Crime and Policing Bill

Debate between Lord Russell of Liverpool and Baroness Cash

Committee stage
Wednesday 17th December 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Cash (Con)]

My Lords, I support all the amendments in this important group. I am conscious of time, and it is late, but I really wanted to come back to a few things that the noble Baroness, Lady Gohir, said. I hope that I have not misunderstood, but I confess to feeling a little confused.

It is very clear in the history of our criminal legislation in this country that introducing previous offences regarding violence against women and girls has had a significant impact and made a difference—for example, coercive and controlling behaviour; stalking, which, of course, does not apply just to women or girls; and female genital mutilation. In all cases, reporting, prosecutions and convictions increased, so the protections have been manifest.

The same applies here. I support wholeheartedly this group of amendments and am very grateful for the indication from the noble Baroness, Lady Sugg, that there have been conversations. I trust that we are pushing at an open door on this. I declare an interest: as well as being a barrister, I spent many years running a behavioural science business. The naming of offences is extremely important in order for people to feel able to come forward. There is a wealth of behavioural science. I hope that a few of my points will reassure the noble Baroness, Lady Gohir, on some of the points she mentioned around the definition, because the reasons why we introduce these offences matter so very much. Honour abuse is so often defined as a family dispute, a cultural issue or something that is too sensitive for others to name. It does not matter which culture we are talking about or which motivation. The noble Baroness is absolutely right about that.

Something in behavioural science tells us, as we know from a wealth of research, that the cognitive availability, the salience of being able to name something, changes the outcome. Kahneman, Cialdini and others talk about how we need injunctive norms in society. It is why the criminal justice system operates so effectively. It tells communities and individuals, “This behaviour is not tolerated”. In the United Kingdom, domestic abuse reforms have consistently shown that explicitly naming conduct, whether it is coercive control, stalking or honour-based abuse—or, as it should really be called, honour-based excuse—shifts police practice, community practice and public understanding. It does not legitimise it. On the contrary, it shows that naming it in a prohibitive framework delegitimises it, collapses ambiguity and increases protection from all parts of the community around those victims. Public health research also shows that people seek help much more readily and quickly when they know that their experience matches a recognised category in law. The stigma is reduced and having recognition and validation of harm increases disclosure.

Naming something operates as a community-level intervention as well. We break pluralistic ignorance when we name a phenomenon such as honour-based abuse. Some noble Lords may know about a study carried out at Harvard University by the famous psychologists Prentice and Miller, who looked at students’ attitudes towards a culture of drinking. They all thought it was accepted by everyone else. The majority did not like it. They continued to go along with it because they did not realise that others felt the same as they did and that the majority view was not to support it. By doing that study and revealing that, Prentice and Miller empowered the students to take a stance and change their own behaviours. That is now well-established psychological research. That is why communities and individuals such as the very tragic victims that we have heard about today and their families, who continue to work, need this legislation and these offences to be named in the way that we are seeking.

It also increases bystander activation. People will get more involved and will understand that there is safety and support around them when they intervene as third parties. People are much more likely to act when they can say, “This is illegal, this feels wrong, this is wrong”. Teachers, GPs, neighbours and extended family members then all have the infrastructure within which to act.

The law functions in a very important way—sometimes, it feels, almost in a magical way. Maybe as a lawyer I would say that, but it does signal to everyone a focal point. It creates a place around which we can all convene and focus. It co-ordinates action where previously things might have gone unsaid and there may have been fear about raising an issue and talking about it. Families and professionals often know that something is wrong but fear acting alone. A statutory definition removes that hesitation and makes it clear where the authority and the power lie.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I rise, mercifully briefly, to come at this from a slightly different direction. Four years ago, when I was a member of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, we had a debate in the assembly specifically about honour-based abuse in the part-session in September 2021. The point I want to raise is that this is not a UK-only phenomenon but an international phenomenon, and I am putting forward the idea that there is something to be gained from looking at the experience and examples of attempts to deal with honour-based abuse in different jurisdictions. The report that the debate was about looked at the incidence of honour-based abuse and how it is being dealt with in countries such as Switzerland, Belgium, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Austria and the Netherlands. That was four years ago, so I suspect things have moved on since then. All I ask is that the Government are conscious of that when they are looking at the current state of international knowledge and the degree to which we can benefit from that.

Honour-based abuse comes underneath the Istanbul convention, which we have finally signed up to. Within that, there is an organisation called the Group of Experts on Action against Violence against Women and Domestic Violence, which has the acronym GREVIO. It has been in existence for about 15 years. I have just checked, and I am ashamed to say that, at the moment, while there is a lot of international representation on this body, there is not a single UK representative, nor has there ever been. I suggest that looking at what this committee does—because it focuses very much on this area—and seeing whether we could not potentially nominate somebody who could go and participate in that and learn from it would be a very good idea.

The only other thing I would say is in the context of the research that the rapporteur for this, who was a representative from Monaco, did. She spoke quite extensively to Nazir Afzal—somebody who I suspect the Minister knows—a prosecutor from the north of England who has been particularly heavily involved in this. One of the things he said really struck me. The report says:

“The crimes were strongly linked to cultural factors”,


particularly factors

“which strengthened … male power and aimed to prevent women from making choices”.

What really struck me was this:

“A 21-year-old man born and raised in England had told him that a man was like a piece of gold which you could clean if you dropped it in the mud, whereas a woman was like a piece of silk, which would be stained forever”.

Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Debate between Lord Russell of Liverpool and Baroness Cash

Monday 23rd June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Cash (Con)]

My Lords, Amendment 183B is in my name and I support the other amendments in this group. First, I draw to the Minister’s attention that this is a probing amendment. It is very long and detailed but none the less intended to generate a discussion of something I feel is very important in a children’s well-being Bill. To exclude the early years seems a lost opportunity; the intention is to generate that conversation.

It is almost 20 years—I have shocked myself by saying how long it is—since I stood as a candidate in Westminster North for the Conservative Party. As an inner-city seat, it was a challenging environment in which to work and to meet people. Deprivation was not uncommon. I remember vividly knocking on a door on the Brunel Estate. As the door opened, the fug of cigarette—and, probably, cannabis—smoke surrounded me. Through the haze, there was what looked to be a very young girl with a baby, probably six months old—now I know better—on her hip. In my shock, in the smoke that emanated from the flat, I said to her, “Is your mum at home?” But she was the mum.

By coincidence, I had just come from an excellent Sure Start drop-in centre around the corner set up by the last Labour Government. I had this moment of clarity, of thinking, “That baby is never going to get to that Sure Start centre”, and that it did not matter who was in government and what was offered—unless we had a proper strategy around early years and a way of reaching that mum, that child’s chances were going to be severely impeded.

I have declared my interest previously, and I declare an interest now, as this was the inspiration for founding Parent Gym, which has run across the country in all the years since it launched in 2010. The intention of Parent Gym, like so many other programmes now like it, was to reach young mums who probably had not had any parenting themselves. The aim was to provide support that was not otherwise available, when reaching out for that support was usually taboo because it came via social services, and they were hostile to the whole prospect of it.

At around the same time, because of my interest in all this, I realised that the beginnings of research were being published into the effects of early life experiences on children. I am delighted to stand in this Chamber today, almost 20 years later, knowing that there is a consensus now around the importance of all the early years and their impact on children—in particular, the first 1,001 days, as we call it—which are so very formative.

We also know now that it is not just those very important years after birth. There is a wealth of research showing the effects of prenatal stress that a mother undergoes. There has been incredible research done in disaster zones, such as after flooding in Puerto Rico, where they have measured the telomeres of the cohort of babies born from the mothers who were in those natural disasters. Telomeres are part of the chromosomal profile that predicts your longevity and your health outcomes. They have found them to be shorter in those babies born in the wake of disasters. We know now that the environment—the family environment, the multigenerational environment—is so very important.

As noble Lords know, I have been involved in some earlier parts of the Bill. We have had important debates about looked-after children and foster care strategy, and so on, but we have not talked at all about the strategy for these families and these very young children. There is such a such a range of evidence now. There is the scientific evidence, but there is also the economic evidence that what we invest in these families comes back multifold for society.

Nobel Prize-winning economist Professor James Heckman did the analysis and found that the returns on early years intervention far exceed those from the remedial action, for which we all bear the cost much later in life. He found returns of $7 to $12 per $1 invested in preventive steps taken.

In this country, in 2018, the Early Intervention Foundation estimated that England and Wales alone spent £17 billion every year—I am afraid that I do not know the current figure but it has grown since then—on late interventions; for example, in social care, youth offending, mental health, special educational needs and criminal justice services. These are many of the things that we have been talking about in this Bill, in this Chamber, and yet we have not discussed, until today, the opportunity here to prevent some of these issues arising.

The numbers are not abstract; they relate to real lives: lives impaired, opportunities lost, families rent asunder, and public resources consumed by crises and situations that could have been prevented. We have looked at the numbers of children in care. We have looked at the numbers of child protection plans. We have not talked quite so much yet—it is in Part 2 of the Bill—about the persistent educational attainment gap that opens up before formal schooling even begins. Only 46% of disadvantaged children achieve expected language and communication standards at age five, compared with 69% of their peers. That is the Department for Education’s own data.

If it is a question of affordability, we are asking the wrong question. The right question is whether we can continue to afford not to do anything. There is plenty of evidence of what works, and we know that there are already plenty of charities and programmes out there, including some of the government programmes that we have heard referred to today, like family hubs and, previously, the Sure Start programmes. Governments always look at this and try to use piecemeal, locally funded, sticking-plaster solutions, but there remains a postcode lottery as to whether there is an infrastructure for these young families and these children who, through no fault of their own, begin life at a disadvantage.

There are a number of things that we know work. Parenting training works, not just in the programme that I founded but in many others: the Family Nurse Partnership, home visiting by trained nurses, health monitoring done by parenting training in the Incredible Years programme, parent-infant psychotherapy—we do not have any shortage of interventions to refer to about what works. I have not tabled the amendment to be directional about which intervention the Government ought to mandate or explore further, but to facilitate a conversation on ensuring that there is a universal approach to all the children in this country to ensure that they are given the right start and right support in life.

Many charities are already doing some of this work—the NSPCC, Barnardo’s, Action for Children, the Parent-Infant Foundation—but that is no substitute for a national infrastructure. We know that Her Royal Highness the Princess of Wales, through her Centre for Early Childhood and the Shaping Us campaign, is working to draw attention to all this, but we need the Government to take this and grapple with it in a meaningful way to ensure that we have some way of identifying these children, and some means by which we place them all within the safety net of our society, knowing that how we treat our children is really a measure of what all of us are. I have placed emphasis on the exploration of this, and I hope that the Committee can engage today in a sensible debate to find the solutions.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I support the spirit behind all the amendments in this group. Amendment 486 is in my name, and I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, and the noble Lord, Lord Young, for also putting their names to it.

I am assuming that we are, in effect, pushing at an open door in stressing the importance of early years to the Government. The noble Baroness the Secretary of State—sorry, she is not noble yet, though she probably will be when she stops being Secretary of State. I should say the current Secretary of State, together with the Minister, came to a Cross-Bench meeting before the Bill came to our House. A question was asked about early years, and the Secretary of State was very clear that it is an absolute priority. I am therefore taking that as read, and the question is not “Is it important?” but “What do we do about it?”

I should declare an interest: I was part of the parliamentary advisory team that worked with Dame Andrea Leadsom on the Start for Life initiative under one of the previous Governments—I cannot quite remember which one—which in many ways was a concerted attempt by a Government to do something about early years. Not least, we were trying to undo the unfortunate effects of what happened to Sure Start, which I think everyone across the House, regardless of party, would agree was one of the great achievements of the Labour Administration of the 2000s. With the benefit of hindsight, it was a tragedy that we allowed it to wither on the vine.

Of course, the Labour Party did not allow it to wither on the vine; the people of this country, exercising their democratic ability to vote, which of course we in this House do not have, decided to put in place the Government who decided that there were other priorities, or could say that it was important but not give as much clear support and direction to it as before. Inevitably, what then happens is some parts of the country will continue to think it is incredibly important but others, for reasons that may seem good to them at the time, give it a lower priority. That is how you end up with such uneven distribution across the country. The lesson from that for our new Government is that, if a Government of whatever political persuasion are not crystal clear that this is a priority, and if they do not lay down clearly what that means in terms of what must happen and what is non-negotiable, the same thing will happen again.