Crime and Policing Bill

Lord Ponsonby of Shulbrede Excerpts

Tuesday 20th January 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ponsonby of Shulbrede (Lab)]

My Lords, I open by thanking the noble Lord, Lord Marks, for so fully setting out his and the other amendments in this group. I agreed with his opening points, and I support all the amendments—I suspect all the speakers in this short debate will support them too. In a sense, they offer a range of possible changes, from a broad review to addressing specific anomalies, which the noble Lord did.

I am absolutely confident that our Lord Chancellor would be very sympathetic to these amendments. I know that he has said in recent speeches that he wants to look at criminal records, and those for young people in particular. That is an excellent starting point, and I hope that the Minister can reinforce that point when she comes to sum up.

Touching on the amendments in my name, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Hampton, the noble Baroness, Lady Sater, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Garnier, and my noble friend Lord Spellar, who will speak on these matters as well. My Amendment 476 seeks to prevent the automatic disclosure of childhood conditional cautions in a DBS check by amending the definition of a criminal conviction certificate in the Police Act 1997.

My Amendment 477, which was touched on by the noble Lord, Lord Marks, addresses a clear anomaly in the law as it stands. The amendment seeks to ensure that the criminal record for a juvenile is dated from the offence rather than the conviction date. As the noble Lord, Lord Marks, said, these could be really quite far apart, so the way the conviction is treated will be different, because the young adult will be convicted even though the offence was committed when he was a youth.

Amendment 478 seeks to ensure that custodial sentences, except for the most serious sentences, will be removed from an individual’s criminal record after five and a half years if the offence was committed before the age of 18.

Sitting here earlier today and at previous Committee sittings of this Bill, the noble Lord, Lord Young of Acton, drew something to my attention which I was not aware of involving non-crime hate incidents. He pointed out that, for youths, a non-crime hate incident is treated the same as for an adult, and that means a six-year retention of the information. That is another example of an anomaly, and I hope, when the Home Office comes to report on non-crime hate incidents, it can ensure that that is tied up with the Ministry of Justice considering the way youth convictions are looked at for DBS checks.

I also want to say something about Amendment 486D, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Carter. That is specifically about transport-related convictions of young people. I support what he is going to say, I am sure, but I have to say that, as a youth magistrate for nearly 20 years, I cannot remember ever seeing a young person in court for evasion of a fare. If he has figures—he is nodding his head—I will listen to them with interest, because it is not my personal experience of what I saw in youth court. I tend to see much more serious cases, but nevertheless I will listen to and support what he says with interest.

The overarching point is that this is a difficult area. It is very easy to point out anomalies. I am sure that we have a very sympathetic Lord Chancellor, and I really hope that the Government seize this opportunity to address the overarching issue of the way we treat our young people, so that they are not held back when they go into the adult world and the world of work.

[Lord Spellar (Lab)]

My Lords, I support the amendments standing in the name of my noble friend Lord Ponsonby and the noble Lord, Lord Marks. I have been arguing for some years in the House of Commons that the DBS scheme has, frankly, run out of control. I can quote from June 2020, when I said to the then Prime Minister Boris Johnson that it was

“a major obstacle to people turning their lives around. It is inefficient, unfair and, frankly, discriminatory. The Lammy report dealt with this in some depth nearly two years ago, so we do not need any more … inquiries. We need action”.

Reference has been made to the impact in different parts of the country. In smaller police forces, not only are cases often not taken to court but cautions are not issued, and instead people are very informally told to mend their ways. In cities, it can often be very different, and this also still lies on the record. The then Prime Minister Boris Johnson said in his reply to me:

“Any MP will have had very hard cases caused by the DBS system”.—[Official Report, Commons, 24/6/20; col. 1309.]


I think there is a general recognition at the political level that this is a problem. I have to say from all my experience that there is deep inertial resistance inside the Civil Service to changing this, and I urge Ministers vigorously to overcome it, particularly given the report done by David Lammy, who was commissioned by the then Conservative Government to look into this area.

We also saw similar problems with the first elections for police and crime commissioners. Unwisely, a requirement was put in that someone should have no criminal conviction. We had a candidate who had to stand down as he had been convicted for possessing an offensive weapon when he was 13. We had another candidate who had committed a minor offence 22 years previously. These are people with long records of public service, and in no way should that have been held against them.

Whatever steps we take should also relate to proportionality and relevance. When I was a Transport Minister, there were proposals to introduce DBS checks at airports—I fully understood that—but if somebody had a conviction for an assault outside a nightclub in Southall on a Saturday night, I was not really worried if he was throwing my bags around in the luggage section. I would have been concerned if he had had a conviction for theft or for dealing in stolen goods. That also needs to be taken into account and be put right.

As a constituency Member of Parliament, I also had a woman who had been given a suspended sentence for an assault, age 18, in an argument with another girl over a partner. In her 40s, this was still preventing her. This does not just affect young people; it blights people right the way through their lives—and not just their lives but their children’s lives, as they are not able to provide support for them and have all the frustration of not developing their skills of life. It does not let people move on but also deprives the workforce of talent.

We are told sometimes that DBS checks and the ongoing system are fine, and that employers will look at them and take proportional action. They do not. Once a DBS check comes back with anything on the record, the fact is that people automatically get dropped. What is even more outrageous is that those same employers then go bleating to government, saying, “We can’t get workers here”, and so we have to bring them in from abroad. That was one factor that led to the huge surge of care workers being brought into this country in recent years—a considerable amount of exploitation and fraud accompanied it, by the way. At the same time, people were being kept off work, on benefits, not able to provide for themselves or their families.

My plea to the Committee is to support change and give people hope that they can turn their lives around, to take the opportunity to reinstate what I would argue were the principles of the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act when it was first brought forward, and to make some progress. We may need to make further changes in the future, but these amendments provide a very good start.