Crime and Policing Bill

Baroness Boycott Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 9th December 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

My Lords, I support all the amendments in this group, so well put forward by the noble Baronesses, Lady Bertin, Lady Kidron, Lady Kennedy and Lady Benjamin, but I particularly want to say a few words about Amendment 298 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Bertin.

I have been really alarmed by this. I was first alerted by my friend Laura Bates talking in her book about the “nudify” apps and how young children can be when they can get targeted—as young as eight or nine—and how this can happen to them in school, where they can be completely unaware and, suddenly, there is a picture of them naked circulating around, and a lot of girls want to drop out of school because of it.

It is not an accident that this is happening. It is driven by money, commerce and capitalism. It is not in any way inevitable that it happens. Something that is made by man—probably by a man, in this case, but maybe by a woman—can certainly be put right by government and by all of us. It is the result of a design choice, a market choice and a policy choice, and we can change it.

These apps are designed to strip girls’ photos and create sexualised images of them, often in seconds. They are incredibly easy to use, quite terrifyingly. I challenge anyone in this House who has not done it just to type in, “Can I have a nudify app?” You will get it in a minute. My great niece, who I work with, did it to herself, and the super weird thing about it is that it does not give you the body of Claudia Schiffer or Kate Moss or something that you are obviously not; it gives you the kind of body that you have.

The reality of it is very stark and horrible. Girls are harassed, threatened, coerced and manipulated before they even really understand what is happening. There is one major app that produces 200,000 fake nude images every day, and we are on track for 8 million of these deepfake images every year. They are an entire industry, which is functioning somewhere, taking money and doing this to our children. The police cannot act until after the harm has occurred, and schools cannot act pre-emptively. The platforms claim that they are not responsible because this is a tool, and it is not them. It is passing off the responsibility. They exist just to facilitate sexual abuse—for which, at the moment, very few people have to pay a price.

I would also like to speak about something that has happened but has not been mentioned very much in this debate. I am an ambassador and patron of a group called The Vavengers, which seeks to stop vaginal mutilation. The person who runs it is Turkish, and she has noticed now that the primary form of cosmetic surgery in Turkey is young women—though not all of them young—going there to have their vaginas reconstructed to look like the vaginas that you see in pornography, which look like those of 13 year-old girls. They are going to Turkey to have their labia cut off. Sema, who is the child of a slave and an extraordinary woman, says you can always tell when you are on the return plane from Istanbul because there are a lot of young women fidgeting because they are in pain. It seems to me that this is an extension of the world that we have arrived in and allowed to happen. It is shocking.

My granddaughter is three. I look at her and think that, in four or five years’ time, she could be the victim of this. As those in this House know, I got into this 55 years ago. If anyone had told me then that the day would come when I would have to ask for someone not to be able to have an app that would take my granddaughter’s clothes off and make her a neurotic, unhappy young woman because she is sexually not like the things she sees in pornography, and with my grandson, who is also three, going through the kind of things that I think young men do, I would say that we should be damned ashamed of ourselves. All of us women in this House, of different ages, have fought long and hard through the years to get where we are, and we and this Government owe it back to the next generation of children. I am very grateful to all the younger women such as the noble Baronesses, Lady Bertin and Lady Owen, for the work they have done. I can only say that I wish that I was not on this journey with them and that it did not exist.

[Baroness Shawcross-Wolfson (Con)]

My Lords, I too support my noble friend Lady Bertin’s amendments and I will particularly talk about Amendment 314. There is no debate about whether certain pornography is harmful. Parliament settled that question decades ago. There is no debate about whether it is right for our Parliament to ban harmful pornography. We already do. We are merely debating whether we have the determination to apply our existing laws to the latest distribution channels.

In the early 1980s, we saw a dramatic increase in video cassette recorders in the home and the subsequent emergence of video nasties. In that era, Parliament was quick to catch up to the latest technological innovation and, as we have heard, the Video Recordings Act 1984 was passed with cross-party support. As a result, pornography released on physical formats is and has always been strictly regulated in the UK. In 2003, Parliament extended those protections through the Communications Act to ensure that UK-based video-on-demand services, including those that specialised in pornography, could not distribute content that the British Board of Film Classification would refuse to classify. Amendment 314 simply takes the definition of harmful content in the Communications Act 2003 and seeks to apply it to online pornography, with a proper framework for enforcement. Some 41 years ago, we said that harmful content could not be distributed on video cassettes, 22 years ago we said it could not be distributed through video-on-demand services, and now it is time to close the gap in the law which allows it to be legally distributed on the internet.

Amendments 291 and 290 would ensure that incest material and depictions of child sexual abuse in online pornography are made illegal. My noble friend Lady Bertin and others have already outlined the immense damage that this content does. I welcome the Government’s commitment to end the depiction of strangulation in online pornography, not least because it demonstrates their conviction that such material can be banned. All it requires is political will. I hope that the Committee will find that same political will to make pornography that mimics child sex abuse or portrays incest illegal.

I support Amendment 292, which would introduce a statutory duty for platforms to verify the age and consent of individuals who feature in pornography. It is the bare minimum we need to start tackling the rampant exploitation in the porn industry.

I conclude by returning to my starting point. In previous generations, when the technology advanced, from cinema to video and from video to streaming, Parliament acted. Today is no different. We have acted because, as the sponsor of the Video Recordings Act said 40 years ago, incredibly presciently:

“Producers and suppliers of this base and debasing material have only one aim—to supply the worst elements of human nature for profit”.—[Official Report, Commons, 11/11/1983; col. 522.]


We have acted because we have long known that violent porn—the type of pornography that depicts acts that are illegal in real life—is damaging. At no point have we as a Parliament or a society proactively debated and agreed to accept the type of abusive pornography that is now mainstream and widespread on the internet. No Minister from any Government has stood at the Dispatch Box and argued that the public have a right to watch scenes depicting incest or child sex abuse—I doubt any Minister would. No Minister has made the case that this material is harmless, and no Minister could, given the evidence we have heard today. We allow this material to proliferate not because we think it is harmless, not because we think it is a matter of free speech, but because we think it is hard to stop. It is hard, but I am hopeful. Today, we have a regulator which is beginning to make great strides in tackling illegal material online. We have a regulator with 40 years’ experience of video classification, and we have a Government who, to echo the words of the Minister, are profoundly committed to halving violence against women and girls. Today, we have an opportunity to close this unconscionable gap in the law. I very much hope that we will do so.

Prisons: Education

Baroness Boycott Excerpts

Thursday 23rd March 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bellamy (Con)]

My Lords, there is a problem within the prison estate in relation to distance learning from external providers, because most prisons do not have external access to the internet. There is an intranet, and it may well be that in due course organisations like the Open University are encouraged to access that facility. But I take the noble Baroness’s question and will investigate further.

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

My Lords, I am sure the noble and learned Lord knows about the Clink Charity, which sets up restaurants in prisons where prisoners are taught by chefs and then serve meals to the general public. If any noble Lords do not know about this, I urge them to go to the one in Brixton. These now have a 49.6% rate of lowering reoffending, because prisoners come out with a job and a skill and somewhere to sleep, which is arranged. This all depends on the good will of the governors. Can the Minister assure the House that he will encourage such projects? I think there are seven now, but there could be many more.

[Lord Bellamy (Con)]

My Lords, the answer is yes. Prison governors are now specifically required to have regard to developing employment opportunities for those in prison, attendance rates at courses and other matters. I pay tribute to Clink, which is a very well-known and respected organisation. Similar programmes are being offered by other employers, and this is all, I respectfully suggest, good progress.

Taking Control of Goods (Fees) (Amendment) Regulations 2021

Baroness Boycott Excerpts

Thursday 13th January 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

My Lords, what we have here is a very serious issue. We already know that, since 2014, debtors have been incorrectly charged VAT when it has been ruled that this should instead be charged to the creditor. Although the Ministry of Justice clarified in its March 2020 and November 2021 guidance that if the creditor is VAT-registered, debtors should not be charged VAT, it did not clarify the actions it would take to look into giving the money back. For this reason alone, I am supportive of the Motion in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, to regret the taking control of goods statutory instrument.

Also, to put it simply, time is running out. Some noble Lords may be aware, but many will not, that there is only a six-year window in which debtors can rightfully claim for this money to be repaid. This means that many debtors, many of whom will not even be aware that this money belongs to them, have unjustly missed out on their opportunity to reclaim VAT. Therefore, the time for action is now. With every passing day of delay, more and more debtors will continue to miss out.

We have come out of a busy Christmas period, the time when many families’ budgets become overly stretched and more financially challenging. The truth is that it is expensive to be poor in this country at the moment. For the average poor family, the poverty premium—a horrible expression—means £490 extra to pay because of meters, being unable to buy in bulk and paying individually for things that other people could pay for in excess. For one in 10 people, that poverty premium is £780 a year. Will the Government ensure that the debt enforcement sector notifies all debtors who may have overpaid VAT? Will they conduct an impact assessment to understand exactly how much has been overpaid? Finally, will they ensure that the debt enforcement sector sets up a scheme to refund this money?

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Ministry of Justice (Lord Wolfson of Tredegar) (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to all noble Lords who have contributed to this debate, in particular the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, whose Motion gave rise to it. The Motion highlights concern about whether debtors have been overcharged in respect of the VAT that attaches to the fees charged by High Court enforcement officers.

The statutory instrument before the House sets out how the VAT that attaches to enforcement agent fees should be collected. The burden of the noble Baroness’s Motion is to criticise the Government for not going further by applying that retrospectively. A number of noble Lords asked what we propose to do to provide compensation to debtors who were charged VAT wrongly prior to the date on which the instrument took effect. I will seek to explain why the use of “wrongly” is itself subject to question.

Let me set out the purpose of the SI and why we have decided that it is necessary to provide clarity and explain why it would not be possible or fair to legislate retrospectively in this area. We decided that it was necessary to legislate because in the summer of 2019—I accept that the issue was floating around earlier—we were made aware that there were dramatically diverging views and practices within the High Court enforcement industry about who the VAT on its fees should be collected from. We initially sought to provide clarity by working with HMRC to draft guidance about the correct approach.

With apologies to the House, I would point out gently to the noble Lord, Lord Thomas of Gresford, that we must be careful when we talk about collecting VAT. There are two different issues here. The first is who is responsible for paying the VAT. The second is can you, as the creditor, recover through the enforcement agent a sum equivalent to the VAT. When the debtor pays that sum, the debtor is are not paying VAT; the debtor is paying a sum equivalent to VAT. That sounds like a legal technicality, but it is not; it is a fundamental distinction that it at the heart of this issue.

An important point to make is that neither the guidance nor the SI seeks to change underlying VAT law. In all circumstances, the creditor is liable for the VAT. That is because the creditor is the recipient of the service of the High Court enforcement officer. The guidance and the SI set out the circumstances in which a sum equivalent to the VAT charged to the creditor can be recovered from the judgment debtor as an enforcement cost. We designed that guidance to ensure careful and fair operation of the law so that creditors would not be out of pocket as a result of enforcement costs, while also ensuring that an amount equivalent to VAT was collected from debtors only in cases where the VAT represented a real cost to the creditor. In other words, an amount equivalent to VAT would be collected from the debtor only in cases where the creditor was not able to recover the VAT from HMRC as an input tax. If the creditor was able to recover the VAT from HMRC, the VAT would not be a real cost to the creditor and therefore a sum equivalent to the VAT should not be collected from the debtor.

In March 2020, we consulted interested parties about the draft guidance. Views remained mixed about whether VAT should ever be recovered from the debtor because the debtor was not the recipient of the service. We considered then, as we do now, that it is fair for the creditor to be able to recover the VAT as an enforcement cost in cases where it will represent a real cost to the creditor. That approach is in keeping with the overarching principle that the debtor is responsible for the costs of enforcement. Some consultees questioned the legal basis for our draft guidance. They noted that the regulations setting out the fees that High Court enforcement agents can recover from debtors do not refer to VAT, so we have accepted that it would be helpful to set out the position in legislation to put the matter beyond doubt. That is what this SI seeks to do.

We have listened to the feedback that we received about the draft guidance and taken on board the dangers that a system that is too complicated or nuanced will make it even more difficult for a debtor to understand whether they were paying the correct enforcement costs and, as a consequence, to know whether to challenge an account of the charges they are presented with. The feedback also highlighted how, in a very complicated system to address this issue, more mistakes are likely to be made.

We do not want that to happen. We want to try to have a simple and comprehensible but fair system. We therefore decided that this SI should allow an amount equivalent to the VAT to be recovered from the judgment debtor only in cases where the creditor is not VAT-registered and cannot therefore recover the VAT from HMRC. We think that approach is simple and properly supportable in principle. We think that it is right to allow creditors in those circumstances, although only those who are not VAT-registered, to recover an amount equivalent to the VAT from debtors as it would represent to them a cost of enforcement. We must remember that the creditors may themselves be suffering from financial vulnerability. For example, the creditor may be an individual who has lost their job, sued their employer and got an award of damages for wages. If we do not have this regulation, it is the creditor who will be out of pocket because they will have to pay the costs of enforcement. So I say with great respect that we cannot approach this matter a little simplistically by assuming that the debtor is always the small person, so to speak, and the creditor is always the grasping outfit. That is not the case.

We must also remember that under this SI an amount equivalent to VAT will not be recovered from the debtor in the vast majority of cases as most creditors will be VAT-registered. I should acknowledge that, as we set out in the Explanatory Memorandum, some VAT-registered creditors may make both taxable and exempt supplies. They will be able to recover only a proportion of the total VAT from HMRC. However, we think that putting them together with VAT-registered creditors is the appropriate policy option. We therefore think that this SI strikes the right balance to ensure that an amount equivalent to VAT is recovered from debtors only where it represents a real cost to the creditor.

I accept that we could have acted faster to clarify this matter. We consulted on draft guidance in March 2020. The work to finalise that guidance was delayed as a result of the department’s response to the pandemic. For example, in this area, we diverted resources and introduced legislative bans on enforcement action by enforcement agents in order to protect public health, so the coronavirus pandemic had an impact on this area as well.

I certainly do not want disagreements about what should have happened in the past to delay any further clarification of future practice, so I am grateful to the noble Baroness for amending the Motion to one of regret.

I understand the concerns expressed about whether in the past debtors have paid more than they should have done. I have great sympathy for the wish, expressed by a number of speakers, to ensure that debtors can have their concerns addressed in legislation. However, limits on retrospective legislation are an important safeguard in a just society as well as being a principle of the rule of law. There must be strong reasons to test those limits even where there is the power to do so. This issue is not one of those exceptional cases.

The issues raised in the Motion are largely matters of private law as between debtors, enforcement agents and creditors, and the interpretation of the legal position between those private parties is a matter for the courts. As we have heard, the issue is currently before the High Court in litigation. It is tempting but slightly inaccurate to say that the Government were taken to court, with all that implies. That case is in fact about a declaration being sought from the court as to what the law is. It is fair to say that there are widely divergent opinions on what the correct legal position prior to this SI in fact was.

To pick up the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Thomas of Gresford, the common law position is simply this. My friend in the other place was not saying that the common law imposes VAT but that it is a basic principle of the common law that when you enforce a debt, you can recover the debt and the costs of enforcement of the debt. If VAT is to you a real cost of enforcement, an amount equivalent to that VAT is recoverable from the debtor. That ties in with basic principles of enforcement of debts, whether it is VAT or indeed your solicitor’s costs in bringing the matter to court and enforcement. To pick up another point, if the enforcement agent is not registered for VAT, they cannot charge VAT on their fees, so the point does not arise in the first place.

We do not think it would be appropriate to legislate for the past. I respectfully disagree with the noble Baroness when she assumes that debtors who paid VAT or a sum equivalent to VAT in the past were wrongly overcharged. That is a point of law which is in dispute. However, we think that debtors must pay the costs of enforcement of a judgment debt. At the same time, we want to ensure that debtors are fairly treated, not just in relation to the process of enforcement but to the costs of the process.

I do not want to give the House a history lesson, but if one goes back to the high sheriff and undersheriffs of days gone by, the predecessors of the High Court enforcement officers, there is an interesting analysis of whether VAT would or might have applied to their fees. Were they acting on behalf of the creditor or on behalf of the court? It is not always very easy to analyse.

VAT itself is not an uncomplex system, so it is easy to understand why successive Governments were perhaps less prescriptive than they might have been as to how it would impact on the fee rates. None the less, where VAT imposes an additional sum and that sum cannot be recovered by the creditor as an input tax, it is an enforcement cost and should be recoverable from the debtor. That said, given that the matter is seized by the High Court, obviously we will keep a close eye on that litigation. We will look at any findings of the court extremely carefully and will consider whether any further action in this area is necessary.

Before I sit down, I should pick up an important point made by the noble Lord, Lord Best, about the enforcement conduct authority. We are strongly supportive of the work that is being done by the Centre for Social Justice, in partnership with the enforcement and debt advice sectors, to set up an enforcement conduct authority to provide independent oversight of firms and to consider complaints. We believe that the proposed authority will make a real difference by raising standards in the industry to protect vulnerable debtors while improving the effectiveness of enforcement. We remain committed to reviewing the new body within two years of its operation and then deciding whether it is necessary to put it on a statutory footing.

The noble Lord, Lord McNicol, referred to PPI. With respect, I am not persuaded that this is a like-for-like issue. The point with PPI is that people were paying sums which they should not have paid and which went into the pockets of the insurance companies. What has happened here is that VAT has been paid, but there is no suggestion that the enforcement officers have not been remitting the VAT which they collected to HMRC. We should look at each issue on its own merits.

Assisted Dying Bill [HL]

Baroness Boycott Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 22nd October 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

My Lords, I rise to support this Bill very strongly. I also strongly support the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Mallalieu: this should be an issue on which the whole House can vote.

Like many noble Lords, I have received letters on this. At the end of the day, this comes down to individual stories of pain and suffering and of loved ones. We all have one; I will share mine with noble Lords. A friend was dying from terminal liver cancer—the cancer was gigantic. She asked her doctor for pills, which were supplied but, in the end, did not work. She begged her husband and son who were with her and they ended up ending her life with a plastic bag. This image has stayed in my head ever since.

As other noble Lords have said, I suspect we have all been involved in experiences of parents or others dying in which we have asked for resuscitation to stop. That was certainly the case with my father and it was a mercy. I do not know whether that is considered to be assisted dying or not; it seems that the boundary is very fudgy.

What is wrong in many areas of our society is how we qualify success and how well we are doing. If we look around the world, it is all about the question of how long we are living; longevity is seen as a sign of success and a sort of moral imperative for us all to strive for—longevity at the cost of anything else. I feel that the people who oppose this Bill are, in some odd way, putting moral stigma on those who support it, as though just to be born and to be in society, we and our loved ones must endure, whatever the state of suffering. This seems entirely wrong.

As the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, said, we would not subject an animal to this. I have put down many dogs in my life, always with tears in my eyes, but always knowing fundamentally that I had done the right thing. I do not know—I suspect none of us in this Chamber knows—what I would do if I was in extreme pain and knew I was dying. Would I want to take that option or choose to battle on? I cannot say. I do not think anyone can say until they get there. However, I know, with my hand on my heart, that I want to have the choice.

As a responsible society that cares about people, we should work on extending and maximising palliative care, but should absolutely know when the time has come to offer the hand of kindness and help someone on their way.