Crime and Policing Bill

Debate between Baroness Brinton and Baroness Cash

Committee stage
Tuesday 27th January 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Cash (Con)]

My Lords, I am sincerely grateful to everyone who has spoken and to the winding speakers today. It is such an important question, and it is such a pleasure to have a debate like this and to engage with former colleagues and noble Peers to discuss an often emotional or passionate issue.

The noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, and I have known each other for such a long time, but not everyone knows that. I believe that I may have referred to the noble Baroness with a pronoun during my speech, and I am very sorry if I did that; it was a lapse from knowing each other and I want to put that on the record. I am very grateful to her for speaking with her typical compassion and empathy for everyone—a testament to her time as the head of Liberty, and the principles that she has lived by ever since.

I say the same to the noble Baroness, Lady Donaghy, and I am very grateful to her for engaging in this debate and being present. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, for citing the data, and noble Peers who supported the amendments. I am very grateful to everyone.

The noble Lord, Lord Moynihan of Chelsea, referenced Scotland. I would like to end on that thought. There is, of course, a direction of travel by the Government, which we welcome and support, but in his response the noble Lord, Lord Katz, did not address what data is going to be collected in relation to sex. I know we are coming on to ethnicity next. I say to the Minister that this is an opportunity to grapple with this issue and to do something by accepting this amendment, which would really support the violence against women and girls strategy. The noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, also made some very sensible points about the common-sense approach of the police, and we have confidence in them to be able to act in a sensible way. For the record, there is no suggestion in this amendment that anyone would be embarrassed or outed. It is about the police recording the data, not publishing the data. We know that data, when the statistics are processed off it, is anonymised.

[Baroness Brinton (LD)]

I am very grateful for that last point. The point I raised was that the data is so small that if only two people had committed a certain offence in a year, they would be identifiable. That was the point the ONS made in its response to somebody else’s FoI request—I do not know whose—because of that identification and then breaching of data for the individual concerned.

[Baroness Cash (Con)]

That has not concerned His Majesty’s inspectorate, the Ministry of Justice or, indeed, Professor Sullivan. In fact, they make the opposite point, which is that the small numbers of trans-identifying individuals—