Crime and Policing Bill

Debate between Baroness Falkner of Margravine and Lord Pannick

Committee stage
Monday 2nd February 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Pannick (CB)]

I take the noble Baroness’s point, and I very much sympathise with those who have been bereaved and who face such an investigation. However, there is a profound difference in what we are considering here, which is an investigation of a woman who has just lost the child she is carrying and who is being investigated with a view to the real possibility of a criminal prosecution of her. We have to recognise that a woman in those circumstances is particularly vulnerable and sensitive. We have to weigh that interest against what I accept is the real concern that there will be women who have acted improperly and unlawfully who will get away with their criminality.

[Baroness Falkner of Margravine (CB)]

I wonder if what the noble Lord describes, with which I have a great deal of sympathy—I say this as a signatory to Amendment 456—would be ameliorated in terms of the distress of the investigation if the Attorney-General were to adopt guidance, and that guidance set out strict criteria that would at least remove or ameliorate the risk of the distress these investigations can cause. The Attorney-General can define very narrowly the circumstances in which the police would be entitled to do that, can he not?

[Lord Pannick (CB)]

He can, but as I have already said, the difficulty is that, however sympathetic the guidance, the circumstances of the woman concerned have to be investigated in order to identify whether her case falls within those criteria. Therefore, the damage he has done to the woman who has recently lost the child is caused, however sensitive the investigation and whatever the criteria. That is the problem.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Falkner of Margravine (CB)]

My Lords, as my noble friend Lord Verdirame has explained, my noble friend Lady Wolf cannot be here today, so I will pick up some of her points in this intervention as she is not here to make them herself. If we want to change the law, many say that Clause 191 will improve the situation for women’s bodily autonomy. I am all for that, but only after a considered debate, which we had in the past when we amended the Abortion Act 1967 to bring it into conformity with changing medical science and social attitudes. It is not as though we are stuck in aspic. This Bill is not the place to do so, as the breadth of amendments that this clause has attracted demonstrates.

I will concentrate mainly on the Covid-era regulations which permitted the obtaining of pills by post at any point of gestation, whereas previously, later stages required face-to-face consultation between the pregnant woman and doctors under the Abortion Act. This may have been necessary during lockdown, and it is a failure on the part of the then Government not to have contemplated a review after lockdown ended. As things stand, Clause 191 will facilitate changes where decriminalisation of late-stage and full-term abortions may well create additional dangers to women’s health, as pointed out at Second Reading by numerous noble Lords. It will also open the door to coerce women to seek late-term abortions against their own wishes. The noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, is not in her seat, but I think that is the point that she was trying to get to in her intervention.

If there is no sanction in law, what reason can one give a controlling partner who insists that it is perfectly permissible in law? Decriminalisation suggests that there is nothing to prevent the woman from aborting late-term through the convenience of pills by post, virtually no questions asked. So you have the perverse effect that, alongside the certainty of greater autonomy for women, we may well see the risk of coercive control and deception. I am sure that is not what the movers of this amendment in the other place sought.

My noble friend Lady Wolf made the point that while home-based abortions have become common, they normally use two drugs in the form of pills: mifepristone, which blocks progesterone, needed in pregnancy, but does not kill the foetus; and misoprostol, which basically causes cramping, bleeding and the emptying of the uterus. If taken early in pregnancy, the result is the same as an early miscarriage, in effect, and in England and Wales it is allowable for abortions up to 10 weeks of gestation.

The pills are advertised as simple to use and as creating early miscarriages with bleeding and perhaps some bits of tissue. So the descriptions are reassuring and encouraging. However, the reality may be very different and life-threatening to the woman, who, whatever her reasons for wishing to terminate the pregnancy, may not appreciate the complications. Pills by post do not require further safeguards than those put into place by the 1967 Act other than a phone or virtual call, which is the least satisfactory method of ascertaining stress, emotional distress or, indeed, coercive pressure.

I want to share with the Committee some examples of emotional pressure. Noble Lords may be aware of the case of Stuart Worby in December 2024. I am grateful to the prosecuting counsel, Edmund Vickers KC of Red Lion Chambers, for giving me some background information to this case. I should add, before I say anything further, that the victim is subject to lifelong anonymity.

In December 2024 the judge summed up the details of the case. A central aspect was that the victim married the defendant after the commencement of the pregnancy. He wished to terminate the pregnancy, but she wished to keep her baby, with or without him. He set about securing the termination without her knowledge and used a female friend to obtain abortive drugs from an online private clinic. The judge pointed out that he must have known that this was dangerous for his wife, as he knew she was many weeks past the time limit to use the drugs safely.

When Mr Worby received the drugs, he first added mifepristone to food and drink. The next day he told the victim that he wanted to try something sexually new in bed, which involved blindfolding her and tying her up. The real purpose was to insert the second type of medication, misoprostol, into her vagina. Shortly after he had done that, she became unwell, and the next day she suffered a miscarriage, losing the baby that she so badly yearned for. The judge’s remarks explained that the offence of administering poison to bring about a miscarriage was made more serious by Mr Worby’s prolonged research and planning over many weeks, by his involving others, by bringing about a miscarriage, and by the devastating effect it had on his then wife’s dream of having a child.

This sorry tale attempts to demonstrate that it is not only, as the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, said, the woman who may wish to terminate her pregnancy or the unborn child. There is a further factor here: the partner, the husband or other members of the family who may seek coercion.

[Lord Pannick (CB)]

I am very grateful to the noble Baroness for giving way. That is a shocking story, but nothing in Clause 191 would affect the criminal liability of the man who behaved in such a disgraceful manner.

[Baroness Falkner of Margravine (CB)]

I find that very interesting. I am sure it will be a welcome debate among lawyers. I will look into that and take it into consideration when I come back with a renewed amendment on Report.

[Lord Pannick (CB)]

I am sorry, but this is simply not a controversial issue. Clause 191 says that

“no offence is committed by a woman acting in relation to her own pregnancy”.

It simply does not affect the criminal liability of anyone else.

[Baroness Falkner of Margravine (CB)]

My Lords, we are coming back to the terminally ill debate that we had on Friday. Women may well be—although not in this particular case—coerced by partners to take pills when they would not otherwise have wished to do so. Perhaps noble Lords who have tabled amendments to do with face-to-face consultations have that in their minds, as a face-to-face consultation would require deeper insights on the part of medical professionals—pills by post do not.

Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

Debate between Baroness Falkner of Margravine and Lord Pannick

Committee stage
Friday 30th January 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Pannick (CB)]

The noble Baroness makes an important point, because this Bill is concerned with providing choice. Of course there is no mandatory obligation, but, if you are given this information, you should have the right—it is your life—to decide whether you wish to take advantage of these provisions. In many cases, if it were me or my family, I would argue strongly that there are other options and other things should be done. But it is a choice, and people should have that choice. That is the philosophy and what has guided so many jurisdictions around the world. Many noble Lords do not agree with that, which is their right, but that is what this Bill is all about.

[Baroness Falkner of Margravine (CB)]

My Lords, the noble Lord rightly emphasises that choice is an essential element of this. But in so emphasising, he appears to cast “choice” in a very black and white manner as if it can suggest, not perhaps 100%, but 99% certainty, one way or another. I am sure the noble Lord is very grateful that he has never been in the situation of the patient sitting in that chair, having a conversation with a doctor, as I have, unfortunately. I can tell him that it is not a conversation with one doctor; it is a conversation across a multiple range of people, because doctors want you to have second opinions and speak to others to see if they might think of how you might ameliorate your illness, particularly in the case of cancer.

Terrorist Asset-Freezing etc. Bill [HL]

Debate between Baroness Falkner of Margravine and Lord Pannick

Wednesday 6th October 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Pannick]

Noble Lords are very familiar with the problems—the unfairness and the practical difficulties—that are caused by special advocate procedures. Clause 23(4) is acceptable only if the person concerned has a right to see at least the essence of the material that is relied on in the case against him, as the Appellate Committee decided in the control order context in the AF case.

The Minister said earlier that fairness depends on its context. I ask him to state clearly on behalf of the Government whether they accept that in this context—the freezing of assets—fairness requires that the individual concerned be personally told the essence of the case against him. I cannot see how it could possibly be fair to freeze a person’s assets on a permanent basis, causing all the disruption and damage to their personal life that the Supreme Court explained in the recent case, without that person being told at least the essence of the case against them and having a fair opportunity to answer it. The Appellate Committee in AF made it very clear that the special advocate procedure is wholly inadequate to ensure fairness in that respect, so I hope that the Minister will confirm to the Committee that the Government accept that the AF principles apply in this context.

[Baroness Falkner of Margravine]

I speak to this amendment on the basis that I was a member of the Joint Committee on Human Rights in the previous Session. I recall that my noble friend the Minister said in his opening remarks some hours ago that he did not want to draw an analogy in the provisions of the Bill with control orders. However, I respectfully suggest that if he looked at the 16th report in 2010 of the Joint Committee on Human Rights, on counterterrorism policy and human rights, which concerned the annual renewal of control orders legislation, he would find that significant aspects of the problems that will arise from Clause 23(4)—not least those of the AF case, referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Pannick—are covered in the report of the committee, which was excoriating. It is a sadness that the previous Government took no account of it whatever.

I do not want to take up too much time at this point in the evening, but let me briefly summarise for my noble friend the three issues that the report raised about special advocates. Those issues were:

“(1) Lack of access to independent expertise and evidence … (2) Ability to test Government objections to disclosure of closed case”,

and, finally,

“Limits on ability to communicate with controlled person”,

after seeing the closed material. The noble Lord, Lord Pannick, has first-hand experience of this, but let me also just read one paragraph from page 21 of that report, which I think expresses quite succinctly what part of the problem is. The report says:

“The special advocates have no means of gainsaying the Government’s assessment that disclosure would cause harm to the public interest, and Government assessments about what can and cannot be disclosed are effectively unchallengeable and almost always upheld by the court. Courts inevitably ‘accord great weight to views on matters of national security expressed by the agencies who are particularly charged with protecting national security’”.

As well as highlighting the deleterious effect of late disclosure, the report touches on international comparisons and finds that no other country uses special advocates in quite the way as we do by denying the defendant—in this case, the designated person—so many rights to which a defendant would normally be entitled under human rights law.

If the Minister is not prepared, at this hour of the night, to concede that there may be some really problematic issues in retaining subsection (4), perhaps he might consider returning to the issue on Report after further consideration.