Crime and Policing Bill

Lord Banner Excerpts

Tuesday 20th January 2026 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Banner]

417: After Clause 145, insert the following new Clause—
“Amendment to the Sentencing Act 2020 to introduce public interest compensation orders(1) The Sentencing Act 2020 is amended as follows.(2) After section 133(b) (compensation orders), insert “, or(c) to make a payment to one or more relevant organisations for public interest or social purposes (“public interest compensation order”).(2) In this Chapter, “relevant organisation” means an organisation listed in Schedule 22A (Relevant organisations for public interest compensation orders).”.(3) After section 135 (making a compensation order), insert—“135A Public interest compensation orders(1) When convicting a person of a relevant offence, the court shall consider whether to issue a public interest compensation order, and what the terms of that order should be.(2) In this section “relevant offence” means an offence listed in Schedule 22B (Relevant offences for public interest compensation orders).(3) The Secretary of State may by order amend the relevant offences listed in Schedule 22B.(4) In determining whether to make a public interest compensation order against an offender, the amount to be paid under such an order, or to which relevant organisation(s) the payment(s) should be made, the court must, in addition to the factor in section 135(3), have regard to—(a) the rights of victims of human rights violations (inside or outside the United Kingdom) to receive effective reparation and remedy,(b) the fact that individuals who are not proven to be direct victims of the offender’s offence may nevertheless be victims of human rights violations to which the offender’s offence is related,(c) the broader impact of the offender’s offence on victims of human rights violations in the United Kingdom or in other countries,(d) where there is a large number of victims of human rights violations to which the offender’s offence is related, the urgency of victims’ needs (which may vary depending on the harms that they have suffered),(e) where the relevant offence is an offence under regulations imposed under the Sanctions and Anti-Money Laundering Act 2018, the purposes of the relevant regulations and any human rights violations arising in connection with conduct that these regulations seek to discourage, and (f) whether it would be appropriate to make another type of compensation order and, if so, whether the offender has sufficient means to pay both orders, as well as the need to prioritise compensation to direct victims of the offender’s offence.(5) If the court considers issuing a public interest compensation order, the court may (but is not required to) ask the Secretary of State to recommend the relevant organisation(s) to which the funds subject to the order should be paid and if the court makes such a request—(a) the Secretary of State shall, within 90 days (the “relevant period”), recommend to the court in writing one or more organisations to which the funds subject to the order should be paid (the “recommendation”) and in doing so, the Secretary of State must have regard to the same factors as under subsection (4) above(b) the court may issue a public interest compensation order after the earlier of—(i) the court having received a recommendation, and(ii) the relevant period having expired,(c) if a recommendation has been made within the relevant period, the court may take it into account in issuing a public interest compensation order but shall not be bound by it.(6) The court may direct that confiscated funds be paid to a relevant organisation subject to such conditions as it considers appropriate.(7) The Secretary of State may by order amend the organisations listed in Schedule 22A and the Secretary of State shall review the organisations listed in Schedule 22A at least annually.(8) If, under subsection (5) above, the Secretary of State recommends one or more organisations that are not listed in Schedule 22B, the organisation(s) recommended by the Secretary of State shall be considered relevant organisation(s) for the purposes of the public interest compensation order at issue.(9) For the purposes of this section, a court may issue a public interest compensation order regardless of whether there is a direct connection between the offender’s conduct and the harm suffered by the ultimate recipients or beneficiaries of the public interest compensation order.”.(4) After Schedule 22 (Amendments of the Sentencing Code and related amendments of other legislation), insert the following new Schedule—“Schedule 22ARelevant organisations for public interest compensation orders1 The following organisations—The Trust Fund for Victims, created by the Assembly of States Parties in accordance with article 79 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.The Register of Damage Caused by the Aggression of the Russian Federation against Ukraine, established within the framework of the Council of Europe by Resolution CM/Res(2023)3, or any successor body or attached fund.The United Nations Voluntary Fund for Victims of Torture, established by the United Nations General Assembly through resolution 36/151 of 16 December 1981.”.(5) After Schedule 22A (Relevant organisations for public interest compensation orders), insert the following new Schedule— “Schedule 22BRelevant offences for public interest compensation orders1 The following offences to the extent that they are offences under the law of England and Wales—Offences arising under regulations imposed under the Sanctions and Anti-Money Laundering Act 2018.”.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment seeks to amend the Sentencing Act 2020. It would allow the courts to award compensation orders not only to individuals but also for public interest or social purposes, thereby enabling the proceeds of confiscated criminal assets to be more readily used to compensate victims of offences under the UK’s sanctions legislation.

[Lord Banner (Con)]

My Lords, in moving Amendment 417 I will speak to the associated Amendment 419, both in my name and with named support across the Committee. The purpose of these amendments is to provide a clear and easy-to-use legal basis for those found guilty of sanctions breaches and other similar offences to pay compensation in the public interest to specified victims’ organisations listed in the proposed Schedule 22A and any other similar organisations added to that list through regulations.

There is a clear case for legislative intervention in this area. By way of overview, the existing law provides only a very narrow basis for using the proceeds of confiscated criminal assets to compensate victims, and only in straightforward cases. Victims are rarely allocated any share of the sums recovered. Amendments 417 and 419 would empower courts to award compensation for public interest or social purposes, addressing a significant gap in the law by enabling compensation in the more complex cases for which the existing law is ill suited—for example, supporting Ukrainians who are most impacted by breaches of the UK’s targeted sanctions against the Putin regime and its corrupt cronies.

Against that overview, I turn to the main features of the existing law to demonstrate why they do not go far enough. First, compensation orders under the Sentencing Act 2020 are designed to compensate direct victims of criminal conduct. Where a conviction has been secured, the court is empowered to order the offender to pay compensation for any personal injury, loss or damage arising from the offence in question. The courts have, however, held that these kinds of compensation orders are intended only for clear and simple cases, where there is an obvious direct victim and the amount of compensation can readily and easily be ascertained. Thus, for example, a builder may take a £15,000 deposit to complete building work for a home owner and fraudulently make no attempt to carry out the work. There is a clear victim and a clear loss: the home owner and the £15,000. The compensation order is well suited to handle that sort of case.

By contrast, a court is highly unlikely to be able to make a standard compensation order in a sanctions breach or similar case. Sanctions breaches are rarely clear and simple cases because, by the nature of the offence, the consequences are wide reaching, and they can violate the rights of a large number of people. Victims of the breach, or indeed the precise loss or damage suffered, will typically be very difficult to identify or quantify with the necessary precision required by the current law.

Courts are ill equipped to handle victim compensation in such cases, given the vast and multifaceted harms at issue and the indirect connection between the harms and the sanctions breach. The NGO Redress has advised that its experts are not aware of any single sanctions breach case in the UK in which the court has issued a compensation order for victims. I would be interested to know whether the Minister can provide us with any such examples. Such compensation orders are simply not suited to complex economic crime, such as sanctions offences.

The second area of the existing law is confiscation orders under the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002. In the event of a conviction, the court can order the confiscation of a portion of an offender’s assets, provided they have been found to have benefited from their criminal conduct. These confiscation orders are intended to deprive the defendant of the proceeds of the crime, rather than to compensate victims. The amounts confiscated are usually paid to the Government’s bank account and then sometimes shared across certain government departments and arm’s-length bodies. No amount is typically paid to victims, subject to very limited exceptions.

The third category of the existing law is forfeiture orders, also under the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002. In this respect, agencies such as the National Crime Agency, HMRC and the Serious Fraud Office, among others, can institute civil forfeiture proceedings in some situations, in which a court may issue a forfeiture order in respect of funds associated with unlawful conduct. Here too, however, the law is inadequate to deal with sanctions breaches. There is a statutory requirement for funds that have been forfeited under such an order to be paid, again, to the Government’s general bank account, with very limited exceptions relating to situations where someone can show that the amount belongs to them and that they were deprived of it by the offender’s unlawful conduct. Again, that is ill suited to the sanctions context.

Pulling this together, I suggest that, unless the law is changed, in the vast majority of cases judges will have no real ability to award compensation to the victims of sanctions and associated crimes. Not a penny will go to the very people most harmed by the criminal violation in question, not because they are undeserving or have not suffered a harm, but simply because there is a gap in the law that means their position cannot be addressed. This shortcoming is increasingly indefensible in the current world in which we live and will only grow as the UK rightly takes more sanctions enforcement action, most immediately in the context of Ukraine but also in any future cases.

Dealing with the context of Ukraine, the UK positions itself, quite admirably, as a global leader on Russian sanctions. Some 3,000 targets have been sanctioned to date. Yet, when it comes to enforcing these sanctions and penalising any breaches of them, it is the UK, not the victims, that retains the proceeds. Having dedicated unprecedented diplomatic and financial resources to seeking to bring an end to Putin’s war for the benefit of the Ukrainian people, it is striking that the courts have practically no legal basis to channel any of the proceeds of Russian sanctions breaches to Ukrainian victims, whom the sanctions programme is ultimately intended to protect.

I turn to alternatives. In correspondence between Redress and the Home Office, which I have seen, the Minister referred to other amendments proposed to the Bill to ensure that the uplifts to existing confiscation orders can similarly be redirected. However, these are subject to the same or similar limitations as the existing law. In particular, the limitation of the concepts of victim and loss being narrowly defined means that redress is not available for indirect victims. It is that gap that my Amendments 417 and 419 are intended to address.

In the light of that, I stress that my challenge to the Minister is a constructive one, because I want to put on the record the personal experience I have of the deeply conscientious engagement he has had on matters of Ukraine that I have raised with him. I thank him publicly for that, as I have done privately. Can he offer a cast-iron guarantee that the existing law, coupled with any proposed amendments the Government are putting forward, goes as far as Amendments 417 and 419, or does he accept that there is a gap? If he does, can he explain the justification for it? I beg to move.

[Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Banner. I have signed Amendments 417 and 419. The noble Lord has made a powerful, constructive and eloquent case for we should try to tackle the public interest compensation orders and deal with the gap that is left by confiscation orders, compensation orders and forfeiture, which he mentioned in his speech.

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I understand where the noble Lord is coming from. I hope my explanation of where we are currently is of help. He may still feel there is a gap between the Government and himself. If so, he knows that we can revisit this in due course. I hope that the explanation I have given and the commitments we have shown in the last month on Chelsea FC, and the general support for the international funding of some £22 billion to Ukraine, are of help. With those comments, I ask him to withdraw his amendment.

[Lord Banner (Con)]

I thank the Minister for his comments, and indeed all speakers. The force of the unanimity on this issue across the Committee is telling. I hope it is the beginning of the momentum that my noble and learned friend Lord Garnier called for.

With respect to a couple of points the Minister mentioned, the proposal would not distract from the existing law because it applies only to relevant offences, which are defined in the amendment as, essentially, sanctions and money laundering. The option of a public interest compensation order would not be available for the dodgy builder-type case that I outlined before. It would not, in fact, distract from direct victims but, in precisely those kinds of offences where the existing law is inapt, it would provide for a remedy for victims. It is true that this category is relatively narrowly defined, but it is precisely that category of offences where the law is currently deficient.

I therefore urge the Minister and officials to give this further consideration. If he is not sick of meeting me on Ukraine-related matters, I am very happy to meet him again to talk through how the wording could perhaps be tweaked to deal with some of the issues he has outlined. If we cannot reach agreement, I would be inclined to bring this back on Report, and/or in the context of the Victims and Courts Bill, as my noble friend mentioned. Against all that background, for now, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 417 withdrawn.

Crime and Policing Bill

Lord Banner Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 9th December 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Banner (Con)]

My Lords, I too support these amendments. I declare an interest of sorts in that I have a young daughter who is fast approaching her teenage years. The idea that she might one day be the subject of the kind of despicable abuse that my noble friend Lady Owen and others have outlined is utterly terrifying, so I am determined to do my part to secure its eradication.

My noble friend Lady Owen outlined the case for her amendments with all the skill and more of any King’s Counsel, so I do not need to say very much, but I want to highlight, in particular, her call for Parliament to be agile on this subject. The speed of proliferation of the kinds of abuse she has talked about risks Parliament looking lead-footed and out of touch if we do not take the further steps that she advocates through her amendments. There is no place for wait-and-see incrementalism in this area.

Any concerns about freedom of expression under the Human Rights Act, which from time to time we hear whispers of, are in my view entirely misplaced. The right to freedom of expression is qualified; it is not absolute. It is plainly not a licence to abuse. I ask rhetorically, and genuinely seeking an answer from the Minister: why not do it?

[Baroness Coffey (Con)]

My Lords, I have signed Amendment 334 on spiking, but I want to congratulate my noble friend Lady Owen of Alderley Edge as she yet again leads the way on the important issues in her other amendments.

Clause 101, on spiking, is certainly welcome. The measure appeared in the previous version of the Bill in the previous Parliament, and I give credit to Richard Graham, the former MP for Gloucester, who brought this to the attention of Parliament. More broadly, I have a little question for the Minister. I am always very nervous when civil servants recommend that we remove things from existing legislation. I notice that the clause will remove Section 22 and Section 23 at the beginning and then there is the broader new Section 24. What has driven that? Too often things disappear and end up with some kind of defect or loophole. That is exactly what concerned my friend Joe Robertson MP, who tabled an amendment like my noble friend’s Amendment 334 on Report in the Commons, having tabled something similar in Committee. His concern was that there is a loophole and that spiking by a reckless act should also be an offence.

I do not need to persuade your Lordships that spiking is a hideous, heinous activity which can destroy people’s physical and mental health. The evidence given by Colin Mackie from Spike Aware UK at Committee stage in the Commons was compelling, especially as it was driven by his personal experience of his 18 year-old son Greg dying through suspected spiking of the kind now known as prank spiking.

At the moment, Clause 101 provides that there has to be an intent to injure, aggrieve or similar. I know that Ministers in the other place felt that the Bill covers recklessness, but I think it is pretty clear that the legislation does not particularly seem to cover prank spiking.

Recklessness is a well-trodden principle in criminal law, dating back a couple of hundred years. It is definitively an alternative to intent so, if the prosecution fails to establish that someone meant to do something, it can also establish that their actions were so reckless that they should be convicted. Indeed, this is what manslaughter is—somebody gets convicted of killing but without having the intent to commit murder. The other example, perhaps not quite so dramatic, is actual bodily harm. The prosecution must establish the harm but can do so on the basis that what was done was reckless so that harm was bound to follow rather than simply that someone intended for harm to happen.

I hope the Government will reconsider their conclusion that what we have before us in Clause 101 is sufficient. I understand that it may be that one MP has got particularly focused on this campaign, but it took Richard Graham to get focused on the issue of spiking for it to make any progress into legislation in the other place. I am grateful to this Administration for picking that up. I look forward to hearing from the Minister and hope again that there may be room for some consensus, not just compromise, on how we can make sure there are no loopholes in this law.

Non-Consensual Sexually Explicit Images and Videos (Offences) Bill [HL]

Lord Banner Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 13th December 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Banner (Con)]

My Lords, I, too, emphatically support the Bill. As the father of a seven year-old girl, with her teenage years and young adulthood ahead of her, I found the stories of those subject to deepfake abuse to be truly terrifying, as is the rate of its proliferation. In the last year alone, over 140,000 new deepfake videos appeared online—more than in all previous years put together. The largest website dedicated to this abuse receives over 13 million visits monthly; one app processed 600,000 images in its first three weeks of operation. The law urgently needs to catch up with this new reality and the Bill would make that happen.

I would like to make three points about it. First, I completely reject the suggestion in some quarters—thankfully, not among any speakers today so far—that the Bill would be an unjustified interference with individual freedoms. This completely devalues the concept of civil liberties and individual freedoms, and it is frankly insulting to those who have devoted and given their lives to defending those freedoms to tarnish them by association with the abusive creation of demeaning fake sexual images of people. The only real rights in play here are those of the victims, as my noble friend Lady Owen so compellingly put it.

Secondly, I support the Bill’s approach of making the proposed offence consent-based, as opposed to the perpetrator’s intent having to be proved. As the Law Commission has explained, it would be impractical to require proof in each case that the perpetrator had the specific motive of causing distress or sexual gratification. Such a requirement would deprive the legislation of practical utility. Like dangerous driving, the act is itself sufficiently reprehensible for the law to treat it as criminal without having to delve into the perpetrator’s mind. In any event, let us be realistic here: it is no leap of faith for the law to assume that someone involved in creating or soliciting deepfake images without consent is not doing so innocently, or is oblivious to the obvious impact that such images can have on their victims. So I ask the Minister to confirm whether the Government will commit, whether through this Bill or other legislation, to a consent-based offence.

Thirdly, I part with the Law Commission in relation to its suggestion—albeit two years ago—that there is insufficient evidence of harm to criminalise creation and solicitation without sharing. For the reasons I gave at the outset of my speech, that view no longer reflects the reality. Today’s AI tools can create highly convincing deepfakes in minutes, presenting an immediate threat both to dignity and safety. If the law does not step in at that stage, before the horse has bolted, in practice it will be ineffective.

The Labour Party manifesto specifically committed to

“banning the creation of … explicit deepfakes”.

Despite the urgency I have outlined, no such proposal has featured in the King’s Speech. Mañana is not an answer. I congratulate my noble friend on taking the initiative with this Bill. I urge the Government to support it and not kick the can down the road in favour of future legislation with diluted and less effective regulation.

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[Lord Ponsonby of Shulbrede (Lab)]

I am afraid I will have to repeat the point I made previously: we understand very well the strength of feeling on this argument, and we are actively considering it.

[Lord Banner (Con)]

My Lords, I think the Minister said earlier that an offence of soliciting would add nothing because of the current established offences in relation to aiding and abetting, et cetera. Can he elaborate on his rationale for that, particularly in circumstances where the primary offence is committed overseas, perhaps in a jurisdiction where it is not actually an offence?

[Lord Ponsonby of Shulbrede (Lab)]

I am afraid I cannot elaborate further, because of the complexity of the situation that the noble Lord highlighted. We realise that it is difficult, and we need to get the law right. I do not want to say that we are taking our time, because this is an absolute government priority. We are in the process of identifying a suitable vehicle to address these issues in this Session of Parliament. The noble Lord makes a good point.