Crime and Policing Bill

Lord Strasburger Excerpts

Wednesday 11th March 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Strasburger (LD)]

My Lords, I was going to speak on Amendments 400 and 407 in this group, but my noble friend Lady Doocey made such an excellent contribution that I will skip my speech on Amendment 400. I want to say, though, that I am not quite sure what the point is of me speaking on any amendment at this stupid time of day and with no chance of a meaningful Division to test the opinion of the House. What we are doing here is not scrutiny; it is just going through the motions. Nevertheless, I will go ahead with my speech on Amendment 407, if only to put my views on the record.

Amendment 407 is in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Cash, who is not here. As my name is also on the amendment, I may, I believe, speak to it on her behalf. Am I correct?

[A noble Lord]

Yes.

[Lord Strasburger (LD)]

Thank you. Amendment 407 asks us to make a practical decision about policing and tackling violence against women and girls. It is not—I repeat, not—about taking sides in a culture war. Recording biological sex in every case is about getting the basics right: honest crime figures, sound operational decisions and better protection for victims of violence. If we do not know clearly in our police data who is male and who is female, we cannot properly track male violence, spot patterns and target resources where they are most needed.

When police forces blur sex and gender identity, the data starts to go wrong. Hardly any perpetrators of sexual violence are women, so it takes only a small number of male offenders being recorded as women to make it look—wrongly—as if women are suddenly committing many more violent and sexual offences. That distorts our statistics, makes it harder to see the true scale of male violence against women, and risks bad safeguarding decisions.

If systems shift between recording sex, gender as perceived or self-identified gender, we lose track of the trends. We can no longer say with confidence whether male violence is rising or falling, or whether policy changes are working. When the public discover that “female” means one thing in one table and something different in another, trust in policing and government data inevitably suffers.

Professor Alice Sullivan is one of the UK’s leading experts in quantitative social science. She was appointed by the Government to independently review how public organisations can best collect data on sex and gender. Her review cuts through the confusion that currently exists. It says that, when the state needs sex data, it should ask a simple factual question about biological sex—“What is your sex: male or female?”—and that that must be kept separate from any voluntary questions about gender identity. It strongly recommends that all police forces record biological sex in all relevant systems.

Some people worry that this will force trans people to out themselves to the police. It should not and it does not have to. The police already record very sensitive information—religion, disability, sexuality—while respecting confidentiality, human rights and data protection law. The sex question is about biological reality for operational and statistical purposes. Held securely in background systems, it is not a licence to broadcast someone’s history or to deny their gender identity in day-to-day interactions. Where there is a need to understand gender identity, that can be done through a separate, clearly labelled voluntary question with strict safeguards.

The choice is stark. If we do not record biological sex, we accept distorted crime figures, poorer operational decisions, broken trend data and growing public mistrust. If we do record biological sex clearly and consistently, we give ourselves honest statistics, better safeguarding and a policing system that can see and therefore tackle the reality of male violence against women and girls.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 407, on the recording of sex in police data. It is a real shame that the noble Baroness, Lady Cash, is unable to be with us because she would have introduced it very elegantly.

A year ago, in March 2025, Professor Alice Sullivan’s Review of Data, Statistics and Research on Sex and Gender came out. It pointed out:

“It is well-established that sex is a major determinant of offending and victimisation”.


The noble Lord, Lord Strasburger, may have been going through the motions but he went through them very well by explaining clearly why this amendment matters. As he pointed out, it is very difficult for the Government to claim to have a target-based campaign to reduce violence against women and girls if they do not have consistent, accurate data in relation to women and girls. Although Professor Sullivan’s review was broadly welcomed by the Government, its recommendations have not yet been acted on. This amendment attempts to nudge some action from the Government.

The issue of delayed guidance is a constant problem. The Women’s Rights Network recently contacted the National Police Chiefs’ Council, inquiring whether it intends to now record sex accurately and address what it said was the “ideological corruption of data”. The NPCC’s reply says that

“updates to the collection and recording of sex and gender reassignment questions are pending subject to the issue of national guidance by the Office for National Statistics/Government Statistical Service following the UK Supreme Court ruling earlier this year”.

That is one pending answer. Individual police forces responding to a variety of organisations’ queries about the continued use of a variety of approaches to collecting sex data—including self-ID, recording a rapist as female and so on—say that they are waiting for guidance from the ONS and the GSS. Is there anyone not waiting for guidance? It feels as though this is a waste of time that is unnecessarily adding to confusion.

In Committee, I went into detail about differing and contradictory data collection practices across police forces. I will not repeat that, but recording practices vary not just between but within criminal justice agencies and even relevant government departments. As there are 40 different databases at a national level relating to criminal justice, the data that is being collected as we speak is full of discrepancies. The Home Office’s annual data requirement on demographic data, for example, advises police forces to record sex subject to a gender recognition certificate. Other mandatory Home Office standards—on police use of force, for example—require officers to record perceived gender, with a choice of male, female or other. There are also the multi agency public protection arrangements, which focus on protecting the public from the most serious harm from sexual and violent offenders, including convicted terrorists. They too conflate sex and gender in their data collection.

However, the Murray Blackburn Mackenzie criminal justice blog discovered via a freedom of information request that MAPPA provides police officers across the UK with

“51 options to record the gender identity of high-risk offenders”.

How does it help to keep the public safe, or aid operational coherence, to know whether a terrorist or paedophile is pangender, genderqueer, agender, bi-gender or gender-fluid, just to name a few of the 51 options they could fill in? I am not trying to be glib; I am just urging the Government to bring clarity and consistency to the collection of data on sex in relation to victims and perpetrators, because otherwise I think it is unfair to claim that there is anything like an evidence-based policy when it comes to sex and, indeed, gender.

We have recently had some exchanges about the new aggravated offences in relation to transgender people, and there are people who are transgender who claim that hate speech and hate crime against them has gone up. I am not challenging whether or not that is true. But to collate the data to make a case for that, one has to make a distinction in the collection of data between somebody who is transgender and somebody who says “I am a woman” who is in fact a transgender person who identifies as a woman.

I think that, for all victims concerned, let alone for understanding the nature of offenders, we need to have accurate, consistent data across all criminal justice agencies and all police forces. I hope that the Minister will at least give us an assurance that the recommendations of Professor Sullivan’s fine and important review—which is full of detail and evidence, with practical conclusions, and which the Government have welcomed—will be acted on. If we can get that assurance tonight, that would be brilliant. If there is any government reluctance to accept Professor Sullivan’s review, it would be really helpful to understand why—what the hold-up is—and maybe the Minister could explain that too.