Crime and Policing Bill

Baroness Chakrabarti Excerpts

2nd reading
Thursday 16th October 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Sugg. First, I congratulate my noble friend Lord Hanson of Flint on securing the considerable legal services of my noble friend Lady Levitt. The Government are very lucky to have them both steering this supertanker. There is much to commend: its focus on several vulnerable groups, including exploited children, victims of stalking, cuckooing and so on. I hope to speak to these parts in Committee. There is further scope to innovate in other areas genuinely to improve criminal justice.

I still have some concerns about an arms race begun over 30 years ago and escalated by some parts of this measure. The Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994—some noble Lords are too young to remember—began raising public expectations that Governments could legislate their way to a harmonious society. Politicians purported to do this even in times of austerity, amid real-time cuts to living standards, in the justice system, and to youth, mental health and addiction services. Continued rhetorical attacks on the judiciary and fiscal attacks on legal aid have left swathes of ordinary people thinking that the law is not for them. It will arrest and prosecute them for a growing array of crimes and misdemeanours but rarely protect them from abusive employers, landlords or unaccountable corporations. That is why I welcome the imminent Hillsborough law.

The disillusionment can be disastrous. Knee-jerk politics fights the alligators but never drains the swamp. I fear that we have been breeding alligators in a swamp in which only populist far-right politics thrives. We see this long shadow in compromises to due process rights, the unregulated deployment of technology at the cost of personal privacy, and always more police powers; every year, yet more powers—broad, vague and never mirrored by measures improving police vetting, training and discipline.

In 1994, it was the end of the right to silence, suspicionless stop and search, and restrictions on gatherings featuring music with a repetitive beat. Now, and for years, the target has been non-violent protest. I share the Council of Europe Human Rights Commissioner’s concerns about our existing public order statute book; and now we have the measures proposed in this Bill, and those trailed as likely new government amendments to come in Committee, to restrict cumulative protest. Protests against asylum hotels make me very anxious. But I would no more ban them than those against job losses, benefit cuts, environmental degradation, war crimes, or racism and antisemitism. What would blanket bans on face coverings at protests mean for dissidents outside the embassy of an authoritarian foreign power? With all its churches, restrictions on protesting “in the vicinity of” places of worship could render our capital an extremely un-British protest-free zone.

Recently Ministers have warned, rightly, of the existential dangers of a far-right Administration. We must never write, let alone legislate for, a blank cheque for potential future anti-democratic abuse. While today is one for broad brushes and four-minute speeches, I hope noble Lords will come prepared for line-by-line forensic scrutiny of Bill and amendment text in the vital weeks to come. The other place may invoke the will of the people, but here we read the small print.

Crime and Policing Bill

Baroness Chakrabarti Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 10th November 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Whitaker (Lab)]

My Lords, I add my support for Amendment 1. There should be a review of all these orders before layering another one on. In fact, some of that work has been done: freedom of information data demonstrates that people from minority ethnic communities are far more likely to be subject to this range of orders—Gypsy and Irish Traveller people are also more likely to receive disproportionate criminal punishments on breaching the orders—so the lack of monitoring of the use of behavioural orders is disturbing. I am sure that my noble friend the Minister does not want to continue this cycle of criminalising vulnerable and disadvantaged communities, so please can we have a formal review of the impact of the orders currently in place?

[Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)]

My Lords, I find myself in agreement with many of the genuine human rights concerns already expressed around the Committee. I find myself in a bit of a time warp because these concerns were evidenced by the use, abuse, disrepute and ultimately disuse that anti-social behaviour orders fell into all those years ago. The criminalisation of vulnerable people, people with addiction problems, people with mental health problems, homeless people and so on is not hypothesis; it was evidenced by the practice of the original anti-social behaviour orders.

I therefore hope that, in his reply, my noble friend, who I know to be a very thoughtful Minister, will go some way to expressing how he thinks these new respect orders will improve on the very unhappy history of ASBOs. Other members of the Committee have already set out what happened in the interim. It would be useful if my noble friend the Minister could explain what will be different this time, why and how.

In a nutshell, my concerns are, first, that the threshold of behaviour likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress is low and vague. To be blunt, some people are easily alarmed and distressed. Harassment is the more objective, higher part of that threshold. That is the entry point at which vulnerable people can first fall into this quasi-civil criminal order that can sweep them into the criminal justice system rather than diverting them from it.

The second concern is that, once one is under the jurisdiction of such an order, it becomes a personal, bespoke criminal code for the individual. I remember the suicidal woman banned from bridges and the pig farmer who was given an ASBO because the pigs wandered on to the neighbours’ land. Is it really appropriate to have bespoke criminal codes for different people in different parts of the country? The postcode lottery point was made well, but there is also the issue of vulnerable people and minorities, who find themselves disproportionately affected.

Once you breach your personalised criminal code—which could be to keep away from a part of town where your close relatives live—you are then swept into the system. That is my third concern about these quasi-civil criminal orders: the ease with which vulnerable people with chaotic lives who have been let down by social services and society in general are now swept into the criminal justice system rather than diverted from it.

Finally, I share the concerns about making such orders available to even younger people, who really should not be anywhere near the criminal justice system. In a much later group—sometime next year, I think, when we will still be in this Committee and will be older, if not wiser—I have tabled an amendment, with the support of the noble and learned Baronesses, Lady Hale of Richmond and Lady Butler-Sloss, to tackle the shockingly low age of criminal responsibility, 10 years-old, that we still have in England and Wales.

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but only if the so-called non-crime hate incident is face to face. What would be completely unacceptable is for people to complain that they suffered alarm or distress because of social media or online messages. Our courts will be chock-a-block with claims that all the rubbish, including nasty rubbish on social media, could be included. The courts have better things to do. It is quite simple: if you do not want nasty messages on social media, get off it. I never once had a nasty or nice message on any social media, since I would not touch it with a 10-foot barge pole. It is a vile platform and, as a libertarian, I say: let the buyer beware.

[Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)]

In the spirit of Committee, I wonder whether I might challenge the noble Lord a little on this epidemic of child criminality to which he so graphically referred. I think we should park these arguably very rare cases of child homicide outside a debate on anti-social behaviour, but would he agree with me that, when it comes to fisticuffs—what would be common assault—or even theft, we know that quite small children in every home in the country are capable of fisticuffs with each other, between siblings, and taking things that are not their own? But is not a crucial difference in our response to those children? Anti-social behaviour on the playing fields of Eton rarely ends up anywhere near the criminal justice system, but looked-after children in particular are more likely to be reported to the police and end up criminalised at a very early age. So does the noble Lord agree that children in, for example, England and Wales are no more malign than children in Scotland, where the age of responsibility is 14? We should look to ourselves as adult society and our responses to these vulnerable children.

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

The noble Baroness says that child homicides are very rare, but they have doubled in the past 12 years. All the statistics that I quoted were from the Youth Justice Board and the Office for National Statistics, showing a huge increase in knife crime. Then there are the police forces themselves; there is an article relating to the Met, or a discussion on a blog from yesterday, asking whether knife crime by children was out of control—and those are their words, not mine.

There has been a huge increase in viciousness, knife use and violent crime by children, and I suggest in my amendments that lowering the age to include 14 to 18 year-olds in respect orders might make a difference, if we could hive them off early. Of course, I accept that children in Scotland, as in England, Northern Ireland and Wales, will also have violent tendencies. My concern is that we are failing to intervene early enough to do anything about them; that is the whole cause of the problem in the past 30 years—a lack of early intervention to deal properly with children. For some, that will mean a caution or restorative justice; for others, it could mean better work from social services. But some prolific young offenders may need to be taken out of circulation, for their own benefit and to save the lives of other children.

Crime and Policing Bill

Baroness Chakrabarti Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 27th November 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Butler-Sloss (CB)]

My Lords, I declare several interests. I am a co-chair of the All-Party Group on Modern Slavery and vice-chairman of the Human Trafficking Foundation. I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Brown. She has done a brilliant first amendment and I am delighted to support her. I played a very small part in the Modern Slavery Act: I was involved in the pre-legislative scrutiny and an earlier report that persuaded the then Home Secretary, now the noble Baroness, Lady May, to put the Bill in place.

Exploitation of children is in the Modern Slavery Act, but it is rather masked and has not been taken seriously, particularly by the police. Perhaps more importantly—this is one thing that the noble Baroness, Lady Brown, did not say—under the Act, a child who is exploited cannot consent to exploitation and cannot commit an offence. That is absolutely crucial, and it probably ought to be expressed again in primary legislation.

I enormously admire a great deal of what this Government are trying to do. I went on behalf of Action for Children to a very useful meeting with Diana Johnson and Jess Phillips, where I got the impression that they were going to move forward on this. But what is offered in this Bill does not really meet the need. To put into guidance what was put in primary legislation 10 years ago seems to make it less important. I ask the Minister to reflect on why you would want to put into guidance something that was expressed, not as well, in primary legislation 10 years ago.

The time has come to deal with county lines. A great deal of work has been done by the National Crime Agency. At long last, at least some magistrates’ courts realise that children who are ferrying drugs around the country—and cash, nowadays, as well as drink and various other things—are in fact victims and not perpetrators. But it is not fully known. The police do not seem to understand it. We need to explain, through primary legislation, to whoever is now in charge of modern slavery in the police that we are talking about child exploitation, of which modern slavery is a component. There is no doubt that these children are enslaved, but I suspect that, in this country, the word “exploitation” is rather easier to understand—and it is time it was there.

This amendment is brilliant. It could perhaps be improved in certain ways, but it asks the Government to do something really practical which, when I went to that very useful meeting, I got the impression they were going to do.

[Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)]

My Lords, I support my noble friend Lady Brown of Silvertown, but she may not need much support, having received the much-coveted gold star from the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, who, I am very proud to say, supports a later amendment of mine on raising the age of criminal responsibility—which, I am ashamed to say, is barbarically only 10 in England and Wales. The UN recommends that it be 14. In Scotland it is 12 and the heavens do not seem to have fallen.

I have a couple of specific points to make in support of my noble friend’s amendment. If I may, I will be as bold as to predict what my noble friend the Minister and his advisers might be about to say in response. If they are about to say that my noble friend’s definition is unnecessary because the definition can be taken from the offence itself in Clause 40, I would like to get in first with two points to counter that. If I am pessimistic and wrong, so be it. Noble Lords know that I do not mind looking a fool.

The first point, which has already been made clearly by my noble friend Lady Brown, is that we need a definition that is about not just a specific criminal offence but interagency working and interventions across services, well in advance of any investigation or prosecution for a criminal offence.

I do not think the second point has been made yet. If the Committee compares the elements of my noble friend’s definition with the definition of the criminal offence in the Bill, it will see that the Government’s approach misses something very important that is to be found in my noble friend’s definition: enabling the child, not just causing the child, to engage in criminal conduct. That addition is important because “causing” is a harder thing to prove and a greater step in grooming. Currently, the Government’s definition is

“causing the child to commit an offence”,

or, indeed, “facilitating” somebody else to cause the child to commit the offence.

To prove causation in law is a serious matter. Enabling—making it easy, making the tools of the trade available, providing the opportunity—is a lower threshold, which is appropriate in the context of children. My noble friend made the point that currently in law they are treated as victims but also as perpetrators, and sometimes it is a matter of luck as to whether you will find the adult and the public service who will take the proper approach, in my view, of always treating the child as a child and as a victim, and not criminalising them. This is the point about “enabling”.

My noble friend the Minister is very experienced in these matters. Whatever he comes back with, I would like him and his advisers to consider the question of the lower threshold of enabling, not just causing. If there is to be a further compromise that includes some element of my noble friend Lady Brown’s amendment, I hope that that is taken on board.

The most formative time in my professional life was as a Home Office lawyer. I know what it is like to work on big Bills and to defend them as originally crafted and drafted. But it is wise, especially in this House, to take good advice and to bend a little when it might improve legislation for the benefit of victims.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, first, I absolutely congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Brown of Silvertown, on her excellently motivated amendment. It is very thought provoking. In particular, this sentence caught my attention:

“The victim may have been criminally exploited even if the activity appears consensual”.


That is one of the most difficult challenges. For some years I have been involved in the grooming gangs scandal, and one of the most horrible parts of that was when the police took the decision that the young 14 or 15 year-old, precocious though she—a general “she”—may have been, was somehow actively consenting to her own rape or sexual exploitation. It was about the notion of this being a child, because the young girl may have looked more adult—it was literally as superficial as that—and about the type, if we are honest, in class terms. Therefore, it was said that she could not be a victim and she was accused of being a prostitute, and so on. We are familiar with that. That is the reason why that sentence stood out to me.

However, I have some qualms, and I want to ask genuinely what we do about those qualms, because I do not know where to go. I am slightly worried, because county lines gangs, as the noble Baroness will know, are a young men’s game. Some of the gang leaders are younger than one would ever want to imagine in your worst nightmare. That is a problem with this, in a way, and with how you work it out. If you have a general rule that this is always a child, how do you deal with the culpability and responsibility of a 17 year-old thug, not to put too fine a point on it, who is exploiting younger people or even his—and it is generally “his”—peers? I am not sure how to square that with what I have just said. It also seems that there is a major clash with the age of criminal responsibility. I am very sympathetic with that not being 10, but how do you deal with the belief that someone aged under 18 is a child, yet we say that a child has criminal responsibility? Perhaps I am just misunderstanding something.

My final reservation is that if we say that everybody under 18 has to be a victim all the time, would that be a legal loophole that would get people off when there was some guilt for them to be held to account for? I generally support this amendment, but I want some clarification on how to muddle my way through those moral thickets, if possible.

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

My Lords, if the Committee will allow me, I will begin by detailing the government amendments in this group. We know that criminal gangs conducting activity such as county lines drug dealing do not stop at internal UK borders, and children are criminally exploited across the UK. To go to the point that the noble Baroness, Lady Doocey, mentioned, this is why—at the request of the Scottish Government and the Northern Ireland Department of Justice—we are making provision in the Bill for child criminal exploitation prevention orders in Scotland and Northern Ireland. That is at their request, and I hope that also answers the point from the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Gower. Since the Bill covers England and Wales, this means that the offence of child criminal exploitation will now apply UK-wide. These amendments have been tabled because, since the Bill was published, we have had those discussions and this is a way of making sure that we have a UK-wide approach.

These orders will give the police and courts across the whole of the United Kingdom powers to prevent child criminal exploitation happening in the first place, or happening again, by putting prohibitions and requirements on an adult who poses a risk of criminally exploiting a child. As I have mentioned, these provisions have been drafted in collaboration with the Scottish and Northern Ireland Governments and consequential amendments are therefore required for England and Wales to ensure that the orders function smoothly across the United Kingdom.

Finally, we have tabled some other amendments to put beyond doubt that assessment of whether an individual has engaged in child criminal exploitation, or associated conduct, in an application for, or imposition of, a child criminal exploitation prevention order is to be determined by the court on the basis of the civil standard of proof; that is, the balance of probabilities. This is appropriate given that there are civil rather than criminal proceedings in this case. The application of the civil standard of proof is well precedented in many similar preventive orders across the statute book and is important to ensure that an order can intervene earlier in the course of a child’s exploitation so that it can be prevented. I hope that I have wide support across the Committee for those measures—I think I do.

Amendment 232B is in the name of my noble friend Lady Brown of Silvertown. I welcome her moving her first amendment in such a positive way. She has secured the support of the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, my noble friend Lady Chakrabarti, the noble Earl, Lord Russell of Liverpool, and the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Gower, and the noble Baroness, Lady Doocey, which is a fairly impressive bunch on a first amendment, so I say well done to her on that. Her amendment seeks to create a further definition of child criminal exploitation.

I say to my noble friend—and I think that this was anticipated by my noble friend Lady Chakrabarti—that “child criminal exploitation” is already defined in Clause 40 by the description of conduct amounting to an offence. It is where an adult

“engages in conduct towards or in respect of a child, with the intention of … causing the child to”

engage in criminality. The noble Baroness, Lady Fox, raised a number of issues for which I am not accountable, but which my noble friend may wish to respond to. That is the Government’s view on the purpose of Clause 40. Clause 40 captures activity online, through the use of technology and whether or not it is seemingly consensual. This definition also operates for the purposes of the child criminal exploitation prevention orders.

My noble friend has made a very strong case, through personal experience as a constituency MP in east London for almost 20 years, on the impact of county lines gangs on young people. I fully accept, understand and appreciate where she is coming from on those issues. That is why the Government introduced Clause 40 in the first place. It is also why the Government are introducing a bespoke stand-alone offence of CCE, along with the CCE prevention orders, to signal unequivocally that using a child to commit crime is against the law and that those children are victims of a crime. I also agree that any apparent consent of the child to involvement is irrelevant to whether they have been criminally exploited, and that criminal exploitation can occur online and through the use of technology. I understand my noble friend’s amendment, but these points are captured by the definition of CCE in Clause 40, which does not include a child’s consent and captures adults’ conduct by means of any method or control.

[Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)]

Obviously, I correctly anticipated the response that was coming, but I would be grateful if my noble friend would deal with this point about “enabling”, which is a substantive point of difference in the two definitions. Enabling is easier to prove than causing. “Causing” is closer to a child being used, which is reflected in my noble friend Lady Brown’s definition, but I do not think that “enabling” is in the Clause 40 definition as it stands.

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

I appreciate my noble friend’s comments. If she will bear with me, I will come on to that point in a moment. I am doing this in a structured order to try to address the points that are before the Committee today.

I say to my noble friend Lady Brown that, within the Bill, we are also taking the power to issue statutory guidance to chief officers. The noble Earl, Lord Russell of Liverpool, and my noble friend have looked at that, and I will return to it in a moment. The guidance will include a descriptive definition of CCE, setting out in lay person’s terms the conduct captured by the offence, and will provide practical guidance on how the CCE offence and orders should be applied.

An important point, to go particularly to what the noble Earl, Lord Russell of Liverpool, said, is that in Clause 60—which we will come to in later considerations—the Secretary of State has power to issue statutory guidance to chief officers of police about the exercise of their functions in connection with the prevention, detection and investigation of CCE offences and CCE prevention orders. I hope that the Committee will recognise that, importantly, the relevant police officers will be under a legal duty to have due regard to that statutory guidance when exercising functions in relation to the CCE offences and the CCE prevention orders. On the question of the statutory guidance, which my noble friend and others have touched on, the guidance has not been issued yet because the relevant legislation has not yet received the consent of this House or indeed Royal Assent. On the applicability of both of those conditions, statutory guidance under Clause 60 will be issued, which will place a legal duty on police officers to adhere to it.

My noble friend Lady Chakrabarti mentioned a very important point. There is a clear difference in what my noble friend Lady Brown of Silvertown has put forward, supported by my noble friend Lady Chakrabarti. I hope this helps: the forms of conduct that are likely to enable a child to commit criminality are expected in most cases to also meet the test of conduct by an adult intended to cause, or facilitate the causing of, a child to commit a future crime. The nature of the offence, which is broad and large, will ensure that it captures offenders who will use children for crime. I believe that that is the right format. Both my noble friends have said that “enable” is a critical word. I believe that a separate definition is unnecessary, as it would have no legal impact over and above what is already in the Bill. It could cause confusion among police and prosecutors about which definition they should be applying.

The statutory guidance, which I emphasise will gave a legal bass and will be issued under Clause 60, is the appropriate place to provide the extra detail to understand proposals that are covered by the amendment, but which are already in scope of the clear and simple legal terms of Clause 40. I know that that is the defence that my noble friend Lady Chakrabarti expected me to use, but it is the defence: Clause 40 is what it is, and the guidance will also be statutory.

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[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

I will sound like I am repeating myself from Question Time, but, very shortly, we anticipate bringing forward a policing White Paper looking at a whole range of mechanisms to improve police performance. If the noble Baroness will allow me, I will wait for further detail on the policing White Paper, which I have already said to the House will be published before Christmas, to allow for further discussion on a range of efficiency and improvement matters for policing. The point she makes is worthy of consideration, but I will park it until a later date in the parliamentary calendar.

[Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)]

I am grateful to my noble friend the Minister for his detailed response, but will he reflect on the potential distinction between “enabling” and “causing”? Will he go back to parliamentary counsel and be clear that enablers will always meet this threshold of causation? I am really concerned about that. I understand that my noble friend has rejected the idea of a separate free-standing definition and is worried about confusion between the offence definition and a general definition, but in blending the intentions of the Government and those of my noble friend Lady Brown, it would be helpful to know that that language of “causing”, without specific mention of enabling, is watertight.

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

I am grateful to my noble friend for further pressing me on the issue. I have tried to explain to the Committee where the Government are on this. We always reflect on debates in Committee, because there are always opportunities for my noble friend and others to bring matters back on Report. I am giving the Committee today the Government’s view that the definition in Clause 40, plus the guidance issued under Clause 60, will be sufficient to cover the objective of ensuring that we have this offence on the statute book and monitored and enforced by authorities.

To the noble Baroness, Lady Doocey, I have just remembered that we will have further discussions on police training in later groups in Committee today, but the White Paper will deal with a whole range of matters on improving police performance.