will he address the specific concern of the Constitution Committee that the language used in these provisions—the concepts of “insulting” and “distress”—is too broad?
As he knows, the Constitution Committee concluded:
“These clauses should be drawn more narrowly and the Government should more clearly define the terminology within the Bill”.
Will the Government reflect on that before Report and come back with a more precise definition in these provisions?
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
I am grateful to the noble Lord. As ever, we will reflect on what has been said. The judgment we have made is as in the clauses before this House, as introduced and supported by the House of Commons. There will be opportunity, if the noble Lord so wishes, to table amendments on Report to reflect any view that he has, but this is the judgment we have made.
The principle of today’s discussion is that the noble Lord, Lord Davies, believes we should strike out these clauses. That is not a principle I can accept—I am grateful for the support of the noble Baroness, Lady Doocey, on that. Whatever reflection takes place on this, our principle is that we have included these clauses for a purpose, which I hope I have articulated, and I wish for the Committee to support that principle.
Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)
Nobody here is going against the principle that we should not racially or religiously insult, harass or be vile to people. We are talking about changing the criminal law and ensuring that the concerns of the Constitution Committee—not mine or those of the noble Lord, Lord Jackson, or anyone else—are looked at again, so that the “real life” that the Minister referred to in justifying this reflects the fact that in many instances emergency workers are called when people are at the height of distress. I appreciate that people will, can and do say all sorts of things, but I am concerned that that distress will be that much more aggravated, and a toxic atmosphere created, if people can too loosely start saying, “I’m going to call the police on you”, when somebody subjectively interprets behaviour as insulting.
It is reasonable for us to raise this in Committee. Instead of saying that he disagrees with us on principle, is the Minister prepared to look at what the Constitution Committee has said, and what is being reflected on here, to see whether, in order to keep to his principle, the wording of criminal law can be tightly drawn so that we do not criminalise ordinary people in distress who say things that somebody might subjectively see as insulting? That is dangerous, illiberal, potentially threatening behaviour from a Government to the public.
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
I do not think I am being illiberal, although I accept that the noble Baroness may have a different view on that. Later in the consideration of amendments, we will come to those of the noble Lord, Lord Jackson, that seek to further define some of the aspects of Clause 109. I am happy to look at the points mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, but the judgment we have made is that these clauses should remain part of the Bill. The noble Lord, Lord Davies of Gower, has asked that they be removed. That is a clear difference between us. I have explained why they should be included; he has explained why he believes they should not. If he wishes to take that stance on Report, we can have a discussion about that.
For ease of recall, I have just been passed a copy of a long letter about the Bill and these clauses, which I have been reminded that I sent to the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, on 12 November. The letter answers some of the points that the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, raised. I do not know whether this four-page letter has been made public, but I am happy to place a copy of it in the Library for the noble Lord and anybody else to examine.
Obviously, there will be the opportunity on Report for the noble Lord, Lord Davies, to again table his clause stand part notices and/or for any Member of the House, once they have had an opportunity to look at the letter to the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, to table amendments to meet the objectives that the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, has mentioned. We support these clauses, and I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Davies, will reflect on that and not seek to remove them.
Lord Davies of Gower (Con)
My Lords, I thank the Minister for responding to this debate. I spent 32 years as a police officer and an emergency worker, and I am still not persuaded by these clauses. As I established in my opening speech, all scenarios for criminalising racially or religiously aggravated abuse of emergency workers are already covered by the criminal law, and this is mere repetition. There exists a raft of legislation which permits the prosecution of a person who commits such conduct. The Sentencing Code already provides for any offence to be aggravated by racial or religious hostility. The Crime and Disorder Act 1998 creates a specific criminal offence for using racially or religiously hostile language. The Public Order Act 1986 also contains such provisions. It is absolutely not correct to claim that emergency workers need further protection under the law when it comes to abusive language.
The Bill therefore creates duplicate offences with different thresholds and different maximum penalties, all while leaving the existing offences untouched. How is this meant to improve enforcement? How are police officers supposed to choose which offence fits which circumstance? The Government have not offered an answer, I am afraid. By creating new stand-alone offences that replicate existing ones, the Government risk producing confusion rather than clarity. Police officers, paramedics and other emergency workers deserve a legal framework that is simple, enforceable and unambiguous.
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
I have said this already in my responses to the noble Lord in Committee, but I think it is important that I comment on what I said in the letter to the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, to re-emphasises the point. The offences under the Public Order Act 1986 have been interpreted by the law over the years, but, essentially, they do not relate to private dwellings. The clauses in the Bill are about private dwellings and give greater clarification. That is the point I put to the noble Lord. In the four-page letter to the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, which I will happily put in the Library, that is one of the key points that I make, as I have in this debate. I re-emphasise that in response to the noble Lord’s closing remarks.
Lord Davies of Gower (Con)
I am grateful for that. Perhaps it would be easier to amend the original law on this, rather than introduce it in these clauses.
As I said, police officers, paramedics and other emergency workers deserve a legal framework that is simple, enforceable and unambiguous, and what is before us is none of those things. Given the poor defence offered by the Government, I think this may be an issue that we have to return to on Report. For now, I beg leave to withdraw my opposition to the clause standing part of the Bill.
“Controlling or coercive behaviour by persons providing psychotherapy or counselling services(1) A person (“A”) commits an offence if—(a) A is a person providing or purporting to provide psychotherapy or counselling services to another person (“B”),(b) A repeatedly or continuously engages in behaviour towards B that is controlling or coercive,(c) the behaviour has a serious effect on B, and(d) A knows or ought to know that the behaviour will or may have a serious effect on B.(2) A’s behaviour has a “serious effect” on B if—(a) it causes B to fear, on at least two occasions, that violence will be used against B, or(b) it causes B psychological harm which has a substantial adverse effect on B’s usual day-to-day activities.(3) For the purposes of subsection (1)(d) A “ought to know” that which a reasonable person in possession of the same information would know.(4) In proceedings for an offence under this section it is a defence for A to show that—(a) in engaging in the behaviour in question, A believed that he or she was acting in B’s best interests, and(b) the behaviour was in all the circumstances reasonable.(5) A is to be taken to have shown the facts mentioned in subsection (4) if—(a) sufficient evidence of the facts is adduced to raise an issue with respect to them, and(b) the contrary is not proved beyond reasonable doubt.(6) The defence in subsection (4) is not available to A in relation to behaviour that causes B to fear that violence will be used against B.(7) A person guilty of an offence under this section is liable—(a) on conviction on indictment, to imprisonment for a term not exceeding five years, or a fine, or both;(b) on summary conviction, to imprisonment for a term not exceeding 12 months, or a fine, or both.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment creates an offence of controlling or coercive behaviour by providing psychotherapy or counselling services.
Lord Marks of Henley-on-Thames (LD)
My Lords, this amendment is in exactly the same form as that which I, with the noble and learned Lord, Lord Garnier, and my friend Lady Jolly, who is now retired, moved to the Domestic Abuse Bill in 2021. The aim of the amendment, which would introduce a new clause after Clause 109, is to criminalise controlling or coercive behaviour by so-called psychotherapists or counsellors who are in fact no better than charlatans or quacks who prey on their clients, generally young people, taking appalling advantage of their vulnerabilities, abusing their misplaced trust, and often charging them substantial fees in the process.
I should make it clear that this amendment does not imply any criticism of the many honest, altruistic and understanding psychotherapists and counsellors who daily help patients and clients up and down the country with advice and therapy. Such honest psycho- therapists offer counselling and help to their clients or patients and generally assist them through very difficult times in their lives.
Lord Garnier (Con)
My Lords, the wording and effect of Amendment 347, which I co-signed, are self-explanatory, but, if the amendment needed any further elaboration, the noble Lord, Lord Marks of Henley-on-Thames, has just provided it. I cannot improve on what he said, but now is the moment when Parliament must, after several earlier attempts by the noble Lord and me to legislate, outlaw the quack counsellors who predate on vulnerable people through controlling or coercive behaviour in order to provide some sort of protection to their victims or intended victims.
I have been concerned about these quacks and tried without success to get previous Governments to legislate for some years. More than 10 years ago, I started work with Sir Oliver Letwin, then the Cabinet Office Minister in the Government of our noble friend Lord Cameron of Chipping Norton, and Tom Sackville, a former Home Office Minister, as well as parliamentary counsel and Ministry of Justice officials, with the support and encouragement of my noble friend Lord Cameron, the then Prime Minister, who had a constituency interest in the matter. I spoke about those quacks on Report on the Modern Slavery Bill in November 2014 and the Serious Crime Bill in February 2015 in the other place, in your Lordships’ House on 2 March 2020 in the debate on the unregulated treatment of mental health, and then again on 2 February 2021, with the noble Lord, Lord Marks, and the noble Baroness, Lady Jolly, on the Domestic Abuse Bill. Now, thanks to the noble Lord, Lord Marks, we have another opportunity to make real progress rather than having a general discussion without resolution.
We have laws to protect children and those under a mental incapacity through intellectual impairment, disability or the effects of old age. We can prosecute those who dishonestly take old and frail people’s money, but we leave unprotected adults who may succumb to pressure exerted on them by others with malevolent intent, because their exploitative activities currently do not come within the criminal law.
For over a decade, I have had in mind the young adult women whose experiences were brought to my attention by their parents and families. In essence, they had been brainwashed or suborned by quack counsellors. They persuaded these young people to break off all contact with their families, infected them with false memories and got them to pay fees for the so-called counselling. Some of those young women were well off and suggestible, but all of them, for no apparent reason, broke off all contact with their families.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, I successfully acted in a libel action for Associated Newspapers, the publishers of the Daily Mail, who had exposed the activities of the Unification Church, commonly known as the Moonies, in brainwashing young adults and breaking up families for nefarious financial, political and bogus religious reasons. What the quacks I have in mind are doing is hideously reminiscent of the Moonies’ activities exposed by the Daily Mail over 45 years ago.
As the noble Lord, Lord Marks, has just reminded us, France, Belgium and Luxembourg have laws to criminalise the behaviour of predatory charlatans who exploit others in a state of emotional or psychological weakness for financial or other gain. As he also reminded us, other countries require genuine counsellors to be registered as counsellors. It must be assumed that their laws do not conflict with the articles of the ECHR that protect the right to private life and family life, the right to freedom of expression and association and the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion.
To take the French example, in that jurisdiction it is an offence punishable by imprisonment and heavy fines to abuse the ignorance or state of weakness of a minor or of a person whose particular vulnerability due to age, sickness or infirmity due to a psychological or physical disability or to pregnancy is apparent or known to the offender. It is also an offence to abuse a person in a state of physical or psychological dependency resulting from serious or repeated pressure, or from techniques used to affect his judgment in order to induce the minor or other person to act, or to abstain from acting, in a way seriously harmful to him—for “him”, also read “her”.
This amendment is clearly different but just as useful. One way of considering whether the proposed offence and defence in Amendment 347 would work is to ask oneself the following questions. Would the offence be prosecutable in theory and in practice? Could each of the elements of the offence be proved in a real-life example? Would the measure deal with the mischief that was identified, and would it catch no one else? I suggest that the answer to those questions is yes. How would it affect partners, husbands, wives, teachers, gurus, salesmen, priests and employers, all of whom are likely to have power and influence? It need not do so. Would it allow the mentally capable who want to give away their fortunes and leave their families to do so? Of course it would. Would it make sufficiently clear what was criminal behaviour and what was not? Would it comply with the European Convention on Human Rights? Yes, I suggest it would. What effect would it have on religious freedom or freedom of expression or association? In my view, it would have none. Is the proposed defence just and workable? Yes, it is. It would place the burden of disproving the defence on the prosecution.
The victims of these bogus therapists have been waiting far too long for Parliament to help them. The amendment, I suggest, is humane and practical and has nothing whatever to do with party politics or, as I have recently been asked, anything to do with youngsters or their parents caught in the maelstrom of the current transsexual controversies. If the laws of France, Belgium and Luxembourg can protect the people this amendment seeks to protect, the law of England can and ought to do so as well. We have, if I may say so, had enough of sophistry and feeble opposition based on a lack of courage, decency and drafting niceties. Too often we have heard it is the wrong day, it is the wrong Bill, this is the wrong way to approach this particular problem. Amendment 347 or something like it should be added to the Bill and I urge the Government to do that. If the Government will not do that, we must return to this on Report.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)
My Lords, I wish to express my sympathy with the amendment in the names of the noble Lord, Lord Marks, and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Garnier. I hope my noble friend will be able to respond sympathetically but will also open the door to a discussion with his Health ministerial colleagues, because I believe that hand in hand with the amendment put forward today goes the need for statutory regulation of the psychotherapy profession. At the moment, anyone can put psychotherapy behind their name or on a label, and there is no protection whatever.
The noble and learned Lord, Lord Garnier, referred to the years in which he had been involved in this. I am afraid I go back to 2001, when as a Health Minister I responded to an amendment to yet another NHS reorganisation Bill. The noble Lord, Lord Alderdice, proposed statutory regulation for psychotherapists and we as a government agreed with the principle. What then happened was that the noble Lord, Lord Alderdice, led work attempting to get agreement within the profession to statutory regulation. It fell down essentially because there were so many different schools of thought within the psychotherapy profession itself that it was impossible to get agreement. Sadly, it essentially died the death.
We debated this amendment in the legislation that the noble Lord, Lord Marks, mentioned, but previously he had a debate in which the regulation of the profession was raised. At that point, the noble Lord, Lord Bethell, the then Health Minister, said:
“The Government are committed to a proportionate system of safeguards for the professionals who work in … health and care … Where practitioners pose a direct risk of harm to the health and well-being of patients, legal avenues will and must be explored … However, more rules are not always the answer to every problem. While statutory regulation is sometimes necessary where significant risks to users of services cannot be mitigated … it is not always the most proportionate or effective means of assuring the safe and effective care of service users”.—[Official Report, 2/3/20; col. 480.]
The noble Lord, Lord Marks, and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Garnier, were pretty convincing on why you need statutory regulation alongside the amendment to this Bill. One of the problems is a lack of hard research in this area. In 2017—it goes back some years—the Brighton Therapy Partnership commented:
“There is very little research into the harm that properly executed therapy can cause. This is an unusual anomaly for a medical field, as in every other area research is abundant into both efficacy and failure of all treatment options”.
Little research has been done in this area, but anecdotally we know that many thousands of people, particularly young people and their families, have been hugely damaged by the quack therapists the noble Lord, Lord Marks, referred to. I hope that, alongside this amendment, my noble friend will agree to a discussion with Health Ministers to look at statutory regulation, which I believe goes side by side with the proposals being made tonight.
Lord Deben (Con)
My Lords, I have not taken part in this Bill before, but I do so now because I have been closely connected with someone who was treated by a so-called psychotherapist and removed from her family as a result. These people do something almost inconceivable. They get inside people’s minds and teach them totally false memories, so they begin to imagine that their parents have abused them and behaved in appalling ways which are entirely untrue. They believe it and as long as they go on with the so-called therapy, they are imprisoned by these wicked people.
This is done for two reasons: money and control. I very much agree with what has just been said, but I do not wish that to be yet another excuse for not accepting this amendment. There are far too many people in this country being destroyed for money and power by wicked people, and our law does not protect them. We have now discussed this so often, so long and so convincingly that frankly, I want to beg the Minister: please do not be another Minister who finds a reason for not doing this. Because if so, he allows yet more young people to have their lives destroyed by some of the most evil people I have ever come across.
I think my contribution was worth while, not just because I have personal and direct connection with someone who was in this condition, but because I want to assure the House that there is no need to worry on a religious ground. I think I am known to have very strong religious views, and I do not think this is going to cause problems for any legitimate religious organisation. There may be some problems from some pretty illegitimate religious organisations such as the Moonies and the Scientologists, but the truth is these people work on their own. They are individuals and they do this for money. I beg the Minister not to let this chance go to protect the most vulnerable young people.
Lord Pannick (CB)
The noble Lord, Lord Marks, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Garnier, and the other speakers have established that there is a very real mischief here. My concern is about the width of this amendment. If it is going to be brought back on Report, either by the Minister or by the noble Lord, Lord Marks, it really needs to be more specific. It is very broad in the concepts it uses, such as the concept of “psychological harm” and whether
“the behaviour was in all the circumstances reasonable”.
It seems to me that the mischief here is people who provide psychotherapy or counselling services in bad faith or dishonestly, and we need to have an amendment which more specifically addresses that mischief. The French legislation to which the noble Lord, Lord Marks, referred was much more specific and tailored than what we have here.
Baroness Gohir (CB)
My Lords, I was not going to speak on this amendment, but the noble Lord, Lord Marks, and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Garnier, have inspired me to speak. I support the amendment and would add another set of people who do exactly the same: spiritual faith healers. They do coercive and controlling behaviour and target the most vulnerable. They do all the things mentioned. In certain minority ethnic communities, they will target vulnerable women, for example, and take large amounts of cash from them. I do not expect noble Lords to amend this proposed new clause to add those sets of people, because they obviously want to maximise their chances of getting their clause through, but they have inspired me to think about replicating their amendment and perhaps proposing it for future legislation. So the Minister can expect a letter from me to discuss this further—which also amounts to spiritual abuse.
Lord Davies of Gower (Con)
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Marks of Henley-on-Thames, and my noble and learned friend Lord Garnier for tabling this considered amendment. Controlling or coercive behaviour is currently legislated against if the offender is or has been
“in an intimate or family relationship”
with the victim. This amendment uses the framework of Section 76 of the Serious Crime Act 2015 and applies it to offenders providing psychotherapeutic or counselling services.
I understand the reasoning behind the noble Lord’s amendment. The original offence is in place because being in an intimate or familial relationship puts both parties in a unique position of proximity. These positions of trust carry a heightened risk of becoming exploitative, and thus legislation exists to recognize this. Psychotherapy and counselling services carry a similar risk; they put patients in extremely open and often vulnerable positions as they entrust the provider with their confidence. Controlling or coercive behaviour becomes more likely given the power dynamics in these relationships and I see no reason why, in principle, the law should not extend past protecting familial or intimate relationships to encompass certain intimate services.
This conclusion is backed up by recent research into mental health services. Earlier this year, the University of Hertfordshire found more than 750 incidents of violence and coercion by staff. These include instances of verbal abuse, intentional neglect and even cases of physical violence. I do not intend to extrapolate from that study and make it seem as if it represents the entirety of our mental health services—I hope it does not. This is an under-investigated area and we do not yet know the scale of neglect in our services, but the most serious conclusion that can be drawn from it is the fact that, of these 750 offences, only four official complaints were made and, of those four complaints, a single one was upheld. Whether the reason for that was ignorance of reporting mechanisms, intimidation by staff or the inexistence of the legal means, it represents a failure of the system.
The least we should do as legislators is promise to further examine the reasons behind those failings: something I hope the Minister can assure us the Government will do. If the Government conclude there is a gap in the law, and that vulnerable people attending psychotherapy or counselling services are being controlled or coerced without the legal means to get justice, I hope that they will consider the amendment in question.
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Marks of Henley-on-Thames, for returning to this issue. I give him credit for his persistence. I welcome the support for these measures from the noble and learned Lord, Lord Garnier. I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Deben, for sharing his personal experiences and to my noble friend Lord Hunt of Kings Heath for reminding us that this issue was raised even back as far as 2001. I am also grateful for my noble friend Lord Kennedy of Southwark making a guest appearance in the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Marks; it is always helpful to see that, as I am speaking for the Government on this occasion. I am also grateful for the constructive comments of the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, and the noble Baroness, Lady Gohir, with regard to these issues.
Amendment 347, as we are clear, seeks to create an offence of controlling or coercive behaviour for psychotherapists and counsellors providing services to clients, by replicating the coercive or controlling behaviour offence under Section 76 of the Serious Crime Act 2015. I am aware that the noble Lord, Lord Marks, has previously shared concerns—he has repeated them today—about unscrupulous therapists taking advantage of their clients’ vulnerabilities by supplanting parents and families in the affections and minds of their clients, for the purposes of turning them against their friends and family through the process called transference. I entirely agree with him that this is a serious issue that deserves careful consideration. Again, I reflect on what the noble Lord, Lord Deben, said in that regard. However, the question for the Committee is whether there is an argument to legislate at this time or whether there are other means to examine the outcomes that the noble Lord seeks. I suggest that for the moment that, for reasons I will explain, legislation would not necessarily be the way forward in this case.
Lord Garnier (Con)
My Lords, I do not wish to criticise the Minister’s intentions and motives, but what he has just said is reminiscent of what I have heard on previous occasions from Ministers of my party and I am sure that the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, probably heard from Ministers in the Tony Blair Government back in 2001. We need to ratchet up the urgency here. Having further reviews is really a delightful departmental way of saying, “Not today, thanks, and possibly not even tomorrow”. We need to grip this. Calls for evidence are fine, so long as they are not calls for further delay or a “can’t be bothered” attitude. I know from my own knowledge of the Minister that he does not belong to the “can’t be bothered” department. If my good friend, the noble Lord, Lord Marks, and others who agree with him on this amendment are to be persuaded that we are not just being brushed off then we need to see some real action. That could mean the Minister, or a Health Minister, agreeing to meet with us, with the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, who has some views about the drafting, and with other Members of this House to have a very serious round-table discussion early in the new year. Otherwise, this will dribble away as it did under the previous Government, and I know that the Minister does not want that to happen.
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
My Lords, there is a case to be made that if, on several occasions, members of the Conservative Party have used the same argument in government, my noble friends in the Labour Party have used the same argument in previous Governments, and I myself use the same argument, then maybe that same argument has some validity. I put that to the noble and learned Lord.
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
I hear what the noble and learned Lord says. I have tried to tell the Committee that the Department of Health and Social Care is taking forward a programme of reform to professional regulation and legislative frameworks for healthcare professionals. Responsibility for that lies with the Department of Health. On this Bill, I speak in response to the amendments on behalf of the Home Office. I am arguing, and I have done so previously, that legislation would not be the appropriate route forward. There may be a common thread with previous Ministers there, but that is the argument that I am putting to the Committee.
I am happy to reflect with colleague as to whether I can ask my colleague Ministers to examine the issues that the noble and learned Lord has put to the Committee, but it is ultimately for them to consider the evidence provided. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Garnier, thinks that that is a brush-off. I hope it is not, but he can judge that in reflecting on what I have said today. If he wishes to then there is the opportunity to raise this issue on Report; the noble Lord, Lord Marks, has already shown his tenacity in doing so on several occasions.
I am happy to try to facilitate for a Minister of Health to examine the issues put before the Committee, and I think it is reasonable that I draw this debate to the attention of the appropriate Minister for Health, including the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, which test the assumptions of the proposed new clause as well. Ultimately, however, I am standing here on behalf of the Government and the Home Office, and speaking for all these matters now. The legislative route is not one that we consider appropriate. I have said what I have said, and I would be very happy, if the noble Lord wishes to withdraw his amendment, to draw the attention of the appropriate Health Minister to this debate, including the noble Lord’s comments and those of other Members. I have heard the request for a meeting from the noble and learned Lord, Lord Garnier, and I will draw that request to the attention of the appropriate Health Minister. If Members remain unhappy after that process then there are a number of options open to them; they are experienced parliamentarians and no doubt they will exercise them.
Lord Marks of Henley-on-Thames (LD)
My Lords, I am very grateful to all those noble Lords who have spoken movingly and persuasively in favour of our amendment. I am also grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Gohir, for giving the added suggestion in relation to spiritual abuse. I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Gower, for the support for our amendment from the Opposition Benches. I am bound to say that I am disappointed by the position taken by the noble Lord, Lord Hanson, on behalf of the Government, for a number of reasons.
First, I have the greatest respect for the way that the noble Lord has handled matters in this House since becoming a Minister, but I have never heard him make a brush-off or an excuse quite as specious as the one that he just made, when he said that the fact that the same excuse made by him had been made by the Conservative Government gave it validity. It does not. There is no validity to such an excuse and, as the noble Lord, Lord Deben, said, the excuses really do have to stop now, because we raise a very real issue.
Secondly, I will consider the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, whom I count as a friend as well as a very wise lawyer. If he has doubts about the drafting then those are something we will discuss, and no doubt can discuss with the Government. I also agree with the points made by those noble Lords who said that regulation is desperately needed for psycho- therapists and therapists. Of course it is, but the fact that we need regulation does not mean that we do not also need the help of the criminal law for those who are unscrupulous enough to use quack psychotherapy and false counselling to dupe people into parting with money and ruining their lives in the process. It is all very well for the Minister to say that he will get the Department of Health involved. We heard that from the Conservative Government, and it is not enough. This is a Crime and Policing Bill that introduces new offences: the protection of victims and vulnerable people, and the visiting of penalties upon unscrupulous and criminal behaviour, is what the criminal law is and ought to be about. The time has come to deal with it.
We have heard about the approach of the noble Lord, Lord Alderdice, to regulation. He has worked on that for many years. He wanted to be here this evening, but I am afraid that he was stuck in traffic in south Oxfordshire—something that happens to many of us, even in south Oxfordshire. The noble Lord has also supported the proposition that this behaviour ought to be criminal, and he supports it now. I suggest that the Government need to take that very seriously indeed.
I do not accept that the wording of the offence is so broad that it does not penalise the correct behaviour. The way that it is phrased in subsection 1(a) is that A commits an offence if
“A is a person providing or purporting to provide psychotherapy or counselling services to another person”.
The point taken by the noble Lord, Lord Hanson—that there may be other people who need regulating—does not count. The number of counsellors that he described would all be caught by this.
This should not now be the subject for an excuse. It is a time for action. We need to legislate now. I would like to meet the Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, and anybody else who is interested. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Garnier, who has also co-signed this amendment, for which I am very grateful, has worked on this for years and so has the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath. If we can have a meeting, work out between now and Report how to get the drafting right, and produce a criminal offence that will work and will outlaw this behaviour then that is something that I would very much like to do, and I will have achieved the end that I seek. I invite the Minister—indeed, as the noble Lord, Lord Deben, put it, I beg him—to take this seriously and end this scourge once and for all with this Crime and Policing Bill. With that said, and at this stage, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment, but we will come back to it on Report.
Baroness Smith of Llanfaes
“Duty to prevent illegal violence and harassment in the workplace(1) Section 2 of the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 (general duties of employers to their employees) is amended as follows.(2) After subsection (2)(e) insert—“(f) the adoption of proactive and preventative measures to protect all persons working in their workplace from illegal violence and harassment, including—(i) gender-based violence;(ii) sexual harassment;(iii) illegal psychological and emotional abuse;(iv) physical and sexual abuse;(v) stalking and illegal harassment, including online illegal harassment;(vi) threats of illegal violence.”.(3) After subsection (3) insert—“(3A) It shall be the duty of every employer to prepare, and as often as may be appropriate revise, an assessment to identify potential risks of illegal violence and harassment in the workplace and implement policies and procedures to eliminate these risks so far as is reasonably practicable.(3B) It shall be the duty of every employer to provide training to all employees on recognising and preventing illegal violence and harassment in the workplace, with a focus on gender-responsive approaches.(3C) In subsection (3B) a “gender-responsive approach” means taking into account the various needs, interests, and experiences of people of different gender identities, including women and girls, when designing and implementing policies and procedures.(3D) In this section, “persons working in the workplace” includes—(a) employees,(b) full-time, part-time, and temporary workers, and(c) interns and apprentices.(3E) In subsection (2)(f) and subsections (3A) and (3B), a reference to the workplace includes remote and hybrid work environments.”.”
Baroness Smith of Llanfaes (PC)
My Lords, I rise to speak to Amendments 348 and 349, in my name. I thank the noble Lords, Lord Russell of Liverpool and Lord Hendy, for adding their names. These amendments seek to tackle one of the most pressing issues in our society, gender-based violence and harassment, with a clear focus on workplaces. As I open this debate, I look forward to hearing contributions from across the Committee on how we can strengthen protections for workers and make our workplaces truly safe.
Amendments 348 and 349 would establish a health and safety framework to address violence against women and girls in the workplace and create a new duty on employers to prevent violence and harassment by amending Section 2 of the Health and Safety at Work Act. This is not the first time I have brought this proposal before noble Lords. During the passage of the Employment Rights Bill, we had a constructive debate on the proposal. Since then, support has grown both inside and outside Parliament. Just last month, the End Not Defend campaign held an event here in Parliament attended by Peers and Members of the other place. Survivors shared harrowing experiences of how the law is failing them. Trade unions, specialist organisations and survivors themselves are calling for action. Their courage in sharing their experiences demands a response from us.
This Bill already introduces a new offence to protect retail workers. It is a welcome step, but why stop there? Violence and harassment affect workers across all sectors. If we are serious about halving violence against women and girls within the next decade, as His Majesty’s Government have pledged, we need a cross-departmental approach that moves beyond a sole focus on criminalisation to prevention and tackling the root causes. Leveraging health and safety law is one way to achieve this. It would make VAWG prevention everybody’s business. These amendments were co-written with the Suzy Lamplugh Trust and Rights of Women—organisations with decades of experience in supporting victims. The amendments’ aims are also supported by several workers unions.
Current legislation falls short. The Worker Protection (Amendment of Equality Act 2010) Act 2023 introduced a preventive duty on sexual harassment, but in practice enforcement occurs only after harm has happened. The Employment Rights Bill will strengthen this requirement when it introduces protections around third-party harassment. However, enforcement can occur only after sexual harassment has been experienced, limiting its preventive function. It also excludes other forms of violence against women and girls in the workplace, such as other forms of harassment and all forms of violence, including physical, psychological and emotional abuse.
The UK ratified ILO Convention No. 190, which requires a gender-responsive approach to workplace safety, yet our laws do not reflect this obligation. Recent cases show the urgency of this, including the tragic murder of Gracie Spinks by a colleague who stalked her, despite repeated reports. Female NHS surgeons report harassment and even rape in operating theatres, described as “surgery’s open secret”. Royal Artillery Gunner Jaysley Beck took her own life after relentless harassment by her superior. There have been reports of sexual assault and rape at Harrods, the CBI, the BBC and McDonald’s.
The Harrods case was not a failure of individual courage; it was a failure of structural responsibility. Multiple institutions had sight of risk, but none had a duty to prevent it. Harrods looked like a modern employer, but it functioned as a closed environment in which power went unchecked and young women were left unprotected. These amendments would have required the risk assessments that never happened. Survivors of al-Fayed’s abuse, represented by no one above, say the same thing again and again: no one stopped him. Legislators must ensure that no workplace in the UK can ever operate with that level of impunity again. Where accountability is optional, exploitation becomes operational. The Harrods redress scheme shows exactly why voluntary arrangements cannot substitute for enforceable duties on employers.
These are not isolated incidents. Rights of Women reports that 56% of calls to its advice line involve harassment or violence from colleagues. The Suzy Lamplugh Trust found that women are eight times more likely than men to experience sexual misconduct at work, yet there is no government data collection, no reporting requirement, and outdated attitudes persist that VAWG is a private matter.
I would like to illustrate the lack of regulation for VAWG in the workplace and why these amendments are necessary. The Equality Act addresses sexual harassment as discrimination but excludes other forms of VAWG, leaving significant safety issues unregulated by the Equality and Human Rights Commission. Employers can adopt domestic abuse policies voluntarily, as recommended by the EHRC in guidance to employers on domestic abuse—although the Welsh version is actually over a decade old. However, much of the currently available guidance assumes domestic abuse occurs outside the workplace and outside the remit of the employer’s liability. This does not align with the statutory guidance to employers in the Domestic Abuse Act, which states that employers should consider the impact of domestic abuse on their employees as part of their duty of care under health and safety law, as regulated by the Health and Safety Executive.
Despite the growing evidence that gender-based violence and harassment harm workers’ health and safety, the Health and Safety Executive does not recognise gender-based violence as a workplace hazard. In its evidence to the Women and Equalities Select Committee 2018 inquiry on sexual harassment, the Health and Safety Executive stated clearly that it has a policy of not applying the Health and Safety at Work Act when it deems that other agencies or regulators have more specific responsibilities. The Health and Safety Executive is currently advising workers to report harassment to bodies that lack enforcement powers. This must change, and harassment and violence in the workplace should be recognised as a health and safety at work matter.
Health and safety frameworks provide a structured, enforceable approach. Updating them to include VAWG would ensure employers have a positive duty to prevent harm, not just to respond after an incident. As with existing health and safety duties, this would be proportionate. These amendments are practical and scalable. They would require risk assessment, clear policies, training, and confidential reporting mechanisms—all proportionate to the size and risk profile of the workplace and consistent with the existing health and safety frameworks.
Amendments 348 and 349 prioritise prevention and victim protection. They reflect expert advice and growing public demand. They align with the Government’s own commitment to halving violence against women and girls within the next decade. Tomorrow, the VAWG strategy will be published. The Safeguarding Minister in the other place said on Monday that
“the strategy has to be for everybody … It has to be for employers as well. It is for businesses, charities—everybody in society”.—[Official Report, Commons, 15/12/25; col. 651.]
I hope that these amendments are viewed as one way to make that vision a reality.
We know what happens when accountability is optional. We have seen it in shops, in hospitals, in the Armed Forces, and we owe it to those who have spoken up and to those who still feel unable to, to act. I look forward to the Minister’s response and hope His Majesty’s Government will consider these arguments as the Crime and Policing Bill progresses through this House. I beg to move.
Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)
My Lords, I was happy once again to add my name to these two amendments from the noble Baroness, because we had a very similar debate on 21 May during the passage of the Employment Rights Bill. On 11 July, the noble Baroness followed up with a letter to the then Minister—the noble Baroness, Lady Jones—laying out the case very clearly.
The Government have the laudable intention of trying to reduce violence against women and girls by 50%, but there is a strange incongruence in respect of that ambition. I wonder if noble Lords are aware of how much time people, if they are fortunate enough to be employed, spend in the workplace during an average year? It is 52% of the year. In a year, more than half of an average employee’s time is spent in and around the workplace. Therefore, when one is putting together a comprehensive strategy to try and reduce violence against women and girls, excluding the workplace from close scrutiny and oversight seems somewhat of an oversight. What the noble Baroness is suggesting in these two amendments therefore seems eminently sensible. Without looking at this very carefully and ensuring that it is effectively included within the strategy in some way, shape or form, the strategy will be fundamentally flawed from the start.
The Health and Safety at Work etc. Act, which is often cited by Governments of whatever persuasion as being the bedrock of trying to ensure rights in the workplace, is now exactly 51 years old. I am sure the Government will wheel out, as they have on previous occasions, the many other Acts and regulations that have been put on the statute book at various points over the past 51 years. However, during the last 51 years, for better or worse—I think for worse—the situation in the workplace, for women and girls in particular but also for men, has fundamentally changed, and the regulations and legislation have not kept up. There is clearly an imbalance.
One need only look at the range of organisations that have suffered quite a lot of reputational damage as a result of not trying to put in place regulations and rules and of not instilling, primarily through leadership, a culture to ensure that the sort of behaviour that we are talking about and trying to stop is called out. I could go through an exhaustive list, but we can look at the embarrassment that various police forces have had to endure in the last few years. We can also look at the embarrassment that the Church of England has had to face and is still facing; that is an institution that not only finds it extraordinarily difficult to acknowledge the existence of that sort of behaviour within its ranks but has the strange anomaly that it is an organisation part of whose purpose in life is to forgive. However, it is not enough to forgive things going wrong if you are not prioritising the needs of those who are being wronged, and that is unfortunately the case in the Church of England and, of course, in the Roman Catholic Church throughout the world, as is very well known.
The military is also an embarrassing example. To have lost a First Sea Lord through impropriety at work is not exactly an example of stellar leadership. It makes one wonder how it was possible for an individual to reach that level of rank—with fundamental and comprehensive reviews and training taking place, in theory, right the way through their career—and to arrive at the pinnacle of their military profession only then to be publicly found very wanting. Clearly, there was something fundamentally wrong with the culture there. We have also had Cabinet Ministers who have had to resign on the basis of inappropriate behaviour in the workplace, particularly harassment and bullying. This is a problem that is endemic; to ignore it is simply not acceptable.
I hope and expect that the Minister’s reply will not be a carbon copy of the answer that the noble Lord, Lord Leong, gave in the debate on the 21 May. That answer was, in effect, a list of all the various regulations and legislation that, in theory, are meant to enable one to address and stop this, but which clearly are not working. To try and defend it, when clearly it is not working, makes one feel that the Minister, if he does do that, is unfortunately taking King Canute as a role model. It is simply not acceptable.
Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)
My Lords, it is always a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Russell of Liverpool, and to support the noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Llanfaes, not least because my noble friend Lord Hendy—who is, sadly, not able to be in the country this evening—co-signed her amendment.
If anyone imagines or suggests that the job of the Health and Safety Executive should be limited to the inspection of heavy machinery or physical infrastructure, as opposed to social infrastructure, then they are not just living in the last century but arguably the one before that. For the Health and Safety Executive to look at its role in such a limited way is also incredibly gendered.
I hope that my noble friend the Minister will look favourably on the intention of these amendments, because they sit so comfortably with other measures that the Government are attempting. The noble Baroness put it very well when she said that this is essential for the credible functioning of the violence against women and girls strategy. Last night, during the course of the Second Reading debate on the Victims and Courts Bill, it was wonderful to hear another Minister, my noble friend Lady Levitt, talk about further work and an expanded regime on allowing whistleblowing and the busting open of non-disclosure agreements that cover up illegal activity—which often means violence against women at work. What the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, is proposing sits so comfortably with that.
I cannot believe that my noble friend the Minister will think anything different not least because, just a few minutes ago, he spoke so passionately about protecting emergency workers when they have to go into difficult and dangerous settings and how they should be protected even from abuse, let alone from violence and more serious criminality. It would be odd if there was no duty on the employers of emergency workers to look at risk, adequate training and culture in the workplace and at what measures might be taken within teams and with training for those same emergency workers. As was suggested by the noble Baroness, this is about joined-up thinking and coming up with a violence against women and girls strategy that the whole Committee and all parties can get behind. I am feeling optimistic about my noble friend the Minister’s reply.
To Committee colleagues on the opposition Front Bench, I would say that there are inevitable concerns about any additional burden on employers. I am seeing nods that suggest that my suspicions are correct. But these duties can be as appropriate. If noble Lords and Committee members have concerns about the precise drafting of the amendments, those can be dealt with before Report. The duties would be to prepare and revise assessments that are appropriate for a particular business—and businesses and workplace settings are so different; they include very vulnerable and secluded settings, with visits and travel, including to people’s homes. This only need be about strategies and training as appropriate; the duties need not be an undue burden on good employers of good faith who have many women workers in particular, although I would like to see all protected.
I hope that the entire Committee can get behind the noble Baroness. I am delighted to see the first ever woman general secretary of the TUC looking as if she might be due to speak after me.
Lord Blencathra (Con)
My Lords, I first seek clarification from the noble Lord, Lord Russell of Liverpool, on his sums. I do not do sums either but, if I heard him correctly, he said that a worker spends 50% of his life at work. If that is what I heard correctly, that is 84 hours a week.
Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)
What I said was that a person fortunate enough to be employed spends on average 52% of one year in and around the workplace.
Lord Blencathra (Con)
I shall need to go back later and do my own sums, but that still seems to me a little bit excessive.
I am not opposed to the proposed new clauses, and I agree with the thrust of them; this is an important issue. But my concern is with turning a broad legal duty, which these two proposed clauses suggest, into concrete and repeatable workplace practice. There are some practical difficulties. First, you get hidden and underreported incidents. We all know that victims often do not report harassment or stalking—and then there are no incident logs, which may underrate the risk. The risk can come from colleagues, managers, contractors, clients, customers or the public, including online, making responsibility and control much harder to map. That might put a simply impossible obligation on employers and impose a very heavy burden on small employers, which would probably not have an HR or personnel department or the security expertise to assess all the potential risk.
Designing “gender-responsive” measures into practical and proportionate steps seems to me to be a very difficult thing to do; a lot of careful tailoring would be required to deal with different people and roles. That may be beyond the capability of many employers, particularly small ones. I know that the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, has looked at the HSE advice, already published, which I think includes detailed guidance on managing work-related stress and preventing work-related violence. That includes information on creating policies to address unacceptable behaviour. Perhaps the voluntary advice it gives could be expanded to deal with the elements at the core of these new clauses.
I also look to what ACAS does. This is what it says on its website:
“‘Vicarious liability’ is when an employer could be held responsible if one of their workers discriminates against someone … The law (Equality Act 2010) says a worker and an employer could both be held responsible if the discrimination happens ‘in the course of employment’. This means something that’s linked to work … This could be at work or outside the workplace, for example at a work party or through social media that’s linked to work”.
That is what ACAS says about discrimination, but I simply wonder whether the better course of action might be not to pass this proposed new clause into law but to get HSE and ACAS to take the thrust of the suggestions and design new guidance that delivers what the noble Baroness and the noble Lord, Lord Russell, want.
The noble Lord, Lord Stevens of Kirkwhelpington, has just left the Chamber, but when I saw him here, I assumed that he was going to speak on this matter. Had he spoken, he would probably have said, “Please do not give any more powers to the Health and Safety Executive”. He was a victim of one of the excessive criminal trials. When he was commissioner of the Met, one of his officers was pursuing a burglar. The burglar ran on to the roof of a factory, and the police officer chased him, fell through the skylight and was seriously injured. The Health and Safety Executive took the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police to court for failing to provide a safe working environment for the officer. The noble Lord, Lord Stevens, said: “I stood in No. 1 court of the Old Bailey—the court that had the trials of murderers, serious criminals and traitors—accused by the Health and Safety Executive of not taking enough care of my workers. When my lawyer asked the chap from the Health and Safety Executive, ‘What should the officer have done?’, he said, ‘Well, he should have stopped; he should have sent for a cherry-picker and scaffolding to make sure it was safe’”. The noble Lord said, “I looked at the jury, and the jury looked at the face of this idiot, and within minutes I was cleared, because a sensible jury knew that that was a ridiculous thing to say”.
That is the only danger of giving these powers to an organisation like the Health and Safety Executive. It may use the bulk of them safely most of the time, but on occasions you will get silly decisions. I should say in conclusion that that case of the noble Lord, Lord Stevens of Kirkwhelpington, is a very good reason why we should keep juries, rather than having a single judge.
I perceive difficulties in putting this proposal into law, but I hope that a solution can be found whereby the Health and Safety Executive, ACAS or others can pursue the contents of new clauses without recourse to legislation.
Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)
My Lords, I have some serious reservations about Amendment 348 and the related Amendment 349. I spoke at length against them when a similar amendment was tabled to the Employment Rights Bill, and I shall not repeat everything that I said then.
The noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, talked about looking at the drafting. That was interesting, because one of my problems is with the wording of this repeated amendment. It is all over the place, quite dangerous and very broad, and it could get us into all sorts of unintended trouble. Let me illustrate.
The noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Llanfaes, spoke passionately and excellently about some the real live problems of sexual harassment at work, and many of us will recognise that. As I say, I have concerns about the language of this amendment. It refers to having a legal mandate for employers to introduce
“proactive and preventative measures to protect all persons working in their workplace from … psychological and emotional abuse”.
We heard from the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, that “psychological and emotional abuse” is a very broad term. The nature of “proactive and preventative measures” might involve stopping something that is very hard to define and could result in real overreach. It could be quite coercive and manipulative.
However, I am particularly nervous about the use of the “gender-responsive” approach that is advocated, particularly in relation to training. We are told in the amendment that
“a ‘gender-responsive approach’ means taking into account the various needs, interests, and experiences of people of different gender identities, including women and girls”.
Women and girls are not a subset of “gender identities”—whatever they are. That is insulting, and gender identities are at the very least contentious. This language confusion, for me, drags the amendment into a potential political minefield. I am familiar with the way in which gender-responsive approaches are being used in the workplace at the present time to undermine women and girls.
I was fortunate enough today to have a meeting here in Parliament with the Darlington Nurses Union. The Darlington nurses are in dispute with their NHS employer because they felt sexually unsafe in their single-sex nurses’ changing room—which, by the way, was fought for as part of health and safety at work in the past. They had a place where they could get changed and they felt unsafe when a gender-inclusive policy allowed a male who identifies as a woman to use their space. This has led to all sorts of problems in relation to what safety at work is. They felt as though there was a degree of sexual harassment going on, and so forth. I am just pointing out that this is a difficult area, so can we at least acknowledge it?
Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)
The noble Baroness, Lady Fox, is repeating, to some extent, some of the perfectly sensible points that she made in the debate earlier in the year. I just point out that, in Committee, these are probing amendments: no more, no less. It is accepted from the get-go that they could be improved, and what I think would be helpful for the Committee is not a long list of the things that are wrong with the amendment—we accept that there may be some things that are wrong with it—but some suggestions, if the noble Baroness is unhappy with the wording, as to what might be put in its place if, as I think is the case, she acknowledges that there is a problem that needs to be dealt with.
Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)
That is a fair comment. The point that I was going on to make was that she was suspended for misgendering using a gender-inclusive policy similar to that advocated in this amendment.
Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)
I suggested then that I was not happy with the wording of an amendment, and it has simply been repeated. I made a speech that I thought was reasonable at the time. This is actually not the same speech, but I am raising some of the issues. I ask, as I asked earlier, why would we use that approach to protecting women and girls when women in the workplace are at present actually the victims of some of these gender-related policies? Therefore, if the amendment comes back as a more straightforward, narrowly defined amendment about sexual harassment at work, I would be much more interested in hearing about it. It is the amendment that is repeated, not just my speech. It is exactly the same wording that I objected to before. No account has been taken of any of the criticisms made in Committee, at the probing stage, so I think I can reasonably say that I would like us all to not repeat ourselves, including with this amendment.
Baroness Smith of Llanfaes (PC)
I want to come back really briefly on the language of “gender-responsive approach”. That is not a “gender-inclusive approach”: it is based on the ILO convention that our Government ratified, along with the rest of the global community, and relates to the fact that more women than men face misconduct at work. I wanted to clarify the language there, but I do take those points.
Baroness O’Grady of Upper Holloway (Lab)
My Lords, I add my support for these probing amendments and I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, for her work on this issue. I strongly welcome the Government’s promise to launch the largest crackdown in history to reduce violence against women and girls. While of course the misery of experiencing violence and harassment is not exclusive to women, surveys from the TUC and others have shown that it is overwhelmingly women who suffer this abuse. I also welcome the Government’s recognition that we need a whole-system approach that places prevention and survivors at its heart. As we have heard already, every part of society has to step up if we are to achieve the goal of every woman feeling safe everywhere, and that must include action to make the workplace a place of safety for women, too.
I had hoped that we had moved on from the notion that violence against women is somehow a private or domestic matter, but let us take the practical example of the Reporting of Injuries, Diseases and Dangerous Occurrences Regulations. This is the UK’s health and safety law that requires employers to report specific serious work-related incidents, such as fatalities and major injuries, to the Health and Safety Executive. These reports help the HSE track risks and prevent future harm, making it a vital legal duty to maintain workplace safety and accountability. But, if you look at it today, you see that the HSE website explicitly states that, while acts of violence to a person at work that result in death or a major injury are reportable, a physical injury inflicted on one employee by another during a dispute about a so-called “personal matter”, or an employee at work
“being injured by a relative or a friend who visits them at work about a domestic matter”
is not reportable. So, the HSE has no responsibility to track violence against women that happens in the workplace which is deemed to be a personal or domestic matter. I find that pretty shocking. You have to question why women’s experience of violence at work is disregarded in this way.
As we have also heard, the Equality and Human Rights Commission has responsibility for the duty on employers to prevent sexual harassment, but it is open and public that it will investigate only what it describes as “strategic cases”, as it simply does not have adequate resources to deliver comprehensive enforcement. Surely, health and safety inspectors who have the powers and ability to go into workplaces have a role to play in enforcing prevention of sexual harassment.
The UK has fallen far behind the ILO’s recommended standard for the ratio of labour inspectors to the size of workforce. In effect, the safety and welfare of British workers has been deprioritised over the last decade and more compared with other countries. But it seems that the safety and welfare of women workers have been deprioritised even more. There is an opportunity for an update and a reset. The new fair work agency and boosting the number of labour inspectors will be vital, but we must get the health and safety framework right, too. For the sake of women workers, I hope the Minister will talk to other colleagues, for sure, but also give careful consideration to the amendments before us.
Lord Pannick (CB)
My Lords, I too support the objective of Amendment 348—who would not support the objective of preventing illegal violence and harassment in the workplace? I suspect that the main argument against Amendment 348 will be the burden that it would impose on employers, particularly small ones, and the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, made that point very eloquently.
I will briefly identify one reason why it is very much in the interests of the employer to have these duties. It is because if there is illegal violence and harassment in the workplace which causes, as it will, damage to the victim, she—and it normally will be she—will be looking for remedies, and the person against whom she is most likely to be advised to sue is not the rogue other employee but the employer. The employer is particularly vulnerable to such a civil claim if they have not, as required by Amendment 348—which no doubt can be improved in its drafting—conducted any sort of assessment to identify potential risks, have not implemented policies and procedures to eliminate those risks, and, in particular, have not provided at least basic training to all employees on the importance of these matters. So, yes, this will impose a burden on employers, particularly small ones, but it is very much in their interests to protect themselves against legal liability and to deter such action taking place.
Baroness Doocey (LD)
My Lords, these amendments ask employers not only to react when something goes wrong but to look ahead, identify the risks and take sensible steps to prevent harm before it happens. That is especially important for women and those in insecure or public-facing roles, who we know are more likely to be targeted and less likely to feel safe reporting what has happened to them.
The statistics are damning. There were nearly 700,000 incidents last year alone, with attacks on lone workers surging by 132% over three years. We strongly support the aim of these amendments; however, as we did previously, we have questions around how a duty to eliminate risks, so far as reasonably practicable, would work in small businesses on tight margins. Layering new mandates on top of existing duties under the Equality Act and employment law risks confusion, which could dilute accountability. This is not an argument against doing more, but a practical issue which needs to be addressed.
There is also a wider cultural point. Legislation can set clear expectations, but workers will be safer only if staff feel confident to report incidents and these reports lead to action, not to victims being sidelined or blamed. Training, confidential reporting routes and proper follow-up, all mentioned in the amendments, are not extras; they are essential if any new duty is to change what has sadly become everyday reality for many people just trying to do their jobs.
Lord Cameron of Lochiel (Con)
My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, for her thoughtful amendments, which seek to place prevention of illegal violence and harassment in the workplace on a clear statutory footing and to expand the duties of the Health and Safety Executive accordingly.
It is clear from the debate that, across your Lordships’ House, we take violence against women and girls extremely seriously, whether that violence occurs at home, on the street, online or in the workplace. We know that gender-based violence remains alarmingly prevalent. Data for the year ending March 2024 shows that 6% of women aged 16 and over experienced domestic abuse, 4% experienced sexual assault and 4% experienced stalking.
These amendments focus on violence at work, in the employment context. Sexual harassment at work is far from uncommon. A recent study by UCL found that nearly one in seven UK workers encountered workplace abuse in the past year, with women reporting significantly higher levels of harassment and assault. Those figures remind us that work must of course be a place of safety, dignity and respect for all employees.
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Llanfaes, for tabling the amendments and explaining them, and for the support given to her by my noble friends Lady Chakrabarti and Lady O’Grady of Upper Holloway, and the noble Lord, Lord Russell of Liverpool, and for the comments from the noble Lord, Lord Cameron of Lochiel, and the noble Baroness, Lady Doocey, on the Front Benches, and the noble Baroness, Lady Fox of Buckley, and the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra.
The Government’s concerns about the amendment do not reflect those expressed by the noble Lords, Lord Cameron and Lord Blencathra, and the noble Baronesses, Lady Doocey and Lady Fox. They made valid points, but they are not ones I will deploy in the argument against the contributions in the debate. I am grateful also for the comments on the amendments by the noble Lord, Lord Pannick.
I start by saying to the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, that the violence against women and girls strategy will be published tomorrow, as has been recognised. It is ambitious. It sets a target to reduce violence against women and girls per se over a 10-year period, and I am grateful to my noble friend for her endorsement of that approach.
I hope I do not disappoint the noble Lord, Lord Russell of Liverpool, in deploying some of these arguments, because I was not party to the arguments in previous Bills, but I will explain to the Committee where the Government are coming from in relation to the points the noble Baroness made. It is important and absolutely right that we reduce violence against women and girls in the workplace, as well as in domestic or public settings. This may reflect some of the arguments that the noble Lord may have heard before, but under existing health and safety at work legislation—the 1974 Act and its related secondary legislation—employers have a clear duty to protect their workers from health and safety risks, including workplace violence. They are required, under the legislation from 1974— which was passed by a previous Labour Government 51 years ago but is still relevant today—to assess and take appropriate steps to eliminate or reduce those risks.
The 1974 Act, along with a range of related regulations, further mandates employers to take measures to reduce the risks of workplace violence. As part of this, the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999—again, a measure from a Labour Government some 26 years ago—requires employers to assess risks in the workplace, including the potential for violence, and take suitable action to reduce or eliminate those risks. The Health and Safety Executive and local authorities, which are both responsible for enforcing the 1974 Act, implement proactive and reactive measures to ensure that employers comply with their duties, which my noble friend Lady O’Grady will be aware of from her previous life experience. This includes ensuring that employers assess risks and implement appropriate controls to protect their workforce, and anyone else affected by their work, from workplace violence. The Health and Safety Executive has also published accessible guidance on its website to help employers comply with their legal obligations.
I heard what my noble friend Lady O’Grady said, but Amendment 349, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Llanfaes, would require the HSE to publish a health and safety framework specifically focused on illegal violence and harassment in the workplace. As I have set out, employers already have duties under the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations to manage such risks, including violence and aggression. Although workplace harassment could be addressed under the 1974 Act, as has been mentioned, the HSE does not intervene where there is a more appropriate regulator or where more directly applicable legislation applies.
Harassment offences in the workplace are covered under the Protection from Harassment Act 1997, which, again, was passed by my predecessors in office. Additionally, the Equality and Human Rights Commission can act under the Equality Act 2010, which was also passed by my party’s predecessors in office. Recent amendments to the Equality Act 2010, which came into force in October 2024, require employers to take proactive measures to prevent sexual harassment in the workplace. This provision is enforced by the EHRC. In the VAWG strategy, which will be published tomorrow—so I am not able to divulge every aspect—there are measures on stalking and on domestic violence protection orders, as well as a whole range of things, including measures in the Bill.
I therefore reassure the noble Baroness that there is a legal framework, which is both robust and comprehensive, for addressing illegal violence and harassment in the workplace. The Government remain committed to raising awareness of this issue and want to examine, as they are doing now, how to apply the violence against women and girls strategy to reduce violence against women and girls across the piece. I ask the noble Baroness to withdraw her amendment, because the proposals in the VAWG strategy tomorrow and the outline I have given of the performance of the Health and Safety Executive are, I hope, sufficient to show that we take this issue seriously and that the Government will not tolerate violence in the workplace.
Baroness Smith of Llanfaes (PC)
It is very clear, from what we have heard in this debate, that the status quo is not working, so what does the Minister propose that the Government actually do to improve this? As we have heard, the Minister has listed all these pieces of legislation, which are clearly not working because so many women still face these issues in the workplace.
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
I am grateful to the noble Baroness for that, and I hope I can give her assurance. My honourable friend Jess Phillips is the Minister directly responsible for the violence against women and girls strategy, although I obviously account to this House for it. She has a history of ensuring that we focus on the reduction of violence against women and girls. The strategy she will publish tomorrow is a strategy for across the piece; it is not just, as we have discussed today, for domestic or public violence against women and girls but a comprehensive strategy. I hope the noble Baroness will give my colleague the benefit of the doubt that she shares the view to reduce and eliminate domestic violence or violence in a workplace setting against women and girls. I speak for the Government in expressing that view.
I therefore hope the noble Baroness will withdraw her amendment and examine in detail the strategy which will be published tomorrow. I will make sure my honourable friend Jess Phillips sees the debate we have had and looks at the points made by noble Lords from across the Committee on how the Health and Safety Executive operates, particularly on the personal basis that has been discussed today.
I hope, with those reassurances, that the noble Baroness will know that this Government are committed to taking action to reduce violence against women and girls by half over a decade. The points she has raised about the workplace are valid but we believe the measures are there to ensure enforcement takes place. I am sure we can reflect with colleague Ministers on how the Health and Safety Executive operates its responsibilities to help achieve the objectives the Government have set in the VAWG strategy.
Baroness Smith of Llanfaes (PC)
I thank all noble Lords who have participated in this debate. I say in response to the Minister that I welcome the publication of the VAWG strategy tomorrow and will look in detail for anything which addresses the workplace.
I turn back to this debate. These specific probing amendments have set out a clear objective and I am grateful to all those who have contributed. It is clear that the Committee agrees with the objective these amendments are trying to achieve, yet they perhaps need more work in terms of the wording.
I will respond to a few of the comments made by noble Lords. The reminder by the noble Lord, Lord Russell, of just how much time individuals spend in the workplace highlights how we cannot achieve the Government’s aim to halve violence against women and girls within this decade by ignoring the workplace and how important it is.
In response to the point from the Conservative Front Bench on employers, the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, raised an interesting point about how having a framework of this kind can help protect employers. That is a positive. Having more guidance, a framework and risk assessments also protects employers’ liability in the future. There were a few points raised there—
Captain of the King’s Bodyguard of the Yeomen of the Guard and Deputy Chief Whip (Baroness Wheeler) (Lab)
I remind the noble Baroness that, in withdrawing amendments, statements need to be brief. She does not need to summarise the debate.
Baroness Smith of Llanfaes (PC)
I appreciate those comments. However, this is about how we will take the amendments further. This has been a really useful discussion in Committee and I value the contributions that people have made. I will not press my amendments today. However, this is not the end of this discussion. I value the comments from the Minister about how we will progress this, particularly with the wording of the amendments and by taking on board the comments raised by noble Lords in this debate. I hope that His Majesty’s Government will reflect on the debate— I am grateful that this will be shared with the Minister in the other place, Jess Phillips—and I would welcome further engagement. I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.
Jimmy Lai Conviction
The Earl of Courtown (Con)
My Lords, His Majesty’s Opposition echo calls for the immediate release of Jimmy Lai. Persecuted under the national security law, which is a breach of the 1984 Sino-British joint declaration, Lai’s verdict was made by politically appointed judges, and the trial was conducted without a jury.
Jimmy Lai’s courage and resilience is an inspiration. Born during the Chinese civil war, his mother was sent to a labour camp. At the age of 12, he arrived in Hong Kong and worked his way up to become one of Hong Kong’s success stories. As a British citizen, he could have come to the UK when the national security law came into force, but he chose to stay in Hong Kong out of solidarity with its people and commitment to his work. At the age of 78, he has spent the past five years in prison, mostly in solitary confinement.
As has been highlighted, requests for consular access have been repeatedly refused, as well as for Lai to have full access to independent medical professionals amid concerns for his health. Moreover, he has been refused access to the sacraments of the Catholic faith. The Chinese Communist Party’s treatment of him, and of Hong Kong, are further evidence that the Chinese Government cannot be trusted. Nor are these matters simply internal affairs for China. Lai is a British citizen. The national security law goes against the Sino-British joint declaration, which China signed, and which obliges the UK to guarantee rights and freedoms in Hong Kong. On the international world stage, the Chinese Government have proven themselves not to keep their word.
We know that the Chinese Communist Party cannot be trusted, and yet plans are progressing for a new super-embassy—the largest embassy in Europe and its largest diplomatic outpost globally. A spokesperson for the Chinese embassy has called for the planning application to be approved,
“to avoid further undermining the mutual trust and cooperation between the two sides”.
This is outrageous, when it is China that has breached the joint declaration, and that, even on British soil, continues to intimidate Hong Kongers. If the planning application for the new super-embassy is approved, at the heart of our capital city, what signal would that give? Can the Minister explain why the Government will not, at the very least, include China in the enhanced tier of the foreign influence registration scheme?
Numerous civil society organisations, including Hong Kong Watch, have written a joint letter to the Prime Minister, asking him to do more in the case of Jimmy Lai and noting that Australia, Canada and Ireland have been able to secure the release of their citizens imprisoned in China. Yesterday, the President of the United States called directly on Xi Jinping to consider his release. Can the Minister clarify whether our own Prime Minister will follow suit and demand his release publicly? In addition, if the Prime Minister refuses to cancel his visit to China in January, will he raise the matter and call for Jimmy Lai’s release in-person with President Xi?
We all recognise the complexities and competing considerations involved in the UK’s relationship with China, but we cannot let these drown out or dilute the Government’s duty to its citizens or to national security. I urge the Government to do more, inspired by Jimmy Lai’s own courage, to stand up to the CCP’s narrative and for our own principles and citizens.
Lord Oates (LD)
My Lords, I associate the Liberal Democrats with the Government’s strong condemnation of Jimmy Lai’s political conviction and of the Chinese Government for engineering it. I join the noble Earl in saluting the courage of Jimmy Lai, who, instead of choosing the easy life available to him, decided at great personal cost to stand up for democracy and freedom.
I have had the privilege of knowing some of those who have made similar sacrifices in other parts of the world. Every time I have met them, I have been humbled by the price they have been prepared to pay, knowing full well in advance of the potential consequences of their actions. That extraordinary and humbling courage requires a commensurate response from our Government in defence of not only an international hero of democracy but a British citizen.
Jimmy Lai is not alone. Many Hong Kongers continue to advocate for democracy despite the consequences, while the CCP continues to seek to undermine Hong Kong’s agreed status. Hong Kongers in the UK are subject to threats and intimidation from the Chinese state, including Carmen Lau, who just last week was subjected to a renewed campaign of intimidation against her.
Can the Minister tell us what assurance the Government can provide to Hong Kongers in the UK that they will be better protected from the outrageous actions of the CCP in our country? Will the Government sanction the CCP officials responsible for extraterritorial intimidation? Will the FCDO update its submission to the Housing Secretary about the risks of the super-embassy in the light of the actions of the Chinese state? Finally, what action will the Government take to signal, beyond any doubt, that the treatment of Jimmy Lai is wholly unacceptable and that they will continue to seek his release, vocally and with concrete action?
The Minister of State, Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (Baroness Chapman of Darlington) (Lab)
I thank both noble Lords for what they have said, particularly about Jimmy Lai himself—he truly is a remarkable person. I have not had the privilege of meeting him, but I know that many in this House have done so and consider him a very dear friend. What he has done throughout his life is truly extraordinary. The fact that, at 78 years of age, he finds himself in this terrible situation, for doing nothing other than standing up for democracy, is shocking. The Government are clear that he should be released immediately because his detention is politically motivated and there is no just reason to detain him in prison for a single minute longer.
The Government summoned the Chinese ambassador when the verdict was given. We have demanded that Jimmy Lai is released immediately. We are continuing to demand consular access, which has not been provided to date. We had senior officials attend the trial in order to make the point that the UK Government are watching this very closely. We raise this with partners, including the United States. We have raised this at every level with the Chinese as well.
On the issue of the embassy, clearly, the decision to allow China to use the former Royal Mint was made under the previous Government. Now, it is subject to decisions to be made by MHCLG, and that process is ongoing. The Prime Minister has raised this personally, and he will continue to do so.
In addition to those questions, the noble Lord, Lord Oates, asked about transnational repression, and that is clearly of deep concern to the Government. We are committed to supporting all members of the Hong Kong community who have used their right to relocate here to the UK. We are clear that any attempts by any foreign Governments, and that includes China, to coerce, intimidate or harm their critics here are completely unacceptable. Freedom of speech and other fundamental rights of all people in the UK are protected under our domestic laws.
Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)
My Lords, I first draw attention to my roles as a vice-chairman of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Hong Kong, as a patron of Hong Kong Watch and as chair of the Joint Committee on Human Rights, which published a report on transnational repression earlier this year and specifically called for China to be included in the advanced higher tier of the foreign influence registration scheme, referred to by the noble Earl, Lord Courtown. The noble Lord, Lord Oates, referred to Carmen Lau. One of the witnesses we had before that committee was Chloe Cheung, who came to this country as a young girl of 14 years of age, and at 19 years of age had a bounty of 1 million Hong Kong dollars placed on her head along with Carmen Lau and other British residents. This is a very serious situation, and I hope the Minister will respond to the point about FIRS when she comes to reply.
Jimmy Lai is a British citizen, and I know him and his family. I have immense admiration for his courage, honesty and integrity. I fear that unless he is released, this outrageous conviction will prove to be a death sentence. Jimmy Lai’s only crime has been to speak the truth, to believe in democracy, to champion freedom and to defend the British-China treaty, which guaranteed “one country, two systems” and has been broken again and again. What more are we doing to secure unhindered access to Jimmy Lai’s medics, pastor, consular officials and loved ones? Does the Minister agree that this sham trial has nothing to do with justice and resembles Lewis Carroll’s parody of nonsensical justice based on verdict first, trial later, with the outcome always a foregone conclusion?
Since Lenin introduced show trials in 1922, Stalin, Mao Tse-Tung and today’s CCP leaders have perfected a technique of gross judicial theatre to spread terror and to inculcate fear. Does the Minister agree that the remaining British and Australian judges who lend respectability to these star chambers should follow Lord Sumption and remove themselves forthwith? In Hong Kong, rule of law has been replaced by rule by law. What are we doing to raise the cases of hundreds of pro-democracy supporters, such as Joshua Wong and Andy Li, who continue to languish in CCP prisons, many on national security charges that range from the draconian to the ludicrous? Will the Prime Minister please think again about going to China until Jimmy Lai has been released from these wretched prison conditions and allowed to leave and be reunited with his family?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
It does have a feeling of a Second Reading debate, but that is because the noble Lord is so knowledgeable about these issues and the case of his friend Jimmy Lai in particular.
I am very grateful to the noble Lord for putting his position in the way that he did. I agree with much of what he said, particularly about Jimmy Lai personally. I will try to respond to the questions in as straightforward a way as I possibly can, because I know that is what he would want. I do not have anything to tell him about FIRS designations. We have not made decisions on that yet, but as soon as that decision is made, I am sure it will be communicated in the usual way.
The noble Lord is absolutely right, and I could not agree with him more, about the nature of this trial, if we can call it that. It was politically motivated. There is no circumstance in which Jimmy Lai should be detained. He should have access to consulate officials, his family, medical treatment and people who can help him with his faith, but he should not need those things because he should not be imprisoned in the first place.
On the issue of judges, we all have our professional regulations and codes that we need to stick to in this place and in any professional walk of life, but we also have our own consciences that guide the decisions we make. It is good that in this country our judiciary is independent and makes its own decisions and choices about what it does. I noted the decision made by Lord Sumption and his reasons for making it, and I think people can make their own conclusions on that.
On the issue of prime ministerial travel to China, I do not know what the Prime Minister’s plans are regarding going to China. This is not a comment in relation to the specific question about the Prime Minister’s travel, but a more general observation: I think it would be a mistake to cut off all ties with China at this point, because there was no leader-level interaction for the previous six years under the previous Government, and it did not get us very far. We may be more successful if we have that degree of engagement and, when we have that engagement, we use it well to make these cases. As the noble Lord said, Jimmy Lai’s case is surely one of the most abhorrent, but there are others too. He is right to remind us of that.
Lord Garnier (Con)
My Lords, I appreciate that we are no longer the superpower that we used to be, but none the less if we were to speak firmly to the Government of China, it would be internationally noticed.
The Chinese Government have no respect for the rule of law, as we can see from the recent trial of Jimmy Lai. The Government occasionally resort to saying that the decision about the embassy in the City of London is at a quasi-judicial stage. Why not treat that with the same degree of seriousness with which the Chinese treat the trial of Jimmy Lai and make a public political decision that until the Jimmy Lai case is resolved in a civilised way, there is no question of the embassy decision being progressed in the favour of the Chinese Government? They will respect hard bargaining. They want the embassy and it is ours to give, so let us refuse it.
Although we disagree with the United States in regard to its attitude towards President Putin and the behaviour that he has exhibited over the last several years, we can agree with the United States on the danger that the Chinese Government pose and should therefore use our alliance with the United States to apply real economic and diplomatic pressure on Beijing, enhanced by our alliance with the United States, in relation to the Jimmy Lai case. I know from the press that President Trump is not happy with the Jimmy Lai case. Nobody here is. Let us use that and what strength we have, in alliance with others, to bring the Chinese to understand that this sort of behaviour is utterly intolerable and will not enhance their own interests in the West.
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
The noble and learned Lord is right to suggest that we speak to our allies and partners about this and try to elicit support from others in securing his release. We are doing that and will continue to do that, including with the United States.
He asks why we do not just disregard the quasi-judicial process, override it and make a politically driven decision in relation to the application for the former Royal Mint. Quite simply, it is because we are better than that, and we do not do that. Having an embassy is not a reward for like-minded partners in this country. That is not how we make these choices. A decision will be made in the right way, taking into account all the issues that are relevant to that decision by MHCLG.
Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws (Lab)
My Lords, like the noble Lord, Lord Alton, I have been involved with the arrest and subsequent trial of Jimmy Lai. I too am a patron of Hong Kong Watch. I am also on the Joint Committee on Human Rights, and members of my chambers have been acting for Jimmy Lai in his case internationally.
I want to raise a number of things that have not yet been mentioned. The first is the extent to which Jimmy Lai is being used as an example. The prosecution of Jimmy Lai is to silence those who are advocating for real democracy. That is what it is really about. The chilling effect is very real when you speak to lawyers there and interact with people who have been major pro-democracy advocates. The difficulty for people such as the noble Lord, Lord Alton, and me, having been sanctioned by the Chinese because of our criticism, is that we often cannot be in touch with people in Hong Kong with whom we have had long-term relationships. To do so would endanger them. If you look at the judgment, I appear as a collaborator in Jimmy Lai’s crimes. Actually, although I am a very close friend of his son and his daughter-in-law, I have never met Jimmy Lai. Yet I am supposed to be one of the people with whom he was conspiring to undermine national security.
He is a man of 78. He has been in custody for six years in solitary confinement. He is suffering serious ill health and Sebastien Lai, his son, only two days ago was here in this House and described in some detail the state of his health and how concerned the family is. Could our Prime Minister not be asking for clemency on that basis? The children of Jimmy Lai are based in this country. They were educated in this country. Jimmy Lai has a British passport. He has never had any other passport. He is a British citizen, a British subject, and has always maintained that of himself. The period between now and the visit to China by the Prime Minister is an opportunity to negotiate for clemency and for him to be returned to Britain, where he could be with his children and live out the last part of his life.
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
We are clear that Jimmy Lai is British. He should be released because there was no need for him to be detained in the first place. This whole situation has been politically driven from the very beginning, not least for the reasons that my noble friend describes about wanting to make an example and to induce this chilling effect that has occurred. Our Prime Minister will do whatever he needs to do and will make the argument in the way that he thinks is most impactful, as I know my noble friend would expect, to argue for and demand the immediate release of Jimmy Lai.
Lord Carlile of Berriew (CB)
Returning to the question of the judges, will the Minister be a little bolder in the light of the clear death of the rule of law in Hong Kong? The continued membership of six Commonwealth senior retired judges on the Hong Kong Court of Final Appeal—four Australian and two British—is used as support by the Chinese regime for how it is behaving. In that light, will the Government not be a little bolder and advise those judges that now is the time for them to resign on the basis of a clear principle, which they must well understand, however long they have been on the Bench?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
I can have a view about that. Others might have a view if the Government were to attempt to instruct judges about what they should do. My comments in response to the earlier question are probably as far as I am going to go this evening, but I hear what the noble Lord says and his reasons for saying it. His words are on the record. Perhaps those judges may want to consider the points that he has made.
Crime and Policing Bill
Wednesday 17th December 2025
(1 day, 19 hours ago)
Lords ChamberCrime and Policing Bill 2024-26 View all Crime and Policing Bill 2024-26 Debates Read Hansard Text Watch Debate Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: HL Bill 111(Corrected)-VII(b) Amendments for Committee (Supplementary to the Seventh Marshalled List) - (17 Dec 2025)
“Offences of causing harassment, alarm or distress: amendments(1) The Public Order Act 1986 is amended as follows.(2) In section 4A (intentional harassment, alarm or distress) omit “, alarm” in each place where it occurs (including the heading) and omit “, alarmed” in subsection (2).(3) In section 5 (harassment, alarm or distress) omit “, alarm” in each place where it occurs (including the heading).”
Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)
My Lords, it is a pleasure to have the opportunity to contribute to Committee proceedings. My Amendment 352 is quite straightforward. It would omit the word “alarm” from the appropriate legislation, by way of a new clause. In the landmark 1976 case, Handyside v United Kingdom, the European Court of Human Rights established that freedom of expression under Article 10 extends to ideas that “offend, shock or disturb” the state or any sector of the population. The court emphasised that tolerance and pluralism are essential for a democratic society, and that this protection applies to both popular and unpopular expression.
The cut and thrust of debate, whether political, religious or philosophical, means being able to challenge long-standing and sometimes deeply cherished assumptions. It can be shocking and disturbing—even alarming—to have the pillars of one’s world view challenged. It can be deeply uncomfortable, but it should not be a matter for the criminal law. That is why I have tabled this amendment to the Public Order Act 1986.
My amendment would remove “alarm” from Sections 4A and 5 of the 1986 Act. Section 4A currently criminalises “words or behaviour” that are intended to cause
“another person harassment, alarm or distress”.
Section 5 criminalises
“words or behaviour … within the hearing or sight of a person likely to be caused harassment, alarm or distress”,
even where that impact is not intended or, indeed, actually caused.
It seems to me that there should be no place in the criminal law of England and Wales for criminalising a citizen on the basis that his words or behaviour cause or are deemed likely to cause alarm. Of course, the law should seek to protect the citizen from harassment and distress: these are impacts that can have untold negative effects on people. In a democratic society, freedom of speech should always be balanced with civility and kindness. But, unlike harassment or distress, being alarmed is not inherently a negative impact. Indeed, it may be positive.
For some years now, we have been warned that our planet is hurtling towards destructive and irreversible climate change—I notice the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, temporarily sitting on my Benches—such that it might not be able to support life as we know it. The science and the prescribed remedy are by no means universally accepted. I make no point about that, but I do observe that those seeking to change our economic behaviour have not flinched at alarming us about the peril we face.
Of course, if you believe that bad consequences will follow bad decisions, you will naturally warn of those dangers, as exemplified by the proponents of Project Fear during the EU referendum. If the perceived dangers are said to be catastrophic, it will inevitably alarm some people. This is seen in the expression of religious or philosophical belief. If a Christian preacher believes, as Christians do, that the Day of Judgment is approaching, in which all people will be judged for the lives they have lived in the here and now, it should come as no surprise that the preacher will seek to ring the alarm bell. If you believe that the world consumption of meat is causing the decimation of the rainforests and leading to the overproduction of carbon dioxide gases, you might well want to alarm the complacent beef eater of those catastrophic consequences in order to make the case for veganism.
Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)
Is the noble Lord saying that, when I was on the Bench here and he hissed at me that I should shut up because I was rude, that was okay because it did not alarm me? Does he remember doing that? We almost came to blows outside.
Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)
I recollect that we have always had a robust exchange of views. I did not in any sense seek to alarm the noble Baroness, but, from memory, she arrived late for a group of amendments, pontificated for a few minutes on issues that she had not heard and then—
Lord in Waiting/Government Whip (Lord Katz) (Lab)
My Lords, I am going to call a halt at this point. This is remembrance of things past. We have an important amendment to discuss today, and we should focus on the amendments.
Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)
I thank the Whip. I was merely elucidating for the benefit of the Committee the context of the noble Baroness’s rather strange intervention on my remarks. I do not quite have the same recollection that she does—
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Beith) (LD)
My Lords, the noble Lord has moved the amendment, and the opportunity is there for other Members to speak to it.
Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)
My Lords, I of course wish the Committee a very happy Christmas when that moment comes, but it was not just in seasonal spirit that I signed the amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Jackson of Peterborough. As he indicated, free expression is a two-way street, and I suggest that it is a two-way street in at least two ways: first, because all democrats, of whichever side of the aisle, ought to guard it jealously, and, secondly, because it must be applied with an even hand, even to people, ideas and causes with which we seriously disagree.
Before entering your Lordships’ House, I worked for 15 years at Liberty, the National Council for Civil Liberties. In that time, I saw the concept of behaviour causing or even just likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress used and abused to arrest and even prosecute people in a way that I believe all Members of the Committee would consider abusive, certainly when applied to people like us or causes with which we agree.
“Alarm” and arguably even “distress”, as opposed to a reasonable fear of a threat or of harm, are very broad. Harassment is a course of conduct and therefore a bit more objective and less broad. Sections 4A and 5 of the Public Order Act 1986 obviously create two specific criminal offences, but the rubric of “harassment, alarm or distress” also now forms the linchpin of anti-social behaviour, with its quasi-civil and criminal orders and the even broader approach that police guidance and police websites take to the concept of anti-social behaviour. However, that matter was discussed earlier in Committee.
The two offences that the noble Lord, Lord Jackson of Peterborough, has identified have, in my direct experience over many years, been applied broadly, indiscriminately and, ironically, in a discriminatory way to, for example, peaceful protesters and to anti-monarchists for wearing republican slogans on their T-shirts when a member of the Royal Family is in town. The noble Lord, Lord Jackson of Peterborough, gave other examples of words that can offend or cause alarm and distress, as opposed to fear or the threat of real harm. I gave the example of the anti-monarchist who was not just arrested but, I believe, charged for the T-shirt in question, but there are also cases of youngsters being charged, certainly being arrested, for being cheeky with the police. I think this cannot just be blamed on the police when these concepts on the public order statute book are just too vague and too broad.
To attempt to leaven the spirit yet again the week before Christmas, I am reminded that today at PMQs, and not for the first time, the leader of the Opposition made reference, if euphemistically, to the Prime Minister’s private parts. Of course, that sort of thing would never happen in your Lordships’ House, but whatever noble Lords think of that approach to parliamentary debate, people on our streets, ordinary people, have been arrested and charged for less. Can that really be right? I think not.
Baroness Lawlor (Con)
My Lords, I will say a few words in support of the amendment. I agree with the difficulty of categorising alarm in the same manner as harassment and distress. Harassment and distress can be objectively measured or distress objectively assessed, but when it comes to alarm, I think what noble Lords have said so far is that it may cause a shock to hear somebody in your group saying something so different to anything you could imagine being said.
I can give an example of a representative image or a representation which may be designed to shock. I was a supporter of Brexit in a very remain constituency, Cambridge. We usually invite people at the end of term, and I had a Vote Leave poster in my window, but as they were coming to a party to celebrate the end of term, I said to my husband that I would take it down because I did not want to upset them. Afterwards, none of them ever could imagine that I might support leave. When I told them, they said, “We had no idea. We couldn’t have imagined we knew anybody in Cambridge who voted leave”. I suppose you could say that I was trying not to spoil their day because people take these matters very seriously, but you could say that alarm could be equated to an instance of thoughtlessness, bad manners or a deliberate intention to shock, as some people will do, but it is not a matter to criminalise. For those reasons, I support removing “alarm” from Sections 4A and 5 but would leave harassment and distress because they can more objectively be measured.
Lord Anderson of Ipswich (CB)
I thank the noble Lord, Lord Jackson, and the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, for raising a point that really had not occurred to me in years of gazing at Sections 4A and 5 of the Public Order Act. I also thank the noble Lord for his reference to the Handyside case, quite correctly observing that freedom of speech means nothing if it does not include the freedom to offend, shock and disturb. But, of course, Handyside was about ideas that offend, shock and disturb. Sections 4A and 5 are not talking about ideas; as the noble Lord said, they refer to threats, abuse and insult.
Outside the rarefied walls of academe, the cases in which Sections 4A and 5 are applied are to the objectionable drunk, on a train or in a doorway, who yells at somebody and can cause, in the words of the statute, distress or alarm. I agree with the noble Lord that they are not very different. In fact, he said it would be otiose to have both “distress” and “alarm” in the sections, but surely there is a shade of difference between the two. If there is some lasting upset, we could call that distress, but if it is a question of frightening or unsettling somebody by yelling an insult in their ear, that is probably closer to alarm. Although I agree with the noble Lord and the noble Baroness about the evils of overzealous prosecutors, I suggest that there is some purpose to these two very similar words both appearing in these two sections.
Baroness Doocey (LD)
My Lords, I have listened to this rather short debate against the particular backdrop of the Government’s increasingly unsettling approach to public order—a direction of travel that raises real concerns on these Benches. The current stance seems to involve simply doubling down on the pattern set by the previous Administration, which, in our view, risks overpolicing protest, overburdening an already stretched justice system, diverting resources from serious crime and threatening legitimate speech.
In that context, we have sympathy with this proposal. However, I have some concerns about changing a standard legal formula in public order and anti-social behaviour law. It is widely embedded in guidance and operational policy; in removing it, there is a risk of creating uncertainty and confusion within the police, local authorities and the courts. At the same time, it is equally clear that the concepts of alarm and distress have, in practice, been stretched far beyond what Parliament ever intended. Some people are very easily alarmed or distressed by noisy but peaceful demonstrations, or simply by views with which they profoundly disagree. These cannot be a sound basis for criminal liability.
There is a real risk that an overbroad test inhibits free expression, penalises vulnerability and hands too much discretion to those who are most intolerant of difference. If the Government will not support this amendment, will the Minister explain how they intend to ensure that public order powers are not used to criminalise mere annoyance, eccentricity or disagreement, but are focused on genuinely threatening, abusive and harassing behaviour?
Lord Cameron of Lochiel (Con)
I thank my noble friend Lord Jackson of Peterborough for tabling Amendment 352. It is welcome to see such a cross-party collection of noble Lords supporting it: the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, the noble Lord, Lord Verdirame, and the noble Baroness, Lady Fox of Buckley, are not names always seen together on an amendment.
The amendment proposes to remove “alarm” from Sections 4A and 5 of the 1986 Act, as we have heard. As others have said, alarm is a word that denotes impression, mood and temperament. It is a word that allows the criminal law to stray beyond the prevention of genuine disorder and into the policing of irritation, discomfort or unease. Several legal cases have shown where this can lead. In a case called DPP v Orum in 1989, a conviction was upheld under Section 5 for shouting abuse at police officers. The court accepted that even trained officers, accustomed as they might be to a degree of verbal abuse, could none the less be persons likely to be caused “harassment, alarm or distress”. Although that may be understandable up to a point, it demonstrates how low the threshold has been set. If professionals whose job it is to face confrontation can be alarmed by rude language, one begins to wonder who cannot be.
Another case is called Norwood v DPP in 2003, in which a man was convicted for displaying a poster saying “Islam out of Britain” in his window. The reasoning again rested partly on the likelihood of causing alarm. Whatever one thinks of the views expressed—many of us would deplore them—the case illustrates how “alarm” can operate as a gateway through which deeply subjective reactions become the basis for criminal liability. It seems that these cases represent symptoms of a statutory provision that has no clear boundary. “Alarm” does not mean “fear of violence”—it does not require intimidation; it does not even require serious upset. It has been stretched to cover being offended, unsettled or merely uncomfortable. I suggest that is not a sound basis for criminal liability.
As others have said, the law retains and contains safeguards where genuine harm arises: “harassment” would remain in the wording of the statute, “distress” would remain in the wording of the provision, and Section 4 remains available for
“Fear or provocation of violence”.
Other statutes address stalking, threats and coercive conduct. My noble friend’s amendment would remove nothing that is truly necessary to protect the public. It would restore a measure of seriousness to public order law. Criminal offences should address conduct that is objectively wrongful, not speech or behaviour that happens to alarm someone whose threshold for alarm may be very low. This amendment has our wholehearted support, and I hope that it has the support of the Minister too.
The Minister of State, Home Office (Lord Hanson of Flint) (Lab)
My Lords, I confess that when I woke up this morning I did not anticipate having a discussion about Thames Valley Police and a gay horse. Such is political life on the Government Front Bench. Nor did I anticipate talking about the Prime Minister’s private parts, referred to by my noble friend Lady Chakrabarti.
On a more serious note, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Jackson, for his amendment. I begin by confirming what my noble friend Lady Chakrabarti said, which is that the right to express views, even those that may be unpopular, is a vital part of our democratic society, and freedom of expression is vital. The noble Lord, Lord Jackson, the noble Baroness, Lady Lawlor, and my noble friend Lady Chakrabarti have argued to remove “alarm” from Sections 4A and 5 of the Public Order Act 1986. I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Anderson of Ipswich, for giving some balance to the argument and coming to a conclusion that I share. To remove from these offences behaviour that causes alarm would mean that behaviour that frightens or unsettles someone but which does not amount to harassment or distress would no longer be covered. Why does that matter? It matters because it would narrow the scope of the law and reduce the police’s ability to intervene early in potentially volatile situations. An example was mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Anderson of Ipswich, in relation to activity on a train, late at night, by an individual with too many beers in their body. That is a valuable cause of alarm.
I say to the noble Lord, Lord Cameron, that these provisions have been in place for many years: in fact, they were passed under the Government of Mrs Thatcher, which is not usually a thing I pray in aid when discussing legislation in this House. Removing “alarm” at this stage —this goes to the point mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Doocey—would affect how offences operate in practice, including the thresholds that have developed through case law. It would impact on the existing legal framework, which already ensures that enforcement decisions are made proportionately and in line with human rights obligations. This includes the important right, as my noble friend said, to freedom of expression.
The balance that the noble Lord, Lord Anderson of Ipswich, struck is the one that I would strike as well. It is a long-standing, 39 year-old piece of legislation that has held up and has been interpreted in a sensible way by those who have legal powers to use it, both police officers and the CPS. Ultimately, we should ensure that the alarm element remains.
Having said all of that, noble Lords will be aware that the Home Secretary has commissioned an independent review of public order and hate crime legislation, which the noble Lord, Lord Macdonald of River Glaven, KC, is considering. He will consider the thresholds relating to public order and hate crime legislation, whether they remain fit for purpose, if legislative changes are required and if we could have more consistent approaches to the offence of inciting hatred. He will also consider how we ensure offence thresholds do not interfere with free speech and how we deal with the type of issues that the noble Lord has mentioned.
I believe we should stay where we are for the reasons I have outlined, but a review is ongoing. It is important that we allow that review to conclude, which it will do by spring next year. The Government will consider and respond to whatever recommendations come forward. We do not know what those recommendations might be, but they are there to be done, and that is one of the reasons the Home Secretary commissioned the review. I understand where the noble Lord is coming from, but I hope I have put a defence of why we should maintain where we are. In the light of the potential review, I invite the noble Lord to withdraw his amendment.
Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)
I thank the Minister for his typically thoughtful and considered response. I think he would concede that this has been a very interesting and intelligent debate. I thank all noble Lords who took part, particularly my noble friend Lady Lawlor, the noble Lord, Lord Anderson of Ipswich, and the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Verdirame, who was hoping to take part in the debate but, because this Committee has overrun somewhat, was not able to be here. I also thank the noble Baroness, Lady Fox of Buckley.
The noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, and the noble Lord, Lord Anderson, touched upon the fact that the real meaning of alarm is a fine judgment. I take on board the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Anderson. However, it is important to look in the context of the advice and guidance that the police are given on the use of Section 4A and Section 5 of the Public Order Act. For instance, to breach Section 5, a person needs to act in either a threatening or abusive manner. He also needs to intend his words or behaviour to be threatening or abusive, or be aware that they may be threatening or abusive. I would say that alarm is a lower standard of criminality—a lower bar—than that.
According to police guidance, Section 4A is designed to deal with:
“More serious, planned and malicious incidents of insulting behaviour”.
You are more likely to be accused of a Section 4A offence in relation to a comment directed to a particular individual—for example, publicly singling out someone in a crowd. I think those are the differences, and we will have a different view as to the appropriateness of whether alarm is apposite for dealing with these offences.
Having said all that, we may come back to this. I am grateful for the support of the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, on this—it is very unusual, but it is a seasonal phenomenon that we agree from time to time. I even agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, from time to time. On the basis of Christmas spirit and all that, and the fact that we will no doubt return to this on Report, I am happy to beg leave to withdraw my amendment.
Baroness Sugg
“Interpretation: sections (Honour as an aggravating factor in sentencing) and (Duty to issue statutory multi-agency guidance)For the purposes of criminal law “Honour-based abuse” means an incident or pattern of violence, threats of violence, intimidation, coercion, control or abuse (including but not limited to psychological, physical, sexual, economic, spiritual, faith-related or emotional abuse) motivated by the perpetrator’s perception that an individual has shamed, or may shame, the perpetrator, the family, or community, or has otherwise broken, or may break, the perceived norms of the community’s accepted behaviours, including by speaking out about the abuse, and where the perception of shame may also prevent a victim from accessing support or help.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment provides a statutory definition of “Honour-Based Abuse”. It defines the term as an incident or pattern of abuse motivated by a perception that a person has brought or may bring shame or dishonour upon a family or community. The definition is intended to capture the range of behaviours that can constitute such abuse, including physical, psychological, sexual, economic, or other forms of coercive control.
Baroness Sugg (Con)
My Lords, I will speak to the amendments in my name in this group. Amendments 353 and 355, co-signed by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Gloucester and the noble Baronesses, Lady Doocey and Lady Kennedy of The Shaws, relate to a statutory definition of honour-based abuse and a duty to issue multi-agency statutory guidance.
Honour-based abuse is a form of domestic abuse motivated by an abuser’s perception that a person has brought, or may bring, dishonour or shame to themselves, their family or their community. It can take many forms and is often complex to identify, but it centres on controlling individuals to compel them to behave in certain ways or subscribe to certain beliefs. For some, the concept of honour is prized above the safety and well-being of individuals, and to compromise a family’s honour is to bring dishonour and shame. In extreme cases, this is used to justify abuse, disownment or physical harm. Honour-based abuse is not a cultural tradition or religious practice. It is a form of abuse that can occur within any community, regardless of faith or background.
Despite increased reporting to the national honour-based abuse helpline, commissioned by the Home Office, it remains the least prosecuted form of violence against women and girls. Across agencies, it is inconsistently recognised, poorly understood and inadequately responded to. Without clarity, front-line professionals are unsure how to spot the signs, and victims can slip through the cracks.
The need for change is starkly illustrated by the story of Fawziyah Javed. Fawziyah was a lawyer; she understood the importance of evidence and tried to protect herself and her unborn child. She repeatedly sought help, reporting to health professionals, contacting the police and gathering evidence against her abusers, but her situation was not taken seriously. Her case exposes a persistent and systemic failure to recognise honour-based abuse within statutory systems. Multiple perpetrators were involved, but they were overlooked because investigations often focused on a single individual, reflecting approaches designed for intimate-partner domestic abuse rather than the extended, collective and coercive nature of honour-based abuse.
In late August 2021, when Fawziyah made a second report to the police, the risks she faced had still not been recognised. On 2 September 2021, Fawziyah, aged 31, and 17 weeks pregnant with a baby boy, was tragically murdered when her husband pushed her from Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh. Immediately after this, as was shown in the Channel 4 documentary “The Push: Murder on the Cliff”, he did not call 999; the first call he made was to his own father. This illustrates the family-involved dynamics of honour-based abuse, which are too often overlooked by statutory systems.
Fawziyah’s mother, Yasmin Javed, has led the campaign to ensure that her daughter’s legacy drives meaningful change, and has permitted me to share Fawziyah’s story. Yasmin’s courage and advocacy ensures that survivors’ voices are heard and their experiences are recognised. She believes strongly that the lack of understanding of honour-based abuse and the absence of a universal statutory definition meant that Fawziyah’s experience and the perpetrators were missed.
Fawziyah’s story demonstrates why we urgently need a statutory definition and accompanying guidance, not just for the police and prosecutors but for teachers, social workers, healthcare professionals and everyone who has an opportunity to identify abuse early before it escalates. It will help professionals understand its complex dynamics and act decisively to protect victims.
In August, the Government announced six new measures to tackle honour-based abuse, including legislating, at the earliest opportunity, to introduce a statutory definition and multi-agency guidance. I am very pleased that we are on the same page on that.
Turning to the definition itself, Amendment 353 puts forward a suggested definition that has been developed over a number of years. It is not my definition but the product of sustained work by the sector, legal experts and, most importantly, survivors with lived experience. From 2022, survivors worked with the University of Nottingham to develop a survivor-informed definition. This work identified serious limitations in existing non-statutory definitions and provided a framework that captures the collective and coercive nature of this abuse. Building on this survivor-informed foundation, barrister Naomi Wiseman, drawing on extensive experience in this field, led further work with violence against women and girls sector partners to draft a statutory definition. Through multiple iterations, consensus was reached upon a definition that reflects the complexity of honour-based abuse.
To date, this work has engaged survivors, over 60 organisations and specialist legal expertise. It combines lived experience with professional knowledge to bring clarity, consistency and stronger protections. This process has been truly sector-wide and survivor-led. Survivors’ voices have shaped every iteration, ensuring that the definition reflects the realities of honour-based abuse. I wish to put on the record my sincere thanks to all those involved, particularly the survivors. Their dedication and insight, born from personal experience and gaps in professional responses, has ensured that future victims can be recognised, protected and believed in the ways that they were not.
This survivor-led process has required significant time, expertise and emotional labour, often carried out amid ongoing abuse, ostracism and bereavement. Every consultation involves survivors and bereaved families retelling painful and traumatic experiences. They do this out of a sense of duty, so that their survival can mean something for the many who are not able to speak out. Dame Nicole Jacobs, the Domestic Abuse Commissioner, has welcomed this work. She said: “I recognise the significant progress that has been made to date and emphasise the importance of grounding any definition in survivor experience. I support the ongoing work led by survivors, the specialist sector and Karma Nirvana to ensure the definition is effective”.
Of course, we all want a definition that works, and I therefore welcome the debate to come, so we can agree a definition that is fit for purpose—one that respects survivors’ lived experience and treats their contribution with the seriousness that it deserves. I am grateful to the noble Baroness the Minister and Home Office officials for their engagement to date. I know that work is ongoing on a revised definition, and I hope that we can work together, with survivors, experts and the sector, to return on Report with a workable, legally sound definition that reflects survivors’ experiences, strengthens protection and supports effective multi-agency working.
Timing matters here. For years, survivors, the sector and front-line professionals have called for a statutory definition, and this Bill is the vehicle through which change must be delivered—it really cannot wait any longer. The CPS and police are revising their guidance, which is due mid-next year, and they need a statutory definition in place to do so effectively. The success of this reform will also depend on the rollout of clear, comprehensive communication and training, a commitment that I am pleased to say that the Government have already made for next year. We need the definition to make that effective. For too long, perpetrators have escaped accountability, while victims have been failed. The time to act is now.
I turn to Amendment 354 in my name, co-signed by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Gloucester and the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy of The Shaws; the noble Baroness, Lady Doocey, has tabled a similar amendment in this group. Amendment 354 would recognise honour as an aggravating factor in sentencing. It would ensure earlier identification of honour-based abuse in investigations and prosecutions, and that sentences properly reflect the gravity of the offending. Safeguarding would be strengthened for victims facing risk from multiple perpetrators, and it would also act as a stronger deterrent.
The murder of Somaiya Begum, a 20-year-old biomedical student, exposed a critical gap in the criminal justice system. Despite an active forced marriage protection order, Somaiya was murdered by a family member. Evidence at trial demonstrated the role of family pressures and honour dynamics, yet the court concluded:
“It is not possible to identify a motive for this dreadful attack”.
In his defence statement, the defendant explicitly relied on notions of honour to shift blame on to other family members. Despite this, the judge did not recognise honour in sentencing. This demonstrates how the absence of formal recognition allows key motivations to be overlooked, weakening justice and accountability.
Somaiya’s case and other cases such as the terrible murder of Banaz Mahmod, to which I know the noble Baroness, Lady Doocey, will refer, illustrate several wider systemic failures. Yesterday would have been Banaz’s 40th birthday—and I pay tribute to Banaz’s sister, Payzee Mahmod, who has been a tireless advocate for changes to the law in Banaz’s memory, and whom I have worked closely with on this campaign. I also want to acknowledge Banaz’s sister Bekhal, who is calling for change in this area too.
When we do not recognise the aggravation of honour in the perpetration of these crimes, there are multiple consequences. First, there is the erasure of victims; when honour motivations are not named, survivors and families feel unseen and invalidated, deepening mistrust in the justice system and perpetuating silence. Secondly, there is unreliable data: judgments rarely reference honour, creating the false impression that such cases are infrequent or absent, despite evidence to the contrary. Thirdly, there are low prosecution rates: between April 2024 and March 2025, only 95 honour-based prosecutions were brought, with fewer than half resulting in conviction. Supporting this amendment would address these failures, improve data, strengthen accountability and ensure that courts formally acknowledge honour-based motivations, giving survivors and families the recognition and justice that they deserve.
Given that we are a little later than planned, many noble Lords who were going to speak in favour of these amendments are sadly no longer in their place. That includes the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy of The Shaws, who, given her long experience, fully supports these amendments, in particular making honour-based abuse an aggravating feature, to send a clear message to communities and sentencing judges.
I pass on my sincere thanks to the Minister for the meeting to discuss this issue with not just her but three Ministers and officials across both departments. I am also very grateful for her own suggestion that she speak to the sector and survivor representatives ahead of this debate to hear from them directly. I listened with interest to the noble Lord, Lord Hanson, earlier in response to the Urgent Question on the VAWG strategy, and I look forward to reading that strategy tomorrow, given his reference a number of times to honour-based abuse.
I appreciate that the Government are clearly working to make progress on this, and I have two questions for the Minister. Will she commit to continuing to work with the sector to bring forward amendments on an agreed definition and guidance for Report? Secondly, while I heard the Minister’s explanation on Monday on existing aggravating factors and sentencing practice, we know from reviewing sentencing remarks in cases of clear honour-based abuse that, in practice, these factors are inconsistently applied and often fail to capture the collective, coercive and family or community-driven nature of the abuse. In that context, could the Minister set out the Government’s position on formally recognising honour-based abuse as an aggravating factor in sentencing?
In conclusion, I pay tribute again to the tireless work and bravery of survivors. Without them the progress on this work to date would not be possible. I would also like to thank Karma Nirvana, whose incredible work supports victims and survivors, brings the sector together collaboratively and campaigns for these life-saving changes alongside over 60 leading organisations. I am deeply grateful to the survivors and sector representatives who attended a briefing for noble Lords here last month. They reminded us plainly that honour-based abuse remains an invisible crime, with invisible perpetrators and, tragically, invisible victims. They told us that making progress on these amendments will save lives, prevent immeasurable harm and deliver recognition and justice for those who deserve it. Fawziyah, Somaiya, Banaz and so many others cannot speak for themselves, but through the courage of their families and advocates, we have the opportunity to act. In their names, I beg to move.
Baroness Doocey (LD)
My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Sugg, for moving her amendment. This group also includes Amendment 356 in my name and in the name of the noble Baronesses, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb and Lady Blower, whose support I greatly appreciate. I also thank Southall Black Sisters for their tireless campaigning in this vital area.
I echo the noble Baroness, Lady Sugg, in paying tribute to Banaz Mahmod and to the extraordinary courage of her sisters, Bekhal and Payzee, whose tireless campaigning has kept the spotlight on honour-based abuse in the hope that Banaz’s legacy will drive real and lasting change. Banaz was just 20 when she was murdered by her father, uncle and five male cousins. Her crime? Leaving her abusive husband and having a boyfriend she wished to marry. Her family convened a council of war to plan her killing, claiming that her wish for divorce and choice of partner brought shame on the family and the wider community. She did everything that we tell victims to do. On five separate occasions, she reported rape, violence and threats to kill—even an attempt on her life by her own father. She named those who would later murder her, yet she was not believed or protected. Her murder is not an isolated tragedy but emblematic of wider patterns of institutional failure to identify and respond to honour-based abuse.
That is why I have I have also added my name to Amendments 353 and 355, calling for a statutory definition to be brought forward as quickly as possible, alongside guidance, so that the thousands of incidents of such abuse reported in the UK each year are treated with the gravity they deserve. I too urge the Government not to miss the opportunity presented by the Bill, and I hope that the Minister will provide that reassurance.
Amendment 356 would make honour a statutory aggravating factor in sentencing. A similar amendment in the other place limited this to murder, but here it is deliberately broader. This would ensure that any offence committed in the name of honour is explicitly treated as aggravated in sentencing. It shares the aim of Amendment 354 but, in the absence of an existing statutory definition, it defines the aggravating factor independently, focusing instead on the perpetrator’s conduct and mirroring existing language from racial and religious aggravation laws. This approach would allow the aggravating factor to take effect immediately, while consultations on the definition take place between the Government and the sector.
Critically, Amendment 356 also recognises the frequent involvement of multiple perpetrators and colluders. In Banaz’s case, police estimated that around 50 men were involved, either in the killing or in shielding those responsible. This recognition is vital for improving how agencies identify and respond to such abuse.
I have reflected on the comments made during Monday’s Committee about the concept of honour already being adequately covered in legislation. I do not want to anticipate the Minister’s response, but I imagine she will say that judges are already familiar with the concept of honour and that evidence of its presence will already result in a stiffer sentence.
Baroness Gohir (CB)
My Lords, I declare my interest of CEO of the Muslim Women’s Network UK. We have a helpline and we deal with honour-based abuse cases.
While I support in principle the introduction of a statutory definition of honour-based abuse, it is essential that the Home Office concludes its work on the definition. I am part of the advisory group on this, alongside many other stakeholders. We must ensure that a final version is workable and fair, and includes statutory guidance, as recommended in Amendment 355.
However, I oppose the definition that has been put forward, although I appreciate that the noble Baroness, Lady Sugg, has suggested it to create debate and discussion. I have a number of concerns. While I appreciate that a number of organisations have put their names to the proposed definition, I suspect that many have not gone through it line by line, as we do in here, and probably just accepted it at face value without thinking about whether it is applicable in law.
First, the definition lists types of abuse that could be motivated by shame. However, I note that stalking and harassment, which are specific offences under the law, are not mentioned and could be motivated by honour, particularly when a victim has escaped from the family or partner and attempts are made to track down, contact and bring back the person. Also, non-fatal strangulation and suffocation are not included in the list, and I would like to see them included.
Secondly, what does the wording actually mean when it refers to
“the perceived norms of the community’s accepted behaviours”
and the community being “shamed”? What do we mean by “the community”, “perceived norms” and “accepted behaviours”? This has to be legally clear for it to be applied. What community are we referring to? The use of this word has not been challenged for decades; we just blindly accept that terminology.
Let us take Birmingham, the city where I live. It has a population of more than 1 million. More than 500,000 are from a minority ethnic background; let us delve deeper into this population. Around 190,000 are from a Pakistani background, 20,000 are Arab, 66,000 are of Indian heritage and 17,000 are of Somali heritage —I could go on with that breakdown. If somebody commits an honour-based abuse crime in Birmingham, are we then suggesting that all those communities—for example, the 190,000 Pakistani community, including myself—are shamed by that crime? Well, that is not true: we would be stereotyping the whole community, and the communities are so diverse.
Even if we amended the wording to “the perpetrator and/or their family feeling they have been shamed or will lose honour and respect within their community”, tens or hundreds of thousands of people will not know who they are. A more accurate description, in my opinion, would be to cite “perpetrators’ perception of being dishonoured among their family and their social circle and their kinship group”.
By using this description, the honour-based abuse definition could even have a wider application. While this type of abuse is mostly associated with minority ethnic communities, honour-based abuse can occur in other contexts, even if to a much lesser extent. For example, it can happen in white, non-minority contexts too, particularly with the rise of toxic masculinity and the manosphere. Violence could be justified as “She embarrassed me”, and “She shamed me”. Then, abuse is committed for that reason. It could also be applied to gang-related contexts where violence is sometimes used to restore and protect honour.
I now turn to “accepted behaviours”. How will this be interpreted in law? This wording opens up the definition to subjective interpretation, risking inconsistent application. Legal risks could include prosecutors struggling to prove a motive beyond reasonable doubt. The defence could argue alternative motivations such as control, jealousy and anger. We must also ensure that those applying a legal definition are provided with clear guidance when any form of abuse is motivated by honour and shame: otherwise, automatic assumptions cannot be made that abuse is motivated by shame and honour just because the perpetrator is from a particular background, for example from a south Asian background. Evidence will be needed to justify why that motivation is linked to honour. As accepted behaviours may vary, it would be wise to list some key ones if it is not possible to provide an exhaustive list.
The very last part of the definition talks about the perception of shame preventing a victim accessing support and help. If honour-based abuse is going to be used as an aggravating factor to increase sentencing, this part needs to be strengthened further. This section needs to be linked to the behaviour of the perpetrator. Instead, it should be framed as where the perpetrator exploits concepts of shame and honour through threats, intimidation, coercion or blackmail, to prevent or deter the victim from seeking support, protection or assistance. An example of this is using intimate images to prevent a victim from speaking out by threatening to share those images.
Putting all of that together, I propose the following definition, some of which could be put in guidance. Honour-based abuse is an incident or pattern of abuse where the perpetrator is motivated by their belief that the victim has caused or may cause them and/or their family to lose honour or respect within their social circle or kinship group because of behaviours that are perceived to bring shame to them that may include: choosing one’s own partner; refusing a forced marriage, female genital mutilation or other harmful practices; having premarital sex, a relationship or pregnancy outside marriage; having interfaith, interethnic, intercaste relationships; ending a marriage or seeking divorce; having LGBTQ+ identity or relationships; seeking education or employment against family wishes; not dressing or having an appearance according to family expectations; having friends of the opposite sex; refusing family control over decisions; disclosing abuse and seeking help; and acts of betrayal within gang-related relationships.
Types of abuse may include: physical or sexual abuse; violent or threatening behaviour; stalking and harassment; non-fatal strangulation or suffocation; controlling or coercive behaviour; economic abuse; spiritual or faith-related abuse; psychological and emotional abuse; isolation; harmful cultural practices such as forced marriage; and intimate image abuse, especially in relation to silencing victims. The definition is long, some of it could be in guidance, and it would need tweaking.
I turn to Amendment 354, which proposes making honour-based abuse an aggravating factor for sentencing purposes. I would support the amendment once we have defined honour-based abuse. I too acknowledge the long-standing campaign called Banaz’s law to get this very law passed. Banaz Mahmod was murdered by her family in an honour killing in 2006. Her sister, Bekhal Mahmod, has been campaigning to have honour-based abuse become a statutory aggravating factor in sentencing. She is supported by Southall Black Sisters in her campaign, and I hope the Government will join us in acknowledging its campaign and hard work. I look forward to hearing from the Minister whether the Government are committed to adding a definition of honour-based abuse to this Bill.
Lord Blencathra (Con)
My Lords, I completely agree with all these proposed new clauses, which are long overdue. I congratulate my noble friend Lady Sugg on her excellent exposition and the noble Baroness, Lady Doocey, on her strong support.
I want first to criticise the term “honour-based abuse”, since there is nothing honourable about it. The term was invented by the perpetrators to make their actions seem more honourable than they were. In reality, these acts are abusive and destructive, involve the horrible murders of girls and women, and are morally wrong and thoroughly evil. I understand that, in an ideal world, we would have different terminology; however, as we are not, we probably cannot change the name now, since it is widely used and understood, including in law. Still, calling it what it is helps us refute the false framing that protects abusers as if they were doing something decent instead of evil.
What is the extent of the problem in the United Kingdom? It is estimated that at least 12 so-called honour killings occur in the UK each year, which averages out to at least one woman or girl murdered per month. The exact number is not known, as these crimes are often hidden and underreported. The figures provided by excellent charities such as Karma Nirvana are expert estimations; I congratulate them on the superb work they do, and I wish Karma Nirvana well in developing its national e-learning modules. The actual number of cases is widely believed to be much higher, because, as I said, many go unreported or are misidentified by authorities. Some police forces simply do not want to add that label, for the same misguided reasons that they covered up the rape of children in certain communities.
This is not a cultural problem to be tolerated or explained away. Since at least one girl or woman is murdered every month in this country, we can imagine that many thousands of other abuses, less than murder, are occurring. They can include physical assault, emotional and psychological control, forced marriage, female genital mutilation, and sexual violence—up to murder itself. Victims are often isolated and silenced by those closest to them. The abuse can be carried out, as we have heard from noble Baronesses, by multiple family members or by members of the wider community. The honour-based abuse includes violence, murder, threats, intimidation, coercion and other forms of abuse carried out to protect or defend the perceived honour of a family or community.
Honour-based abuse is not a private family dispute; it is a serious human rights violation. It strips people of their autonomy, their choice and their safety. As it is hidden, many victims never reach out for help. When they do, they need responses that are informed, compassionate and co-ordinated, and they need to be taken seriously by the police, education authorities and the health service.
Despite some excellent initiatives being taken by the charities and the Home Office, I feel we are still talking about it sotto voce. We all need to denounce aspects of honour-based abuse for the evil that it is and not tolerate excuses—that it is mandated by some people with a perverted misinterpretation of religion and practised by ignorant people.
I turn to my Amendment 355A. The College of Policing already provides extensive guidance on how to identify honour-based abuse. Officers are advised to look for a wide range of indicators: control of movement, restrictions on communication, coercive family behaviour, fear, anxiety, unexplained absences, threats of being taken abroad and the collective involvement of extended family members. I have just read out a small selection; I believe that the college has about 15 different indicators that tell police officers, “These are things you can look for that might add up collectively to honour-based abuse”. If one wants a definition, one can look at the College of Policing indicators and the suggestions from the noble Baroness, Lady Gohir—and there you have a definition of all the factors that could encompass honour-based abuse. The college’s guidance is detailed, thoughtful and clearly written; it recognises that honour-based abuse is not a single incident but a pattern that is often hidden, often escalating and often involving multiple perpetrators acting together.
However, after setting out all these excellent warning signs, the guidance stops short of the critical next step. It tells the professionals what to look for but gives them no instruction on how to record what they have found. There is no requirement to flag up an incident as honour-based abuse. There is no standardised data field, no multi-agency reporting framework and no clarity on whether a case should be logged as domestic abuse, forced marriage, coercive control, child safeguarding or all the above. In short, the system trains police officers to recognise honour-based abuse but then leaves them with no mechanism to ensure the system itself recognises it.
Baroness Cash (Con)
My Lords, I support all the amendments in this important group. I am conscious of time, and it is late, but I really wanted to come back to a few things that the noble Baroness, Lady Gohir, said. I hope that I have not misunderstood, but I confess to feeling a little confused.
It is very clear in the history of our criminal legislation in this country that introducing previous offences regarding violence against women and girls has had a significant impact and made a difference—for example, coercive and controlling behaviour; stalking, which, of course, does not apply just to women or girls; and female genital mutilation. In all cases, reporting, prosecutions and convictions increased, so the protections have been manifest.
The same applies here. I support wholeheartedly this group of amendments and am very grateful for the indication from the noble Baroness, Lady Sugg, that there have been conversations. I trust that we are pushing at an open door on this. I declare an interest: as well as being a barrister, I spent many years running a behavioural science business. The naming of offences is extremely important in order for people to feel able to come forward. There is a wealth of behavioural science. I hope that a few of my points will reassure the noble Baroness, Lady Gohir, on some of the points she mentioned around the definition, because the reasons why we introduce these offences matter so very much. Honour abuse is so often defined as a family dispute, a cultural issue or something that is too sensitive for others to name. It does not matter which culture we are talking about or which motivation. The noble Baroness is absolutely right about that.
Something in behavioural science tells us, as we know from a wealth of research, that the cognitive availability, the salience of being able to name something, changes the outcome. Kahneman, Cialdini and others talk about how we need injunctive norms in society. It is why the criminal justice system operates so effectively. It tells communities and individuals, “This behaviour is not tolerated”. In the United Kingdom, domestic abuse reforms have consistently shown that explicitly naming conduct, whether it is coercive control, stalking or honour-based abuse—or, as it should really be called, honour-based excuse—shifts police practice, community practice and public understanding. It does not legitimise it. On the contrary, it shows that naming it in a prohibitive framework delegitimises it, collapses ambiguity and increases protection from all parts of the community around those victims. Public health research also shows that people seek help much more readily and quickly when they know that their experience matches a recognised category in law. The stigma is reduced and having recognition and validation of harm increases disclosure.
Naming something operates as a community-level intervention as well. We break pluralistic ignorance when we name a phenomenon such as honour-based abuse. Some noble Lords may know about a study carried out at Harvard University by the famous psychologists Prentice and Miller, who looked at students’ attitudes towards a culture of drinking. They all thought it was accepted by everyone else. The majority did not like it. They continued to go along with it because they did not realise that others felt the same as they did and that the majority view was not to support it. By doing that study and revealing that, Prentice and Miller empowered the students to take a stance and change their own behaviours. That is now well-established psychological research. That is why communities and individuals such as the very tragic victims that we have heard about today and their families, who continue to work, need this legislation and these offences to be named in the way that we are seeking.
It also increases bystander activation. People will get more involved and will understand that there is safety and support around them when they intervene as third parties. People are much more likely to act when they can say, “This is illegal, this feels wrong, this is wrong”. Teachers, GPs, neighbours and extended family members then all have the infrastructure within which to act.
The law functions in a very important way—sometimes, it feels, almost in a magical way. Maybe as a lawyer I would say that, but it does signal to everyone a focal point. It creates a place around which we can all convene and focus. It co-ordinates action where previously things might have gone unsaid and there may have been fear about raising an issue and talking about it. Families and professionals often know that something is wrong but fear acting alone. A statutory definition removes that hesitation and makes it clear where the authority and the power lie.
Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)
My Lords, I rise, mercifully briefly, to come at this from a slightly different direction. Four years ago, when I was a member of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, we had a debate in the assembly specifically about honour-based abuse in the part-session in September 2021. The point I want to raise is that this is not a UK-only phenomenon but an international phenomenon, and I am putting forward the idea that there is something to be gained from looking at the experience and examples of attempts to deal with honour-based abuse in different jurisdictions. The report that the debate was about looked at the incidence of honour-based abuse and how it is being dealt with in countries such as Switzerland, Belgium, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Austria and the Netherlands. That was four years ago, so I suspect things have moved on since then. All I ask is that the Government are conscious of that when they are looking at the current state of international knowledge and the degree to which we can benefit from that.
Honour-based abuse comes underneath the Istanbul convention, which we have finally signed up to. Within that, there is an organisation called the Group of Experts on Action against Violence against Women and Domestic Violence, which has the acronym GREVIO. It has been in existence for about 15 years. I have just checked, and I am ashamed to say that, at the moment, while there is a lot of international representation on this body, there is not a single UK representative, nor has there ever been. I suggest that looking at what this committee does—because it focuses very much on this area—and seeing whether we could not potentially nominate somebody who could go and participate in that and learn from it would be a very good idea.
The only other thing I would say is in the context of the research that the rapporteur for this, who was a representative from Monaco, did. She spoke quite extensively to Nazir Afzal—somebody who I suspect the Minister knows—a prosecutor from the north of England who has been particularly heavily involved in this. One of the things he said really struck me. The report says:
“The crimes were strongly linked to cultural factors”,
particularly factors
“which strengthened … male power and aimed to prevent women from making choices”.
What really struck me was this:
“A 21-year-old man born and raised in England had told him that a man was like a piece of gold which you could clean if you dropped it in the mud, whereas a woman was like a piece of silk, which would be stained forever”.
Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)
My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 356, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Doocey. First, I would like to apologise for my intervention earlier. I am afraid I am getting very grumpy, and the Christmas Recess has arrived just in time.
All the amendments in this group have validity, and it might be worth trying to combine them on Report, because this is such an important issue. When serious crimes are committed in the name of so-called honour, the law should recognise that for what it is: a particularly severe and controlling form of abuse. This amendment is to ensure that our justice system understands the dynamics at play in so-called honour-based abuse—abuse that is often collective, prolonged and enforced through fear and the threat of extreme violence.
The case of Banaz Mahmod illustrates this with devastating clarity. Despite reporting rape, violence and repeated threats to her life, and naming those responsible, she was not protected. After her murder, a police watchdog investigation found serious institutional failings, including a failure to grasp the specific risks posed by so-called honour-based abuse.
This amendment reflects the Women and Equalities Committee’s recommendation to explicitly recognise so-called honour in sentencing guidelines to ensure an understanding of such abuse. Recognising so-called honour as an aggravating factor in sentencing would send a clear and necessary signal that crimes motivated by perceived shame or dishonour are deliberate acts of gender-based violence.
This amendment is also supported by victims, survivors, specialist organisations, including Southall Black Sisters, and Banaz’s sister, who has campaigned tirelessly and at huge personal risk. However, there is one thing about all these amendments that I feel is totally wrong and we need to rethink, and that is the fact that I have been saying “so-called honour”. This has nothing to do with honour. This is dishonour, and that is what we should call it.
Lord Hampton (CB)
My Lords, I have added my name to Amendments 353 and 355, which were so powerfully introduced by the noble Baroness, Lady Sugg. I express due deference to the thought-provoking input from my noble friend Lady Gohir.
I am a teacher and, before one is accepted as a teacher, one has to do five days of observation in various schools, just to see whether you like the look of it. On my first day of observation at a school in Hackney, we were at the staff briefing at the beginning of the day and we were reminded to be sensitive to the fact that that week was the anniversary of one student’s mother and sister having been killed by their father and brother. That was my first experience of honour-based abuse, and a pretty stark lesson in the responsibilities that school staff shoulder.
Schools are uniquely placed to spot abuse. Dirty collars can be a sign of neglect, expensive trainers can be a sign of grooming and unexpected holidays could be FGM: the list goes on. Schools are often the first place where honour-based abuse is visible, through changes in behaviour, attendance or disclosure. Yet, without a clear definition, warning signs are too often missed.
Because honour-based abuse differs from other safeguarding risks, it is frequently collective, hidden and fast-escalating. Generic safeguarding guidance does not equip schools to recognise or respond safely. Inconsistent understanding creates dangerous inconsistencies in response, leaving children’s safety dependent on where they go to school. Statutory guidance would set a clear national standard. A lack of clarity leads to hesitation and harmful mistakes, including inappropriate family contact or mediation. A statutory framework gives staff confidence to act decisively and safely.
Early identification in schools can prevent serious harm and tragic loss of life, but only if honour-based abuse is properly defined and schools are properly trained, supported and embedded in a clear multi-agency safeguarding and response. It seems logical. I hope the Government agree.
Baroness Lawlor (Con)
My Lords, I support the general aims of these amendments. I am broadly sympathetic to the group and I agree with the need to address the problem of honour-based abuse specifically. I understand that it will be a difficult matter, and not simple, to define it tightly. Some honour-based offences are criminal offences, as we know: they involve murder. We have heard already about the murder of Banaz Mahmod in 2006 in Handsworth, in Birmingham, where she was strangled and her body put in a suitcase. For that crime, the perpetrators were found and convicted.
There is also voter impersonation, which I think we could be stronger on because it involves controlling and coercive behaviour. I have been told by members of one community in particular in an area of London with which I am very familiar that they are not allowed to go to the polls and they are not allowed to vote. The women there will laugh at you and tell you that their husbands vote for them. They are just not allowed to go to the polls. In fact, grown women who are married are not allowed to go out except when accompanied by their husband, an uncle or their husband’s brother. That, to my mind, is pretty specific coercive or controlling behaviour for grown women.
We have the law to deal with clear breaches of the law, but I agree that it is difficult to define abusive and coercive behaviour that is not immediately an offence within the law. I therefore support the desire to define it and the need to recognise that this controlling behaviour does exist. It does not fall within an easily definable way of dealing with it, but we must address it. There are reasons to address it, for instance, with grown-up people past the age of 18 who are obliged to wear a certain sort of dress to conform to community norms that will set them apart from their community, or with women I have spoken to who are not allowed to continue their education. This is not for reasons of finance or because money is needed from a job. They have to stay at home, quite often because there is a coercive husband at home who does not want his wife to go out for any reason, unless or until there are children whom she may take to school or bring to the hospital. Any thought of continuing studies after a certain age is absolutely ruled out.
These are not easy things to deal with. They fall within that difficult area of family arrangements and the rightful place we award the family in arranging its affairs internally. But unless we are going to become a society where different groups of people remain segregated socially, educationally and in terms of the very law, and we allow borderline abuse to continue in the family setting because we do not have a definition of it, which denies basic freedoms to certain groups of girls and, indeed, young women, and can often lead to far worse things, we should try to tackle it. I support these amendments for that reason. We need some definition and some guidance, and we need to cover them within the abuse framework.
Lord Anderson of Ipswich (CB)
My Lords, I entirely agree with everything that has been said about the need to highlight this appalling practice and, so far as possible, bring it to an end. But if one’s chosen means is the fettering of the discretion of a sentencer, one has to be extraordinarily careful about definitions. There, I rather echo what has just been said.
I understand how difficult this is, but, for example, the definition in Amendment 353 would mean that if there is an incident motivated by the perpetrator’s perception that an individual has shamed the perpetrator, the sentencing judge would be required to treat that as an aggravating factor. That could be two young lads outside a nightclub; one of them has shown a compromising picture of the other, and the other feels shamed or that he may be shamed if he shows it. That is how the violence begins. Violence is always bad and it always has to be punished, but of all the possible motivations for violence, is that really one that we are going to single out as a mandatory aggravating factor?
I must admit that I slightly wonder whether the best way to achieve the spotlight that the noble Baroness, Lady Cash, so rightly wants to place on this is by amending the sentencing guidelines. I thought that inherent in a lot of what she said was perhaps the implication that there ought to be a specific offence, rather as we managed to do with non-fatal strangulation and suffocation. If we are to adopt this means, imperfect and relatively low profile as it may be, we must be very careful about the words. As the Minister knows better than any of us, it is very easy to legislate for what one has in mind, but the unintended consequences are also there, and the law of unintended consequences is, I am afraid, one of the strongest on the statute book.
Lord Cameron of Lochiel (Con)
My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lady Sugg for bringing this matter to the Committee and for her eloquent elaboration of the rationale behind her amendments. I also thank other noble Lords for speaking, particularly those who recounted the moving stories of specific women who have been victims of this abuse.
It is safe to say that this is an issue that unites us all; no one wants to see any form of abuse perpetrated against women and girls, but honour-based abuse is perhaps one of the most pernicious forms of abuse. Due to its specific character and profile, it can all too often be swept under the carpet, hidden by communities that perpetrate it and ignored by authorities that should put a stop to it. I welcome in particular the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Russell of Liverpool, for making the important point that this is an international criminal phenomenon. It is very easy to see it within a UK bubble, but it is incredibly important to remind ourselves of that context.
The many victims of honour-based abuse are left without justice because of fears of inflaming what are termed community tensions. That is borne out by the facts. Only 95 prosecutions were brought forward for honour-based abuse cases in the year 2024-25, and of those cases only 46 led to convictions. The reason behind these appallingly low conviction rates is the persistent failure to recognise the unique characteristics of honour-based abuse—the fact that it often involves numerous perpetrators, many of whom are family members or members of an extended community, acting collectively to abuse and in many cases, as we have heard, murder the victim.
It is important to recognise that there has been a concerted effort more recently to better recognise and respond to honour-based abuse. The Government should be commended for committing—on 26 August, I think—to legislating for a statutory definition and the publication of multiagency guidance on how to deal most appropriately with such abuse.
Again in August this year, the College of Policing, as referenced by my noble friend Lord Blencathra, launched a new advice note to police forces to support officers in their efforts to identify and tackle these forms of abuse. That followed the recommendations that emerged from the Tees Valley super-complaint, which was an important investigation for many reasons but especially because it found that police forces generally tended to include the risk of honour-based abuse only in their domestic abuse policies, not in other policies, thereby leading to an incoherent approach. The investigation also found that police forces generally lacked the cultural awareness to recognise the wider religious and cultural drivers behind this form of violence, and that this had led to police officers failing to recognise the wider risks of honour-based abuse after victims reported it.
I commend and fully support Amendments 353 and 355 by my noble friend Lady Sugg. They simply attempt to put into the Bill two of the measures that the Government have already committed to: a statutory definition informed by the actual experiences and the reality of the victims, and a comprehensive set of multiagency guidance. That is an important step and the Government should be commended for committing to it, but it will be of no use if the Government do not speedily implement these measures.
I echo the sense of urgency expressed by noble Lords from across the Chamber. I believe that the Bill is the legislative vehicle for these changes, and if they are not included in this Bill then there will likely not be another opportunity for quite some time. I urge the Minister to bring forward amendments on Report to make good on the Government’s promise to the victims of what can only be termed the most horrific patterns of abuse and violence.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Ministry of Justice (Baroness Levitt) (Lab)
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baronesses, Lady Sugg and Lady Doocey, and the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, for tabling Amendments 353, 354, 355, 355A and 356. I thank all noble Lords for what has been a powerful, moving and interesting debate on this subject. Honour-based abuse is a dreadful thing. I add my voice to those who want to thank all the survivors for their courage and determination in speaking out.
I remember that, when I received judicial training, we were told that we as judges should refer to these horrible crimes as so-called honour-based abuse to make it clear—as was noted by the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, and the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra—that there is nothing to do with honour about them. That said, the Government have listened to the preferences of survivors and the specialist sector, and for this reason I will refer to it only as honour-based abuse. I can see the noble Baroness, Lady Sugg, nodding her head.
The amendments seek to ensure that front-line professionals such as the police, social workers and teachers properly understand and spot this abuse and accurately record and store this information. We absolutely share that objective. As your Lordships will be aware, the Government have already committed, as the noble Lord, Lord Cameron, has reminded us, to introducing multi-agency statutory guidance on honour-based abuse, alongside a statutory definition. We recognise that doing so is a vital step towards providing a clear framework for professionals with statutory safeguarding responsibilities as to how they should identify honour-based abuse. To that end, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Sugg, for meeting me last week to discuss Amendments 353 and 355. I thank Natasha Rattu of Karma Nirvana, whom I met this morning.
I congratulate your Lordships on the strength of feeling about getting this measure on the statute book as soon as possible. The Government agree that swift action is needed to ensure that professionals have a strong foundation for tackling honour-based abuse, but I would just say that this is an extremely nuanced and complex form of abuse. We need to ensure that the range of abuse experienced is captured and that we do not build in any unintended consequences, to use the phrase used powerfully by the noble Lord, Lord Anderson. To that extent, I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Gohir, and we are happy to work with her to ensure that we have covered all eventualities.
We must do this once and we must get it right. We owe that to the victims and survivors who have suffered. I am not able today to give a timeline for this commitment or say whether this Bill will be used as a suitable legislative vehicle, but I assure your Lordships that we are getting on with this work and are doing so quickly. My speaking note said “at pace”, but I asked the officials to take it out because it tends not to gain favour in this House. We are doing it quickly, and I can confidently commit to the Government updating the noble Baronesses and the noble Lord on the progress of this work ahead of Report. I hope that provides reassurance to various Members who raised the question of timeliness.
I now turn to Amendment 355A, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, which makes the important point that we need to ensure that data collection and storage by statutory agencies is consistent and accurate. The Home Office already requires all police forces to share data on criminal offences that have been flagged as related to honour-based abuse. This is published annually. But I agree with the sentiment of his amendment and can confirm that, in developing the multi-agency statutory guidance, the Government will consider how to ensure that data in relation to suspected and confirmed criminal offences related to honour-based abuse is properly recorded and stored by front-line agencies.
Amendments 354 and 356 seek to add honour-based abuse as a statutory aggravating factor. As your Lordships are aware, doing so would require courts to treat such offences as having increased seriousness because of the presence of this factor. We completely agree that in principle this is a good thing but, as both noble Baronesses correctly anticipated, we do not believe that creating a statutory aggravating factor is either necessary or desirable.
The reason we think it is not necessary is that the specific elements that make honour-based abuse so serious are already covered in the sentencing guidelines. Judges are already required to treat the fact that an offence involved an abuse of trust or that the victim was vulnerable as aggravating factors. In cases where the abuse is part of a domestic relationship, there is the entire overarching guideline specifying additional factors, which explicitly mentions honour-based abuse. These amendments would therefore unnecessarily duplicate existing guidelines, which the courts are required by law to follow.
I said it was neither necessary nor desirable; I turn now to why it is not desirable. I also speak from experience when I say that the workload of a Crown Court judge is an extremely heavy one, in large part due to the backlog in the Crown Courts inherited by this Government. Adding to the list of statutory aggravating factors significantly adds to the workload of judges when sentencing. For every new aggravating factor, the list of items that a judge needs to state that they have considered, and their sentencing remarks, get longer and longer. I therefore feel strongly that we ought not continually to increase this list, especially when existing guidelines already apply.
The noble Baroness, Lady Sugg, alluded to the fact that I had said this in relation to another group of amendments earlier in the week. These two proposed aggravating factors are the sixth and seventh time that new aggravating factors have been debated in this Committee so far, and I know that there are more proposals for different aggravating factors yet to come. As I hope your Lordships will appreciate, our judges already have a huge undertaking as part of the sentencing process. We wish to avoid unnecessarily burdening them or the process any further, because to do so would risk lengthening individual sentencing hearings, just at the time when we are trying to reduce the backlog in the interests of the very victims we are discussing, among others.
That said, the noble Baroness, Lady Sugg, makes a powerful case and I would welcome further discussion with her as to how we can achieve the objectives, even if not necessarily by adding a further statutory factor—I mention both noble Baronesses in that context. This Government’s priority is to strengthen identification and response through robust statutory guidance and a clear definition, ensuring that professionals have the tools they need to tackle this complex form of abuse effectively. So, on the understanding that we will consider Amendments 353 and 355, which I know are the top priority for the key stakeholders, ahead of Report, I invite the noble Baroness to withdraw her amendment.
Baroness Sugg (Con)
My Lords, I thank all noble Lords for taking part in this debate. As I said, it is slightly later than hoped but really is much appreciated. I am grateful for the Minister’s reply and, as I said earlier, her openness to engage on these issues.
On the aggravating factor, I will consider carefully what the Minister had to say and look forward to having ongoing conversations on that. On the definition and statutory guidance, I very much agree that we must ensure that it is fit for prosecution, but we also need to make sure it works for interventions to protect earlier, ideally before any crime is committed. The definition really needs to be survivor-grounded: it needs to reflect their lived experiences and must recognise the impact of multiple perpetrators, the presence of community dynamics, layered coercion and collective control.
I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Gohir, for her contribution. I know that everyone involved in developing the definition and, crucially, survivors themselves are very keen to engage directly with her.
We have been discussing this for many years. The definition and the guidance are the crucial amendments, as they would act as the foundation for the systemic changes we need to see, and this Bill really is the right place to do that. I very much hope that the Government will bring back a revised definition and guidance amendment on Report that is agreed by the sector and survivors. I will do all I can to help on that. If that is not the case, I reserve the right to return to this again, but, on that basis, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness Morris of Bolton) (Con)
I cannot call Amendment 355A, as it is an amendment to Amendment 355.