Crime and Policing Bill

Debate between Baroness Butler-Sloss and Viscount Colville of Culross

Committee stage
Tuesday 9th December 2025 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Colville of Culross (CB)]

I too support all the amendments in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Bertin, but I shall speak particularly to Amendment 298.

As other noble Lords have pointed out, these nudification apps are horrific and bring untold harm to the women and men who are victims of them. They are so prevalent in schools that they are effectively normalised, shocking and shaming thousands of children on a daily basis, as my noble friend Lady Boycott has just pointed out. This week, Ofcom fined the app Nudify for failing to implement the mandatory age-verification measures under the OSA. Amendment 298, if accepted, would increase the pressure on Ofcom and the Government to close down all nudification apps, for children and adults alike.

As with the AI companion amendment in the name of my noble friend Lady Kidron, which was debated last week, this is yet another new technology that was not foreseen in the Online Safety Act. Despite your Lordships’ best efforts to future-proof protections for users, new functionalities and technologies will always be created that will need your Lordships’ attention. Nudification apps are just the latest in what will be a long line of new tech harms.

The problem is that, at the moment, there is a voluntary agreement for the big app stores not to sell nudification apps, but they are still being downloaded and are freely available on smaller app stores. Unfortunately, I do not believe voluntary protections by the tech companies work. Your Lordships have to look only at the Bletchley summit agreement in which tech companies signed up voluntarily to publishing the safety testing of new AI models prior to their release. Unfortunately, this has not happened in many instances, and in some egregious cases there is a failure to comply with this commitment.

Some AI models appear to have mundane uses but can subsequently be adapted for the purpose of nudification. These need to be safety tested to ensure that they cannot create harms—in this case, nudification—and, as has just been explained, the present voluntary agreement is not creating adequate protection. This amendment would go a long way to remedy this lacuna in the law and make the digital space safer for millions of people. I hope that it will be the first step in the Government bringing forward far-reaching AI safety legislation. I hope that the Minister listens to the voices from across the Committee and responds favourably to the proposal in the amendment for the creation of an offence of possession of nudification software.

[Baroness Butler-Sloss (CB)]

My Lords, I support all these amendments for the reasons which have been given, and do not propose therefore to go through them. I want to give one extreme example of what happens when people watch a pornographic film and go on and carry out what the film did. I happen to have dealt with the case of one of the Bulger killers. I was told that they had watched a pornographic film belonging to the father of one of the two boys and then went out immediately and did exactly what the film did. That is why they killed the Bulger child. They followed the pornographic film. It did not, of course, stop them being convicted of murder. If that can happen to 10 year-olds then a large number of people are absolutely vulnerable to doing exactly what they watch. That is yet another reason why we should support these amendments. We have on the Front Bench, among the Ministers, those who are really caring. I hope, therefore, that they will not only listen to us but do something.