B

Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)

Speaking in the House of Lords on 5 February 2026

Debate

Crime and Policing Bill

Contribution

My Lords, I am trying the patience of the Committee, but Amendment 470 is in my name. In a week when our entire politics is reeling from the betrayal, treachery and most likely serious criminality of a now disgraced Peer, I hope we might all empathise with victims of abuses of power by covert human intelligence sources—CHIS—or police or other agency spies. Notwithstanding the ongoing public inquiry into the decades-old spy cops scandal, the Covert Human Intelligence Sources (Criminal Conduct) Act 2021 granted prior and absolute criminal and civil immunity to officers and agents of a whole host of public bodies if acting under a new scheme of pre-authorisation to commit crime. By this one Act, the centuries-old principle of equality before the law was breached.

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