Crime and Policing Bill

Debate between Baroness Cash and Baroness Fox of Buckley

Committee stage
Tuesday 27th January 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Cash (Con)]

My Lords, I rise to move Amendment 438B, the wording of which is intended to be replaced by Amendment 438EF. I am very grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Fox of Buckley, and the noble Lord, Lord Jackson of Peterborough, for supporting this amendment. I am also grateful to the Minister for reminding us about the general direction of travel taken by the Government in this area: the views expressed by the Home Secretary and others over the last six months about improving data collection and, again, in the White Paper, the objective to make data collection more consistent nationally. All of that is extremely welcome.

Sex is a foundational principle in crime. By that I mean the sex of an individual is a primary determinant of both offending patterns and victimisation risks. So, it is a crucial piece of information in terms of the overall justice system at every point. For example, 98% of recorded rape offenders are male, and roughly nine in 10 suspects in serious violent offences are male, and those proportions have remained significantly consistent over time. This information underpins offender profiling, multi-agency public protection arrangements, domestic abuse risk models, custody practice and the Government’s own crime strategies, as we have just been hearing. If sex were not a material variable, none of those systems would function as they do.

Despite this, at the moment there is no consistent national standard for what sex means in police recording systems. In some forces it means biological sex, in others it may reflect self-declared gender. In others, the two are conflated or left ambiguous. In some systems, records can be altered without clear audit. The same offender committing the same offence can therefore be recorded differently depending on the force or the system. That produces incoherent national datasets, undermines comparability between forces and also degrades—talking about AI and information collection—trend analysis.

This is a massive problem, because police data is the entry point for the entire criminal justice system. It feeds directly into that risk assessment, offender management, safeguarding decisions, prison allocation, probation supervision and national crime statistics. If the data is unstable at the point of entry, everything downstream is compromised. It is not just my view; this concern has been reinforced by repeated warnings from His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services and the Office for National Statistics, which have consistently found that police-recorded crime data is highly sensitive to inconsistent recording practices.

Where the system is already struggling with data quality, it is incredibly important that the core variables are clear, standardised and grounded in the facts. It is not a hypothetical situation and we know that Scotland has already tested the alternative and made the necessary changes. For several years, Police Scotland, like forces in England and Wales, was recording sex in the basis—at times—of self-declared gender, including for suspects in sexual offences. The result was that biological males charged with rape could be recorded as female, rendering national statistics unreliable and damaging overall public confidence in the system. After sustained scrutiny, it announced in October 2025 that biological sex would be recorded for crime and policing purposes, with any transgender status recorded separately where relevant. Operational reality forced that correction, which has been welcomed by the public.

The independent experts have also supported that measure. The Government-commissioned review led by Alice Sullivan found that public bodies, including justice agencies, have allowed sex to be redefined or replaced, which degrades the data quality. The conclusion is very clear in her review. In all areas, including crime, sex should mean biological sex, and, where gender identity is recorded, it should be recorded separately, not substituted. Murray Blackburn Mackenzie’s analysis showed that, once sex recording drifts from biological reality, crime statistics become unreliable, contested and incapable of supporting sound policy or public trust. When one thinks about the very small numbers of women in the numbers I have just related in respect of violent offences, for example, one can see that wrong data could massively skew this.

The same issue arises in offender risk. Official Ministry of Justice analysis shows that men who identify as women have offending profiles aligned with the male offender population; trans women and men have the same offending profile, including for violent and sexual offences. To be absolutely clear, I am not suggesting that trans women are in any way more inclined than the average man to commit offences, but in population profiles, the same rate of offences is perpetuated within that population—male pattern violence does not change through identity declaration. When men are recorded as female in police data, male violence is understated, female offending is overstated and risk analysis is distorted. This really matters for repeat offender analysis, escalation risk and, most importantly, safeguarding.

We have already seen the consequences of ignoring biological sex in custodial settings. In England, we have had assaults occurring through the placement of men in the female prison estate. The Government responded to this by tightening allocation rules, explicitly re-anchoring decisions in biological sex and risk assessment. That policy recognises the basic truth that biological sex is a material safeguarding factor in criminal justice. That is a well-established principle among criminologists. Police data is the upstream source for those decisions.

This matters massively for the Government’s violence against women and girls strategy. That strategy relies on police-recorded crime data to measure prevalent trends and progress. It rests on two empirical facts. Women and girls are disproportionately the victims of certain crimes—I hope there is no one in this House who would dispute that—and those crimes are overwhelmingly perpetrated by men. If police data cannot reliably identify male offenders because sex has been replaced by gender identity then progress cannot be measured and accountability collapses.

There is nothing in this amendment that would alter how the police should interact with transgender people or that would prevent gender identity being recorded separately where operationally relevant. It does not seek to change how individuals are treated. It simply seeks to ensure that biological sex is not lost or overwritten, because all the evidence shows that it matters. A criminal justice system that cannot accurately record the sex of offenders simply cannot accurately analyse male violence or protect women effectively. That is why I beg to move this amendment.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I have enthusiastically added my name to Amendment 438B, now replaced by Amendment 438EF, on the recording of biological sex in police data to prevent reliance in administrative records on self-identification and so on. The noble Baroness, Lady Cash, has laid out the arguments with great clarity and precision, and I appreciate that. In the past, I have tabled similar amendments to previous Bills. Unfortunately, my attempts were far less elegantly argued than hers, but they were rebuffed, as though I was motivated by some ideological attempt at undermining inclusion policies. Nothing could be further from the truth. The truth is that I want ideology out of data and data collection.

I think there is a slightly different atmosphere now, and I hope that we can have this discussion. Since then, the Supreme Court’s clarity on equality law in the distinct category of biological sex in relation to single-sex provision gives us an important marker. We have had the Sullivan review, commissioned by the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology under Rishi Sunak’s Government. Its themes were broadly welcomed, I think, by the present Government, which are to identify obstacles to accurate data collection and research on sex and gender in public bodies and in the research system and to set out good practice.

I state at this point that we owe huge thanks to Professor Alice Sullivan for her 226-page review. It was a real work of public service. It found that the recording of sex and gender across the justice system and police forces is highly inconsistent and in a muddle, and therefore is not reliable. This matters, because anything that erases biological sex or confuses biological sex in official data in relation to crime is problematic. Many of the policies in the Bill, if they are to be effective, rely on evidence, and that evidence must therefore be based on reliable data.

Employment Rights Bill

Debate between Baroness Cash and Baroness Fox of Buckley

Committee stage
Tuesday 24th June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, in a previous life, I used to work in further education with many young people who were non-traditionally successful. In more current times, I have worked on matters relating to prison reform and I am very interested in former prisoners gaining employment. In all the instances of working with young people who did not have traditional qualifications or were trying to get into work, or with former prisoners, you were in a situation where you were talking to local employers and asking them to take a punt—a risk—on people. You would say, “Look, the worst that can happen is that you try this person out, it doesn’t work out and no one’s lost anything, but actually I’ve got every faith they will be brilliant”, and so on and so forth. You had to say, “Take a risk”, and I am afraid that in all the responses from employers they are saying, whether we like it or not, that the Bill—if enacted as it is presently constituted —will mean they become risk averse and will not take risks on a former prisoner or a young person who is a bit of a scally. So it is key to assess social mobility.

In addition to that group of people, one of the key ways in which work contributes to social mobility is often through young entrepreneurs or young people who, again, might not be conventionally the kind of people who will pass the Civil Service exam, will not necessarily fit in as an ideal employee and might be slightly eccentric or risk-takers, but who will set up their own micro-business. We know that they are the kind of people who might well be successful, although sometimes they might not be.

Throughout the passage of the Bill, there have been a lot of amendments tabled about micro-businesses—not SMEs, as they are traditionally still quite large businesses whereas micro-businesses have around 20 staff, or even two, three or four. If you talk to young entrepreneurs—the sort of young men who drop out of college but set up semiconductor manufacturing organisations, like some people I know, a builders’ business or a small hairdressers’ business—they realise that many parts of the Bill, which I have opposed throughout, will affect them. They do not have huge HR departments, they are not lawyers and they do not know what they are going to do, but they will be held liable for swathes of regulatory rules mandated by the Bill about the way they run their micro-businesses.

Those people are part of the great success of social mobility. They start out and make a success of it, but now it might not be worth it. They are not always poor and impoverished people. It can be young people making good through small businesses.

If it is the case that this is scaremongering about the worst fears or people just being paranoid, fair enough. But this Labour Government, of all Governments, should want to assess whether the Bill inadvertently, not intentionally, damages social mobility via employment. I therefore urge the Minister to accept this harmless but important amendment.

[Baroness Cash (Con)]

My Lords, I support the amendment tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Sharpe, and the comments made by the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, who covered quite a few of the points I planned to make. I want to speak specifically about young people.

Speaking very recently in front of a committee, Employment Minister Alison McGovern said that

“the situation for young people is a big worry for me at the moment”

and that:

“A lot of our young people—nearly 1 million—are effectively on the scrap heap”.


Those are not words I would have chosen myself; they are her words to a cross-party committee.

We have heard a lot of statistics during today’s debates. I will just add a few more. There are 1 million people not in education, employment or training, which includes a lot of young people. In addition, we have massive numbers of people receiving sickness benefits. All these young people will be a risk for employers.

The Minister is quite right that there has been an uptick in new businesses starting, but there is a serious downturn in the number of jobs created; unemployment is rising year on year, month on month since this Government took power; and the tax rises in the Autumn Budget are beginning to really kick in. We have seen that in the written submissions by numerous business organisations to the Government, other groups and Peers in this Chamber, begging—pleading—with us all to make their case about the significant costs they are already facing due to the national insurance rises. We can see it in real time. This amendment is a request to monitor the situation and come back with an impact assessment on perhaps the most vulnerable people in our society.

To show that these young people really want to succeed and want to have an opportunity, I will read the Committee a couple more numbers that the Minister is probably already well aware of. Some 60% of young people under the age of 30 would love to start a business, 9% of them have done so and 18% more of them would like to do so this year. These are the most vulnerable young people in our society. They are our future, as our demographics are getting older, and we are going to become more and more reliant on the economy that they generate. I have said it before, and I will say it again and again in this Chamber: Governments do not create growth; businesses create growth. We are now looking to these young people to start businesses and take risks on employing others. I urge the Government to, at the very least, come back having monitored that there is no impact on them and no further impact on the loss of employment that could ensue.