Crime and Policing Bill

Debate between Baroness Shawcross-Wolfson and Viscount Colville of Culross

Committee stage
Tuesday 9th December 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Shawcross-Wolfson (Con)]

My Lords, I too support my noble friend Lady Bertin’s amendments and I will particularly talk about Amendment 314. There is no debate about whether certain pornography is harmful. Parliament settled that question decades ago. There is no debate about whether it is right for our Parliament to ban harmful pornography. We already do. We are merely debating whether we have the determination to apply our existing laws to the latest distribution channels.

In the early 1980s, we saw a dramatic increase in video cassette recorders in the home and the subsequent emergence of video nasties. In that era, Parliament was quick to catch up to the latest technological innovation and, as we have heard, the Video Recordings Act 1984 was passed with cross-party support. As a result, pornography released on physical formats is and has always been strictly regulated in the UK. In 2003, Parliament extended those protections through the Communications Act to ensure that UK-based video-on-demand services, including those that specialised in pornography, could not distribute content that the British Board of Film Classification would refuse to classify. Amendment 314 simply takes the definition of harmful content in the Communications Act 2003 and seeks to apply it to online pornography, with a proper framework for enforcement. Some 41 years ago, we said that harmful content could not be distributed on video cassettes, 22 years ago we said it could not be distributed through video-on-demand services, and now it is time to close the gap in the law which allows it to be legally distributed on the internet.

Amendments 291 and 290 would ensure that incest material and depictions of child sexual abuse in online pornography are made illegal. My noble friend Lady Bertin and others have already outlined the immense damage that this content does. I welcome the Government’s commitment to end the depiction of strangulation in online pornography, not least because it demonstrates their conviction that such material can be banned. All it requires is political will. I hope that the Committee will find that same political will to make pornography that mimics child sex abuse or portrays incest illegal.

I support Amendment 292, which would introduce a statutory duty for platforms to verify the age and consent of individuals who feature in pornography. It is the bare minimum we need to start tackling the rampant exploitation in the porn industry.

I conclude by returning to my starting point. In previous generations, when the technology advanced, from cinema to video and from video to streaming, Parliament acted. Today is no different. We have acted because, as the sponsor of the Video Recordings Act said 40 years ago, incredibly presciently:

“Producers and suppliers of this base and debasing material have only one aim—to supply the worst elements of human nature for profit”.—[Official Report, Commons, 11/11/1983; col. 522.]


We have acted because we have long known that violent porn—the type of pornography that depicts acts that are illegal in real life—is damaging. At no point have we as a Parliament or a society proactively debated and agreed to accept the type of abusive pornography that is now mainstream and widespread on the internet. No Minister from any Government has stood at the Dispatch Box and argued that the public have a right to watch scenes depicting incest or child sex abuse—I doubt any Minister would. No Minister has made the case that this material is harmless, and no Minister could, given the evidence we have heard today. We allow this material to proliferate not because we think it is harmless, not because we think it is a matter of free speech, but because we think it is hard to stop. It is hard, but I am hopeful. Today, we have a regulator which is beginning to make great strides in tackling illegal material online. We have a regulator with 40 years’ experience of video classification, and we have a Government who, to echo the words of the Minister, are profoundly committed to halving violence against women and girls. Today, we have an opportunity to close this unconscionable gap in the law. I very much hope that we will do so.

[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.