Lord Jackson of Peterborough
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Crime and Policing Bill
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Lord Davies of Gower (Con)
My Lords, Amendment 411 is in my name and that of my noble friend Lord Cameron of Lochiel and my noble and learned friend Lord Keen of Elie. The amendment was championed by my honourable friend Matt Vickers in Committee in the other place.
The amendment alters the statutory threshold for the exercise of the powers under Section 60 of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994. That section permits a police officer of at least the rank of inspector to authorise stop and search powers within a defined locality for a period of 24 hours. Where such an authorisation has been given, a police officer may stop any member of the public to search them for offensive weapons or dangerous instruments without suspicion of the commission of an offence—so, essentially, it allows for a temporary adjustment to standard stop and search powers.
The current test that must be met is for the officer of sufficient rank to reasonably believe that incidents involving serious violence may take place in any locality in his police area. Our amendment would lower the threshold so that the police would be able to use Section 60 powers where there is a reasonable likelihood of violence, not serious violence. The fundamental principle behind this amendment is that the police should be able to act where there is a threat of violence—any form of violence—without being required to weigh the seriousness of that violence. This would remove the more subjective element of the test.
We know that stop and search powers are highly effective in combating crime and preventing violent offences. In the year ending March 2025, there were a total of 528,582 stops and searches conducted by officers in England and Wales. This represented a slight decrease of 1.4% from the previous year. Of those, 5,572 were conducted under Section 60 powers, which actually represented an increase of 5.4%. This is welcome; I am pleased to see the police making good use of their powers. But, given that there were 1.1 million incidents of violence with or without injury recorded by the police in the year ending June 2025, that the figure that the ONS has given shows no statistically significant change compared with the previous year, and that there were still 51,527 knife offences, there is more work that needs to be done. Lowering the threshold for the use of Section 60 is another tool that the Government could utilise in their efforts to crack down on the use of offensive weapons and the incidence of violence. I beg to move.
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 Jackson of Peterborough (Con)
As usual, the noble Baroness is making a cogent and persuasive case, but I do not think she concedes that we are not talking about suspicionless searches; we are talking about an expectation that violence will happen—there will be a violent incident rather than a seriously violent incident.
I just leave her with the figures: in London, from 2021, there were 311,352 stop and searches, and they had fallen to 135,739 in 2024. At the same time, there was an 86% rise in knife crime. The argument that those of us on this side are making is that there has to be a balance. None of us wants racially profiled overpolicing, but at the same time, we have to find a reason why when we reduce stop and searches, there is an inevitable increase in knife crime.
Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)
I hear the noble Lord, but with respect, this provision relates to suspicionless stop and search. That is a term we use to describe a stop and search power that does not require reasonable suspicion that the person who is about to be stopped and searched is a criminal, is equipped or whatever it is.
The power in Section 60, therefore, is a suspicionless stop and search power, which is why it needs to be circumscribed and why there have to be certain conditions met before an area can be designated, because the normal law of the land, as noble Lords will recognise, is that anywhere in the land a constable can stop and search an individual whom they reasonably suspect of carrying a knife or being otherwise involved in criminality.
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
Section 60 powers are in operation and have been there for some significant time. As I shared with the Committee a moment ago, the use of those powers by police officers was significantly higher in the mid to late 2000s than it is now. That is because we are trying to ensure that there is operational guidance—not ministerial guidance—on the use of stop and search powers. Stop and search is seen by the police as a tool of last resort in an area where there is serious violence. I am not going to speculate for the noble Viscount on what that serious violence barrier is; that is an operational decision for the police at a local level in a particular circumstance.
The legislation is clear. The level of use has dropped because the police recognise that this is a tool of last resort which has to have the confidence of the community. I cannot differentiate between levels of violence in a way that may help the noble Viscount today, but the level of violence must be deemed at the time by a local senior police officer on the ground to be sufficiently worrying that he or she determines an area in which stop and search powers will operate. That may not answer the point, but I hope it is of some help to the noble Viscount.
Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)
On that issue, notwithstanding the fact that these powers have to be sanctioned by a police inspector, they are often accompanied by a public information initiative from the police force concerned, and their time limit is 24 hours. If this amendment were accepted, would it not give the police the opportunity to use these powers at football matches, at which there is a chance not of serious violence but of public disorder leading to lower-level violence? In the last year or so, they have used them 357 times. Therefore, they would not necessarily use the more draconian dispersal orders which are sometimes used at football matches. What this side is asking for is more flexibility not just in respect of knife crime but of public order-related events such as football matches.
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
I say this as best I can to the Committee: to my knowledge, there has been no request from the police for that reduction in threshold to allow them to exercise further stop and search powers. Indeed, as has been shown over the last 15 or 16 years, the use of stop and search has significantly decreased to around the 5,000 figure, as I mentioned earlier. I hear what the noble Lord says, but I am not sure that the police themselves want to exercise that power to control crowds at football matches. I will leave it at that, if I may.
Lord Hogan-Howe (CB)
My Lords, I am generally with the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, and we have done an awful lot together to look at cyclists being held more accountable. On this, however, I am probably going to suggest an amendment to her amendment. As it stands, the problem with her amendment is that the police currently have the power to stop any vehicle on the road without reason. They can stop somebody with or without a mask, or for no reason at all. This power would therefore not add anything, given that the police already have the power to stop any vehicle.
As the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, acknowledged, whether it be in the cool of the winter, or even sometimes on a cool summer’s day, there is a reason to wear a mask or a face covering if you are cycling, because it gets cold. We have probably all been there. However, something to look at in the future—perhaps on Report—is whether someone, having been stopped, can be ordered to remove their face mask. There is not an awful lot of point in stopping them and they can keep their face mask on if their identity is in question. That is also true for motorcyclists, who wear helmets. Their faces are obviously encased in a helmet and there is no power to ask them to remove the helmet. Most of them do, because it gets pretty uncomfortable after a few minutes—in fact, if you prolong the conversation long enough, they always take it off—but there is no power to compel them to do it. That may be something that could be considered in the future.
On the police needing powers to stop cyclists, there is no power to stop an e-scooter, but any vehicle on the road can be stopped by an officer for any reason—not the least of which is that the police are expected to direct traffic. That is one of the reasons that they are given the power to either redirect or stop vehicles. So, as it stands, I am not sure about this amendment.
Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)
My Lords, I support the excellent and tightly drafted amendment from my noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe. I say that it is tightly drawn because proposed new subsection (2) is about concealing one’s identity, not about wearing the clothes themselves: the scarf or the hat. I speak as a cyclist who frequently cycles in the winter, when of course you need to wear protective clothing to keep you warm. However, this is about allowing a police officer, or another person who is entitled to know your identity, to know your identity, and it is about failing to stop when required to do so by a constable.
I am glad that my noble friend mentioned the issue of live facial recognition. I am just about to finish my four-year term on the British Transport Police Authority. In terms of clear-up rates, one of the issues we have in unfortunately failing to tackle violence against women and girls—which, of course, is a government priority and a priority of the Department for Transport—is that we have way too many persistent, repeat offenders on bail who are travelling on the rail network and who are able to enter stations and get on trains. Live facial recognition, were it to be rolled out for a good reason, with proper checks and balances, would significantly reduce the incidence of those people being able to get on trains and Tubes and assault women and girls, and others. Live facial recognition is important because, if people are going to be wearing face coverings, that will naturally circumscribe the powers used in live facial recognition.
Rates of crime on bikes and scooters have gone up. Many people who are committing those crimes are hiding their identity and I believe that, in most cases, there is a legitimate reason for the police to stop them. In 2024, Sky News received figures from FoI requests that showed that crimes involving e-bikes and e-scooters had risen by more than 730% in the preceding five years. These crimes included theft, robbery, burglary, drug trafficking, stalking, rape, violent crimes and weapons offences. In 2023-24, 11,266 crimes were recorded that mentioned an e-bike or e-scooter—up from just 1,354 in 2019-20. These figures do not include data from the Metropolitan Police and the West Midlands Police—I know that West Midlands Police have been busy doing other things, not always to their great credit —so the actual numbers were likely higher.
On 30 December 2025, the Metropolitan Police reported that it had seized 37 e-bikes and scooters in an attempt to tackle crime and anti-social behaviour. That resulted in 52 arrests and weapons being seized. Between January and December 2025, Merseyside Police seized 1,000 unregistered vehicles, e-bikes, e-scooters and scramblers. It launched Operation Gears in July 2024 to deal with crime and anti-social behaviour linked specifically to bikes and scooters. In its words, two-wheeled vehicles
“are increasingly linked to serious criminal activity, including violence, robberies, and serious organised crime (SOC) offences”.
The Metropolitan Police has also produced reasonably new data—up to the end of 2023. They show that there were 4,985 cases of robbery and theft of a mobile phone in London using a motorcycle or an e-bike in 2023, and a face covering was worn in over 1,000 of those. These statistics demonstrate that it is legitimate to link bikes and scooters to crimes. Therefore, if someone is covering their face specifically to avoid identity while using these vehicles, it does raise suspicion, and it most emphatically gives police a legitimate reason to exercise their due and proper powers. On that basis, I support my noble friend’s amendment.
Baroness Butler-Sloss (CB)
My Lords, as someone who regularly jumps out of the way on a pavement from e-bikes, electric scooters and so on, I think this amendment is probably very sensible, but we should listen to the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, because, as far as I can see, it does not go sufficiently far. We need to add to it, perhaps on Report, a provision that the police can require someone to take their face covering off, because without that, I do not think it goes very far.
Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)
My Lords, I strongly support the excellent amendment of my noble friend Lord Young of Acton. I declare an interest as a paid-up member of the Free Speech Union.
I was brought up in Plumstead in south-east London, as was Stephen Lawrence. I can absolutely understand the horror and the imperative for action that arose from the disgraceful racist murder of that young man in 1993: there was a clamour to tackle the culture that gave rise to five racist thugs taking that young man’s life. That is a very important context, but I am afraid that things have developed in a way that we did not foresee way back in 1993.
In preparing for this debate, I was reminded of the remarks of the Director of Public Prosecutions, Stephen Parkinson, in 2024:
“I had to look up what on earth the term”—
non-crime hate incidents—
“meant—I was puzzled by it”.
Coming from the DPP, that reveals a lot about what a strange anomaly NCHIs have been.
The idea that there is a kind of police record that can result in ordinary people who have committed no crime being visited by police at their home or workplace because an investigation has been launched into whether their views or attitudes may one day lead to criminal activity should be seen as entirely incongruent with British justice and freedom of expression. It brings to mind the film “Minority Report” and the fictional idea of pre-crime. But this is not fiction: it is the real world. The idea that, in the real world, a person could lose their job because an NCHI shows up on an enhanced DBS check ought to be anathema to us.
Mention was made earlier of Allison Pearson. My noble friend Lord Herbert of South Downs is absolutely right: it was the Communications Act or another piece of legislation that was involved when Essex Police visited her on Remembrance Sunday 2024. She has nevertheless raised the public profile of the impact of NCHIs on people and, for that, we should thank her, as we should Harry Miller and others.
The Times reported that year that 13,200 NCHIs were recorded by 45 police forces in the 12 months to June 2024. That includes allegations against doctors, vicars, social workers and even primary school children. As we have heard, Policy Exchange calculated that this had amounted to at least 60,000 hours of officer time. It surely was never a defensible use of police time, especially while so many serious crimes such as burglaries and sexual offences remain unsolved and uninvestigated. There are too many stories to tell, but one elderly woman was shocked to find herself the subject of an NCHI after taking a photograph of a sticker which read: “Keep males out of women-only spaces”. She did not even put the sticker up; she just took a photo of it. The 73 year-old received a visit from police officers after she was caught on CCTV taking the photo of the sticker, which someone had put up on an LGBT Pride poster. She said she agreed with its sentiments and wanted to show it to her partner. Apparently, the police thought this made her a likely future criminal.
My noble friend Lord Herbert said that these cases have been bad for public confidence in the service, and he is right. It is therefore welcome that over the last year or so there has been a growing realisation and consensus in the Government that there is a need to address the problem. In particular, I welcome the recent press reports that the college and the NPCC are set to recommend scrapping non-crime hate incidents as a result of the review.
My noble friend Lord Herbert has promised that there will be a sea change. We must wait and see the final detail on how the changes are delivered in practice. I say this partly because what we are attempting to do in turning policing away from an excessive focus on what we might call DEI issues towards the criminal matters that the public care about goes against the grain of the last two decades of police culture. We have seen before how difficult this is to uproot. The previous Government published new statutory guidance on NCHIs in 2023. Training should have been given to call handlers on the raised thresholds and common-sense tests, and we should have seen a reduction in the number of non-crime hate incidents recorded, but, sadly, the report published the following year by His Majesty’s inspectorate, An Inspection into Activism and Impartiality in Policing, concluded that there was
“inconsistency in the way forces have responded to the new guidance”
and that
“We often found that call takers hadn’t received training about NCHIs, and had limited, if any, knowledge”
of the statutory guidance.
First, can the Minister say how we will ensure that police training on the new regime is not undercut by an obsession with DEI issues and the politicisation of policing which has clouded police judgments too often in recent years? Secondly, we need to see a clearer commitment from the Government on how they plan to respond to the NPCC report and what the timelines will be. I know there are ongoing reviews into police discretion and hate crime, and I particularly welcome the review by the noble Lord, Lord Macdonald of River Glaven, of hate crime legislation. I hope that he will feel emboldened to address one of the more fundamental issues; namely, the injustice resulting from the creation of a hierarchy of victims by legislating for certain protected characteristics rather than treating all victims equally.
However, these ongoing reviews should not be an excuse for inaction. Will the Minister make the commitment that, should the NCHI review require primary legislation to implement its recommendations, this will be done via amendments on Report—a point made by my noble friend Lord Blencathra—preferably adopting my noble friend’s carefully crafted amendment?
While I understand the previous Government’s decision to introduce statutory guidance via the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 as a first step towards introducing some common sense in this area, it had the unfortunate consequence of providing a statutory basis for recording NCHIs. If this is to be corrected, the law will need to change.
Again, the devil will be in the detail. The NPCC’s final report has not yet been published, but it did publish a progress report last October. There were a number of points where I would want to see improvements in the final report before I could feel confident that the new system will avoid the pitfalls of the current regime. One of those relates to the NPCC’s recommendation that the Home Office introduce a new national standard of incident recording. As I alluded to earlier, the current threshold, which dates back to 2011, is too low and does not adequately cater for contemporary policing demands.
We ought to think carefully, too, about any new definition. The current draft proposition put forward by the NPCC defines an incident as
“a single distinct event or occurrence which may be relevant to policing for preventing or solving crime, safeguarding individuals or communities or fulfilling other statutory policing purposes”.
This helpfully makes it clear that there needs to be a clear policing purpose for this data to be recorded. I am concerned about the words “may be relevant”. At the very least, would it not be better for it to say, “likely to be relevant”? My concern is that an activist police officer would record practically anything on the basis of “may”. We all know hoarders—the kind of people who keep everything because they tell themselves it may be useful in the future.
Finally, we need greater clarity on enhanced DBS checks. The progress report recommends that the Home Office consider whether there needs to be further guidance, but key questions are ignored. Will the police delete NCHIs that they have already recorded, and will the new anti-social behaviour incidents be disclosable in enhanced DBS checks? I am pleased to support this very good and sensible amendment.
Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)
My Lords, I want to say a heartfelt thank you to the noble Lords, Lord Young of Acton and Lord Hogan-Howe, for leading on this. It is telling that there is cross-party support for this amendment. The Government should take note of such rich and excellent speeches from across the House. There is widespread concern for all sorts of reasons, and action should be taken.
I feel a bit cynical because I have celebrated the demise of non-crime hate incidents on a number of occasions in the past. When the Fair Cop founder Harry Miller won his High Court challenge in 2020, the judge declared that non-crime hate incidents had a chilling effect and unlawfully infringed on Harry’s freedom of speech. I remember that a lot of us thought that would be the end of that. I then listened to a number of Home Secretaries declaring that there was a problem with non-crime hate incidents, and I thought, “Oh, good, something will be done”, because politicians like to do something. But I am most reassured, genuinely, by the present Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, who seems to be determined to get to the bottom of this and to sort it out. Her emphasis that the police should focus on streets and not tweets is quite a good summation of where we are. However, despite that universal acknowledgement that non-crime hate incidents are not fit for purpose in many ways, I worry that, as with the Greek mythological Hydra, all the various attempts at cutting off the monstrous NCHI serpent’s head will result in another couple of heads growing instead. It is important that we do not just console ourselves with getting rid of the name while allowing the sentiment and the politics of it to remain.
As somebody who has spoken many times on this issue in this House, often greeted by some eye-rolling but also offered endless assurances that it was all being sorted—not by this Government but by a previous Government—I now believe that assurances are not enough, and we need to make this issue watertight. We need primary legislation as a guarantee that there will be no more non-crime hate incidents and a full deletion of the historic records held by the police. The noble Lord, Lord Herbert, made the point that when there have been changes in the criminal law, records have not been deleted, but these are not crimes, so they should be deleted. Even if they are not used, the idea that the state has a file on hundreds of thousands of people with the words “bigot” or “hate criminals” across them, even if they are hate non-criminal, is not right and they should be deleted.
Baroness Brinton (LD)
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Herbert, for his contribution because he set out the balance between non-crime hate incidents and non-crime incidents and the difference between the two. One of our concerns on these Benches is that—I am going to use the phrase he used, for which I apologise, but I had already written it down—in looking at this amendment, we must not throw the baby out with the bathwater. That is really important, and I will explain why in some detail later.
I remind the Committee that, in considering our two amendments about hate crime last week, I referred to the recommendation Combating Hate Crime by the Council of Europe, which says that
“hate can be manifested with different degrees of severity, ranging from everyday stigmatisation and discrimination, microaggressions and verbal abuse, to violence, terrorism, war crimes and genocide”,
which is an enormous spectrum. The reason why non-crime incidents, whether hate-related or not, need to be recorded is that often, the perpetrators go on to escalate their behaviour.
I have referred before in this House to being stalked by a political opponent for three years. Before we could get the police to take it seriously, we had recorded some 75 incidents, probably half of which were crimes but half were not. As things escalated, it went from minor crimes to the perpetrator using a very large knife on tyres. The police psychologist said, “If we don’t get him now, it will be people next”. It is that entire spectrum of behaviour, with some incidents ending up being part of a crime, that means we cannot just throw out all non-crime incidents.
I am afraid that the same is also true for non-crime hate incidents. I am grateful that the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, referred to the appalling case of the antisemitic attacks, because those would go as well if this amendment were accepted, since there would be no capacity for the police to start monitoring and recording such things until they tipped the balance into a crime, even though the damage was done in those earlier incidents, repeatedly to the same group of people. I think of friends of mine who go to synagogue in one town, and of young Muslim friends in my home town of Watford who are shouted at on their way to worship every single week by the same small group of people. Probably neither of those would even get to the first bar of being recorded as a non-crime hate incident; but, if their behaviour follows the typical course and escalates, and the police have not recorded anything, they have nothing to go back over. So I beg the movers of this amendment to—
Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)
What the noble Baroness has described is a crime. Those people shouting racist abuse at Jewish people or Muslims on the way to a mosque are committing a crime under the existing legislation that has been in place for many years. It has nothing to do with the recording of police intelligence, which is unfettered by this amendment, and it is certainly the case that what she has described is de facto a criminal offence.
Baroness Brinton (LD)
I referred to the comments made by previous speakers on this group who talked about police wasting their time recording. The two groups of people I have just referred to have tried to report these incidents and have not been able to get them taken particularly seriously. Therein lies the problem. I absolutely agree with the noble Lord, Lord Herbert, that there has to be new, revised, clear guidance about how the police need to process these things. It may be that there will be many that are not now processed, but we cannot just say that we should get rid of non-crime hate incidents in their entirety.
A lot of the other speeches during this debate have talked about the polarisation in our society being because people are now saying things to others, with people becoming offended. We discussed this briefly last week. The things being said to people on the street would not have been said five or six years ago. People might have thought them as they walked past, but it was quite rare. We are deeply offended if it targets us. We often do not recognise when we are being offensive to other people. I say again: there is something about the way our society is working at the moment that means we have to learn to look at ourselves, not just at the others we do not like. The police, who are literally trying to police all this, are in a very invidious position. They need tools to record information because it helps them to assess and understand when other things happen. It is much broader than non-crime hate incidents, as I have alluded to already.
Paul Giannasi OBE, the national hate crime lead for the police, has been reviewing the current protocols and his recommendations for a new code of practice will be very welcome. I am sure, from what the noble Lord, Lord Herbert, has said and from what I have heard elsewhere, that there certainly will be changes. We have to understand that the key issue here is balancing those individual rights: the absolute freedom of expression as expressed by the noble Lord, Lord Young of Acton—he and I had a debate about JS Mill last week—alongside the state’s obligation to protect citizens against targeted victimisation. The police must be able to gather intelligence and evidence and log symbolic messaging to targeted groups. All the other things—about whether those end up on DBS—can be looked at as part of this review, and I am sure they will be. But the police need to see that bigger, wider picture.
One of the problems about the Lawrence murder was that the police were not watching what was happening in that community in the months and years running up to it. That institutional blindness was certainly one of the things that came out of the inquiry. As others have said, the monitoring of such incidents was the result of the recommendations by Sir William Macpherson as part of his public inquiry in response to Stephen Lawrence’s murder.
I come back to this point: in terms of practical value, the police must be able to record incidents that do not in and of themselves amount to criminal offence, because many crimes, such as I described with harassment, and indeed with stalking, require evidence of a course of conduct. People say to me, “Oh, but stalking is always about relationships; that’s not about a hate crime”. Quite a lot of stalking is actually non-domestic, and it is targeted at somebody because of a particular characteristic.
I finish on the point I made right at the start about the evidence that police need for this course of conduct if behaviour escalates. If a group of people go out and do things again and again, there is a point at which it is going to tip over. I was party to and a survivor of something that ended up as 132 crimes; once the police saw all the evidence that we had been holding of the earlier non-crime hate, it was extremely helpful when things started to escalate. Reform is absolutely needed. We hope that the review will have recommendations for a new regime. But I also hope that it will not leave victims vulnerable, either from perpetrators whose behaviour escalates or from police who are not quite clear about the role they have in recording non-crime incidents.