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.