Crime and Policing Bill

Baroness Fox of Buckley Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 27th January 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure, as ever, to support my noble friend in her Amendments 436 and 437. She is an expert in intellectual property, but she might want to copyright the term “Wild West of street crime”, as we have got used to it.

Amendment 436 goes to the heart of a police accountability. That is the wider issue here. It seeks to put on a statutory footing the imperative to provide timely data in respect of enforcement, openness and transparency. It is not necessarily about interfering in the operational effectiveness or decision-making of the police, but it is about openness, transparency and restoring the faith and trust that taxpayers should have in their local police. Unfortunately, the noble Lord, Lord Bach, is not in his place. I am sure he discharged his duties commendably in Leicestershire, but, frankly, the police and crime commissioner model has not worked. I speak as someone who used my maiden speech in the other place in June 2005 to call for elected police commissioners. I am afraid that it has been a damp squib. The relationship between senior police officers and the commissioners, to whom they should have had accountability, has not worked out in the way it should have done. I applaud the Government for the decision to discontinue that.

We see egregious examples of apparent two-tier policing. Robert Peel is probably turning in his grave now when he looks at the antics of the chief constable of the West Midlands, who colluded with Islamist thugs and their representative, the Member of Parliament for Birmingham Perry Barr, in preventing Jewish fans from attending a game in our second city. He also lied twice to a parliamentary committee, seemingly with impunity. He has now left the service with a large taxpayer-funded pension.

The question is: do the police actually care what elected politicians and Ministers think? I am not sure that is the case. There have been lots of cases of alleged two-tier policing. More recently, one has to look only at the comparison between the policing of the Palestinian hate marchers in our capital from October 2023 and, for instance, the banning of a Walk with Jesus rally in east London or the heavy-handed policing of farmers protesting at the Government’s tax policies at the end of last year. This is not a political issue. It is an issue of the undermining of policing by consent and that is bad news for all of us.

Data is needed for the justice system, particularly the police force, both to work effectively and so that they can be scrutinised by lawmakers and the public. Public perception of our police matters. We want our police to be perceived positively by the public based on evidence that they are doing their jobs well. Public perception of the police is currently low, and crime rates appear to be high. Data on enforcement would both be a motivation for effective policing and help them to be held accountable—and, more importantly, give an accurate public image.

We currently have a crisis on our hands in respect of law enforcement in England and Wales. Knife crime in England and Wales rose by 78% between 2013 and 2023; even when the population growth was factored in, this was still a 68.3% rise. In 2024, 31.5% of all robberies committed in London’s Met police area involved stealing mobile phones—this increased from 21.6% in 2021. Noble Lords will know that the Committee considered my amendment on the theft of mobile phones, ably introduced my noble friend, earlier this month. In-person theft offences—which, according to Policy Exchange, is where an item is stolen from a person but, unlike a robbery, no force is used or threatened—the percentage of cases is even higher and represents between 68.5% and 72.6% of offences during the last four years. London has faced a dramatic surge in theft from the person offences: a 170% increase in the three years up to 2024. Also, there were nearly 95,000 shoplifting offences in the year to June 2025, a 38% increase on the previous year.

This amendment is about enforcement data. The police are not always effective in dealing with these crimes. In the year to March 2025, the Met solved 5% of burglaries and robberies reported to it. It solved less than 1.5% of reported bike thefts and less than 8% of shoplifting offences. In 2024, only 0.6% of theft from the person offences were solved. This declined from just 1.1% in 2021. Public perception of the police is becoming worse. In 2022, 50% of Londoners thought that their local police were doing a good job; in 2025, that had dropped to 45%.

Police forces across England and Wales should publish data annually on the enforcement of offences so that the public and lawmakers know how successfully crimes are being policed. The public also deserve to know this information. If the rate of crime is increasing, so then should the rate of enforcement. We must support the Peelite principle of policing by consent. We need to collect, collate and analyse data to restore public confidence. That is why we need to support my noble friend’s amendment, as I have today. I hope the Minister will give consideration to what is essentially a cross-party amendment.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I totally support Amendment 436 on the collection of enforcement data; the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, and the noble Lord, Lord Jackson of Peterborough, have explained well why I do. But I am rising to speak to Amendment 437 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, calling for a review of police paperwork. I will just explain why. I have put my name on a number of amendments that require more data collection, which might sound contradictory. But we need more granular and accurate data, while ensuring that data is streamlined and necessary, rather than collected just for the sake of it. In that sense, there is no contradiction.

The review of paperwork is necessary to identify and cut out all the endless and needless form-filling that police officers are forced to do. Whenever you talk to rank and file police officers, one of the most voluble frustrations that they voice is the ever-growing regime of paperwork and bureaucracy. They complain that they did not sign up to become pen-pushers and this is hardly what they envisaged when they joined the force.

More seriously, we have just heard a very moving debate on the mental health challenges faced by some police officers. I do not want to be glib, but when you talk to police officers, they will often say that they are tearing their hair out and completely demoralised because of the amount of bureaucracy that they face—so it is worth bearing that in mind.

The impressive multiplication of the number of forms the police have to fill out could be interpreted as indicative of the scientification or the professionalisation of police work, as the bureaucratic regime’s apologists would have us believe. I think the duplication of information, which is often banal, indicates a stifling bureaucratisation of policing and a trend that is reiterated by officers as impeding their ability to respond to crime or engage in proactive crime solving.

I want to use an example from some years ago. I was a victim of a very nasty, unpleasant mugging. I reported it to the police, as one does, and they were hyperactive in their response. I got a very nice letter reassuring me that they were there for me as a victim. got a form to fill in, asking whether I had had the right kind of support as a victim. I even had a follow-up phone call to find out why I had not filled out my form and to make sure I was okay. The problem was that at no point did anyone visit me in the sense of attempting to apprehend the person who had committed the mugging. That never came up. It was all about my feelings about being a victim of crime, rather than solving the crime. Imagine how much paperwork went into that. I was bemused, but infuriated as well.

We would like this review to ask how paperwork has proliferated. Certain people argue that the process-driven approach to policing is created by risk aversion—the police covering their own backs, potentially. It might be that it is an obsession with communication. There is certainly a lot of press releasing done, tweets put out and so on. The main thing is that we have to get to the bottom of what is creating it. I think—there will be a discussion on this on a later group—that a lot of the work generated does not have anything to do with core policing. When I talk to police officers I know, they say they are engaged in a wide range of activity related to equality, diversity and inclusion initiatives, which are also bureaucratic in terms of the kind of things that they have to do. We heard about non-crime hate incidents on a previous group. How many hours are spent investigating those? There is also a great deal of paperwork being generated by that, and hopefully we have seen the back of them.

Perhaps this amendment is kicking at an open door. I am hoping for a positive response from the Minister because the Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, has made similar points. It seems that cutting red tape is a part of what the Home Office is trying to do, so I am delighted about that.

I have a couple of reservations. I am slightly worried that the solution for cutting red tape that has been put forward is a greater use of AI. I am all for sensible use of technology, but I note that West Midlands Police recently took a shortcut and cut back on a lot of hours of paperwork that would have been wasted in a proper investigation in relation to the Maccabi Tel Aviv football game with Aston Villa. The problem with that shortcut and paper-saving exercise was that as a consequence it came up with a non-existent football match to justify the banning of the Israeli fans, as we know. Recent research by businesses has shown that for every 10 hours apparently saved by the use of AI, four hours are used checking errors and fact-checking AI output. They have had to bring in extra staff to do that particular type of work.

Finally, I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Neville- Rolfe, on her reservations about the licensing of police officers. I am afraid that fills me with horror. Credentialism is notorious for being more bureaucratisation. If you want any evidence, just look at the university sector and what is happening on that in certain sectors.

[Baroness Doocey (LD)]

My Lords, Amendment 437 calls for a review of the volume of paperwork that police officers must complete in the course of their duties. This is one of the most persistent frustrations voiced by front-line officers. Despite the introduction of a new digital case file system, the use of automatic redaction tools and simplified disclosure guidance, the core problem remains: a combination of the pre-charge full file requirement and an onerous disclosure regime. We share the noble Baroness’s concerns, but we do not believe a review is the answer. The evidence is already on the table, as are the solutions.

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[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.

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[Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)]

As a woman, I have often been called emotional in debate, but that is the nature of the patriarchy. I did not mean to be emotional; I am just trying to ask about the practicality of this proposed obligation on the police to be the determiners of the biological sex of a person they arrest, not for sex offences but for any offence. I heard in some of the remarks of the noble Baroness, Lady Cash, for example on the importance of knowing as much about a prisoner as possible, an argument for making a clear determination in a prison setting, because one needs to determine who should be imprisoned with whom. I understand that. I can certainly envisage this being highly proportionate and relevant for arrest and investigation for sex offences, but that is not the breadth of this proposal. This is for any arrest, charge, caution or suspect, which would be overbroad and a complete administrative and practical nightmare for police officers.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

Can the noble Baroness clarify a couple of things? First, does she recognise any problems at all about the data as it is presently collected—in different forms by different police forces, and then used as national crime data as though it is reliable and consistent? Does she have any qualms? I am sure the noble Baroness, Lady Cash, would be happy to work with the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, as great legal minds working together, emotionally or non-emotionally, on better wording. I can understand that, but the import of this is the data.

Secondly, the noble Baroness rightly points out that many of us are committed to campaigning against violence against women and girls. How can we reliably know how many women and girls are victims of such violence or who the perpetrators of that violence are? We cannot just assert it unless we have reliable statistical data. That is the point of the Sullivan review, which I hope she would show some respect towards even if she is not quite clear that she supports this amendment.

[Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)]

To be clear, a perpetrator is someone who is convicted, not anyone who is arrested. As I tried to suggest in response to the comments about incarceration, it is much easier to justify greater intrusion at the point of conviction, particularly if someone is going to prison. I do not think this is about drafting; it is about the practical policy the amendments are proposing. How on earth is it viable to put this obligation to be the determiner and decision-maker over somebody’s biological sex? Is it reasonable to put that on every constable? I look forward to hearing from the noble Lord on the Opposition Front Bench, because he served as a police officer for many years and with some distinction. He may know better than I whether this will be welcome for police officers in their everyday duties, for every arrest and every offence.

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[Lord Katz (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Cash, for her Amendment 438B and the subsequent Amendment 438EF, which seek to mandate the collection of sex data on perpetrators of crime. I thank everybody who spoke with some force and passion on a debate that certainly was not dry and simply about data. We heard the views of my noble friend Lady Chakrabarti, the noble Baroness, Lady Fox of Buckley, the noble Lord, Lord Jackson of Peterborough, and the opposition Front Benches.

Before I go any further, as referred to by a number of noble Lords, particularly the noble Baroness, Lady Cash, we are absolutely resolute in our goal, expressed in the violence against women and girls strategy published before Christmas, to halve violence against women and girls over the decade. We recognise that it takes a whole-government, indeed a whole-society, approach, but we are resolute in doing that and the issues that we are discussing in this group are germane to that effort.

However, there are already powers available to the Home Secretary to obtain data from police forces. The question is whether these are adequate. Section 44 of the Police Act 1996 gives the Home Secretary powers to obtain relevant data from chief constables. This power, which noble Lords have mentioned in the debate on this group, is exercised through an annual data requirement which sets out what data should be recorded and provided to the Home Office. Such data is routinely published as official statistics to provide a window on the work of government and the police service.

The content of the annual data requirement is reviewed annually and, where new requirements are made out, it allows collections to be added or existing ones amended. However, we accept that these powers fall short of what is required. Not to presage the next group too heavily, the noble Baroness, Lady Cash, will be aware that, in December last year the Home Secretary announced that we will legislate to mandate the recording of suspects’ ethnicity data. This will happen at the earliest opportunity as part of our wider legislative proposals on police reform, which we announced in the White Paper on police reform published yesterday.

As announced in that White Paper, we are introducing key proposals to address the fragmentation of data across police forces and recording formats. In that White Paper, which I commend to your Lordships, we say that we will work with the police to introduce a number of measures around data—for instance, developing new technology to integrate data nationally; mandating national standards on data to create consistency in recording data across police forces and improve the quality of datasets; introducing a single national decision-maker with authority over key national datasets; and removing unnecessary barriers to data sharing across police forces and agencies. This will provide the necessary statutory powers to ensure the delivery of recommendation 4 of the National Audit on Group-Based Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse by the noble Baroness, Lady Casey, and will improve the integrity of the data that the police use, collect and analyse.

Furthermore, I agree that consistent and accurate data on sex needs to be recorded, and we are carefully considering the implications of the Supreme Court ruling that clarified the definition of sex in the Equality Act.

In replying directly to my noble friend Lady Donaghy’s question about thinking about it from the individual’s perspective, and what they may or may not want to happen in terms of their gender identification, it is still fair to say that the data collected will be anonymised and treated as per current GDPR and other data protection terms. This is about collecting data for wider analysis rather than thinking about what might happen to that individual from the way that that data is collected.

I hope I have reassured the noble Baroness, Lady Cash, of the work going on in this area. In light of this and our commitment in the White Paper to bring forward legislation in the context of our wider reforms to policing, I ask that she withdraws her amendment.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

May I just clarify one question? Could the noble Lord explain the Government’s attitude to the Sullivan review? When are they going to act on it? It is very comprehensive and I understood that the Government, particularly the Home Secretary, were perfectly positive about it but, like too many reviews, it sits there, with all that hard work, data collected and intellectual energy, and is not acted upon. If it had been, these amendments would not be necessary. Maybe the noble Lord could give us a timeline to clarify that.

[Lord Katz (Lab)]

As the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, said, there was certainly a lot of work done. I believe that it was commissioned by the previous Government, so it overlaps from the previous Administration into ours. I am not sure that I can provide a concrete timeline from the Dispatch Box, so I would be happy to write to the noble Baroness with those details.