Lords Chamber

Tuesday 20th January 2026

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14:38
None Portrait Introduction(s): Baroness Gill; Baroness Davies of Devonport
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Charles Charles III, Charles III, by Charles III, by the Charles III, by the Grace Charles III, by the Grace of Charles III, by the Grace of God Charles III, by the Grace of God of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and of her other realms and territories. King, head of the Commonwealth, defender of the Faith to all Lords, spiritual and temporal, and all other subjects whatsoever to whom these presents shall come. Greeting. Know ye that we of our special grace, certain knowledge, and mere motion, in pursuance of the Life Peerages Act 1958, and of all other powers, in that behalf us enabling do by these presents advance, create, and prefer our trusty and well-beloved Neena Gill commander of our most excellent order of the British Empire to the state degree, style, dignity, title and honour of Baroness Gill of Jewellery quarter in our city of Birmingham and of Southall, in our London Borough of Ealing.

And for us, our heirs and successors do appoint, give and grant unto her the said name, state, degree, style, dignity, title and honour of Baroness Gill to have and to hold on to her for her life, willing and by these presents granting for us our heirs and successors, that she may have, hold and possess a seat, place, and voice in the parliaments and public assemblies and councils of us, our heirs and successors within our United Kingdom, amongst the Barons, and also that she may enjoy and use all the rights, privileges, Preeminences, immunities and advantages to the degree of a Baron duly and of right belonging, which Barons of our United Kingdom have heretofore used and enjoyed, or, as they do at present, use and enjoy.

In witness whereof we have caused these our letters to be made patent witness ourself at Westminster in the afternoon of the 14th day of January, in the fourth year of our sign-manual.

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I. Nina Baroness Gale, do swear by Almighty God that I will be by Almighty God that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to His Majesty King Charles, his heirs and successors according to

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Charles Charles III, Charles III, by

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Charles III, by the Charles III, by the grace Charles III, by the grace of Charles III, by the grace of God of the United Kingdom, of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and Britain and Northern Ireland, and of our other realms and territories. King, head of the Commonwealth, King, head of the Commonwealth, defender of the Faith, to all those spiritual and temporal, and all other our subjects, whatsoever to other our subjects, whatsoever to whom these presents shall come. Greeting. Know ye that we of our special grace, certain knowledge, and mere motion, in pursuance of the Life Peerages Act 1958, and of all other powers, in that behalf us enabling do by these presents advance, create, and prefer our trusty and well-beloved Sharron Elizabeth Davies member of our most excellent order of the British Empire to the state degree, style, dignity, title and honour of Baroness Davies of Devonport of Bradford on Avon in our County of Wiltshire.

And for us, our heirs and successors do appoint, give and grant unto her the said name, state, degree, style, dignity, title and honour of Baroness Davies of Devonport to have and to hold unto her for her life, willing, and by these presents granting for us our heirs and successors, that she may have, hold, and possess a seat, place, and voice in the parliaments and public assemblies and councils of us, our heirs and successors within our United Kingdom, amongst the Barons, and also that she may enjoy and use all the rights, privileges, Preeminences, immunities and advantages to the degree of a Baron duly and of right belonging, which Barons of our United Kingdom have heretofore used and enjoyed, or, as they do at present, use and enjoy.

In witness whereof we have caused these our letters to be made patent witness ourself at Westminster in the afternoon of the 15th day of January, in the fourth year of our reign, by warrant under the King's

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sign-manual. I. Sharon Baroness Davies of Devonport, do solemnly, sincerely, Devonport, do solemnly, sincerely, and truly declare and affirm that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to His Majesty King allegiance to His Majesty King Charles, his heirs and successors, Charles, his heirs and successors,
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None Portrait Oral questions: Rising level of youth unemployment Lord Leigh of Hurley (Conservative)
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Second, Oral Question Lord Leigh of Hurley. my name on the Order Paper.
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None Portrait Oral questions: Findings of the MBRRACE-UK report: 'Maternal mortality 2022-2024' that the maternal death rate in pregnancy rose by 20% between 2009–11 and 2022–24
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whilst the National Maternity, Maternity and Neonatal Taskforce, chaired by the Secretary of State, will transform these into a deliverable national Action plan to drive change. In the meantime, we
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Baroness Hughes of Stretford Portrait Baroness Hughes of Stretford (Labour)
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drive change. In the meantime, we are taking various actions, including piloting Martha's Rule including piloting Martha's Rule and expanding the maternal medicine networks.

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I thank my noble friend for that answer. She'll know that the conservative promised to halve maternity mortality by 2025, and as the report shows, instead, it's risen substantially with stark disparities for older women and those from BME and disadvantaged backgrounds. And between 2021 and 23, over 600 women died either during or shortly after pregnancy, a tragedy compounded by the fact that the majority of cases this was from a preventable complication of the pregnancy itself.

So I know the government's doing certain things to which you referred, and those are welcome. But actually I think that they're not being applied consistently in every area. And more importantly, trusts and trusts are not reply are not required to inform NHS England of the plans that they're making. And in short, there seems to be a lack of robust oversight. I say to my noble friend so can she tell me how will the government ensure that the standards and new procedures that they want to implement will be implemented effectively by every trust and in relation to every

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pregnant woman? Hear, hear. My noble friend is right to use the word tragedy in respect of maternal deaths, particularly those from preventable causes. And my noble friend is also correct that noble friend is also correct that unfortunately and sadly, that most aspects of maternal safety ambition, aspects of maternal safety ambition, which was set up under the previous government, are very unlikely to be
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Lord Davies of Gower Portrait Lord Davies of Gower (Conservative)
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My Lords, I beg to move amendment 411 standing in my name and that of my noble friends Lord Cameron of Lochiel and Lord Keen of Ellie. This is an amendment championed by my hon. Friend Matt Vickers at committee. In the other place, the amendment alters the statutory threshold for the exercise of the powers under section 60 of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act, 1994. That section permits a police officer of at least the rank of inspector to authorise, stop and search powers within a defined locality for a period of 24 hours.

Where such an authorisation has been given, a police officer may stop any member of the public to search them for offensive weapons or dangerous instruments without suspicion of a common of the commission of an offence, so essentially it allows for a temporary adjustment to standard stop and search powers. The current test that must be met is for the officer to of sufficient rank to reasonably reasonably believe that incidents involving serious violence may take place in any locality in his police area.

Our amendment lowers the threshold so that the police would be able to use section 60 powers, where there is a reasonable likelihood of violence, not serious violence. No, the fundamental principle behind this amendment is that the police should be able to act where there is a threat of violence, any form of violence, without being required to weigh the seriousness of that violence. This removes the more subjective element of the test. We know that stop and search powers are highly effective in combating crime and preventing violent offences.

In the year ending March 2025, there were a total of 528,582 stop and search conducted by officers in England and Wales. This represents a slight decrease of 1.4% from the previous year. Of those, 5572 were conducted under section 60 powers, which actually represents an increase of 5.4%. This is welcome, and I am pleased to see the police making good use of their powers. But given that the there were 1.1 million incidents of violence with or without injury recorded by the police in the year ending June 2025, a figure that the ONS has said shows no statistically significant change compared with the previous year.

And there were still 51,527 knife offences. There is more work that needs to be done. So, my Lords, lowering the threshold for the use of section 60 is another tool that the government could utilise in their efforts to crack down on the use of offensive weapons and the incidents of violence. I beg to move.
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Lord Jackson of Peterborough Portrait Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Conservative)
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Amendment proposed after clause 144, insert the new clause as 144, insert the new clause as printed on the Marshalled List. My Lords, I rise to support the Lords, I rise to support the amendment in the name of my noble friend on the front bench. And may I also thank the House for their forbearance, the fact that I wasn't able to move my previous amendment on mobile phone thefts, and I'd like to put on record my warmest thanks to my noble friend, Baroness Neville-rolfe for moving it so eloquently on that occasion.

My Lords, this is an issue about the difference between serious crime and serious violence and violence. But the wider context, my Lords, is the fact that UK has a knife crime problem in London. The number of incidents up to June 2025 was 15,639, and this is an increase of nearly 72% from the data recorded in the year 20 1516. Unfortunately, it has to be said that the numbers of stop and search encounters peaked at the end of the last Labour government and dramatically decreased under the previous.

The last two governments. Between 2003 and 2011, numbers of stop and search stop and searches increased, peaking at 1.2 million. But by 2018 this had fallen 77%. The number of arrests resulting from stop and search encounters had fallen from 120,000 to 48,000. My Lords, the fact of the matter is that there is significant evidence that Stop and search does demonstrably have an impact on the incidence of knife crime and therefore reducing crime. A study released in 2025 by two criminologists, Piquero and Lawrence Sherman, found that stop and search encounters were successful in reducing deaths and injuries related to weapons when they analysed data between 2008 and 2023.

The conclusion of the study was, quote, increased stop and search encounters can significantly reduce knife related injuries and homicides in public places. An evidence from a number of bodies and think tanks, including Policy Exchange, suggests that whilst there may be a range of causal factors, a link between rates of knife crime and rates of stop and search exists as the rate of stop and search searches decreases, the amount of knife crime increases as stop and search rises. The amount of knife crime also rises, my Lords.

To quote the Chief Constable, Sir Stephen Watson, the Chief Constable of Greater Manchester, last year, if you don't back your officers to do stop and search, they will stop doing stop and search. And if you stop doing stop and search, you'll see street robberies going up. So, my Lords, the issue is that the difference between serious violence and violence within that context, and my simple point to your Lordships' House is that if we want to take weapons off the streets and prevent incidences of knife crime and other crime, then you have to increase, stop and search, and therefore you have to give warranted officers the legal underpinning and the authority to make those appropriate decisions for stop and search.

In 2023, there were 5014 occasions when a police officer found a weapon or firearm when looking for a prohibited item, 3221 of these cases, they were looking for drugs. This is a case of effective policing and not just a case of getting lucky. My Lords, if we can stop for violence, they may find weapons that could have led to a more serious situation. If not, there is a potential for people to just walk away. On that basis, I think it's wise for the government to give consideration to this amendment because it does allow flexibility in operational policing, and I do believe fundamentally it will prevent crime and may, even in the long run, prevent serious injury or death.

And therefore, I would invite Ministers and the House to give briefly.
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Lord Blencathra Portrait Lord Blencathra (Conservative)
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To. brings clarity and accountability to the exceptional power in section 60 of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act of 1994. This is not a call for strengthen police powers. It's a call to describe them accurately so the public understands their narrow scope and the safeguards that constrain them. Section 60 is triggered only when a police officer of or above the rank of inspector reasonably believes exceptional rather than just routine. The inspector level threshold, the within, the written and recorded authorisation, the geographic and temporal limits, the ability to seize weapons, and the requirement to provide records to those stock are not peripheral details.

They are the legal guardrails that protect civil liberties while enabling targeted public safety action. I simply ask, where is the dividing line between violence and serious violence? OK, someone gets stabbed multiple times and is life threatening. I think we'd all agree that serious violence. But what about the person who gets stabbed once and suffers a non-life threatening cut? It's not merely violence so it doesn't count. And that is why we have to change this definition to any violence, no matter how serious it may be called.

This is not wide ranging. This is not a wide ranging opening of the stop and search powers, applying everywhere for all time, using the word violence in operational documents with an explicit cross-reference to the sixth section, 60 targets reduces confusion and broadens with broader strategic programs labelled serious violence. It prevents the normalisation of suspicionless searches and makes it easier for Parliament oversight bodies and the public to scrutinise each authorisation against the statutory test. My Lords, I conclude by saying this amendment is modest, it's practical and it's proportionate.

It highlights the statutory safeguards and does not remove any of them, but it does give the police a sensible power to save lives and injury where they think there may be more violence. I do urge the House and the noble Lords Minister to support amendment 411.
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Baroness Chakrabarti Portrait Baroness Chakrabarti (Labour)
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I am. >> I'm pleased to to follow the noble Lord Lord Sentamu and I share some of his concerns about this amendment. But I wonder, before I amendment. But I wonder, before I share those concerns, if I might ask the noble Lords opposite to ask the noble Lords opposite to explain the relationship and potential contradictions between this amendment and the amendment that they have in the next group on on digital identity, because that amendment could have been that subsequent.

It's a shame, in a way. I think that these these amendments don't sit in a single group, because I think it would have been easier to expose the thinking behind them and the relationship between them, because that amendment prohibiting the police, requiring someone to to show a digital identity document in the event that they're stopped and searched, could have been drafted by my former colleagues at Liberty. This amendment on diluting protections against arbitrary stop and search would, would, would certainly not have been drafted by my former colleagues at liberty.

So, so noble Lords opposite seem to be pointing into into different directions when it comes to this, this relationship between the citizen and the state on the street. Now, I'm grateful to the to the noble Lord opposite for for setting out his amendment. And he spoke about the large number of of of stops and searches with some precision, I think. But what he didn't do was to go on to set out the number of those searches that resulted in a charge in an arrest, a charge or a conviction, because that is the kind of the kind of correlation that we need to examine.

If we if we want to justify suspicionless, stop and search in particular, as, as a very useful tool for preventing very serious crime. So I would be interested in any information that noble Lords have about how many of these searches, particularly suspicionless searches, lead to, for example, a criminal charge. That is the kind of ratio that I think the committee ought to examine. Like the noble Lord Sentamu, I am concerned about suspicionless stop and searches. It really quite a blunt instrument.

I'm not saying it doesn't have a place on in the statute, but an obvious example is, you know, when, when, when when a guests come to this palace, they, they routinely go through a form of a suspicionless stop and search by walking through airport style security gates and having any bags stopped and searched. No, no room for concern or feelings of injustice there because it's a high security environment. Everybody understands the risk to the palace and those within it, and everybody is treated in the same way.

So there isn't this concern about arbitrary or discriminatory treatment. And and when, for example, under the Terrorism Terrorism Act or indeed under other statutes, place of particular risk and sensitivity is identified. In that way. You can see some the beginnings of some justification for suspicionless stop and search. But with respect to the noble Lord Jackson of Peterborough, when he spoke in support of this amendment, he was really almost, it seemed to me, justifying routine suspicionless stop and search.

Why not have it just everywhere in England and Wales? If it's so, if it's so effective? And of course why not is because, as the noble Lord Sentamu says, if you make this too readily available on to lower threshold suspicionless stop and search at large will lead to arbitrary and discriminatory results, and to a feeling of distrust by some communities, in particular young black men in particular, but not exclusively distrust between them and the

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police. It's of course, of course. As usual, the the noble Lady is

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As usual, the the noble Lady is making a very cogent and persuasive case. But I don't think she case. But I don't think she concedes that we're talking we're not talking about suspicionless searches. We're talking about an expectation that violence will happen. There will be a violent incident rather than a seriously violent incident. And I'll just leave you with the figures in London from 2021, there were 311,352 stop and searches, and it had fallen to 135,739 in 2024, but at the same time, there was an 86% rise in knife crime.

So I think the argument that those of us on this side are making is there has to be a balance. None of us want racially profiled overpolicing, but at the same time, we have to find a reason why if you reduce stop and searches, you're going to inevitably have an increase in knife crime.

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There's a noble Lord Birt with respect, this provision relates to suspicionless stop and search suspicionless stop and search because and this is a term that we use to describe a stop and search power that does not require reasonable suspicion that that person that I'm about to stop and person that I'm about to stop and search is a criminal or is going equipped or whatever it is. So this this power in section 60 is a this power in section 60 is a suspicionless stop and search power, which is why it needs to be circumscribed and why they have to be certain conditions met before an area can be designated.

Because the normal law of the land, as noble Lords will recognise, is that is that anywhere in the land an officer, a constable, can stop and search an individual who they reasonably suspect of carrying a knife or otherwise being involved in criminality. Yes.

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A section 60, in and of itself is a special circumstance. So the suspicionless piece or not needs to suspicionless piece or not needs to be looked at in that context. And I would just like to offer you this would just like to offer you this context. There is no such thing as non-serious violence. Let's be very clear when we're talking about the clear when we're talking about the impact of knife carrying, in particular, a knife that is ended up in the body of a person has been shown to multiple members of the community used to create terror before that tragedy has happened, and the idea that a stop and search is only potent when it leads to an arrest or a charge, is simply incorrect.

I have been a youth worker for over 35 years. I've worked with some of the most gang involved people in the entire country, and they will tell you they will be armed because they don't believe they're going to be stopped. So every time you do a stop and search, it sends a ripple, particularly to those who need to hear the ripple that it could happen. So it lowers their propensity to go armed. So just because it doesn't lead to a charge, a charge, it doesn't mean it hasn't been effective.
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