(1 day, 9 hours ago)
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Lord Clement-Jones
“(4A) Before the appropriate national authority makes regulations under subsection (1) for the purpose of implementing a new international agreement, or significantly altering an existing agreement, the authority must conduct and publish a comprehensive Privacy Impact Assessment.(4B) The Privacy Impact Assessment required under subsection (4A) must analyse and report on—(a) the necessity and proportionality of the information sharing arrangements,(b) the mechanism by which individual rights, including those under Article 8 of the Human Rights Act 1998, will be safeguarded,(c) the risks of non-compliance with the data protection legislation or of unintended consequences arising from the sharing of personal data, and(d) the nature and volume of personal data intended to be shared or accessed under the agreement.(4C) The appropriate national authority must lay before Parliament, no later than 12 months after the first regulations are made under this section, and annually thereafter, a report on the operation of regulations made under this section.(4D) The annual report required under subsection (4C) must include, in particular—(a) an assessment of the overall volume and categories of information shared under the regulations,(b) a detailed analysis of the impact of the regulations on the privacy and data protection rights of individuals, and(c) a summary of any internal reviews, audits, or legal challenges relating to information sharing under the agreements implemented by the regulations.”Member's explanatory statement
This amendment requires a privacy impact assessment to be carried out before regulations are made under this section.
Lord Clement-Jones (LD)
My Lords, in moving Amendment 464 I will speak to Amendments 467, 468 and 503, in my name. These amendments collectively address the governance of Clauses 192 to 194, which grant the Secretary of State broad powers to make regulations giving effect to international law enforcement information-sharing agreements. Following the recent passage of the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025, we are now operating in a new legal landscape, where the statutory threshold for protecting data transferred overseas has been lowered. These amendments are not just desirable; they are essential safety mechanisms to fill that gap.
Amendment 464 would be a safeguard of, so to speak, look before you leap. It stipulates that, before regulations are made under Clause 192 to implement a new international agreement, the authority must publish a comprehensive privacy impact assessment. The necessity of this assessment has intensified following the enactment of the Data (Use and Access) Act. The UK’s new test for onward transfers of data has lowered the bar. It no longer requires foreign protections to be essentially equivalent to ours, but merely not materially lower. This creates a dangerous new risk profile. The European Data Protection Board has explicitly noted that this new test omits key safeguards against foreign government access and removes redress mechanisms for individuals. If the general statutory floor has been lowered, Amendment 464 becomes the essential safety net. We must assess these specific risks via a privacy impact assessment before we open the digital borders, to ensure that we are not exposing UK citizens to jurisdictions where they have no legal remedy.
This brings me to Amendment 467, which addresses the nature of the data being shared. Where regulations authorise the transfer of highly sensitive personal data, such as biometrics, genetics or political opinions, this amendment would require enhanced protective measures. All this highlights the illusion of data protection when transferring data to high-risk jurisdictions that lack the rule of law. We know that in authoritarian states domestic intelligence laws will always override the standard contractual clauses usually relied on for data transfers. Because the Data (Use and Access) Act has removed the requirement for foreign safeguards to be essentially equivalent, we cannot rely on the general law to protect highly sensitive biometric or health data. My amendment would restore the requirement that transfers of such sensitive data must be demonstrated to be strictly necessary and proportionate. We cannot allow efficiency of data sharing to deny the reality that, in some jurisdictions, once data arrives, the state will have unrestricted access. Transparency must follow these powers.
Amendment 468 would mandate the production of an annual report on international law enforcement information sharing. This is vital because we are entering a period of divergence. The European Commission, at the urging of the European Data Protection Board, will be monitoring the practical implementation of the UK’s revised data transfer regime. If the EU will be monitoring how our data laws operate, surely Parliament should be doing the same. We need an annual report to track whether these law enforcement transfers are inadvertently exposing UK citizens to jurisdictions where they have no effective legal redress. Without this feedback loop, Parliament is legislating in the dark.
Finally, Amendment 503 would ensure that regulations made under Clause 192 are subject to the affirmative resolution procedure. Given that the primary legislation governing data transfers has been loosened, it is constitutionally inappropriate for these specific law enforcement agreements to slip through via the negative procedure. Amendment 503 would ensure that these regulations, which may involve the transfer of our citizens’ most sensitive biometric data to foreign powers, must be actively debated and approved by both Houses of Parliament.
We support international co-operation in fighting crime, but it must not come at the cost of lowering our standards. These amendments would restore the safeguards that recent legislation have eroded. I beg to move.
Lord Davies of Gower (Con)
My Lords, we thank the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, for his amendments and the importance that he has obviously placed on the right to privacy of the general public.
I support the principle behind Amendment 464. Sharing information often carries a risk with it, particularly when it is for the purposes of law enforcement, and especially when this is done internationally. Law enforcement data contains information that is far more personal to the individual or case in question than the norm. Any data of this sort must be handled with the highest discretion. Ensuring that the sharing of this data respects the right to privacy carries no unintended consequences and, most importantly, is necessary and should be the benchmark from which regulations are made.
If this amendment is accepted, I do not see the additional need for Amendment 468. At the very least, the privacy impact assessment under Amendment 464 should form the basis of any annual report that Amendment 468 would mandate. Less is more when it comes to admin and reports, so I am hesitant to support a new report that is not necessarily needed.
I think Amendment 467 is sensible. In general, internationally shared data should not include information prejudicial to any individual, let alone domestic citizens. This particularly extends to the sharing of biometric data for the purpose of unique identification or genetic identification.
These categories of data are obviously vital for the purposes of law enforcement, but law enforcement extra territorially risks placing this data in the wrong hands. This and similar data should therefore be particularly protected, which is the aim of the noble Lord’s amendment. I hope that the Minister can outline what the Government intend to do to ensure that the international sharing of personal data is undertaken in the most discreet and protected manner.
Lord in Waiting/Government Whip (Lord Katz) (Lab)
My Lords, it is a pleasure to kick off what I very much hope will be the last day in Committee—not to jinx it. I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, for setting out the case for these amendments, which relate to the provisions in Clauses 192 to 194.
International law enforcement information-sharing agreements are a vital tool that provide law enforcement officers with access to new intelligence to fight crime, increase public protection and reduce the threat of societal harm posed by international criminality. To clarify, these measures provide the appropriate national authority with the power to make regulations to implement both new and existing legally binding international law enforcement information-sharing agreements. Such regulations may, for example, make provision for the technical and, where appropriate, operational detail to facilitate the information sharing provided for in a particular agreement.
The UK is recognised globally for having one of the most robust data protection regimes, anchored in the Data Protection Act and UK GDPR, which ensure that privacy is protected even in the most complex areas of law enforcement and international co-operation. This Government are committed to maintaining these high standards and ways of working to ensure that data protection and privacy are not compromised as we strengthen cross-border security. UK law already requires data controllers to conduct a data protection impact assessment for any activity that is likely to result in a high risk to individuals’ rights and freedoms. Public bodies and law enforcement authorities are bound by the Human Rights Act, the European Convention on Human Rights and the Equality Act, and they must duly assess activities accordingly.
Existing data protection principles and statutory requirements, particularly data protection impact assessments, already cover the concerns raised by the noble Lord’s amendments, making new duties duplicative and unnecessary. As is required under Article 36(4) of the UK GDPR, regulations made under this power as they relate to the processing of personal data will require consultation with the Information Commissioner’s Office.
The international law enforcement information-sharing agreements preceding the making of regulations under Clause 192 are subject to the usual treaty ratification procedures, including the provisions regarding parliamentary scrutiny provided for in Part 2 of the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010. Any such agreement will be laid before Parliament with an Explanatory Memorandum, which would include the background to why the Government are entering into the agreement, its implementation and a note of any existing domestic legislation and human rights considerations. Additionally, an overseas security and justice assistance assessment will be required. Introducing additional scrutiny requirements would risk duplication and provide no additional substantive information to Parliament beyond what is currently available.
We must also consider the operational sensitivity of such processing. Law enforcement data sharing involves sensitive systems and procedures. Publication of such assessments may inadvertently expose vulnerabilities or methods that criminals or adversarial parties may seek to exploit.
Ministers regularly update Parliament on international law enforcement co-operation, including data sharing. I have a long list of examples before me—I will not detain your Lordships with too many of them. The Cabinet Office issued the Government’s response to the EAC report Unfinished Business: Resetting the UK-EU Relationship on 23 January this year and published it shortly thereafter. A couple of days before, on 21 January, my noble friend Lord Hanson appeared before the EAC to discuss the UK-EU reset, which focused on the LEJC, migration and the border partnership. You do not have to go far back for another example: on September 8, the Foreign Affairs Committee questioned the Cabinet Office and FCDO Ministers on post-summit implementation, co-ordination and future UK-EU co-operation frameworks. That is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to parliamentary oversight of these matters.
Law enforcement authorities and government departments work closely together to assess international law enforcement capabilities and their effectiveness. Such assessments, by their very nature, are operationally sensitive and would not be suitable for publication. Specifically singling out international law enforcement data sharing also risks presenting a skewed picture of wider domestic operational activity, given that law enforcement outcomes are often the result of multiple capabilities and instruments being used. Owing to the breadth of law enforcement authorities that may be engaged in such information-sharing activity, and the likely multiple data systems, sourcing and collating operational data that would be suitable for inclusion in a published annual report would create significant demand and risk diverting resource from other critical law enforcement priorities.
We must also consider the implications for the international parties to such agreements, who may have concerns about the publication of such data and assessment, particularly where it may relate to operationally sensitive matters. That, in turn, may affect and limit the negotiability of future agreements. Such reports could potentially expose operational practices that it may not be appropriate to place in the public domain. We must be mindful that agreements will vary in scope with international partners; to publish detail on the volumes of data exchanged may inadvertently cause concern from international partners on differing operating scopes.
Finally, as to whether regulations made under Clause 192 should be subject to the draft affirmative procedure, I simply point the noble Lord to the report on the Bill by the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee, which made no such recommendation. We are usually held to the high standards of that committee and admonished when it finds us wanting. In this case, we were not found wanting, which I think is a very good tick that I pray in aid.
I understand the concerns of the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, about these clauses, but I hope that I have reassured him that data protection remains at the heart of our approach. With that in mind, I ask him to withdraw his amendment.
Lord Clement-Jones (LD)
My Lords, I thank the Minister for his detailed reply. It was very cheerful, which I find quite extraordinary in the circumstances. It is almost as though he has been reading Voltaire’s Candide: everything is for the best in all possible worlds. I will read carefully what he said, but there was an extraordinary amount of complacency built into his response about the nature of sharing data across borders—specifically that the existing regime is sufficient to safeguard these transfers and that my amendments would introduce unnecessary friction into law enforcement co-operation. That is because the rules of the game have changed since the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025.
The Information Commissioner can operate only within the legislation provided, which is no safeguard in those circumstances. I have the highest regard for the Information Commissioner and his office, but they have to operate within the bounds of the law, which have changed since the Act was passed. I mentioned the European Data Protection Board and so on. The Minister has performed some kind of parliamentary jujitsu by seeming to say that sensitive data, which I cited as being one of the reasons why I tabled my amendments, makes it far too difficult to do what I am proposing. I admire his speechwriting but I must say that I do not think that is an answer.
I will withdraw my amendment, but I believe that the Act that we spent so long debating has changed the rules of the game and that these amendments are necessary to ensure that international co-operation does not become a backdoor for the erosion of privacy. I will come back to this but, in the meantime, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.
Lord Hanson of Flint
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment is consequential on my amendment to clause 192, page 223, line 27.
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment is consequential on my amendment to clause 192, page 223, line 27.
Baroness Brinton (LD)
My Lords, my late friend Lord Wallace of Tankerness had originally laid this proposal that Clause 195 should not stand part. I had signed it to support him because of my interests in human rights. His untimely death last week means that I am now leading on something that he, as an excellent lawyer, really understood and cared about. We shall in this debate, when we get into the detail, miss his incisive legal mind, combined with a passion for fairness and the rule of law. We miss him so much already. I am not a lawyer, but I will do what I can. I thank the Defence Extradition Lawyers Forum, or DELF, for its help and advice in the last few days, as well as its excellent technical briefing, from which I shall quote.
The core of asking that Clause 195 not stand part is straightforward. It would remove the right for a retrial following a conviction in absentia where the person convicted is deemed to have been present, even if there has been no contact between that person and their court-approved lawyer. As ever, there is more in the detail. Clause 195 proposes to amend Sections 20 and 85 of the Extradition Act, governing extradition following convictions in absentia. Following a stakeholder symposium convened in January, DELF identified material inaccuracies in the Government’s stated justification for the clause. Unfortunately, there are consequences as a result of these inaccuracies that will have serious implications for individuals facing extradition in future.
In the Government’s justification for Clause 195, they said that the proposed amendments
“ensure compatibility between UK domestic legislation and the UK-EU Trade and Cooperation Agreement”.
Article 601(1)(i) of the TCA, which governs convictions in absentia, already aligns with Section 20 of the Extradition Act 2003. Those safeguards, grounded in fundamental rights, reflect the carefully calibrated EU extradition framework, strengthened in 2009 to enhance protections for convictions in absentia. It sought to promote legal certainty and mutual recognition while respecting differing national legal systems. The problem is that Clause 195 risks making UK legislation inconsistent with the TCA in two material respects, thereby undermining the reforms advanced by the UK in 2008-09.
First, Article 601(1)(i)(iii) of the TCA permits refusal of extradition where a person did not deliberately absent themselves for a trial in absentia unless they have a right
“to a retrial or appeal … which allows the merits of the case … to be re-examined”.
That standard is reflected in Section 20 of the Extradition Act, as interpreted by the Supreme Court, but Clause 195 would dilute this safeguard by reducing it to a mere “right to apply” for a retrial, thus weakening protections previously secured across Europe.
Secondly, Article 601(1)(i)(ii) of the TCA deems a person present at the trial only where they have
“given a mandate to a lawyer … to defend him or her at the trial, and was indeed defended by that lawyer at the trial”.
However, new subsection (7A) in Clause 195 will weaken this protection, treating a person as present solely by virtue of their legal representation, even where there has been no contact or instruction between lawyer and client.
There is further concern over the Government’s inaccurate statement that the
“interpretation … changed as a result of … Bertino and Merticariu”.
The Supreme Court did not create new law by distinguishing between a right to retrial and a mere right to apply for one. Rather, it affirmed the settled meaning of “entitled”, endorsing established authority, which made it clear that entitlement does not mean “perhaps” or “in certain circumstances”. In doing so, the court in that case overturned the conflicting decision in BP v Romania 2015, which had erroneously treated a discretionary right to apply for a retrial as sufficient, having misapplied case law on procedural requirements that do not undermine a genuine entitlement.
Lord Davies of Gower (Con)
My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, for tabling this clause stand part notice. I would like to add my reservations about this clause.
First, I am concerned that this clause has not received sufficient scrutiny and consideration by Parliament. It was added on Report in the other place on 17 June last year. The Minister moving the new clause dedicated only 255 words to explain its effect and it was not mentioned by a single other Member. It has not received adequate attention. For that reason, I am pleased that the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, has tabled this amendment to allow us to press the Government on the measures they are proposing.
The second point is the potential impact this clause could have on the right to a fair trial for British citizens. Under Section 20 of the Extradition Act 2003, where a person has been convicted in another country, the judge at the extradition hearing must first decide whether the person has been convicted in their absence and then decide whether the person deliberately absented themselves from the trial. If the judge is satisfied that the person was convicted in absentia and did not deliberately absent themselves from the trial, the judge must determine whether the person would be entitled to a retrial or to a review that amounts to a retrial in the territory to which the person would be extradited. If the judge does not believe that the person would be entitled to a retrial if extradited, the judge must discharge the prospect of extradition.
The Supreme Court in the recent cases of Bertino and Merticariu distinguished between the right to a retrial and the right to apply for a retrial. The court has held that a person’s entitlement to a retrial does not simply mean the person “might” be entitled to a retrial but that they “must” be entitled. This means that a conditional entitlement to a retrial that is dependent upon the finding of the court in the requesting country is insufficient for extradition to proceed. This places a decision on whether a fair trial can be had firmly in the hands of British judges. That is surely right. It is plainly preferable for the determination of the ability for a retrial to take place to be undertaken by a British judge, as opposed to merely relying on the decision of a foreign court.
However, in Clause 195, the Government are seeking to overturn this ruling, thereby removing a key safeguard against unfair extradition. If this clause is brought into force, the judge in Britain would have to order a person’s extradition on the simple assertion by the requesting country that the person could be permitted to stand trial in person, regardless of whether that is actually true or not.
Let us imagine a person who was tried in absentia and was not aware of their conviction in another country. If they were extradited and not permitted a retrial, they would not have been able to stand up in court and defend themselves against the charges they had been accused of. That is surely a recipe for serious injustice. In short, I am concerned that this clause will lead to more British citizens being extradited on the whim of a foreign judge and not afforded the right to a fair trial. For this reason, I very much support the proposition from the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, that the clause should not stand part.
The Minister of State, Home Office (Lord Hanson of Flint) (Lab)
My Lords, I begin by saying how sorry I am that it is the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, moving her proposition and not Lord Wallace of Tankerness, who we will greatly miss. As we all know, he was a staunch advocate for the people of Orkney and Shetland. I served nine years with him in Parliament, as we crossed over during that time, and found him to be an exemplary public servant as Deputy First Minister for Scotland and as a Member of Parliament. I had less contact with him in your Lordships’ House and I am genuinely sorry that I cannot have contact with him today. I pass my condolences to his family. I am also grateful to the noble Baroness Lady Brinton for taking up the cudgels on this specialist subject and doing it in a way that is professional. I promise that I will try to answer the questions and follow up on the points she has raised.
I am also grateful to the noble Baroness for reminding me of the constituency case of Paul Wright in Mold, which I dealt with in a former life as Paul Wright’s Member of Parliament, following the extradition case with Greece. I will have to google it to refresh all the details in my memory, but it was an important constituency case for me to take up as a Member of Parliament at that time. I am sorry that the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Gower, feels that this did not receive sufficient scrutiny, but I take his point, and I hope I can answer his points today.
Clause 195 standing part of the Bill means that, under the Extradition Act 2003, the UK may extradite individuals either to face trial or serve a sentence. Where a conviction occurred in absentia and the UK court finds the person did not deliberately absent themselves, the judge must determine whether they will be entitled to a retrial in the requesting state. This clause will amend Sections 20 and 85 of the 2003 Act to restore the original policy intention that the individual must have a right to apply for a retrial, not a guaranteed retrial, for extradition to proceed. The amendment is required, as the noble Baroness mentioned, following the Supreme Court’s judgment in Merticariu v Romania, which interpreted the current drafting of the 2003 Act as requiring a guaranteed retrial—something some states cannot offer. Without this fix, certain legitimate extradition requests could be blocked, undermining justice for victims.
I know the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, mentioned this, but the amendment itself does not change any existing safeguards or processes governing extradition. The full suite of safeguards in the 2003 Act, including judicial oversight and human rights protections, remains unchanged. This includes the UK court’s powers to consider and determine whether someone deliberately absented themselves. I hope that gives her some reassurance.
The small government Amendment 537 makes minor drafting changes. It simply provides that Clause 195 will be commenced by regulations, as opposed to automatically coming into force on Royal Assent, as was originally planned.
I have heard what the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Gower, has said and I have heard the complex case that the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, has mentioned. The noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, asked whether she could have a meeting with appropriate supporters to discuss this and I would be happy to do so. For the purposes of confirming that, I would be grateful if she could email me the details of who she wishes to attend that meeting. It is entirely up to the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, but I would be happy if the noble Lord, Lord Davies, wishes to attend—or I could offer him a separate meeting if he wants to have further discussions or representations. If that can be discussed outside Committee, I would be happy to do that.
In the meantime, I hope the reassurances I have given are sufficient for the moment. I would be happy if the noble Baroness would withdraw her opposition to the clause standing part, pending any discussion, which I will ensure takes place if possible—subject to our diaries—before Report, as appropriate. If not, we can still have the discussion, so that we can at least reflect on the points that have been made today.
Baroness Brinton (LD)
My Lords, I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Gower, for speaking in support of the clause not standing part, particularly for speaking about the very short time that it had for debate in the Commons, which obviously did not have the chance to go through some of the detail that DELF has provided for us in this Committee.
I also thank the Minister. He is, as ever, courteous and thoughtful. I am not sure we have closed the gap between where I believe that there are problems and where he and his officials think that this is all resolved. Therefore, I am very grateful for the offer of a meeting. I would be delighted if the noble Lord, Lord Davies, wanted to join us. I will indeed email him names, but in the meantime I withdraw my opposition to the clause standing part.
Baroness Chakrabarti
“Age of criminal responsibilityIn section 50 of the Children and Young Persons Act 1933, for “ten” substitute “14”.”Member’s explanatory statement
This new clause would raise the age of criminal responsibility in England and Wales from ten to 14 years so that no child under that age could be tried for or convicted of a criminal offence.
Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)
My Lords, Amendment 469 is in my name and the names of the noble and learned Baronesses, Lady Butler-Sloss and Lady Hale of Richmond, and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester.
I ask Members of the Committee to think back to when they were 10—if that is not too difficult. Perhaps they were studying the Victorians in primary school. If so, they might have been astonished to learn that children of any age, even younger than 10, could be prosecuted in the 19th century. But there was an important nuance; even in the Victorian Juvenile Offenders Act 1847 and its spiritual successors, the Children Act 1908 and the Children and Young Persons Acts 1933 and 1963, there was a presumption of doli incapax—that children below 14 are inherently incapable of forming criminal intentions. This had to be rebutted beyond reasonable doubt by any individual prosecution. This is the very thing that will have spared many of us from criminalisation at tender ages for our misdemeanours in formative years. Of course, most of us also have the safeguards of loving, diligent parenting and/or class privilege.
When we foregrounded this debate in an Oral Question just over two weeks ago, my noble friend Lord Watts, who is not currently in his place, in his own inimitable style, suggested that my concern about our low age of criminal responsibility was somehow a middle-class preoccupation. I agree that class is relevant to this question, but, with respect to my noble friend, his analysis is rather upside down. It is not children on the playing fields of our famous public schools who are likely to be referred to the police for the fisticuffs, minor thefts and criminal damage that is almost inevitable in early years; it is instead the poorest and most vulnerable, such as children in care, who are also preyed upon by groomers and exploiters, and even blackmailed with the threat of being reported to the police by their abusers.
Baroness Butler-Sloss (CB)
My Lords, I put my name to this amendment and I agree with everything that the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, has said. This is the third time that I have tried to raise the age of criminal responsibility in this House. I tried first in the Blair Government and lost. I tried the second time in the coalition Government and lost. On each occasion, I asked for a modest increase, to 12. I would be content with 12, but I would naturally prefer 14. It is very sad, but I just wonder whether every Government, of whichever political persuasion, are so afraid of the press and the press headlines that they are not prepared to change the law. Some years ago, the four children’s commissioners of the United Kingdom wrote a joint report in which they said that the United Kingdom is the most punitive country in the whole of Europe. That has not changed.
I tried two relevant cases: the first was on the anonymity of the Bulger killers, aged 10; the second was Mary Bell, aged 10. I do not know whether noble Lords know that the two Bulger killers, aged 10, had found a pornographic video hidden under the bed of the father of one of them, and they watched it. It was a story of how to kill a small child after painting the child blue. Those two little boys went out and did exactly what the film had shown. That seems to me to be highly relevant to considerations. It was an appalling crime; there is no doubt about that, but one does really need to think—as the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, has reminded us—about the maturity of the brain, which is not properly completed by the age of 10, and is only still partly completed by the age of 14. There is substantial evidence that one Government after another absolutely refuse to recognise.
Ten is very young. As the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, said, let us think back to when we were 10—I find that particularly difficult at my age. One bears in mind one’s children or one’s grandchildren, how they behaved and the extent to which they really understood, not perhaps between right and wrong—I would hope they did—but the consequences of what they have done or might do. That seems to be something that is gained later in life than the age of 10.
One point that noble Lords might be concerned about is what would happen to a 10 year-old if they committed a really serious offence, particularly murder, with which I have been twice concerned. The fact is that Section 45 of the Children Act 1989 would send such a child who was a danger to him or herself or to others to secure accommodation. I am a patron of an admirable secure accommodation unit in Exeter. Every child in that unit has at least two carers, and some who are particularly troublesome have three. They are properly educated and looked after in a way that would of course happen to a child convicted of an offence; they would be sent nowadays to secure accommodation.
Mary Bell, however, was sent to prison. The very humane Member of this House, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf, arranged that the Bulger killers should not go on to an adult prison; they in fact left at the age of 18. Noble Lords might be interested to know the reason why I gave anonymity to those two young men. I received evidence from the police, sitting as a judge, that there were vigilantes out there determined not just to injure them, but to kill them. There was substantial evidence that there were groups of vigilantes in various parts of the country. That was why I gave them anonymity. I ask the Minister to reflect on what the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, and I have said: 10 is very young.
Lord Bailey of Paddington (Con)
My Lords, I support this amendment. The noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, has brought me to this point after watching the deliberations on this. I was someone who, through multiple decades of youth work in particular and community work, was reluctant to do this, but I feel that it is the right thing to do. I just note a few things that would need to happen to make this effective and safe for the wider public.
I have dealt with many gang-involved young men, in particular. There are groups of young men whose sole job is to recruit for those gangs. Sometimes, with our criminal age of 10 being so low, it has made a number of children safer because it has kept them away. If you raise that age, it means that those recruitment people can go around saying, “You’re okay. You can’t be prosecuted, you can’t go to court and you can’t get in trouble”. If we are going to make this change, it needs to be sounded very clearly that there is still a route for you to get in trouble—that it is very important.
The more important piece, I would argue, is to look at how the Metropolitan Police now approach all young children; it views them as a victim first and it is very reluctant to move them into being a criminal without some very serious evidence—that approach needs to be embedded somewhere alongside this change. However, I make the point that there are a number of 10 year-olds—there are not millions of them out there, but there are enough in some of our poorest communities—who are sophisticated enough to be a real danger.
If we are going to make this change, we should make sure that, alongside it, we still have a way to affect the behaviour of those young children, in particular around bullying. If we remove supervision from them—often, supervision from the police is the only thing that carries enough weight in their own mind—they become a serious source of bullying and can cajole other children into breaking the law.
While I will support the amendment, I have been moved to this position only very recently, because it has had to fight against multiple years of experience of dealing with some young children who are very criminally involved, deliberately so. I still see the noble Baroness’ point, but I make a plea to the Minister to make sure that measures are put in place to keep the community safe and to identify young people early, not labelling them as criminals but dealing with their ability to bully and cajole other young people.
Lord Hacking (Lab)
My Lords, I shall speak on Amendment 469, and I have listened with great care to the persuasive argument presented by my noble friend Lady Chakrabarti and by the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, whom I think I can also refer to as a noble friend. I have also been briefed by Justice, a body that I have the highest respect for; indeed, I have been a member of Justice—I think I joined in 1964—for up to 60 years.
I accept the widespread view in other countries that the age for findings of criminality should be 14 years, which is the proposition in Amendment 469. I accept also that Scotland has recently raised the age of criminality from eight years to 12 years. We should also take into account the alarming increase in crime committed by young children going down to the age of nine years, and even lower. I read, for example, from Home Office statistics, which record that 9,544 offences were committed by children aged nine or younger in 2024. That is a rise of 30% on the 7,370 under-10 crimes recorded in 2019, before the pandemic, and an 18% rise on the total for 2022 of 8,064. They range, alarmingly, over crimes concerning rape, arson, stalking, attacking police, making death threats and drug and racially motivated offences—that is for nine year-olds. In Cheshire recently, police faced an attempted murder suspect who was too young to go before the courts. I take full account of all that.
However, I have a sense of unease in raising the age of criminality from 10 to 14 years. The noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, raised the case relating to two year-old James Bulger, of February 1993. I need not go into the full facts, but it suffices to say that in a shopping centre in Bootle in Merseyside, a little boy, two year-old James Bulger, was separated from his mother and was met by two other boys, 10 year-olds Jon Venables and Robert Thompson. They proceeded to take him away, eventually to a railway line, where they committed the most horrendous murder of that little boy. Following that, they were tried and convicted in November 1993 and in June 2001 were released from prison on licence. The noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, has dealt with their anonymity following their release.
The record is that—and I think this is very relevant—Robert Thompson is not known to have been a reoffender, but not so with Jon Venables. He has had multiple convictions, including for child pornography. He is currently in prison and recently, in 2023, bail was refused because he still posed a danger and a risk to the public. As I said, I have expressed my unease about this.
The only further comment I make on the horrendous case relating to poor two year-old James Bulger is that it is not the only recorded crime of horrendous behaviour by young persons. I recall reading in the newspaper of the recent murder of a pensioner, and I am fairly sure that it was underage children who were responsible for that. I also recall reading in the newspapers of the murder of a homosexual in a public park. Again, if I recall correctly, underage children were involved, including a young girl.
Juvenile crime, I suggest, should be kept on the record. It was highly relevant in the case of Jon Venables that it should be kept on the record. Perhaps we could make an exception for the very serious crime that I have outlined to your Lordships. But one way or another, that record of criminality should remain with the juvenile.
Lord Sentamu (CB)
My Lords, I am not going to repeat the wonderful presentation by the noble Lord, Lord Hacking. There is a sentiment in me which wants to go a long way with some of the things we have said. I listened quite intently to the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, and the arguments were what I call suitable for a seminar, in that you can look at all sides of them. I am persuaded that some children may need greater care and support. It is quite possible that those who exhibit criminality could be helped and end up in a different place. Certainly, listening to the wonderful presentation by the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, and the cases that she has tried, I do not think anyone could say a 10 year-old can commit a crime—that would be very strange. If they have committed a crime, they have committed a crime, and in questions of criminality it is not simply a matter of the law, because, say, you are, like me, an older man at nearly 77. In all of us, there is a propensity to be saintly and holy, but also a darkness which you have to deal with.
I am not uneasy about children having a criminal record if they have committed a crime; I am uneasy about the way they are then treated. We heard from the noble and learned Baroness about making sure that their identity is not put out in the public domain, because there will be vigilantes who want to terrible things to young children. On the fact that a judge took a decision on their being taken to another prison, there are appropriate ways of punishing people without feeling that all punishment must be the same because the nature of the crimes is like those of other criminals. I would have a thought that, with a child such as Thompson or Venables, and considering what they did to young James Bulger, you need to find appropriate ways of dealing with their safekeeping and providing help, but not in the same way as you would treat a John Sentamu. For instance, if I commit a terrible crime, although I am 77, I should be answerable to the rest of the population. The way we handle children often leaves a lot to be desired.
I was a chaplain in a remand centre, and some of those young people had committed horrendous crimes. When you looked back, nearly 99% of their habits had been learned from adults; it was not that they were dreaming of doing these terrible things. It was a borstal for the young, so I take on the arguments made. On the arguments about children that the noble Baroness gave us, I do not think it is a question of age. I do not know how their brains work, although that might help in terms of sentencing, but for me it is not a question of age.
During the Stephen Lawrence inquiry, we went to Wales, and we—and William Macpherson, who was the chair of the inquiry—were shocked that children as young as six were committing some of the most horrendous racist incidents. By the way, we call it the Stephen Lawrence inquiry but the rest of the population do not say that. They keep on calling it the Macpherson inquiry. It is not that; its title is the Stephen Lawrence inquiry. Again, you looked at the parents and they were not responsible. It was a group enterprise. Kids in school were learning the language and there was not enough information to help them understand that behaving like that is not going to help them.
We as a nation should take the view that all children belong to us, and it is our responsibility to make sure we create an environment in which they are going to be helped. Locking them up and throwing away the key cannot be acceptable where children are concerned, no matter what crimes they may have committed. We should examine, in the streets where we live, how well we have helped and supported children.
I ask the Minister, as we have matters that need to be taken seriously, to consider whether it is best to do this through this Bill, or whether it would be better to arrange a seminar to examine the issue before Report, and find out what would be best for our children, instead of applying the unhelpful label “criminal” or deciding that a threshold of 14 or 12 will do it, because kids as young as seven can do some terrible things. We should put our hand on our hearts and say that maybe, as a society, we need to do much better.
Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd (CB)
My Lords, I rise briefly to support the amendment in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, and the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss.
It is important to recognise the very important point made by the noble Lord, Lord Bailey, in relation to the problems of gangs in London, but I do not believe that that should be the reason why we should not make a change.
There are three things one can say very quickly. First, the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, has dealt at length with the enormous improvement in understanding the development of the mind and the enormous scientific advances that have been made. Across the criminal justice system, we generally are very bad at adapting to science.
Secondly, it is right to pay tribute to the Youth Justice Service across England and Wales. It has improved, and we now deal with youth crime and young people in a much more humane and civilised manner than we did 20 years ago. The number in places like Feltham has fallen enormously, and thank goodness it has. I do not know how many of your Lordships have been there, but it is a terrible place, and you do not want to send people there, particularly young people.
Thirdly, this was an issue I looked at when chairing the Commission on Justice in Wales. I must tell the noble Lord, Lord Hanson, that he is not to worry: I am not making a devolution point now, but I will come back to that at Report. However, I will say that the commission that examined this issue was firmly of the view that the age of criminal responsibility should be raised to 12, having heard a lot of evidence. It seems to me that this is something we cannot kick into the long grass again. We must recognise change, and we should make it now.
Lord Hacking (Lab)
The noble and learned Lord may recall from his days at the Bar that the juvenile courts were very sensitive to their role; that the judge and the counsel did not wear wigs; that the young offender was not kept in the dock, but was placed alongside his lawyers, and so forth. So we have, stretching back a long way, been very sensitive when trying juveniles.
Baroness Brinton (LD)
My Lords, as a former trustee of UNICEF, I rise to support Amendment 469, so clearly presented by the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, and signed and spoken to by the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss. Internationally, the minimum age of criminal responsibility is recognised as 12, and UNICEF has always been clear that it should be 14. I heard what the noble Lord, Lord Bailey of Paddington, said, and understand his concerns about the very large number of young people and children being groomed and pulled into criminal gangs. He is right to say that we need more concerted support in terms of police, education and youth work intervention, but it is not the children’s—younger children’s—fault that they have ended up there. The noble Lord, Lord Hacking, and the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Sentamu, recognised that heinous crimes needed to be marked in a certain way, but both also commented on the fact that we needed to understand that these were children. I am really grateful for the comments of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd.
Your Lordships’ House has been discussing this for many, many years and as the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, said, she was campaigning on this long before she came into Your Lordships’ House. Now is the time; we need change. We need to do that because there is so much evidence now.
In 2011, Nicholas Mackintosh, who chaired the Royal Society study on brain development, told the BBC then that there was
“incontrovertible evidence that the brain continues to develop throughout adolescence”,
and that some regions of the brain, responsible for decision-making and impulse control, do not mature fully
“until at least the age of 20”.
That Royal Society report cited the
“concern of some neuroscientists that the … age of criminal responsibility in the UK is set too low”.
We are still discussing it today.
UNICEF’s view is that 14 should be the minimum age, using scientific research as a base, but it is very specific that no country should have the age below 12. This places England, Wales and Northern Ireland in breach of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which is bad enough, but the real problem is a court system that assumes that children have capacity to make decisions when all the research shows that that is not reliable. It is wrong for a Government to assert that any interference with a child’s human rights can be justified.
UNICEF says in its excellent guidance note on youth offending published in 2022, that children under the minimum age of criminal responsibility,
“should not be considered (alleged) child offenders but, first and foremost, children in need of special protection”.
It says that offending behaviour by such children
“is often the result of poverty, family violence and/or homelessness … their involvement in offending behaviour is an indicator of potential vulnerability that has to be addressed by the social welfare system. Special protection measures for children … should address the root causes of their behaviour and support their parents/caregivers. The measures should be tailored to the child’s needs and circumstances and based on a comprehensive and interdisciplinary assessment of the child’s familial, educational and social circumstances”.
That matches the advice of the medical specialists too. Frankly, it is time that the Government stepped up and took the brave decision that we need to recognise that we are out of kilter with the rest of Europe and, frankly, most of the world.
Prosecuting children and holding them in young offender institutions does not give them the time and space to learn how to live their lives differently. We have heard from both the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas, and the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, about how the arrangements work for children in specialist secure accommodation. We can still use those systems but without giving children the label of being a criminal when, clearly, they are not capable of making the right decisions.
I am really grateful to my noble friend Lord Dholakia, who has been campaigning on this particular issue for decades before he came into your Lordships’ House in 1997. His Private Member’s Bill in 2017 resulted in a wide public discussion. It is a shame that, nine years on, we have not progressed further. Let us do so now.
Lord Davies of Gower (Con)
My Lords, this has been a genuinely interesting debate. The amendment in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, would raise the age of criminal responsibility in England and Wales from 10 to 14. For the reasons I will set out below, I am unable to support it.
First, the purpose of the age of criminal responsibility has not been designed to criminalise children unnecessarily. Rather, it is to ensure that the state can intervene early and proportionately when a child’s behaviour causes serious harm. As the noble Baroness, Baroness Levitt, the Minister, stated in this House, setting the age at 10 allows the justice system to step in at a point where intervention can prevent further offending and protect both the child and the wider public, and, crucially, children are not treated as adults. They are dealt with through youth courts under a distinct sentencing framework with rehabilitation as the central aim.
The evidence shows that the system already uses this power sparingly. We are told that, in 2024, only 13% of all children sentenced were aged between 10 and 14, and that proportion has been falling year on year. Of the 1,687 sentences imposed on children in that age group, just 23 resulted in custody. Those figures matter. They demonstrate that the age of criminal responsibility being set at 10 does not mean routine criminalisation of children. It means retaining a backstop for the most serious and persistent cases while diversion remains the norm.
Raising the age to 14 would create a dangerous gap. It would mean that children aged 10 to 13 who commit grave offences—including serious violence, sexual offences or sustained harassment—could not be held criminally responsible. This would limit the state’s ability to manage risk, protect victims and, in some cases, protect the child. There are rare but tragic cases—
Baroness Butler-Sloss (CB)
I am very grateful to the noble Lord. Section 44 of the Children Act deals with children who are a danger to themselves and to others. The only difference in the criminal court is that it comes through the family proceedings court, but in fact the local authority would have to deal with it and the child would be put into secure accommodation. I wonder whether the noble Lord could take that on board.
Lord Davies of Gower (Con)
I am grateful to the noble and learned Baroness for that. I do not dispute that fact; I quite accept it.
There are rare but tragic cases, such as the murder of James Bulger, where a criminal justice response is unavoidable and undoubtedly in the public interest.
I respectfully suggest that international comparisons cited in this debate are far from straightforward and can sometimes serve to confuse matters. In fact, certain countries are now moving in the opposite direction. Sweden, for example, is proposing to lower its age in response to gang exploitation of children who know that they cannot be prosecuted. That underlines a key point. If the threshold is set too high, it can incentivise adults to use children as instruments of crime.
It is also worth noting that, although Scotland recently raised the age of criminal responsibility, Scotland’s experience should not justify this amendment. Even after deciding the age of criminal responsibility should be raised from eight years old, Scotland raised the threshold to 12 and not to 14. The Scottish Government also retained extensive non-criminal powers to respond to serious harmful behaviour. This amendment would go significantly further without clear evidence that such a leap would improve outcomes for children or public safety.
It is worth noting that a number of Commonwealth countries retain the doctrine that a child is considered incapable of wrongdoing, which was abolished in England and Wales by the Crime and Disorder Act 1998. In many of those jurisdictions, the standard age of responsibility is similar to ours. Australia, for example, has a standard age of criminal responsibility of 10 years old, but a rebuttable presumption exists up to the age of 14. However, I should also stress that, simply because other countries may have higher ages than England and Wales, that is not, in and of itself, a justification to alter ours. We must ensure that the age of responsibility here is suitable for our needs—
Lord Marks of Henley-on-Thames (LD)
Before the noble Lord leaves the question of international comparisons, can he confirm that in Sweden the proposal is to lower the age of criminal responsibility from 15 to 13, rather than leaving that unsaid?
Lord Davies of Gower (Con)
I cannot confirm that, but I will certainly have a look at it.
The question is not whether children should be protected but whether removing the ability to intervene criminally until 14 years old would make children, victims or communities safer. I do not believe that it would. The current system already prioritises proportionality and rehabilitation, while retaining the capacity to act when it is absolutely necessary. For those reasons, I cannot support this amendment.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Ministry of Justice (Baroness Levitt) (Lab)
My Lords, my noble friend Lady Chakrabarti has a long and honourable record of raising issues on behalf of some of the most vulnerable in society. She and the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, make a formidable team when moving this amendment. I am very grateful to them for ensuring that this important issue remains at the forefront of every Government’s mind, including this one.
It was about a fortnight ago that your Lordships’ House debated this issue in response to my noble friend’s Oral Question. I said at the time, and repeat today, that the age of criminal responsibility is a complex and sensitive issue. I want to take this opportunity to set out in a bit more detail than the Oral Questions format allows why the Government believe that we should keep the age of criminal responsibility at 10 years old.
Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)
I am grateful to all noble Lords who participated in what I felt was a very thoughtful debate. Though it is invidious to do so, I would like to single out two contributions in particular.
The first is the contribution of the noble Lord, Lord Bailey of Paddington. It is quite a big thing to come to Committee and say, “I have listened. I still have concerns, but I have changed my mind in the face of an argument from the opposite side of the aisle”. I pay tribute to him for that, remembering that it was his party, not mine, that took us into the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child in the first place. I am very grateful to him. He does great credit to his party and this House.
I must thank the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, for a lifetime of public service and of considerable distinction at the Bar, on the Bench and in your Lordships’ House. It was she who gave the answer to the legitimate concerns of the noble Lord, Lord Bailey, about what would fill the gap in relation to dangerous and bad behaviour by young children if they were not to be criminalised: they would be dealt with in the family court and would be supervised and treated with a welfare approach, rather than a criminal justice one.
I thank everyone. I am obviously disappointed to some extent with my noble friend the Minister’s response, but I hope that the door is not slammed closed. I understand that a Back-Bench amendment is not necessarily the way to deal with something of this complexity and magnitude. However, I note, for example, that the Bar Council of England and Wales is currently conducting a commission into the age of criminal responsibility. I hope that, if the Government do not engage with it, they will at least watch those developments very carefully. This amendment was tabled on the basis of an age of 14; I may consider returning on Report with the proposition of age 12. For now, at least, and with thanks, I beg leave to withdraw.
Baroness Chakrabarti
“Safeguards against abuses by Covert Human Intelligence Sources(1) Section 27 of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 is amended as follows.(2) For subsection (1) substitute—“(1) This Part applies to criminal conduct—(a) under an authorisation under this Part, and(b) where the conduct is in accordance with the authorisation.”.(3) For subsection (2) substitute—“(2) This part also applies to civil liability in relation to any conduct which—(a) is incidental to any conduct within subsection (1), and(b) is not itself conduct an authorisation or warrant for which is capable of being granted under a relevant enactment and might reasonably have been expected to have been sought in the case in question. (2A) If a person acts in accordance with a criminal conduct authorisation under section 29B (covert human intelligence sources: criminal conduct authorisations), the nature of that authorisation and compliance with it shall be considered and deemed relevant to—(a) any decision as to whether prosecution for a criminal offence by that person is in the public interest,(b) any potential defences to such charges of criminal conduct, and(c) any potential civil liability on the part of that person, and the quantum of any damages.(2B) The protections in subsection (2A) only apply where the conduct is not carried out for the primary purpose of—(a) encouraging or assisting, pursuant to sections 44 to 49 of the Serious Crime Act 2007 (incohate offences), the commission of an offence by, or(b) otherwise seeking to discredit,the person, people or group subject to the authorised surveillance operation.”.”Member's explanatory statement
These amendments replace provisions of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 as amended by the Covert Human Intelligence Sources Act 2021 granting complete advanced criminal and civil immunity for authorised operatives and agents, with a public interest defence as long as they did not act as agents provocateurs.
Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)
My Lords, I am trying the patience of the Committee, but Amendment 470 is in my name.
In a week when our entire politics is reeling from the betrayal, treachery and most likely serious criminality of a now disgraced Peer, I hope we might all empathise with victims of abuses of power by covert human intelligence sources—CHIS—or police or other agency spies. Notwithstanding the ongoing public inquiry into the decades-old spy cops scandal, the Covert Human Intelligence Sources (Criminal Conduct) Act 2021 granted prior and absolute criminal and civil immunity to officers and agents of a whole host of public bodies if acting under a new scheme of pre-authorisation to commit crime. By this one Act, the centuries-old principle of equality before the law was breached.
Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer (LD)
My Lords, I was very pleased to add my name to this amendment in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti. To me, it is the most important amendment to the Bill, and she laid out fully why it is so needed. As she said, this will be about trust in the police, and without this sort of regulation, that trust will be lacking—especially given the spy cops inquiry, which I have been following. That inquiry led me to want to put my name to this amendment, particularly because it has been going on for 10 years, involving three judges, and we should now have the lessons from it. If it had wound up, we would have had the lessons from that inquiry, and this amendment fills a bit of the gap from not having them.
The problem with that inquiry is that quite a lot of it is held in secret and a lot of the transcripts are heavily redacted, so it is very difficult for a Member of your Lordships’ House to follow, as I have tried to, what the lessons will be. For those reasons, we should support this amendment, even if it is just a stopgap until that inquiry eventually reports. That could be years from now, so I am pleased to support the amendment.
Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)
My Lords, I support Amendment 470, which I, too, have signed. I agree with every word that we heard from the noble Baronesses, Lady Chakrabarti and Lady Miller. This references a deep vein of misogyny that existed then in the Met police—and I suspect it still exists, in spite of all the promises to the contrary. The noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, is so calm; it always astonishes me how calm she stays when I know she feels exactly the way I feel about this, which is absolutely furious. I know that when I stand up I am absolutely furious about quite a lot of things, but this plumbs the depths of my fury.
Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)
Thank you, everybody. I tried to be a core participant in the spy cops inquiry—I think it was the first one—but the judge ruled that it did not apply to me because I had been spied on by the regular police, not the spy cops, so I could not be part of it. I was very disappointed about that.
Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)
My Lords, I oppose this amendment. I have to concede that, as usual, the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, made a beguilingly attractive case for the amendment, but in essence this would be a legislative overreach. This activity is not being undertaken with impunity. We have checks and balances, although I accept they can be improved. I say to the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, that children are used because of county lines, where children are used to move weapons and drugs.
Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)
I will give way a little later as I want to develop my point, if the noble Baroness will be so kind as to allow me.
I think there are two sides to every story. When I was first a candidate and then Member of Parliament for Peterborough, I remember the sight every week of animal rights activists at Huntingdon Life Sciences. I do not support the activities of rogue police officers, as enunciated in what the noble Baroness said about spy cops, but we must not conflate separate phenomena: a full public inquiry—albeit in camera, which I do not agree with, as there should be openness and transparency—and specific criminal cases. One can also make the case that those police officers and others who were doxed by animal rights activists have suffered a huge degree of harassment and violent intimidation since the allegations arose, without having the opportunity to clear their names in a court of law. I give way to the noble Baroness.
Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer (LD)
I would like the noble Lord to give way to my noble friend.
Baroness Brinton (LD)
I am grateful. The noble Lord referred earlier to children and county lines. The problem with this case is that relationships were formed under lies by police officers and children were born of those relationships, whose fathers then disappeared. It is nothing to do with the criminalised activity of children. Will he please reconsider his comments with that relevance?
Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)
The noble Baroness makes a very fair point. I was referring to the issue of county lines and why children may be used. I deprecate the unacceptable activity to which she refers; none of us would support the fathering of children in a pretended relationship, so she makes a very fair point.
I was talking about Huntingdon Life Sciences and animal rights activists. That violence escalated to a significant level over a number of years, which culminated in the violent attack on and near-death experience of the then chief executive of Huntingdon Life Sciences. It was a very unpleasant period. Therefore, there was a reasonable case to be made that the Metropolitan Police, Cambridgeshire Constabulary and others needed to embed officers and intelligence assets within the animal rights movement to alleviate the risk of further serious criminal activity. That was an animal rights issue, but it could easily not have been.
The noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, concedes very fairly that she does not want to circumscribe cases where you have to do long-term surveillance of, say, a terrorist plot which might be carried out were it not for police activity and long-term embedding of people. That is separate to cases where there has not been an operational rationale for preventing criminal activity, so I accept that there is a difference.
That is why this amendment is rather heavy-handed. No doubt the Minister will refer to the commissioner, who will look at whether these activities are timely and appropriate, but words matter. Incidentally, when the noble Baroness mentioned the Covert Human Intelligence Sources (Criminal Conduct) Act 2021, I think she made an unusual inference that it was to facilitate criminal activity. I may have been mistaken in hearing that and she may want to intervene.
Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)
The noble Lord, Lord Jackson, is completely right; that is the purpose of that Act. The Covert Human Intelligence Sources (Criminal Conduct) Act is all about authorising CHISs to commit offences, because we understand that that is sometimes necessary to keep your cover.
Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)
That is true as far as that goes. However, in the wider context, the principal objective of that legislation is not to enable people to commit crimes but to prevent people being subject to endless civil and criminal litigation that may arise from their duties as representatives of public bodies, be they the security services, the police et cetera. So I think that the noble Baroness is being slightly unfair to the Ministers at the time who put through that legislation. What she outlined was clearly a corollary of passing that legislation, but it was not the principal reason, as I am sure she will concede.
The reason I wanted to speak is to interrogate the details of this amendment. Looking at paragraph (2B)(b) of the proposed new clause, I wonder what is meant by
“otherwise seeking to discredit, the person, people or group subject to the authorised surveillance operation”.
That seems a very wide-ranging paragraph and a recipe for much litigation in the future. Should it eventually be found on the face of the enacted Crime and Policing Bill, the way that it will be interpreted will give rise to a situation where the police, the security services and others are much more reluctant to enter into long-term surveillance of the kind I discussed earlier in seeking to thwart a terrorist plot, because of that quite wide-ranging and open paragraph.
Generally speaking, the noble Baroness has made a very fine point and I agree with much of what she said, but I genuinely do not understand the point of that paragraph. If it is a way of describing an agent provocateur, I understand that—and, because she is a prominent lawyer, she will no doubt tell me where that is found in other pieces of legislation. However, currently, that paragraph could be misinterpreted, and it will circumscribe the capacity of the security services and the police to do their job and protect individuals. For those reasons, while I am not necessarily against the amendment, I would like further clarification if possible.
Baroness O'Loan (CB)
My Lords, I have long had a responsibility for the investigation of matters involving CHISs and I fully accept that many people who agree to become CHISs do so in the public interest, because, without their activities, the intelligence that they are able to collect would be unavailable. I also accept that undercover activity of this kind has long been a feature of criminal investigation.
Nevertheless, while the CHIS Act, which was passed in 2021, provided a very necessary statutory framework for the operation of CHISs, because that was previously absent, it does not contain sufficient safeguards against abuse, particularly where such acts risk falling beyond the scope of the authorisation of the CCA, particularly where they are well concealed by those committing such crimes and not reporting back properly.
Regrettably, like many others, I have seen repeated abuses of authorisations of CHISs. I have also seen CHISs acting way beyond the scope of their authorisations, sometimes with the knowledge of those who manage them, to the extent that they value the CHIS more than dealing with unauthorised and perhaps criminal conduct by the CHIS.
When the CHIS is not an undercover officer—and, of course, not all CHISs are undercover state employees—there is less control and potentially a higher risk. Unlike in the experience of the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, we in Northern Ireland have been able to expose unlawful activities of CHISs to bring them to account. So it can be done.
Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd (CB)
My Lords, I add briefly to this debate. When the matter came before your Lordships’ House with the passage of the CHIS Bill towards the end of 2020 and beginning of 2021, whether to move from the use of CHISs and their conduct being looked at ex post facto to it being looked at in advance was hotly debated. It is a difficult subject to debate in an open Chamber. We all accept that CHISs are necessary, but it is impossible to go into the details of those cases here. Further, it is important to concentrate not on what happened prior to 2020, although such cases are illustrative of the abuses that can occur; we are concerned with what has happened since 2021 and how well the Act is working.
As things stand at present, I cannot really add much to what the noble Baroness, Lady O’Loan, has said. My experience of this area of CHISs is that we have learned an enormous amount from Northern Ireland. We ignore at our peril what the judiciary and those who have experience of Northern Ireland tell us. That peril is that we need to be absolutely clear that the system we have of authorising when CHISs engage in criminal activity is subject to rigorous scrutiny. What disturbs me, and why I support the amendment from the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, is that the key to the new system was prompt, effective and detailed scrutiny, reported to the best extent possible, of the way in which the system is operating.
On what the noble Baroness has said, I have looked at these reports myself. They are necessarily vague—they have to be, because you cannot put the information into the public domain—but they are delayed. I hope that the Minister will look very seriously at this and maybe meet some of us so that we can see the reality. Is this system working? If it is not working, we must revert either to the old system or to what is proposed in this amendment. It is key to public confidence in the police that we do not have a repeat of what happened in the matters that are the subject of the inquiry that has been spoken about—though this amendment has absolutely nothing to do with that—that the CHISs operate properly, and that anything that goes wrong is properly dealt with. We cannot have another scandal on the scale of that which has been investigated for the past 10 or 12 years—I have lost count of time.
This is, therefore, a matter where the amendment put forward by the noble Baroness really should be investigated. I hope that the Minister will look very seriously at it. I had long discussions during the passage of the Bill in 2020 to try to ensure that we had a good system. At present, on what is available, there is no real democratic accountability and no independent scrutiny of it. We must have that, if public confidence in the police is not to suffer the kind of problems that it suffered, into which the inquiry is going on, in relation to pre-2020 events.
Lord Hacking (Lab)
My Lords, I am so glad that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas, and the noble Baroness, Lady O’Loan, have participated in this debate. Like myself, they attended the recent meeting chaired by my noble friend Lady Chakrabarti. It was very nice to hear from the noble Baroness, Lady O’Loan, the admiration for the courage of the witnesses who came to speak to us at that meeting.
In any form of covert human intelligence, there has to be deception. It is the only way that the officer of the state, whoever he or she may be, can penetrate through to get the confidence of the criminals who they are there to investigate. But there should be, as my noble friend Lady Chakrabarti says in her amendment, some restraint in what they get up to.
When the noble Lord, Lord Jackson, got up, he started by saying that he opposed this amendment, but it was pleasing that, by the end of his speech, he was quite neutral. That was very reassuring.
My noble friend Lady Chakrabarti referred to the 2011 case of R v Barkshire, which concerned an undercover police officer infiltrating a group of climate change activists. The police officer, who I will not name, indulged in a sexual relationship, for about seven years, with one of the ladies involved. It also involved the birth of a child. This police officer, according to my brief, had as many as 10 other sexual relationships during the course of his activity as an undercover officer. When it came to the court, it was said that he went “much further” than the authorisation given to him, and that he played
“a significant role in assisting, advising and supporting … the very activity for which these appellants were prosecuted”.
That is why my noble friend—I hope she notes that I am giving her full support in this amendment—is absolutely right to suggest that there should be restraint. I accept entirely the restraint which is contained in Amendment 470.
Baroness Brinton (LD)
My Lords, I thank JUSTICE and the group Police Spies Out of Lives, particularly the women who were on the receiving end of the treatment by the CHISs. I declare an interest as a director of the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust, which has given grants to Police Spies Out of Lives for well over a decade, in the run-up to the beginning of the inquiry.
The noble Baroness, Lady Jones, talked about how long it has taken to get the abuses taken seriously, and it really has. The inquiry itself took many years to be established, and there was damage to those women’s lives in the aftermath every time they went to people in the establishment to ask them to please take their concerns seriously. There was stunning silence.
The trust had a chance to meet and hear from these extraordinary women, who were seeking justice for many decades. Without their determination there would be no inquiry, no TV documentaries and no newspaper articles. I salute them all for their refusal to be cowed and their strength of character, even in the face of repeated setbacks from the establishment, including the extremely slow inquiry—which is not expected to conclude before 2030, and quite possibly later—at an enormous cost to the public purse and, above all, to these victims of the police spies.
The glacial speed of the public inquiry into undercover policing is on a par with the long delays of other historic scandals including infected blood, Post Office Horizon and the Independent Inquiry into Child Sex Abuse. As young girls and women who were taken advantage of in the 1970s head towards getting their pensions, it is vital to ensure that there are no further delays.
As we heard from the noble Baronesses, Lady Chakrabarti and Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, and my noble friend Lady Miller of Chilthorne Domer, Amendment 470 would replace provisions in the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, as amended by the CHIS Act 2021, which grants complete advanced criminal and civil immunity for authorised operatives and agents with public interest offences, as long as they did not act as agents provocateurs.
The noble Baroness, Lady O’Loan, helpfully made clear her experience in Northern Ireland and the shortcomings of the CHIS legislation. The contribution from the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas, also confirmed that we must continue to learn lessons from the new system. Amendment 470 would correct the law to ensure that, in future, those using CHISs must have a high standard of regulation and accountability. We, as a country, need more oversight of CHISs’ criminal activity and the mechanism to ensure that officers and their superiors meet these high standards and make decisions in light of the law.
From these Benches, we welcome Amendment 470 and the safeguard that it offers to the victims. I say this to the noble Lord, Lord Jackson, but the officers too, because it would give them a framework and responsibility to think about any actions, whether they need permission for them and, if so, whether they should really be thinking about doing it at all, which is long overdue.
Lord Davies of Gower (Con)
My Lords, it might not surprise the Committee to hear that I do not support this amendment and I am sure I will find myself making the same arguments as the Minister when he responds.
In 2021, Parliament passed the Covert Human Intelligence Sources (Criminal Conduct) Act, which was introduced to this House by my noble and learned friend, Lord Stewart of Dirleton. Its effect was to create a legislative framework through which covert intelligence officers can be authorised to participate in conduct which would normally be criminal. The criminal conduct authorisation might be granted under Section 29B of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, as inserted by the 2021 Act, only if it is proportionate and necessary, in the interests of national security, prevention of crime and disorder, or in the interests of our economic well-being. Subsection (6) of that section also requires the person authorising the criminal conduct to ensure—and this is important—that all alternative avenues that do not make use of criminality have been exhausted. Subsection (7) states that the decision to grant an authorisation is required to comply with the Human Rights Act 1998. Finally, there is an explicit goal for the Investigatory Powers Commissioner.
Therefore, there already exists a number of safeguards to prevent covert intelligence officers overstepping the bounds of their authorisation and to ensure that the authorisation itself is tightly drawn and strictly necessary. When a criminal conduct authorisation is granted, the officer to whom it relates is permitted to engage in the specified criminal conduct and cannot be prosecuted for that conduct. It is perfectly well understood and accepted that covert agents do, on occasion, have to engage in such criminal conduct in the course of their operations. It is absolutely right that the law protects them when this is the case.
It is also worth noting that the 2021 Act did not create new powers for the police and intelligence services; it simply placed on a statutory footing the mechanism by which they can be authorised to engage in criminal behaviour. This is surely preferable to having the whole system working on the side and in the dark.
The noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, proposes in her Amendment 470 to remove the criminal and civil immunity provided to officers when they commit a criminal offence in pursuance of an authorisation to do so. She proposes replacing it with a defence to criminal or civil charges. However, she has also included an exception to that possible defence—when an officer encourages, assists or attempts to discredit the person who is under surveillance. I find this a startling exception. If a covert officer is given a criminal conduct authorisation and that authorisation, taking into account all the available safeguards, includes permission to commit an inchoate offence, I cannot see why that officer should not be able to do so. Certainly, the officer should not be held criminally or civilly liable.
I am sure the Minister will have further points to add, but we on these Benches cannot support this amendment.
Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)
Is the noble Lord saying that he supports officers or their assets acting as agents provocateurs, inciting crime rather than investigating it?
Lord Davies of Gower (Con)
I am not saying that at all. We all recognise that things have gone wrong, but what I say generally is that this type of policing—indeed, quite a number of aspects of policing—is about testing the law. Certainly, this is the case with the involvement of CHISs.
Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)
The noble Lord mentioned all the safeguards, but why does he think the safeguards failed not once, but multiple times, and over quite a number of years?
Lord Davies of Gower (Con)
I cannot answer for all the cases that have gone wrong; indeed, I cannot answer for any cases that have gone wrong—it is not my place to do that. I can say, however, that it very much depends on good leadership and good supervision, and all of that comes down to good training. It has always been my view that training is at the core of all of this.
Baroness O'Loan (CB)
Does the noble Lord accept that statutory blanket immunity from civil or criminal action acts as a barrier for people who are affected by such unlawful activities? It is a significant concern because of the impact that barrier has on those who might need to bring such action, and who might have difficulty getting funding or access to the necessary support. Then, there is an ongoing huge impact on trust in the police.
Lord Davies of Gower (Con)
Trust in the police in this area is essential. I am not sure I quite get the gist of what the noble Baroness is asking, but I am very happy to discuss it outside the Chamber later, if that would help.
Baroness O'Loan (CB)
It was about statutory blanket immunity—the extent of the immunity.
Lord Davies of Gower (Con)
Again, I would have to have a look at that before I give an answer. I am very happy to discuss it with the noble Baroness.
Lord Hacking (Lab)
Can the noble Lord comment on the case of R v Barkshire, and does he endorse the behaviour of the counter-intelligence officer in that case?
Lord Davies of Gower (Con)
I am not entirely sure that I know all the facts of that case, so I am probably not qualified to answer that question. I spent my job putting people behind bars, not defending them. I am not a lawyer; I would not like to take that any further, frankly.
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend Lady Chakrabarti for her amendment. The discussion today has taken me back to my time in Northern Ireland, when I had to see the product of covert intelligence. As Counter-Terrorism Minister in 2009, I had to see the product of that intelligence, so I understand the value of that. I also understand that the amendment seeks to amend the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 by removing the legal protections for covert human intelligence sources who have been tasked by the police and a limited number of other public authority agencies, such as the intelligence services, with engaging in specific, tightly defined, pre-approved criminal conduct. Furthermore, the amendment seeks to remove protections for CHISs engaged in such authorised criminal conduct where it engages the offences of encouraging or assisting an offender under the Serious Crime Act, or seeks to discredit those who are subject to a particular investigation. I understand the motive behind what my noble friend has brought forward.
I begin by addressing the undercover police inquiry, raised by the noble Baronesses, Lady Miller of Chilthorne Domer and Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, my noble friend Lord Hacking and the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, from the Liberal Democrat Front Bench. I took office in July 2024, and the undercover policing inquiry had operated for nine years at that stage. It is clear that the historical allegations under consideration by the inquiry are absolutely appalling. Such behaviour should rightly be condemned. The inquiry is ongoing, and we await the findings and any recommendations, but let me assure all those who have spoken that I am now responsible in the Home Office for managing inquiries, and I wish to see recommendations as soon as possible, for the very reasons noble Lords and Baronesses have mentioned today.
The current landscape around undercover operatives is much changed, and since 2013 enhanced safeguards have been put in place, but the Government want to see the lessons of that inquiry and consider them as soon as possible.
Noble Lords may recall the Covert Human Intelligence Sources (Criminal Conduct) Act 2021, which has been referred to today, and the revised CHIS code of practice of 2022, mentioned by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas, which were subject to debate and approval both here and in the House of Commons. This scrutiny includes consideration of similar amendments proposed by my noble friend at the time.
I say to noble Lords generally, including my noble friend Lord Hacking, that CHIS play a crucial part in preventing, detecting and safeguarding the public from many serious crimes, including terrorism, drugs and firearms offences, and child sexual exploitation and abuse. Those who do it do so at such personal risk to themselves. I noted and welcome the support from the noble Lords, Lord Davies of Gower and Lord Jackson—I will take the support where I can get it. It needs to be properly authorised and specifically defined criminality by the state, and they do so knowing that they will not be penalised for carrying out that activity, particularly by those engaged in criminal or terrorist activity, who may otherwise pursue legal action against them.
It is important that we place on record that CHIS authorisations and criminal conduct authorisations under Part II of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 can be validly given only where the proposed conduct is necessary, proportionate and compliant with the Human Rights Act. Valid authorisations make activity carried out in relation to them “lawful for all purposes”, providing protection from criminal and civil liability. However—I know my noble friend knows this—should a court find that the authorisation does not satisfy these necessary requirements, or should the conduct go beyond what is permitted by the authorisation, it will not be rendered lawful.
Given the significance of these powers, it is important to note that there are independent and effective avenues of oversight and redress, and that these exist—I know that colleagues who have spoken know this, but it is worth putting on the record again—via the Investigatory Powers Tribunal for anyone who believes they have been subject to improper activity by a public authority using covert investigatory powers.
Baroness O’Loan (CB)
I wonder whether the Minister is aware that the Investigatory Powers Commissioner has commented on the unsatisfactory nature of the recording of CCAs in a number of cases most recently, which appears to indicate a deterioration in that area.
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
I am always interested in what Sir Brian Leveson, the Investigatory Powers Commissioner, says. From my perspective he provides robust oversight, which includes comments that he has made, and he and his inspectors pay particular attention to that criminal conduct authorisation. He produces annual reports—I know that they are time-lagged, for reasons that are self-evident with any annual report. In his annual report in 2024, he identified
“good levels of compliance for the authorisation and management”
of police undercover operatives and noted that the quality and content of police undercover operative criminal conduct authorisations was found to be of a “good standard”. I will always look and listen to what he says because we have a responsibility to ensure that these matters are dealt with for the product of that CHIS to help protect the public at large.
I assure my noble friend and in this context the noble Baroness, Lady O’Loan, that the CHIS cannot be authorised to entrap people—which is one of the objectives of her amendment. Any such entrapment would be in conflict with Article 6 of the ECHR—as my noble friend knows, we are committed to maintaining our obligations under the ECHR—which protects the right to a fair trial. Furthermore, I point my noble friend to the publicly available Undercover Policing: Authorised Professional Practice, which states in clear terms that an undercover operative
“must not act as an agent provocateur”.
I hope that satisfies my noble friend on that point.
Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)
I will ask a similar question to the one I asked the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Gower. If these safeguards are so wonderful and if it is all in good order, why was this allowed to happen? The evidence of the spy cops from the early days of that inquiry was that the people overseeing the CHIS knew what was happening regarding their relationships with the women. They knew and they let it happen. That does not sound like good order.
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
With due respect, the noble Baroness is raising historical issues; there have been improvements in performance management and control over time. As I said, those historical issues are appalling but are currently under investigation within the remit of the John Mitting inquiry into undercover policing. I want to see the recommendations of that inquiry as soon as possible so that we can see where there are further issues. I see that the noble Baroness wants to jump in again, which is fine. Leaping up is part of the parliamentary tennis that we play, and it is important that she has the opportunity to do so.
Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)
It also keeps us fit. All through the inquiry, the police have blocked information from being given out. They have constantly tried to stop the truth becoming open. I can understand the Minister saying that he is waiting for the inquiry to report, but it could take another decade. In the meantime, we still have those concerns about the police. The women’s concerns were brushed away. There might have been various pathways for them to complain, but they were brushed away. Why does the Minister think it is any better today?
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
The noble Baroness tempts me to go into areas of the inquiry, which I will not do. The inquiry is looking at historical abuses, which we have recognised and which are appalling. In the meantime, there have been legislation and improvements by policing in the management of covert operations. I am giving the noble Baroness that assurance now that we believe there are improvements in that management but things that need to be looked at in relation to the previous operation.
The legislation that the noble Baroness is seeking to amend has also put in place a range of measures as a whole. I say to my noble friend Lady Chakrabarti that I have made clear that CHISs cannot be authorised to entrap. This amendment would impose broad and unintended constraints on intelligence gathering by CHISs where criminal conduct is a factor—for example, by preventing CHISs going along with offences that they do not instigate. I have seen the product of that type of activity by CHISs. It is extremely valuable for crime prevention and for bringing people who are committing criminal or terrorist acts to the courts.
My noble friend’s amendment would also rule out the possibility of discrediting the subject of an investigation—for example, a terrorist organisation—in cases where it is equally important to do so. My noble friend has fulfilled her duty. She is challenging the Government on these matters. Self-evidently, we are in a better place than we were many years ago. I await with interest the recommendations of the John Mitting inquiry on undercover policing and whether there are further issues for us to examine.
I want to touch on two other points. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas, sort of asked for a meeting. I am always open to meeting with Peers. In my tenure in this job, I have tried to meet with anybody who has asked. But in this case, given that there is an inquiry ongoing, it would be inappropriate for me to meet with him to discuss those matters now.
Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd (CB)
I was talking not about the inquiry but about the level of supervision and what is happening in the reports under this Act. I entirely agree with the Minister that what happened in the inquiry has nothing to do with this regime. The inquiry is relevant only because it shows the horrendous consequences of not supervising the use of CHISs. All I was concerned to understand better was why there are problems with the reports being so slow and what problems are being encountered. You cannot put this into the public domain, but it would reassure, from the point of view of democratic accountability, if we saw what the problems were and whether there were other means—such as strengthening the code of conduct—to put it right. The peril here is the discrediting of the police five years down the line. That is what I am concerned to avoid.
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
I hear what the noble and learned Lord says. Those are operational matters for the police, in my view, but we can make some judgments on that. I will reflect on what he has said and what he has requested, but my initial gut reaction—and I would like to trust my gut, on several occasions—is that it would not be appropriate to do that. I will reflect on what he said. I am trying to complete my remarks, but I see that the noble Lord, Lord Jackson, wishes to speak, and I will always give way to him.
Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)
I thank the Minister for his generosity. I find myself in complete agreement with the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas. I found his remarks, like those of the noble Baroness, Lady O’Loan, and others, very helpful. I think I understand that he specifically ruled out our considering inquiries, but the suggestion that I—as someone who, as the noble Lord, Lord Hacking, described, was hostile and is now more agnostic—would make to the Minister is that if he could look at secondary legislation, such as regulations, in terms of the timeliness of reports for the commissioner to bring forward, that would strengthen the scrutiny and oversight of the process. I fully agree with the process, but what seems to have come out as a consensus in the debate today is that people think the scrutiny process is clunky and not timely, so everyone loses in terms of reputation. If the Minister can perhaps give an undertaking that he will at least look at the issue prior to Report, that would be helpful.
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
Given what has been said, I will reflect on the comments that have been made. It is important that Sir Brian Leveson has his independence and oversight. I shall look at my gut feelings on this, but I will consider it, take advice and see where we are outside the debate today. In relation to my noble friend’s amendment, I still hope that, given what has been said today—a valuable discussion has been had—she will withdraw it.
Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)
Again, I am grateful to all noble Lords who have spoken in what I think was an important and thoughtful debate. There is quite a lot of common ground, actually. There is common ground that we must have covert human intelligence sources. They must play a role in investigating the most serious crimes, in particular. There is further common ground that part of keeping someone’s cover in, for example, a criminal gang or a terrorist cell, must inevitably sometimes include participating in criminal activity; otherwise, those around them will spot that they do not belong. Again, that is common ground. There is also common ground that it was right to put activities that were previously completely in the shadows on a statutory footing, as happened in 2021.
The difference between some Members of the Committee and others is about whether, when someone is authorised to commit criminal offences in such a role, that authorisation should bring advance total immunity for all purposes, civil and criminal, or whether instead the authorisation should equip them with a public interest defence. That is the difference between us. It is a question of principle but also of practice as to where the balance should be struck, and which system—the one currently on the statute book or something like the one I propose—would give a better balance of safeguards for the brave and genuine public servants who do this work without abusing the trust, but also for the rights of citizens to be protected from abuse. That is the difference between us. Which mechanism provides the most proportionate approach? I do not think there is a gulf, but this is something to keep under review and keep discussing.
As I said earlier, in the report from which the Minister read selectively, Sir Brian Leveson talks about reporting being good, but even he concedes, in the same report, a lack of “specificity” on occasion, only a “general descriptor”, a “number of errors” and so on. So there are some issues that warrant serious and ongoing scrutiny.
My noble friend the Minister may regret telling the Committee that he now has special responsibility for inquiries in the Home Office—his kindness may be a liability—but I suspect that we will want to keep pressing him, not least on the progress of the inquiry on the past but, as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd, said, on the way the system is operating today. The report suggests that the system today is not operating in the way that we would ideally like. With that, for the moment at least, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Lord Alton of Liverpool
“Universal jurisdiction over the crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes, and ancillary conduct (England and Wales)(1) The International Criminal Court Act 2001 is amended as follows.(2) In section 51(1)—(a) after “person”, insert “, whatever his or her nationality,”;(b) after “war crime”, insert “in the United Kingdom or elsewhere.”.(3) Omit section 51(2).(4) In section 52(1)—(a) after “person”, insert “, whatever his or her nationality,”;(b) after “conduct”, insert “in the United Kingdom or elsewhere.”.(5) Omit section 52(4).”Member's explanatory statement
This new clause gives effect to the JCHR’s recommendation to amend the ICC Act 2001 to provide for the exercise of universal jurisdiction over the crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes, and ancillary conduct. This would allow for the authorities in England and Wales to prosecute persons suspected of these crimes without any requirement for a connection to the UK.
Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)
My Lords, in moving all-party Amendments 472 and 473, I thank the co-sponsors and other supporters, who include the noble Baronesses, Lady Kennedy of The Shaws and Lady Hodgson of Abinger, my noble friends Lord Anderson of Ipswich and Lord Carlile of Berriew, and the noble Lords, Lord Wigley and Lord Clement-Jones.
These amendments have been recommended to the House in two separate reports of the Joint Committee on Human Rights, which I have the honour to chair. One of those arose from the legislative scrutiny of this Bill; the other was its report on how to deal with the atrocity crimes of Daesh against the Yazidis and other minorities. The recommendations and amendments of the JCHR were unanimous and enjoyed all-party support. They also enjoyed the strong support of the International Development Committee of the House of Commons and its chair Sarah Champion MP, and organisations such as Redress.
The Minister and others will have seen a letter from the International Bar Association’s Human Rights Institute, signed by more than 30 of some of the most illustrious and distinguished practitioners in the field. These amendments are a response to what the JCHR saw as a justice gap. They are also compatible with practice in other jurisdictions and are limited in scope. They make a very small but indicative and incremental change by removing the requirement of UK citizenship and UK residence from Sections 51 and 58 of the International Criminal Court Act 2001. I will try to summarise the key arguments in favour of the amendments for the Committee, then tackle some of the misconceptions.
Under international law, the UK is already legally obliged to prosecute suspects of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes who are present on its territory regardless of nationality or residence. A failure to do so puts the UK at risk of becoming a safe haven for alleged perpetrators of international crimes. The rule of law is weakened when alleged perpetrators of genocide or crimes against humanity and war crimes can be here in the UK without facing justice, so this is about closing that justice gap.
These amendments give substance to the long-standing case for reform repeatedly raised since 2009 and are not directed at any particular country, individual or context. There is no concealed political agenda, and safeguards are included to ensure the continuation of prosecutorial oversight by the Crown Prosecution Service and the Attorney-General of decisions about whether to prosecute. They also make a reality of the often-repeated desire for the United Kingdom to reinforce and renew its claim to leadership in promoting the rule of law. We will be doing so by ending impunity for the gravest international crimes and by empowering British courts to act where alleged perpetrators of international crimes are present in the United Kingdom.
It is a mirage to cite the role of the International Criminal Court, as it cannot single-handedly provide accountability for international crimes, even before considering the use of vetoes by those who would not wish such crimes to be referred to that court. Capable national courts must share the burden, as the German courts have done, in successfully prosecuting the crime of genocide. Other comparable democracies already prosecute suspects present on their territory, and that option should be open to us too.
Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws (Lab)
My Lords, I support the noble Lord. This legislation presents a unique opportunity to close long-outstanding accountability gaps in the UK’s universal jurisdiction laws and ensure that the perpetrators of the world’s most serious crimes can be brought to justice on British soil, which is not always possible under current law.
Many organisations support these amendments, which, to be clear, amend the International Criminal Court Act. That Act confined universal jurisdiction relating to crimes under the Rome statute to those who had residency in or nationality of this country, so it is very limited. The United States law followed ours and limited certain crimes that would be covered by universal jurisdiction to nationality and residence. It has now amended its law to make sure that anybody coming through the United States who is suspected of serious, grievous crimes that would fall under this universal jurisdiction framework could be arrested. That is also the case in large parts of Europe.
Noble Lords will be asking what this business of universal jurisdiction is. UK courts can prosecute certain international crimes under the principle of universal jurisdiction because it is a legal framework that allows states to pursue justice for the most serious offences committed abroad, even when the case has no direct connection to their citizens or territory. Noble Lords can imagine what those crimes are. They include genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and torture. Universal jurisdiction reflects the global consensus that such crimes are so grave that they demand accountability wherever they occur.
At present, as I have said, the UK’s ability to prosecute grave international crimes under universal jurisdiction is limited. It is quite contradictory, but under the International Criminal Court Act, prosecutions can be brought for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity only where the suspect is a UK national or resident. As a result, individuals accused of serious international crimes can enter this country without facing justice—and, let me tell you, they do.
I hear this from reliable witnesses who have fled persecution. They know those who have come here, seeking independent schools for their children or university places—usually for their sons, it has to be said—and to shop at Harrods or vacation in London with all its amenities. They often come in civilian attire, not wearing the Iranian revolutionary guard or Russian general uniforms that they wear back at home. They come for all manner of purposes. They come and go, and we cannot act. When I was the master of an Oxford college, there was a scandal because the son of a revolutionary guard torturer found a place at an Oxford college, his father having accompanied him. This is happening in a subterranean way, and action could be taken.
Lord Wigley (PC)
My Lords, I support Amendments 472 and 473. We have already heard how these amendments could help victims and survivors to seek justice for some of the worst atrocities. We heard from the noble Lord, Lord Alton, and a moment ago from the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy, of cases of genocide and crimes against humanity. The noble Lord, Lord Alton, also emphasised the reason why we need to care about justice and accountability for such atrocities. Many may wonder why we, in these islands, are best suited to investigate such crimes. How is it that alleged perpetrators enter the UK? Surely this should be regarded as a matter of national security.
However, my main purpose in speaking today is to bring the debate closer to home. In August 2024, Wales and the UK lost a remarkable man, described by his friends and families as a gentle giant—Ryan Evans. He was from Wrexham, not far from where I live. Ryan was then working as a safety adviser for Reuters in Ukraine. As it happens, Elinor and I took in a family of refugees from eastern Ukraine.
Ryan was in the east of Ukraine, with a news crew from Reuters news agency, when the hotel in which they were staying was hit by a missile. Ryan was killed and nine other people were injured in the attack. So, why was Ryan killed? He worked for Reuters, covering the atrocities committed by Russia in Ukraine. Russia does not want the world to know the scope and nature of those atrocities. Because of that, journalists and media outlets are specifically targeted. A recent report by Truth Hounds and Reporters Without Borders commented that, the case of Ryan Evans,
“stands not only as a testament to the dangers media professionals face but also as a call for accountability and reinforced protections for all members of journalistic teams”.
The killing of Ryan Evans is part of a wider pattern of similar atrocities and war crimes and crimes against humanity. As things stand, and without these important amendments, the family of Ryan have very limited avenues for justice and accountability within the UK. That is because the alleged perpetrators are not British citizens or, indeed, British residents. As such, when we talk about universal jurisdiction, we are talking not only about faraway cases in distant countries. British citizens may well be among victims or survivors, and we cannot continue denying them and their families an avenue for justice here in the UK.
I draw the attention of noble Lords to the words of the family of Ryan Evans—namely, David and Geraldine Evans—who came to Parliament last year and made this plea in support of strengthening the laws. These are words that deserve to be brought to the attention of the House:
“It’s been sixteen months since we had the terrible news of our son Ryan’s death. For those who have lost a loved one suddenly, they will know that you’re in shock for months—even longer; and, as time unfolds, the questions that initially came into your mind come back stronger. In Ryan’s Case questions like - “Was the single missile strike on his hotel deliberately planned? Was he killed instantly, or did he suffer? What is our Government doing to bring the people responsible for killing him to justice?”
They go on to say,
“Some questions we have the answers to, yes, Russia did target our son’s hotel in Kramatorsk deliberately. He died helping to seek the truth, by working with independent journalists, an unarmed non combatant. Russia’s propaganda machine tried to justify the attack and his death with ridiculous statements, as they do in their horrifying attacks on civilians, including non Ukrainian citizens. We seek justice for our son’s murder”.
Their plea concludes with the words:
“We, his family, have a life sentence of grief, which will never go away. The impact on us, his parents, his siblings, his children and wider family and friends is incalculable and life-changing. We look to our government to change the law to work to bring the people responsible for such war crimes and deaths, to justice. As long as one of our family members is alive, we will seek justice and work with our government for help. Ryan would want that; he was a man of integrity, honour and courage, as the following quote reminds us, In the words of Lois McMaster Bujold: ‘The dead cannot cry out for justice; it is a duty of the living to do so for them’”.
We need to do better for the families of victims and survivors, including the family of Ryan Evans. We need to make sure that the law in the UK enables them to seek truth, justice and accountability.
In December 2024, Reuters reported that Ukraine’s security service had named a Russian general it suspects of ordering a missile strike on the hotel and, in Reuters’ words,
“with the motive of deliberately killing employees of”
Reuters. The security service of Ukraine has named a deputy chief of Russia’s general staff as the person who approved the strike that killed Ryan Evans and wounded two of the agency’s journalists. Truth Hounds and Reporters Without Borders have identified two senior leaders in the army units that took the decision to strike the hotel. I understand that these names are known to the British Government.
At this stage, in view of the fact that we are considering the death of a British citizen, I would expect the authorities in the UK, at a minimum, to start investigations into the alleged perpetrators. The options to bring them to account in the UK are clearly limited, but I believe that Amendments 472 and 473 could help ensure that the alleged perpetrators are investigated for war crimes. I ask for the support of noble colleagues in memory of Ryan, for his family and indeed for justice.
Lord Macdonald of River Glaven (CB)
My Lords, I want to strongly support these amendments, and I shall be relatively brief. The noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy of The Shaws, was kind enough to inform the Committee that in her presence I described the present situation as illogical. In fact, I think I spoke a good deal more strongly than that, and she has been kind enough not to repeat the totality of my remarks.
This is a reform which has been proposed and urged upon successive Governments for years. I found the speech from the noble Lord, Lord Alton, utterly persuasive and completely unanswerable. I take issue with him on only one point, which is when he expressed a little bit of surprise that the CPS would be supporting him. When I was the head of the CPS, I strongly supported this reform. Indeed, shortly after I stepped down from that position, I wrote a column in the Times asking this question: what is it about prosecuting war criminals in this context that the Government do not like? I never received a reply to that question which I understood, and the question is still live.
Lord Verdirame (Non-Afl)
My Lords, I also offer my support but express some concerns that I believe could be addressed. I do not think I need to say very much as to the reasons I support the amendments, because the speakers before me have all done such a stellar job.
The one point that I would perhaps clarify is that a number of these offences under international law impose on the UK an obligation to prosecute or extradite. The problem that we have is that, in many cases, we cannot extradite. We cannot extradite in some cases because there is no jurisdiction that can, in practice, begin a criminal prosecution. But sometimes we cannot extradite because the jurisdictions to which we would extradite are jurisdictions where the suspect would face the death penalty or torture. In those cases, the individuals would, in effect, find a safe haven here because of our generous human rights protection, to which I think we should all remain committed. So we may end up with individuals who cannot be deported or extradited and whom we cannot prosecute unless we have some reform of universal jurisdiction. That is the need for this change, which would also bring us into line with international obligations.
My concerns are the following. First, we need to remember that universal jurisdiction is the last resort. In a lot of these cases, it is true that the country where the offence was committed, or of which the alleged offender is a national, will not be able to prosecute. However, ideally, the prosecutions should take place in a jurisdiction that has a closer connection with either the offence or the offender. Where that is not possible, we need to look at other options. Another option is prosecution before an international court and tribunal. As we know, under the ICC statute, the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court is always complementary to national jurisdictions. Only in the third instance, and as a last resort, should we look at prosecution under universal jurisdiction. It is only when everything else fails, which unfortunately might happen quite often, that prosecution under universal jurisdiction should be contemplated.
Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)
I ask the noble Lord to continue the discussions with those of us proposing this amendment today, but our amendment is not as ambitious as he suggests. I wish it were, but actually it is much more limited. On some of the points he raised about the kinds of people who could be brought for prosecution to the United Kingdom under universal jurisdiction more widely, yes, that could happen in a country like Germany, but it would not happen under this amendment. This is about people coming here and being able to do so with impunity rather than immunity, simply because we do not have any powers to arrest them or take them to court.
Lord Verdirame (Non-Afl)
I appreciate that it is about only those who are within the jurisdiction, but a lot of officials come within the jurisdiction at different points in time and for different reasons. There was another case a few years ago in which I was also instructed, concerning the visit of the Egyptian head of intelligence to the United Kingdom. On that occasion, there was an attempt to arrest him, which failed, and his immunity was upheld. That is the sort of scenario where we need clarity.
Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)
I am very glad that my noble friend has raised that point, because it is very relevant. If, for instance, the Foreign Office were to say to the Attorney-General, “We are bringing someone here to have discussions about how to secure peace in Sudan”, but they might have been involved with the RSF or the Sudanese Army in some of the atrocities there, there would be no requirement to prosecute them, because in those circumstances the Attorney-General simply would not allow the prosecution to proceed.
Lord Verdirame (Non-Afl)
It is not quite like that, because the Foreign Office would have to issue special permission for the person who came within the jurisdiction, and now that we have clarified the law, that would give that individual immunity. As for the Attorney-General’s decision not to consent, there is a risk that that could be subject to judicial review, and there have already been attempts in that space. But I agree that that is a very important procedural requirement, and it is already in the Act.
Lord Sentamu (CB)
My Lords, I support Amendments 472 and 473. On the arguments and all the difficulties and intricacies, the noble Lord, Lord Verdirame, cannot be doubted, given his involvement and the things he has done. In the end, however, I am a simple person. I know that there are complications and it is difficult, but if these amendments are accepted, it would allow the possibility of exploring all those intricacies and complications.
The really annoying thing for most of us is when people whom we know have committed terrible atrocities—when the evidence is incontrovertible—can leave the places they have devastated and come here to do their shopping and have holidays. This country, and particularly this present Government, say that everything is going to be best under the rule of law. Lord Bingham, in his book The Rule of Law, said some wonderful things—that the rule of law is the nearest thing we have to a universal origin. In other words, there are no areas the rule of law does not cover. I say that because there is a possibility of enshrining what Lord Bingham was talking about.
Globalisation has given we citizens of the world the possibility of living in a global village. It is no longer about living on this little island—we all belong to this huge global village, and whoever touches any citizen in our global village touches us. It is not just the people who live in Ukraine or somewhere else: they touch them, and they are touching us.
We are therefore partly involved in all this. The United Kingdom must not become a haven, as the noble Lord said, for those who committed such atrocities and are escaping justice and the places where they were done. We must not be a place that gives the impression that the door is open and they can come here. They do their shopping, and some even bring their children to send them to university or other places of learning; I have known this. They think that they are getting away with it. To me, that is what must not happen.
Margaret and I came to this country in 1974, and it was another nearly six years before Idi Amin’s Government fell. We were terrified to have any contact with the Ugandan embassy, because the people he had sent before his Government fell had committed terrible atrocities. Margaret and I knew these characters and they got away with it. In his regime, nearly 900,000 people were murdered, including the chief justice, the chancellor of the university, the head of the civil service—I could go on and on. These dictators and people like that seem to have a very long arm that prevents anybody getting near them.
For me, these amendments are opening a door for further conversation. The proposers of the two amendments were wise in saying that this, if it is to happen, should be laid at the door of the Attorney-General. The Attorney-General, who has a lot of advisers and very able people, will look at it and make a decision on whether prosecution happens. They are not simply opening it out to every court, to everybody, to think they can have a go. It is so limited. If we do not do this, as a country that really upholds the rule of law, and if we do not have this universal jurisdiction as an armoury in place, we will simply have people coming here when they have committed terrible atrocities, and they will look as though they are untouchable.
Baroness Ludford (LD)
My Lords, all the speakers have made a powerful case in support of these two amendments, not least of course the noble Lord, Lord Alton, who moved the lead amendment. I apologise to him for missing the first few minutes. I was caught out because I had not remembered that Amendment 471 had already been debated. I have had the advantage of reading that part of the JCHR report, both on the account of—
Lord Katz (Lab)
My Lords, I apologise, but the noble Baroness has just said that she was not in her place at the start of the group. Really, she should not be speaking to the group if she was not in her place. That is the usual convention and courtesy of the House and is set out in the Companion as well.
Baroness Brinton (LD)
My Lords, Amendments 472 and 473 from the noble Lord, Lord Alton, add a series of small but vital issues that would ensure that the UK can play its part in holding to account perpetrators of the most serious international crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. Above all, these amendments would give victims and their families the opportunity to achieve the justice that they deserve. I thank the British Institute of Human Rights, Genocide Response and Redress for their very helpful briefing.
The noble Lord, Lord Alton, and the signatories to his amendments have set out in detail the legal reasons why the current laws in relation to these international crimes need to have certain loopholes closed ,and other noble Lords have spoken to them as well.
As chair of human rights at Liberal International, I attend the annual Geneva summit on human rights. Last February, I met people who had fled from Sudan, Iran, Cuba, Russia and Tibet, and Uyghurs from China, who had been on the receiving end of the most appalling crimes, from genocide to crimes against humanity, including torture and war crimes. All of them look to countries such as the United Kingdom to uphold the standards of universal jurisdiction. Sadly, as outlined by the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy, we do not do that fully and, as the noble Lord, Lord Alton, put it, we need to share the burden.
By not being prepared to empower our courts to act where alleged perpetrators of international crimes are present in the UK, we let people down. Without the changes proposed in Amendments 472 and 473, the British courts lack jurisdiction over alleged perpetrators of international crimes—including leaders of the Iranian regime who may travel to the UK for medical treatment, despite there being credible allegations of their involvement in international crimes against humanity, and the alleged perpetrators of genocide in Darfur—because the alleged conduct falls under the Rome statute crimes but does not trigger universal jurisdiction under UK law.
Lord Davies of Gower (Con)
My Lords, I fully understand the noble intentions behind Amendments 472 and 473, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Alton of Liverpool. The crimes he speaks of are among the most abhorrent and the work he has done is admirable. He is to be warmly congratulated. However, for reasons I will set out, the Opposition cannot support the amendments.
We must first recognise that the British justice system has, first and foremost, a responsibility to uphold the rule of law and punish criminality in Britain. Similarly, the British Government have, first and foremost, a responsibility to protect the security of Britain, and this must be our principal concern. The British Government are not a global Government; we cannot police the world, and we must be very open and honest about that.
It is also a more than unfortunate fact that there are a number of Daesh fighters and other terrorists who have been returned to Britain but have not successfully been prosecuted for the crimes the noble Lord, Lord Alton, refers to. Daesh committed widespread war crimes, genocide against Yazidis and numerous crimes against humanity. To pick up on the noble Lord’s point, if we have people in Britain who committed these heinous crimes but have not yet been prosecuted, I am not sure we should be adding even more by bringing prosecutions against people with no connection to the United Kingdom. Let us prosecute those who have been involved in genocide and war crimes who are in the UK first, before we start trying to prosecute others.
It is also very important that we do not simply welcome people with terrorist connections back into our country. We on these Benches are firmly supportive of the Home Secretary robustly using her powers to exclude people from the United Kingdom who pose a threat to the British people and, where necessary, to strip particularly dangerous people of their British citizenship.
Finally, there is also a question of where prosecutions should best take place. There is a compelling argument for prosecutions and investigations to take place closer to where the crimes were committed, which should allow for a better evidence-gathering process. Ultimately, we must be careful not to subordinate the safety and security of the British public for the purposes of advancing international law. For these reasons, we cannot support the amendments.
Lord Garnier (Con)
Can my noble friend comment on the remarks of the noble Lords, Lord Verdirame and Lord Macdonald of River Glaven? Did he find nothing in what they had to say the least bit attractive?
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Alton of Liverpool, my old home city, for the way in which he has approached these amendments. I thank him for the work of the Joint Committee on Human Rights, which he chairs, and through him I pass on my thanks to my old colleague Sarah Champion, the MP for Rotherham, for the work she has done on this issue. As he knows, we had an opportunity to debate the committee’s report in Grand Committee. I was fortunate that my noble friend Lord Katz took the debate on that occasion and was able to set out the Government’s response, which the noble Lord, Lord Alton, will realise has not really changed in the intervening months since that debate. However, I am grateful to him, my noble friend Lady Kennedy of The Shaws, the noble Lords, Lord Wigley and Lord Macdonald of River Glaven, and the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Sentamu, for their supportive comments, and I will come on to comments from other noble Lords in due course. I know the noble Baroness, Lady Ludford, is not in her place at the moment, and missed the start of the debate so was therefore not able to speak in this debate—although she tried—but if she reads Hansard tomorrow, she can make any points she was going to raise in a letter to me and we will consider those prior to Report, which I hope is a fair compromise.
Before I go on to the main bulk of the arguments, I refer to the noble Lord, Lord Wigley, and his comments on the death of Mr Ryan Evans, of Wrexham, which is close to both him and me. It is obviously a deeply sad incident and his death in Ukraine in 2024 followed a Russian strike, as the noble Lord outlined. The UK Government continue to support efforts to ensure accountability for the crimes that are committed in Ukraine. This includes supporting the independent investigation of the International Criminal Court into the situation in Ukraine, as well as providing assistance to Ukrainian domestic investigations and prosecutions of international crimes. Although I cannot give him much succour today in relation to that particular issue, I hope he will pass on the Government’s condolences to Ryan’s parents. We are obviously happy to have further representations on that matter should he wish to make them in due course.
The points made by my noble friend Lord Katz in the previous debate—and those with which I shall respond to the noble Lord, Lord Alton of Liverpool—relate to the fact that the UK applies its universal jurisdiction only to a very few specific international crimes. Our approach to universal jurisdiction is designed to ensure that those suspected of, or accused of, crimes are investigated, charged and tried fairly and impartially at every stage, with access to all available evidence. This is in accordance with local constitutional and legal frameworks. It remains the case—and I know this will disappoint those noble Lords who have spoken in support today—that we do not believe that it is necessary at this time to extend the scope of the UK’s policy on universal jurisdiction to include genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. It is the long-standing view of successive Governments in general that where there is no apparent link between the UK and an international crime—and this goes to the point the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Gower, made—we support the principle that such crimes are best investigated and prosecuted where they are perpetrated. That also goes to some of the points mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Verdirame, because the advantages of securing evidence and the witnesses required for a fair investigation and a successful prosecution are part of a credible judicial process.
It should be noted that the UK already has jurisdiction over the crimes of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity where they are alleged to have been committed by UK nationals or residents. In some cases where the UK does not have jurisdiction, such as in Ukraine—I have just mentioned the situation in relation to Mr Ryan Evans, as alluded to by the noble Lord, Lord Wigley—we are trying to ensure that we build domestic capabilities, and we support the work of the Office of the Prosecutor General to ensure that allegations of war crimes are fully investigated by independent, effective and robust legal mechanisms.
To go back to the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Verdirame, the most serious international crimes not covered by the UK’s universal jurisdiction policy are generally already subject to the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court, which, again, I would argue today, is better placed to prosecute such offences where they are not being dealt with by the relevant domestic authorities. The UK is a strong supporter of the ICC and its mission to end impunity. I know that we will do what we can to ensure that the crimes that have been mentioned today are dealt with by that international court, but I have to say that the debate that we had in the Moses Room, led by my noble friend Lord Katz, and the response I have given to the amendments today are the Government’s position. I accept and respect the points that have been put to the Committee today, but given the considerations that I have mentioned, I ask the noble Lord, Lord Alton, to withdraw his amendment. In saying that, I suspect we will return to these matters on Report. The Government will always reflect on what has been said in Committee, but I hope in due course the noble Lord will withdraw his amendment.
Lord Verdirame (Non-Afl)
I apologise for interrupting, but I just wanted to make sure that I am not misunderstood. The ICC is there where it has jurisdiction, but the problem that we have is that, in some of these countries, there is no ICC jurisdiction yet. Syria is not a party to the ICC; Ukraine has become a party to the ICC but only as of 1 January 2025. Any offence in Ukraine predating that would be an issue in terms of ICC jurisdiction. That is where the gap in universal jurisdiction policy is quite relevant. I just wanted to clarify my position, which was not to say that we do not need it.
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
I accept that, and I thought I understood the noble Lord’s position clearly, but I am grateful for his clarification. It still adds to the general point that I have made today, and I go back to the original, overarching point that the UK applies universal jurisdiction to only a very few specific international crimes. Our approach—through long-standing support of successive Governments—is that, where there is no apparent link between the UK and an international crime, we support the principle that such crimes are best investigated and prosecuted close to where they are perpetrated. That may not be a position that satisfies the noble Lord, Lord Alton of Liverpool, or his supporters today, but it is one which I hope I have clarified. I note also—which I did not mention earlier—the support of the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, for the general approach of the noble Lord, Lord Alton. With that, I ask him to withdraw the amendment.
Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)
My Lords, I thank everybody who has participated in this important debate. I was particularly grateful, of course, to the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy of The Shaws, with her immense experience and as a colleague on the Joint Committee on Human Rights—we are beginning to miss her already, only one week after she rotated off the committee. This was a unanimous recommendation, not just in one but in two reports. We took evidence. This was not just about our inability to intervene in faraway places. We took evidence about British nationals who had been in north-east Syria and in northern Iraq and who had committed what even the Foreign and Commonwealth office has now decided was a genocide—it is willing now to use that word, which is very unusual on the part of the FCDO.
So we have the evidence. We know that 400 of the British fighters who went there came back, and not a single one has been prosecuted for the crime of genocide. Too often, there has been rank impunity. We also know that they have connections with other people who are not British citizens and who regularly travel to the United Kingdom. What this limited amendment seeks to do is not bring all those people before the British courts; it is about taking people who come into the UK with those kinds of links and bringing them to justice if the Attorney-General believes that there is a case to answer.
I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy, for reinforcing the argument, and I thank my noble friend Lord Macdonald of River Glaven, the noble Lords, Lord Verdirame and Lord Wigley, and my noble and right reverend friend Lord Sentamu. I wish we could have heard from the noble Baroness, Lady Ludford, but I suspect there will be an opportunity on Report, and I hope that omission will be put right. Nevertheless, I was grateful to hear what the noble Lord, Lord Hanson of Flint, said about being willing to hear what she has to say but on a one-to-one basis. I also thank the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Gower, and of course the Minister himself.
Lord Cromwell
“Report: economic crime fighting fund(1) The Secretary of State must undertake an assessment of the viability, and potential merits, of establishing an economic crime fighting fund based on the principle of reinvesting a proportion of receipts resulting from economic crime enforcement into a pooled fund for the purposes of providing multi-year resourcing for tackling economic crime.(2) The assessment specified in subsection (1) must also examine the impact of budget exchange rules on the functioning of the asset recovery incentivisation scheme. (3) In carrying out the assessment, the Secretary of State must consult such persons as they consider appropriate.(4) The Secretary of State must publish and lay before Parliament a report on the outcome of the assessment by the end of the period of 12 months beginning with the day on which this Act is passed.”
Lord Cromwell (CB)
My Lords, today we have discussed at length some very important issues that are also pretty bleak. It has been lightened for me only by hearing the noble Lord, Lord Jackson, referred to as neutral, which is not an epithet that I would normally attach to him. I am sorry that he is not in his place. I hope that my operational amendment will conclude with a more positive and optimistic outcome.
I thank the Minister and his officials for meeting me to discuss this amendment, along with Labour MP Phil Brickell who, with the support of the APPG on anti-corruption, championed this amendment in the Commons. I am also grateful to that APPG for the excellent policy note it provided to the Minister following our meeting. I thank the Minister also for his helpful subsequent letter of 9 December. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, and the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, for their kind support and for adding their names to the amendment. The noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, wanted to be here but has been called away. He did, however, give me a statement, from which I will quote briefly when it is apposite.
The purpose of the amendment is to include in the Bill a requirement to undertake a viability study of the establishment of an economic crime fighting fund. I am mindful that this is Committee so I will mention only the following three summary points about the amendment. First, there are two statistics to illustrate the scale of the problem. Economic crime overall currently costs the UK £350 billion a year. That is equal to 17.5% of GDP, but we spend less than 0.05% of GDP tackling it. Also, of the £100 billion in illicit financial flows alone each year, law enforcement recovers only some 0.2%.
Secondly, crime-fighting agencies are currently trapped in a cycle of underfunding. The 2024 Civil Service survey found that only a third of National Crime Agency staff thought they had the necessary tools for their job, the lowest percentage of all 107 public bodies surveyed. This lack of funding limits vital recruitment, damages effectiveness and crushes morale. Meanwhile, despite fraud accounting for 43% of all reported crime last year, fraud prosecutions were down 50% on the 10-year median level.
Thirdly—this is where the fund comes in—despite the underfunding in the face of the almost overwhelming level of economic crime, the agencies still manage to generate an average of £566 million per year in fines and recovered assets. However, most of that £566 million recovered per year is not reinvested in fighting economic crime. Instead, most of it goes to the Treasury and the Home Office. Redirecting even a fraction of these funds to the key agencies fighting economic crime would be transformational.
This amendment would simply require a very timely viability assessment of enabling these agencies to break out of the current negative funding cycle, to fight more economic crime and to gain long-term sustainable funding for their vital work. Please note that the taxpayer would pay nothing. The funding would be paid for by the confiscated proceeds of crime—rather poetic justice.
I clarify the following points, which arose in discussion of the amendment after Second Reading. First, the fund would be wholly separate from victim compensation and would not alter the status quo in that area. There are also many cases where economic crime cannot be linked to specific victims—for example, where a criminal is laundering money from a drug-dealing gang.
Secondly, this is not a new or unique idea. All 13 supervisors for the accountancy sector retain penalties imposed for anti-money laundering breaches. The Ministry of Justice is permitted to retain part of the value of fines and fixed penalties collected, amounting to nearly £360 million in the financial year 2024-25. The FCA is allowed to retain a proportion of fines. This amounted to £71.6 million in the same period. These are just some UK examples. There are numerous other precedents of fines being reinvested, in the UK and internationally.
Thirdly, the current system is opaque and subject to the dreaded annularity rules, meaning that any money which the agencies retain must be spent by the year’s end or it is taken away. This encourages some truly bizarre behaviours to use up the money in time. One example we discussed with the Minister in our meeting was a sponsored yacht race.
There is also a specifically British wrinkle here. Police forces, as Crown servants rather than civil servants, are subject to different accounting rules. Thus the Met can keep some of the seized cash and spend it over multiple years, allowing it to plan and use it strategically. I quote the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe:
“The police force has been able to take a share of the criminal assets they seize, should a court so decide. Everyone accepts that the amount seized is a small fraction of the criminal assets out there. The police’s share of money is pooled in the Treasury and then returned to the forces—albeit that this process often takes 1-2 years. Nevertheless, this allows the police to invest in discovering and seizing further criminal assets”.
However, unfortunately, the National Crime Agency, the Serious Fraud Office, HMRC and the Crown Prosecution Service cannot do this. They are, as mentioned, captured by Treasury rules that require central government bodies each year to return what they have not spent. This confused and chronic underfunding cannot continue.
While I welcome the Government’s anti-corruption strategy and their interest in improving the economic crime levy and the ARIS systems, recent discussions with HMT and other officials suggest that they are not going to do anything substantive to move forward, claiming there is a lack of data from law enforcement agencies on the return on investments from the use of these funds. I therefore suggest to the Minister that consultation on the viability of the fund that the amendment proposes would be the right opportunity to speed up the frankly glacial progress made so far on data collection in the Home Office.
Finally, I remind the Minister and the Committee of two things. First, the amendment would not require the fund to be established, but simply that its viability be examined. Secondly, there was and is wide cross-party support for the amendment in the Commons. Details of this support have been provided already to the Minister. I therefore ask him the following question. If, as he may indicate in response, he or the Government consider that such a viability study could be undertaken without legislation, will he commit from the Dispatch Box today to implement such a study and tell the House when it can be expected to start and to report?
I give the last word to the former director of the National Economic Crime Centre, Adrian Searle:
“Substantive and sustained funding … is crucial. The resource currently deployed is not commensurate with the scale of the problem … Doing the necessary analysis appears to be a no brainer”.
I look forward to any comments from others and hope for a positive response from the Minister. I beg to move.
Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)
My Lords, I do not normally get involved with money issues because they are too messy and convoluted. The last time I recommended any sort of money being given to the police was when I was on the Metropolitan Police Authority. It was going to scrap the wildlife crime unit, and I argued strongly that we should keep it. It was not about naughty squirrels; it was about people committing crimes against wildlife. I felt it was an incredibly important unit, but that is by the by.
This is a growing crime. I can remember discussing it 20 years ago and people saying, “We need more money to fund the work and we need better systems”, and all that sort of thing, so it is surprising that we need this now after so long. It addresses a persistent weakness in our response to economic crime—the lack of stable long-term funding. Economic crime undermines public trust and causes real harm to individuals and communities, yet the agencies tasked with tackling it are often operating on short-term budgets, dependent on annual settlements and unable to plan effectively. This amendment asks the Government to undertake a serious assessment of whether a proportion of the proceeds recovered from economic crime could be reinvested into a fund to strengthen enforcement. That strikes me as an incredibly sensible approach; it would also stop the Treasury from grabbing the money and using it in even worse ways.
Baroness Doocey (LD)
My Lords, economic crime is not a marginal issue. It is a national crisis affecting millions of people every year but, generally speaking, it goes under the radar most of the time. These are not victimless offences: they destroy life savings, devastate small businesses and undermine trust in our economy and democracy. When economic crime goes unchecked, it is not the powerful who suffer but ordinary people.
The amendment is modest and pragmatic. It would not establish a new fund; it simply asks for a viability study. I know the Minister is never keen even on turning a semicolon into a comma but, in this instance, it is not asking an awful lot of the Government—the Minister must stop stabbing his heart—just to agree to look at a viability study. It is really not a big deal. There are already clear precedents for this approach, as the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, just said; the FCA, the Ministry of Justice and parts of the police are already able to retain fines in different ways. If the Government are really serious about the UK’s reputation as a global financial centre, they must match rhetoric with resources. Can I persuade the Minister, for once, to move and just say yes?
Lord Davies of Gower (Con)
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Cromwell, for moving this amendment. Economic crime is one of the most pervasive threats to public trust and business confidence in the UK. In the year ending March 2024, fraud accounted for around a third of all crime recorded by police. Industry estimates suggest that economic crime costs the UK economy tens of billions of pounds per year, according to police statistics. These staggering statistics underscore the need for effective enforcement and resourcing.
In this context, the need to seek more sustainable and predictable resourcing for economic crime enforcement is understandable. The proposal to assess the viability of an economic crime fighting fund based on reinvesting a proportion of receipts from enforcement reflects a desire to tackle this persistent and widespread issue. I recognise that there may be merits to an approach that allows specialist technology and expertise to be built and retained over multiple years.
The amendment also calls for an examination of the impact of budget exchange rules on the functioning of the asset recovery incentivisation scheme. There have been reports that recovered assets sometimes cannot easily be redeployed by front-line investigators and that incentives can be blunted by accounting constraints. If funds that are recovered through enforcement cannot, in practice, be retained or redeployed effectively by those doing the work, it is sensible to ask whether the current framework is optimally aligned with the policy objective of strengthening economic crime capability. However, I recognise that any move towards hypothecation of enforcement receipts raises potential governance issues, and there is also the question of how such a fund would sit alongside existing funding streams and the Government’s wider strategy in this area.
I therefore look forward to the Minister’s response to this amendment. I would be grateful if he could outline what steps the Government are currently taking to fight economic crime and whether they believe that any further action is required.
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Cromwell, not just for his amendment today but for his patience in sitting through the Committee debates prior to introducing his amendment this evening. I am also grateful for the meeting we had with him and Phil Brickell, MP for Bolton West, in October and the meeting we had on 18 November.
It is important that Amendment 482 is considered. It would require the Government to consult on the viability of a ring-fenced economic crime fighting fund, and the intention of the amendment is to examine whether such a fund could provide multi-year resourcing for tackling economic crime. I am grateful for the comments from the noble Baronesses, Lady Doocey and Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, in support of the amendment. The amendment recognises the significant harm that economic crime causes—reflected in the contributions made—to individuals, businesses, the economy and wider society.
The Government remain committed to tackling economic crime. That is evidenced not just by words in this Chamber but by our continued investment through the asset recovery incentivisation scheme and the economic crime levy, which has allocated £125 million to tackling economic crime in recent months. These schemes are delivering state-of-the-art technology to provide law enforcement agencies with the tools they need to stay ahead of criminals. It also includes an important factor, which is the recruitment of 475 new officers across the threat leadership, intelligence, investigative and prosecution capacity. We are putting people on the ground to deal with this issue as part of the, we hope, tangible benefits that we can get in the fight against economic crime. As a Government, we want to continue to work with our partners to ensure that we are most effectively investing the funding available.
I understand and accept—and did so in the face-to-face discussions we had with the noble Lord, Lord Cromwell, and the Member of Parliament Phil Brickell—that the call for sustaining funding is an important one that needs to be investigated. I want to confirm to the noble Lord what I hope is of help to him: the Government are committed to exploring the funding landscape with the aim of strengthening economic crime enforcement. This is witnessed by the statements we have made in the recently published economic anti-corruption strategy, which was published last December —particularly paragraph 42, on page 23, which I quote for the noble Lord:
“In the context of Spending Review 2025”,
we will
“explore the funding landscape with the aim of strengthening economic crime enforcement”
as a joint Treasury and Home Office priority commitment in that anti-corruption strategy.
This strategy is fixed and there was a timescale for it when published. I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Cromwell, will accept our intentions in identifying the issues that he has raised and not just doing what we have done to date, which is to ensure that we have put resources in already. I hope that that review commitment in the strategy from December is of help to the noble Lord regarding the objectives of his amendments here today.
With that commitment, I would be grateful if he would at least welcome it and hold us to account on it and, in doing so, withdraw his amendment today.
Lord Cromwell (CB)
First of all, I can certainly promise to hold the Minister accountable for it, so I hope that pleases him. I thank the speakers—the noble Baronesses, Lady Jones and Lady Doocey, and the noble Lord, Lord Davies—who have kindly commented on this amendment. I thank the Minister in particular for engaging with me before and for his comments tonight. I am still not quite sure what I am looking at. I think he used the phrase “exploring the funding landscape” a couple of times. When does that exploration reach its destination and come up with a report?
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
We have the strategy, which was published in December. It is a fixed-term strategy, which includes the commitment to examine the points that the noble Lord has mentioned. My time is quite stretched at the moment but, if the noble Lord would find it helpful, I am very happy for him to meet officials dealing with that aspect particularly. We can potentially explore from there whether his input is helpful in stretching that strategy and making some positive outcomes from it.
Lord Cromwell (CB)
I thank the Minister for that answer. I was described in a previous debate as a legislative terrier, so I can assure him that I would like very much to meet his officials and, if necessary, nip their heels, because I am after a date when we are going to find the result of this viability study. Let us leave it at that. I am very grateful for his positive response. On that basis, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.
“Rural crime prevention strategy(1) On the day after the day on which this Act is passed, the Secretary of State must establish a rural crime prevention task force to develop proposals for tackling rural crime.(2) The task force must be given a remit that includes, but is not confined to, examining—(a) the particular types of crime that occur in rural areas, including but not limited to—(i) quad bike theft;(ii) equipment theft;(iii) animal rustling;(iv) fly tipping;(v) worrying of livestock by dogs;(vi) hare coursing;(vii) poaching,(b) crime rates in rural communities across England and Wales,(c) the current levels of police resources and funding in rural communities,(d) whether specific training in how to respond to rural crime call-outs should be undertaken by police control room operators,(e) the operational case, and the funding implications, of appointing rural crime specialists in Police Forces across England and Wales which serve areas that include a significant rural population, and(f) whether a National Rural Crime Coordinator should be established.(3) The task force established under subsection (1) must submit a rural crime prevention strategy to the Secretary of State within six months of its appointment. (4) The Secretary of State must, within a month of receiving the report made by the task force, lay the report and a written response to the task force’s recommendations before both Houses of Parliament.(5) The Secretary of State must, within a month of laying their response to the task force’s report, ensure that an amendable motion on the subject of the rural crime task force’s recommendations is laid, and moved, before both Houses of Parliament.”Member’s explanatory statement
This new clause would require the Secretary of State to establish a task force to produce a strategy for tackling rural crime, makes provision for specific aspects of the task force’s remit, and requires the Secretary of State to bring forward a substantive motion before both Houses of Parliament on the task force’s recommendations.
Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer (LD)
My Lords, I am most grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Cromwell, for adding his name to our amendment and especially for spotting the rather attractive typo in an earlier Marshalled List whereby “animal rustling” had become “animal hustling”. The only animal hustling I am aware of is when my small dog hustles me out of bed in the morning.
I have tabled this amendment to probe the Government’s thinking about rural crime prevention. I appreciate that a recent rural crime strategy from the National Police Chiefs’ Council covered the years 2025 to 2028. It is very helpful to have that document and to see the priorities there. However, I do not believe it replaces a government-wide prevention strategy. Many issues would benefit from the Government having a complementary strategy, for example from the Department for Education and Defra, both of which have a huge role to play in educating the public with regard to the countryside and its wildlife on questions such as when lighting a fire in the countryside becomes a crime—something that is increasingly serious with climate change. What is criminal behaviour when you are in your boat and you spot a dolphin? I will not weary the Committee with too many examples.
Society as a whole and the Government need to take a role in ensuring that our rural areas do not become crime hotspots. Organised crime, sadly, sees rural areas as a soft touch. A big example of this was recently highlighted by your Lordships’ House’s Environment and Climate Change Committee: fly-tipping on an industrial scale. It has become almost a full-time job for my noble friend Lady Sheehan to go around the country looking at these huge fly-tips. She has done a terrific job, raising awareness of the scale of the problem and eliciting some response for the Environment Agency and the Government. It is a question of public awareness, because it is important to report very early on where something is going to become a fly-tip. It illustrates how rural crime has become big criminal business, as has wildlife crime.
In hare coursing, for example, there is big money to be made through the bets placed. That is disastrous for farmers, driving straight through their fences and hedges. It is hard to stand in the way when you are alone and facing a gang. It is also hard to police in remote rural areas. I hope the Government are paying attention to that sort of crime. They should be praised for pledging to introduce a closed season for hares, which is an excellent thing to do, but it will be a shame if hares continue to suffer from hare coursing. Peregrine falcon chicks—not something you would normally associate with commanding high prices and being the subject of organised crime—have become such a luxury item in the Middle East that there is now a need to police peregrine falcons’ nests. Eel poaching—not one or two eels for supper but glass eels, which are the babies, all illegally fished—is a trade worth £53 million at the last annual count and is wiping out the eel.
Lord Cromwell (CB)
My Lords, I have added my name to this amendment, which I thoroughly support, despite it committing the legislative sin of having a list in it. It references animal hustling, which is probably already a criminal offence in a different area of the law, so I will leave that alone. The question surely posed by the amendment is: why is a rural-specific strategy needed? Not only does rural crime have specific characteristics, too often it happens out of sight and perhaps out of mind of the often metropolitan policymaker.
This concerns three related themes, the first of which is isolation. Rural homes and businesses are often isolated, making them vulnerable to crime, including violent and destructive crime, while the motorway network provides a rapid and anonymous escape route. A more recent phenomenon is the use, from the highway, of drones to scope out machinery or products for later theft —something we will return to with Amendment 486A. The police generally do their best to engage with the local community—I pay tribute to Leicestershire’s Neighbourhood Link scheme, which is local to me—but, on an area basis, police resources are spread very thinly.
The second theme is waste dumping, which has been touched on. There has at last started to be some press coverage of the large-scale and often toxic waste dumped by the lorryload at illegal waste dumps in the countryside, of which a growing number are now being recognised. Anywhere that a vehicle can pull over out of sight for just a few moments, there is constant fly-tipping of discarded furniture, building materials, tyres and unwanted household goods—to say nothing of the endless food wrappers, beer cans, bottles and seemingly ubiquitous Red Bull cans, which now form a continuous linear rubbish dump along the base of almost every rural hedgerow in my area. There is also the widespread dumping and then setting alight of stolen cars. Imagine the effect in a field of wheat when that happens.
I would also like the Committee to note that, in responding to a series of Written Questions from me, Defra—the “ra” does stand for “rural affairs”—has confirmed that it has no current obligation to address these matters beyond the immediate edge of national highways. Criminals know this, of course, and exploit it by driving up rural tracks or into fields to tip their waste.
The third theme is wider rural crime. I recently spoke to a farming family who, against everything they believe in, kill all the hares on their land every year. Why? Because, if they do not, violent gangs in four-wheel drive vehicles come and deliberately crash through their hedgerows, career across their crops and kill the hares on their land with dogs. Such “coursing”, as it is called, in some cases involves international criminal syndicates betting large sums on the outcome.
I could go on: churches are stripped of their roofs, there are armed gangs of violent poachers, raids and threats at village shops and post offices and widespread vandalism and theft. In short, rural areas are under siege from people who, with either criminal intent or anti-social indifference, are turning what we like to portray as a green and pleasant land into a rubbish-strewn hinterland whose population increasingly fear for their safety, livelihoods and property. That is why we need this amendment: to recognise that rural areas have specific characteristics, specific types of crime and an overall lack of focus, despite the best efforts of an overstretched police force.
Finally, I will refer briefly to the Minister’s answers to questions on the Statement on the police reform White Paper on Tuesday evening. He was asked a question on how rural policing would be covered. His reply was that the Government were looking at reviewing the funding formula and that the overall organisational model would include responsible, non-elected persons. I do not wish to express a view on the reforms, but I respectfully point out that he did not say anything about how rural areas would be affected by the reform.
Secondly, in response to a question on waste crime, the Minister said that organised crime was behind it—he was correct, of course—and that regional and national agencies would be looking “over time” at how to deal with serious organised crime. I suggest to him that a dedicated, rural-focused strategy is needed to prevent and tackle such crime, not just the Environment Agency, which largely deals with post-facto matters.
There needs to be a specific strategy to develop and enforce appropriate countermeasures to what is not a passing rural crime wave but a rising flood. I commend the amendment for highlighting this and I hope that the Minister and the Government will get behind it.
Lord Forbes of Newcastle (Lab)
My Lords, I seek to make a brief contribution to the discussion on this amendment. Noble Lords might ask themselves why somebody whose political experience was predominantly in a metropolitan area would seek to speak on rural issues, but I grew up in Weardale, in County Durham, and my mother still lives in the dale. From growing up there and from contemporary experiences, I know that the issue of rural crime is felt very keenly by communities in rural areas and can damage the fabric of those communities in a way that makes them feel further under threat.
To the list of examples of crime given by the noble Baroness who spoke just a few moments ago I can add the stealing of oil from fuel tanks, the stealing of logs from log stores, and drink-driving, which we know is more prevalent in rural areas than it is in urban areas. That is why I particularly welcome the Government’s commitment to reviewing and reducing the drink-driving limits for the whole country.
In the context of this amendment, we need to reflect on why some of these issues occur in rural areas and what the root causes of the lack of response may be. Many rural communities have a greater sense of trust and of community spirit, but that can have a downside, in that it can make people more susceptible to fraud and more liable to be scammed, particularly online. Alongside the amendments under consideration, I welcome the measures to introduce stronger investigatory powers and a stronger national approach to such crimes. Although crime can affect people anywhere, for those living in rural or isolated areas without support around it can be quite devastating.
There is a challenge around the whole-scale withdrawal of police stations and a police presence from many of our rural communities. That has resulted in one particular case that I am aware of, because it affected my mother. She was subject to the theft of some logs from land that she owns. The police response in that area was, “We suggest you go out and buy some cameras from Amazon to see if you can record this”. I do not think that that is sufficient, appropriate or suitable in the circumstances. It implies that a small-scale crime such as that is of no grand consequence, but to somebody like my mother, it has a very real consequence, because it has affected her fuel supply over the winter period.
There is an issue about the particular nature of crimes that are more prevalent in rural areas. As we come to Report, I hope we can look more fully at ways in which the Government can work alongside police and crime commissioners, while they are still in existence, and whatever their successor bodies are, to ensure that rural areas do not feel second best when it comes to crime prevention and community safety.
Earl Russell (LD)
My Lords, I will speak in support of the amendment in the name of my noble friend Lady Miller, to which I have added my name. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Cromwell, for his support, and those who have spoken already.
The amendment addresses an issue that has for too long been treated as peripheral: the growing crisis of rural crime. For those who live and work in our countryside, there is the reality of financial loss, fear, and a deep sense of vulnerability and isolation. After rising to around £52.8 million in 2023, the estimated cost of rural crime stood at around £44 million in 2024. Despite some improvements, the resources devoted to addressing this remain inadequate. Freedom of information requests from my party submitted last April uncovered the shocking fact that only 0.4% of the police workforce across England and Wales is dedicated to rural crime teams. In Norfolk, for example, there are just two dedicated full-time officers, and some forces have no rural crime forces at all.
Lord Davies of Gower (Con)
My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Miller of Chilthorne Domer, the noble Earl, Lord Russell, and the noble Lord, Lord Cromwell, for tabling their amendment. As a rural-dweller myself, I agree and recognise many, if not all, of the offences that have been identified. Our rural communities are incredibly important. On this side of the Committee, the Opposition have made it an absolute priority to support them in this difficult time. That support extends past simply fiscal policy following recent tax policies to all issues that affect them, including crime. It is promising that, last year, rural crime fell by over 16%, but there is still work to be done. Those offences still cost rural communities over £44 million a year—a fact that underlined our pledge to set up local taskforces to tackle rural crime.
Our objectives are not different from those of the noble Baroness; we simply differ on delivery. A top-down, centralised approach is never normally the most effective way to tackle local disconnected issues, and rural crime is a prime example of this. It is far less the operation of the highly organised criminal gangs we see in our cities, and more often the actions of an isolated few who sense an opportunity to steal or exploit the countryside and act on it.
Localised problems require localised solutions. Police forces are budgeted based on local needs, and are therefore the most alert to the specific issues facing their communities. It should be them organising taskforces to tackle rural crime, as they have the knowledge and ability to act and adjust to the changing crime picture in their area. While we agree with the noble Baroness’s intentions and entirely support them, we would much rather see funding directed to local forces and delegate responsibility to them and their taskforces to tackle the rural crime that we all want to see curbed. I hope the Minister agrees.
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Miller of Chilthorne Domer, for raising these issues, and to the noble Lords who have spoken in support of her. As someone who represented a rural constituency in the House of Commons for 28 years, I can say that things such as sheep worrying, isolation and local policing were meat-and-drink on a daily basis. In fact, the north Wales rural crime unit was the model for a lot of the work that has been done on rural crime at a national level. I therefore appreciate and understand the problems that are faced by rural communities. I say to the noble Baroness and others that the Government remain committed to tackling those crimes that particularly impact our rural communities.
Noble Lords have spoken today about some of the government measures being brought forward, but I want to address them as a whole. As part of our safer streets mission, we are introducing important measures to protect rural communities that look at clamping down on anti-social behaviour, strengthening neighbourhood policing and preventing the very farm theft that the noble Lord, Lord Cromwell, spoke of, as well as the issue of fly-tipping, which has been mentioned by noble Lords today. I would also add shop theft to that. That is an important issue because, particularly in rural areas where there is perhaps only one shop, an organised crime gang, or regular shop theft, can impact small independent businesses very strongly. We are trying to deal strongly with those issues. Rural communities across England and Wales are already better protected from the rising threat of organised gangs, and we have new strategies to tackle crimes plaguing countryside areas.
I was struck by my noble friend Lord Forbes of Newcastle, who focused not just on the rural crime issues that I know he is aware of but raised important issues around fraud and the isolation that fraud can bring. I advise him that, in a three-year fraud strategy that we intend to publish in relatively short order, the Government intend to look very strongly at those issues and at what we can do in that space.
Developing a robust response to a rural crime is extremely important. I know that noble Lords have mentioned it, but the objective of the amendment is, as the explanatory statement says,
“to establish a task force to produce a strategy for tackling rural crime”.
I say to the mover of the amendment that, in November 2025, the Home Office, Defra and the National Police Chiefs’ Council published the Rural and Wildlife Crime Strategy, which, in essence, does what the amendment asks for, and which will bring together the points that the noble Lord, Lord Cromwell, asked for, with ministerial oversight. The strategy is a vital step in the mission to provide safer streets everywhere.
There is also a Defra-led rural task force that was set up last year—that sounds like a long way away, but it was just over a month ago—with the aim of gathering evidence through a series of meetings and workshops to look at the specific challenges faced in rural areas. The evidence gleaned from the workshops is being examined, and it will be used to outline the Government’s strategic ambition for rural communities.
Some of the points that noble Lords have mentioned today, such as tackling equipment theft, are a huge concern. I understand that. We intend to implement the Equipment Theft (Prevention) Act 2023, which will introduce forensic marking and registration on a database of all new terrain vehicles and quad bikes. I am also pleased to say that we recently announced removable GPS systems. Those are demands that I had just over a year ago when I went to the rural crime conference chaired by the police and crime commissioners for Norfolk and Cheshire. We have acted on that.
Clause 128, which has already been considered, contains a valuable tool for the police that will help them tackle stolen equipment. It will ensure that, where it has not been reasonably practical to obtain a warrant from the court, the police can enter and search premises that have been electronically tagged by GPS or other means and where items are present that are reasonably believed to have been stolen. That is a very strong signal for organised criminals that we are going to track and monitor them and have a non-warranted entrance to their property if they have stolen equipment—and we will hold them to account for it.
I was pleased to be able to announce last year at the police and crime commissioners’ conference a long-term commitment of £800,000 for the National Rural Crime Unit and the National Wildlife Crime Unit. We have committed to replicating this year’s funding next year, in 2026-27; in what are tight and difficult financial times, we have still managed to commit that funding to help to support the National Police Chiefs’ Council in achieving the aims of that strategy.
To go to some of the specific issues that the noble Baroness, Lady Miller, mentioned, such as hare coursing, the establishment of that unit and work that it has done, and through that unit Operation Galileo, has seen a 40% reduction in hare coursing—again, that was mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Cromwell, as a specific problem that has existed and causes great difficulties in rural areas.
We have also looked not just at the excellent work of the National Rural Crime Unit but, overall, at how we can tackle rural crime in an organised way. Again, I recognise that there are challenges. The Government separately, through the Statement that we made only a couple of days ago in this House, are looking at reorganising and shrinking the number of police forces, and we are going to have a commission to look at that, with a review, in the next few months to come to some conclusions. We are trying to centralise some national activity on serious organised crime, which is very much behind a lot of that rural crime. That landscape will need to be looked at.
The noble Lord, Lord Cromwell, referred to what I said on Tuesday night. We are looking at how we review the funding formula—that is important. Again, I cannot give specific answers on that today, but I would say to the noble Baroness who moved the amendment and noble Lords who have spoken to it, including the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Gower, that significant work is being done on this. We have a strategy and a task force; we have co-operation with Defra and specific measures being brought in that have been called for for a long time on equipment theft and wildlife crime, as well as on the funding of the unit. We have looked at a range of other measures that we will bring forward to tackle organised crimes in rural areas. With the neighbourhood policing guarantee, we are looking at every neighbourhood police force having named, contactable officers dealing with local issues. We are putting 13,000 of those neighbourhood police officers in place over the next three to four-year period, which will mean that we have 3,000 extra neighbourhood police officers by March this year and 13,000 by the end of this Parliament. That is focusing people from the back room to local police forces.
Again, there is a big mix in this, and I know that noble Lords will appreciate that it is a significant challenge at the moment, but I hope that that work is helpful and that the direction of travel suggested by the amendments is one that noble Lords can understand we are trying to achieve. With that, I hope that the noble Baroness will withdraw her amendment.
Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer (LD)
My Lords, I thank all noble Lords who have spoken. There was a theme running through the debate of the difficulty faced by those in rural areas of isolation. The noble Lord, Lord Davies of Gower, mentioned that I was seeking a top-down solution—not at all; I think that I am probably in your Lordships’ House because of looking for localised solutions. But that does not replace having an overall government strategy.
I am very pleased to hear from the Minister that they are committed to the funding for that unit; that is very helpful. I asked specifically about heritage crime, besides wildlife crime, so, between now and Report, perhaps the Minister could help me and provide a little more on how the Home Office is co-ordinating with the DCMS. Might he be able to write to me on that and also answer my question as to why wildlife crime is not notifiable? With that, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Earl Russell
“Offence of failing to meet pollution performance commitment levels (1) A water or water and sewerage company (“C”) commits an offence where C has—(a) failed to meet its pollution performance commitment level for three consecutive years, or(b) experienced an increase in serious pollution levels for three consecutive years. (2) For the purposes of this section—(a) “water or water and sewerage company” means companies which are responsible for the provision of water, or water and sewerage, services and which are regulated by Ofwat and the Environment Agency,(b) “pollution performance commitment level” means the level of performance on pollution that the company has committed to deliver, and which is reported against by Ofwat in its annual water company performance report, and(c) “total pollution incidents per 10,000km2” and “serious pollution incidents” mean the relevant figures under those headings reported by the Environment Agency in its annual environmental performance report.(3) If guilty of an offence under this section, C is liable—(a) on summary conviction, to a fine;(b) on conviction on indictment, to a fine.”Member’s explanatory statement
This new clause creates an offence of failing to meet pollution performance commitment levels.
Earl Russell (LD)
My Lords, in moving Amendment 484 on behalf of my noble friend Lady Bakewell, who is unable to be here, I shall also speak to Amendment 485 in this group on pollution. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, for her support for both. The amendments address the critical, environmental and public trust issue of the persistent and systematic failure of water companies to stem the flow of pollution into our rivers, lakes and coastal waters. The amendments are designed to work in tandem as a linked pair of provisions specifically targeting persistent and sustained underperformance. They are not designed to punish one-off incidents. They are a measured response to prolonged and sustained regulatory failures that, in the public’s eye, have become a matter of criminal neglect.
Amendment 484 would insert a new clause into the regulatory framework, creating a clear corporate criminal offence for a water or sewage company. That offence would be triggered when a company already regulated by Ofwat or the Environment Agency either fails to meet its pollution performance commitment level for three consecutive years or experiences an increase in serious pollution levels for three consecutive years. The pollution performance commitment level used is the exact target that companies commit to under the existing regulatory framework, which Ofwat reports on annually. The data regarding serious pollution incidents is similarly drawn directly from the Environment Agency’s annual environmental performance data.
A three-year threshold is a deliberate and calibrated response. We recognise that water companies can face individual problems from climate change, weather events, rapid population growth and other unforeseen circumstances. However, when failures persist year after year, are reported in black and white in regulatory reports but nothing is done, that is a different matter. By setting this three-year window, we would offer companies ample opportunity to correct their course. If they failed to do so, as a result of this amendment it could result in the matters being criminal.
Amendment 485 would build directly upon this foundation by creating personal criminal liability for senior managers. Liability would arise where a corporate offence under Amendment 484 was committed and the individual had failed to take all reasonable steps to prevent it. We have adopted a functional or a robust definition of senior manager, mirroring successful legal models in health and safety and economic crime already in legislation. It would apply to anyone who plays a significant role in making decisions about how the company’s relevant activities are managed or organised. This ensures that no one could evade their responsibility through misleading job titles or a corporate web of complex structures.
Critically, this amendment includes built-in protections to ensure fairness. The core requirement is to “take all reasonable steps”. A manager who could demonstrate that they have done this would have a clear path to acquittal. This structure would pierce the corporate veil without being reckless. Decisions regarding budgets and infrastructure carry personal weight for those who operate at the top.
Although there has been change, there is a lot that still needs to be done. Bill payers are facing a 26% increase in their bills and, in 2025 alone, supply interruptions across England and Wales rose by 8%. Even more concerning is the 60% increase in serious category 1 and category 2 incidents, which climbed to 75 in 2024. I recognise that we have had the Water (Special Measures) Act, the Cunliffe review and the recent White Paper and that there is more legislation to come. We welcome a lot of the measures, particularly those in the White Paper. Regulators have also imposed record fines, some as high as £90 million, but we must confront the reality that we may have reached the limits of a solely fines-based model.
When penalties are too modest, they just become the cost of doing business; when they are too punitive, they risk bringing down the very water companies that we are trying to sanction. Despite these fines, executives continue to draw substantial bonuses. Shareholders continue to receive massive dividends, while the environment bears the scars. The public is being asked to fund a staggering £104 billion in the promised AMP8 investment, and much of it is publicly underwritten through government schemes. We must have a statutory mechanism that ensures that this money delivers verifiable environmental gains rather than just being siphoned into higher gearing and profits.
Some critics may argue that these amendments will deter talent and overburden regulators. I disagree. These provisions are carefully calibrated to protect those who work in this industry, and they could do exactly the opposite. They could attract into the industry those people we need who are motivated to make change. Having that protection of the “reasonable steps” defence could help to attract the very talent we need. These measures are in line with requirements of the Environment Act that the polluter must pay. For too long this has not happened, and individual poor performance has been allowed to pass unchallenged.
These amendments provide the precise tools needed to bridge the gap between reporting failure and enforced change. Persistent pollution is not a technical glitch or an oversight; it is a substantial betrayal of public trust and an environmental duty. These issues need more thought than I have seen to date from the Government, despite the legislation coming forward.
The new water regulator, when established, must have the necessary tools to hold individual companies and individual corporate members within them to account personally for any serious and persistent failings; otherwise, it will not succeed, just as other regulators have not. I hope that the Government will view these amendments as a timely enhancement to their own thinking and plans for further reform. I beg to move.
Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)
I love these amendments and wish I had tabled them myself. They are excellent. Water companies dumping sewage into rivers has been illegal for years: it is just this and the previous Government’s refusal to act that has let it continue without serious consequences.
The legislation allows Ministers to set a bar of what is acceptable behaviour and, so far, every politician in charge has refused to say what is and is not a major failure. The result of this political cowardice is that water companies continue to make a profit out of polluting our waterways and beaches, and the people in charge continue to collect their big pay cheques and bonuses.
Regulators such as Ofwat have been in bed with the water industry bosses, and the Environment Agency has lost staff and legitimacy. Labour are wedded to private ownership of water and refuse to consider public ownership, even though it would be the most popular legislation they could enact this Parliament. I keep making suggestions about how Labour can get some voters back, but it is not listening.
These companies are fleecing bill payers with the excuse that they need to carry out the investment they have failed to do for decades. They have taken the public’s money and given it directly to shareholders. They have run up debts to pay even higher dividends and the bill payers are now paying for those debts. What is going to stop them doing this all again?
These amendments take a direct route to stopping pollution by making this personal to the people at the top. If they do not spend the money to invest and reduce pollution, then that is a crime. They are taking the public’s money and failing to improve. My own preference would be to put them on long-term community service cleaning up the sewage from our beaches, waterways and riverbanks. I would probably put them in special uniforms so that everybody passing by would know exactly who they are. I would also put a complete ban on dividend and bonus payments.
I am happy—she says, through gritted teeth—to support this more moderate suggestion, as being something the Minister might accept. I would not give them three years to turn it around either, but setting some sort of firm deadline would be preferable to the inaction of this, and the last, Government.
Finally, the best way of stopping the crime of water companies dumping sewage in our rivers is to take them into public ownership. Reduce bills by reducing the money wasted on debt repayments and replace the current set of overpaid bosses with people who can do the job and care about our environment.
Lord Deben (Con)
My Lords, I declare a historic connection with the water industry in the sense that I was the chairman of a water-only company more than 10 years ago, but it means I know a bit about the water industry and perhaps that is helpful after the last intervention, because the truth of the matter is that this is not just a problem of the water companies.
First, it is the problem of those people who controlled the water companies. The way in which it was operated was a great mistake. There were two regulators and the Environment Agency was almost always overturned by Ofwat. Ofwat was leaned on by successive Governments to keep down the price of water. So I start by saying that we must have a system in which we are paying for the big changes that we know about—and, because I have been around for such a long time, I remember why privatisation took place. It was not anything to do with Mrs Thatcher wanting to privatise. It was because, when it had been public ownership, both municipal and national, there had never been investment. It is all right for the noble Baroness to say that that is what we want; if you look at the history, it is about the worst history of public investment that we ever had. We had Surfers Against Sewage and the filthiest water: the worst water in northern Europe. When we signed up to the water directive, as we did when were sensibly in the European Union, it was quite clear that we did not meet the standards. The Daily Telegraph used to say, “Oh well, of course our water is better than anywhere else because they drink bottled water in France”. The truth was that our water did not meet the standards of the whole of Europe.
The privatisation took place to get private money into the water industry, to make the changes that were necessary—and, for a bit, it worked. I was the Minister responsible after that had been done and it was murder to try to deal with it. As these companies brought new technology and the rest into it, they had to charge more and therefore we had all the arguments about keeping the water price down. Unfortunately, we have to recognise that water is not cheap and it is going to be more and more expensive. For example, Essex & Suffolk Water—which is about 200 to 300 yards outside Anglia, where I am affected, so I do not have a direct connection—has announced that it cannot provide new water for any new or extended industry until 2036. That is the effect of climate change and of not having the water we need.
We have to be frank about our problem: we are going to have to spend a lot more money on water, make it much more efficient, use new technology and do that through the privatised system that we have. There is no point in arguing about it; it is not going to be nationalised. The Government have made that quite clear and nobody else is going to nationalise it. So let us see how we can make this work. That is why I have come to be semi-supportive of this amendment: the reality is that we have not been able properly to regulate water and we need to do so. Directors of companies in these areas need to be personally responsible when, for a period, they have clearly not done the job which they are supposed to do.
The noble Baroness wanted us not to have three years. Frankly, you have got to have a period in which you can see whether this a persistent problem or a one-off. We are going to have lots of one-off problems. I know it bores the Committee for me constantly to talk about climate change, but the point about climate change is that it is really climate disruption. It means that we have very significant changes in weather which we cannot predict in advance and therefore we can have real problems, with so much water that we cannot deal with it or not enough water so we cannot provide for people. That does not mean to say that the people of Tunbridge Wells do not have a very considerable complaint about the fact that, yet again, they have not been able to have the water that they ought to have.
Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)
It is very brave of the noble Lord to say categorically that this Government will not put the water companies into public hands, because they are famous for their U-turns, so who knows what is going to happen next week? Secondly, all these bonuses and huge payouts surely show a level of incompetence. They had the money to do the investment and they gave it instead to shareholders.
Lord Deben (Con)
I am sorry, the second part of the noble Baroness’s comments are ones she makes about everybody who is in the private sector. That is what she thinks about the private sector and I do not agree with her. The Polanski mechanisms of this world are devastating politically and economically and, really, I am not going to answer that because I just think it is not true and is nonsense.
However, the first part is actually quite important. The reason the Government do not want to nationalise the water companies is that it would cost a great deal of money that we ought to use for other things—and it does not necessarily end up with a better system. I am a historian: I always like to look at what happened before. When it was in the public sector and was run by municipalities, we did not spend the money. That was the problem. And we still would not do so, because there is always something better to spend the money on immediately. We are politicians; you do it for what the next moment is. The trouble with investment in water is that it is crucial, but it is long term.
Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)
First, I do not want to get into a spat with the noble Lord but could he not mention people by name in this Chamber? That is quite rude. Secondly, I am an archaeologist and I know exactly how these things start. The fact is, it may be that public ownership did not help but private ownership has made it much worse—and it is not true that I condemn all private businesses.
Lord in Waiting/Government Whip (Lord Wilson of Sedgefield) (Lab)
We are straying away from the amendment and strolling into a bigger debate. If we can get back to the amendment, that will be fantastic.
Lord Deben (Con)
On the personal attack, Mr Polanski is the leader of a party. If he cannot be referred to in this House, I wonder what on earth we are coming to.
Lord Cromwell (CB)
I will follow the strictures just put on us to stay with the amendment. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Deben, as he still came back for another bite, that as someone who sat on the Industry and Regulators Committee that looked into the water industry in detail, I know that the Victorian system reached its capacity in 1960, and public and private ownership both failed in different ways for the simple reason that he gave: short-termism. That is the problem we face: the multiple billions that have to be spent over a long period, and no Government looking to get re-elected for the next five years will ever spend it.
Lord Davies of Gower (Con)
My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville, for tabling this amendment and the noble Earl, Lord Russell, and the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, for putting their names to it and contributing today.
Although we understand the noble Baroness’s intention, we do not believe that this amendment is the right approach to ensuring that our water companies act ethically and serve the customer. Neither do we believe that increasing offences for companies or for individuals is the right approach to decreasing water pollution. They are already subject to the powers of Ofwat and the Environment Agency; additional measures will just drive up legal costs and encourage hostile behaviour.
The Water (Special Measures) Act of last year placed a new duty on companies to publish an annual pollution incident reduction plan, and we should wait and see what the outcome of that policy is before we attempt to legislate further. It is undoubtedly an important issue, but we simply do not believe that this is the best way to go about it. I look forward to hearing the Minister’s response.
Lord Katz (Lab)
I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville, for tabling the amendment, the noble Earl, Lord Russell, for moving it, and the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, for putting her name to it and speaking to it. I enjoy—well, “enjoy”—sparring on issues of water ownership and water companies. Usually it is in Oral Questions rather than in the middle of the Crime and Policing Bill but, hey ho, you take your chances wherever you can. I also thank the noble Lord, Lord Deben, for bringing his sense of history and active participation over a number of decades, if I may say so, on the issue of water ownership and stewardship. I found myself agreeing—which may not be too strange—in no small part with many of his comments.
Before I get into the meat of my remarks, I want to be clear: as the noble Lord, Lord Deben, said, the Government are not going to nationalise the water industry. It would cost around £100 billion.
Lord Katz (Lab)
I am very happy to direct the noble Baroness towards Defra’s costings on this. You have to take account of all sorts of factors, including debt that you inherit as well as the equity stake of the companies that they are currently valued at. It is a very simplistic economics that leads you down the primrose path of the valuations that some people like to think it would cost. That is not the case.
I also gently point out to the noble Earl, Lord Russell, that the £104 billion that comes up in PR24 to which he referred is an investment commitment from the water companies. We are building new aqueducts now and we have not built them for decades, and that is one of the main reasons why we have continual problems of lots of rain but not enough water supply, to which the noble Lord, Lord Deben, referred. Anyway, I will take off my Defra Whip hat and put on my Home Office Whip hat, and I will speak to the amendment.
Performance commitment levels, including for pollution, are set for Ofwat in the price review process. Where companies fail to meet these commitment levels, they must return money to customers through reduced bills in the next financial year. Companies are therefore already penalised for failing to meet their performance targets. In addition, this Government have already introduced the toughest sentencing powers in history against law-breaking water executives. Provisions in the Water (Special Measures) Act 2025, to which the noble Earl, Lord Russell, referred, extend the sentencing powers of the courts to include imprisonment in all cases where the regulator’s investigations have been obstructed by individuals and enable obstruction cases to be heard in the Crown Court. As a company cannot go to prison, the provisions ensure that directors and officers are held to account. The threat of imprisonment will act as a powerful deterrent as water companies invest in upgrading broken water infrastructure and clean up our rivers, lakes and seas for good.
The 2025 Act also allows the Government to expand and strengthen the current range of financial penalties available to the Environment Agency in a bid to clamp down on more water company offences. The Government have consulted on the scope for these new penalties and their value. The changes will make it much easier and quicker for the Environment Agency to hold water companies to account. Through the 2025 Act, the Government have also given Ofwat the power to ban executive performance bonuses where companies fail to meet certain standards. Since this was introduced in June last year, six companies out of nine—Anglian Water, Southern Water, Thames Water, United Utilities, Wessex Water and Yorkshire Water—have triggered the bonus ban rule, and more than £4 million of potential bonuses have been blocked. This is the legislation working in action.
The Government announced, in response to the Cunliffe review, that they will establish a single powerful regulator for the entire water sector, with the teeth to enforce the standards that the public rightly demand. We have also accepted the recommendation from Cunliffe to end the era of water companies marking their own homework through operator self-monitoring. We will introduce open monitoring to increase transparency and restore public trust. We have set out our wider vision for the future of the water sector in a White Paper published on 20 January. This marks the most fundamental reset to our water system in a generation. When parliamentary time allows in a new Session, we will introduce a water Bill creating the laws that we need to fundamentally change the system.
The noble Lord, Lord Deben, asked whether the Government are committed to this. The Water (Special Measures) Act last year, our response to the Cunliffe review, the water White Paper and our commitment to legislate are a down payment on our commitment to do right by the industry, the environment, the consumer and those who wish to invest in our water system. I hope that the measures I have set out demonstrate that the Government and regulators are taking firm action to hold water companies and their executives to account for poor performance. For these reasons, in the knowledge that we will bring forward further legislation in due course, I hope that the noble Earl will withdraw the amendment.
Earl Russell (LD)
My Lords, I thank everybody who has spoken. That was a more interesting group of amendments than I expected it to be. I apologise—at the start I should have declared my interest as a board member and director of the Water Retail Company.
This has been an interesting debate. My amendment was not really about the ownership or privatisation of water—my party has a middle way on that—but about ensuring that the Government have the tools to change the behaviour and direction of water company executives. I take the Minister’s point about the £140 billion, but a lot of that is underwritten. We need that to be invested to get the change. I recognise the issues of climate change and the problems that we face, but this amendment is carefully crafted and is about adding this extra tool to the toolbox.
Fundamentally, my worry is that when we create the new regulator, which I welcome, it needs to be set up to succeed and to deliver—when, frankly, no other regulator has to date delivered in this space. My worry is that fines alone may not be enough to change corporate behaviour. I do not want to come back in another five or 10 years, when the climate has moved on and the problems we face are worse, and see that more money has gone in but the systems have not changed. However, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment, and I thank all those who have spoken.
Lord Garnier
“Joint enterprise(1) The Accessories and Abettors Act 1861 is amended as follows.(2) In section 8 (abettors in misdemeanors), after “shall” insert “, by making a significant contribution to its commission,”.”
Lord Garnier (Con)
My Lords, my Amendment 486, co-signed by the noble Lords, Lord Ponsonby of Shulbrede and Lord Berkeley of Knighton, and the noble Baroness, Lady Fox of Buckley, is a probing amendment designed to enable the Committee to consider the criminal law on joint enterprise and the Government to tell us how and when they intend to reform this troubling aspect of our law. The noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, regrets that he cannot be here this afternoon. He had wanted to refer to the law of Scotland, which I will not—simply because it would be a mistake for me to venture into that dangerous water. The noble Lord, Lord Ponsonby, after having listened to what I have to say and endured my speech, might regret that he could be here, but I am very grateful to him for being here.
The instigator of this amendment is Kim Johnson, Member of Parliament. She presented a Private Member’s Bill to this effect in the other place in February 2024, and initiated a debate on joint enterprise through her Amendment 13 to this Bill on Report in the other place in June 2025. Amendment 486 is framed in the same terms, and its supporters come from across your Lordships’ House. Legal academics and practitioners outside Parliament have argued for it as well.
Section 8 of the Accessories and Abettors Act 1861, if changed by my amendment, would provide that “Whosoever shall”—and here I add the amending words—
“by making a significant contribution to its commission”,
and would continue,
“aid, abet, counsel, or procure the commission of any indictable offence, whether the same be an offence at common law or by virtue of any Act passed or to be passed, shall be liable to be tried, indicted, and punished as a principal offender”.
I believe that the noble Lord, Lord Marks, will address the corresponding need to amend the Magistrates’ Court Act 1980 later this evening.
The last Government rejected this proposal because they said it would be too difficult for the prosecution to prove a significant contribution. I disagree. This amendment may not provide the best or only answer, but the intention is to bring to Parliament’s and the Government’s urgent attention the need for clarity, and therefore justice, in an aspect of our criminal law that has, over the years, led to confusion and injustice, as our courts have wrestled with how to deal with defendants who agree to commit one crime but who go on separately or together to commit another one. Over the years, that has led to a version of the law of joint enterprise that has allowed several people to be convicted of a crime, usually murder or manslaughter, even if only one person committed the fatal act. In some cases, there have been demonstrably unjust convictions.
Let me mention a few recent developments. The first is the combined Supreme Court and Privy Council decision in two appeals, Jogee and Ruddock, from England and Jamaica respectively, heard in 2016. If I may, I will refer to those two appeals as Jogee. The question of law relating to the liability of a secondary party was whether the common law took a wrong turning in two cases, one called Chan Wing-Siu, in 1985, and the other the Crown v Powell and English, in 1999.
The Jogee appeals concerned a subset of the law of secondary liability for a crime relating to the person who did not himself forge the document, fire the gun or stab the victim—the person who did so is the principal—but who is said to have encouraged or assisted the principal to do so. There is no question that persons who are indeed together responsible for a crime are all guilty of it, whether as principals or secondary parties. Sometimes it is not possible to determine exactly whose hand performed the vital act, but this does not matter, so long as it is proved that each defendant either did it himself or intentionally assisted or encouraged it.
Jogee did not affect that rule. In Jogee, the court was considering a narrower subpart concerning secondary parties who had engaged with one or more others in a criminal venture to commit crime A but, in doing so, the principal had committed a second crime, crime B. In many of the reported cases, crime B is murder committed in the course of some other criminal venture, but this aspect of the law is not confined to cases of homicide or even to cases of violence. The question in Jogee is the mental element that the law requires of the secondary party. This narrower area of secondary responsibility has sometimes been labelled joint enterprise. To speak of a joint enterprise is simply to say that two or more people were engaged in a crime together. That, however, does not identify what mental element must be shown in the secondary party. The narrower area of secondary responsibility in question, where crime B is committed during the course of crime A, has been in the past more precisely called parasitic accessory liability—a phrase that I have to accept does not exactly trip off the tongue.
The two cases of Chan Wing-Siu and Powell held that, in the kind of situation described, the mental element required of the secondary party is simply that he foresaw the possibility that the principal might commit crime B. If the secondary party did foresee this, the case is treated as continued participation in crime A—not simply as evidence that he intended to assist crime B but as automatic authorisation of it. So the secondary party was guilty under this rule, even if he did not intend to assist crime B at all. This set a lower test for the secondary party than for the principal, who will be guilty of crime B only if he has the necessary mental element for that crime, which is usually intent. That was in contrast to the usual rule for secondary parties, which is that the mental element is an intention to assist or encourage the principal to commit the crime.
Jogee held that Chan Wing-Siu and the Crown v Powell had taken a wrong turning in their reasoning. The decisions departed from the well-established rule that the mental element required of a secondary party is an intention to assist or encourage the principal to commit the crime. They also advanced arguments based on the need that co-adventurers in crimes that result in death should not escape conviction without considering whether the secondary parties would generally be guilty of manslaughter in any event. The Supreme Court decided that the law must be set back to the correct footing that stood before Chan Wing-Siu.
The mental element for secondary liability is the intention to assist or encourage the crime. Sometimes the encouragement or assistance is given to a specific crime and sometimes to a range of crimes, one of which is committed. Either will suffice. Sometimes the encouragement or assistance involves an agreement between the parties, but, in other cases, it takes the form of more or less spontaneous joining in a criminal enterprise. Again, either will suffice.
Intention to assist is not the same as desiring the crime to be committed. On the contrary, the intention to assist may sometimes be conditional, in the sense that the secondary party hopes that the further crime will not be necessary. If he nevertheless gives his intentional assistance on the basis that it may be committed if the necessity for it arises, he will be guilty. In many cases, the intention to assist will be coterminous with the intention that crime B be committed, but there may be some where it exists without that latter intention.
In most cases, it will remain relevant to inquire whether the principal and secondary party shared a common criminal purpose, for often this will demonstrate the secondary party’s intention to assist. This will be a matter of fact for the jury after careful direction from the judge. The error, Jogee says, was to treat foresight of crime B as automatic authorisation of it, whereas the correct rule is that foresight is simply evidence—albeit sometimes strong evidence—of intent to assist or encourage. It is a question for the jury, in every case, whether the intention to assist or encourage is shown. The correct rule, therefore, is that foresight is simply evidence—albeit sometimes strong evidence, as I say—of intent to assist or encourage, which is the proper mental element for establishing secondary liability.
The story does not end there, I am sorry to say—for those noble Lords who are still with me. For those convicted post Jogee, there is now a concern in the minds of some academics and practitioners that the Court of Appeal has subsequently lowered the conduct element and removed causation once again to widen liability through another error of law.
This criticism follows two cases in the Court of Appeal in 2021 and 2023, one called Rowe and the other called Hussain, where it was held—if I have this right—that, save for procuring a crime, conduct is enough, causation is not necessary and contribution is implicit and need not be measurable. The consequence is that the statutory language of “aid, abet, counsel or procure” is lost, and liability through complicity does not require proof that the accused person made a significant contribution to the crime in which he is alleged to have been complicit. Without a significant contribution, an alleged accomplice is not meaningfully involved in the principal’s crime.
Professor Matthew Dyson in his paper “The Contribution of Complicity”, published in the Journal of Criminal Law in 2022, suggests that judges should direct juries on contribution. This would retain the necessary derivative nature of complicity. Dr Felicity Gerry KC, who appeared for one of the defendants in Hussain, argues that the result of Dyson’s research
“is a much safer legal framework to ensure only those who make a significant contribution to the crime are at risk of conviction. The current approach fails to make it clear that there must be some nexus between the alleged acts of assistance and encouragement and the principal’s commission of the crime. Dr Beatrice Krebs has explained that without further guidance on the level of contribution made by the accessory’s action towards the principal’s commission of the offence, the jury has no tool to distinguish between an accessory who was merely present and one who by their presence has assisted or encouraged. Put simply—the decision in Hussain leaves a real risk of convicting people who make no significant contribution to the crime. The fundamental problem both Dyson and Krebs identify is the Court of Appeal focus on the accessory’s conduct rather than proof of the contribution to the principal’s commission of the offence”.
Dyson’s proposed test of a significant contribution, which I import into Amendment 486, is a measure that could have tightened the conduct element in complicity, just as Jogee envisaged greater care in fault.
Dyson argued that Jogee passed over the important issue of what contribution an accomplice needs to make to a principal’s crime. He submitted that
“English law is too willing to assume that such a contribution has occurred and has little detailed law to test for it”
and that a more rigorous approach is needed. He suggested a two-part approach:
“to be liable for assisting or encouraging a crime, the accomplice must make a substantial contribution to the principal’s commission of it; to be liable for procuring the principal’s crime, the accomplice must bring the crime about”.
Whether the accomplice’s assistance or encouragement had made the necessary substantial contribution would be a question for the jury. This approach, he argues, would be consistent with what was said in Jogee about overwhelming supervening acts. Where such an issue arose, a jury would first have to decide what level of contribution the assistance or encouragement of the accomplice had made and would then have to decide whether that had persisted to the point when the principal committed the offence.
The Court of Appeal rejected that proposition in Hussain, so, in addition to all those wrongly convicted before Jogee, there is a growing cohort of prisoners whose contribution to a crime has never meaningfully been measured. With no minimum threshold for the conduct element and, in murder, the consequence of lengthy tariffs on life sentences, this latest approach to joint enterprise contributes to overcriminalisation and overincarceration. Prison overcrowding and perceived injustice are, I suggest, a toxic mix. Absent a further case before the Supreme Court, we look to the Law Commission and the Government to find a way through.
In December 2024, the Law Commission announced a review of homicide and the sentencing framework for murder. It will, among other things, examine the law on joint enterprise following the Supreme Court ruling in Jogee. I suggest that the published timetable for the review is too long: opened in August 2025, with two separately focused consultation papers to be published in 2026 and 2027, it will not report until 2028. Would it not be possible to conclude the proposed review with two separate, if linked, reports—first, much earlier, on the offences, and, secondly, on defences and sentencing—rather than waiting until 2028 to publish one final report? Depending on what is in the legislative programme for 2028-30 and bearing in mind the delays caused by a general election and changing political priorities, it could be well over two years before anything is done.
I know from my own experience in government and opposition in Parliament since 1992 that Governments are reluctant to do anything that looks like being weak on crime, especially violent crime, but getting the law on joint enterprise understood and settled in statute is not a sign of weakness but evidence of the search for justice. I beg to move.
Lord Ponsonby of Shulbrede (Lab)
My Lords, I thank the noble and learned Lord, Lord Garnier, for introducing this matter so fully. He started by saying that this was a troubling aspect of the law. I want to talk about how troubling it is and to reflect on the academic research which underpins many of the comments he made. I was a youth magistrate for many years, and my experience is underpinned by the academic research which I will refer to.
Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)
My Lords, if ever there was a day to consider whether we should just assume guilt by association, then today’s political context provides us with a reminder that it is complicated. I have added my name to Amendment 486 on reform of joint enterprise, tabled by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Garnier. Having listened to the elegant and legally erudite contribution from the noble and learned Lord, followed by such a well-informed contribution from the noble Lord, Lord Ponsonby, I am rather nervous that I am going to let the side down somewhat, but let me take a different approach.
Reading through the first-hand accounts in In Their Own Words produced by the Joint Enterprise Not Guilty by Association grass-roots campaign group that the noble Lord, Lord Ponsonby, referred to, really brings home that this tool of criminal justice is destroying too many young lives by incarcerating them for crimes which they made no significant contribution to. Sending people to prison for life and labelling them as murderers when they have not killed anyone, or were in many instances effectively bystanders, is something Parliament must address. Why? We have a responsibility to make sure the law is fit for purpose and applied properly and as originally intended. I think joint enterprise fails on all those counts.
I think we can all understand what the intention of joint enterprise is and was. Sometimes those who do not actually wield the knife do seem equally culpable—the armed robber involved in the heist that has gone wrong is the example always used. It could be deemed that he is as guilty as his accomplice who shot the cashier because he significantly contributed to the crime by, for example, carrying or supplying the gun or threatening the cashier. We can all acknowledge that in the brutal murder of Stephen Lawrence a group was closely involved in the killing.
Interestingly, if you look back to the ancient history of the law, which was explained by the noble Lord, Lord Finkelstein, in a Times article a couple of years ago, it also brings home that things can be complicated but people can be equally guilty. It began, apparently, with duelling aristocrats in the 18th century. The courts hit on the idea of reducing the number of duels by making seconds and surgeons liable for murder alongside the principals, so once more we can blame the hereditaries for everything that has gone wrong since—that was a joke.
It is important to stress that this is not about getting the guilty off the hook because behind each of these joint enterprise cases, the victims of crime, the families of those brutally killed, must not be forgotten, but justice for them is ill-served by overcriminalisation or overpunishment of the wrong culprits.
I want to use a couple of examples. Faisal Fiaz found out about the murder that he “committed” at the same time as everyone else because he saw it on social media. He did not know beforehand that there had been a murder because he was waiting in the back of a car as two of his colleagues in the drugs gang he was involved in went round the corner intending to steal cannabis from a local dealer. I want to stress that Faisal was no angel—he was involved in the drugs trade; he was a teenager in a gang—but he did not know that his gang accomplices were carrying a knife or that they had gone on to stab the dealer to death. The stabber fled the country to Pakistan and is still at large, whereas Faisal was jailed for life, with a minimum of 23 years, without any compelling evidence of intent or knowledge of the crime about to happen or even that it had happened. His presence in the vicinity and guilt by association was deemed enough to suggest to the CPS that he contributed to the murder in such a way that he is in prison for life. He was punished as harshly as he would have been had he wielded the knife, but I do not think that was the original intention, which was for the heist gone wrong or a duel.
That seems to be the crucial weakness in the current law of joint enterprise: the courts seem indifferent to the precise contribution to the crime of the accused, and this breaks the link between any action and accountability for that action. In this context, of course evidential standards are watered down and can even be dispensed with.
I was struck listening to Joseph Appiah, who was part of a group that clashed with rival schoolboys when he was 15. He was 200 yards away from the fatal stabbing of a 16 year-old. He did not stab the victim, nor did he see the stabbing, and he assumed that that would all be taken into account. He said:
“I didn’t see it, I didn’t know what happened and I can account for where I was, I could prove it. I always thought, well, you know, I didn’t do it, so when all the evidence comes out, eventually they will see the light, but that’s not how it went”.
Despite no DNA or evidence that he was directly involved or that he saw the act or knew that a knife was involved, he was found as culpable as the teenager who did in fact commit a stabbing.
Understandably, people conclude that the law of joint enterprises is so loosely interpreted by the criminal justice system because it makes it easier to secure convictions. It removes the faff of investigation, evidence gathering, proof beyond reasonable doubt and so on. In other words, it fuels cynicism in criminal justice. There are also side injustices created by the courts wielding joint enterprise as a blunt instrument. Fear of being convicted that way means that defence barristers have been known to persuade innocent clients to plead guilty to lesser charges such as GBH to avoid a trial of joint enterprise.
All these problems are well known, as we have heard. Back in 2016, the Supreme Court ruled that the law around joint enterprise had taken a wrong turn and been used wrongly for three decades. The court thought that it was rightly restoring the proper law of targeting those who intended to commit or assist in a serious crime. But, as we are all too aware, Supreme Court clarifications are not always used to rectify wrong readings of the law—the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies has revealed that, in the three years leading up to the ruling in 2016, 522 individuals were charged, but in the three years afterwards, 547 were.
As others have noted, reform of joint enterprise has gone as far as it is possible for it to go in the courts, and it now needs a change in the law. I give credit to Kim Johnson MP, who has used her voice in the other place to draw attention to this and inspire us all. Her attempts have failed so far, but the Government should now grab this chance, here in Committee, to right this wrong.
I have some qualms with one part of this debate, however, which is the implication that this is an actively racist law, or, to quote Jimmy McGovern, that its purpose is allegedly
“to keep scum off the streets, that’s how I think the police see it. That’s how they see all these young people – as scum”.
I loved Jimmy McGovern’s powerful 2014 drama “Common”, but I do not think that that is what is going on here. Joint enterprise has been used by many in good faith to try to tackle the scourge and blight of gang violence.
Yes, young Black people are 16 times more likely to be prosecuted for joint enterprise—there were also lots of young people, with 14% between the ages of 14 and 17 and 40% between 18 and 24, and 93% of defendants were male—but let us be honest: there is a real problem of young Black men stabbing each other. I live in Wood Green in Haringey, and it is real and it is not racist to note it. It is something we have to take into account.
Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)
We need them to understand that the criminal justice system is not targeting them personally for crime but is fair and proportionate. That is what we should do.
Baroness Brinton (LD)
My Lords, I support Amendment 486 and thank the noble and learned Lord, Lord Garnier, for his excellent introduction to it, which was very clear to follow.
Over the decades, thousands of people have been wrongly jailed for life in appalling miscarriages of justice because of the use of joint enterprise to charge those present with the commission of a serious crime. Sometimes that might be someone who was present and thought they were going to be involved in a low-level crime, whereas they had no involvement at all in the actual violence or murder committed by another but were still charged under joint enterprise as if they had also committed the act of violence or murder. That is very similar to the example that the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, gave us.
Even worse, there are those who have been jailed for murder simply because they were present at the act of murder, although they had not been members of the gang involved. Over the last 15 years, this House has seen various amendments and had debates and questions trying to correct and clarify when charges should or should not be used for those who did not commit serious acts of violence. As has already been mentioned, a decade ago the Supreme Court recognised that joint enterprise had been used repeatedly and incorrectly in many cases, but nothing has really changed since then. I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, for quoting the figures for the three years before and after 2016, because that judgment has not changed the numbers either.
The key questions addressed by the Supreme Court, including what qualifies as assistance and encouragement, remain obfuscatory. It is still not clear whether presence at a serious crime is in itself enough. I will not repeat the data that the noble Lord, Lord Ponsonby, and others have mentioned in the briefing we got from Joint Enterprise Not Guilty by Association. I differ slightly from the view of the noble Baroness, Lady Fox. It is quite notable that over 50% of those prosecuted are not just young Black men and women, but there is also substantial overrepresentation of disabled and neurodivergent people, as well as many under 25. I might understand the last, but not the others on their own.
The proposal of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Garnier, would completely change the approach to considering who has been involved in serious crime. The amendment would ensure that, rather than guessing the individual's state of mind, associations and foresight of what might occur, the CPS must look at actual material actions, making that the baseline objective threshold for prosecution. I hope that the Minister is finally prepared to change the injustice in the use of joint enterprise and start a new era based on facts, not suppositions.
Lord Marks of Henley-on-Thames (LD)
My Lords, I fully support this amendment. I agree effectively with every word that has fallen from the lips of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Garnier, the noble Lord, Lord Ponsonby, and my noble friend Lady Brinton, and almost every word uttered by the noble Baroness, Lady Fox of Buckley. I hope that the Government will listen and give careful consideration to this amendment.
The law of joint enterprise has long been unsatisfactory. It was substantially improved by the decision of the Supreme Court in the Jogee case, as explained by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Garnier. The present state of the law in the light of Jogee is that an offence is committed by an accessory only if the defendant charged as an accessory intended to assist the principal in the commission of the offence. Even so, the law is still unsatisfactory and unclear, as extensively supported by the academic evidence cited by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Garnier, and by the noble Lord, Lord Ponsonby, and it sorely needs reform.
The phrase “significant contribution” to the commission of the offence used in the amendment is apt. It would overcome the difficulties mentioned by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Garnier, with the Court of Appeal’s position on the related accessory offences of procurement. The phrase has been proposed by the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies and widely by academics. It was the phrase used in Kim Johnson’s Private Member’s Bill, which was supported by, among others, Sir Bob Neill, who was then chair of the Justice Select Committee, and therefore one presumes by the committee itself.
While the expression may in some ways seem vague, it sets exactly the type of test that juries can and do recognise and regularly apply, rather similarly to the test for dishonesty used in relation to Theft Act offences. The amendment would make an offence of being an accessory much more comprehensible and justifiable than the present test. The present test, I suggest, focuses disproportionately on the mental element of accessory liability, whereas the amendment would focus on the actual contribution of the accessory to the commission of the offence.
There is considerable cause for concern that joint enterprise law in its operation is discriminatory. The noble Lord, Lord Ponsonby, mentioned the research showing that Black people are 16 times more likely to be prosecuted on the basis of joint enterprise than white people. The noble Baroness, Lady Fox, mentioned the same research. What neither mentioned is that that staggering figure—I suggest that it is staggering—was based on the CPS’s own figures for 2023.
I accept that there may be cultural issues, as mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, but they have to be judged against the caution that was mentioned by my noble friend Lady Brinton. There is also serious evidence of unjustified, unwarranted group prosecution. There is significant concern about evidence of racial bias and the risk of guilt by association in consequence. The point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Fox—that it sometimes may seem easier to prosecute for joint enterprise than by establishing individual guilt—is, or may be, justified. Concerns about guilt by association and gang involvement are entirely legitimate. I think they are shared by the public, and they are evidenced by the clear examples we have heard today. They evidence a lack of principle in prosecution and in the application of the law.
In evidence to the Leveson review, Keir Monteith KC and Professor Eithne Quinn from the University of Manchester argued that joint enterprise was overused. They went so far as to say that it contributed, as inevitably statistically it does, to the growth of the backlogs. They cited the trial of seven Black teenagers in 2022 who were accused of murder, where the prosecution accepted that they could not be sure who stabbed the victim, but asserted that all of those who went to the park where the killing occurred
“shared responsibility, at the very least contributing to the force of numbers”.
That was an inaccurate or, at the very least, incomplete statement of the law in the light of Jogee. Six of the seven defendants were acquitted, but the fact that they were tried and went through the period that they did prior to trial highlights the confused state of the law, which makes the essential ingredients of the offence difficult for jurors and sometimes even prosecutors to understand.
We should also take into account, particularly given the delays in bringing trials to court, the serious risk of charges based on joint enterprise leading to defendants who are ultimately acquitted being held on remand, as one of the seven defendants in the case I mentioned was for no less than 14 months.
Finally, I have a technical point that was mentioned by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Garnier, to whom I had mentioned it. While I support the amendment completely, it needs to be reworded or supplemented to cover summary offences. That is because, as a result of the amendment of Section 8 of the Accessories and Abettors Act 1861 by the Criminal Law Act 1977, the accessory offence under the 1861 Act applies only to indictable offences—offences that are either indictable only or triable either way. A parallel amendment to Section 44(1) of the Magistrates’ Court Act 1980 is required to cover summary offences. There is no justification for distinguishing between them. With that rather academic point, I hope that the Government will act on this.
Lord Davies of Gower (Con)
My Lords, I am grateful to my noble and learned friend Lord Garnier for bringing forward this amendment and for the care and intellectual rigour with which he has set out the case for revisiting the law on joint enterprise. He has laid out a clear case for why this area of criminal law generates much concern, not least because of the length of sentences involved and the understandable anxiety about culpability and clarity in attributing criminal responsibility.
My noble and learned friend has, rightly, reminded the Committee of the complex and often unsettled journey that this area of law has taken, from the missteps identified by the Supreme Court in Jogee through to more recent Court of Appeal decisions, which some commentators argue have again widened liability in ways that risk injustice. His concerns about overcriminalisation and the potential for convictions where an individual’s role is marginal are serious points that deserve careful reflection. I look forward to hearing the Minister’s thoughts on them.
That said, while I welcome this debate and acknowledge the force of many of the arguments advanced, I am not persuaded that this amendment provides the right statutory solution at this stage. The introduction of a requirement that an accessory must have made a “significant contribution” to the commission of an offence raises difficult questions of definition and application. What amounts to “significant” is not self-evident. If left undefined, it would inevitably fall to the courts to develop meaning over time through case law, creating precisely the uncertainty and inconsistency that this amendment seeks to address. Alternatively, attempting to define “significant contribution” exhaustively in statute risks rigidity and unintended consequences across a wide range of factual scenarios. Tied to this, there is currently a wealth of case law that can be applied by the courts when considering joint enterprise. This case law would be made redundant in many scenarios if the law were to be changed by this amendment, which would surely not be desirable.
I believe that my noble and learned friend acknowledges that this amendment may not be the only way, or even the best way, but rather uses it as a probing amendment to draw attention to the problem. There is clearly an ongoing need to ensure that the law of secondary liability remains anchored to principles of intention, causation and moral culpability and that juries are properly directed to distinguish between meaningful participation and mere presence.
However, given the Law Commission’s ongoing review of homicide and sentencing, which includes consideration of joint enterprise in light of Jogee, I am cautious about pre-empting that work with a statutory change that may generate further ambiguity. Reform in this area must be evidence based and coherent. While I welcome the discussion sparked by this amendment and commend my noble and learned friend for his persistence in pursuing clarity and justice, I cannot lend the amendment my support today. However, I hope the Government will reflect carefully on the concerns raised and indicate how they intend to ensure that the law on joint enterprise is both fair and clearly understood.
Baroness Levitt (Lab)
My Lords, Amendment 486 in the name of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Garnier, raises an issue that has long troubled the criminal justice system. I am very grateful to the noble and learned Lord for giving me sight of his speech in advance.
The criminal liability of secondary parties is an important but sometimes controversial concept in the law, and the Government acknowledge the anxiety over the consequences for those prosecuted and convicted as a result of the application of the rule. On the one hand, there are very real and understandable concerns. First, we recognise the anxiety that this has a disproportionate effect on young people and on those from certain ethnic groups. Secondly, it is a matter of serious concern that the law is widely misunderstood. For example, I pay tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, in relation to her powerful speech, but in fact she said several things that were not quite right. For example, we have no law of collective responsibility, and mere presence without more is never enough to convict. Even lawyers and judges sometimes struggle with the application of this concept, as any of your Lordships who attempted to follow the limpid explanation of the law in this area from the noble and learned Lord, Lord Garnier, may well understand.
On the other hand, and seriously, it must be remembered that the reason why the rule exists is to ensure that it is possible to prosecute those who take part in group crimes—often, but not always, crimes of violence. Please remember that if your son or daughter was attacked by a large group, one of whom may have held the weapon, but others of whom were assisting and encouraging, you would want the entire group to face justice—more so if, because it was not possible to distinguish which of the many feet was kicking the victim, you could not prosecute any of them because you could not show which foot in fact delivered the fatal blow among the others which contributed to it. This is what, among other things, the doctrine of joint enterprise is there to cover.
I appreciate that the noble and learned Lord’s amendment is intended to probe the Government’s position. While the intention behind the amendment is understandable, as drafted, we believe that there are flaws in it which mean that it is not acceptable and would cause more difficulties than it solved for the courts which have to apply it. The issues about which the Government have concerns include the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Davies, about what would count as “significant”. For example, is purchasing the weapon or acting as a lookout significant? What about shouting encouragement or driving the getaway car? You could not just leave this to a jury to decide, because then there would be a real risk of unacceptable disparities in decisions made on the same facts. In one part of the country, acting as a lookout could mean you were guilty of murder, but in another part, on the same facts, you would be acquitted. You could even get those results in courtrooms next door to each other in the same building. Such uncertainty would make prosecutions in group violence cases pretty much impossible, as well as leading to verdicts which would not command public confidence.
There are further issues, one of which has been identified by the noble Lord, Lord Marks, in relation to the magistrates’ court, but the amendment does not apply to the full range of offences because it does not address how it interacts with other forms of secondary liability, such as encouraging or assisting a crime under the Serious Crime Act 2007. The noble and learned Lord’s summary of the development of the law pre and post the landmark case of Jogee in 2016 illustrates, I venture to say, the great complexity of this area, but I reassure your Lordships that the Government are listening.
Mention has been made of the few important pieces of work that are going on in this area. As the noble and learned Lord, Lord Garnier, has said, the Law Commission’s review of homicide offences and sentencing for murder is considering the implications of the current law on joint enterprise. I note the noble and learned Lord’s concerns about the length of time, but I should make it clear that the Law Commission is an independent body—in a sense, that is part of the point of it—which decides how to run its projects. It is not looking at joint enterprise on its own but at how joint enterprise is related to homicide offences and sentencing. One of the things it is considering is whether we should adopt a first and second degree murder to reflect the different roles played in sentencing, if not necessarily in conviction for a particular offence. As the noble and learned Lord will know, there is a significant interaction between the categorisation of homicide offences, the impact of partial defences and mandatory sentencing requirements, which makes separating out of these aspects of the report more complex.
Secondly, the Law Commission’s review of criminal appeals is examining if or how historic convictions are considered, which is a key area of concern for many people. Thirdly, the CPS has been consulting on its policies on gang-related prosecutions. This includes the controversial use of drill and rap music as evidence. It is also improving data collection on joint enterprise cases. As a number of your Lordships have referred to, last September, the CPS published its first annual data report on joint enterprise homicide and attempted homicide cases. The Government also recognise the important work of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Miscarriages of Justice and the Westminster Commission, in which the noble and learned Lord is involved. I need not remind him that it is in the process of taking evidence and considering reform of joint enterprise, and we look forward to its report.
So, while the Government recognise the concerns about joint enterprise, and work is under way to address these issues, we cannot support this amendment today for the reasons I have given, and I invite the noble and learned Lord to withdraw his amendment.
Lord Marks of Henley-on-Thames (LD)
Can I just ask the Minister to reconsider, or at least explain, her argument that it is significant in this regard that different juries might come to different conclusions on the same or similar facts in different parts of the country, on one day or another? Is not her experience as a judge that that is an everyday event? Does she not consider that that is one reason why juries do not give reasons and are not asked for their reasons for any given decision that they make? Because it is a fact of life that we all accept.
Baroness Levitt (Lab)
Not giving reasons is of course one of the criticisms that is sometimes made of jury trials. In the Government’s view, the wider and broader concept in the current law of an act of assistance or encouragement, combined with the intention to assist or encourage, gives a broad enough scope to allow juries to look at the conditions in every different case—whereas, when you are saying a “significant contribution”, it would be a matter of value judgment for particular juries as to whether they thought that a lookout was a significant contribution or not. For that reason, we think it would introduce significant uncertainty and significant risk of disparity in verdicts.
Lord Garnier (Con)
My Lords, I thank all noble Lords who have taken part in this debate. It has been, for me, an interesting and educational 55 minutes and I hope that the Government will have found it so as well. Although the Law Commission is of course an independent body, I dare say it might be sent a copy of this evening’s debate, which might encourage it to accelerate the way in which it is looking at this admittedly difficult and complicated question. I do not think that any of us who have spoken this evening thinks it is an easy question.
I thank the noble Lords, Lord Ponsonby and Lord Marks of Henley-on-Thames, the noble Baronesses, Lady Fox and Lady Brinton, and my noble friend on the Front Bench Lord Davies of Gower for their thoughtful and useful—I do not say “useful” in a demeaning way; I genuinely mean it—contributions to this debate, because it is, as I have said, difficult. The Minister was the first to accept that. She and I—and perhaps the noble Lord, Lord Marks, and others—will have summed up to juries and directed juries on the question of joint enterprise in one case or another. I dare say, at Snaresbrook Crown Court, there were probably quite a lot of difficult cases that had to be dealt with. However, I do not accept the Minister’s suggestion that juries would find it difficult, or that it would create other sorts of difficulties, to work out what “significant contribution” means.
Juries can work out, following proper direction from the judge, how to deal with actions taken in self-defence. You could get a different set of facts which would allow the defence to run, whereas, in other cases, it would not. Significant contribution is not a difficult concept, and it is not one that 12 members of a jury, when properly directed by the judge and having heard arguments from the lawyers for the respective parties, the prosecution and the defence, could not grapple with. They could. One has to think not just about “significant contribution”: let us work out what “no contribution” means. What does “insignificant contribution” mean? It strikes me that by simply posing those questions, one should not be frightened of the “significant contribution” question.
As I say, I understand the public policy, I understand the politics and I understand that my Government in the past, and now this Government, are worried about being seen to be weak on crime. For goodness’ sake, we have heard that record played year in, year out. But I hope that this evening’s short discussion will encourage others outside Parliament to keep pressing their arguments, both in court and academically. I hope that those who have taken part in this debate will continue to press for reform in this area. And I hope that the Law Commission, if it is listening, will accelerate its process.
It is now nearly 7.15 pm on a Thursday and it is almost a capital offence to talk in Committee stage on a Thursday at this hour. So I will bring my remarks to a conclusion by finally repeating my thanks to all those who have taken part. I beg the leave of the Committee to withdraw my amendment.
Lord Cromwell
“Use of drone technology: offence(1) A person commits an offence if they use drone technology to—(a) conduct reconnaissance of land or buildings with the intent of committing a further crime, or(b) carry items including controlled drugs, stolen goods, illegal weapons, harmful substances, or other items intended for illegal use in respect of people, property or good order. (2) A person guilty of an offence under subsection (1) is liable—(a) on summary conviction, to a fine not exceeding level 5 on the standard scale;(b) on conviction on indictment, to imprisonment for a term not exceeding two years or a fine (or both).”
Lord Cromwell (CB)
My Lords, I have just been informed by the noble Lord, Lord Garnier, that I am about to commit almost a criminal offence by speaking at all. “We few, we happy few”. I will be as quick as I can. I start by thanking the Ministers, the noble Lords, Lord Hanson and Lord Hendy, for their kind assistance in considering this amendment, and the former’s very helpful letter to me of 29 January.
Drone technology has transformed many aspects of life and it would be foolish to suppose that it would not be used by criminals as part of their activities across the world. The technology continues to evolve, to become autonomous and t be coupled with AI. Legislation, almost by definition, cannot keep pace with such evolving technologies. While noble Lords will be relieved to know that I am not going to tilt at AI windmills tonight, I put down this amendment to highlight the abuse of drones for criminal purposes just for reconnaissance and for illegal deliveries. I have been on the receiving end of the former, finding drones buzzing around business premises to scope out what machinery or products are stored there which criminals can later return to steal. I understand that drones are similarly used along railways, for example, to look for copper wiring to steal.
The Minister’s letter of 29 January argues that the necessary law is, on paper, largely there, and that the real challenge lies in practical enforcement. His letter explains that, while technically it may be possible to show that someone is, under the Theft Act 1968, committing the offence of “going equipped for stealing”, reconnaissance as such is nevertheless not a criminal offence, essentially because it is very hard to prove intent. I entirely accept this, and also the Minister’s point that it would not be practical or proportionate to create no-fly zones over every possible target of theft.
However, I worry about people who feel unprotected when drones are routinely flown over domestic, commercial or public property in a way that is plainly intrusive and potentially preparatory to crime. It seems that nothing can be done. They and the police must stand off and wait until an act of criminality under existing laws is committed. I suspect that we may, in that case, see people start to take the law into their own hands.
As regards the use of drones as a means of delivery, their use to get drugs and other items into prisons is already well known, but there is a growing and wider use of drones as a delivery service for illegal items elsewhere. I was recently told about a delivery drone seen regularly flying back and forth between a drug dealer’s hilltop house and the settlement below.
The Minister’s letter encouragingly points out that new regulations now require drones to be equipped with what is called direct remote identification, which works like a digital number-plate that can be detected, apparently by anybody with a smartphone, who can then report this to the police.
Baroness Doocey (LD)
My Lords, as the Home Secretary observed in the recent White Paper, policing has not always kept pace with a rapidly changing world. Airspace has indeed become a new frontier for both opportunistic and organised crime. Drones are now being used by burglars and organised gangs as near-silent scouts, identifying empty homes, weak locks or high-value items through windows. The law can, of course, address the burglary that follows, but it struggles to capture the preceding act of reconnaissance. This is particularly relevant to rural crime, where drones are acting as the advance guard for the theft and export of GPS equipment.
In our prisons, drones are described by residents as “almost routine”, delivering drugs, phones and weapons straight into exercise yards. Ministry of Justice data shows more than 1,700 drone incidents in a single year. That fuels violence and instability across the estate. However, as the Justice Committee pointed out last October, the problem is not only the drones but the conditions that allow them in: broken windows, unmaintained netting and faulty CCTV. Creating a new offence may have value, but it cannot by itself remedy years of underinvestment in the prison system.
I want to raise two further concerns. The first is an operational one. With core capital grants under severe strain, how can we realistically expect overstretched forces to invest in drone detection and countersurveillance technology? Secondly, until national integration plans are fully delivered, data on drone incursions will remain largely trapped in 43 police silos, leaving us blind to the wider intelligence picture.
Lord Davies of Gower (Con)
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Cromwell, for tabling his amendment. We entirely understand the intention behind it and support its aim.
In government, we gave police forces the power to intercept or seize drones suspected of being used to break the law, and those that attempt to smuggle drugs or weapons into prisons. Before the 2024 election, we announced our intention to implement no-fly zones around prisons, extending the current provisions over airports. We therefore entirely support the aim of prohibiting drone use for criminal ends. Using drone technology as a reconnaissance tool for a crime is self-evidently wrong and that should be reflected in the law.
Similarly, using drones to carry drugs, stolen goods, weapons, harmful substances or anything similar must be tackled by the police. For the police to do so, they must be given the means. Nowhere is this more evident than in prisons, where drugs and weapons are being transported in by drones in order to run lucrative illegal businesses. Reports suggest that some offenders are deliberately breaking probation terms in order to sell drugs in jail, where they can make more money. Anything that enables this must be stamped out. If drones are indeed a means of transport for many of these drugs, we should target those who operate the drones and play a part in criminal enterprises. I hope that the Minister recognises this problem and will agree with me that the amendment is entirely correct in its aims.
Lord Katz (Lab)
I thank the noble Lord, Lord Cromwell, for setting out the case for his amendment. In tabling the amendment, he wrote to my noble friend Lord Hanson of Flint and to my noble friend Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill at the Department for Transport on the issue.
I think across the Committee we share the same concerns. I stress that the Government take the issue of the use of drones to facilitate illegal activity extremely seriously. However, my noble friend Lord Hanson of Flint set out in his letter to the noble Lord that the challenges of responding to these are not gaps in our criminal law so much as limitations on the practical enforcement tools available and in regulation to improve the visibility and compliance of drones. We are working to address these issues by supporting the development of counter-drone technologies and operational approaches, and ensuring regulations are in place that enable the legitimate use of drones while assisting operational responders in identifying illegitimate users.
Amendment 486A seeks to criminalise the use of drones for criminal reconnaissance and the carrying of illicit substances. The act of criminal reconnaissance is not in itself currently an offence, as proving intent, prior to an act being committed or without substantive additional evidence, would be extremely difficult for prosecutors. Criminal reconnaissance using a drone encounters the same issue. It would be impractical and disproportionate to arrest anyone for taking photos of a property or site, or for piloting a drone. In both instances, the act of reconnaissance would not be practically distinguishable from legitimate everyday actions, making the proposed offence effectively unenforceable. Where intent could be proven, it is likely that such acts could be prosecuted under existing legislation—for example, the offence of going equipped for stealing in Section 25 of the Theft Act 1968.
The carrying of illicit materials, whether it is in and out of prisons or elsewhere at large, is already an offence, regardless of a drone’s involvement. There is already a comprehensive regime of offences relating to the possession and supply of drugs, weapons and other illicit materials. I do not think that the amendment would address any gaps in the criminal law.
The Government have already made changes to the unmanned aircraft regulations to require drones to be equipped, as the noble Lord, Lord Cromwell, set out, with direct remote identification, which will improve visibility and accountability of compliant drones. This system will allow drones to broadcast identification and location information in-flight and will help identify drone operators who may be acting suspiciously or breaking the law.
I share the sentiment of the noble Lord and the Committee in seeking to curtail the use of drones for criminal purposes. However, for the reasons I have outlined, I ask that he withdraw his amendment and let me sit down—as I have a cough.
Lord Cromwell (CB)
My Lords, I thank everyone who has taken part; I am not going to namecheck—you all know who you are.
It would be an act of cruelty to encourage the Minister, with his cough, to say anything further. I was tempted to ask him to go into a lot more detail, but I do not think that is a good idea.
I suspect we may need to come back to this issue as drone technology continues to advance. I cannot resist mentioning that, more locally, the large giraffe fence that is erected in front of this building will be absolutely no defence against a drone attack—so let us hope it does not come. With that, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.
“(za) sections 40 and 41;(zb) section (Child criminal exploitation prevention orders: Scotland and Northern Ireland)(1) and Schedule (CCE prevention orders: Scotland);”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment gives the Scottish Ministers power to make regulations containing provision consequential on the specified provisions.
“(aa) section (Pornographic images of strangulation or suffocation: Scotland);”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment gives the Scottish Ministers power to make regulations containing provision consequential on the specified new clause (inserted after clause 84).
“(aa) sections (Child sexual abuse image-generators: Scotland) and (Possession of advice or guidance about child sexual abuse or CSA images: Scotland);” Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment gives the Scottish Ministers power to make regulations containing provision consequential on the specified new clauses (inserted after clauses 63 and 64).
“(za) section (Duty to report remote sale of knives etc in bulk: Northern Ireland);”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment gives the Department of Justice in Northern Ireland power to make regulations containing amendments consequential on my new clause, (Duty to report remote sale of knives etc in bulk: Northern Ireland), inserted after clause 36.
“(za) sections 40 and 41;(zb) section (Child criminal exploitation prevention orders: Scotland and Northern Ireland)(2) and Schedule (CCE prevention orders: Northern Ireland);”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment gives the Department of Justice in Northern Ireland power to make regulations containing provision consequential on the specified provisions.
“(aa) section (Pornographic images of strangulation or suffocation: England and Wales and Northern Ireland);”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment gives the Department of Justice in Northern Ireland power to make regulations containing provision consequential on the specified new clause (inserted after clause 84).
“(aa) section (Child sexual abuse image-generators: Northern Ireland);”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment gives the Department of Justice in Northern Ireland power to make regulations containing provision consequential on the specified new clause (inserted after clause 63).
“(ca) section (Child abduction: Northern Ireland);”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment gives the Department of Justice in Northern Ireland power to make regulations containing provision consequential on the specified new clause (inserted after clause 104).
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment provides that the new power of the Secretary of State to amend the list of prevention orders in clause 51 (inserted by my amendment to clause 51, page 68, line 30) is subject to the affirmative resolution procedure.
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment provides for regulations made by the Secretary of State under the specified new clauses (inserted after clause 84) to be subject to the affirmative procedure.
“(c) regulations under paragraph 10(4) of Schedule (CCE prevention orders: Scotland).”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment provides that the new power of the Scottish Ministers to amend the list of prevention orders in paragraph 10 of the new Schedule about CCE prevention orders in Scotland (inserted after Schedule 5) is subject to the affirmative resolution procedure.
“(c) regulations under paragraph 10(6) of Schedule (CCE prevention orders: Northern Ireland).”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment provides that the new power of the Department of Justice to amend the list of prevention orders in paragraph 10 of the new Schedule about CCE prevention orders in Northern Ireland (inserted after Schedule 5) is subject to the affirmative resolution procedure.
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment adjusts provision about regulations made by the Welsh Ministers to take account of Part 2A of the Legislation (Wales) Act 2019 (which is inserted by the Legislation (Procedure, Publication and Repeals) (Wales) Act 2025).
Lord Katz (Lab)
My Lords, these are minor and technical amendments to the process by which Welsh Ministers will make regulations under powers conferred by the Bill. Recent legislation passed by the Senedd created “Welsh Statutory Instruments”, which are subject to three kinds of procedure in the Senedd that are similar to the affirmative and negative procedures followed in this place. These two amendments simply update the Bill’s provisions to reflect this new process, ensuring that the regulation-making power conferred on the Welsh Ministers by Clause 192 reflects the provisions of the Legislation (Wales) Act 2019 as recently amended. I beg to move.
Lord Davies of Gower (Con)
My Lords, this is a short and uncontroversial amendment. The 15 days in Committee we have had on the Bill have been a very long but important process, and I thank all the noble Lords on the Front Bench opposite for the many hours dedicated to the Bill so far. The amendment makes an amendment to the regulation-making powers of Welsh Ministers in consequence of the Legislation (Procedure, Publication and Repeals) (Wales) Act 2025, and for that reason I have no objection.
“(8) Regulations made by the Welsh Ministers under section 192 are subject to the Senedd annulment procedure (see section 37E of the Legislation (Wales) Act 2019 (anaw 4)).”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment adjusts provision about regulations made by the Welsh Ministers to take account of Part 2A of the Legislation (Wales) Act 2019 (which is inserted by the Legislation (Procedure, Publication and Repeals) (Wales) Act 2025).
““regulations” means regulations under any provision of this Act except section 201.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment is consequential on my amendments to clause 201, page 232, lines 25 and 35.
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment removes section 40(5), which should extend to England and Wales only, from a list of provisions having UK extent.
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment provides for Schedule 7 (which lists the offences to which clause 65 applies) to have UK extent.
“(ja) section (Pornographic images of strangulation or suffocation: England and Wales and Northern Ireland) (5);”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment provides that the amendment to the Online Safety Act 2023 in the specified new clause (inserted after clause 84) extends to the whole of the UK.
“(ja) sections (Obscenity etc offences: technology testing defence) and (Technology testing defence: meaning of “relevant offence”);”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment provides for the specified new clauses (inserted after clause 84) to have UK extent.
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment provides that clause 36(1), which inserts new section 141D of the Criminal Justice Act 1988, extends to England and Wales and Scotland. At present it extends only to England and Wales.
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment provides that the subsections of the specified new clause (inserted after clause 84) that amend the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008 extend to England and Wales and Northern Ireland.
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment provides for the specified provisions of my new clause (Duty to report remote sale of knives etc in bulk: Northern Ireland), inserted after clause 36, to extend to Northern Ireland only.
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment provides that the subsection introducing the new Schedule about CCE prevention orders for Northern Ireland (inserted after Schedule 5) extends to Northern Ireland only.
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment provides that the specified new clause (inserted after clause 105) extends to Northern Ireland only.
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment provides that the specified new clause (inserted after clause 104) extends to Northern Ireland only.
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment provides that the new subsection inserted by my amendment to clause 94, page 121, line 17 extends to Northern Ireland only.
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment provides for the specified new clauses to extend to Northern Ireland.
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment provides that the new Schedule about CCE prevention orders for Northern Ireland (inserted after Schedule 5) extends to Northern Ireland only.
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment provides that the subsection introducing the new Schedule about CCE prevention orders for Scotland (inserted after Schedule 5) extends to Scotland only.
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment provides that the specified new clause (inserted after clause 84) extends to Scotland only.
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment provides that the new Schedule about CCE prevention orders for Scotland (inserted after Schedule 5) extends to Scotland only.
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment gives clause 28(2) the same extent as the provisions it amends, with the effect of allowing trial on indictment in Scotland for an offence under section 141A of the Criminal Justice Act 1988.
“(ba) section 36(2);”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment provides for clause 36(2) to have the same extent as the provision it amends. It is related to my second amendment to clause 200, page 230, line 29, which provides for new section 141D to extend to Scotland as well as England and Wales.
“(ba) section (Duty to report remote sale of knives etc in bulk: Northern Ireland)(4);”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment provides for the specified provision to have the same extent as the provision it amends.
“(ca) section (Child sexual abuse image-generators: Scotland);”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment provides for the specified new clause (inserted after clause 63) to have the same extent as the provisions it amends.
“(ca) section (Child sexual abuse image-generators: Northern Ireland);”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment provides for the specified new clause (inserted after clause 63) to have the same extent as the provisions it amends.
“(da) section (Possession of advice or guidance about child sexual abuse or CSA images: Scotland)”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment provides for the specified new clause (inserted after clause 64) to have the same extent as the provisions it amends.
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment removes clause 195 (extradition) from the list of provisions that come into force on Royal Assent. The effect is that it will be commenced by regulations under clause 201(1).
“(ba) sections (Obscenity etc offences: technology testing defence) and (Technology testing defence: meaning of “relevant offence”);”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment provides for the specified new clauses (inserted after clause 84) to come into force 2 months after Royal Assent.
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment is consequential on my amendment to clause 94, page 121, line 17.
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment provides for the Scottish Ministers to make commencement regulations rather than commencement orders.
“(za) section (Duty to report remote sale of knives etc in bulk: Northern Ireland)(1) to (3), and section (Duty to report remote sale of knives etc in bulk: Northern Ireland)(4) so far as extending to Northern Ireland;” Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment provides for my new clause (Duty to report remote sale of knives etc in bulk: Northern Ireland), inserted after clause 36, to be commenced by order made by the Department of Justice in Northern Ireland.
“(za) section (Child sexual abuse image-generators: Northern Ireland) so far as extending to Northern Ireland;”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment gives the Department of Justice in Northern Ireland power to commence the specified new clause (inserted after clause 63) for Northern Ireland.
“(za) section (Child criminal exploitation prevention orders: Scotland and Northern Ireland)(2) and Schedule (CCE prevention orders: Northern Ireland);”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment gives the Department of Justice in Northern Ireland power to commence the new provisions about child criminal exploitation prevention orders for Northern Ireland.
“(aa) section 94(3);”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment gives the Department for Justice in Northern Ireland power to commence the provision inserted by my amendment to clause 94, page 121, line 17.
“(aa) sections (Stalking protection orders: Northern Ireland) and (Guidance about disclosure of information by police: Northern Ireland);”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment provides for the Department of Justice in Northern Ireland to commence the specified new clauses.
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment gives the Department of Justice in Northern Ireland power to commence the subsections of the specified new clause (inserted after clause 84) that amend the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008, in so far as they extend to Northern Ireland.
“(ba) section (Child abduction: Northern Ireland);”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment gives the Department of Justice in Northern Ireland power to commence the specified new clause (inserted after clause 104).
“(8A) Section (Safeguarding vulnerable groups: regulated activity (Northern Ireland)) comes into force on such day as the Department of Health in Northern Ireland may by order appoint.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment gives the Department of Health in Northern Ireland power to commence the specified new Clause (inserted after clause 105).
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment gives the Scottish Ministers power to commence the specified new clauses (inserted after clauses 63 and 64) for Scotland.
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment gives the Scottish Ministers to commence the subsection introducing the new Schedule about CCE prevention orders for Scotland (inserted after Schedule 5).
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment gives the Scottish Ministers power to commence the specified new clause (inserted after clause 84).
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment gives the Scottish Ministers power to commence the new Schedule about CCE prevention orders (inserted after Schedule 5).
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment provides for the Scottish Ministers to make commencement regulations rather than commencement orders.
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment is consequential on my amendments to clause 201, page 232, lines 25 and 35.
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment is consequential on my amendment to clause 201, page 232, line 33, inserting a new subsection after subsection (8).
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment is consequential on my amendments to clause 201, page 232, lines 25 and 35.
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment is consequential on my amendment to clause 201, page 232, line 33, inserting a new subsection after subsection (8).
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment is consequential on my amendment to clause 201, page 232, line 25.