Crime and Policing Bill

Lord Blencathra Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 20th January 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

My Lords, I support the amendment in the name of my noble friend on the Front Bench. At this juncture, I also thank the Committee for its forbearance when I was not able to move my previous amendment on mobile phone theft. I put on record my warmest thanks to my noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe for moving it so eloquently on that occasion.

This is an issue about the difference between “serious violence” and “violence”, but the wider context is the fact that the UK has a knife crime problem. In London, the number of incidents up to June 2025 was 15,639, which was an increase of nearly 72% from the data recorded in 2015-16. Unfortunately, it has to be said that the number of stop and search encounters peaked at the end of the last Labour Government and dramatically decreased under the two previous Governments. Between 2003 and 2011, stop and search numbers increased, peaking at 1.2 million, but by 2018 this had fallen by 77%. The number of arrests resulting from stop and search encounters had fallen from 120,000 to 48,000.

The fact is that there is significant evidence that stop and search does demonstrably have an impact on the incidence of knife crime, and therefore reduces crime. In a study released in 2025, the two criminologists Alexis Piquero and Lawrence Sherman analysed data between 2008 and 2023, and found that stop and search encounters were successful in reducing deaths and injuries related to weapons. The conclusion of the study was that

“increased stop and search encounters can significantly reduce knife-related injuries and homicides in public places”.

Evidence from a number of bodies and think tanks, including Policy Exchange, suggests that, while there may be a range of causal factors, a link between rates of knife crime and rates of stop and search exists. As the rate of stop and search decreases, the amount of knife crime increases. As stop and search rises, the amount of knife crime falls. The Chief Constable of Greater Manchester, Sir Stephen Watson, said last year:

“If you don’t back your officers to do stop and search, they will stop doing stop and search. And if you stop doing stop and search, you’ll see street robberies going up”.


The issue is the difference between “serious violence” and “violence” within that context. My simple point to the Committee is that, if we want to take weapons off the street and prevent incidents of knife crime and other crime, we have to increase stop and search. Therefore, you have to give warranted officers the legal underpinning and the authority to make the appropriate decisions for stop and search. In 2023, there were 5,014 occasions when a police officer found a weapon or firearm when looking for a different prohibited item. In 3,221 of those cases, they were looking for drugs. This is a case of effective policing and not just getting lucky. So, if they could stop for “violence”, they might find weapons that could have led to a more serious situation. If not, there is a potential for people to just walk away.

On that basis, it is wise for the Government to consider this amendment, because it allows flexibility in operational policing. Fundamentally, it will prevent crime and may even in the long run prevent serious injury or death. Therefore, I invite Ministers and the Committee to give this amendment their strong support.

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

My Lords, I support my noble friend’s Amendment 411, because it brings clarity and accountability to the exceptional power in Section 60 of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994. This is not a call to strengthen police powers; it is a call to describe them accurately, so the public understand their narrow scope and the safeguards that constrain them.

Section 60 is triggered only when

“a police officer of or above the rank of inspector reasonably believes”

one of a small number of factors: that incidents of violence may take place in a locality; that a weapon used in a recent incident is being carried locally; or that people are carrying weapons without good reason; and that there has already been an incident of serious violence. The statute requires the authorisation to be for

“any place within that locality for a specified period not exceeding 24 hours”.

These are tight operational limits.

Changing the definition from “serious violence” to “violence” keeps all the safeguards that make this power exceptional rather than just routine: the inspector-level threshold; the written and recorded authorisation; the geographic and temporal limits; the ability to seize weapons; and the requirement to provide records to those stopped. Those are not peripheral details; they are the legal guardrails that protect civil liberties while enabling targeted public safety action.

I simply ask: where is the dividing line between violence and serious violence? If someone gets stabbed multiple times and it is life-threatening, we would all agree that is serious violence, but what about the person who gets stabbed once and suffers a non-life-threatening cut? Is that merely violence and so does not count? That is why we have to change this definition to any violence, no matter how serious it may be called. This is not a wide-ranging opening of the stop and search powers applying everywhere for all time. Using “violence” in operational documents with an explicit cross-reference to the Section 60 triggers reduces confusion with broader strategic programmes labelled “serious violence”. It prevents the normalisation of suspicionless searches and makes it easier for Parliament, oversight bodies and the public to scrutinise each authorisation against the statutory test.

This amendment is modest, practical and proportionate. It highlights the statutory safeguards and does not remove any of them, but it gives the police a sensible power to save lives and prevent injury where they think that there may be more violence. I urge the Committee and the Minister to support Amendment 411.

[Lord Sentamu (CB)]

My Lords, I agree with the wording as it is in the Bill. The word “serious” is quite important. Stop and search, particularly in the London area, has been abused. You are supposed to stop somebody because of “reasonable” grounds to suspect, but as somebody who was stopped and searched six times, and every time I did not have anything they thought I would have, I see it as a sort of overpolicing.

It is a pity that the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, is not here, because when he became the chief police officer in this place, he realised that some of this was not working and was antagonising communities, not delivering the result that was expected. The Bill is worded in terms of “serious”; the amendment tries to lower the threshold. As the intention of the Bill is to stop serious crime, “serious” to me is quite important. I do not support the amendment and would like to retain the wording in the Bill.

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[Lord Shamash (Lab)]

My Lords, in my experience, the fastest and most dangerous group of cyclists are Deliveroo and Uber Eats riders. That would be the case because they have to get as many deliveries in as they can. In my experience, an awful lot of them wear face masks. I would be interested to hear from the Minister and the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe—we have heard what the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, had to say—what you would begin to do about that. They have great big things on their backs saying Deliveroo or Uber Eats, but they drive fast and wear masks. Will the police stop them?

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

My Lords, I rise to support my noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe and her Amendment 416, because it addresses a very real and rapidly accelerating problem on our streets: the use of face coverings by criminals on e-bikes and e-scooters to hide their identity while committing thefts, robberies and drug-related offences. I did not know that the Mayor of London had stolen my noble friend’s “Wild West” quote; I have lots of pages of newspaper reports on the “Wild West”. We should make sure that it is properly attributed to her; she was the inventor of the slogan.

We are not dealing with petty opportunism here, but with organised, masked offenders using high-powered electric bikes capable of 50, 60 or even 70 miles per hour, weaving through pedestrians and traffic with impunity. That may partly be the answer to the concerns of the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe. I agree that the amendment may need to be tweaked on Report. We are not talking here about an ordinary man or woman on an ordinary bike pedalling along and wearing a mask to keep out the cold; we are talking about people on big electric bikes, often fat-tyre bikes, belting along at phenomenal speed, wearing balaclavas rather than masks. There is certainly an element of criminality; it is not just ordinary cyclists trying to protect themselves from catching flies while they are riding.

Police forces across the country report that these vehicles are now central to a surge in mobile phone snatching and associated criminality. The scale is stark. Mobile phone thefts have almost doubled to 83,000 a year, with London at the epicentre, recording 65,000 thefts in the last reporting period. The crimes are not only fast; they are deliberately anonymous. Officers and victims consistently describe offenders wearing balaclava masks and full facial coverings. Schools in London have issued warnings about males in balaclavas targeting children for their phones on the way to school. In Newcastle, residents report masked riders armed with crowbars and knives terrorising neighbourhoods, snatching phones and intimidating women walking home.

This is not a marginal issue; it is a pattern. The police are clear: illegal e-bikes and e-scooters are being used for “all sorts of criminality”, including drug dealing, robbery and organised theft. The City of London Police states explicitly that illegal e-bikes are frequently used to commit crimes such as phone snatching, and its targeted operations have reduced such offences by 40% in the square mile. But officers say that identification is the greatest barrier to enforcement. When a rider is masked, unregistered and travelling at 50 miles an hour, the chances of apprehension are vanishingly small. As we discussed the other day, I commend the Met unit using its own fast electric e-bikes to chase these guys on bikes.

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I emphasise finally that these are matters for the Government, ultimately, in my view, to decide. I therefore look forward to hearing what the Minister has to say.

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

My Lords, I am delighted to rise to support my noble friend Lord Young of Acton’s excellent Amendment 416E, which seeks to abolish the non-crime hate incident regime, which is long overdue. The principle at stake is quite simple and fundamental. The state must not brand people as potential wrongdoers when no criminal offence has been committed. So I congratulate my noble friend on moving the amendment and the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, whose masterful speech made an absolutely compelling case for the immediate abolition of this obnoxious regime.

I am delighted to hear the wise words of my noble friend Lord Herbert of South Downs, in his role as chair of the College of Policing. If it looks like, as the noble Lord said, the regime is not fit for purpose, and if that report gets to the Home Office before Report, we want amendments on Report to abolish it, rather than putting it out to consultation for another three months to decide whether to do it in some future criminal justice Bill. If it is not fit for purpose now, it should not be fit for purpose a moment longer than necessary.

For far too long, under all Governments, this gross abuse of our fundamental freedoms has been tolerated. I cannot count the number of times I have heard police and Ministers justify it on the basis that it is an essential intelligence-gathering tool which would be helpful in heading off future crimes. I strongly believe in intelligence-led policing and recording secretly any information on potential criminal activity. But it is not intelligence if you record it on a database and give it to prospective employers with, in the immortal words of Monty Python, a “nudge nudge, wink wink, say no more” sort of thing.

Recent reporting makes this danger painfully clear. As my noble friend said, we now have the documented cases of a nine year-old boy logged for calling another pupil a retard; two schoolgirls accused of saying someone else smelled like fish; and the extraordinary case of Harry Miller, a former police officer, who was visited at work by Humberside Police because he tweeted this joke:

“I was assigned Mammal at Birth, but my orientation is Fish”—


it is not a very funny joke, but nevertheless—which the force recorded as a non-crime hate incident until the High Court ruled its actions a “disproportionate interference” with his freedom of expression, and rightly so.

The case of Allison Pearson was mentioned by my noble friend: the national newspaper columnist had police officers knock on her door on Remembrance Sunday to accuse her of “stirring up racial hatred” over a tweet she had already deleted. It was never told what she was being investigated for, because no offence had been committed. A person who has committed no crime can be questioned, placed on a police record and left with a stain that follows them into job applications, community life and future interactions with the state.

This is not a harmless administrative note. A police record, even where no offence has been committed, can surface in enhanced checks, damage careers and stigmatise people in their communities. It creates a two-tier system of reputational punishment: one for those convicted of crimes and another, less visible but no less damaging, for those who have merely expressed opinions or made mistakes. That is a grave injustice. The state must not be in the business of branding citizens as potential wrongdoers when no criminality has been established. Recording non-criminal speech as a hate incident treats lawful expression as if it were a criminal matter.

This practice chills debate, deters whistleblowers and journalists, and discourages civic participation. It stops harmless jokes and humour. If this system had existed 30 years ago in the British Army, hundreds of thousands of sergeant-majors would have had millions of records against them, because the wonderful terms of abuse and insults they had for us when we got our marching wrong and made mistakes were absolutely astronomical. I do not think we suffered any harm because of those jokes and humour at our expense.

Amendment 416E restores the proper boundary between policing and free expression. It does not prevent the police investigating genuine criminal offences or using intelligence proportionately where there is a real threat to safety. What it does is prevent the indefinite administrative stigmatisation of people who have committed no crime. It protects employment prospects, reputations and the right to speak without fear of being treated as a suspect.

To me, the key subsection is not on stopping them doing it in future but on purging current records, as proposed new subsection (5) says:

“Within three months of the coming into force of this section, any police authority which has retained any record of a non-crime hate incident, save in accordance with the provisions of subsection (4), must delete such record”.


I agree entirely, but I warn noble Lords that the police, in many cases, will try not to do it. They will find every excuse to hang on to that database and not delete it immediately.

I have tremendous respect for the police and the brave work they do on our behalf, and I pay tribute to the 4,000 officers killed in the last 200 years, since the first salaried officers went on duty. All the police I have ever met have wanted to save lives, crack down on crime and keep the King’s peace—but if you gave them a completely free hand, they would want to collect from every person over the age of five their fingerprints, DNA and biometric data and use them to stop crime. They would succeed—it would make a tremendous difference—but I think that is not the sort of society we want to allow. Therefore, we should not permit the retention of data on individuals who have not committed any crime.

I was interested in what the noble Lord, Lord Hogan- Howe, said about recording. When I heard the Metropolitan Police commissioner say a few weeks ago that it was not going to investigate non-crime hate incidents and was just going to record them, I thought, “Hang on”. That means that if someone accuses someone else of being racist, the police will not investigate to see whether it is right or wrong but will still record it as a crime. If keeping it recorded means in the call centre, on the record, that is okay, but it should not be recorded on any other database if it is not actually a crime.

I conclude by saying that this reform is practical. As my noble friend said, police resources are finite. Recording and managing non-crime entries diverts police officers from investigating real criminality and protecting victims. If the state wants to monitor tensions, it can do so through proportionate, anonymised intelligence and community safety work, not by placing individuals on quasi-criminal registers for conduct that is lawful. I support my noble friend’s amendment, and I support what my noble friend Lord Herbert of South Downs said about the College of Policing saying it is not fit for purpose. I therefore look forward to a commitment from the Minister that we will have an amendment on Report that implements what my noble friend Lord Young has said in Amendment 416E.

[Lord Kempsell (Con)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as a freelance journalist and, therefore, somebody who has a very great care for freedom of speech. What a pleasure it is to follow the speech of my noble friend Lord Blencathra, which so brilliantly summarised all the reasons there are to support Amendment 416E in the name of my noble friend Lord Young and the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe.

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[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Young of Acton, for tabling this amendment. This has been a useful debate, and I hope that we can at least look at the common direction of travel on this matter: the need for reform.

I have heard from the noble Lord, Lord Young of Acton, and His Majesty’s loyal Opposition, through the noble Lord, Lord Davies. I have also heard from the noble Lords, Lord Blencathra, Lord Kempsell, Lord Jackson of Peterborough, Lord Hogan-Howe, Lord Clement-Jones, Lord Herbert of South Downs, the noble Baronesses, Lady Brinton and Lady Fox of Buckley, and the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler- Sloss. They have raised a range of issues that, in essence, point to the need for change in this system.

I think it is fair to say, and I hope that the Committee will accept, that the current Government have held office since July 2024. There has been a lot of discussion on the issues caused by, and effect of, non-crime hate incidents since the guidance was published in 2014. I do not want to lose the principle, which was mentioned by the noble Lords, Lord Hogan-Howe, Lord Clement-Jones and Lord Herbert of South Downs, that the non-crime hate incident regime had its genesis in the Macpherson report, and in trying to anticipate and examine where crimes were being committed, potentially in the future, and monitor a range of abuses that were present.

However, I say to the Committee—and I think this was recognised by Members in their contributions today —that how the police should respond to hate incidents that fall below the criminal threshold is a complex and sensitive issue. That is precisely why the then Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, the Member for Pontefract, Castleford and Normanton, and the current Home Secretary, my right honourable friend Shabana Mahmood, the Member for Ladywood, have asked the College of Policing and the National Police Chiefs’ Council to conduct a thorough review into non-crime hate incidents.

The review is examining whether the current approach is proportionate, consistent and compatible with the fundamental right to free expression—which goes to very point that was made. As the noble Lord, Lord Herbert of South Downs, said, the review is being led by policing experts and is expected to conclude, in his words, “shortly”. The publication date is one for the College of Policing. We have had the interim report, which has said that there are significant concerns in the way non-crime hate incidents are operating.

Given the points that have been made today, and given that the Government have commissioned a review, seen the interim report and, in the words of the noble Lord, Lord Herbert of South Downs, expect to receive the final report shortly, I would again ask the Committee to bear with us—I know that I have asked for this on a number of occasions—to examine what professional police officers and the College of Policing are recommending on non-crime hate incidents.

The noble Lord, Lord Young of Acton, rightly asked some significant questions. What is happening to database logging of anti-social behaviour incidents? What is happening to people who have previously had non-crime hate incidents put against their name? What is happening with regard to non-disclosure? What is happening in terms of the publication of the report and the Government’s response? Those are all fair and legitimate questions.

However, I say to the noble Lord and the Committee that the current Government have come in, recognised that there is an issue, commissioned the College of Policing to look at that issue and have received an independent report, and we expect a full report on how we can deal with those issues and tweak the regime so that we do not lose the very good things that have sometimes been brought out of non-crime hate incidents and we do not throw everything out immediately. I do not know what the final report is going to say.

At Second Reading, the noble Lord, Lord Herbert of South Downs, said:

“The review has found that the current approach and use of non-crime hate incidents is not fit for purpose, and there is a need for broad reform to ensure that policing can focus on genuine harm and risk within communities. The recording of hurt feelings and differing views should not continue”.—[Official Report, 16/10/25; col. 406.]


That is a very clear statement. However, in moving from that in the interim report to whatever the new regime might be, it is incumbent on the Government to reflect on what the final report says. I am not ducking the amendment that the noble Lord has brought forward, nor his challenge that we need to make some changes. As he says, there is an open door. If we did not want this to be reviewed, we would not have asked the College of Policing and the Police Chiefs’ Council to review the incidence of non-crime hate incidents. Self-evidently, some of the examples given today are not what the original purpose of that legislation and approach was meant to be.

Going back to the Macpherson report, there was a serious element as to how assessments have been made. In Committee today, Members have talked about anti- semitism, racism and a range of incidents where the collection of information might give a bigger intelligence picture that requires a policing response, but which may or may not be a policing response that requires individuals to have their names put against them.

The concerns of everybody, from the noble Baroness, Lady Fox of Buckley, through to the noble Lord, Lord Young of Acton, are legitimate, and the Government want to look at and address them. I hope that this can be examined. However, I hope that the noble Lord will withdraw his amendment and await the outcome of the police review, so that any reforms are grounded in both robust evidence and a consensus.

Ultimately, the Government must and will take some decisions, and we will be held to account in the House of Commons and in this House as well. In the absence of that detailed response, I am not sure that I can come to this Committee and say, “This is what we will do”, because we need to examine that in detail.

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

I am very grateful to the noble Lord for his customary courtesy. I can accept his point that, since the Home Office has not yet received the final report, and Report may start in two or three-weeks’ time, it may not be possible to bring forward detailed primary legislation on Report. However, it seems to me—and perhaps my noble friend Lord Herbert can confirm this—that many of the changes may be administrative matters for the police and may not require legislation. What may require legislation may therefore be quite small. This Government, like the last one, love Henry VIII clauses. So would it not be possible for the Government to accept a simple Henry VIII clause so that, where legislation is required on this, a proper regulation can be brought in in the future, once the Government have consulted on what is required, to implement any of the legal changes necessary to give effect to my noble friend’s amendment.

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

I say to the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, in the nicest possible way, that my noble and learned friend Lord Hermer has given strict instructions to Government Ministers on Henry VIII clauses, and the various statutory instrument committees in this House and in the House of Commons have also expressed a grave view on them.

I put it to the Committee—and I hope that the Committee will accept this in good faith, as I am trying to do it in good faith—that the Government have recognised that there is a problem, and the Government have asked the College of Policing and the National Police Chiefs’ Council to examine that problem. The Government have received an interim report, which the noble Lord, Lord Herbert of South Downs, referred to at Second Reading. The Government are awaiting the final report, which the noble Lord has said is coming shortly. I have not seen the final report. There may be things in it that maintain, change or revoke altogether the issues that have, quite rightly, been raised. But, if the Government had not realised that there was a problem, we would not have asked for solutions to be brought forward.

I know that I occasionally say, “Something will be happening very shortly”, but I say, in genuine help and support for the Committee, that we know that there is a problem. We want to change that problem, but we are trying to make sure that we get sufficiently robust professional advice to be able to make some political decisions based on the advice that we receive. With that, I have tried to help the noble Lord and I hope that he will withdraw his amendment.

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Moved by

[Lord Blencathra]

416H: After Clause 144, insert the following new Clause—
“Police power to confiscate undocked electric cycles and scooters for hire(1) The police may confiscate any undocked electric cycle or scooter for hire which has been left on—(a) a public pavement,(b) a public highway,(c) any other public place, including pedestrian precincts, or(d) any other place where the owners have not given consent for electric cycles or scooters to be collected.(2) The police must take reasonable steps to notify the hire company responsible for the electric cycle or scooter confiscated under subsection (1).(3) The police may charge the hire company with responsibility for the electric cycle or scooter confiscated under this section a fee of up to £1,000 for the release of the electric cycle or scooter.(4) The Secretary of State may, by regulations, delegate local authorities or authorised agents to exercise powers on behalf of the police under this section.(5) If the Secretary of State delegates powers under subsection (4), they must publish a code of practice for local authorities and authorised agents on the implementation of confiscation powers and the charging of fees under this section.(6) For the purposes of this section—“local authority” means any council, unitary authority, district or other body with statutory responsibility for highways, public order, or refuse disposal, and“authorised agent” means any person or organisation appointed in writing by a local authority.”

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

My Lords, the Committee will be pleased to know that this is my last batch of amendments on the scourge of illegal bikes scattering our pavements and those big bikes the size of motorbikes mowing us down on the pavement. The Committee will also be pleased to know that, as I am attending the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, this is probably the last speech I will be making on the Bill for a short time.

The problem we face is plain and immediate. Thousands of dockless e-bikes and e-scooters have been dumped across our pavements and public spaces, creating a chaotic, inconsistent and dangerous environment for pedestrians. It is not often that I can agree with the Mayor of London, who described the rollout of these services as having become something of a “Wild West”, a term I understand that he took from my noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe. There has been a rapid commercial expansion of cycling without the regulatory framework or parking infrastructure needed to protect the public and preserve access to our streets.

This is not an abstract nuisance but a daily reality for people trying to get to work, for parents with pushchairs, for older people, and for blind and visually impaired citizens, who rely on clear and unobstructed tactile routes. It is a public safety and accessibility crisis that has been documented repeatedly by local authorities, clinicians and charities, and it demands a statutory response. Amendments 416H and 416I would provide that response. One would create a targeted operator charge to fund enforcement and drive better operational systems; the other would give clear and proportionate powers to remove and permanently dispose of manifestly illegal high-powered machines that pose acute safety and criminal use risks.

The evidence from the ground is clear. Local authorities are already acting because the problem is real and costly. Local enforcement teams in Kensington and Chelsea have seized over 1,000 dangerously parked rental e-bikes this year and recovered more than £81,000 in release and storage fees to fund further enforcement action. They did that after repeated complaints about pavement obstruction and trip hazards. Councils have recovered significant sums in seizure and storage fees and have reinvested that money to expand enforcement activities. These are not isolated seizures but the tip of a systemic problem.

Clinicians are seeing new patterns of injury directly attributed to heavy hire bikes. Trauma and orthopaedic surgeons report a rise in lower leg injuries caused when heavy e-bike frames fall on riders or pedestrians, a phenomenon that has been labelled in clinical and medical circles as “Lime bike leg”. These are not minor bruises: the weight and construction of modern e-bikes, particularly the overheavy Lime ones, mean that even low-speed falls can produce fractures and soft tissue damage requiring hospital treatment.

Charities representing blind and visually impaired people have described how dumped e-bikes block tactile paving and prevent safe access to crossings, forcing people to alter or abandon journeys. One campaigner described repeatedly walking into e-bikes and being “put off” visiting central areas because of the unpredictability and danger of obstructed pavements. Residents and local councillors are vocal. Councils report that residents are “sick” of e-bikes blocking footpaths and that the current situation is undermining confidence in local streets. These are not rhetorical flourishes; they reflect sustained public pressure and the failure of voluntary operator-led measures to deliver consistent outcomes.

So who is responsible, and why have voluntary measures failed? The nuisance is concentrated among a small number of large operators that have scaled fleets rapidly: Lime, Forest, Voi and newer entrants such as Bolt. These companies operate dockless models that rely on users to park responsibly. Where that expectation is not met, the public realm becomes cluttered and dangerous.

Operators have taken some steps—funding parking bays, running in-app messages and offering incentives for correct parking—but these voluntary measures have not been sufficient to prevent widespread obstruction or to ensure rapid removal of dangerous or blocking bikes. The result is a patchwork of local rules and inconsistent enforcement that leaves vulnerable people exposed and councils bearing the cost of removal.

Councils are not standing idly by, but the tools they currently have are reactive and costly. Seizure and storage operations require staff time, secure storage facilities and administrative processing. Councils are forced into an expensive cycle of removal and storage because operators do not consistently prevent or properly remedy dangerous parking. I go further and submit that they simply do not care. They are making big money from e-bike hire, so why should they bother about safe parking when there is no penalty on them for letting their users dump them anywhere they like?

I turn to my Amendment 416H, on the operator charge, its justification and its effect. The proposed operator charge is a proportionate “polluter pays” mechanism that would ensure that those who profit from dockless fleets meet the real costs their services impose on the public realm. Operators make big profits from large fleets and dense urban coverage. Where voluntary agreements fail, statutes should set clear duties to ensure safe parking and fund the use of designated bays, to remove and relocate dangerously parked bikes within a short enforceable timeframe, and to be accountable for repeat non-compliance.

Where operators’ business models externalise the costs of pavement obstruction and enforcement, it is fair and efficient to require them to internalise those costs and pay for them themselves. Revenues from the charge could be used by local authorities to fund enforcement teams and rapid removal to secure storage; invest in parking infrastructure, such as a designated parking spaces, where required; and fund data-sharing and monitoring systems, which would enable councils to identify repeat non-compliance and target enforcement.

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[Lord Katz (Lab)]

They are, but we always leave it to chief officers to direct their police forces to use the full waterfront of different powers and regulations under their purview. We can always encourage them. I am sure that a number of chief officers will be looking intently at the debates in all the days of Committee on the Crime and Policing Bill and will understand the priorities the Committee voices. Certainly, with no little thanks to the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, and others, we have had plenty of debate on this issue and they will have heard that it is one of extreme concern.

Clause 8 will allow the police to act immediately to stop offending behaviour and confiscate vehicles without delay. In addition, the Government have consulted on changes to secondary legislation to enable quicker disposal of seized vehicles, and our response will be published in due course. These measures demonstrate the Government’s commitment to effectively tackling the illegal and anti-social use of micro-mobility devices such as e-bikes and e-scooters without duplicating powers that are already in place.

I want to stress that riding a privately owned electric scooter on public roads is illegal, and the police have powers to take enforcement action against offenders, including seizure of the e-scooter for the offence of driving without insurance or a licence. The enforcement of road traffic law remains an operational matter for chief officers, who are best placed to allocate resources according to local needs, threats, risks and priorities. The Government will continue to support the police with the tools and powers they need, but this amendment would add unnecessary complexity without improving public safety. With that in mind, I ask the noble Lord to withdraw his amendment.

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

I am grateful to noble Lords and the Minister for speaking in this short but important little debate on cycling. I am particularly grateful to my noble friends Lord Goschen and Lord Cameron of Lochiel, the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss—and, for the first time, a Lib Dem spokesperson has supported, in concept, one of my cycling amendments. I am either on the right side, maybe, or I am doing something terribly wrong if the Lib Dems are backing me.

Over the past few weeks, as we debated various amendments that I put down on bikes of all sorts, and looked at delivery couriers cycling on pavements on these big, fast, heavy, illegal bikes, and the scooters and bikes dumped on the pavements, the general mood was, “Well, your amendments are not perfect, Lord Blencathra, but there’s a problem here and something needs to be done about it”. I hear what the Minister has said, as far as these big, illegal bikes like motorbikes are concerned: they are already illegal and the police have power to do something about them. He suggested that the powers in the devolution Bill will deal with all these cycling problems. Between now and Report, I shall look more carefully at the Bill to see if it does cover all the gaps, but it may be that on Report we will still want to bring back some little amendment on one of these issues—possibly on the precarious criminal liability of delivery couriers, which we discussed last time. A lot of colleagues thought this was terribly wrong and that something needed to be done about it. However, if the Government do something about it, I will not need to, but if they do not do what we think we need to do, I will do something on Report. On that basis, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.

Amendment 416H withdrawn.

Crime and Policing Bill

Lord Blencathra Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 15th January 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

My Lords, I rise to oppose Amendment 379 and support most of Amendment 471, inadequate though it is. My views may not be the same as those of my noble friends on the Front Bench, of course. We all value the right to protest, but rights are not a shield for criminality. The Government and Policing Ministers have been very clear that live facial recognition is being developed and deployed as a targeted, intelligence-led tool to identify known or wanted individuals or criminals on watch lists. It is not a blanket surveillance tool of the public. The Home Office has opened a consultation and asked for stronger statutory rules and oversight precisely to ensure proportionate lawful use.

Amendment 379 would in effect tie the hands of senior officers at the very moment when targeted identification can prevent or stop serious crime. If a protest contains people who are wanted for violent offences, sexual offences or other serious crimes, the ability to identify them quickly and safely is not an abstract technicality; it is how we protect victims and uphold the rule of law. To say that demonstrations are somehow sacrosanct and must be free from tools that help catch criminals is to place form above substance. That is not to dismiss legitimate concerns about privacy and bias. We should legislate a clear statutory framework, independent oversight and robust safeguards, and I know that the Government are consulting on exactly that path.

I will want to see strong action to correct mistakes and address suggestions that it cannot tell the difference in some ethnic groups. That has to be remedied if that allegation is true. But the right response is to legislate proportionate limits and accountability, not to pre-emptively ban a narrowly targeted operational capability at protests and thereby risk letting wanted suspects slip away. For those reasons, I urge the Committee to reject Amendment 379 and instead press the Government to bring forward the statutory code and independent oversight that the public rightly expect.

Amendment 471 is a different kettle of fish—and possibly “off” fish as well. The amendment is far too liberal and fails to protect the public from out-of-control public authorities. I will explain why. As a person relieved of ministerial duties in 1997, I found myself a rather bored Back-Bencher on the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000—the famous RIPA. The Minister at the time—I think it was Alun Michael—was waxing lyrical about how it would tackle serious crime, terrorism and paedophiles. He mentioned how it would help the police, the National Crime Agency—or whatever it was called then—MI5, MI6, HMRC and a couple of other big national government departments.

We were all in agreement that it was a jolly good thing for these agencies to have that power. Then something the Minister said prompted me to table a Question on what other public bodies could use RIPA powers, and we were shocked to discover that there were actually 32, including at that time something called the egg inspectorate of MAFF, responsible for enforcing the little lion mark on eggs. Schedule 1, listing the public authorities with phone-tapping powers, has expanded a bit since those days, and it now numbers 79. However, that is not the correct number because one of the 79 entries says “every local authority”, so we can add another 317 principal local authorities to that list. I think “every government department” covers all the agencies and arm’s-length bodies under their command, so they also have access to RIPA. In other words, a worthy proposal to let some key government agencies have power to snoop on our mobile phones to detect serious crime, terrorism or paedophilia has now become available, to some extent, to hundreds and possibly thousands of public bodies.

The relevance of this is that if we agree that facial recognition technology can be extended beyond the police, immigration, the National Crime Agency, the security services and possibly a few other big government departments that are concerned with organised crime, people trafficking and immigration, I believe our civil liberties will be at stake if local authorities and some others get to use it as well. If local authorities get the power of facial recognition, I am certain that they will abuse it. A Scottish council uses RIPA to monitor dog barking. Allerdale district council, next to me in Cumbria, used it to catch someone feeding pigeons. Of course it would be brilliant, in my opinion, to catch all those carrying out anti-social behaviour, such as riding dangerously on the pavement with their bikes, not picking up dog mess or generally causing a disturbance. But that is why I think this amendment does not go far enough.

We do not need codes of practice and safeguards—we need a complete ban on all other public authorities using it until it has been tried and tested by the police and we are satisfied that it does not cause false positives and is operationally secure. Then, if it is ever extended to other public authorities, it must be solely, as proposed new subsection (1)(a) says,

“used for the purpose of preventing, detecting, or investigating serious crimes as defined under the Serious Crime Act 2007”.

If we do not have these protections, local councils will end up checking our recycling, what library books we take out and what shops and pubs we use, and will justify it by saying it will help them deliver a better spatial strategy or design services to user patterns.

I look forward to the Liberals going back to their original roots as real liberals and bringing forward a better amendment that will protect our liberties.

[Lord Strasburger (LD)]

My Lords, I rise to support Amendment 379, to which I have added my name, and to very strongly support it. But before I do, I hope the Committee will forgive me if I digress very briefly to tidy up a matter that arose in Committee on Tuesday. I made the point that the police have the duty to facilitate protest rather than prevent it, and the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, intervened to ask me where he might find a justification for that statement. Well, I have good news. I have here the National Police Chiefs’ Council’s protest operational advice document, and on page 10, under the heading “Role of the police”, it says that authorised professional practice

“identifies two duties associated with the policing of protest. Broadly these require that the police must … not prevent, hinder or restrict peaceful assembly … in certain circumstances, take reasonable steps to protect those who want to exercise their rights peacefully. Taken together, these duties (the first a negative duty, the second a positive one) are often described as an obligation to facilitate the exercise of the freedoms of assembly and expression”.

I also have here a very handy flow chart entitled “Facilitating Peaceful Protest”, and I will make it available to the noble Lord following this debate.

To return to this group, it is now eight years since South Wales Police started deploying early versions of live facial recognition technology. When it did so, the technology was extremely inaccurate and there was absolutely no legislation in place to regulate or oversee the use of this mass surveillance technology—and that is what it is.

For those noble Lords who have not had the opportunity to experience facial recognition technology, I will give a quick overview of how it is used. It currently involves a large van full of electronics being parked in a location, such as a busy shopping street, where large numbers of ordinary people will walk past going about their daily business. On the top of the van are cameras pointing in all directions; they are scanning and recording the faces of all the passers-by. The technology tries to match them to a pre-prepared watch-list, which is a set of images of people the police want to find for some reason. Throughout the many hours of the deployment, something like 20 police officers will be standing around chatting and waiting for the system to decide, rightly or wrongly, that somebody whose face matches a person on the watch-list has just walked past. Several of the otherwise unoccupied police officers then detain the target and try to determine whether it is a true match.

Big Brother Watch, which I chair, has observed many deployments of facial recognition by the Metropolitan Police, and has seen many false matches happen. As well as false positives, the system is also susceptible to false negatives, where it fails to recognise somebody who is on the watch-list, and anyone who the police would like to speak to but was not put on the watch-list can wander by undetected. The Committee can form its own view on whether this is a productive use of scarce police time and money, but one thing is clear: this is a highly intrusive mass surveillance of thousands of citizens, almost all of whom are completely innocent and should be of no interest to the police.

The UK already has one of the highest densities of CCTV cameras in the world. Facial recognition technology will in time be added to those fixed cameras in public spaces. The police, your local authority, supermarkets or whoever will be able to keep tabs on who you are and what you are doing. This technology is far more intrusive than fingerprints or DNA. Live facial recognition can capture your face and location from a distance without you having any idea it has happened. It is as if you have a barcode on your forehead that can be read without your knowledge.

The collection and retention of fingerprints is tightly regulated by the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 and the Crime and Security Act 2010. Similarly, the use of DNA is strictly regulated by the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 and the Protection of Freedoms Act 2012. But what regulation is there for facial recognition, the most intrusive technology of the lot? Since the first deployment in 2017, absolutely no legislation, none at all, has been introduced to control this serious threat to our privacy. As we have already heard, the phrase “facial recognition” is not mentioned once in UK legislation.

Police forces, including the Met, have had a go at writing their own rules and marking their own homework, but that is obviously not their skill set; it is the job of legislators. The police’s homemade rules vary from force to force, and nobody is monitoring what is actually happening on the ground. For example, they assure us that all images they collect that do not match someone on the watch-list are instantly and permanently destroyed to preserve the privacy of innocent passers-by, but whether that always happens cannot be verified because there is no scrutiny, as there would be with, for example, DNA. This serious legislative vacuum is not the fault of the police; it is the fault of all the Governments since 2017, who were asleep at the wheel and did nothing to control the use of this highly intrusive technology.

You might ask: “Why does it matter to me? Why should I care if the state knows where I am and what I am doing? I am an honest, law-abiding, clean-living citizen. There is nothing in my life that I need to conceal from the police, my boss or my spouse”. You might be told by advocates of mass surveillance, “If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear”. Well, that claim is first attributed to the great democrat Joseph Goebbels. The Chinese state, where much of the technology for facial recognition comes from, uses it to monitor the behaviour of its citizens. It is used not just to keep track of where they are, but to assess whether they are being good citizens in accordance with the state’s definition of what a “good citizen” is.

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[Lord Moynihan of Chelsea (Con)]

Shifty is a great description—the noble Baroness could have said far worse than that.

I was given a hard time and then let go. We have to accept that there will be errors, but we have to understand where this is going. We can less and less afford to have police on the streets—we have seen that problem—and technology has to take over. Look at the super-spotters, a very successful crime-fighting group in New York. They would go to an area where there was a lot of crime—noble Lords will know that there was a process in New York where they directed people to crime hotspots—where they looked at the gait of individuals to see whether they were carrying guns or knives. Soon, people in those areas discovered that they had better not carry guns because they would be stopped by these super-spotters and arrested. If you are not carrying a gun, which they had all stopped doing, you cannot kill somebody because you do not have a gun to kill them with. It was a tremendously successful operation in lowering crime.

State-of-the-art facial recognition, at least before I stopped looking at it a couple of years ago, was more in gait than in face. We have to understand that you can start training technology to be much more effective than even these super-spotters at spotting people who are carrying, using their gait to recognise an individual rather than their face. There are all sorts of ways in which this software will be used to recognise people. It will get better and better, and fewer mistakes will be made; mistakes will always be made none the less, but that is the way of policing. They were mistaken when they stopped me—I was this tremendously law-abiding good chap, but they stopped me, and so will the facial recognition.

I loved the description from the noble Lord, Lord Strasburger, of the 20 police hanging around, which I am sure resonated with noble Lords around the entire Chamber as the sort of thing that happens, but over time we will have to depend on technology such as this. We will have to be extremely careful about civil liberties, but we cannot blanket get rid of this technology, because it will be very important to policing.

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

My Lords, I had sought to intervene on the noble Lord, Lord Strasburger, before he sat down, but the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, beat me to it. I want to ask him a simple question but, first, I am sorry that we are on different sides of this—when we served together on the snoopers’ charter Bill, we were totally united that it was a bad Bill and we worked hand in glove to amend it. Can he tell me the substantive difference between a camera and a computer watching everyone in the crowd and picking out the wanted troublemakers and those 20 policemen he talked about looking at everybody in the crowd and picking out the wanted troublemakers from their briefing or their memory? What is the real difference between them?

[Lord Strasburger (LD)]

When I observed these deployments of facial recognition and looked at the 20 policemen standing around, it occurred to me that they would probably find a lot more of the people they were looking for if they just went round to their houses and knocked on the door, rather than working on the off-chance that they might walk past them in the high street.

[Lord Clement-Jones (LD)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lady Doocey for eliciting a very useful debate, as was the intention. I particularly welcome some of the comments made by the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, but say to him that a Crime and Policing Bill might possibly be the place for discussion of the use of live facial recognition in policing. Maybe we can make some progress with the Government, we hope, responding or at least giving an indication ahead of their consultation of their approach to the legislative framework around live facial recognition. I very much hope that they will take this debate on board as part of that consultation.

As my noble friend Lady Doocey clearly stated, these amendments are necessary because live facial recognition currently operates, effectively, in a legislative void, yet the police are rolling out this technology at speed. There is no explicit Act of Parliament authorising its deployment, meaning that police forces are in effect, as my noble friend Lord Strasburger indicated, writing their own rules as they go. This technology represents a fundamental shift in the relationship between citizen and state. When LFR cameras are deployed, our public spaces become biometric checkpoints where every face is indiscriminately scanned. By treating every citizen as a suspect in a permanent digital line-up, we are abandoning the presumption of innocence. The noble Baroness, Lady Jones, made that point very well. As a result, there is a clear issue of public trust.

Amendment 379 would prohibit the use of LFR during public assemblies or processions unless a specific code of practice has been formally approved by resolution of both Houses of Parliament. This is essential to protect our freedoms of expression and assembly under Articles 10 and 11 of the ECHR. The pervasive tracking capability of LFR creates what the courts have recognised as a chilling effect, as described by my noble friend Lady Doocey and the noble Baroness, Lady Jones. Law-abiding citizens are discouraged from attending protests or expressing dissenting views for fear of permanent state monitoring. We know that police forces have already used this technology to target peaceful protesters who were not wanted for any crime. People should not have to hand over their sensitive biometric data as the price of engaging in democratic processes. Without explicit parliamentary consent and an approved code of practice, we are sleepwalking into a surveillance state that bypasses democratic oversight entirely.

Amendment 471 would establish that LFR use in public spaces must be limited to narrowly defined serious cases—such as preventing major crimes or locating missing persons—and requires prior judicial authorisation specifying the scope and purpose of each deployment. The need for this oversight was made absolutely clear by the 2020 Court of Appeal ruling in R (Bridges) v Chief Constable of South Wales Police, which found LFR use unlawful due to fundamental deficiencies in the legal framework. The court identified that far too much discretion is left to individual officers regarding who ends up on a watchlist and where cameras are placed. We must replace operational discretion with judicial scrutiny.

The Government themselves now acknowledge the inadequacy of the current framework, which they describe as a “patchwork framework” and say it is

“complicated and difficult to understand”.

Well, that is at least some progress towards the Government acknowledging the situation. They say that the current framework does not provide sufficient confidence for expanded use—hear, hear. The former Biometrics and Surveillance Camera Commissioner made clear his concerns about the College of Policing guidance, questioning whether these fundamental issues require

“more than an authorised professional practice document from the College of Policing”

and instead demand parliamentary debate. The former commissioner raised a profound question:

“Is the status of the UK citizen shifting from our jealously guarded presumption of innocence to that of ‘suspected until we have proved our identity to the satisfaction of the examining officer’?”


Such a fundamental shift in the relationship between citizen and state cannot, and should not, be determined by guidance alone.

The College of Policing’s APP on LFR, while attempting to provide operational guidance, falls short of providing the robust legal framework that this technology demands. It remains non-statutory guidance that can be revised without parliamentary scrutiny, lacks enforceable standards for deployment decisions, provides insufficient detail on bias testing and mitigation requirements, and does not establish independent oversight mechanisms with real teeth.

Most critically, the guidance permits watch-list compilation based on subjective assessments without clear statutory criteria or independent review. This leaves fundamental decisions about who gets surveilled to operational discretion rather than judicial oversight. In response to the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, who was keen on one bit of our amendment but not the other, I say that this intelligence-led tool effectively delegates it to a senior police officer and they, in a sense, have a conflict of interest. They are the ones who make the operational decisions.

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

I am grateful to the noble Lord for giving way. It seems that he and his noble friends keep talking about the police and the restrictions which will be imposed on the police. But Amendment 471 seems to extend facial recognition to hundreds and hundreds of public authorities, provided they adhere to a code or comply with certain practices. Does he still stand by the idea that facial recognition should be extended to hundreds of public authorities, in addition to the police?

[Lord Clement-Jones (LD)]

If the noble Lord accepts the fact that controls are required, which he did not in his earlier comments, I think he would be greatly reassured if you had to have judicial oversight of the use of live facial recognition, which is useful in circumstances other than purely policing. What we are talking about is a greater level of control over the deployment of live facial recognition. We can argue perfectly satisfactorily about whether or not it should be extended beyond the police, but we are suggesting that, alongside that greater deployment, or possible greater deployment, there should be a much greater degree of oversight. I think that effectively answers the noble Lord.

The Metropolitan Police’s own data from recent LFR operations shows a false alert rate requiring officers to make numerous stops of innocent people. Even with claimed accuracy improvements, when a system processes thousands of faces, even a small error translates to significant numbers of misidentifications affecting law-abiding citizens.

More concerning is the evidence on differential performance, and that is where I fundamentally agree with the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe. The National Physical Laboratory’s 2020 testing of facial recognition systems found significant variation in performance across demographic groups. While contemporary LFR systems used by UK police show better performance than earlier algorithms, independent research continues to identify measurable differences in accuracy rates across ethnicity and gender. The Court of Appeal in Bridges ruled that South Wales Police breached the public sector equality duty by failing to satisfy itself that the software was free from racial or gender bias, yet current deployment practices suggest insufficient progress in addressing these equality obligations.

We should also address the secrecy surrounding police watch-lists. The Justice and Home Affairs Committee of this House recommended that these lists be subject to compulsory statutory criteria and standardised training. There is no independent review of watch-list inclusion, no notification to those placed on lists and no clear route for challenge or removal.

I also very much appreciated what the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, had to say about the problems with software. But the chilling sentence he delivered was “Technology has to take over”. That is precisely the problem that we are living with. If technology is to take over, we need a legal framework to govern it. The current patchwork of overlapping laws addressing human rights, data protection and criminal justice is not fit for purpose.

These amendments provide the democratic and judicial guard-rails needed to contain this technology, and we cannot allow the convenience of new tools to erode our established civil liberties. Only Parliament should determine the framework for how LFR is used in our society, and only the courts should authorise its deployment in individual cases.

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[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I have added my name to Amendment 382F, an amendment that, carefully and proportionately, takes on tackling the problems of the ever-growing number of overlapping Acts and statutes that are used to limit free speech. If public order laws on protest are, to quote the Liberal Democrat Benches from the other day, a confused mess, the labyrinthine patchwork affecting free speech is an impenetrable quagmire. The noble Lord has done a real public service here by carefully going through how, inadvertently and often by mission creep, censorious laws undermine democratic speech rights and are actually damaging the UK’s reputation internationally.

I am not just talking about JD Vance or Elon Musk, who I have heard commented on in this House and dismissed sneeringly by many in Westminster as spreading just Trumpist misinformation or hyperbole. We need to recognise that even the bible of globalist liberalism, the Economist, no less, featured a cover last May proclaiming “Europe’s free-speech problem”, identified the UK as one of the most censorious on the continent and provided a lot of evidence. There has been lots of discussion all over the political spectrum in relation to the idea of 12,000 arrests a year, 30 a day, for speech offences that spring from laws that the amendment seeks to rein in, and for which this House is responsible. We are talking here about crime and policing, and the police are expected to treat speech offences as criminal acts and to police them.

Since the introduction of hate crime laws, which I remind the Committee is a relatively recent concept popularised from the mid-1980s, the legislative and regulatory implications of restricting hate and words that are said to have caused distress have proliferated, and it has grown into a real tangle of tripwires. In that tangle, many people in the police and the CPS, and even politicians, seem confused about what one can say legally and what is verboten.

I am sure that noble Lords will remember the extraordinary story of the Times Radio producer, Maxie Allen, and his partner, Rosalind Levine. They were the couple who were arrested by six uniformed officers, in front of their young children, for posting disparaging messages about their daughter’s school in a private WhatsApp group. It received a lot of publicity, and they have just been paid £20,000 for wrongful arrest, although they have not received an apology. What stood out for me about that story was that when the police officers went into her house, Ms Levine asked what malicious communication offence they were being accused of. The detective did not know, had to Google it and then read out what Google said. That strikes me as not healthy. We as legislators have a responsibility to tackle this. Too often, we just pass more and more laws, with more restrictions on freedom, and never stop to look at whether anything on the statute book can be repealed, streamlined or rolled back.

I commend the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan of Chelsea, for his detailed, well-thought out and proportionate attempt at tackling the way the law has grown and the negative impact that is having on democratic free speech. I also want to commend him for his courage in taking on this issue. As we know, and he referred to this, if anyone takes on hate speech laws, you just think, “Oh, my goodness, he’s going to be accused of all sorts of things. He’s going to be accused of being a bigot. It’s a risk”, so when he told me he was doing this, I gulped. It is horrible to be accused of being a racist, a misogynist, homophobic, a hatemonger, or whatever, but that is the very point. Being accused of being pro-hate speech, if you oppose hate speech legislation, is itself silencing of a democratic discussion on laws and we as legislators should not be bullied or silenced in that way. Ironically, the best tool for any cultural shift in relation to prejudice, in my view, is free speech. To be able to take on bigotry, we need to be able to expose it, argue against it and use the disinfectant of free speech to get rid of the hate, whereas censorship via hate speech laws does not eliminate or defeat regressive ideas; it just drives them underground to fester unchallenged.

The noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, has laid out the key legal problems in his approach to this, especially in relation to the lack of precision in terminology used across speech-restricting laws. He has raised a lot of real food for thought. Perhaps I can add a concern from a slightly different perspective, to avoid repeating the points he has made. For me, there is another cost when law fails to clearly define concepts such as abusive or insulting words, grossly offensive speech, and what causes annoyance, inconvenience and needless anxiety—these things are littered all over the law. It is that the dangerously elastic framing of what speech constitutes harm or hate has been deeply regressive in its impact on our cultural norms. There has been a sort of cultural mission creep which has especially undermined the resilience of new generations of young people. The language of hate speech legislation now trips off the tongues of sixth-formers in schools and university campus activists. When they complain that they disagree with or are made to feel uncomfortable by a speaker or a lecturer and say that they should be banned for their views, they will cite things straight out of the law such as, “That lecturer has caused me harassment, alarm and distress”. Where did they get that from? They will say that those words are perceived as harmful and that if they heard them, it would trigger anxiety—even claiming post-traumatic stress disorder is fashionable. It is because we have socialised the young into the world of believing that speech is a danger to their mental well-being, which has cultivated a grievance victimhood. It is a sort of circular firing squad, because the young, who feel frightened by words which they have picked up and been imbued with from the way the law operates, then demand even more lawfare to protect themselves and their feelings from further distress. They are even encouraged to go round taking screenshots of private messages, which they take to the police, or they scroll through the social media of people they do not like to see whether there is anything they can use in the law.

The law has enabled the emergence of a thin-skinned approach to speech, and this has been institutionalised via our statute book. The police do not seem immune to such interpretations of harmful words, either, and I am afraid that this can cause them to weaponise the power they have through this muddle. It wastes police resources and energy, an issue very pertinent to this Bill.

I will finish with an example. In August 2023, an autistic 16 year-old girl was arrested for reportedly telling a female police officer that she looked like her lesbian nana. The teenager’s mother explained that this was a literal observation, in that the police officer looked like her grandmother, who is a lesbian. The officer understood it as homophobic abuse, so a Section 5 public order offence kicked in on the basis of causing “alarm or distress” by using abusive language. If you witness the film of the incident, seven police officers entered the teenage girl’s home, where she was hiding in the closet, screaming in fear and punching herself in the face. You may ask who was distressed in that instance. The girl was held in custody for 20 hours and ultimately no charges were brought. But we must ask whether the statute book has created such confused laws and encouraged police overreach, and whether it encouraged that young police officer, who heard someone say the words “lesbian nana”, to immediately think, “arrest her, hold her for 20 hours and say that she is causing distress”. What has happened to the instincts of a police officer when they think that this would be the answer?

Many people to whom I speak about the problem addressed by this amendment suggest that it has been overstated. They say that, yes, the police are a bit too promiscuous in arresting people, but the numbers charged and convicted are fairly stable. In fact, a journalist recently told me that in some instances they are going down. But as legislators, should we not query whether this implies that the laws are giving too much leeway to the police to follow up malicious, trivial and politicised complaints? This creates the chilling consequence of the notion of process as punishment: you might not be charged, but you are arrested, and law-abiding citizens are humiliated and embarrassed with the cops at the door. We must take this amendment very seriously, and I hope that the Minister will give us a positive response.

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

My Lords, it is a delight to listen to the noble Baroness, Lady Fox of Buckley, who hit the nail on the head: in fact, she hit many nails on the head, and I agree with everything she said.

I support Amendment 382F because it restores the proper boundary between criminal law and free expression. Criminal sanctions must be reserved for conduct that poses a real risk of harm, threats, menaces and conduct intended to intimidate, not for speech that merely offends or causes hurt feelings. Section 127 of the Communications Act and related provisions currently include abusive and insulting material, and even communication that causes “anxiety”—a formulation that has produced inconsistent enforcement and a chilling effect on legitimate debate.

Should I have reported my MS consultant when he told me the good news and the bad news? The good news was that he knew what it was, and the bad news was that it was MS. He wanted to check how spastic I was. That word, “spastic”, can sound like a terribly insulting term, but it was a medical reference to my condition. This morning, I got a text message reminder: “Your UCLH appointment with the spasticity walk-in clinic at Queen Square will take place early tomorrow morning”. We must make sure that we do not treat all words which may seem insulting as actually being so. The law should be precise and proportionate. Vague criminal offences that hinge on subjective reactions invite over-policing in online life and risk criminalising satire, political argument and robust journalism. Recent parliamentary analysis shows that arrests under communications offences have increased, while convictions have not kept pace, suggesting that resources are being spent on low-value prosecutions rather than on genuine threats to safety. Legal commentary also suggests the difficulties courts face in applying terms like “grossly offensive” and “insulting”, and that undermines predictability and fairness.

This amendment would not leave victims without recourse. Civil remedies, harassment injunctions, platform moderation and targeted civil criminal offences for stalking, doxing and credible threats remain available and should be strengthened. That combination protects vulnerable people while ensuring that criminal law is not used as a blunt instrument against free expression.

Of course, there are trade-offs. Decriminalising insults means some distress will no longer attract criminal penalties, but the correct response is not to expand criminal law; it is to improve support for civil remedies and focus policing on genuine threats. That approach better protects both free speech and personal safety.

For these reasons, I urge the Minister to support Amendment 382F in order to defend free expression, sharpen the law so that it targets real harm, and ensure that our criminal justice system focuses on threats that endanger people rather than on words that merely offend them.

Crime and Policing Bill

Lord Blencathra Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 13th January 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

How nice it is to be back here again. I oppose Clauses 118, 119 and 120 standing part of the Bill. These clauses introduce a pre-emptive targeting of people based on location rather than behaviour. That should concern anyone who cares about the right to peaceful protest. Under these clauses, a senior police officer may designate an area in anticipation of a protest, based on a belief that an offence is likely to occur. Once that designation is in place, simply wearing an item said to conceal identity becomes a criminal offence. This applies to everyone in a designated area. Criminal liability comes not from conduct but from being in a certain place and from what a person is wearing. That is a profound shift in approach and one that I cannot support.

It is also a massively broad discretion. An inspector can designate a locality for up to 24 hours, extendable, on the basis of a prediction or guess, rather than evidence, of immediate serious violence. The result is a huge power to ban everyday protective coverings across a place at a time based only on an estimate of what might happen. That is exactly the kind of power that leads to overenforcement and a chilling effect on protest, particularly for those who already face risks from being identified.

The Government may say that defences to these provisions exist for health, religion or work, but those protections operate after arrest and charge, not at the point where the person decides whether it is safe for them to attend a protest at all. That is the key issue here. Liberty’s supporters have been clear about the real-world impact. One disabled person wrote:

“I am clinically vulnerable … Forcing disabled people like me to unmask is surely disability discrimination”.


Another said:

“As a single woman, I do not want to be identified”.


Women who have experienced domestic abuse may cover their faces for the same reason.

For others, including diaspora activists and those with credible fears of transnational repression, anonymity is not a political statement but a basic safeguard. We have already seen reporting on how mask restrictions at solidarity protests in the UK, including those linked to Hong Kong, have deterred participation because surveillance and reprisals are real concerns. This then becomes about who feels safe enough to exercise their democratic rights.

I must also ask: are these clauses really necessary? The police already have a targeted power, under Section 60AA of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, to require the removal of certain items where this is justified. That power has been used in recent protest policing, including at protests outside a migrant hotel in Epping. Can the Minister say what evidence the Government have of a gap in existing targeted powers that they cannot meet, rather than simply a desire for broader, pre-emptive control? The Government have not demonstrated an operational gap so far. What we appear to have instead is a preference for wider, pre-emptive control rather than targeted, evidence-based policing.

That matters because Articles 10 and 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights are absolutely clear: any restriction on protest must be necessary and proportionate, and the Strasbourg court has repeatedly warned against measures that deter peaceful participation through fear of sanction. A clause that criminalises ordinary behaviour across a designated area, without reference to a person’s actual behaviour, is precisely the kind of measure that risks crossing that line.

Will the Government consider narrowing the trigger to “imminent and serious violence or disorder” and introducing a clear front-end reasonable excuse protection, rather than relying on defences only after arrest? If the Government’s concern is intimidation or disorder, then the answer is the better use of existing targeted powers, not a blanket approach that sweeps up disabled people, women concerned about safety and minority communities, along with everybody else. For all those reasons, I support removing Clauses 118, 119 and 120 from the Bill.

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

My Lords, I stand to oppose the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, and to suggest that it is vital that these clauses stand part of the Bill, because protest is strongest when it is open, accountable and proud. A movement that hides its face borrows the language of secrecy; a movement that stands unmasked invites public judgment and moral authority.

History teaches us that the most effective and morally persuasive movements were led openly. Emmeline Pankhurst marched into the public square and faced arrest and imprisonment without concealment, because the suffragette cause depended on moral clarity and public witness. Arthur Scargill led the miners in mass action, visible and unhidden, because solidarity is built on faces and names, not anonymity. Martin Luther King Jr stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and in the streets of Birmingham with nothing to hide, because non-violence and moral authority require openness. Mahatma Gandhi led millions in acts of civil resistance with a visible, symbolic presence that made the movement impossible to ignore.

The Government’s own summary of the Bill is clear about the purpose of these measures. It refers to:

“A new criminal offence which prohibits the wearing or otherwise using of an item that conceals identity when in an area designated by police under the new provisions”.


That designation is constrained by a statutory trigger:

“A designation can only be made … when the police reasonably believe that a protest may or is taking place in that area, the protest is likely to involve or has involved the commission of offences and that a designation would prevent or control the commission of offences”.


These are targeted powers, aimed at preventing criminality while protecting lawful assembly. It is not about silencing dissent; it is about responsibility and transparency. The fact sheet also notes a practical enforcement tool:

“The bill also creates a new power for the police to require someone to remove a face covering during a protest”.


That power underlines the expectation that those who lead and speak for causes should be prepared to be seen and held to account.

I mentioned older historical protest leaders, but I can bring the Committee more up to date. Contemporary political figures continue to lead visibly. We all have tremendous respect for the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, who has led a few protests in the past. I have looked at about 50 absolutely magnificent photos of the noble Baroness protesting in Westminster and other areas. She has been at the forefront of various Green Party protests. She said that she had been protesting all her life, but I could not find any of her as a schoolgirl at the anti-Vietnam War or Aldermaston protests.

She has a varied repertoire: stop the police Bill; stop pension financing; outside the Royal Court of Justice with a banner saying “Neither Confirm Nor Deny”; stop fracking in Lancashire; stop dumping sewage, South West Water; renters’ rights; and many more—all with her trusty loudhailer. She also said that part of protest was to cause inconvenience and disruption. I suggest that the three of them on the green holding up a banner against Guantanamo Bay did not cause much inconvenience.

The serious point, as I tease the noble Baroness, is this: in every single photo, after her last 50 years of protest, she and her colleagues had their faces uncovered, demonstrating modern political leadership in public demonstrations. To all other organisations I say that, if the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, whom I admire as a conviction politician, can protest so frequently with her face uncovered, so can and should everyone else. So I say, “Go on, organisers: encourage openness, train you marshals and make sure your aims are clear”. To the police I say, “Use these powers proportionately and protect lawful assembly”. To the public I say, “Support the right to protest and expect those who lead to do so with courage and transparency”.

I conclude by saying that, when protest is unmasked, it persuades rather than intimidates; it invites debate rather than hiding behind anonymity. That is how movements achieve lasting change.

[Lord Pannick (CB)]

My Lords, that was a powerful speech, but it really is not the case that all protesters are in the position of Martin Luther King, Emmeline Pankhurst, Mahatma Gandhi and the noble Baroness herself. There are protesters who have good reason for wishing to conceal their identity. If I am a protester against the current regime in Tehran and join a protest in London in order to express my views, I will be genuinely and properly concerned that my identity being revealed may well lead to action being taken against my family and associates in Tehran, and I have a very good reason for not wanting to have my identity disclosed.

I am concerned that Clause 118(2) is too narrow. It provides a defence for a person who has concealed their identity: showing that the reason they are wearing a mask is for

“a purpose relating to the health of the person or others, the purposes of religious observance, or … a purpose relating to the person’s work”.

Those are the only defences. That does not cover the example I gave—I could give many other examples—of the protester concerned about what is going on in Tehran. So I suggest to the Minister that, although I do not support the wish of the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, to remove these clauses, I do think she has a point about the narrow scope of the defences in the clause.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Pannick (CB)]

The amendments in this group are motivated by understandable concern about the decision of the Supreme Court in the Ziegler case, which is [2021] UKSC 23. The noble Lords, Lord Davies of Gower and Lord Faulks, made powerful submissions relating to that case.

The Committee may wish to be reminded that the Supreme Court reconsidered the statements made in Ziegler in the abortion services case, which was [2022] UKSC 32. Further guidance on the issues in Ziegler was given by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Burnett of Maldon, as the Lord Chief Justice in the Cuciurean case, which is [2022] 3 WLR 446. The Supreme Court said, in the abortion services case, that it is not for the jury or the magistrates in each individual case to assess whether the conduct of the defendant is protected by human rights law. That was the concern, as I understand it, of the noble Lord, Lord Faulks. The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester suggested that that is highly desirable, but that is not the law.

In the abortion services case, in paragraphs 63 to 66, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Reed, who is the President of the Supreme Court, spoke for a seven person Supreme Court. It was an enlarged court because of the importance of the issue. He addressed the principles. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Reed, said at paragraph 63:

“The first question was whether, in a case where the exercise of rights under articles 9 to 11 of the Convention is raised by the defendant to a criminal prosecution, there must always be an assessment of the proportionality of any interference with those rights on the facts of the individual case. The answer is no”.


In paragraph 64, he said:

“The second question was whether, where an offence is liable to give rise to an interference with the exercise of rights under articles 9, 10 or 11 of the Convention, it is necessary for the ingredients of the offence to include (or be interpreted as including) the absence of reasonable or lawful excuse in order for a conviction to be compatible with the Convention rights. The answer is no”.


Paragraph 65, says:

“The third question was whether it is possible for the ingredients of an offence in themselves to ensure the compatibility of a conviction with the Convention rights under articles 9, 10 and 11. The answer is yes”.


The position under the law is that the prosecution will say that Parliament has enacted a specific offence; that is the law of the land, and it is simply not open to the defendant to say that they are entitled to seek to overturn the ingredients of the offence by reference to convention rights. The law of the land is set out in the criminal offence. Therefore, respectfully, much of the criticism of Ziegler fails to recognise that the courts themselves have understood that Ziegler went too far, and that what Parliament has determined in relation to the law is the governing law—notwithstanding Articles 9 to 11 of the convention.

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

My Lords, I have a couple of amendments in this group. First, I say to the right reverend Prelate that the peaceful religious processions that he had in mind, such as those at Easter, were not the sort of processions that the chief constable of Greater Manchester Police had in mind when he recently said something to the effect of him having seen an appalling increase in aggro and violence in demonstrations, and that:

“The intolerable has become normalised”.


That is quite different from the peaceful processions that the right reverend Prelate had in mind.

Before I turn to my amendments, I want to say how much I enjoyed the Minister’s winding-up speech in the previous debate. He was in absolutely top form, especially in his demolition of the noble Lord, Lord Marks. I suspect that most of the best bits in his speech were not written by his officials; I shall treasure them. I hope that I do not become a victim of such a wonderful oration against me.

I have two amendments in this group. The first is quite small, simple and titchy, and the second is slightly more complicated.

Clause 122(2) says:

“It is a defence for a person charged with an offence under this section to prove that they—


(a) had a good reason for climbing on the specified memorial,


(b) were the owner or occupier of the specified memorial, or


(c) had the consent of the owner or occupier”


to do so. My first amendment would delete the general excuse of having a “good reason”. The only defences left for a person charged with an offence under Clause 122 would be that they were the owner or occupier of the memorial or had the consent of the owner or occupier to climb on it. I wonder about “occupier”; I presume that that is to cover memorials that are not just statues but buildings, such as the Hall of Memory in Birmingham. I would be grateful for a slight elucidation on what is meant by the occupier of a memorial.

I turn to the proposed new clause in my Amendment 378B. It is simple in principle but looks a bit complicated. It simply reproduces the operative test, as well as the definition of “community”, in the Public Order Act 1986 (Serious Disruption to the Life of the Community) Regulations 2023 and would put them in the Bill, giving them primary law status. This would improve legal certainty and parliamentary scrutiny.

Many clauses in the Bill, and many of the amendments, speak of

“serious disruption to the life of the community”.

We may conclude from this that the disruption must be pretty serious indeed to qualify as “serious”. However, that is not the case since the previous Government passed the 2023 regulations, which defined and, some commentators would say, diluted the concept of serious disruption.

In plain terms, my proposed new clause would place in the Bill all the illustrative examples and interpretive tests introduced in the Public Order Act 1986 (Serious Disruption to the Life of the Community) Regulations. As I suggested, those regulations make amendments to provisions in the Public Order Act 1986 concerning the meaning of the expression

“serious disruption to the life of the community”.

Section 12 of the Act gives the police the power to impose conditions on people organising and taking part in public processions. A senior police officer can exercise this power if they reasonably believe that a procession may result in

“serious disruption to the life of the community”.

Serious disruption to the life of the community is not defined in the Act itself, but Section 12(2A) sets out a non-exhaustive list of examples that may constitute serious disruption.

The 2023 regulations refine that list. The amendments to Section 12(2A) and (2B) of the Act also provide that, when considering whether a public procession in England and Wales may result in serious disruption, a senior police officer must take into account the disruption that may occur regardless of whether the procession is held, as well as the disruption that may result from the procession, and may take into account the cumulative disruption that may be caused by more than one public procession or public assembly in the same area. The amendments also provide that the term “community” extends to anyone who may be affected by the public procession regardless of whether they live or work in the vicinity of the procession. They state that “disruption” is anything

“that is more than minor”,

in particular to

“the making of a journey”

or access to goods and services. The regulations define this as

“access to any essential goods or any essential service”,

including access to

“the supply of money, food, water, energy or fuel … a system of communication … a place of worship … a transport facility … an educational institution, or … a service relating to health”.

That is what the regulations say in redefining

“serious disruption to the life of the community”

in the Act. Although my amendment looks complicated, it simply suggests that those regulations should be incorporated into the Bill as primary legislation. Transferring the regulations into the Bill would bring legal clarity—the police, courts and organisers would read the statutory test directly from the Act rather than a separate statutory instrument, reducing uncertainty about where the operative tests are located. It would mirror the stated purposes of the 2023 regulations to provide greater clarity. It would bring consistency of application—putting the tests in primary legislation would reduce the risk of interpretive divergence between different SIs or guidance and make the threshold for imposing conditions more visible to Parliament and the public. The cumulative effects would be preserved—the clause could, and should, reproduce the regulations’ treatment of cumulative effects so that multiple impacts are properly captured, as the regulations already contemplate cumulative assessment.

Of course, the Minister will say that embedding illustrative examples in primary law makes future policy adjustments harder and might require primary legislation and time to respond to unforeseen operational guidance. However, I suggest that retaining my proposed new clause, to secure clarity and parliamentary oversight but add a short delegated powers safeguard—a power to change it in future by regulations—would be perfectly okay.

I support Amendment 369A on pyrotechnics at protests tabled by my noble friend Lord Davies of Gower on the Front Bench, but it does not go far enough. I cannot think of any lawful excuse for possessing pyrotechnic articles while taking part in a protest. Protests are a vital part of our democratic life. They are a place for voices to be heard, grievances to be aired and change to be sought. But they are not a place for devices that can cause panic, injury or irreversible escalation. Pyrotechnics are designed to startle, burn, explode and smoke; they are not tools of peaceful persuasion. To allow a defence based on an honestly held political belief risks turning lawful protest into a dangerous theatre of risk and fear. Public safety must be paramount.

There are a few other things I could say about pyrotechnics at protests, but I will cut short my remarks in the interests of time. I see no justification whatever for anyone to have pyrotechnics at any protest or for there to be a lawful defence for it.

[Lord Hogan-Howe (CB)]

My Lords, I support and have added my name to Amendment 382H. I also support the amendments from the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Gower. My support is based on the concerns over and consequences of the Ziegler case. Noble Lords have said today that it was wrong in law, but that is not for me to say. The policy consequences for policing the streets of this country have been profound and negative, particularly in the area of public protest and disorder policing.

The Ziegler case was one of the simplest offences to prove in the criminal law. It was an offence of wilful obstruction of the highway. There were only three parts to prove; it was wilful, it was obstruction and they were on a highway. That was the offence, and it is one of the simplest we have policed over the years. It became complex only when people alleged that there was a reasonable excuse—for which read “a political purpose”—for their obstruction of the highway.

In the past, all the police needed to prove was that it was a highway—which is well established in law—that it had been obstructed and, usually, that they had asked someone to move on and they had either returned or not moved. That was about as complicated as it was. But as soon as you have to import intent, recklessness or reasonable excuse, the offence starts to become more complex and the police have to think carefully before intervening. I know that in this House people sometimes talk about the police being careless with the law, reactive and reactionary—I am not talking about any individual; I am just saying, as a general comment, that it has been said—but my experience is that, on the whole, they try to get it right and to balance everybody’s rights, often in very difficult circumstances.

My reading of Ziegler is that the Supreme Court seemed to say that dealing with obstruction of the highway is far too simple when dealing with protesters—that it is okay for everybody else but for protesters it gets a little more complicated. The Supreme Court ruled that the exercise of the convention rights to freedom of expression and freedom of assembly and association, sometimes grouped together as the right to protest, constituted a lawful excuse, which means that before a person can be convicted for obstructing the highway, the prosecution must prove that a conviction would be a proportionate, and thus justified, interference with that person’s convention rights. The Ziegler judgment has caused very real difficulties for police in dealing with environmental and many other protests and, I argue, for judges in attempting to run trials fairly and efficiently and instruct juries about what must be proved.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Hendy (Lab)]

I raise a point on Amendment 378B, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra. Unless I have missed something in that lengthy amendment, the effect of it might well be to interfere with the exercise of the right to picket in an industrial dispute. The right to picket is protected by Section 220 of the Trade Union and Labour Relations (Consolidation) Act and, in a lawful industrial dispute, by Section 219. I doubt that that was the intention of the mover of the amendment. Is it possible to have some clarity on that point?

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

I am grateful to the noble Lord. It is my intention, and I believe it is the case—possibly the Minister will confirm—that my amendment would not change one iota. It would simply incorporate all the current regulations from the 2023 regulations and move them verbatim into the Bill, making it a primary case. It would not change any of the provisions at all. If there are technical drafting issues then they can be corrected later, but there is no intention to change any of the concept.

[Lord Leigh of Hurley (Con)]

My Lords, I support all the amendments and will speak to a point that comes up in Amendment 378B. Because it arises in 378B, I am raising it now, but it affects the subsequent amendments in the next few groupings, particularly my amendments. It all flows from Section 12 of the Public Order Act 1986.

Essentially, there is some concern that so much discretion will be left to the police. It is clear that, for one reason or another, the police have not been effective in controlling protesters to date. Noble Lords may have seen the video clip on social media showing Gideon Falter, CEO of the Campaign Against Antisemitism, being told by police he was “quite openly Jewish”, and therefore causing a breach of the peace.

We are in the middle of assessing the appalling decisions by the West Midlands police, who consulted a large number of mosques, including some very radical ones that housed an imam who stated that women should not leave their home without their husband’s permission. These people were consulted on whether or not Israeli tourists should be allowed to visit the West Midlands. The police claimed they had consulted the Jewish community in the area: that was not true. It is clear they realised that the Israeli tourists would be in danger, but they decided to ban them from coming on the false excuse that they would be the aggressors. So they turned the victims into the guilty ones.

Your Lordships may have seen another video clip— on Friday or Sunday night—outside an Israeli-owned restaurant in Notting Hill called Miznon. There were some very aggressive and intimidating protesters and the police simply stood there. There may have been one arrest, but that was it. So innocent employees, eaters, diners and members of the public faced a very unpleasant situation.

Crime and Policing Bill

Lord Blencathra Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 7th January 2026 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Blencathra]

369ZA: After inserted subsection (2)(c), insert—
“(d) ensure that all other members of the public who are not protesting are not hindered in any way from going about their daily business.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment to Amendment 369 seeks to ensure that members of the public who are not protesting are able to go about their daily business.

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

My Lords, I support the proposed new clause establishing an express statutory right to protest and will speak to my amendments which, I believe, would make that right workable, balanced and fair to all members of the public. I begin by saying that the right to protest is a cornerstone of any free society. It is a mark of confidence, not weakness, when a nation allows its citizens to gather, speak, dissent and challenge those in authority.

I support that principle wholeheartedly, but rights do not exist in isolation. They exist in a framework of mutual respect, where the rights of one group cannot simply extinguish the rights of another. That is why I have tabled these amendments: to ensure that alongside the duty to respect, protect and facilitate protest, public authorities must also ensure that those who are not protesting are not hindered in going about their daily business.

My amendment proposes a new subsection (2)(d), which makes that duty explicit. I have proposed two further subsections in Amendment 369ZB, (3)(d) and (3)(e), to make it clear that preventing inconvenience to any member of the public and permitting people to go about their daily lives are legitimate grounds for proportionate restrictions on protest.

This is not an attempt to water down the right to protest; it is an attempt to anchor it in the real world. As the noble Lord, Lord Marks, said, in the words of the convention, it is to protect the rights and freedoms of others as well. In the real world, “the public” is not an abstract; the public are individuals: it is a nurse trying to reach her shift on time; it is a carer who must get to an elderly relative; it is a parent taking their child to school; it is a worker who risks losing wages, even a job, because the road has been blocked; it is a small business owner whose customers cannot reach them; it is the disabled Peer in this wheelchair who could not get across Westminster Bridge three years ago because Just Stop Oil were blocking me getting across—I should have borrowed one of their banners and then the police would have helped me across.

All these people matter every bit as much as those who are protesting. Their rights are not secondary. Their needs are not trivial, and their lives should not be treated as collateral damage in someone else’s political campaign.

Some argue—I think the noble Lord, Lord Marks, said so—that inconvenience is a part of protest, but inconvenience is not a theoretical concept. Inconvenience has consequences—missed medical appointments, missed exams, missed care visits, missed wages, missed opportunities. For many people, what is dismissed as mere inconvenience is in fact material harm.

I want to be absolutely clear that a legitimate public interest does not need to be a crowd of thousands. It does not need to be a major national event. It does not need to be a threat to infrastructure. Sometimes a legitimate public interest is one person, one individual, who simply needs to get to work or go to school or go to hospital. A democracy protects minorities, and sometimes the minority is a minority of one.

My amendments recognise that reality. They would ensure that the right to protest was balanced with the right of everyone else to live their lives. They would give public authorities clarity rather than ambiguity, because at present the police are often placed in an impossible position. If they intervene, they are accused of supporting protests. If they do not intervene, they are accused of failing to protect the public. My amendments would give them a clear statutory duty: protect protests, yes, but protect the public and ensure that daily life can continue.

This is not about silencing anyone; it is about ensuring that protest remains peaceful, proportionate and legitimate. If protests routinely prevent ordinary people going about their lives, public support for them will erode. When public support erodes, the right itself becomes more fragile. I think we all saw on television recently motorists getting out of their cars and dragging people off the road. That should not happen. They had to become vigilantes to clear the road. That was because they felt the authorities were not doing their duty in keeping the roads clear.

My amendments would strengthen the right to protest by ensuring that it was exercised responsibly, in a way that commands public respect rather than public resentment. The proposed new clause before them is well intentioned, but without my amendments it risks creating a one-sided right that elevates the interests of protesters above the interests of everyone else. That is not balance, that is not fairness, and it is not how rights should operate in a democratic society. My amendments would restore that balance. They recognise that the right to protest is vital but not absolute. They recognise that the rights of protesters must coexist with the rights of those who are not protesting. They recognise that sometimes the legitimate public interest is not a grand principle but a simple human need—the need to get to work, to keep an appointment, to reach a hospital or simply to go about one’s daily business without obstruction. I commend my amendments to the Committee. I beg to move.

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, it was quite difficult to sit here and listen to that, but I will come to that. I very strongly support Amendment 369, and I do so with a real sense of fury that we are in this position, that we actually have to do this, and that it is not obvious to any Government that in a democracy we need the right to protest to be protected. To engage in peaceful protest means irritating other people. I apologise to the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, but, unfortunately, what he said just now was complete and utter nonsense.

Over recent years, we have seen a real erosion of protest rights through one Bill after another. I sat here and watched it all and protested at every single move. Each was justified on a narrow, technical or operational point but, taken together, they amounted to a clear political direction—making protests harder, riskier and much easier to shut down.

Amendment 369 does not invent new rights. It states in clear and accessible language that peaceful protest is a fundamental democratic right and that public authorities have a duty to respect, protect and facilitate that right.

Amendments 369ZA and 369ZB seek to qualify that right by reference to whether members of the public are “hindered”, experience “inconvenience” or are able to go about “their daily business”. These amendments fundamentally misunderstand the nature of protest. Almost all meaningful protest causes some degree of hindrance or inconvenience. If it does not, it is very easy to ignore. From the suffragettes to trade unionists to civil rights campaigners, protest has always disrupted business as usual, precisely because that is how attention is drawn to injustice. For example, proscribing Palestine Action was such a stupid move by the Government and has caused more problems for them and the police than if they had just left it alone and arrested its members for criminal damage and similar.

I come back to these embarrassing amendments. It is not just the problem of their intent, which I disagree very strongly with, but their vagueness. Terms such as “hindered” and “inconvenience” are entirely undefined. Being delayed by five minutes could be an inconvenience. Noise could be an inconvenience. Simply being reminded of a cause that one disagrees with could, for some, be considered an inconvenience. If those concepts become legal thresholds for restricting protest, the right itself becomes meaningless.

The noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, used the phrase “in the real world”. I live in the real world, and I understand what protest does and why it is needed. Under these amendments, any protest that is visible, noisy or effective could be banned on the basis that someone somewhere was inconvenienced. Democracy is by its nature sometimes noisy, disruptive and inconvenient. It is very inconvenient being here at night debating these issues, quite honestly, in a moderately cold Chamber.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Viscount Stansgate) (Lab)]

My Lords, the noble Lord is slightly premature. Technically, we are debating Amendment 369ZA, to which the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, is entitled to reply.

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

Yes, my Lords, procedurally I have to be the tail-end Charlie here and seek leave to withdraw the amendment. However, I am so pleased that the noble Lord, Lord Marks, was able to get in and do a summing up of his amendment.

As soon as I saw Amendment 369, I thought, “This is too extreme; it is unbalanced, and I’ve got to rebalance it”. But I could not rebalance it by tweaking it, so I adopted the maximalist approach of the noble Lord, Lord Walney, and that approach, which I agree is also slightly unbalanced, managed to provoke an important debate on the balance of rights and the right to protest. Of course, it provoked the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, but if one is to be beaten up in this House, there is no one better to beat me up than the noble Baroness, because she does it with a smile on her face. I know that, deep down, she does not mean it.

I was delighted to be defended by the noble Lord, Lord Pannick. He was right: we already have all the law we need here—we do not need a new statute. I was interested in one of the points the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, made, which I have seen too. Protests have changed. She said that they have become more violent and toxic and that she was screamed at by nasty protesters. That is not very good. I like what the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, said: that disruption does not often work but persuasion does. He said that disruption is a mechanism for change, but people have rights as well, and that the criminal law is not the place to put in a new law on rights.

I am also grateful for the wise contribution of the noble Lord, Lord Walney. You cannot ignore the public’s views on the disruption protesters cause, and if the protesters go too far, the public will take their own action and will rebel. I mentioned seeing motorists getting out of their cars and dragging protesters off the roads. The noble Lord also mentioned the damage to the economy, and I agree with him on that.

I agree with my noble friend Lord Goodman, who gave an excellent exposition of the balance of rights and duties. I thank my noble friend Lord Davies of Gower. I agree with him and welcome his view that the amendments are not essential.

Finally, I say again to the noble Lord, Lord Marks, that I profoundly disagree with his amendment and what he said, but he had a very powerful and persuasive case, and I congratulate him on the way he set it out.

In his usual courteous way, the Minister took all our points of view into account, and he agreed with the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, that we already have all the rights we need and do not need a new law. So with that, and at this wonderful hour of the night, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.

Amendment 369ZA (to Amendment 369) withdrawn.

Crime and Policing Bill

Lord Blencathra Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 7th January 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Goddard of Stockport (LD)]

My Lords, I speak to Amendment 399 in the names of my noble friend Lady Pidgeon, who cannot attend today, and my noble friend Lady Doocey. This amendment would enable CCTV systems on the railways to be quickly available to the police and continuously for 30 days, alongside defining the technical standards to support this access. It is about ensuring that investigations on the railways can be carried out efficiently.

The amendment was first tabled by our colleague Daisy Cooper following a spate of bike thefts at St Albans station. In trying to resolve this issue, the correspondence from the British Transport Police was quite revealing. The CCTV system at St Albans station is operated by Govia Thameslink Railway—GTR—as part of a commercial franchise agreement. GTR manages CCTV across 238 stations, with over 6,000 cameras. Although British Transport Police and other forces have established information-sharing agreements with GTR and similar operators, these agreements are designed to govern data management, including storage and access protocols. They do not constitute contracts with commitments to supply CCTV footage within specific timeframes or of specific volumes.

Currently, there are no provisions for rail franchise agreements that mandate specific service levels for supplying CCTV footage—it is not established in law yet. While this may change over coming years, as the franchises may be nationalised, this remains an issue. Unlike council-owned CCTV systems, which often feature integrated platforms allowing direct access, many rail CCTV systems are standalone, not remotely connected. Retrieval often requires physical visits to stations, which can delay access, and sometimes operators impose limits on the duration and length of footage they can supply.

While I acknowledge that these are challenges resulting from the current franchise arrangements, which will gradually be resolved, other constraints are rooted in the operational systems. I am aware that in September, the Government announced that they will be providing funding of almost £70 million so that Network Rail can make some improvements to CCTV. Although this is welcome, Amendment 399 would ensure that a legal obligation exists, and I hope the Minister will look carefully at the issues we are raising today.

Amendment 356A from the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, would put a duty on British Transport Police to take steps to prevent violence against women and girls on trains. This is a national emergency: one in four women have experienced domestic abuse, and a woman is killed by a man once every three days. Given that fewer than one in six victims of rape or attempted rape report their assault to the police—the reasons cited including that the police would not believe them or could not help them, or that they would not be understood—and given that only 2.6% of rape offences result in a charge or summons, it is crucial we do everything we can to assist in this process.

We fully support specialised teams tackling violence against women and girls in every police station, including British Transport Police stations, and we welcome the Government’s overall work in this important area.

The amendment also raises the issue of rolling stock design. As the railway comes under public ownership, there is a real opportunity for the Government to lead on the right design of the interior of their new fleets of trains; procedures to cut out crime and ensure safety and accessibility for everybody should be the heart of that design. However, it should be noted that the rolling stock would not be publicly owned; rather, it would continue to be leased, as now. That issue may need to be looked at again.

Amendment 356F from the noble Lord, Lord Hendy, would create the offence of assaulting a public transport worker, which is similar to the offences of assaulting retail workers and emergency workers. We are sympathetic to this amendment but as the noble Lord himself indicated, the wording may need refining. However, the principle behind it is clear, and it is obvious that protection is needed.

This is an important group of amendments that addresses the safety of our railway networks, systems and travelling public. I look forward to the Minister’s response to the many serious points that have been raised.

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

In rising to support Amendment 356A in the name of my noble friend, I recognise that the problem will probably be enforcement, and the answer may have to be a lot more British Transport Police routinely patrolling certain trains.

I also want to raise another issue which affects women. The amendment deals with the big crimes—rape and other sexual offences, stalking, upskirting and domestic abuse—but women and girls also suffer bad behaviour on trains. For example, if a woman or girl gets on to a train and the only seat left has some yob’s rucksack on it, how many would say, “Could you move your rucksack, please?” They would probably stay silent, afraid that if they did speak up, they would be attacked.

The same things happen late at night, when groups of youths have been drinking and are making a noise or playing their music loudly, causing a complete disturbance. A few weeks ago, I had the guts to tell someone to take his feet off the seats, and he did. But I wonder how many women and girls would actually take that action, asking people to turn the music down, behave themselves, stop the swearing and loutish behaviour, and stop throwing their empty beer cans about. Women will not do that sort of thing—they will not take action—and are therefore suffering.

I do not have an answer to this problem, but it has to involve improving behaviour on trains generally. Perhaps, like the US Transportation Secretary, who told people to dress properly on planes and not like scruffs just off the beach, we should say similar about Great British Railways: when you are on trains in future, behave yourselves, because women and girls are suffering.

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I hope that I have been able to give some comfort to the noble Lords and noble Baronesses who put forward these amendments—

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

Will the Minister take this idea to the British Transport Police? By the time one has done a three-hour journey, one is heartily sick of hearing, for the 20th time, “See it. Say it. Sorted”. Could it possibly intersperse between those announcements something like: “This coach has video recording. We will take action against any passengers who harass or cause trouble for others”? That may not be the right wording, but something warning about that might be helpful.

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

I will give consideration to that with my colleagues in the Department for Transport. As somebody who travels every week on the train to this House, “See it. Say it. Sorted” appears on my journey on a number of occasions—in my case, in both English and Welsh. The noble Lord makes a valid point: there should be an acceptance and acknowledgment that the type of antisocial behaviour which he has referred to, at a low level, can be intimidating for individuals. The ability to undertake physical violence in the extreme form that allegedly took place in Huntingdon—I have to use the word “allegedly”—and the low-level abuse that might occur are significant issues. Transport staff on railways, from whichever railway company, and the teams that are operating require the support of the state to give them that back-up.

Under the current legislation, I believe that my noble friend’s amendment is not necessary. However, the general principle that we have heard from the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, and other speakers, including my noble friend and the noble Baroness, Lady Pidgeon, via the noble Lord, Lord Goddard of Stockport, is absolutely valid and was well worth raising. I hope that I have been able to give assurances on that and that the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, will withdraw her amendment.

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[Baroness Doocey (LD)]

My Lords, Amendment 357, first tabled by my party in the other place last year, would extend the operation of the Equipment Theft (Prevention) Act by making explicit reference to GPS equipment or, as the industry now prefers, global navigation satellite systems.

For several years, Liberal Democrats have highlighted the sharp rise in rural crime, with organised gangs systematically targeting farms and rural businesses. Their focus has been on stealing high-value GPS drones, receivers and in-cab screens from tractors and harvesters. This equipment is worth thousands of pounds and is essential for modern precision farming. The loss of these units leaves farmers facing costly delays and crop losses at critical times of the year. These thefts have formed part of a well-organised international trade whereby equipment is stripped, containerised and shipped overseas, often beyond recovery. Crucially, offences spiked as rural policing came under ever-increasing strain. Local stations were closed and experienced neighbourhood teams hollowed out, taking with them the deep local knowledge that underpins effective intelligence gathering.

Organised gangs stepped into that vacuum, criss-crossing county boundaries with little deterrence. We recognise that real progress has been made over the last year, with insurance claims for GPS theft now starting to fall, thanks to greater collaboration between farmers, insurers, police and the National Rural Crime Network, whose invaluable work is now rightly benefiting from strengthened national funding and support. The Equipment Theft (Prevention) Act should build on that work, offering a strong framework for prevention, giving the Secretary of State powers to require immobilisers and the marking and registration of agricultural machinery, and to extend these measures to other equipment by regulation.

Amendment 357 would strengthen that framework by naming GPS units explicitly in the primary legislation. This would give a clear signal of intent, ensure momentum and guard against any further delay in bringing the provisions into effect. We welcome the Government’s recent commitment to include removable GPS units in future regulations and I am pleased that Ministers have listened to evidence presented from these Benches and others. The reality, however, is that the key provisions of the Act have not yet been brought into force and the secondary legislation required to implement them is still pending. Our amendment would ensure timely and decisive action, so that farmers and rural businesses see the benefits on the ground sooner rather than later. This is a simple, practical step that would support the Government’s aims and help stop the theft and resale of vital agricultural technology. I beg to move.

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

My Lords, I start with a simple question: where on earth are the regulations that we were promised way back in 2023 when we passed the Equipment Theft (Prevention) Act? I took that Bill through this House with all-party support, getting Royal Assent in July 2023. The Home Office promised that it would consult urgently on the necessary regulations and started that consultation immediately.

The consultation closed in July 2024, but the Government announced their conclusions only on 17 October 2025 and have dumped some of the most important provisions of the Act. It will now apply only to new all-terrain vehicles with forensic marking and registration, and to removable GPS units. Dumped are the proposals for immobilisers and extending it to other agricultural machinery. A £5,000 quad bike is protected, but not the £500,000 combine harvester. If someone breaks into the £300,000 John Deere tractor and steals the £10,000 GPS unit, that is covered, but not the John Deere itself. I saw one advert for a GPS that said, “Put this in your tractor, and you will be able to track it if the tractor is stolen”. Well, that is only if a farmer makes it impossible to remove and the thief has to steal the tractor as well as the GPS unit.

Dumping the proposals covering hand tools may be a wise measure, even though an incredible number are stolen. I accept that a forensic marking and registration scheme for power tools needs more time if it is ever to happen. It is estimated that the power tools market may have reached £1.5 billion in 2025. Professional power tools average about £200 each; a DeWalt combi kit of six tools sharing the same battery will come in at about £1,000. Therefore, if tradesmen are spending about £1.5 billion on £200 per item tools, that is over 7 million new tools bought per annum—I think I have half of them in my own garage, actually, but that is another matter. It would be a massive logistical task to register those 7 million tools, but large machinery is different.

Last year, 10,241 tractors, worth £1.6 billion, and 400 combine harvesters, worth £160 million, were registered in the UK. Some 34,000 excavators, diggers and earth-moving machines were sold, worth £1.5 billion, while 8,000 ATVs were sold with a total value of just £80 million. We will therefore have 44,000 big machines worth £3.4 billion with no forensic marking or isolator scheme, but we will have one for just 8,000 ATVs worth a mere £80 million. I do not understand the sense or wisdom of that. If it is possible to devise a forensic marking registration scheme for 8,000 vehicles, it should not be rocket science to devise one for 44,000 vehicles worth 42 times more. I therefore urge the Home Office to lay the ATV and GPS regulations immediately and then get on with drafting the next phase of those regulations to apply them to big farm machinery and construction equipment.

[Lord Davies of Gower (Con)]

My Lords, this group of amendments addresses an issue that will be immediately recognisable to many people across the country: the theft of essential equipment from those who rely on it for their living. Turning first to Amendment 357, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Doocey, we broadly support the intention behind extending the Equipment Theft (Prevention) Act 2023. This was an Act brought in by the Conservative Government to protect businessmen and tradespeople, and the noble Baroness’s amendment would ensure that it explicitly includes GPS equipment. Technology becomes ever more central to commercial activity, particularly in agriculture, construction and logistics. It is therefore right that the law keeps pace with the evolving nature of equipment theft. GPS units are high-value, easily resold and frequently targeted. Bringing them clearly within scope of the Act is a sensible and proportionate step to help disrupt illicit resale markets.

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[Lord Katz (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank all noble Lords for speaking in this debate and raising these important issues. Turning first to Amendment 357, moved by the noble Baroness, Lady Doocey, I can confirm that the Government remain committed to the implementation of the Equipment Theft (Prevention) Act 2023 and fully support the intentions behind its introduction. Informed by responses to the call for evidence and direct consultation with industry, the Act will cover the forensic marking and registration on a database of new all-terrain vehicles, quad bikes and, I am pleased to say, removable GPS systems.

The NFU Mutual Rural Crime Report 2025 highlights that GPS theft cost an estimated £1.2 million in 2024. GPS units are particularly vulnerable to theft and their theft massively disrupts day-to-day farming operations, which is exactly why we have included them in the legislation. I am pleased to echo the acknowledgement by the noble Baroness, Lady Doocey, of the progress that has been made in this important area, with, as she said, falling insurance claims thanks to the concerted efforts of the police and other parties.

The Act requires secondary legislation before it can come into effect and we intend to bring this forward as soon as possible. As the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, said, the Government’s response to the call for evidence was published quite recently, in October 2025. We are very grateful to all those who took the time to respond, and we carefully considered the views and evidence provided in those responses. Significant technical concerns were raised and we needed to assess the impact before we committed to introducing secondary legislation. We did not want to introduce regulations that were not fit for purpose or, more importantly, that would adversely impact vehicle safety.

The noble Lord talked about the comparison between smaller vehicles and larger, more expensive farming machinery, such as tractors. We have carefully considered the benefits and implications of including other agricultural equipment in the regulations. The installation of immobilisers into other large pieces of machinery post manufacture poses a similar risk to ATVs, so there is a delicate balance to be struck between the costs to businesses and the achievability of the ends of the regulations.

Should the Act become more effective in tackling rural theft, the legislation would be widened in the future by introducing other large agricultural machinery in a further tranche of regulations. We are looking at the situation and the way the regulations operate, and will see whether we can apply them further.

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

Can the Minister give a rough timescale for a consultation on extending this to include heavy agricultural machinery or contracting equipment?

[Lord Katz (Lab)]

I do not want to commit to any particular timescale. It probably ill behoves me to do so, but I will point out that, having published our response to the call for evidence a couple of months before Christmas, we are obviously trying to motor ahead with it, if noble Lords will forgive the pun.

I turn now to Amendment 368, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Gower, which proposes two changes: first, to expand enforcement provisions under the 2023 Act and, secondly, to introduce a statutory aggravating factor for theft of tools from tradesmen under the Sentencing Act 2020. The Government recognise the distress caused by tool theft and its impact on tradespeople and small businesses, which the noble Lord, Lord Davies, spoke to. As he said, these tools are essential to livelihoods, and their loss can cause real financial and emotional harm. That is why we are already taking action through the National Vehicle Crime Working Group, which brings together specialists from every police force to share intelligence and tackle emerging trends in vehicle-related crime, including tool theft.

On sentencing, the current framework is sufficient and robust. Courts must follow guidelines issued by the Sentencing Council, which already require consideration of harm, culpability and aggravating factors such as financial loss, business impact and emotional distress. Courts also have powers to impose compensation orders to ensure that victims receive financial compensation. Introducing a statutory aggravating factor, as this amendment calls for, would duplicate existing provisions unnecessarily and have limited impact on outcomes. Indeed, I am reminded that a wise man once said,

“I am sceptical of the need for more aggravating factors”.—[Official Report, 15/12/25; col. 585.]

That was of course the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Gower, speaking just three weeks ago, on 15 December, in response to an amendment moved by the noble Baroness, Lady Doocey, to Clause 102 on self-harm. I could not have put it better myself.

I hope I have been able to reassure the noble Baroness, Lady Doocey, that we accept the spirit of her Amendment 357 and we are working to give effect to this issue. I hope too that the noble Lord, Lord Davies, will understand why we do not consider his Amendment 368 to be necessary, and forgive my light ribbing a moment ago. For all these reasons, I invite the noble Baroness to withdraw her amendment.

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[Lord Holmes of Richmond (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to speak in this Committee and to follow my friend the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, who perfectly and proportionately set out the principles in this amendment, which I support to every last sentence. We are now discussing a number of amendments on areas where the existing law, and this Bill as drafted, are clearly out of date and full of gaps—not least when we consider how our nation, our economy and the state itself are seeking to move to digitisation, which has such benefits for citizens and communities, our cities and our entire country. But one key element which enables, empowers and underpins almost every element of that digital transformation is effective digital ID.

There are a number of arguments that could be made at another time about the correct approach to digital ID. I would suggest that the principles around self-sovereign ID should strongly be considered. Mandation is clearly problematic, while the reasons for introducing a digital ID should be clearly made and the benefits set out. But the specifics of this amendment are clear, proportionate and timely, because a digital ID is critical and essential to availing oneself of the opportunities—and, indeed, to protecting oneself against many of the harms. To not have a digital ID protected by the criminal law would be a huge, inexplicable and indefensible gap.

If the Government want digital ID to be the means of accessing government services and to see greater digital inclusion—and, through that, the attendant and very necessary financial inclusion—action to protect our digital ID is critical. The noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones effectively set out his amendment, which is proportionate, valid, timely and necessary. I very much look forward to the Minister accepting the principle as set out.

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

My Lords, identity theft, as my noble friend Lord Holmes of Richmond said, is no longer a niche crime; it is the dominant fraud type in the UK and getting worse. In 2024, over 421,000 fraud cases were filed to the national fraud database and almost 250,000 were identity fraud filings, making identity theft the single largest category recorded by industry partners. CIFAS, the credit industry fraud avoidance system, recorded a record number of cases on the national fraud database in 2024. The organisations themselves prevented more than £2.1 billion of attempted loss, yet criminals are shifting tactics. Account takeovers rose by 76% and unauthorised SIM swaps surged, driven by the rapid adoption of AI and generative tools that let fraudsters create convincing fake documents and synthetic identities at scale.

We have all read of some of the high-profile examples: celebrity impersonation via deepfakes and cloned voices has been widely reported; manipulated videos and voice clones purporting to show public figures from Elon Musk to Martin Lewis, Holly Willoughby and others, have been used to generate investment scams and phishing campaigns. Documented victim losses include large individual losses linked to celebrity impersonation scams. One NatWest customer is reported to have lost £150,000 after responding to a scam impersonating Martin Lewis.

However, I think we are all more concerned with the tens of thousands of ordinary people who are not celebrities and who lose all their savings to these crooks. They are the victims who suffer real financial loss and damage, with long and costly recovery processes, while businesses face rising prevention costs and operational strain. I therefore strongly support the concept of the draft clause and the need for it. While it is well intentioned, I fear that it has some technical difficulties. It is a bit broad and vague about what “obtains” and “impersonate” mean. It also risks overlap with the Fraud Act, the Computer Misuse Act and the Data Protection Act, and lacks some clear defences for legitimate security research and lawful investigations. It also needs to address AI and the deepfake-specific methods, and set out what we can do about extraterritorial reach, for example, or aggravating factors for organised, large-scale operations.

We all know that my noble friend Lord Holmes of Richmond is, as we have just heard, an absolute expert on AI; he recently addressed a top-level group of the Council of Europe on this subject. May I suggest that he and the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, get together with the Home Office or other government digital experts and bring back on Report a more tightly drafted amendment? Among other things, it should tighten the definitions of “obtain”, “impersonate” and “sensitive”; ensure that the mens rea is tied to dishonesty or intent to cause loss or gain; include recklessness in enabling others; limit the scope to unlawfully obtained data or use that bypasses authentication; and explicitly include AI/deepfake methods when used to bypass checks or cause reliance. It should also have clear defences for lawful authority and make sure that duplication is avoided, whether it be with the Fraud Act, the Computer Misuse Act or the Data Protection Act. Finally—I know this is an impossible ask, and that Governments find it almost impossible to do—something should be done about extraterritorial reach, because that is terribly important.

I say to the Minister: there is a gap in the legislation here. We should plug it, and we may have time to bring back on Report a more tightly drawn amendment that would deal with all the concerns of noble Lords and the possible problems I have just raised.

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My Lords, I rise briefly to support strongly the comments of my noble friend Lord Blencathra and the principle of the amendment laid by the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones. This is a timely amendment, possibly timelier than the noble Lord anticipated, because today the Government have announced the promotion of a Minister to promulgate digital IDs among the population.

Digital IDs are going to have a huge vista and connection, not just in linking to personal data but in other areas of life: in the relationship between the state and the individual; and in the payment of parking tickets, road tolls, stamp duty and fishing licences—a different sort of fishing, as it begins with an “f”, not a “p”. So I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, on the thrust of the amendment, although I accept that some polishing is required.

If the Government are to promote digital IDs, the population at large need to have confidence not just that they will be correctly introduced but that there are safeguards against such impersonation. I strongly support the principle of this amendment and say to the noble Lord, Lord Hanson of Flint, that if the Government resist it in principle, what confidence can the man in the street have that the Government are sincere about the safeguards they intend to introduce, alongside their intention for digital IDs—to get that balance right between the state and the individual, coupled together against the criminal?

We need to bring this back on Report. I hope the Minister is prepared to meet the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, and others to address this principle, so that the Government get off on the right foot, if they intend to promote digital IDs, and not resist this, because there is a world of pain if they do.

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Tackling this is hampered by the lack of a consistent national framework for recording or investigating freight crime, leaving major gaps in data and enforcement. This is all against the backdrop of the Government’s target to increase rail freight by 75% by 2050, a target set by my noble friend Lord Harper when he was Secretary of State for Transport, to which this Government remain committed. But that growth in the rail freight sector cannot materialise if the sector faces such high levels of theft. My amendment does not seek any new offences but would require the Home Secretary to establish a new freight crime code. The aim is to ensure that incidents of freight crime are properly recorded and investigated across the country. Among the issues with current data collection is the fact that freight theft is currently recorded as theft from a vehicle. This does not reflect the seriousness or the specific nature of freight crime. I look forward very much to what the Minister has to say in relation to this.

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

My Lords, I support my noble friend’s Amendment 365 after Clause 117, which would increase penalties for those who deliberately avoid paying rail fares. Deliberate fare evasion undermines the integrity of our railway and costs taxpayers and passengers hundreds of millions each year. We must be firm in protecting revenue that funds services and investment.

However, there is another side to this issue that we cannot ignore. Recent reviews and watchdog recommendations show a system that is complex, inconsistent and at times unfair to passengers who make genuine mistakes. The passenger watchdog has called for a national yellow card warning for first-time errors and a central railcard database to prevent innocent people being prosecuted for technical or administrative errors. I always book advance tickets on the train; they are slightly cheaper than the full-fare ones. A few weeks ago, business here finished early, so I got to Euston early and caught an earlier train than I had booked. When I produced my ticket, I said to the manager, “I’m on an earlier train. Is that all right?” He said, “I’ll let you off on this occasion”. I think what he meant was that he would let me off paying the full fare because I was on an earlier train. But I have heard of people, with a ticket that they have paid for, being accused of fare evasion for being on the train at the wrong time. That is a perfect example of where the yellow card system should be used.

The Office of Rail and Road was asked to review revenue protection practices precisely because enforcement has been uneven and opaque. We have seen the consequences of those failures. Thousands of prosecutions were quashed after courts found that operators had used inappropriate fast-track procedures and many passengers faced the threat of criminal records for minor errors. These are not abstract concerns; they are real harms to livelihoods and trust in the system.

I support the principle of tougher penalties for deliberate evasion, but only if there are clear safeguards. Those safeguards should be: a statutory first-warning step; a consistent published test before any prosecution; improved point-of-sale information and standardised enforcement guidance for all the different train operators; and mandatory staff training and data sharing to identify repeat offenders rather than punishing honest mistakes. I understand that the Government have accepted the ORR’s recommendations and must now legislate to ensure that enforcement is proportionate and transparent.

In short, tough penalties and fairness are not mutually exclusive. We can deter deliberate evasion while protecting innocent travellers, but only if this amendment is paired with the reforms that the ORR and passenger bodies have recommended. I urge the Minister to support the amendment on that basis and to press the Government to enshrine these other safeguards in law.

[Viscount Goschen (Con)]

My Lords, my noble friend Lord Blencathra has made a very pragmatic speech on the difficulties of fare evasion and the extraordinary complexities of the ticketing and fares system in the UK. Of course, I note that the Government are legislating in this area as part of the broader GB Railways Bill that is coming down the tracks, as it were. I really do not believe that there is a single individual in the United Kingdom who could answer 20 questions about the cheapest fare from A to B crossing C and get it right. It is an extraordinary system, and I quite agree that many people are making inadvertent errors, which should absolutely be taken into consideration.

Equally, the Minister will have heard me talking about enforcement on many occasions throughout the passage of the Bill. The law is brought very quickly into disrepute if the laws that law-abiding people see as absolutely necessary are avoided by a determined criminal element. We have all seen it. We have all seen it on the Tube, with people barging through, tailgating and hopping over the barriers. I have seen two officials of London Underground at Green Park station late in the evening, chatting to one another—someone comes barging past and they do absolutely nothing. If that continues, then I suggest we get ourselves into a very difficult situation indeed. So, when the Minister comes to respond, I ask that he talks about enforcement and about the attitude of the police to combat this serious issue which robs the railways and London Underground of hundreds of millions of pounds and is unsustainable.

I think that, on the ticketing issue and the fare issues, the answer really lies in technology. I think that apps have made this much more straightforward. It is absolutely a task for computers to find the best ticket from A to B, but there are plenty of people who do not use those, who are not particularly computer literate and who prefer a paper ticket. So, it is perhaps more complex than it seems from the outside, but I really think we have to put more effort on enforcement in this difficult area.

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To be clear, this amendment does not change the law. It would not create a new offence. It would require the Home Secretary to establish a freight crime code and ensure that incidents are properly identified, recorded and investigated across all police forces. Recording these high-value crimes differently from a standard theft from a vehicle better reflects the seriousness and economic consequences of freight crime, which creates the groundwork for building a stronger deterrent to the organised and occasional criminals who are taking a huge amount of money out of our economy, threatening drivers and destabilising the logistics industry. I will be interested to hear what the Minister has to say, considering he is not looking to bring in a new Bill but is seeking to create a code. Surely, it is not beyond the wit of the Government to create a code to record and investigate, and ensure that people understand that these are high-value crimes and not just thefts from vehicles.

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

I want to comment on something the noble Lord, Lord Goddard, said and endorse it. I regularly travel to the Council of Europe in Strasbourg and I use the marvellous level-access tram system. There are no barriers or gates, but periodically four people come on in a team with their little electronic machines, go between one station and another, and check we all have our little “aller simple” travelcard. If someone does not have it, they are hauled off. It is only one team of about four people in all of Strasbourg, but everyone is terrified of not having a valid ticket. That may be the solution: check people on the trains rather than at the barriers.

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Finally, I cannot understand why Governments in the past have not called these people to account when they have had them in for meetings and they have said they are going to go away and do something about it. Why have they not? The answer is that nobody is asking them to do it and there is no financial incentive to do it either. That is what Governments are for, it seems to me. This is a real opportunity to do something about it. I support it 100% and I hope the Government will take action on it.

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lord Jackson on the quality of the amendment he drafted. I also congratulate my noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe on the superb speech she made setting out why this amendment is necessary. As we know, it addresses one of the fastest-growing forms of organised crime in the UK: the theft and rapid export of mobile phones—thousands and thousands of them. These are no longer opportunistic street offences. As noble Lords have said, they are part of a highly profitable, highly mobile criminal market that depends on one thing above all else: the ability to reactivate and resell the stolen devices abroad.

A couple of years ago, I was outside Victoria station, at the end of Victoria Street, waiting to cross the road. I saw a woman waiting for the pedestrian lights to change, holding her mobile phone out—I think she was trying to read the map—almost like a Geiger counter. Then I saw two guys on a motor scooter coming around the corner and I tried to shout to her to put her phone away, but too late—it was snatched in seconds.

That was a couple of years ago, when I think there were motor scooter gangs doing it. Now, as we have seen—we were talking about the e-bike problem in our debates on the Bill before Christmas—there are lots of videos of these guys on their very fast bikes, snatching phones, and I believe the Met now has a response squad on those high-powered bikes chasing the phone thieves. So it is a big problem, particularly in London.

At present, our defences are simply not keeping pace. IMEI blocking helps, but criminals now routinely bypass it by altering identifiers or moving devices to jurisdictions where UK blacklists are ignored. What they cannot bypass is the cloud. As noble Lords have said, modern smartphones are useless without access to the cloud-based services that power authentication, updates, storage and app ecosystems.

The amendment therefore introduces a very simple, proportionate requirement. When a user reports their phone lost or stolen, cloud service providers must take reasonable steps to block that specific device from accessing their services. If a stolen phone cannot be reactivated, it cannot be resold. If it cannot be resold, it is not worth stealing. It is as simple as that.

My noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe hinted that the phone companies may possibly have a financial benefit from not co-operating here. The noble Lord, Lord Hogan- Howe, was more blatant. I will be more blatant still. I am absolutely certain that they are conspiring not to co-operate so that they can sell more phones. We were discussing all-terrain vehicles a couple of hours ago. When the Equipment Theft (Prevention) Bill was going through, the police officers who were advising us said that they had heard from some of the big manufacturers of ATVs—the ones which make motorbikes with locks you cannot penetrate—that they were deliberately putting rubbish locks on the ATVs because when the £8,000 quad bike was stolen, the farmer immediately replaced it. They saw a market in goods being stolen. I think the big phone companies see exactly the same thing: there is a market in replacement phones.

The noble Lord asked: why do the British Government not do something about it? I suspect it is mega US-UK politics. If we said we were going to restrict the ability of Apple, Google and others to sell their phones here, I think we would have Mr Trump seeking to invade us next week, so I suspect there are geopolitical problems there.

The amendment also ensures proper safeguards: verification before blocking, a clear appeals process, and a role for the Secretary of State in setting technical standards. It strengthens law enforcement by requiring timely notification to the National Crime Agency and local police, giving them valuable intelligence on organised theft. This is not about burdening industry. It is about ensuring that all providers meet a consistent baseline of responsible behaviour—one that many already follow voluntarily, but which criminals exploit when it is not universal.

I conclude by saying that we have an opportunity here to collapse the economic incentive that drives mobile phone theft. Cloud-based blocking is practical, proportionate and overdue, and I commend the amendment to the Minister.

[Lord Davies of Gower (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Jackson of Peterborough for tabling these excellent amendments, and to my noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe for moving Amendment 366 on his behalf.

This amendment is driven by a simple proposition: if we are to bear down on the scourge of phone theft, we must remove the profit motive, because it is precisely this incentive to profit that drives the vast industry behind phone theft. Too often, the criminal justice system is left trying to deal with the consequences of crime after the event, rather than addressing the incentives that fuel it in the first place. Phone theft is now a high-volume, high-impact crime, particularly in our cities, and it causes not only financial loss but real fear and disruption to victims’ lives.

What this amendment seeks to do is eminently practical. It asks cloud service providers, which already control the digital lifeline that makes a smartphone valuable, to take responsible and timely steps to deny access to those services once a device is verified as lost or stolen. A phone that cannot access cloud backups, app stores, authentication, service or updates rapidly becomes worthless on the secondary market, whether at home or abroad.

This is not a novel idea nor an untested one. As many noble Lords will know, the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee has examined this issue in detail. In its recent correspondence with Ministers and technology companies, the committee highlighted both the scale of the problem and the frustrating gap between what is technically possible and what is currently being done. The committee made it clear that voluntary action has been uneven, that existing measures are inconsistently applied across platforms, and that stronger co-ordination, potentially underpinned by legislation, may be required if we are serious about prevention. This amendment directly reflects that evidence-based work and gives effect to its central recommendations.

Importantly, the amendment builds in safeguards for users to appeal or reverse a block where a mistake has been made or a device is recovered. It leaves the detailed technical standards, timelines and sanctions to secondary legislation, allowing flexibility and proper consultation with industry, and it recognises the importance of law enforcement by requiring prompt notification to the National Crime Agency and local police, strengthening intelligence and disruption efforts. Fundamentally, if we can force cloud service providers to implement this provision, we can break the cycle of phone theft. I look forward to the Minister’s response.

Crime and Policing Bill

Lord Blencathra Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 17th December 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Gohir (CB)]

My Lords, I declare my interest of CEO of the Muslim Women’s Network UK. We have a helpline and we deal with honour-based abuse cases.

While I support in principle the introduction of a statutory definition of honour-based abuse, it is essential that the Home Office concludes its work on the definition. I am part of the advisory group on this, alongside many other stakeholders. We must ensure that a final version is workable and fair, and includes statutory guidance, as recommended in Amendment 355.

However, I oppose the definition that has been put forward, although I appreciate that the noble Baroness, Lady Sugg, has suggested it to create debate and discussion. I have a number of concerns. While I appreciate that a number of organisations have put their names to the proposed definition, I suspect that many have not gone through it line by line, as we do in here, and probably just accepted it at face value without thinking about whether it is applicable in law.

First, the definition lists types of abuse that could be motivated by shame. However, I note that stalking and harassment, which are specific offences under the law, are not mentioned and could be motivated by honour, particularly when a victim has escaped from the family or partner and attempts are made to track down, contact and bring back the person. Also, non-fatal strangulation and suffocation are not included in the list, and I would like to see them included.

Secondly, what does the wording actually mean when it refers to

“the perceived norms of the community’s accepted behaviours”

and the community being “shamed”? What do we mean by “the community”, “perceived norms” and “accepted behaviours”? This has to be legally clear for it to be applied. What community are we referring to? The use of this word has not been challenged for decades; we just blindly accept that terminology.

Let us take Birmingham, the city where I live. It has a population of more than 1 million. More than 500,000 are from a minority ethnic background; let us delve deeper into this population. Around 190,000 are from a Pakistani background, 20,000 are Arab, 66,000 are of Indian heritage and 17,000 are of Somali heritage —I could go on with that breakdown. If somebody commits an honour-based abuse crime in Birmingham, are we then suggesting that all those communities—for example, the 190,000 Pakistani community, including myself—are shamed by that crime? Well, that is not true: we would be stereotyping the whole community, and the communities are so diverse.

Even if we amended the wording to “the perpetrator and/or their family feeling they have been shamed or will lose honour and respect within their community”, tens or hundreds of thousands of people will not know who they are. A more accurate description, in my opinion, would be to cite “perpetrators’ perception of being dishonoured among their family and their social circle and their kinship group”.

By using this description, the honour-based abuse definition could even have a wider application. While this type of abuse is mostly associated with minority ethnic communities, honour-based abuse can occur in other contexts, even if to a much lesser extent. For example, it can happen in white, non-minority contexts too, particularly with the rise of toxic masculinity and the manosphere. Violence could be justified as “She embarrassed me”, and “She shamed me”. Then, abuse is committed for that reason. It could also be applied to gang-related contexts where violence is sometimes used to restore and protect honour.

I now turn to “accepted behaviours”. How will this be interpreted in law? This wording opens up the definition to subjective interpretation, risking inconsistent application. Legal risks could include prosecutors struggling to prove a motive beyond reasonable doubt. The defence could argue alternative motivations such as control, jealousy and anger. We must also ensure that those applying a legal definition are provided with clear guidance when any form of abuse is motivated by honour and shame: otherwise, automatic assumptions cannot be made that abuse is motivated by shame and honour just because the perpetrator is from a particular background, for example from a south Asian background. Evidence will be needed to justify why that motivation is linked to honour. As accepted behaviours may vary, it would be wise to list some key ones if it is not possible to provide an exhaustive list.

The very last part of the definition talks about the perception of shame preventing a victim accessing support and help. If honour-based abuse is going to be used as an aggravating factor to increase sentencing, this part needs to be strengthened further. This section needs to be linked to the behaviour of the perpetrator. Instead, it should be framed as where the perpetrator exploits concepts of shame and honour through threats, intimidation, coercion or blackmail, to prevent or deter the victim from seeking support, protection or assistance. An example of this is using intimate images to prevent a victim from speaking out by threatening to share those images.

Putting all of that together, I propose the following definition, some of which could be put in guidance. Honour-based abuse is an incident or pattern of abuse where the perpetrator is motivated by their belief that the victim has caused or may cause them and/or their family to lose honour or respect within their social circle or kinship group because of behaviours that are perceived to bring shame to them that may include: choosing one’s own partner; refusing a forced marriage, female genital mutilation or other harmful practices; having premarital sex, a relationship or pregnancy outside marriage; having interfaith, interethnic, intercaste relationships; ending a marriage or seeking divorce; having LGBTQ+ identity or relationships; seeking education or employment against family wishes; not dressing or having an appearance according to family expectations; having friends of the opposite sex; refusing family control over decisions; disclosing abuse and seeking help; and acts of betrayal within gang-related relationships.

Types of abuse may include: physical or sexual abuse; violent or threatening behaviour; stalking and harassment; non-fatal strangulation or suffocation; controlling or coercive behaviour; economic abuse; spiritual or faith-related abuse; psychological and emotional abuse; isolation; harmful cultural practices such as forced marriage; and intimate image abuse, especially in relation to silencing victims. The definition is long, some of it could be in guidance, and it would need tweaking.

I turn to Amendment 354, which proposes making honour-based abuse an aggravating factor for sentencing purposes. I would support the amendment once we have defined honour-based abuse. I too acknowledge the long-standing campaign called Banaz’s law to get this very law passed. Banaz Mahmod was murdered by her family in an honour killing in 2006. Her sister, Bekhal Mahmod, has been campaigning to have honour-based abuse become a statutory aggravating factor in sentencing. She is supported by Southall Black Sisters in her campaign, and I hope the Government will join us in acknowledging its campaign and hard work. I look forward to hearing from the Minister whether the Government are committed to adding a definition of honour-based abuse to this Bill.

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

My Lords, I completely agree with all these proposed new clauses, which are long overdue. I congratulate my noble friend Lady Sugg on her excellent exposition and the noble Baroness, Lady Doocey, on her strong support.

I want first to criticise the term “honour-based abuse”, since there is nothing honourable about it. The term was invented by the perpetrators to make their actions seem more honourable than they were. In reality, these acts are abusive and destructive, involve the horrible murders of girls and women, and are morally wrong and thoroughly evil. I understand that, in an ideal world, we would have different terminology; however, as we are not, we probably cannot change the name now, since it is widely used and understood, including in law. Still, calling it what it is helps us refute the false framing that protects abusers as if they were doing something decent instead of evil.

What is the extent of the problem in the United Kingdom? It is estimated that at least 12 so-called honour killings occur in the UK each year, which averages out to at least one woman or girl murdered per month. The exact number is not known, as these crimes are often hidden and underreported. The figures provided by excellent charities such as Karma Nirvana are expert estimations; I congratulate them on the superb work they do, and I wish Karma Nirvana well in developing its national e-learning modules. The actual number of cases is widely believed to be much higher, because, as I said, many go unreported or are misidentified by authorities. Some police forces simply do not want to add that label, for the same misguided reasons that they covered up the rape of children in certain communities.

This is not a cultural problem to be tolerated or explained away. Since at least one girl or woman is murdered every month in this country, we can imagine that many thousands of other abuses, less than murder, are occurring. They can include physical assault, emotional and psychological control, forced marriage, female genital mutilation, and sexual violence—up to murder itself. Victims are often isolated and silenced by those closest to them. The abuse can be carried out, as we have heard from noble Baronesses, by multiple family members or by members of the wider community. The honour-based abuse includes violence, murder, threats, intimidation, coercion and other forms of abuse carried out to protect or defend the perceived honour of a family or community.

Honour-based abuse is not a private family dispute; it is a serious human rights violation. It strips people of their autonomy, their choice and their safety. As it is hidden, many victims never reach out for help. When they do, they need responses that are informed, compassionate and co-ordinated, and they need to be taken seriously by the police, education authorities and the health service.

Despite some excellent initiatives being taken by the charities and the Home Office, I feel we are still talking about it sotto voce. We all need to denounce aspects of honour-based abuse for the evil that it is and not tolerate excuses—that it is mandated by some people with a perverted misinterpretation of religion and practised by ignorant people.

I turn to my Amendment 355A. The College of Policing already provides extensive guidance on how to identify honour-based abuse. Officers are advised to look for a wide range of indicators: control of movement, restrictions on communication, coercive family behaviour, fear, anxiety, unexplained absences, threats of being taken abroad and the collective involvement of extended family members. I have just read out a small selection; I believe that the college has about 15 different indicators that tell police officers, “These are things you can look for that might add up collectively to honour-based abuse”. If one wants a definition, one can look at the College of Policing indicators and the suggestions from the noble Baroness, Lady Gohir—and there you have a definition of all the factors that could encompass honour-based abuse. The college’s guidance is detailed, thoughtful and clearly written; it recognises that honour-based abuse is not a single incident but a pattern that is often hidden, often escalating and often involving multiple perpetrators acting together.

However, after setting out all these excellent warning signs, the guidance stops short of the critical next step. It tells the professionals what to look for but gives them no instruction on how to record what they have found. There is no requirement to flag up an incident as honour-based abuse. There is no standardised data field, no multi-agency reporting framework and no clarity on whether a case should be logged as domestic abuse, forced marriage, coercive control, child safeguarding or all the above. In short, the system trains police officers to recognise honour-based abuse but then leaves them with no mechanism to ensure the system itself recognises it.

Crime and Policing Bill

Lord Blencathra Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 17th December 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Shinkwin (Con)]

My Lords, in speaking to Amendment 346C, I welcome the other amendments in this group in the names of my noble friends, Lord Blencathra and Lord McColl of Dulwich.

Amendment 346C is a modest and reasonable amendment, which would do exactly what it says on the tin. It would require the Home Secretary to institute

“a review assessing the effectiveness with which operators of bicycle courier services ensure that their employees and contractors conduct themselves on the roads in such a way as to avoid committing the offences in section 106”.

The review, which must be published within a year of that section coming into force, would recommend any changes to the law which the review determines may be necessary. The rationale for this amendment is similarly simple: it seeks to probe how the law could be changed to ensure that companies which contract for the services of delivery cyclists bear some responsibility for the conduct of those cyclists on the road.

Noble Lords will not be surprised to hear that I approach this issue from the perspective of a severely disabled person, whose condition makes me extremely vulnerable to the impact—and I use the term advisedly to mean the actual physical impact—of being hit by an individual riding one of these e-bikes in, to use the legislative terminology, a “dangerous, careless or inconsiderate” way. To put it bluntly, the impact would be catastrophic; I would not expect to survive. So I completely agree with my noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe, who said on day six of Committee that you take your life in your hands when you cross some roads in central London. I do so, quite literally, every day, on my way to and from your Lordships’ House.

Now I entirely appreciate that whether I live or die is neither here nor there in the grand scheme of things. It would be a shame if I were killed, but the earth would continue to turn. I know that. Equally, I know that I am just one person. I think of all those people with visual impairments, for example, who literally risk life and limb just stepping outside their front door. So the review should consider the impact on them as well, and not just in terms of their independence, mental health and well-being, all of which will of course bring associated costs for the NHS and social care services, but of their employment prospects. For why would anyone want to risk going to work, given they could end up in hospital before they have even got to the office as a result of being hit by a courier cyclist on an e-bike while they were walking along the pavement or trying to board a bus from one of those so-called floating bus stops?

I cite this group as just one example—and of course there are people with mobility impairments like mine, or simply older people whose reflexes are not as sharp as they once were—to highlight how the dangers presented by dangerous, careless or inconsiderate cycling on e-bikes, particularly by courier and delivery cyclists, are having a far greater impact on our society than we perhaps realise. I would go so far as to say that the effect has been to airbrush out of the bigger social picture whole swathes of society. So while I am not suggesting that an assessment of impact should be disability-exclusive, I would argue that such an impact alone merits a review.

I say to the Minister that I am not laying the blame at the door of Government per se. The Member’s explanatory statement accompanying the amendment refers to the companies which contract the services of delivery cyclists bearing

“some responsibility for the conduct of these cyclists”—

the point being that the responsibility is shared. But none of us, either in Parliament or the Government, can deny that we also share responsibility for addressing the problem; in our case, by providing the most effective legislative framework to facilitate the change we all want to see—safer streets.

I am reminded of what the noble Lord, Lord Russell of Liverpool, said on day six in Committee, about us having made a “huge strategic mistake” by not factoring in the need for safety from the outset when these e-bikes were introduced. I agree with him. Sadly, some people, especially those in the Department for Transport, appear not to. They—and I dare say they are non-disabled and a bit slow on the uptake, bless them, so we need to make allowances—still do not seem to have woken up to the fact that this experiment has gone badly wrong.

That needs to be the starting point of the review. There must be a recognition—a fact which I sense the Minister implicitly acknowledges—that there is a significant and growing problem, which cannot simply be dismissed by officialdom’s obtuse obfuscation of, “Well, we are where we are”, because if we do not recognise that where we are is bad then we cannot move on.

Lime, the other e-bike hiring companies and companies such as Just Eat deserve to be in the dock and not in the saddle when it comes to this review. Yes, they will be part of the solution, but right now they are doing very nicely thank you very much from being a big part of the problem. They cannot be allowed to set or influence the review’s terms of reference or to sit on the review panel. That should be done by those most affected by dangerous, careless or inconsiderate cycling, not by those whose irresponsible indifference means they are profiting from putting people’s lives at risk.

In conclusion, I believe that the case for a review is compelling. As my noble friend Lady Stowell said on day six in Committee, courier delivery service e-bike users are “the worst perpetrators”. It is time we reviewed the situation. I beg to move.

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

My Lords, my Amendment 416K supports a targeted, enforceable measure that holds delivery platforms to account where their operational model and oversight failures contribute to dangerous cycling on our streets. This is not about blame for individual riders alone; it is about closing a regulatory gap so that companies that profit from rapid, app-driven deliveries also carry responsibility for foreseeable harms linked to their business models and practices.

If noble Lords want a bit more excitement in their lives than the excitement of participating in this debate then I invite them to accompany me, when we rise tonight, to walk along Millbank, Horseferry Road and Marsham Street, past the Home Office. The excitement will come from them dodging out of the way of dozens of Deliveroo couriers belting along the pavements delivering to the thousands of flats in this area.

Even more excitement may come when I manage to confront one of these riders and we have an exchange of views, but not usually a meeting of minds. When I see them belting along the pavement, I drive straight for them. My chair is heavier than theirs, so they are the ones who are forced to dodge out of the way. When I manage to stop one on those massive, fat tyre, illegal bikes and speak to them, I can say with all honesty that every single one I have seen is a recent arrival to this country. Half do not speak English and do not know the law on riding killer bikes on the pavement. The other half do know and tell me to go away sexually, that they will do what they like, and who will stop them.

If I had said that a month ago, I might have been accused of racist comments, but on 4 December this year, the Home Office issued a press release to say that, in targeted action, it and the police had arrested 171 food delivery couriers for criminal activity, and 60 of them were illegal migrants facing deportation. The Home Office press release said:

“It comes as Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood has been targeting people working unlawfully in the ‘gig economy’. Border Security Minister Alex Norris has also met representatives from food-delivery firms to encourage them to do more to tackle the issue—such as using facial recognition checks to prevent riders sharing their identities with people who do not have permission to take up work in the UK. Norris said that November’s action ought to ‘send a clear message: if you are working illegally in this country, you will be arrested and removed’. He added: ‘We are tightening the law to clamp down on illegal working in the delivery sector to root out this criminality from our communities’”.


Good on you, Minister, and good on the Home Office—they have provided proof of what I have encountered every night for the past two years on the streets of Westminster, within hundreds of yards of this building. Good luck to you in trying to send them back to Eritrea, Somalia or wherever, because there is bound to be some immigration judge who will block you and cite bogus human rights reasons for why they cannot be deported. But that is your problem and not for today.

My amendment supplements what Minister Norris was doing. He exhorted the food delivery companies to do more to tackle the issue. My proposed new clause would give the police the power to penalise the food delivery companies financially, since money is the only thing that will make them change.

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[Lord Katz (Lab)]

To be clear, I was talking about evidence of causality rather than necessarily data on incidents. Let me make some progress, and maybe the noble Lord will be a little mollified by the time I get to the end of my contribution—or maybe not.

The fundamental purpose of the new offence is to—

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

I am sorry, but I am afraid that saying that there is no evidence of causality is just what the Department for Transport wants the Home Office to believe. The evidence is quite clear; there are no better words than from the Mayor of London himself, Sadiq Khan, who said it is a Wild West out there. Many other councils in London are now trying to ban bikes from their areas because of the danger they cause, and those heavy, gigantic food delivery couriers are the worst offenders of all.

[Lord Katz (Lab)]

Again, I say to the noble Lord that I will make some progress and then he may come back at me again before I finally sit down.

The fundamental purpose of the new offences is to appropriately punish offenders and deter dangerous cycling behaviours. There is no carve-out or special provision for delivery riders. To be clear, all road users will face equal treatment before the law under these provisions. I can also assure the noble Lord, Lord Shinkwin, that, like all new government enactments, the Crime and Policing Act will be subject to post-legislative review three to five years after Royal Assent, so there is the opportunity to review the action.

Amendment 416K from the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, would allow for food delivery companies to receive an unlimited fine should any of their riders be convicted of any offences under Clause 106. A complicating factor around this, as many noble Lords recognised, is that many such riders operate in the gig economy—the noble Viscount, Lord Hailsham, and the noble Baroness, Lady Pidgeon, set that out particularly well. We are not always talking about the relationship between an employer and an employee, so using what we would consider normal working relationship incentives and rule structures is not always the easiest thing to do.

It is worth stating, particularly as the Employment Rights Bill finally finished its passage through Parliament yesterday, that as part of that wider package of employment reforms, there will be a major consultation on employment status which will help to clarify these grey areas. Again, I cite the contribution that the noble Viscount, Lord Hailsham, made. I say in response to the noble Lord, Lord Davies, that is probably the best place to have a review of the grey areas around contractors and employers working in the gig economy. A problem has clearly been identified in the delivery driving sector, but there are many other sectors— I remember from my time spent in Committee on the Employment Rights Bill that there are lots of areas where the lack of clarity on employment status is causing all sorts of consequences.

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

I am so grateful to the noble Lord for giving way again; I hope this will be the last time. If he and my noble friend Lord Hailsham are correct that the current law on vicarious liability might mean that Deliveroo and Uber Eats are not liable for the agents they are using, does he accept my noble friend Lord Goschen’s point that we are Parliament and, if the current law does not cover it, we can amend the law as we suggest to make sure that those companies are liable for the people who deliver food in their name, with a great big bag on their back advertising that?

[Lord Katz (Lab)]

I do not disagree with the proposition that the noble Lord makes. Of course, we are Parliament, but I suggest that we should legislate in a slightly more deliberative way than simply shooting at ducks ad hoc as they come up in the stall.

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Moved by

[Lord Blencathra]

346D: After Clause 106, insert the following new Clause—
“Dangerous, careless or inconsiderate cycling offences: supply of batteries for modification of cycles(1) Where an offence under sections 27A (causing death by dangerous cycling), 27B (causing serious injury by dangerous cycling), 28B (causing death by careless, or inconsiderate, cycling) or 28C (causing serious injury by careless, or inconsiderate, cycling) of the Road Traffic Act 1988 is committed on a cycle which has been modified since purchase with a battery, a person who supplied the battery for the modification may be charged with an offence if the battery—(a) has a maximum continuous rated power which exceeds 250 watts, or(b) does not comply with statutory guidelines on lithium-ion battery safety for e-bikes issued by the Office for Product Safety and Standards.(2) A person guilty of an offence under this section is liable on summary conviction to a fine.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment seeks to put a penalty on the suppliers and sellers of batteries used for the modification of cycles used in the committing of offences under the Road Traffic Act 1988.

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

My Lords, I neglected to say at the start of my previous remarks that although it may be the case, as my noble friend Lord Shinkwin said, that the world would not stop turning if he was killed by an e-bike on the streets, my orbit would certainly be destroyed, as would that of many of us, if that were to happen to him. One possible solution might be that, when I fit a bulldozer blade to my chair, I can precede him and he can ride safely behind me.

My Amendment 346D states that if anyone is convicted of causing death or injury by dangerous or careless cycling, and if the e-bike has an illegal battery with a power rating greater than 250 watts or does not meet the approved standard, then the supplier of the battery should receive an unlimited fine imposed by the court, not the police. I think we would all agree that the concept I am trying to get at here is right. We must get at the suppliers of the batteries that do not conform to UL 2849, the US standard, or EN 15194, the European standard.

I admit that the problem here will be enforcement. Just like all the other illegal stuff we have wrestled with in this Bill—from knives to pornography—if it is sold online, it is very difficult to stop. Furthermore, illegal sellers will say that they thought the battery was for an off-road bike, which would be perfectly legal.

However, this is where the proposed new clause in my Amendment 416J might work. It would give the police a power that could be delegated to a local authority or other agents to perform. The proposed new clause says:

“If a retailer supplies batteries which do not comply with statutory guidelines on lithium-ion battery safety for e-bikes … the police may issue notices requiring the retailer to … recall relevant batteries from consumers … suspend the sale of relevant batteries, and … warn consumers about the risks of relevant batteries”.


Again, it is not perfect, and in some ways it is not nearly strong enough to cut off the illegal supply of batteries that are not compliant with either US or European construction standards.

My proposed new clause and the Bill are concerned with dangerous cycling. Recent figures show that there were 11,266 incidents involving e-bikes and e-scooters in 2023-24, and this figure is rising rapidly. Therefore, for the purposes of this Bill, we have to get at the supply of illegally doctored and excessively overpowered batteries. These are the same batteries that cause the most fires, including fatal ones. That is because the number of dangerous and non-compliant batteries in circulation is a significant and fast-growing problem.

Authorities rely on data regarding fires and product recalls to gauge the scale of the issue. The Office for Product Safety and Standards has issued 21 product recalls and published 29 product safety reports for unsafe e-bikes, e-scooters and batteries since 2022. Specific enforcement action was taken against the brand Unit Pack Power’s e-bike batteries, which were linked to several fires across England, with withdrawal notices issued to four online marketplaces, 20 sellers and the manufacturer.

The number of fires caused by lithium-ion batteries is surging rapidly. London Fire Brigade data shows that it responded to 88 e-bike fires in 2022; that figure rose to 134 in 2025, as of late September. In 2023, almost 200 fires involving e-bikes or e-scooters were reported across the UK, resulting in 10 fatalities. The rise in fires is primarily linked to unregulated conversion kits and low-cost batteries, often purchased from online marketplaces—but fires are not our concern today.

--- Later in debate ---

So I am grateful for the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, for raising the issues, but, for the reasons I have outlined, I ask him to withdraw his amendment.

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for his response and all noble Lords who have spoken in this short debate. I think that noble Lords and Ministers are getting the message from nearly all sides of the Committee—apart from the noble Lord, Lord Pannick—that there is a real problem here that the Government are not addressing.

[Lord Pannick (CB)]

I entirely accept that there is mischief here. My comments were addressed at the specifics of the amendment—but I accept that there is a problem that needs to be addressed.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

I am grateful for the clarification from the noble Lord; I did not wish to misquote him. Following his comments, I note that, of the thousands of batteries for sale, none of them specifically say, “Buy this battery and illegally break the law. Add it to your legal bike and break the law by going on the pavement”—they are more subtle than that. The closest I came was in the example I cited in the debate on the previous group, where one company said that its bike—capable of speeds of 64 kilometres per hour—was suitable for “off-road and commuting”. The advertising is much more subtle, but everyone knows what is going on. These batteries are being sold for illegal purposes.

The problem I had with these amendments was that, to get them in scope of the Bill, I had to pull my punches and narrowly tweak them in some ways. Therefore, of course the amendments are technically flawed. I would have liked to put down an amendment on the chips, but that, I think, was not in order. To try to get at the concept of the problem, which all noble Lords support, I had to put down amendments that I accept are flawed. However, what the amendments seek to achieve is consistent with the rest of the Bill: we have had problems with knife crime, so, in addition to penalties for the carriers and users, the Bill has clauses trying to cut off and penalise the online suppliers—and the same goes for crossbows. Then we have all the sexual offences in Part 5 of the Bill, again with attempts to tackle the online supply of illegal photos, as well as lots more clauses on the online supply of illegal material.

I am grateful to my noble and learned friend Lord Garnier. He pointed out that it is easy to pick out flaws—I can pick all the flaws myself—and the technical faults in these amendments. However, what we are getting at here is that every noble Lord who has spoken feels that the Government are not doing enough on this issue. I believe that we can do a lot more. Of course, I want the police to grab every massive, overweight and overfast illegal bike out there and destroy it, but they will never keep up with the supply. We have to cut off the supply, and my amendments, in their inadequate way, were seeking to do that.

I am grateful to the Minister, because I think we have had a bit of movement over the past two days, with the Home Office now offering to discuss with colleagues how we can get this a lot better. I hope that we can, with noble Lords around the Committee, agree something on Report that tackles the specific problem, without causing great new problems of enforcement. Something needs to be done. I do not think we are prepared to wait for the Department for Transport’s strategy on safer cycling or road use, which we may never see. I suspect that, when we do see it, it will be grossly inadequate in tackling the scourge of huge, heavy, illegal e-bikes mowing down pedestrians on the pavement. Since both Ministers have been kind enough to agree to meet us before Report, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.

Amendment 346D withdrawn.

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[Baroness Doocey (LD)]

My Lords, on these Benches we take a very different view and strongly support Clauses 107 and 108, which recognise a simple reality. Emergency workers can face racially or religiously aggravated abuse whenever and wherever they are carrying out their duties, including in private homes. They cannot choose their environment or walk away from hostility. Their professional duty is to step into what are at times chaotic, volatile situations, and to stay there until the job is done. The law should follow them into those settings and make clear that such targeted hostility is no more acceptable in a hallway or a living room than it is on a street corner. This debate has shown that the issue is not about policing opinion or curtailing lawful expression but about drawing a firm line between free speech and deliberate acts of intimidation directed at those who protect the public.

These clauses are drafted to catch only behaviour that crosses that line in aggravated circumstances, and they sit alongside, rather than in place of, the wider framework of public order and hate crime. In our view, striking them out would send the wrong message, undermining our commitment to those who protect us. Looking ahead, it will of course be vital that their use is monitored and that guidance for police and prosecutors is kept under review, so that the balance struck here remains both proportionate and effective in practice.

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

My Lords, before the Minister rises, could I ask a simple question? It would seem to me that, under the definition of emergency workers in Section 3(1)(j) of the Assaults on Emergency Workers (Offences) Act 2018, an emergency worker is

“a person employed for the purposes of providing, or engaged to provide ... NHS health services, or … services in the support of the provision of NHS health services”.

I think we all support the words of the Secretary of State for Health, but is he in danger of falling into the trap of criticising the BMJ for the action it has taken?

[The Minister of State, Home Office (Lord Hanson of Flint) (Lab)]

I will come back to that point in a moment. I think the noble Lord is trying to inject a slight bit of topicality into a different argument, but I respect his opportunities in trying to raise those issues.

I say at the outset that I am with the noble Baroness, Lady Doocey, on this, which is why we brought this forward. I am grateful to her for standing up and supporting the objectives of the Government in her contribution. I have to say to the noble Lords, Lord Davies and Lord Jackson, and the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, that I cannot and will not support their approach to delete these clauses from the Bill.

Emergency workers, as the noble Baroness has said, risk their safety every day to protect the public. They deserve robust protection through legislation, especially against abuse directed towards them because of their protected characteristics, which is not only harmful but erodes the principle of respect and public service, which are core values of this democracy.

As the noble Baroness rightly said, when emergency workers walk through a door of a private dwelling, they are faced with the circumstances in that private dwelling; they cannot walk away. They are there because of an emergency—perhaps medical, police or fire—and, if they face abuse in that private dwelling, then they deserve our support, just as they have our support if they face abuse on the street for a racially aggravated reason. If somebody does something at the end of their path on a street in Acacia Avenue and abuses them, they will find themselves under the course of the law on those matters.

I believe—and this is what these clauses are about—that, if the emergency worker is racially abused in the property, then they deserve that protection. It is critical for sectors such as health, fire and policing to have that legal support. We cannot leave them, as the noble Baroness rightly said, to be abused. The law must recognise this and make sure we have proper protection.

Currently, as has been mentioned, the Public Order Act 1986 and Section 31 of the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 provide important safeguards in public spaces. It is not acceptable to call somebody a racially abusive name in a public space, so why is it to call them that name in a place of a private dwelling? It is not acceptable, so we are going to bring those clauses into play.

The noble Lord asks why we do this. We do this because Sergeant Candice Gill of Surrey Police, supported by the deputy chief constable—and, may I just say, by the Conservative police and crime commissioner for Surrey—has campaigned for this change in the law, having personally experienced racial abuse in a private home. It is not a sort of technical matter that the noble Baroness or the noble Lord, Lord Jackson, have mentioned; it is a real issue of racial abuse in a private dwelling to a police officer—who is doing her job, serving and trying to protect and support the public, and is being racially abused with no consequence whatsoever. Sergeant Candice Gill, after whom I would be proud to call this legislation Candice’s law, is campaigning and has campaigned to make this an amendment to the Bill.

The noble Lord, Lord Jackson, asked why we brought it forward in the House of Commons as an amendment. I will tell him why: it was brought to our attention, it is an action we do not support, and it is an area where we think action needs to be taken. That is why we have brought it. I do not think it is fair that people are racially abused in homes. Sergeant Candice Gill has campaigned on this and has brought it to the attention of the Government; we brought an amendment forward in the House of Commons which is now before this House, and I believe it should have support.

Clauses 107 to 109 will close that legislative loophole. The removal of the dwelling exception will make racially or religiously aggravated abuse of an emergency worker in a private dwelling an offence. The change will ensure that offenders prosecuted under Clause 107 face a maximum sentence of two years’ imprisonment. The offence in Clause 108 will be liable to a fine not exceeding level 4. As I have said, Lisa Townsend, the Conservative police and crime commissioner for Surrey, said:

“This long-overdue change to the law would never have happened without Sgt Gill’s courage and determination”.


I think we owe this to Sergeant Gill and any other officer, health worker, fire service worker or police officer who has been racially abused in a home where they have gone to help support individuals. They deserve our support.

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[Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)]

My Lords, it is always a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Russell of Liverpool, and to support the noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Llanfaes, not least because my noble friend Lord Hendy—who is, sadly, not able to be in the country this evening—co-signed her amendment.

If anyone imagines or suggests that the job of the Health and Safety Executive should be limited to the inspection of heavy machinery or physical infrastructure, as opposed to social infrastructure, then they are not just living in the last century but arguably the one before that. For the Health and Safety Executive to look at its role in such a limited way is also incredibly gendered.

I hope that my noble friend the Minister will look favourably on the intention of these amendments, because they sit so comfortably with other measures that the Government are attempting. The noble Baroness put it very well when she said that this is essential for the credible functioning of the violence against women and girls strategy. Last night, during the course of the Second Reading debate on the Victims and Courts Bill, it was wonderful to hear another Minister, my noble friend Lady Levitt, talk about further work and an expanded regime on allowing whistleblowing and the busting open of non-disclosure agreements that cover up illegal activity—which often means violence against women at work. What the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, is proposing sits so comfortably with that.

I cannot believe that my noble friend the Minister will think anything different not least because, just a few minutes ago, he spoke so passionately about protecting emergency workers when they have to go into difficult and dangerous settings and how they should be protected even from abuse, let alone from violence and more serious criminality. It would be odd if there was no duty on the employers of emergency workers to look at risk, adequate training and culture in the workplace and at what measures might be taken within teams and with training for those same emergency workers. As was suggested by the noble Baroness, this is about joined-up thinking and coming up with a violence against women and girls strategy that the whole Committee and all parties can get behind. I am feeling optimistic about my noble friend the Minister’s reply.

To Committee colleagues on the opposition Front Bench, I would say that there are inevitable concerns about any additional burden on employers. I am seeing nods that suggest that my suspicions are correct. But these duties can be as appropriate. If noble Lords and Committee members have concerns about the precise drafting of the amendments, those can be dealt with before Report. The duties would be to prepare and revise assessments that are appropriate for a particular business—and businesses and workplace settings are so different; they include very vulnerable and secluded settings, with visits and travel, including to people’s homes. This only need be about strategies and training as appropriate; the duties need not be an undue burden on good employers of good faith who have many women workers in particular, although I would like to see all protected.

I hope that the entire Committee can get behind the noble Baroness. I am delighted to see the first ever woman general secretary of the TUC looking as if she might be due to speak after me.

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

My Lords, I first seek clarification from the noble Lord, Lord Russell of Liverpool, on his sums. I do not do sums either but, if I heard him correctly, he said that a worker spends 50% of his life at work. If that is what I heard correctly, that is 84 hours a week.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

What I said was that a person fortunate enough to be employed spends on average 52% of one year in and around the workplace.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

I shall need to go back later and do my own sums, but that still seems to me a little bit excessive.

I am not opposed to the proposed new clauses, and I agree with the thrust of them; this is an important issue. But my concern is with turning a broad legal duty, which these two proposed clauses suggest, into concrete and repeatable workplace practice. There are some practical difficulties. First, you get hidden and underreported incidents. We all know that victims often do not report harassment or stalking—and then there are no incident logs, which may underrate the risk. The risk can come from colleagues, managers, contractors, clients, customers or the public, including online, making responsibility and control much harder to map. That might put a simply impossible obligation on employers and impose a very heavy burden on small employers, which would probably not have an HR or personnel department or the security expertise to assess all the potential risk.

Designing “gender-responsive” measures into practical and proportionate steps seems to me to be a very difficult thing to do; a lot of careful tailoring would be required to deal with different people and roles. That may be beyond the capability of many employers, particularly small ones. I know that the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, has looked at the HSE advice, already published, which I think includes detailed guidance on managing work-related stress and preventing work-related violence. That includes information on creating policies to address unacceptable behaviour. Perhaps the voluntary advice it gives could be expanded to deal with the elements at the core of these new clauses.

I also look to what ACAS does. This is what it says on its website:

“‘Vicarious liability’ is when an employer could be held responsible if one of their workers discriminates against someone … The law (Equality Act 2010) says a worker and an employer could both be held responsible if the discrimination happens ‘in the course of employment’. This means something that’s linked to work … This could be at work or outside the workplace, for example at a work party or through social media that’s linked to work”.


That is what ACAS says about discrimination, but I simply wonder whether the better course of action might be not to pass this proposed new clause into law but to get HSE and ACAS to take the thrust of the suggestions and design new guidance that delivers what the noble Baroness and the noble Lord, Lord Russell, want.

The noble Lord, Lord Stevens of Kirkwhelpington, has just left the Chamber, but when I saw him here, I assumed that he was going to speak on this matter. Had he spoken, he would probably have said, “Please do not give any more powers to the Health and Safety Executive”. He was a victim of one of the excessive criminal trials. When he was commissioner of the Met, one of his officers was pursuing a burglar. The burglar ran on to the roof of a factory, and the police officer chased him, fell through the skylight and was seriously injured. The Health and Safety Executive took the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police to court for failing to provide a safe working environment for the officer. The noble Lord, Lord Stevens, said: “I stood in No. 1 court of the Old Bailey—the court that had the trials of murderers, serious criminals and traitors—accused by the Health and Safety Executive of not taking enough care of my workers. When my lawyer asked the chap from the Health and Safety Executive, ‘What should the officer have done?’, he said, ‘Well, he should have stopped; he should have sent for a cherry-picker and scaffolding to make sure it was safe’”. The noble Lord said, “I looked at the jury, and the jury looked at the face of this idiot, and within minutes I was cleared, because a sensible jury knew that that was a ridiculous thing to say”.

That is the only danger of giving these powers to an organisation like the Health and Safety Executive. It may use the bulk of them safely most of the time, but on occasions you will get silly decisions. I should say in conclusion that that case of the noble Lord, Lord Stevens of Kirkwhelpington, is a very good reason why we should keep juries, rather than having a single judge.

I perceive difficulties in putting this proposal into law, but I hope that a solution can be found whereby the Health and Safety Executive, ACAS or others can pursue the contents of new clauses without recourse to legislation.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I have some serious reservations about Amendment 348 and the related Amendment 349. I spoke at length against them when a similar amendment was tabled to the Employment Rights Bill, and I shall not repeat everything that I said then.

The noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, talked about looking at the drafting. That was interesting, because one of my problems is with the wording of this repeated amendment. It is all over the place, quite dangerous and very broad, and it could get us into all sorts of unintended trouble. Let me illustrate.

The noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Llanfaes, spoke passionately and excellently about some the real live problems of sexual harassment at work, and many of us will recognise that. As I say, I have concerns about the language of this amendment. It refers to having a legal mandate for employers to introduce

“proactive and preventative measures to protect all persons working in their workplace from … psychological and emotional abuse”.

We heard from the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, that “psychological and emotional abuse” is a very broad term. The nature of “proactive and preventative measures” might involve stopping something that is very hard to define and could result in real overreach. It could be quite coercive and manipulative.

However, I am particularly nervous about the use of the “gender-responsive” approach that is advocated, particularly in relation to training. We are told in the amendment that

“a ‘gender-responsive approach’ means taking into account the various needs, interests, and experiences of people of different gender identities, including women and girls”.

Women and girls are not a subset of “gender identities”—whatever they are. That is insulting, and gender identities are at the very least contentious. This language confusion, for me, drags the amendment into a potential political minefield. I am familiar with the way in which gender-responsive approaches are being used in the workplace at the present time to undermine women and girls.

I was fortunate enough today to have a meeting here in Parliament with the Darlington Nurses Union. The Darlington nurses are in dispute with their NHS employer because they felt sexually unsafe in their single-sex nurses’ changing room—which, by the way, was fought for as part of health and safety at work in the past. They had a place where they could get changed and they felt unsafe when a gender-inclusive policy allowed a male who identifies as a woman to use their space. This has led to all sorts of problems in relation to what safety at work is. They felt as though there was a degree of sexual harassment going on, and so forth. I am just pointing out that this is a difficult area, so can we at least acknowledge it?

Crime and Policing Bill

Lord Blencathra Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 15th December 2025 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Blencathra]

345: After Clause 106, insert the following new Clause—
“Police guidance and pilot: enforcement of criminal offences for illegal vehicles on roads(1) Within six months of the passing of this Act, the Secretary of State must issue guidance to the college of policing and the National Police Chief’s Council on enforcement of criminal offences committed by drivers of vehicles illegally being driven on public roads.(2) The guidance under subsection (1) must include guidance on enforcement of criminal offences committed by drivers of vehicles which—(a) do not have a valid MOT;(b) are not registered with the DVLA;(c) are driven without a registration plate or one that is non-complaint or not associated to that vehicle;(d) are driven by drivers without a valid driving license;(e) are not insured;(f) are persistent evaders of toll, congestion or parking offences;(g) are displaying a stolen, ceased or fraudulent Blue Badge;(h) are vehicles registered overseas which have been in the UK for more than six months.(3) In conjunction with the guidance published under subsection (1), the Secretary of State must by Regulations make arrangements for an enforcement pilot, within the area of one or more police forces and for a period of not more than two years working with other public bodies that may lead to improving enforcement of the criminal offences in subsection (2).(4) In the context of the pilot under subsection (3), the Secretary of State may provide by regulations that—(a) outsource the operation (but not the oversight) of the pilot to another public body, or to a firm accredited by the Enforcement Conduct Board; (b) permit information sharing between relevant public bodies who hold information which will assist enforcement of those criminal offences in (2) and the operators of the pilot;(c) provide the operators of the pilot the powers that they need to detain vehicles where the owners have not responded to requests to regularise any of the offences in subsection (2).”

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

Amendments 345 and 398 stand in the name of my noble friend Lord Lucas. As I said earlier, my noble friend is making a good recovery from an operation. Amendment 345 is straightforward. It asks the Secretary of State to give clear national guidance to policing bodies on how to enforce criminal offences committed by drivers of illegally operated vehicles and to run a short, tightly defined pilot to test practical improvements in enforcement. Across the country, too many dangerous and unlawful vehicles remain on our roads. We have vehicles without MOTs and without insurance, driven by drivers who are unlicensed or who are using stolen or fraudulent plates. These are not just paperwork problems; they are real risks to road users and communities. At the same time, persistent evasion of tolls, congestion charges and parking rules blights town centres and funds organised offending. The current responsibilities are fragmented between the DVLA, local authorities and the police, and that fragmentation creates gaps that offenders exploit.

My noble friend’s amendment would do three things. First, it would require the Secretary of State to issue guidance to the College of Policing and the National Police Chiefs’ Council so that enforcement is consistent, proportionate and focused on the highest harms. Secondly, it would mandate a time-limited enforcement period so that we can test new operational models and information-sharing arrangements in a controlled way. Thirdly, it would allow a pilot to be run with accredited partners under strict oversight so that we can learn what works without rushing into permanent untested powers.

Why is a pilot the right approach? A pilot is the responsible way to proceed. It would let us trial better use of data, test targeted interventions against repeat and organised offenders, and measure the impact on road safety and community harm before any national rollout. It would also allow Parliament to see independent evidence about proportionality, costs and safeguards, which is exactly what the public expect. Let me be clear: this amendment is not a blank cheque. Any information-sharing would have to comply with data protection law, any detention powers would be narrowly defined and subject to review, and any outsourced delivery would operate under ministerial oversight and public reporting. The Secretary of State would have to build those safeguards into the regulations and the pilot design so that civil liberties and accountability are front and centre.

This would be a practical, evidence-led new clause. It would build on existing enforcement work and give police the tools to tackle the most dangerous and persistent offenders while protecting the public and taxpayers. I ask noble Lords to support this amendment so that we can make our roads safer, reduce organised and repeat offending and ensure that enforcement is effective and accountable.

I conclude by saying that I like the other amendments in this group, and I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, and other Peers who have signed them. I look forward to hearing what she has to say. However, I am mystified as to why this amendment is in a group of amendments all about drunk-driving. Having said that, I beg to move.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Hampton (CB)]

I shall speak to Amendment 356G in my name and that of the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter of Kentish Town, who has spoken so forcefully on the subject.

Drink-driving remains one of the most preventable causes of death on UK roads. The latest Department for Transport figures show that an estimated 260 people were killed in crashes on Britain’s roads involving at least one driver over the legal alcohol limit in 2023, and approximately 1,600 people were seriously injured.

Alcohol interlock technology, or alcolocks, can reduce reoffending and save lives. Alcolocks prevent a vehicle from starting if alcohol is detected on the driver’s breath. The driver has to breathe into a tube, and the levels of alcohol are instantly detected before the engine is able to be turned on. According to the RAC Report on Motoring 2025, 82% of UK drivers support the introduction of alcolocks, so—stops, looks meaningfully at Ministers—it is very popular with voters. Research for the RAC report also found rates of admitted drink-driving near pre-pandemic levels, with more than one in 10 respondents, 12%, saying they had driven when they thought they were over the limit, either directly after drinking or on the morning after. The figures for younger drivers were even more pronounced, with 14% of those aged 25 to 44 admitting to drink-driving, and as many as 18% of those under 25.

The good news is that alcolocks are already in the Road Safety Act 2006, but the experimental wording in its Section 16 effectively turned the interlock provisions into a contingent pilot that ended in 2010. That pilot was never fully taken forward and the powers never came into effect. As a result, alcohol interlocks are not part of the UK courts’ sentencing toolkit. This has left the interlock scheme in limbo, despite years of persistent drink-driving offending and the accompanying road deaths and injuries. However, removing this experimental wording will mean that the interlock scheme under Section 15 of the Road Safety Act can be brought into force, restoring the original purpose of the Act to give courts a rehabilitative, safety-oriented sentencing tool for drink-drive offenders.

Section 16 meant that courts could impose an alcohol ignition interlock programme order only in designated pilots or trial court areas—that is, only in areas specifically chosen by the Secretary of State. This was a purposefully cautious approach for any scheme to be selective and closely monitored to build an evidence base. However, the evidence base is now robust and expansive, and the UK is behind the curve, with all 50 US states, most EU countries, New Zealand and more all introducing a form of alcohol interlock programme, with substantial research available that supports their effectiveness.

This provision is already there in legislation; it just needs a tweak. These international programmes show that alcolocks can reduce reoffending by up to 70% and are as effective as airbags in reducing road deaths. All the Government have to do is accept this amendment.

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

May I ask for one point of clarification? These alcolocks sound fantastic. Do they have to be fitted by the manufacturers when the car is made, or can they be attached as a gadget afterwards?

[Lord Hampton (CB)]

I hear that they can be fitted in an hour for under £200.

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[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

My Lords, this has been an eye-opener of a debate, not just for me but, I think, for many noble Peers; we have all learned something that we did not know before.

I feel a bit of a fraud doing this little wind up at the end. It really should be the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, after her superb speech and the amendments she spoke to. Let me just rattle through a few comments. I am sorry that my noble friend Lord Attlee did not like my noble friend’s amendment. Mind you, I did not like his amendment on random stops much either.

My noble friend Lady Coffey was right. The police should have good reason for stopping someone. I remember a few years ago that my constituents, way up in the wilds of Cumbria, used to complain that when they left the local pub late at night, they would drive a few yards and a police officer hiding in a car around the corner would stop them and say, “We have reason to think you have been drinking, sir”. Was that a random stop or was it done with good reason? The noble Lord himself said that the police do not need a reason to stop someone, so we do not need random stopping.

The points made by my noble friend Lord Bailey of Paddington were absolutely right. We read those horrible stories about policemen being dragged along, and I hope the gap there can be plugged.

I really liked what the noble Lord, Lord Hampton, said about interlock schemes. I think I first heard of those on “Tomorrow’s World” 20 years ago and they still have not been implemented. I simply do not understand what the problem is with doing a pilot. If the noble Lord brought that back on Report and it was in order, many of us would be tempted to support him.

I come now to the two big crunch amendments, which were the eye-opener for me. The noble Baroness was so right to talk about uninsured vehicles, and so was my noble friend Lord Ashcombe. I had no idea that the fine was less than half the insurance—that just cannot be right. Although we cannot put increased fines in the Bill, I like the idea of confiscation. Everyone says, “The police have the power to confiscate”, but are they actually doing it? I get the impression that very few vehicles are being confiscated.

We have automatic number plate recognition all over the country. If it is working, why are there tens of thousands of uninsured cars on the road? I say to the police, and perhaps to the Home Office to advise them: get out there and start grabbing those vehicles, getting the people and confiscating their cars. When they get them back, it will be not a £50 administrative fine but a £500 admin fine added to the current penalty to get their vehicle back. That might act as a disincentive for them until the government strategy comes along.

I conclude with the amendment from my noble friend Lord Lucas. The Minister seemed to make a very good case as to why his amendment was not necessary, and he did it in a courteous and nice way. I thank him for agreeing that my noble friend may come to the Home Office and meet the officials there and be briefed on it. With those words, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 345 withdrawn.

Crime and Policing Bill

Lord Blencathra Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 15th December 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Brinton (LD)]

My Lords, I want first to pick up on the amendment from the noble Baroness, Lady Maclean, and both her comments and those of the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, and ask the Minister a question. Am I right in thinking that given that the Prison Service—and I think also the Probation Service—must do a full assessment of risk on any transgender prisoner, the protections they seek are already there?

I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Maclean, for raising the case of Karen White. The Scottish Prison Service apologised because it did not do what it should have done: a full risk assessment. Had it done that, she would not have been placed on a women’s wing. I therefore hope the Minister can confirm that the protections for the public, particularly for victims, remain, because now, following the Karen White case in particular, real care is taken to make sure the law is followed. I would find it extraordinary if crimes were just dropped off the list because somebody had a transgender recognition certificate—so could the Minister confirm that this is not the case?

Turning now to my noble friend Lord Clement-Jones’s amendment, we on these Benches also welcome Clause 87, but it needs strengthening. My noble friend’s amendment is very clear: we have to be able to stop offenders changing their names without the knowledge of the police. That also plays into the amendment from the noble Baroness, Lady Maclean. Research from the Safeguarding Alliance has shown that key legislation is being made redundant because of a loophole that people can use to get through the cracks. This is not just about transgender issues; it is about people just changing their name regardless of their gender. Frankly, this makes Sarah’s law and Clare’s law utterly useless. I hope the Minister is prepared to consider this.

The remaining amendments in this group, from the Government, look as though they are sensible adjustments to the arrangements regarding sex offenders obtaining driving licences in Northern Ireland. We look forward to hearing from the Minister in more detail on those.

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

My Lords, I was not going to participate in this debate until I heard about the Scottish case and the Scottish Prison Service admitting that it got it wrong and that it did not carry out what they should have done.

I recall Julia Hartley-Brewer interviewing the SNP Scottish Justice Secretary. The Justice Secretary was saying that it was terribly difficult to reach an assessment, make a judgment and try to get it right. Julia Hartley-Brewer said, I believe, “What is the problem? Just look down his trousers and you will find the answer”. I commend that as the best answer I have ever heard.

[Lord Cameron of Lochiel (Con)]

My Lords, beginning with the amendments that regulate the name changes of sex offenders, I am glad that Members across your Lordships’ House agree on the necessity of regulations. Clause 87 is a sensible measure from the Government, and the amendments that build on its principle are similarly prudent. An individual who commits a crime as intrusive and offensive as a sexual offence demonstrates that they are a threat to public order and safety. After all, that is the reason why we have a sex offender register. Criminals who have proven that they pose a risk should be monitored by the authorities, and the authorities should have the necessary details to monitor and manage them.

Amendment 317 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, would ensure that those who change their name by deed poll are legally required to alert the police of this change. The amendments in the name of the Minister extend the provision restricting the granting of driving licences in a new name to Northern Ireland. All these amendments seek to consolidate the existing legislation to ensure that there are no gaps there or in the Government’s new law, and we support the principle behind them.

The most consequential of the amendments in this group is that tabled by my noble friend Lady Maclean of Redditch. It would serve to bar those who commit sexual offences from obtaining a gender recognition certificate. This is a very necessary measure. I am glad that the Government have not yet granted an exemption for sex-offending transgender criminals, which would allow them to attend a prison different from their biological sex. Hailing from north of the border—where, as others have commented, there have been several incidents of that happening—I believe that it is a very worrying scenario indeed.

The Government have still not implemented the Supreme Court’s judgment in the For Women Scotland case, neither in statute nor in guidance. There is still the chance that those who commit sexual offences can end up in the wrong prison through obtaining a gender recognition certificate. I am not remotely suggesting that the Government would wilfully do this, but I hope that, given their record on prisoner administration, the Minister can understand our concerns.

No safeguards currently exist outside of ministerial discretion. A way to guarantee that this does not happen would be to bar sex offenders from obtaining a certificate in the first place; it is a bare minimum. In sending such people to prison, we are admitting that they are not trustworthy among the public; why, then, should we risk the safety of prisoners of the opposite sex? For those reasons, I support my noble friend’s amendment, and I hope the Minister can too.

--- Later in debate ---

Moved by

[Lord Blencathra]

330: After Schedule 10, insert the following new Schedule—
“ScheduleDisqualification for riding a cycle: minor and consequential amendments1 The Road Traffic Offenders Act 1988 has effect in relation to a person disqualified for riding a cycle as if it was amended as follows.2 In section 26 (interim disqualification)—(a) omit subsection (7) to (11);(b) in subsection (12), for “section 34 or 35” substitute “section 34”.3 Omit sections 34A to 37A (provisions relevant only to a person disqualified for driving a mechanically propelled vehicle).4 In section 38(1) (appeal against disqualification), for “section 34 or 35” substitute “section 34”.5 In section 39 (suspension of disqualification pending appeal) omit subsections (3) and (4).6 In subsection 40 (power of appellate courts in England and Wales to suspend disqualification) omit subsections (7) and (8).7 In section 41 (power of appellate courts in Scotland to suspend disqualification) omit subsections (3) and (4).8 Omit section 41A (suspension of disqualification pending determination of applications under section 34B).9 In section 42 (removal of disqualification)—(a) in subsection (3) omit “(disregarding any extension period)” wherever those words appear, and(b) omit subsection (3A)(b), (3B) and (5)(a).10 Omit sections 44, 44A and 45A (endorsement of licence and driving record).11 In section 46 (combination of disqualification with orders for discharge)—(a) in subsection (1), for “sections 34, 35, 36, 44 or 44A” substitute “section 34”;(b) in subsection (2)—(i) omit “or” at the end of paragraph (a), and(ii) omit paragraph (b);(c) in subsection (3), for “sections 34, 35, 36, 44 and 45A” substitute “section 34”.12 In section 47 (supplementary provisions as to disqualifications and endorsements)—(a) in subsection (1)—(i) for “section 34, 35 or 44” substitute “section 34”, and(ii) omit “or endorsement”;(b) omit subsections (2) to (4).13 Omit sections 48 to 50 (exemption from disqualification and endorsement for offences against construction and use regulations, etc).”Member’s explanatory statement
The purpose of this amendment is to amend the Road Traffic Offenders Act 1988 as it applies to persons disqualified for riding a cycle.

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

My Lords, my noble friend Lord Lucas is making a good recovery from an operation and has asked me to move or speak to his amendments for him. I suspect that he is watching on parliamentlive.tv to see if I get it right, so I hope the Committee will forgive this awful breach of protocol when I say, “Ralph, switch off the TV; just rest up and recover”. I shall move his Amendment 330, speak to his other amendments in the group and speak to my own amendments at the end, if I have time.

The purpose of this amendment is to fine-tune Part II of the Road Traffic Offenders Act 1988 as it applies to persons disqualified from riding a cycle. The proposed new schedule would omit Sections 34A to 37A, 41A and the other odd section on the ground that they are relevant only to disqualified drivers of mechanically propelled vehicles. For example, Sections 34A to 34C cater for reduced disqualification on successful attendance on a course and apply only to persons convicted of a specified motoring offence. Section 35 relates to persons convicted of an offence in which fixed penalty points are to be taken into account, but fixed penalty points do not apply to cyclists. Sections 35A to 35D, which relate to custodial sentences, do not sit well with the proposed new cycling offences. Sections 36 to 37A all relate to motor vehicles, whether it be by disqualification until a driving test is passed, the revocation of a driving licence or the surrender of a revoked driving licence to the Secretary of State. Accordingly, all those sections would be omitted.

Noble Lords may well ask which of the disqualification provisions in Part II would therefore remain, as they apply subject to those minor and consequential amendments set out in the schedule. My noble friend has listed them: Section 26, interim disqualification; Section 38, appeal against disqualification; Section 39, suspension of disqualification pending an appeal; Sections 40 and 41, power of appellate courts to suspend disqualification; Section 42, removal of disqualification; Section 43, the rule for determining the end of a period of disqualification; Section 46, combination of disqualification and orders for discharge; and Section 47, supplementary provisions as to disqualification. That concludes Amendment 330.

On Amendment 338, my noble friend says that new Clause 29A(7) introduces new subsections (8) to (12). This amendment would extend the clause to new subsection (12A), forming part of another amendment that I propose to speak to later.

On Amendment 339, the thrust of Clause 106 is to bring cycling offences pretty much into line with those that apply to motor vehicles. However, at present, provision for obligatory disqualification is omitted for the most serious offences, so it may be said that there will be a lacuna in the law—disqualification, with motor vehicles being, inter alia, an added deterrent to offending. Accordingly, the amendment now before the Committee would amend Section 34 of the Road Traffic Offenders Act 1988 by prescribing that the period of disqualification for the two most serious offences of causing death or serious injury by dangerous cycling will not be less than five years and two years respectively. The other two offences of causing death or serious injury by careless or inconsiderate cycling, where the culpability is less, will be subject to obligatory disqualification for not less than 12 months. No additional amendment of Section 34 would be required.

The only alteration that would be made by Amendment 340, in respect to the penalties for certain serious cycling offences, is the insertion of references to “obligatory” in column 5 of Part I of Schedule 2 to the Road Traffic Offenders Act 1988. The expression relates to disqualification. Without it, certain provision in the amendment of Section 34 would be of no effect.

Amendment 342 is my noble friend’s last amendment in this group. He says that it would insert three subsections. He proposes a substitute for new Section 29A(12) to extend the penalties for certain serious cycling offences set out there. The proposed new subsection (12A) would amplify the definition of “disqualified”, and subsection (12B) would introduce proposed new Schedule 11A.

The only amendment that would be made by proposed new subsection (12) is with respect to the penalties for certain other serious cycling offences not catered for in new subsection (11), again with the insertion of the word “obligatory” in column 5 of Part I of Schedule 2 to the Road Traffic Offenders Act 1988. As before, the expression relates to a disqualification. It too is necessary if Section 34 is to bite.

Proposed new subsection (12A) addresses the fact that “disqualified”, as currently defined, is couched in terms that at present can apply only to disqualified drivers of “mechanically propelled” vehicles. In other words, “disqualified” is for holding or obtaining a driving licence. That formulation is retained in paragraph (a).

As for the riders of cycles, I am sure noble Lords are well aware that a driving licence is not required for them. Therefore paragraph (b), in relation to them, inserts a different formulation. It redefines “disqualified” as disqualified for riding a cycle

“on a road or other public place”,

the latter expression being in conformity with the same wording in the new cycling offences created by this provision.

Finally, proposed new subsection (12B) would introduce a new Clause 106(11)(a), containing as it does

“minor and consequential amendments of the Road Traffic Offenders Act 1988”.

That concludes my noble friend’s amendments. If one thought that the debate on the last amendment was highly technical, this one is even more technical. I shall set a test at the end by asking questions to see whether all noble Lords have got it.

I turn now to my own Amendments 337B to 337F. I am certain that the Minister will see that in the Marshalled List there are four groups of amendments tabled by many more Peers than just me who are deeply concerned at the scourge of dangerous cycling inflicting serious damage on pedestrians and aiding criminality. I am sure the Minister saw the news item last week on the Met finally cracking down on the big, heavy, illegal bikes capable of 70 mph that are used for snatching phones. Many of them are driven by food delivery couriers—mainly Deliveroo. I encounter them every night on my way home on the pavements outside Millbank.

We also have the problem of thousands of e-bikes—mainly Lime—lying scattered over our pavements; of companies deliberately selling massive off-road bikes, which people then use on our streets; of some e-bikes being so heavy that they are breaking the legs of users; and of thousands of people riding on our pavements, with grossly inadequate enforcement to stop it.

The penalties under Clause 106 are inadequate and I have suggested increased penalties for anyone convicted, as has my noble friend Lord Lucas. However, I submit that no one will ever be convicted under its subsections, because a conviction depends on someone, presumably a police officer, concluding that the cycling

“falls far below what would be expected of a competent and careful cyclist”,

and that a competent cyclist would conclude that it was dangerous. Will the Minister tell me how many times the Home Office expects to find a police officer present to witness this behaviour and come to the subjective conclusions in subsections (4) and (6)? We need a simple objective test, as is in my Amendment 337E, which would mean that anyone

“who rides a cycle on any pavement … is to be regarded as cycling without due care and attention”.

I challenge any noble Lord to dispute that. It seems to me pretty obvious that that has to be the case.

My Amendment 337C introduces

“a presumption that it is automatically dangerous cycling if the person is riding a bicycle capable of exceeding the legal 15.5 mph speed limit and weighs more than 30 kilograms”.

Thirty kilograms is a new concept, but it is now essential. A non-electric bike weighs between 8 kilograms and 15 kilograms, and most electric bikes now weigh about 25 kilograms. However, the company Lime has increased the weight of its bikes to 35 kilograms, leading to a phenomenon known as “Lime bike leg”. In August, the Telegraph reported the following, which the BBC also covered:

“I’m a trauma surgeon and treat patients with ‘Lime bike leg’ weekly … It’s a really common cause of leg injuries today”.


Lime bikes are 25kg heavier than normal pedestrian bikes. The report continued:

“Doctors have observed an increase in lower leg injuries caused by heavy e-bike frames falling on their riders”


and breaking their legs.

I fed into a road safety algorithm, “What would be the effect of a 35-kilogram bike with a 70-kilogram man sitting on it hitting a pedestrian at 25 mph?” and the answer was, “Almost certainly in every case: fatal with pretty horrific, catastrophic injuries”. Even at 15.5 mph, the injuries would be life-threatening, and totally fatal in the case of a child. Therefore, we must introduce a weight restriction, as well as strictly enforcing the 15.5 mph speed limit.

Would a “competent and careful cyclist” ever ride a bike on a pavement, or ride a 35-kilogram bike faster than 15.5 mph? Of course not. If someone is riding one of these massive, heavy, fast bikes, we do not need a subjective judgment on the quality of the riding; the criterion for dangerous cycling has been met per se.

My Amendment 337D would add an aggravating factor. It simply makes the point that if an innocent pedestrian is killed by a person using an illegal e-bike capable of going faster than 15.5 miles per hour and weighing more than 30 kilograms, an additional penalty should be applied. I apologise for my typo in the amendment; it says 25 kilograms, but it should be 30 kilograms. I suggest an additional five years, and a minimum of 15 years where a life sentence has been given. This is not for the ordinary cyclist who is reckless but for someone deliberately using a big, heavy, fast, killer bike.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

My Lords, it seems an awful long time since my cycling proficiency test. We can debate whether standards have slipped in the 50-plus years since I took my test, but I think it is a common experience of all noble Lords who have spoken that a small minority of cyclists’ reckless actions potentially put people at risk. As a temporary resident of London during the week, I regularly see cyclists on pavements and going through red lights. I can report that, on crossing a zebra crossing one evening, I myself was almost hit by a cyclist, who was then pulled over by a police car not 100 metres later, much to my satisfaction. So it is possible for enforcement to happen.

I want to start with enforcement, because it is a thread that has run through a number of noble Lords’ contributions. It is right that strict legislation is already in place for cyclists, and the police do have the power to prosecute if these laws are broken. Cyclists have a duty to behave in a safe and responsible way that is reflected in the highway code. The Road Traffic Act, as the noble Lord, Lord Cameron, mentioned, imposes a fine of £2,500 for dangerous cycling and of £1,000 for careless cycling. The Road Traffic Act 1988 also makes it an offence to ride a bike if a person is unfit to do so due to drink or drugs. A considerable amount of activity is undertaken by the police to enforce these potential breaches of legislation. In fact, the Government themselves have pledged £2.7 million for each of the next three years to support police enforcement action on road traffic offences in the form of Operation Topaz, which is a strategic partnership between the Department for Transport, the Home Office and the National Police Chiefs’ Council.

I was pleased also to hear from the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, about the City of London Police, who I know have taken this matter extremely seriously. They have cycling police officers who can catch offenders who have gone off-road into areas where vehicles or police officers on foot could not catch them, so it is important we recognise that. We have had contributions today from the noble Lords, Lord Russell of Liverpool, Lord Shinkwin, Lord Hogan-Howe, and Lord Blencathra, who introduced amendments on behalf of the noble Lord, Lord Lucas. We have also heard from the noble Viscount, Lord Goschen, and the noble Baronesses, Lady Stowell of Beeston, Lady Neville-Rolfe, Lady Pidgeon and Lady McIntosh of Pickering. All have touched on the issues of enforcement and whether the legislation is significant enough.

I want to draw the Committee’s attention to Clause 106, which is where these amendments are coming from. Clause 106 underlines the Government’s determination that cyclists who cause death or serious injury should face the full force of the law, as if that were done by a motor vehicle. The criminal justice system should not fail fully to hold to account the small minority of cyclists whose reckless actions lead to tragic consequences. A number of contributors to the debate have mentioned their personal experiences and have also witnessed incidents. There is a whole cohort of cyclists who obey the law and who perform well, and as the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, would anticipate me saying, there is a health benefit to cycling that should be recognised and encouraged. However, there is certainly a holding to account of death and serious injury, and that is where the Government are coming from as a starting point to the debate today.

A wide group of amendments has been put forward, and I will try to touch on each amendment in turn. The noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, spoke on behalf of the noble Lord, Lord Lucas. I spoke to him before he went on his short, I hope, leave of absence from the House and discussed these amendments with him briefly. I wish him well for his speedy recovery and thank the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, for introducing the amendments on his behalf.

Amendments 330, 338, 339, 340 and 342 would allow persons to be disqualified from cycling upon conviction of any of the offences in Clause 106. Again, let us not forget that Clause 106 contains the penalty of significant jail time, and potentially a life sentence with significant jail time added to it. I agree that dangerous or careless cyclists are a serious risk to others, but disqualification would pose significant challenges. This may touch on other, later amendments, but self-evidently, cyclists are not currently required to have licences, and the only obvious way to address this would be to introduce a licensing system. However, such a system would be complicated, costly and, I would argue, potentially disproportionate, in that it would be created solely to enforce offences perpetrated by a small minority of people. Again, I do not think the noble Lord intended his amendment to serve as a barrier to cycling, but my concern is that it would risk implementation of this and would not really be workable.

In his own right, the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, introduced Amendments 337B and 337F. Again, these would introduce greater criminal penalties for cyclists riding heavier, faster e-bikes. I do understand that, as has been mentioned by a number of noble Lords, it is e-bikes that have been illegally modified for greater speed that represent an inherently greater risk to other road users. There is no longer any weight limit, following enactment of the Electrically Assisted Pedal Cycle Regulations 1983, but they do specify that the electrically assisted speed for e-bikes is limited to 15.5 miles per hour. E-bikes that can achieve greater speeds would not be compliant with these regulations and therefore would be classed as motor vehicles. Because they are motor vehicles, a person using such could already be prosecuted under the existing offences in the Road Traffic Act 1988 of causing death or serious injury, which carry the same penalties as proposed in the new cycling offences: a life sentence with a 14-year potential sentence.

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

Just for clarification, the Minister said that they will be classed as motor vehicles. Does that mean they are still motor vehicles, even though they might not be registered or insured?

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

They are classed as motor vehicles for the purposes of the legislation if they can travel above 15.5 miles per hour; but they are not, self-evidently, for the reasons I have already outlined, subject to the licensing arrangements that we have to date.

Mandatory uplifts based on specific vehicle type would be a novel but also an inconsistent approach to sentencing. Sentencing should always reflect the facts of the case and the level of culpability. Introducing rigid statutory additions could undermine the principle of proportionality, create inconsistency and risk setting an undesirable precedent. On the noble Lord’s amendments on changing the “careless and inconsiderate” cycling definition, I understand his desire to put beyond doubt that cycling on a pavement or in an area intended only for pedestrians should be considered as cycling without due care and attention. However, cycling on pavements is already an offence in its own right, as set out in Section 72 of the Highways Act 1835, which is an awfully long time ago and has stood the test of time. It is also an offence under Section 129 of the Roads (Scotland) Act 1984. Given that these offences are still in place, I would suggest that, along with those in the Bill for serious offences, that provides a sufficient deterrent.

Amendment 337F would insert the definition of a cycle. Again, I come back to Section 192 of the Road Traffic Act 1988, which already defines cycles, and this definition includes compliant electrically assisted pedal cycles. As I said earlier, an e-bike that does not comply with the relevant legislation is a motor vehicle for the purposes of the legislation, not a cycle.

I turn to a series of amendments—341A to 341D, 342A to 342F, 346A, 346B and 498A—in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, which propose that a person could receive up to 12 points on their driving licence upon conviction of any of the offences in Clause 106. Reaching 12 points on their driving licence would, of course, disqualify them from driving a motor vehicle.

As I have mentioned already, cyclists do not require any form of licence to cycle, therefore the noble Lord proposes points on a driving licence as an alternative penalty. In the Sentencing Bill, which is currently before your Lordships’ House, there is already a new driving prohibition requirement that the court can impose when giving a community or suspended sentence order. This prohibition will allow a court to take a more flexible and tailored approach to punishment than a driving disqualification, and it will be available irrespective of the offence that has been committed. I hope that the noble Lord agrees that the provision in the Sentencing Bill goes some way towards meeting his objective.

The noble Lord’s Amendments 346A and 498A seek to create a registration scheme for the purposes of enforcing the new offences in Clause 106—

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

I am grateful. This Minister would not have gone over time had he not given way, but he now has gone over time and so will sit down. I commend the course of action that I suggested to the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra.

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

I am grateful to the Minister for his decency in replying as fully as he possibly could. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, that there are many more groups to go on cycling, and I think he will have a chance of input there.

The general thrust that the Minister detected is one thing, but, if I may say so, my forecast was right. I said at the beginning that the general thrust I would detect was that Peers from all sides would be highly critical that not enough is being done. Clause 106 is okay as far as it goes, but there is a much wider problem out there, as articulated by nine other Peers from all sides, in addition to me. My noble friends LadyMcIntosh of Pickering and Lady Stowell asked why this never-ending consultation is taking place. Someone said that, as this is a Home Office Bill, why does it not just get on with it? It may be a Home Office Bill, but it is the Department for Transport’s policy, and that is where the rot lies.

Those who criticised the last Government were absolutely right to do so. I condemn in no uncertain terms the Department for Transport under the leadership from 2019 to 2022 of Mr Grant Shapps, who was obsessed with getting more and more e-bikes and e-scooters on the road. The reason the consultations were extended was, in my view, and in what was tipped off to me, that he wanted to get so many more e-bikes out there that it would be impossible to pull back on them. It is like the police saying that everybody is shoplifting and so there is nothing they can do about it. Mr Shapps wanted to say, “Everyone has got e-bikes now, so we cannot put in a registration system and we cannot control them”.

If noble Lords want further evidence of the Department for Transport’s attitude, in February 2024 it went out to consultation again. The consultation was to double the size of the electric motor from 250 watts to 500 watts and to introduce an additional speeding system. There were 2,100 responses; the vast majority of professionals—police forces and others—totally condemned it, and the Department for Transport had to pull that back, and rightly so. But mark my words, it will try it on again and again.

The noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, made a very good point: why should cyclists have a right to a healthy life but not the pedestrians who are getting mowed down? He tabled some good amendments that would be excellent. He made the point that although everyone has called for more enforcement, you cannot have more enforcement if you do not know the bike and the identity of the person riding it.

My noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe made the point that the amendments just do not go far enough. She used the term Wild West. I assume she was quoting the press release—I have it here—from the Mayor of London, Mr Sadiq Khan, who said that very thing last month: London is now a Wild West for e-bikes.

The noble Lord, Lord Russell of Liverpool, made an absolutely excellent speech, and I commend him for it. He is right to say that we have boosted cycling, which is a good thing, but have not boosted the safety protocols. He is right about cyclists jumping red lights. You do not have to go far to see that; go to our prison gates at the Peers’ entrance and stand there and look at the pedestrian crossing and the lights. Last week, when the lights changed to red for the cars, I was halfway across when a cyclist tried to come through. I stopped and said: “Get back! Get back!” He did actually stop and move back a bit. That happens all the time. They use the red lights as an excuse; when cars stop, the cyclists belt through.

My noble friend Lord Goschen made the point that there is no enforcement at all. He wondered why anyone would bother to buy a moped or a small motorbike, when you have to have an MOT and insurance and pass a test, when they can buy an e-bike which goes 70 miles an hour and does everything you want, and you do not have to do anything to register or insure it, and no one will stop you when you break the law.

My noble friend Lord Shinkwin made the comment, rightly so, that there is a threat to disabled people. I am glad the noble Baroness, Lady Pidgeon, welcomed my definition of cycles. It is possible that that was the only thing she agreed with me on, but I will take any little crumbs of comfort. I am glad that my noble friend Lord Cameron of Lochiel supported most of my amendments, as I fully support his. I did ask for tougher penalties, but I am now content that the penalties are okay.

The Minister, in his speech, which was as courteous as usual, said that only a small minority break the law. He is right, I think, when that applies to the conventional cyclists and not e-bikes. In the past, it was my experience that it was a tiny minority of Lycra louts—the ones with their heads down between the handlebars and their backsides up in the air, belting through lights. I submit that I am certain that the majority of e-bike riders are breaking the law one way or another, either by excessive speed or by riding through lights or on the pavement. I can say with absolute certainty that 100% of the food delivery drivers are breaking the law, but more of that in another group. I disagree with the Minister that we cannot have a simple presumption that if people are riding a bike on the pavement then it is automatically, per se, and without any other judgment needed, seen as driving without due care and attention.

I simply say this again. I always come in with slightly more trenchant views than many other colleagues in the House, but we have had support today from colleagues with much more moderate amendments than mine. I am fairly certain we will see that when we come to the other groups. The Minister has to go back to the Department for Transport and tell it to get off its high horse and on to its bike. We must have proper amendments to toughen up the law and deal with all the other abuses of e-bikes, particularly in London. In those circumstances, on the assumption that we will be doing more work on this, I beg leave to withdraw my noble friend Lord Lucas’s Amendment 330.

Amendment 330 withdrawn.

Crime and Policing Bill

Lord Blencathra Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 9th December 2025 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Blencathra]

316ZA: In subsection (2), in the heading of the inserted section, leave out “sexual abuse” and insert “bestiality”
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment seeks to alter the wording of Amendment 316 to refer to “animal bestiality” rather than “animal sexual abuse”.

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lord Black of Brentwood on introducing his proposed new clause and on running through the sordid details, which we did not want to hear and do not want to think about, but had to hear if we are to have better legislation, which I believe his proposed new clause will introduce. His proposed new clause is far superior to Section 69 of the Sexual Offences Act 2003, since it describes the abuse of the animal and not just the perversion of the offender. It links to all the other online offences we have in the Bill—where people are publishing dangerous and pornographic pictures of abuse, strangulation, et cetera—and animal sexual abuse needs to be included there too. Therefore, I strongly support his amendment, which has also been signed by other noble Lords and my noble friend Lady Coffey.

When I first saw his amendment, I was motivated to use the term “bestiality”, since I was brought up in Scots law, which had very robust words to describe illegal sexual activity—at least illegal a few years ago. Bestiality is still the term used in Scotland. I initially thought that the term “abuse” was milder than bestiality and that bestiality conveyed a more condemnatory stance of the filthy perverts who were doing this. However, after a discussion with my noble friend Lord Black of Brentwood, I now agree that bestiality is a more restrictive legal term focusing on the perverted behaviour of the man rather than the abuse of the animal. Abuse is the key word here. I accept that the terminology “animal sexual abuse” is a more contemporary term emphasising the act as cruel and exploitative rather than just a taboo behaviour.