Crime and Policing Bill

Baroness Kidron Excerpts

2nd reading
Thursday 16th October 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Kidron (CB)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for her kind words about the new offence with respect to child sexual abuse image generators and I take the opportunity to recognise the work of the specialist police unit that has worked alongside me on these and other issues. Working at the front line of child sexual abuse detection and enforcement is to come up against some of the most sordid and horrendous scenarios that can make you lose faith in humanity, so I want to put on record our huge debt to those in the unit for their courage and commitment.

I was also pleased to hear the Minister’s commitment to criminalise pornography that depicts acts of strangulation and suffocation. This is one of a number of concerns that the noble Baroness, Lady Bertin, will speak to shortly, and I shall be supporting her on all her amendments. During the Recess, I chaired a meeting of extremely senior health professionals and the prevalence of young people presenting in clinical settings suffering from violence and abuse during sex was simply horrific, with outcomes ranging from fear and trauma to death itself. There is an epidemic of sexual violence, normalised and driven by pornography, and I very much hope that the noble Baroness will have the support of the whole House on this matter.

I have four further areas of concern and I am going to touch on each very briefly. First, this House successfully introduced amendments to the Data (Use and Access) Act to empower coroners to require technology companies to preserve data when a child has died. At the time, we proposed that preservation notices should be automatic and that statutory guidance should be developed, but this was refused. We now have the law, but bereaved families are still unable to benefit from its provisions, because preservation notices are not being used quickly enough, and nor are the powers fully understood. It is simply heartbreaking to see a parent who has just lost a child become a victim of a system that does not understand or use its own powers. I will be tabling amendments to make the new law work as was promised and as Parliament intended.

Secondly, we have all seen media reports of chatbots suggesting illegal content or activity to children. I remain unclear about the Government’s appetite to strengthen Ofcom’s codes or to resolve the differences of opinion between Parliament and the regulator about the scope of the Online Safety Act. Nevertheless, I will be seeking to ensure that AI chatbots that suggest or facilitate illegal activity are addressed in the Crime and Policing Bill.

Thirdly, as I have indicated, I welcome the CSAM generator offence in the Bill, but a gap remains and I will be tabling amendments to place clear, legally binding duties on developers of generative AI systems to conduct risk assessments, identifying whether and how their systems could be misused for this narrow but devastating purpose.

Finally, I am curious about youth diversion orders. I am by no means against them, but I would like to understand whether they are to be backed up by other support, such as autism screening and therapeutic support. Many at the front line of this issue say that there is a serious lack of resource, and I would be interested to hear from Ministers how young people are to be supported once diverted, and whether the Government have plans to look further at the responsibility of tech companies that deliberately design for constant engagement, even if extreme content is being used simply as bait. It is no longer possible to consider the online world as separate from any other environment and, if we do not impose the legal order we require elsewhere, we will continue to create a place of lawlessness and abuse.

Crime and Policing Bill

Baroness Kidron Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 27th November 2025 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Baroness Kidron]

266: Clause 63, page 81, line 34, at end insert—
“46D Child sexual abuse image-generation risk assessment(1) A provider of an online service, including but not limited to a generative AI large language model, must risk assess the likelihood of their service being used to create or facilitate the creation of a CSA image or images as defined by section 46A.(2) If a risk is identified in a CSA risk assessment—(a) where the provider is regulated by the Online Safety Act 2023, a provider must report the risk and agree to steps to reduce, mitigate and manage the risks with OFCOM;(b) where the provider is not regulated by the Online Safety Act 2023, a provider must agree to steps to reduce, mitigate and manage the risks of their online service being used to create or facilitate the creation of CSA images with the National Crime Agency.(3) Where a provider regulated by the Online Safety Act 2023 fails to agree to or implement steps to reduce, mitigate and manage the risks with OFCOM (see subsection (2)(a)), they can be subjected to OFCOM’s enforcement powers set out in Part 7, Chapter 6 (enforcement powers) of that Act.(4) Where a provider not regulated by the Online Safety Act 2023 fails to agree to or implement steps to reduce, mitigate and manage the risks with the National Crime Agency (see subsection (2)(b)), they commit an offence.(5) A provider that commits an offence under this section is liable to be issued with a penalty notice by the National Crime Agency.(6) In this section a “penalty notice” means a notice requiring its recipient to pay a penalty of an amount not exceeding whichever is the greater of—(a) £18 million, or(b) 10% of a provider’s qualifying worldwide revenue for the most recent complete accounting period.(7) A penalty notice may be reissued where a provider continues to commit an offence under this section.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment is intended to ensure that services that do not fall into scope of Clause 63 as currently drafted still assess and mitigate the risk of their services being used as an AI child sexual abuse generator.

[Baroness Kidron (CB)]

My Lords, in moving Amendment 266, I will speak also to Amendments 479 and 480, all of which are in my name. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, the noble Lords, Lord Clement-Jones and Lord Russell, and the noble Viscount, Lord Colville, for their support.

All three amendments concern illegal or harmful online activity. Amendment 266 places a legal duty on online services, including generative AI services, to conduct risk assessments evaluating the likelihood that their systems could be used to create or facilitate child sexual abuse material. Subsection (1) of the proposed new clause establishes that duty. Subsection (2) requires providers to report the results to Ofcom or the National Crime Agency, depending on whether or not they are regulated under the Online Safety Act. Subsections (3) to (7) set out the enforcement mechanisms, drawing on Ofcom’s existing enforcement powers under the OSA or equivalent powers for the NCA.

Amendment 266 complements Clause 63, which creates the new offence relating to the supply of CSA image generators to which the Minister has just spoken, but it is in addition to those powers. In June 2023, the BBC reported that the open-source AI model Stable Diffusion was being used to generate child sexual abuse material. Researchers at Stanford University subsequently found that Stable Diffusion had been trained on datasets containing child sexual abuse material. This issue is not confined to a single model. The Internet Watch Foundation and the chair of the AI Security Institute have warned of the potential for open-source AI models to be used for the creation of CSAM.

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[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

I am very happy to arrange a meeting with an appropriate Minister. I would be very happy to sit in on it. Other Ministers may wish to take the lead on this, because there are technology issues as well. I have Home Office responsibilities across the board, but I have never refused a meeting with a Member of this House in my 16 months here and I am not going to start now, so the answer to that question is yes. The basic presumption at the moment is that we are not convinced that the technology is yet at the stage that the noble Lord believes it to be, but that is a matter for future operation. I again give him the assurance that, in the event that the technology proves to be successful, the Government will wish to examine it in some detail.

I have absolutely no doubt that we will revisit these matters but, for the moment, I hope that the noble Baroness can withdraw her amendment.

[Baroness Kidron (CB)]

I pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Nash, for his amendment and his fierce following of this issue, and for bringing it to our attention. I recognise that this is a Home Office Bill and that some of these things cross to DSIT, but we are also witnessing crime. The Home Office must understand that not everything can be pushed to DSIT.

Your Lordships have just met the tech Lords. These are incredibly informed people from all over the Chamber who share a view that we want a technological world that puts kids front and centre. We are united in that and, as the Minister has suggested, we will be back.

I have three very quick points. First, legal challenges, operational difficulties and the capacity of the NCA and Ofcom were the exact same reasons why Clause 63 was not in the Online Safety Bill or the Data (Use and Access) Bill. It is unacceptable for officials to always answer with those general things. Many noble Lords said, “It’s so difficult”, and, “This is new”, with the Online Safety Bill. It is not new: we raised these issues before. If we had acted three or four years ago, we would not be in this situation. I urge this Government to get on the front foot, because we know what is coming.

Crime and Policing Bill

Baroness Kidron Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 9th December 2025 Lords Chamber

In conclusion, how many more times will we debate these issues? These amendments are not radical; they are reasonable, evidence-based and urgently needed. We cannot allow the increase in harmful online content to continue. This must stop. I urge the Government to support these amendments, which are the foundation of a safer digital world. If we fail to act, we risk legitimising a culture in which abuse is normalised and young people grow up with a distorted understanding of healthy relationships. As I always say, childhood lasts a lifetime, so let us act now to ensure that every childhood is free from abuse and victimisation. I look forward to hearing the Minister’s response.

[Baroness Kidron (CB)]

My Lords, it is a privilege to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin. I share much of her frustration about us being here discussing this again and hearing that litany of powerful images—that I would rather unhear—from the noble Baroness, Lady Bertin. I do not propose to add to them, except to say that what the noble Baroness has said on the record, in Hansard, is not an exaggeration or cherry-picking; it is normal, and the House must consider whether that is the “normal” we would like to live in.

I have been proud to add my name to the noble Baroness’s amendments. I commend her on her work on the pornography review, which I know was an enormous effort and, as I understand it, quite a catastrophic personal experience. I also want to take the opportunity to commend the Government on recognising the issue of strangulation. I know we will come to it, but I wanted to mention it in this group, because it is this relationship between what happens online and how that then impacts offline that we have to concentrate on. A few weeks ago, I was with a group of very senior medical professionals, and one consultant radiologist talked about how post-mortem guidance is being changed to check for strangulation as a cause of death among young women. That is chilling. The entire room was chilled. It is an indictment of how prevalent and serious the consequences of violent pornography are. We must not hide behind thinking this is happening in another space; this is the space in which people are now living.

On the same theme, some time ago I was contacted by a lawyer who told me that she dreaded freshers’ week. Each year, an increasingly long line of barely adult young men would come through her door facing charges of acts of sexual violence which mimicked behaviour they had seen online. A wealth of talented young women are now traumatised at a crucial point in their life, and a litany of young men, probably equally talented, are now sex offenders. These lives are being ruined.

The amendments tabled by the noble Baroness are sensible—I believe that was the word the noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin, used. I do not know whether they are radical; I hope they are, and I hope they solve the problem, but they are sensible solutions. They seek to close the gaps, and have taken learnings from other jurisdictions, which is crucial. The whole world is tackling this, and we must learn from what other people understand. We do not need to make it all up ourselves. “Not made here” is about the worst thing that we keep on seeing in politics, particularly in the online sphere.

I support all the amendments in this group, and I wanted briefly to mention just two of them. First, Amendment 298 would prohibit ownership of software which we often call “nudification” apps. A Teacher Tapp survey last week found that one in 10 teachers were aware of pupils creating “deepfake, sexually explicit videos”, and the safeguarding lead who was quoted warned that deepfakes and nudifiers

“feel like the next train coming down the track”.

I know a lot of safeguarding staff, and this is what they are saying. Can we, as a Parliament and as a House, be ahead of the train coming down the track rather than waiting for it to come and ruin our schools?

The Children’s Commissioner points out in her briefing, which supports these amendments wholeheartedly, that nudification technology is harming girls. Even if they have not been directly targeted by the tools, girls report withdrawing from the online world—for example, not posting pictures of their full faces to reduce the chances of their being transplanted on to a naked body. Can we not, as a House, stand up for women in the public sphere? This is not okay. It is so regressive to look at a technology that silences young girls’ participation in this new world.

Rightly, this amendment does not create an offence for under-18s, so I have another request of the Government: that they accept the amendment but also commit to adopting a broader strategy to tackle the deepfake crisis in schools before it is too late.

Last week, we had a debate in which the Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Hanson, said that this issue sits with DSIT and not the Home Office. My understanding is that the issue I am addressing could sit with DSIT and the DfE. However, the Government as a whole have a commitment to children, and as a whole they have committed to halving violence against women and girls. I will do a shout-out here and say that men do experience violence, but it is primarily experienced by women and girls. So, unless the Government start to act more swiftly on our concerns about technology-facilitated sexual abuse, they will be failing in both their responsibility to children and their commitment to women and girls.

Amendment 314 seeks to create parity between laws that regulate pornography online and offline. It is a perennial cause of harm that the tech sector lacks accountability. This lack of accountability, the lack of parity, seen through the lens of pornography, is the very definition of tech exceptionalism. The laws that apply to the rest of our lives in society do not apply in the technological sphere, protected by tens of millions of lobbying dollars. This is at the heart of the problem that we are discussing. Pornography has been a major engine of the tech sector. It is worth billions of dollars, responsible for millions of downloads and a significant driver of online traffic.

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[Baroness Levitt (Lab)]

My Lords, it would not be right to begin the Government’s response to this group of amendments without first thanking unequivocally the noble Baroness, Lady Bertin. The whole Chamber will join me in saying that we have a great deal to thank her for. She has worked tirelessly on the independent pornography review and has long campaigned to raise awareness of the ways pornography shapes sexual behaviour. This Government share her determination to ensure that the online world is a safer place for everyone, and we are immensely grateful to her for her insights.

The motivation for these amendments is important and I make it absolutely clear that I take them seriously. I have not disagreed with a single word that has been said in the impassioned and sometimes angry contributions in this Chamber—I share that anger and outrage. The noble Baroness, Lady Bertin, is aware, following our meeting last week, of the reasons why the Government will resist her amendments at this stage. However, I look forward to continuing our discussions in greater detail over the coming weeks, including in meetings between my department, the Home Office and DSIT. I hope we will all work closely together to achieve our shared objectives.

I also take this opportunity to announce that the Government will accept, in part, one of the noble Baroness’s recommendations from her pornography review—namely, recommendation 24. The Government will review the criminal law relating to pornography, which will give us a chance to look at the law holistically and consider whether it is fit for purpose in an ever-developing online world. Importantly, the review I am announcing today will look into the effectiveness of the existing law in relation to criminalising, among other things, harmful depictions of incest and any forms of pornography that encourage child sexual abuse.

I know the noble Baroness is anxious that any review should not be used as a delaying tactic to avoid making any decisions. I hope she will take it from me that it is my wish to make sure that this takes place quickly. In addition, as I mentioned to her when we met, the Government are not completely opposed to considering swifter action where this is critically important, and I know we will discuss this further at our next meeting.

Given what I have just said, I hope your Lordships will forgive me if I address Amendments 290 to 292 briefly, in the light of the fact we are proposing a review. I am very grateful for the contributions of the noble Baronesses, Lady Benjamin, Lady Kidron, Lady Sugg and Lady Owen, my noble friends Lady Kennedy and Lady Berger, and the noble Lords, Lord Clement-Jones and Lord Cameron of Lochiel—I hope I have mentioned everybody.

I appreciate the motivation behind these amendments, and I reassure my noble friend Lady Kennedy that the Government and I are very much in listening mode. Of course images of actual child incest or actual child sexual abuse are extremely harmful. The same is also true for intimate photos or videos shared without consent, and I note the concerns about how effectively this law is being enforced and regulated. I reassure the noble Baroness, Lady Bertin, that I am committed to working with her on the issues raised by these amendments and I very much look forward to meeting again to discuss them in greater detail to see where we can go with them.

Amendment 298 would criminalise the possession of nudification tools by users. Once again, I accept the intention behind this amendment and recognise the harm caused; it is horrifying. My noble friend Lady Berger spoke movingly about its impact on young women, and other noble Lords spoke strongly about this as well.

Our concern is that this amendment would not target those who provide these unpleasant tools to users in the UK. Additionally, as drafted, it would criminalise the possession of legitimate tools which are designed to create intimate images, such as those used in a medical context. I reiterate that we have significant sympathy for the amendment’s underlying objective, so we are actively considering what action is needed to ensure that any intervention in this area is effective. I assure the noble Baroness that we will reflect carefully on what she and other noble Lords—including the noble Baronesses, Lady Kidron, Lady Boycott and Lady Owen, my noble friend Lady Berger, and the noble Viscount, Lord Colville, among others—have said in this debate. I also assure her that we aim to provide an update on this matter ahead of Report.

Finally, Amendment 314 seeks to bring regulatory parity between offline and online pornography. I commend the noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin, for her continued advocacy on this topic over the years. The noble Baroness, Lady Kidron—for whom huge respect is due, in this House and elsewhere—the noble Lords, Lord Carter of Haslemere and Lord Nash, and the noble Baroness, Lady Shawcross-Wolfson, among others, all spoke powerfully about this.

I stress once again that I do not disagree with the motivation that underlies this amendment. No one could disagree with the general principle as a matter of common sense, but extensive further work with the noble Baroness, Lady Bertin, is needed to consider and define with sufficient certainty what currently legal online pornography should not be permitted. It is also important that we make a thorough exploration of the existing legislation and regulation to ensure any new offence is enforceable, protects users to the highest standard and works as intended.

Under the Video Recordings Act, the distribution of pornography on physical media formats is regulated by the BBFC, as we have heard. Obviously, the BBFC will not classify any content which breaches criminal law. Amendment 314 as drafted would create a criminal offence which would require a judgment to be made about whether the BBFC would classify content which has not been subject to the classification process. The noble Lord, Lord Pannick, expressed concerns about the drafting of this amendment while supporting its underlying motivation. As I hope your Lordships will agree, creating this style of criminal offence requires a clearer and more certain definition of this pornographic content, as any individual would need to be able clearly to understand what they need to do to regulate their conduct, so as not to inadvertently commit a criminal offence.

I hope the noble Baroness, Lady Bertin, will appreciate the reasons I have set out for the Government not supporting these amendments today. That said, I hope the announcement of the review into the criminal law and the Government’s commitment to work with the noble Baroness over the coming weeks will leave her sufficiently reassured not to press her amendments at this stage.

[Baroness Kidron (CB)]

I want to ask the Minister about the timing. Her tone is exceptionally welcome— I will leave the substance of her response to the noble Baroness, Lady Bertin—but I am watching facial recognition, edtech and AI being rolled out by the Government with impunity. Even earlier today, at Questions, the tool was put at a higher order than the safety. What is the timeframe for the reviews and in which we can expect these very urgent questions to be addressed? There is a Bill in front of us, but when will the next Bill come?

[Baroness Levitt (Lab)]

Can the noble Baroness imagine just how unpopular I would be if I committed to an absolute timeframe? What I can say is that I hope she will take it from me that I regard this as important. The meetings with the noble Baroness, Lady Bertin, have started. This matters but we need to get it right.

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[Lord Hacking (Lab)]

My Lords, I enthusiastically join my noble friend Lady Chakrabarti in praising the noble Baroness, Lady Owen. I was in the House—it was on a Friday—when she first moved her Private Member’s Bill. The Minister then was the noble Lord, Lord Ponsonby, and he promised that the Government would review and come to the assistance of the noble Baroness. What she is doing now is quite amazing, with a number of very detailed amendments. I will hold myself here to await what my noble friend the Minister will say in reply, but I do hope she will be very positive.

[Baroness Kidron (CB)]

My Lords, I rise to add my voice to the praise for the noble Baroness, Lady Owen—me too—and to put on record my support. I believe the noble Baroness did such a detailed, forensic laying out of her amendments. I would just like to make a couple of points.

During the passage of the Online Safety Act, we had a lot of discussion about an ombudsman. It was very much resisted. At the same time—in the same time- frame as that Bill took place—I was an adviser to the Irish Government, who put in an ombudsman. I think we are missing something. It was a very big part of the previous discussion about chatbots and so on in an earlier group. I very firmly agree with what the noble Baroness said as she laid out her amendments: we really need a way of alerting the regulator to what is going on, and it is not adequate for the regulator to have only an emerging harms unit that is waiting for us to fill in a form, which is the current state of play. I leave that with the Minister as a problem that needs solving.