Lord Strasburger (LD)

My Lords, given the hour I do not want to detain the House for much longer. In fact, I have deleted the first page of my speech accordingly, and I will address the comments of the noble Baroness, Lady Lawrence, in a moment. First, this amendment insists that all future incident recording guidance must have due regard to freedom of expression—and that matters. In a liberal democracy, the test is not whether we protect only speech we agree with; it is whether we protect the space for robust, sometimes uncomfortable, debate on race, religion, sex, gender, politics and many other issues. Police guidance should start from the principle that lawful speech is not a policing problem. Further, it deals with the past as well as the future. It should require that historic non-crime hate incident records which do not meet the proper recording threshold must not be disclosed on DBS checks and must be deleted when discovered. That is vital for natural justice. If we accept that this category has been misused and overused, we cannot leave people’s lives quietly marred by data that should never have been held in the first place. I particularly address these remarks to the noble Baroness, Lady Lawrence. This is not about turning a blind eye to genuine hate crime. On the contrary, by scrapping a vague, perception-based non-crime category, we free up police time and attention to focus on real offences: threats, harassment, violence and criminal damage. We will make the system clearer for victims and for officers. We will be sending a simple message that if you have been the victim of a crime, the law is there to protect you, and if you have merely heard something you strongly dislike, that is not in itself a matter for the police. At the moment, too many people are unsure where that line lies. They fear that expressing a lawful view on a controversial subject might bring a knock at the door or a mark on their record. That chilling effect is corrosive. It drives honest disagreement underground and pushes some people out of the public square altogether. We should be defending the right to argue and criticise, and to challenge within the law, not encouraging people to outsource every disagreement to the police. The amendment would preserve the ability of the police to record information where it is genuinely necessary for crime prevention and public safety. It would hardwire respect for freedom of expression into any future guidance. In doing so, it would strengthen civil liberties and good policing. It says that the police are there to deal with crime, not to catalogue lawful opinions. This is a distinction worth defending and I urge the House to support this amendment.