Crime and Policing Bill

Lord Strasburger Excerpts

2nd reading
Thursday 16th October 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Strasburger (LD) [V]]

My Lords, I declare my interest as chair of Big Brother Watch. I welcome the earlier comment by the noble Lord, Lord Herbert, that the non-crime hate incident regime is not fit for purpose. This Bill has much to recommend it, but four minutes is nowhere near enough to do it justice, so I will focus on just two concerning aspects.

Until recently, our country was an exemplar of how government and other institutions could be held to account by citizens through peaceful protest. However, in 2022, the previous Government gave us the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act, which handed senior police officers and Ministers powers to impose extensive constraints on protests. Then, in 2023, the Public Order Act further enhanced police powers to restrict and criminalise protest activity. As a result, in just two years, 712 protests in England and Wales were subject to police conditions, 95% of them in London.

Now it seems the Government want even more powers to restrict protests. Clause 124 will enable police to ban protests in the vicinity of a place of worship. Whatever “in the vicinity of” means, it will certainly include Parliament Square and most urban centres. Clause 118 will have a chilling effect on some people’s willingness to engage in protest. Furthermore, the Government are promising additional clauses to enable the police to ban repeating protests—which is, of course, most protests.

Protecting the right to protest is vital to maintaining a healthy, vibrant democracy where power is questioned and balanced by the collective will of citizens. The cumulative effect of more and more restrictions on protest is one of the reasons why our country is sliding down the world’s free speech league, and this trend needs to be reversed.

I turn to an astonishing omission from the Bill. The collection of DNA, how it is retained, examined and used as evidence, and its eventual destruction, are quite rightly controlled by several Acts of Parliament and detailed regulations, all overseen by a statutory regulator. However, when it comes to the relatively new facial recognition technology, none of these protections and none of this oversight exists—nothing at all. Facial recognition is far more intrusive than DNA; it is as if citizens are walking around the streets with a barcode on their foreheads that police can read from a distance to identify them. It drives a coach and horses through our time-honoured right—with limited exceptions—to withhold our identity from the police. When this technology is incorporated into this country’s vast network of CCTV cameras, as it surely will be, it will be possible to track us wherever we are, going about our lawful business. Since the technology was first used in south Wales in 2017, police forces have reluctantly had to cobble together their own rules and mark their own homework, falling foul of the courts in the process.

So we would assume that the new Government would seize the opportunity of a major Bill on policing to introduce the long-overdue statutory regulation of facial recognition technology. But if you thought that, you would be wrong. The Bill does nothing to urgently fill the black hole where the essential regulation should be—the black hole that is crushing our privacy. Instead, the Government are presenting a Bill that says nothing about facial recognition, other than in Clause 138, which seeks to make the technology even more intrusive by linking it to the DVLA database. This extraordinary regulatory vacuum must be filled by amendments during the passage of the Bill.

Crime and Policing Bill

Lord Strasburger Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 7th January 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Strasburger (LD)]

My Lords, I draw the Committee’s attention to my interest as chair of Big Brother Watch. I will speak about Amendments 369 and 371 in the name of my colleague and noble friend Lord Marks.

Protest is the lifeblood of any vibrant democracy, and in the United Kingdom it is one of the most powerful ways for ordinary citizens to make their voices heard. Our democratic system depends not only on elections but on the active participation of the people between elections. Protest is essential because it allows us to challenge decisions, hold leaders accountable and demand change when systems seem slow or unresponsive.

Throughout our history, protest has driven meaningful progress. Universal male suffrage in Britain was pushed forward by mass movements such as the Chartists and later reform campaigns which used strikes, mass meetings and demonstrations to pressure Parliament into extending the franchise and paying MPs so that working-class men could serve. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, that I imagine those were quite inconvenient to a few people. Women’s suffrage in the UK was won by the suffragettes only after decades of marches, processions, civil disobedience and hunger strikes, culminating in the Representation of the People Act.

Peaceful protest educates the public, sparks debate and creates the pressure necessary for reform. In a healthy democracy, disagreement is not a threat but a sign that citizens care deeply about their society. However, our right to protest is, as has already been said, under relentless attack. Through the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 and the Public Order Act 2023, the previous Government introduced multiple restrictions on our precious right to protest. Then last year, the current Government found a way to further suppress peaceful demonstrations by misusing terrorism legislation to stop protests. This led to 2,700 arrests of mostly elderly people who were protesting about what was happening in Gaza. We had the bizarre sight, week after week, of police arresting vicars and old ladies in Parliament Square when they posed no threat whatever to anyone.

[Lord Pannick (CB)]

Can I just point out to the noble Lord, if he will allow me to, that these people were not arrested for expressing a view about Gaza? They were arrested for supporting Palestine Action, which is a violent terrorist group.

[Lord Strasburger (LD)]

Not so far as I know.

It was absolutely farcical, but not very funny, when you consider that the hundreds of police officers involved had far more useful things that they could have been doing. But it seems even that was not enough for the Government. Through this Bill, they are attempting to introduce a raft of further constraints on the right of the British people to express themselves via peaceful street demonstrations.

The law surrounding protest is in a complete mess. Recent legislation has been knee-jerk and reactionary, leaving the legal landscape a complete muddle. Police often struggle to know how to police demonstrations properly, which usually leads to excessive heavy-handed policing and people being charged with all sorts of offences when they may not have been. This has also made the law extremely unpredictable: the mission creep of legislation and case law over recent years has meant that there is now a raft of serious criminal offences —that is, indictable offences—tried in the Crown Court that are no doubt adding to the unacceptable backlog in the courts. It is very easy for someone to attend a peaceful demonstration and inadvertently commit an offence or a more serious offence than they would have reasonably expected their conduct to amount to.

For example, a protester who temporarily blocks a road—as many do—would historically have been charged with wilful obstruction of the highway under Section 137 of the Highways Act. This was a summary-only offence, which used to have a maximum sentence of a fine, although this was increased to six months’ custody in the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022. Section 7 of the Public Order Act 2023 introduced a new offence of interfering with national infrastructure, which includes all A and B roads, with a maximum sentence of 12 months’ custody. Section 78 of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 also created a new statutory offence of public nuisance, which only requires the doing of an act that obstructs a public right. This is far wider than the old common-law offence that required the obstruction to be “significant”. The effect of all the above, as an illustration, is that someone who stands or sits in a road, as part of a protest, could be charged with any of the four offences that I have just mentioned. There is no real consistency in the charging decisions between different police forces or different CPS regions, meaning that people are often charged with very serious offences for minor conduct. There have even been cases in which different people are charged with different offences arising from identical conduct at the same protest.

The various laws about protest overlap with each other and have not been developed as a coherent framework. Protesters and police are unsure about which laws apply in particular situations. This results in inadvertently heavy-handed policing, inconsistent prosecution, miscarriages of justice, waste of the public purse and clogging up the courts. More importantly, it results in a cumulative chilling effect on our democracy and a stifling of debate. It is high time that the disorganised and disjointed framework of statutes covering the democratically vital activity of protest is subject to a root-and-branch review—one that is truly independent and thorough—and that is precisely what Amendment 371 calls for.

However, since Amendment 371 was laid, the Government have announced a review of public order and hate crime legislation. It is being chaired by the noble Lord, Macdonald of River Glaven, for whom I have the greatest respect. But the terms of reference for the review seem to be focused rather narrowly and do not appear to cover the matters I have just raised—namely, the unco-ordinated and overlapping legislation on protests. I doubt that, in the short period until the review reports next month, the noble Lord will be able to examine the different approaches to arresting and charging between the different police forces. Perhaps the Minister can reassure the Committee that the current review will be broad enough to cover all the shortfalls in the existing regime I have outlined. If he cannot give that assurance, Amendment 371 will need to be passed on Report to generate the full review that is needed.

Amendment 369, if passed, will hopefully prevent future Governments cumulatively eroding protest rights, as has been customary for the last few years.

[Lord Hogan-Howe (CB)]

My Lords, I would vote against Amendment 371. It is a difficult area and there has to be balance. The noble Lord, Lord Pannick, put it very well. We get more disruption from Remembrance Day every year across the country because roads are closed and people cannot do what they want to do. There are many times in society when we do things which cause disruption to others, but, if pushed, I would be more towards the position of the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, than I would Amendment 371.

I have three points to make on Amendment 371. First, as the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, said, it duplicates what is already in the convention rights, and I cannot see the purpose of that. Secondly, it says nothing about the basic dilemma, which the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, demonstrated very well: most protest is intended to cause disruption in order to attract attention. People say that causing disruption is a right in a democracy, and I agree with that entirely, but I have to say that it is one of the most inefficient mechanisms for getting an argument over. A guy shouted about Brexit outside my office for about three years. All I could hear was one word about not liking Brexit; I never heard what his argument was. I am not sure a protest ever does any of that. It just attracts attention.

Disruption does cause that attention, but making Amendment 371 the only reason why the police would have to decide whether a march went ahead and if conditions were to be imposed would not address that basic dilemma. Nor would it address the dilemma that mass disobedience has, as the noble Lord, Lord Strasburger, said, achieved far more in the way of democratic change than many forms of parliamentary intervention. It is a mechanism, but a balance has to be struck. Individuals have a right, in addition to the police allowing them to do so, to make sure they can get to a hospital or that a fire engine can get through when it needs to, rather than simply when someone concludes that they will let it through.

Thirdly, the criminal law is the wrong place to state convention rights. If you are going to state them, there may be a place in law, but the criminal law is for declaring offences. If you want to start declaring rights, you might want to start declaring human responsibilities. The start of the Human Rights Act talks about human responsibilities but never got around to providing any enforcement mechanisms. All those things we ought to have as duties towards each other are articulated nowhere. Protestors can have their right to protest, but they do not have to worry about the rights of the poor child who cannot get to school or people who are trying to attend a place of worship. They have rights too, but the protestor apparently does not have to balance their rights when considering exercising his or her own.

My final point is a direct challenge to the noble Lord, Lord Marks, who I really like and respect, and the noble Lord, Lord Strasburger. The noble Lord, Lord Pannick, was quite right: it is quite unfair to criticise the police for arresting people at marches who are supporting a proscribed terrorist organisation. You may not like the proscription, but this place passed the legislation. We also passed legislation saying that it is an offence to support a proscribed organisation. Therefore, if you start waving banners about and saying you support these organisations, there will be a consequence. I do not see how it is okay to argue that the police, in taking action on the laws we passed, are doing something wrong. You may not agree with the law, but it is not right to blame the police for exercising it. That is a confusion that has arisen over the last few months, and it is one we can put right.

[Lord Strasburger (LD)]

The objection was to the way that terrorism legislation was misused to, in effect, suppress protest. It was misused by combining as a group Palestine Action with two other desperately terrorist organisations, so that MPs and Peers had no opportunity to decide on one and not the other two. It was a bit of a fix.

[Lord Hogan-Howe (CB)]

I understand the point from the noble Lord, Lord Strasburger. My only challenge is that I do not think it is fair or accurate to blame the police for that confusion. I would stand up for the police, of course, but it would be better of this place to acknowledge that dilemma without blaming them for exercising the powers that we gave them.

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[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

I hope it does not surprise noble Lords if I confess that I have been on the odd protest in my time. I have quite enjoyed the freedom to have a protest. I have protested against the apartheid Government, against the National Front and, if the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, will bear with me, against his Government when he served as a Minister.

The right to peaceful protest is an important part of our democratic society. It is a long-standing tradition in this country that people are free to gather together and demonstrate their views, provided they do so within the law. This Government are committed to protecting and preserving that right. I hope that that gives some succour to the noble Lords, Lord Marks and Lord Strasburger, the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, and indeed others who have spoken in favour.

The noble Lord, Lord Marks, set out his case for the two amendments on public order. Amendment 369 seeks to introduce a statutory right to protest into the Public Order Act 1986, along with a duty on public authorities to respect, protect and facilitate that right. I understand the concerns that he has put and I accept and appreciate those concerns, but, as has been said, not least by the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, these protections are already firmly established in UK law. Public authorities are required under the Human Rights Act 1998, passed by a previous Government in which I was pleased to serve, to act in accordance with the rights to freedom of expression and assembly set out in Articles 10 and 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights.

However, as has been said by a number of noble Lords today, including the noble Lords, Lord Hogan-Howe and Lord Davies of Gower, and as set out in the amendments from the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, these rights are qualified. This point is illustrated by Amendments 369ZA and 369ZB, put forward by the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra. On that qualification, I am not going to get into the argument between the noble Lords, Lord Marks and Lord Blencathra, but for the noble Baroness, Lady Fox of Buckley, and others who have argued for the amendment today, the key point is that that right, as has been said, can be restricted only where restriction is lawful, proportionate and justified. The right to peaceful protest is also recognised under the common law and creating a separate statutory provision risks duplicating existing protections, which could lead to confusion in how the law is interpreted and applied. It might also complicate operational policing without offering any additional legal safeguards.

I have to say that I agreed with the noble Lord, Lord Goodman of Wycombe, that there is a fundamental right to protest. But I respectfully submit, as I think he argued in his contribution, that the amendment would not strengthen that commitments and might indeed introduce uncertainty into the law. That is a very valid and important point, because existing legislation under the Human Rights Act 1998 and Articles 10 and 11, qualified rights under the European Convention on Human Rights, set out the issues that again were ably outlined by the noble Lord, Lord Pannick. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Marks, that the right to protest exists: it is one that I cherish and have exercised myself and may even exercise myself again in the future, who knows? It is an important right, but his amendment would cause confusion and water down the ability to provide that security of protest under the existing legislation. Therefore, I ask him ultimately to not press it further.

I turn to Amendment 371, which would require the Government to commission an independent review of the existing protest legislation within 12 months of the Bill receiving Royal Assent. The noble Lord, Lord Strasburger, said that the Government called the review post the tabling of this amendment. We proposed the review on 5 October last year. The Home Secretary announced an independent review of public order and hate crime legislation on 5 October last year and I suggest that Amendment 371, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Marks, would essentially be what the Government have already ordered and would, if agreed today, negate the purpose of what the Government have already ordered and extend the review that we have already ordered still further by establishing that review in law.

We announced the review on 5 October because of the very issues that all noble Lords have mentioned about balancing the right to peaceful protest and the right to enjoy non-harassment, the right to potentially go to a synagogue, or the right to go about your daily business. Those issues are extremely important, which is why the Home Secretary has appointed the noble Lord, Lord Macdonald of River Glaven, KC, a former Director of Public Prosecutions, as one of the people to undertake the review. His independence and expertise will ensure a rigorous, impartial review. He will have the help and support of former assistant chief constable Owen Weatherill, who brings operational experience from his role with the National Police Chiefs’ Council as lead for civil contingencies and national mobilisation. That independent review reaffirms this Government’s ongoing commitment to keep public order legislation under review.

[Lord Strasburger (LD)]

I am sorry to intervene so late. Could the Minister please confirm whether the review led by the noble Lord, Lord Macdonald, will consider the issue I was raising, which was the incoherence and overlap between the various pieces of legislation on protest?

Crime and Policing Bill

Lord Strasburger Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 13th January 2026 Lords Chamber

That was probably what I objected most to about the remarks from the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra: the suggestion that “may” cause a problem is targeted and that allowing blanket designation by the police is targeted. It is the opposite of targeted; it is blanket. It chills freedom of expression, which experts say is already being chilled in this country. So I suggest that people take the comments of the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, very seriously indeed.

[Lord Strasburger (LD)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti. I agree with everything that she said. I start by reminding the Committee that I have an interest as chair of Big Brother Watch. In this group we are considering Clauses 118, 119 and 120, which are not only draconian in their effect but very poorly drafted. In the course of my speech, I have five questions about these clauses for the Minister, which I ask him to respond to when he replies.

Clauses 118, 119 and 120 create a new offence of concealing identity at protests. However, as I will demonstrate, and as has already been said, it is vital that individuals are able to preserve their anonymity at protests. Other clauses in the Bill promote the use of highly intrusive and totally unregulated facial recognition technology at protests. We are currently in the Wild West with this mass surveillance technology. It is being used by law enforcement and private firms without any permission, regulation or oversight from Parliament. The Bill contains the first mention of the phrase “facial recognition” in any legislation, yet it does nothing to control or monitor its use. Perhaps the Minister could explain why the Bill fails again to regulate and control this mass surveillance technology?

Authorising the use of this technology, as the Bill does, without first controlling how it is used, puts the cart way ahead of the horse. The combination of this mass surveillance and prohibiting face coverings at protests, as these clauses do, has a seriously chilling effect on people’s willingness to participate in demonstrations.

There are many categories of law-abiding citizens—we heard some from the noble Lord, Lord Pannick—who may prefer to conceal their identity at protests for entirely legitimate reasons, such as those protesting against a hostile foreign state who fear retribution for themselves or their families; those who prefer that their employer does not know their political views; those who criticise their own religious or cultural communities; survivors of sexual violence and harassment, who need to stay below the radar; or those who simply do not wish to be the subject of mass surveillance by totally unregulated facial recognition technology. Anonymity is an important enabler of freedom of assembly and association. It allows participants a certain level of protection against authorities singling out or identifying specific individuals.

There are serious problems with the drafting of Clauses 118 to 120. Clause 119 does not require that a person knows they are in a designated area for them to commit an offence. This compares unfavourably with Sections 12(5A) and 14(5A) of the Public Order Act 1986, which also imposes conditions on processions and assemblies. That Act includes the requirement that, at the time of the offence,

“the person knows or ought to know that the condition has been imposed”.

There is no such requirement in Clause 119, so a protestor who knows nothing of such a designation could well be arrested and prosecuted. Can the Minister explain why that is right?

Worse still, Clause 118 appears to reverse the burden of proof, which means a defendant would have the burden—presumably on the balance of probabilities—to prove that they were wearing a face covering for health or other reasons. Why is this not the criminal burden or standard? This risks people being wrongly convicted on the lower standard of proof, which is especially concerning as the offence has such wide application. Furthermore, anyone wearing a Covid-style mask in the locality of a protest, even if they are there for a completely different reason, could be caught by this offence and would not have the protections of the normal burden and standard of proof at trial. Can the Minister explain why that is the case?

Clause 119 has no limit on the types of offences that would give rise to the power to make the designation. That means that the designation could be made disproportionately, such as on the basis of only minor offences. In addition, there is no protection from the offence itself and its designation being circular, which means that an officer may justify a designation against concealing identity on the basis that they believe the offence of concealing one’s identity may be committed.

Another problem with these clauses is that the maximum sentence of one month’s custody is the same as for the offence of refusing to remove a face covering under Section 60AA of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994. I think the Committee will agree that the conduct element of the Section 60AA offence—refusing to comply with the lawful direction of a police officer—is significantly more serious and by definition implies awareness of the condition, unlike the new offence. It seems disproportionate that the new offence would attract the same sentence. Does the Minister agree?

Clauses 118 to 120 are defective in many important ways. In any case, even if they were better written, they would still unreasonably and unnecessarily inhibit and have a chilling effect on lawful protests. For all these reasons, they must be strongly opposed and removed from the Bill.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

I will say two things to the noble Lord in our defence. His presumption assumes that a police force in five years’ time will be dominated by right-wing Conservatives, Reform members or Socialist Workers Party members, who instruct the police force to instigate that designated area. I happen to believe— I am sure the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, would agree with me—that the police are independent of government, they have integrity, and they determine policies based on legislation.

This does not give a police officer the power to be a political commissar, whether of right or left, but gives the police the power to say, “There is potentially criminal action in this designated space; therefore, in this space we need to ensure that we can remove face coverings”. If there is another Government who he fears in the future—all of us may fear different Governments of different authoritarian natures—I guess that they will have won an election and will have 400 or so Members of Parliament, and they can pass what the heck they like anyway.

Therefore, there is an argument to say to the noble Lord that his fears are undermining the integrity and the independence of the police force, and all I am doing in this legislation is giving the police the power to take action should they, as the police, determine that they want to do it.

The noble Lord, Lord Strasburger, mentioned that it does not require someone to know they are committing the offence. Clause 119(2) requires the police to notify in writing that the designation has been made, the nature of the offence, the locality to which the designation applies and the period for which it applies. So it could even be a designation in writing for a limited time and in a limited place, but it is important that we do so.

A number of noble colleagues have raised religious and medical exemptions and further loopholes. The purpose of the new offence is, as I have said, to prevent protesters concealing their identity in order to avoid conviction for criminal activity in the designated place.

The measure does provide a reverse legal burden on the defendant to prove, on the balance of probabilities, that they wore a face covering for work purposes, or religious or health reasons. But, as with any charge, that is a defence in the Bill, in the future Act, in law, that allows people to say, “I am a paint sprayer”, or that they were seeking to prevent illness that might cause further illness if they did not wear a mask, or that, potentially, they had a religious reason to wear a mask. That is a defence in the event of any charge being made. But, again, it is a defence at the time when the police officer might well say to an individual that that mask needs to be removed.

[Lord Strasburger (LD)]

Be that as it may, what does the Minister say to people in all the other categories which are not mentioned in the clause as exemptions? People who have work reasons or marital reasons or whatever are not mentioned as exemptions; what do you say to them about attending protests? Are they just to avoid protests on that basis?

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

There are designations that we have set down in law and there are designations that are not set down in law, but the measure is a proportionate one that the police can undertake, and in the event of an individual knowing that that is happening, they can accordingly take their own measures and decide to either protest or not protest. That does not curtail the right to protest.

The measure does not ban face coverings at every protest. An individual can go to a protest; they can wear a face covering for the reasons that the noble Lord, Lord Strasburger, has outlined, and only if the police believe that criminal actions could be taken is that area designated. Then it is a matter for the individual, and I believe a majority of peaceful, legitimate protests will not be captured by this legislation, and the police must take great—

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

The exemptions in the Bill are very clear, and I have already talked about those that relate to religious, work or health reasons. Police officers will make a judgment on those issues on the ground and, as in the experience of the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, they have a significantly difficult job to do at any demonstration.

If I can give any comfort to the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, and the noble and learned Baroness, all the offences under the Bill are currently under review by the noble Lord, Lord Macdonald of River Glaven, as part of the review that he is undertaking, to be completed by spring 2026. I have no doubt that he will pay close attention to the comments that are made in this debate and make an assessment to government about whether the points made by noble Lords are ones that he should reflect on. I would say to the Committee—

[Lord Strasburger (LD)]

I am astonished by that statement. Is the Minister saying that we should knowingly pass faulty legislation because we know that the noble Lord, Lord Macdonald, will pick it up and sort it out later?

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Butler-Sloss (CB)]

My Lords, some months ago I was trying to get to Oxford Street and at Oxford Circus a large number of people were sitting on the ground, making it impossible for either end of Regent Street or Oxford Street to move. I believe they were there for several days. All I can say is that, as an ordinary member of the public, I found it extremely irritating, so I am very sympathetic to Amendment 370.

[Lord Strasburger (LD)]

My Lords, I will comment briefly on Amendments 382A and 382C. Amendment 382A amounts to the banning of protests in almost any circumstances at the behest of the police. Proposed new subsection (2)(1B) is particularly guilty in this respect, allowing, as it does, for a protest to be banned because, in the opinion of a chief officer of police, it would place undue demands on the police. But the police, as a public authority, have a duty to facilitate protests, not prevent them. Of course, that duty to facilitate protests has resource implications for the police, sometimes serious implications. That means that the police must be provided with adequate resources by the Government, but it does not mean that, as an alternative to proper resourcing, financial corners should be cut by the Government, thus making it impossible for the police to carry out their duty to facilitate protest. But that is precisely what Amendment 382A would do. It says that protests should be banned because the police are underresourced. It would be better if it said that the police must be sufficiently resourced to allow them to facilitate protest. It does not, and for that reason Amendment 382A must be opposed.

Amendment 382C seeks to extend from six days to 28 the notice period for informing the police of a demonstration, but many demonstrations are spontaneous or are, by necessity, organised at short notice. In any case, the amendment would appear to not achieve anything, because this section of the Bill already contains a provision for late notice as soon as practicable, so there is nothing to be gained by increasing the formal notice period, unless the goal is to make it ever more difficult to organise a protest. Amendment 382C should also be opposed.

[Lord Walney (CB)]

I will briefly comment on the issue of notice periods for protests, because I have sympathy for the desire to create an ordered system where there is more notice for protests, although I struggle to see how it could be practical in some ways. But the main issue that I would like the Government to reflect on is the now fairly routine practice of the police disregarding the fact that many protests do not meet the current seven days. They may have their reasons, but they take a view to not have any form of prosecution for that. Even if they were to prosecute, the fines are relatively low and therefore not a deterrent. So any change in the notice period needs to be wrapped in with looking at the issue that this law is simply not being enforced at all officially at the moment.

Crime and Policing Bill

Lord Strasburger Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 13th January 2026 Lords Chamber

Whatever my misgivings on the accountability of the Parades Commission, those principles could be applied by a senior police officer or, indeed, the Secretary of State. If we are looking at principles to think about between Committee and Report, we might think about this. I think the impact on communities is already operating in Northern Ireland. As I say, I make no mention of my support for the Parades Commission, but I think it is important to look at the legislation that set it up and the principles that are there, because I think the Government amendment and Amendment 380 continue the piece of work that has happened in Northern Ireland, which is instructive about how this can work. I hope that is helpful in terms of the amendments that have been put forward. I very much support the Government’s amendment and Amendment 380 in my name.

[Lord Strasburger (LD)]

I shall speak to Amendments 372 and 380 and various other amendments in this group. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Hanson, for his kind remarks at the end of the previous group, but I fear that, after this speech, normal service might be resumed. There are many issues to cover in this group, and I will try to be as brief as possible.

Government Amendment 372 amends the Public Order Act 1986 to impose a duty on the police to consider so-called “cumulative disruption” caused by repeated protests in a given area. The amendment gives the police unprecedented powers to restrict or prohibit protests that are expected to be too disruptive. This amendment represents a grievous attack on the right to protest, which is vital to our democracy, and has many unintended consequences, as I shall outline. The overly broad framework would empower the police routinely to curb freedom of expression and assembly as exercised through peaceful protest. It would significantly expand the definition of serious disruption to include so-called cumulative disruption caused by repeated protests in an area. This would allow the police pre-emptively to prohibit peaceful demonstrations if, in their opinion, an area has been the site of too many protests, which is an extremely broad discretion.

Until this debate started, I had no idea that this provision is aimed at frequent protests outside synagogues. The amendment says nothing to that effect, and it has very broad application to all protests, so I shall carry on on that basis.

Presumably it would apply if the protests in question were organised by different groups who advocate for different causes. This could create a first-come, first-served version of free speech, where areas are given what could be described as a protest allowance at the whim of the local constabulary. The police would be within their rights to prohibit peaceful assemblies once that allowance had been used up. This opens up the concerning opportunity for groups of citizens to censor their political opponents by using up an area’s protest allowance before their opponents have had a chance to protest themselves.

Furthermore, as has already been said this evening, the amendment is silent on what constitutes an area. We do not know whether this power would permit the police to move a demonstration to a different part of a square, to another part of town or even to a difficult-to-reach rural area, resulting in decreased attendance and visibility. Perhaps the Minister could enlighten the Committee on that.

Similarly, Amendment 372 does not specify within what timeframe disruption would have to be repeated to be considered cumulative. This is another question for the Minister. The suggestion that so-called cumulative disruption should be taken into account in considering conditions for restrictions or prohibitions of protests is also disproportionate. Will the Minister please explain why one person’s right to protest should be extinguished simply because somebody else has already protested in the same location about the same cause, or about a different cause?

What about causes that evolve or develop over time, legitimately calling for further protests to coincide with the next stage of public debate? The courts have also repeatedly concluded that a relevant consideration regarding the proportionality of Article 10 and Article 11 rights is whether the views giving rise to the protest relate to “very important issues”. That would de facto be more likely to apply to causes that have led to repeated protests than it would to causes that have given rise to a single protest. This provision, if enacted, would give the police an additional power to ban or curtail protests on the most important causes: the ones most worthy of protest and the ones most protected by the courts. Will the Minister please explain if that is the intention?

Amendment 372 is poorly drafted. It is far too broad to prevent the problems that I have described, and it gives the police far too much power to curtail or prevent peaceful protest on the most important matters. Government Amendments 372 and 380 should both be withdrawn or, if necessary, voted down.

Government Amendment 381 would create a new offence about protesting outside the homes of public officeholders. This may be sensible but should it not have a reasonable conduct defence, as appears in other harassment-type offences, to cover, for example, situations where a neighbour speaks amicably to a politician about a local issue as they are leaving home? Would it be proportionate to criminalise that perfectly normal interaction? That is another question for the Minister.

On Clause 124, which caused so much heat rather than light earlier, it goes without saying that worshipers must be free to access their places of worship, be they synagogues, mosques, churches, or whatever, and worshippers must be able to do so without intimidation or threats or fear of the same. But those rights are already fully protected by the Public Order Act 1986. Under the Act, conditions may be imposed on protests by senior police officers if they believe that the procession may result in serious public disorder or where the purpose of the organisers is the intimidation of others. Section 12(2)(a) of the Act specifically includes places of worship, so Clause 124 may be completely unnecessary.

The amendments tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Blower, and the noble Lord, Lord Hain, seek to clarify what is meant by “in the vicinity”. They are all well and good, but just about every place where people demonstrate is close to a church or another place of worship. For example, Parliament Square and Trafalgar Square would fail the test. Clause 124 could enable the police to ban or restrict just about any protest on that basis. That is probably not the intention, but it would be the result.

Amendment 378A in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Walney, would allow restrictions to be placed on protest or assembly if they take place in the vicinity of places used for “democratic decision-making”. Given the high standing of the noble Lord, Lord Walney, in this House, I find this idea rather strange. It would restrict protest close to Parliament, which is where the people who make the decisions, the people the protesters most want to influence, are to be found. The whole point of protest is to engage in a democratic process and seek to persuade decision-makers to a particular point of view. If anything, protest is more proportionate where it takes place in the vicinity of decision-makers. There is no sensible argument for Amendment 378A; it should be rejected.

Turning briefly to Amendment 370A, I understand that the idea of designating as an “extreme criminal protest group” is something that the noble Lord, Lord Walney, has been advocating for a long time. I oppose it because it is an oppressive and draconian restriction on the right to protest, in essence banning specific protest organisations. It is, of course, right that the law steps in to criminalise unlawful protest activity, but this is already done frequently on an individual basis. Criminalising association with others who share the same cause is wholly disproportionate; not everyone associated with a group shares any criminal intent. Designation or restriction of ECPGs will serve only to criminalise other law-abiding citizens because of their shared, but reasonably held, political views about a particular cause.

Taken as a whole, this group of amendments extends the regressive and anti-democratic tendencies of the previous Government—and now this one—to suppress or ban legitimate and peaceful protests in whatever way they can. Substantial pruning is required to get the Bill into a state where it no longer threatens our cherished democratic processes. Peaceful protest educates the public. It sparks debate. It creates the pressure needed for reform. In a healthy democracy, disagreement is not a threat but a sign that citizens care deeply about their society.

[Baroness O’Grady of Upper Holloway (Lab)]

My Lords, I support what I understand to be probing amendments in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Blower, but first I want to seek clarification from my noble friend the Minister on government Amendment 372. I do so from the perspective of someone who had direct responsibility for organising mass demonstrations when I was at the TUC, which now could be caught in this net.

First, can the Minister clarify the definition of disruption and whether that applies to conduct or location, and the safeguards that will be applied under “cumulative impact” to ensure that any restrictions and conditions imposed by the police are proportionate? As cumulative impact, as we have heard, will be applied collectively to demonstration organisers, this could lead to a rationing of protests in a particular area, presumably even when they are entirely peaceful. In practical terms, can the Minister explain how such a ration would be distributed between, as we have heard, potentially very different organisations with very different aims? Who will decide and on what basis or are organisations supposed to figure it out for themselves?

In central London, there are really only one or two routes, which have viable assembly points at the start and finish, available for very large demonstrations. How realistic is it for the Home Office to suggest, as it did in a press release, that the police could instruct organisers of national demonstrations to divert their demonstrations to alternative routes when in central London there may be none? Crucially, can the Minister tell us whether consideration of the cumulative impact of demonstrations will be weighed against the public’s right to protest in response to the cumulative impact of real-world events? For example, hundreds of thousands of people turned out for successive TUC marches through the 2010s—I recognise that not everybody here may have joined them, but plenty did—in response to the mounting harm that austerity and public service cuts were inflicting on workers, families and communities.

More recently, hundreds of thousands have joined demonstrations in solidarity with the Palestinian people. Again, the frequency of these very large protests is not happening in a vacuum, nor is it divorced from the strength of public feeling. While the International Court of Justice may not reach its verdict on genocide in Gaza for some years, much of the UK population, according to a YouGov poll published in June last year, has already made its mind up. Have the Government really considered the societal impact of making expression through peaceful protest much more difficult?

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In this area the noble Lord, Lord Strasburger, asked about safeguards around this power. It is a defence for a person charged under these powers to show that they were not aware that the premises were used by a public officeholder as a dwelling. If sufficient evidence is raised, the prosecution must prove otherwise beyond reasonable doubt. We consider this a necessary safeguard to prevent instances where individuals might unknowingly find themselves in breach of the law, for instance where someone is protesting about an issue unrelated to the public officeholder outside an apartment block where that officeholder lives. The noble Lord talked about reasonable behaviour, but I would say that reasonable behaviour is protesting outside a constituency office or a town hall, not outside somebody’s private home.

[Lord Strasburger (LD)]

I thank the noble Lord for taking the intervention, but my question was not about protest. It was more that, if an officeholder and a constituent met outside and had a conversation, I did not want that sort of interaction to be criminalised—not a protest, just a conversation.

[Lord Katz (Lab)]

That is a helpful clarification. Ultimately, there are still the basic safeguard backstops of the CPS decisions to prosecute and police decisions to make arrests. There will always be discretion and flexibility, and one might posit that the CPS would not risk a prosecution where it was clear that there was not necessarily any offence caused. If the officeholder is engaged in mutual conversation, there would be no wish to see a charge brought, so I hope that addresses the concern the noble Lord raises.

Amendment 382 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Davies, would seek to strike out the new offence from the government amendment. The new offence gives the police clearer and broader powers to act swiftly to deal with protests outside the homes of public officeholders. It is right that we protect them and their families from the harassment, alarm and distress that such protests inevitably give rise to. We have purposefully limited the offence to the homes of public officeholders; as such, it would remain open to anyone to protest outside an MP’s constituency office, a council chamber, a town hall or indeed the Houses of Parliament.

I hope that I have been able to persuade the noble Lord, Lord Davies, of the need for the new offence in subsection (4) of the proposed new clause in Amendment 381. The new offence is targeted and proportionate in defending those dedicated public servants, in this House and elsewhere, who put themselves forward to take part in our democratic institutions. They should be able to do this without a fear of being harassed in their own home. If, however, the noble Lord continues to have concerns about Amendment 381 then we will not move it in Committee, but he should be clear that we will bring the amendment back on Report.

Let me now respond to the other non-government amendments in this group. Clause 124 strengthens police powers to impose conditions on protests in the vicinity of places of worship. I put it to noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, that we have seen a clear need for this measure as a result of the protests we have seen following the conflict in Gaza, and indeed thugs targeting mosques as part of the disorder in the summer of 2024.

Frequent large-scale protests since 7 October 2023 across the UK have significantly impacted the Jewish community, particularly in London and in Manchester, Leeds and other cities. We have heard reports of fear and disrupted access to places of worship. To reassure the noble Lord, Lord Strasburger, it is absolutely clear that this is related to the impact that we have seen in the wake of the protests arising from the conflict in Gaza, in the wake of 7 October 2023. I am slightly surprised that that was news to him, but fair enough.

Current police powers under the 1986 Act are insufficient to address the intimidating effects of protests that are currently being experienced by religious communities. Let me be clear to the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, that this is the lived experience of the Jewish community over the past two years. It is not about assuming the potential of harassment; it is about assessing and preventing the actual impact of harassment. Again, I commend the clarity and force of the argument of the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, who spoke forcefully about the fact that it is about intention and impact. I am also grateful to him for raising the rationale for the Court of Appeal ruling out the judgment on cumulative impact in the previous secondary legislation. It had nothing to do with the cumulative nature of those regulations.

The noble Baroness, Lady Jones, touched on a number of things. We will probably not get to it tonight, but we are talking about facial recognition later in Committee, and indeed we have a consultation on it. We are not ignoring that, and we can attend to it. A number of Peers mentioned Palestine Action and the proscription. I am not going to relitigate discussions that we have had. My noble friend Lord Hanson has dealt with that very well on a number of occasions, but I will just add my tuppence-worth. You can very easily support the cause of Palestinian statehood and freedom and criticise the Israeli Government by supporting a range of organisations that does not include one such as Palestine Action, which has been proven to organise and behave like a terrorist organisation. I will say no more on that.

I fully appreciate the intent behind Amendments 371A to 371F, tabled by my noble friend Lady Blower, but the law must be clear to all concerned. I put it to my noble friend that this is already the case. The term “in the vicinity” is already used in Sections 12 and 14 of the Public Order Act 1986 and is clearly understood in that context. Substituting reference to

“within 50 metres from the outer perimeter”

of a place of worship could be unduly restrictive.

Moreover, the power to impose conditions purposefully applies regardless of whether the organisers of the protest intended for the protest to have that effect. What matters is the impact of the protest on worshippers, not the intentions of the protesters. There is a question that arises from the formulation that my noble friend Lady Blower uses in her amendment. If you are using a place of worship but not necessarily for the act of worship—say, you are taking your child to a Sunday school or to a youth club at your synagogue, your mosque or your gurdwara—would that be covered by her amendment? But that may be dancing on the head of a pin slightly.

The question from the noble Lord, Lord Marks, of harm having to occur for the offence to have taken place and the formulation of the wording gets the cart before the horse. He saying that harm has to occur for the offence to have been caused. I say that this is about preventing harm and harassment being caused in the first place.

The noble Lords, Lord Davies of Gower and Lord Walney, and my noble friend Lord Mendelsohn have put forward various other new public order-related proposals. The noble Lord, Lord Walney, seeks to give effect to various recommendations contained in the report Protecting our Democracy from Coercion, which he submitted to the previous Administration. Of course, I pay tribute to his long-standing work in this area on political violence and extremism.

I do not propose to get too far into the detail of these particular amendments, given that the Government have commissioned a review of public order legislation led by the noble Lord, Lord Macdonald of River Glaven. It seems like hours ago—actually, it was hours ago—that he showed perspicacity in guessing that I might pray this in aid. His review will publish its findings in the spring, and it is right that we wait for the outcome of the review before bringing forward further public order legislation.

On the cumulative impact proposals that we are adding to the Bill, the Government consider the need, as demonstrated by recent events, to impose a duty on the police to take into account the impact of cumulative disruption. Because we have had these repeated protests that have left communities, particularly religious communities, feeling unsafe and intimidated, the legislation is an important step in ensuring that everyone feels safe in this country, while protecting the right to protest. This is a first step, but we will of course await the words of the noble Lord, Lord Macdonald, in the spring to see how we might develop these issues further.

Crime and Policing Bill

Lord Strasburger Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 15th January 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

My Lords, I rise to oppose Amendment 379 and support most of Amendment 471, inadequate though it is. My views may not be the same as those of my noble friends on the Front Bench, of course. We all value the right to protest, but rights are not a shield for criminality. The Government and Policing Ministers have been very clear that live facial recognition is being developed and deployed as a targeted, intelligence-led tool to identify known or wanted individuals or criminals on watch lists. It is not a blanket surveillance tool of the public. The Home Office has opened a consultation and asked for stronger statutory rules and oversight precisely to ensure proportionate lawful use.

Amendment 379 would in effect tie the hands of senior officers at the very moment when targeted identification can prevent or stop serious crime. If a protest contains people who are wanted for violent offences, sexual offences or other serious crimes, the ability to identify them quickly and safely is not an abstract technicality; it is how we protect victims and uphold the rule of law. To say that demonstrations are somehow sacrosanct and must be free from tools that help catch criminals is to place form above substance. That is not to dismiss legitimate concerns about privacy and bias. We should legislate a clear statutory framework, independent oversight and robust safeguards, and I know that the Government are consulting on exactly that path.

I will want to see strong action to correct mistakes and address suggestions that it cannot tell the difference in some ethnic groups. That has to be remedied if that allegation is true. But the right response is to legislate proportionate limits and accountability, not to pre-emptively ban a narrowly targeted operational capability at protests and thereby risk letting wanted suspects slip away. For those reasons, I urge the Committee to reject Amendment 379 and instead press the Government to bring forward the statutory code and independent oversight that the public rightly expect.

Amendment 471 is a different kettle of fish—and possibly “off” fish as well. The amendment is far too liberal and fails to protect the public from out-of-control public authorities. I will explain why. As a person relieved of ministerial duties in 1997, I found myself a rather bored Back-Bencher on the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000—the famous RIPA. The Minister at the time—I think it was Alun Michael—was waxing lyrical about how it would tackle serious crime, terrorism and paedophiles. He mentioned how it would help the police, the National Crime Agency—or whatever it was called then—MI5, MI6, HMRC and a couple of other big national government departments.

We were all in agreement that it was a jolly good thing for these agencies to have that power. Then something the Minister said prompted me to table a Question on what other public bodies could use RIPA powers, and we were shocked to discover that there were actually 32, including at that time something called the egg inspectorate of MAFF, responsible for enforcing the little lion mark on eggs. Schedule 1, listing the public authorities with phone-tapping powers, has expanded a bit since those days, and it now numbers 79. However, that is not the correct number because one of the 79 entries says “every local authority”, so we can add another 317 principal local authorities to that list. I think “every government department” covers all the agencies and arm’s-length bodies under their command, so they also have access to RIPA. In other words, a worthy proposal to let some key government agencies have power to snoop on our mobile phones to detect serious crime, terrorism or paedophilia has now become available, to some extent, to hundreds and possibly thousands of public bodies.

The relevance of this is that if we agree that facial recognition technology can be extended beyond the police, immigration, the National Crime Agency, the security services and possibly a few other big government departments that are concerned with organised crime, people trafficking and immigration, I believe our civil liberties will be at stake if local authorities and some others get to use it as well. If local authorities get the power of facial recognition, I am certain that they will abuse it. A Scottish council uses RIPA to monitor dog barking. Allerdale district council, next to me in Cumbria, used it to catch someone feeding pigeons. Of course it would be brilliant, in my opinion, to catch all those carrying out anti-social behaviour, such as riding dangerously on the pavement with their bikes, not picking up dog mess or generally causing a disturbance. But that is why I think this amendment does not go far enough.

We do not need codes of practice and safeguards—we need a complete ban on all other public authorities using it until it has been tried and tested by the police and we are satisfied that it does not cause false positives and is operationally secure. Then, if it is ever extended to other public authorities, it must be solely, as proposed new subsection (1)(a) says,

“used for the purpose of preventing, detecting, or investigating serious crimes as defined under the Serious Crime Act 2007”.

If we do not have these protections, local councils will end up checking our recycling, what library books we take out and what shops and pubs we use, and will justify it by saying it will help them deliver a better spatial strategy or design services to user patterns.

I look forward to the Liberals going back to their original roots as real liberals and bringing forward a better amendment that will protect our liberties.

[Lord Strasburger (LD)]

My Lords, I rise to support Amendment 379, to which I have added my name, and to very strongly support it. But before I do, I hope the Committee will forgive me if I digress very briefly to tidy up a matter that arose in Committee on Tuesday. I made the point that the police have the duty to facilitate protest rather than prevent it, and the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, intervened to ask me where he might find a justification for that statement. Well, I have good news. I have here the National Police Chiefs’ Council’s protest operational advice document, and on page 10, under the heading “Role of the police”, it says that authorised professional practice

“identifies two duties associated with the policing of protest. Broadly these require that the police must … not prevent, hinder or restrict peaceful assembly … in certain circumstances, take reasonable steps to protect those who want to exercise their rights peacefully. Taken together, these duties (the first a negative duty, the second a positive one) are often described as an obligation to facilitate the exercise of the freedoms of assembly and expression”.

I also have here a very handy flow chart entitled “Facilitating Peaceful Protest”, and I will make it available to the noble Lord following this debate.

To return to this group, it is now eight years since South Wales Police started deploying early versions of live facial recognition technology. When it did so, the technology was extremely inaccurate and there was absolutely no legislation in place to regulate or oversee the use of this mass surveillance technology—and that is what it is.

For those noble Lords who have not had the opportunity to experience facial recognition technology, I will give a quick overview of how it is used. It currently involves a large van full of electronics being parked in a location, such as a busy shopping street, where large numbers of ordinary people will walk past going about their daily business. On the top of the van are cameras pointing in all directions; they are scanning and recording the faces of all the passers-by. The technology tries to match them to a pre-prepared watch-list, which is a set of images of people the police want to find for some reason. Throughout the many hours of the deployment, something like 20 police officers will be standing around chatting and waiting for the system to decide, rightly or wrongly, that somebody whose face matches a person on the watch-list has just walked past. Several of the otherwise unoccupied police officers then detain the target and try to determine whether it is a true match.

Big Brother Watch, which I chair, has observed many deployments of facial recognition by the Metropolitan Police, and has seen many false matches happen. As well as false positives, the system is also susceptible to false negatives, where it fails to recognise somebody who is on the watch-list, and anyone who the police would like to speak to but was not put on the watch-list can wander by undetected. The Committee can form its own view on whether this is a productive use of scarce police time and money, but one thing is clear: this is a highly intrusive mass surveillance of thousands of citizens, almost all of whom are completely innocent and should be of no interest to the police.

The UK already has one of the highest densities of CCTV cameras in the world. Facial recognition technology will in time be added to those fixed cameras in public spaces. The police, your local authority, supermarkets or whoever will be able to keep tabs on who you are and what you are doing. This technology is far more intrusive than fingerprints or DNA. Live facial recognition can capture your face and location from a distance without you having any idea it has happened. It is as if you have a barcode on your forehead that can be read without your knowledge.

The collection and retention of fingerprints is tightly regulated by the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 and the Crime and Security Act 2010. Similarly, the use of DNA is strictly regulated by the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 and the Protection of Freedoms Act 2012. But what regulation is there for facial recognition, the most intrusive technology of the lot? Since the first deployment in 2017, absolutely no legislation, none at all, has been introduced to control this serious threat to our privacy. As we have already heard, the phrase “facial recognition” is not mentioned once in UK legislation.

Police forces, including the Met, have had a go at writing their own rules and marking their own homework, but that is obviously not their skill set; it is the job of legislators. The police’s homemade rules vary from force to force, and nobody is monitoring what is actually happening on the ground. For example, they assure us that all images they collect that do not match someone on the watch-list are instantly and permanently destroyed to preserve the privacy of innocent passers-by, but whether that always happens cannot be verified because there is no scrutiny, as there would be with, for example, DNA. This serious legislative vacuum is not the fault of the police; it is the fault of all the Governments since 2017, who were asleep at the wheel and did nothing to control the use of this highly intrusive technology.

You might ask: “Why does it matter to me? Why should I care if the state knows where I am and what I am doing? I am an honest, law-abiding, clean-living citizen. There is nothing in my life that I need to conceal from the police, my boss or my spouse”. You might be told by advocates of mass surveillance, “If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear”. Well, that claim is first attributed to the great democrat Joseph Goebbels. The Chinese state, where much of the technology for facial recognition comes from, uses it to monitor the behaviour of its citizens. It is used not just to keep track of where they are, but to assess whether they are being good citizens in accordance with the state’s definition of what a “good citizen” is.

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[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

My Lords, I had sought to intervene on the noble Lord, Lord Strasburger, before he sat down, but the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, beat me to it. I want to ask him a simple question but, first, I am sorry that we are on different sides of this—when we served together on the snoopers’ charter Bill, we were totally united that it was a bad Bill and we worked hand in glove to amend it. Can he tell me the substantive difference between a camera and a computer watching everyone in the crowd and picking out the wanted troublemakers and those 20 policemen he talked about looking at everybody in the crowd and picking out the wanted troublemakers from their briefing or their memory? What is the real difference between them?

[Lord Strasburger (LD)]

When I observed these deployments of facial recognition and looked at the 20 policemen standing around, it occurred to me that they would probably find a lot more of the people they were looking for if they just went round to their houses and knocked on the door, rather than working on the off-chance that they might walk past them in the high street.

[Lord Clement-Jones (LD)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lady Doocey for eliciting a very useful debate, as was the intention. I particularly welcome some of the comments made by the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, but say to him that a Crime and Policing Bill might possibly be the place for discussion of the use of live facial recognition in policing. Maybe we can make some progress with the Government, we hope, responding or at least giving an indication ahead of their consultation of their approach to the legislative framework around live facial recognition. I very much hope that they will take this debate on board as part of that consultation.

As my noble friend Lady Doocey clearly stated, these amendments are necessary because live facial recognition currently operates, effectively, in a legislative void, yet the police are rolling out this technology at speed. There is no explicit Act of Parliament authorising its deployment, meaning that police forces are in effect, as my noble friend Lord Strasburger indicated, writing their own rules as they go. This technology represents a fundamental shift in the relationship between citizen and state. When LFR cameras are deployed, our public spaces become biometric checkpoints where every face is indiscriminately scanned. By treating every citizen as a suspect in a permanent digital line-up, we are abandoning the presumption of innocence. The noble Baroness, Lady Jones, made that point very well. As a result, there is a clear issue of public trust.

Amendment 379 would prohibit the use of LFR during public assemblies or processions unless a specific code of practice has been formally approved by resolution of both Houses of Parliament. This is essential to protect our freedoms of expression and assembly under Articles 10 and 11 of the ECHR. The pervasive tracking capability of LFR creates what the courts have recognised as a chilling effect, as described by my noble friend Lady Doocey and the noble Baroness, Lady Jones. Law-abiding citizens are discouraged from attending protests or expressing dissenting views for fear of permanent state monitoring. We know that police forces have already used this technology to target peaceful protesters who were not wanted for any crime. People should not have to hand over their sensitive biometric data as the price of engaging in democratic processes. Without explicit parliamentary consent and an approved code of practice, we are sleepwalking into a surveillance state that bypasses democratic oversight entirely.

Amendment 471 would establish that LFR use in public spaces must be limited to narrowly defined serious cases—such as preventing major crimes or locating missing persons—and requires prior judicial authorisation specifying the scope and purpose of each deployment. The need for this oversight was made absolutely clear by the 2020 Court of Appeal ruling in R (Bridges) v Chief Constable of South Wales Police, which found LFR use unlawful due to fundamental deficiencies in the legal framework. The court identified that far too much discretion is left to individual officers regarding who ends up on a watchlist and where cameras are placed. We must replace operational discretion with judicial scrutiny.

The Government themselves now acknowledge the inadequacy of the current framework, which they describe as a “patchwork framework” and say it is

“complicated and difficult to understand”.

Well, that is at least some progress towards the Government acknowledging the situation. They say that the current framework does not provide sufficient confidence for expanded use—hear, hear. The former Biometrics and Surveillance Camera Commissioner made clear his concerns about the College of Policing guidance, questioning whether these fundamental issues require

“more than an authorised professional practice document from the College of Policing”

and instead demand parliamentary debate. The former commissioner raised a profound question:

“Is the status of the UK citizen shifting from our jealously guarded presumption of innocence to that of ‘suspected until we have proved our identity to the satisfaction of the examining officer’?”


Such a fundamental shift in the relationship between citizen and state cannot, and should not, be determined by guidance alone.

The College of Policing’s APP on LFR, while attempting to provide operational guidance, falls short of providing the robust legal framework that this technology demands. It remains non-statutory guidance that can be revised without parliamentary scrutiny, lacks enforceable standards for deployment decisions, provides insufficient detail on bias testing and mitigation requirements, and does not establish independent oversight mechanisms with real teeth.

Most critically, the guidance permits watch-list compilation based on subjective assessments without clear statutory criteria or independent review. This leaves fundamental decisions about who gets surveilled to operational discretion rather than judicial oversight. In response to the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, who was keen on one bit of our amendment but not the other, I say that this intelligence-led tool effectively delegates it to a senior police officer and they, in a sense, have a conflict of interest. They are the ones who make the operational decisions.

--- Later in debate ---

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

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Doocey, for tabling the amendments and starting this important debate. Facial recognition is an increasingly important tool that helps the police, and I am grateful for the support of the noble Lords, Lord Blencathra, Lord Cameron of Lochiel and Lord Hogan-Howe. I was particularly struck by the comments from the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan of Chelsea, on gait and movement, which point to why this is valuable.

Currently, facial recognition technology is used to identify those suspected of committing crime, those who may be in breach of a court order and, as the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones said, those who are missing persons and could be found. To put some context to it, for example, there were 127 people arrested following the use of facial technology during the disturbances in the summer of 2024 around asylum protests. According to the Metropolitan Police’s figures, between January 2024 and September 2025, 1,300 people were arrested for offences including rape, robbery and GBH, and, in that period, 100 sex offenders were arrested for breaching their conditions: that is, going to an area where they should not have gone. That is quite a valuable action, tool and resource. But that does not mean—which goes to the heart of the amendment the noble Baroness moved—that the concerns of the noble Lord, Lord Strasburger, the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, the noble Baroness herself and the Liberal Democrat Front Bench are not ones that need to be examined.

Noble Lords will be aware that, currently, the use of facial recognition technology is already subject to safeguards, including the Human Rights Act and Data Protection Act. The Government accept that there is a need to consider whether a bespoke legislative framework is needed. We need to get it right. We need to balance the need to protect communities from crime and disorder with the need to safeguard individual rights.

As the noble Baroness, Lady Doocey, will know, and as has been referenced in this debate, on 4 December, the Government launched a consultation: I have a copy available for the House. It is a 10-week consultation on a new framework for the enforcement of the use of facial recognition and similar technologies. The consultation explores when and how these technologies should be used, what safeguards are required to protect the issues that noble Lords and Baronesses have raised today and how to ensure that their use is proportionate to the seriousness of the harm being addressed.

I refer the Committee to page 5 of the summary to the consultation:

“The government is therefore committed to developing and introducing a new legal framework that sets out rules for the overt use of facial recognition by law enforcement organisations”.


That is a clear government objective. The consultation is about how we achieve that government objective. It runs until 12 February and I encourage all those who have spoken to submit their views.

I take Amendment 471 as a positive contribution to the consultation. Some aspects would cause difficulties, but it is a fair point to put to the Committee today. I hope noble Lords will accept that I cannot pre-empt the outcome of the consultation, which runs until 12 February. However, the clear objective, which I have read out, is to find the framework that noble Lords are seeking. We will need legislation to put in place the new legal framework, and that will come when parliamentary time allows.

[Lord Strasburger (LD)]

The Minister says that he cannot pre-empt the outcome of the consultation, but surely Clause 125 already pre-empts the outcome of the consultation.

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

I do not think that it does. We will leave it at that. There is a proper and full consultation document, a copy of which is, I am sure, available in the House for Members to look at.

I revert to my starting point. For the reasons that have been laid out by a number of Members in the Committee today, across the political divide and none, it is a valuable tool. Do the noble Lord and the noble Baroness who raised this have an objection to automatic number plate recognition? Under current regulations, every vehicle that goes past a camera at the side of the road is an “innocent” vehicle but some of those number plates will lead to crime being solved or individuals being caught. The principle is there. If they object to the principle then we will not find common ground on this. We need regulation—I have accepted that. We are bringing forward the consultation, but, ultimately it is a valuable tool to stop and prevent crime and to catch criminals.

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[Lord Young of Acton (Con)]

My Lords, I support the amendment tabled by my noble friend Lord Moynihan of Chelsea and the noble Baroness, Lady Fox of Buckley. I declare my interest as the director of the Free Speech Union.

The strongest argument for repealing the Malicious Communications Act and Section 127 of the Communications Act is that these laws were made during an analogue era and are clearly not fit for purpose during our current digital era. That is one reason why the Law Commission of England and Wales, in its 2021 report on which communications laws should be reformed, recommended that both the Malicious Communications Act and Section 127 of the Communications Act be repealed.

That has not happened, but a good illustration of just how unfit these two laws are was alluded to by the noble Baroness, Lady Fox. The Times submitted FOI requests to all 43 police forces in England and Wales, asking them how many arrests were made in England and Wales in 2023 and in previous years for online offences under the Malicious Communications Act and Section 127 of the Communications Act. Of the 43 police forces, 37 responded to the FOI request. In just those 37 police forces, in 2023 12,183 people were arrested on suspicion of having committed just one of these two offences through something they had said online. That is a huge increase on the number of people arrested in 2018—just 5,502—on suspicion of committing these two offences for things they posted online. The figure more than quadrupled in a five-year period. That boils down to 33 people being arrested every day in 2023 on suspicion of having committed just one of these two offences under the Malicious Communications Act and Section 127 of the Communications Act.

That happened because of the explosion of speech which is supposedly offensive, annoying, distressing, alarming or indecent, et cetera, online on social media. This is something the framers of these laws could not possibly have anticipated, and it is causing the police to waste a colossal amount of time. In addition, the number of people who were charged—bear in mind that 12,183 people were arrested—was 1,119. The police are clearly being overzealous in responding to complaints about supposed offences under these two laws relating to things people have said online.

Another index of just how much time is being wasted is that many of the people who are not charged end up having the episode recorded as a non-crime hate incident. The Free Speech Union has estimated that, as best we can tell, something like a quarter of a million non-crime hate incidents have been recorded since the concept was introduced by the College of Policing in 2014—and that is in England and Wales alone. That is an average of around 65 a day.

One reason so many NCHIs are being recorded is that, when the police arrest someone under suspicion of having committed an offence under the Malicious Communications Act or Section 127 of the Communications Act and conclude that in fact no offence has been committed, the incident is recorded as an NCHI. As I have said before in this House, one of the penalties for having an NCHI recorded against your name is that it can show up in enhanced criminal record checks when you apply for a job as a teacher or a carer or try to volunteer for a charity such as the Samaritans. According to Policy Exchange, in a report published last year, police in the UK as a whole are spending 6,000 hours a year investigating episodes and incidents that turn out to be NCHIs and are recorded as such. That is a strong argument for repealing the Malicious Communications Act and Section 127 of the Communications Act.

I will give two examples, from the FSU’s case files, of just how absurd the police’s overzealous policing of social media has become. We went to bat for one of our members, Julian Foulkes, a former special constable in Kent. He said in a spat online with a pro-Palestinian activist that some of the pro-Palestinian marchers were once step away from heading to Heathrow and stopping people disembarking from flights from Israel. That person complained, as I understand it, and six police officers—six—turned up at Julian Foulkes’s home, arrested him, took him down to the station and would not release him until he had agreed to accept a caution. With our help, he got that caution expunged and went on to sue the police for wrongful arrest. He was given £20,000 in compensation and got an apology from the chief constable of the police force concerned. That is a good example of the kind of time-wasting that the police are being led into because of the difficulty of enforcing these analogue laws in a digital era.

The second example is Maxie Allen and Rosalind Levine, the parents of two daughters, who were arrested, again by six police officers, in front of their youngest daughter because of things they had said in a WhatsApp group that parents at their daughter’s school were members of and something they had said in an email to the head teacher of their daughter’s school. It is incredible that the police thought that six police officers were needed to take these parents into custody. Julian Foulkes was under suspicion of having committed an offence under the Malicious Communications Act. In their case, they were under suspicion of having committed an offence under Section 127 of the Communications Act. Again, in due course, no further action was taken. We helped them sue the police for wrongful arrest and they too were given compensation of £20,000.

Be in no doubt that the noble Baroness, Lady Fox of Buckley, and my noble friend Lord Moynihan are correct when they say that the process is the punishment. Even though no action was taken and no prosecutions were made in those two cases, Julian Foulkes and those parents were caused huge anxiety and distress by what they went through before the police decided to take no further action. That is a strong case for following the Law Commission of England and Wales’s advice and repealing the Malicious Communications Act and Section 127 of the Communications Act.

Briefly, I absolutely agree with the proposal in the amendment to remove the word “insulting” from the sections of the Public Order Act in which it remains. Noble Lords will not need reminding that the word “insulting” was removed from some sections of the Public Order Act, specifically Section 5 and related provisions, by the Crime and Courts Act 2013, following a campaign by Rowan Atkinson and others which pointed out how absurd it was to criminalise insulting. In one case, a young man was arrested for insulting a police officer’s horse, as noble Lords may recall. It was an effective campaign and it resulted in the word “insulting” being removed from Section 5, but it remains in many other parts of the Public Order Act. To my mind, the same arguments forcefully made by Rowan Atkinson and others at the time for removing the word “insulting” from Section 5 equally apply to the other sections of the Public Order Act where it remains. Just as we do not have a right not to be offended, we do not have a right not to be insulted.

I close with a quote from JS Mill, which I believe is from On Liberty. Mill warned that the criminal proscription of uncivil language is intrinsically likely to protect the holders of received opinion at the expense of dissidents. He wrote:

“With regard to what is commonly meant by intemperate discussion, namely invective, sarcasm, personality, and the like”—


we could add the word “insulting” to that list—

“the denunciation of these weapons would deserve more sympathy if it were ever proposed to interdict them equally to both sides; but it is only desired to restrain the employment of them against the prevailing opinion: against the unprevailing they may not only be used without general disapproval, but will be likely to obtain for him who uses them the praise of honest zeal and righteous indignation”.

[Lord Strasburger (LD)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, on his courage in raising these issues. I am going to say little more than that, other than that I was instrumental in getting a sentence added to the code of conduct for members of the Liberal Democrats, which says that no one has the right to not be offended.

[Baroness Brinton (LD)]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan of Chelsea, set out the principles that he believes are important to secure freedom of speech by removing the words “abusive or insulting” from a number of pieces of legislation. From these Benches, we absolutely accept freedom of speech. But I want to pick up on the point that the noble Lord, Lord Young, made when he quoted John Stuart Mill. There is a second half to the sentence about the right to free speech. Mill says that

“the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others”.

It is on preventing harm to others that this entire debate is balanced.

I am sure that there are many justifications for feeling that freedom of speech is being curtailed for people who just want to express their opinion. But the reason that we have the laws we do at the moment, particularly since the 1950s, is due to the harm that has been done to others. I think there was reference made earlier to the Race Relations Act of 60 years ago; that was in the consequence of very overt racial harm done to entire communities in our society. John Stuart Mill would have absolutely supported that legislation to protect. That is what the balance is between our freedom of speech and our responsibility as parliamentarians to protect those, particularly the most vulnerable, in our society.

That is why I want to go back briefly—not quite as far back as the Race Relations Act 1965—to when the original provisions on hate crimes were first introduced by the Blair Government in 1998. There is no doubt that this was partly in response to growing concerns relating to the ineffective policing of and legal responses to racist violence, which, again, was then very evident on our streets. The noble Baroness, Lady Lawrence, and her family had campaigned for this more robust legislative framework, and not just because it was much clearer that, as a society, we did not and should not accept hate-motivated crimes, especially towards particular communities and those with protected characteristics.

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[Lord Berkeley of Knighton (CB)]

My Lords, I shall speak extremely briefly, because, compared to the expertise of my noble friends on the Cross Benches who have spoken thus far, I would probably merit nothing like the status of a keyhole surgeon—more like a butcher, really—in terms of legal matters. But I would just say that what I have heard is very convincing, coming from people with such expertise. I very much look forward to hearing the Minister’s reasons for rejecting the amendment, if that is what he feels he must do.

[Lord Strasburger (LD)]

My Lords, I am absolutely astonished. Until 10 minutes ago, I had no idea that these provisions existed—that a constable without suspicion could seize a person’s devices, interrogate their data and hold on to them more or less indefinitely. Could somebody, perhaps a Minister, tell me in what circumstances suspicionless search like this is justified?

[Lord Davies of Gower (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lords, Lord Anderson of Ipswich and Lord Clement-Jones, for bringing forward the amendments in question. Amendments 390 and 391 have been well reasoned, and I am particularly happy to offer my support to the principle behind them. Objectivity should be the aim of every piece of legislation, and I welcome any measures towards that end. That is particularly the case when we are dealing with laws that provide the police with powers that can be used at the expense of people’s privacy. Clause 135 does this, allowing constables to extract online information from defendants’ devices should they need to determine whether the person has been involved in an act of terrorism.

I understand the Government’s intention behind this clause, and that it may have implications for national security. However, because of the importance, we should leave as little of its interpretation to human discretion as possible. We are all aware that, while we continue to support our forces, there are occasional instances of bad faith actors and, more generally, mistakes are a natural product of human enterprise. Allowing a constable’s belief to determine whether it is necessary to retain held information is an unnecessary risk that the Government do not need to take.

Similarly, we are not opposed to the principle behind Amendment 390. Individuals who are subjected to these new powers should not have the anxiety of an indefinite investigation hanging over their heads if the authorities do not have reasonable suspicion that a crime has been committed. For that reason, introducing a limit on the amount of time that information can be held without reasonable suspicion is sensible. That said, I am unsure whether three months is long enough for police forces to determine whether retention is necessary. This is especially the case given the heightened stress that a decrease in officer numbers will put forces under. Despite this, I hope the Minister can agree that a limit is a sensible suggestion and update the Committee on the Government’s position.

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[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

I have made the case and the noble Lord, Lord Anderson, and others can accept that case or not. If he believes that keyhole surgery is still required, he has a mechanism to begin the operation. I hope the Committee can accept the assurances I have given, based on the fact that this is an amendment to the 2000 Act. The normal practice already in place is to have codes of practice, and I am proposing, via the discussion, to have revised codes of practice, subject to parliamentary affirmative scrutiny, and that the clauses will not be implemented until such a time as both Houses give their assent to those measures. I hope that assuages the noble Lord; if it does not, he knows what to do.

[Lord Strasburger (LD)]

I am sorry, I must be missing something here. There is a provision to conduct a really draconian intervention on a traveller as they pass through an airport, but it is not on the basis of suspicion. On what basis does the constable, or whatever he or she is, choose that traveller rather than another traveller, if there is no suspicion involved?

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

I hope I can help the noble Lord. The Schedule 7 and Schedule 3 powers are exercised at pace. Some investigations, particularly those involving complex or sensitive matters, could well extend beyond three months. Evidence often emerges gradually and may be fragmented.

Statutory codes of practice provide a flexible and responsive mechanism for setting out detailed safeguards and allow for timely updates on operational and legal contexts. If we embed such details in primary legislation, with due respect to the noble and learned Baroness, that would create inflexibility and mean that we may not keep pace with changing threats or operational realities. The codes are subject to parliamentary scrutiny; they can be revised as needed and ensure robust protection. That is why I have put that argument before the Committee. If it feels that that argument is not acceptable, we will have to have that discussion later on. That is my defence against having keyhole surgery at this time.

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[Baroness Doocey (LD)]

My Lords, Amendment 396 in my name raises fundamental issues about this part of the Bill. My concern is about Clause 138 and its clear potential to enable facial recognition searches of the DVLA’s vast image database. That would be a dramatic change. At present, drivers’ data can be accessed only for road traffic purposes.

Amendment 396 would place a safeguard in the Bill to prevent authorised persons using information obtained under these powers for the purposes of biometric searches using facial recognition technology. It would ensure that the private images of millions of citizens cannot be repurposed to feed live or retrospective facial recognition systems without full parliamentary debate and explicit consent. Around 55 million facial images are held by the DVLA; they are collected in good faith and with a clear expectation of privacy, alongside names, addresses and medical records, for the routine purposes of getting a driving licence. Turning that repository into a police biometric pool would mark a profound shift in the relationship between the state and the citizen. Combined with live facial recognition on our streets, it would create the infrastructure for real-time, population-scale surveillance, scanning the faces of tens of millions of law-abiding people as they go about their daily lives.

In effect, most of us would find ourselves on a perpetual digital watch list, our faces repeatedly checked for potential wrongdoing. That is troubling not only because of the bias and misidentification in these systems but because it is simply not proportionate policing. The public broadly support the use of technology to catch criminals, but they also want limits and safeguards. A 2024 survey by the Centre for Emerging Technology and Security and the Alan Turing Institute found that only one in five people—just 19%—trusted police forces to use biometric tools responsibly.

That anxiety is particularly strong among women. Barely three years ago, the Casey review exposed appalling misogyny and a serious abuse of data access within policing. Against that backdrop, granting digital access to millions of female drivers’ personal details and photographs is hardly reassuring, especially when previous safeguards have failed so spectacularly. Last year alone, 229 serving police officers and staff were arrested for domestic abuse-related offences, and a further 1,200 were on restricted duties linked to such allegations. The fear is real that combining facial recognition with DVLA access could allow abusers within policing to misuse these powers to trace survivors, to remove their freedom to hide and to undermine public trust still further. We also know that this technology misidentifies members of ethnic-minority communities far more frequently, compounding injustice and eroding confidence in policing by consent.

I share the ambition for policing to use data more intelligently. Forces need joined-up intelligence systems across the entire criminal justice network, but there is a world of difference between targeted access to high-risk offender data and a blank cheque to harvest the personal information of millions of people.

Clause 138 is far too wide. It allows the Secretary of State to authorise digital access for policing or law enforcement purposes, which frankly could mean anything. What information may be accessed, and for what purpose, would later be set by regulation made under the negative procedure, giving Parliament only the most cursory scrutiny of measures, with huge implications for privacy and liberty. Such sweeping powers should not be slipped through in secondary legislation. The public did not give their driving licence photographs to become part of a national face search system. There has been no debate, no consent and no assessment of the risk to those who have good reason to remain hidden. Once civic freedoms are eroded, they are very rarely rebuilt.

When the Minister replies, I hope we will hear what the Government’s policy intention is. If their intention is to keep open the possibility of using DVLA data for surveillance, they should say so and try to justify it. We know that the police have specifically asked for this. It is not good enough to say, “This is our intention”; my amendment would ensure it cannot happen. That is the safeguard the public expect and the least this Committee should demand.

[Lord Strasburger (LD)]

My Lords, I rise to speak in favour of Amendment 396, to which I have added my name—my notes are only two pages long. It would ensure that the DVLA drivers database was not used for a purpose for which it was never intended; namely, to search drivers’ photos for a match with images collected by live facial recognition.

Facial recognition technology could be a useful tool in fighting serious crime if it was properly regulated and supervised, which is the case with other biometric technologies such as fingerprint and DNA, but currently it is open season on facial recognition, with no statutory constraints on its use or misuse. That means that this deeply invasive, mass surveillance tool poses a serious threat to the civil liberties and human rights of UK citizens. If used in combination with the DVLA drivers database, it would be a disproportionate expansion of police powers to identify and track innocent citizens across time and locations for low-level policing needs. It would give the authorities access to the biometric data of tens of millions of our fellow citizens. It is vital that safeguards are introduced in law to prevent this happening. This is precisely what Amendment 396 would do.

In Committee in the other place, the Policing Minister said that

“police forces do not conduct facial matching against images contained on the DVLA database, and the clause will not change that”.—[Official Report, Commons, Crime and Policing Bill Committee, 29/4/25; col. 442.]

But Clause 138 allows regulations to be made at a later date setting out how driver licensing information will be made accessible to law enforcement. All that Amendment 396 does is create safeguards to ensure that the regulations made under Clause 138 cannot provide for facial recognition searches of the DVLA database. I commend it to the Committee.