Baroness Doocey (LD)

My Lords, as the Home Secretary observed in the recent White Paper, policing has not always kept pace with a rapidly changing world. Airspace has indeed become a new frontier for both opportunistic and organised crime. Drones are now being used by burglars and organised gangs as near-silent scouts, identifying empty homes, weak locks or high-value items through windows. The law can, of course, address the burglary that follows, but it struggles to capture the preceding act of reconnaissance. This is particularly relevant to rural crime, where drones are acting as the advance guard for the theft and export of GPS equipment. In our prisons, drones are described by residents as “almost routine”, delivering drugs, phones and weapons straight into exercise yards. Ministry of Justice data shows more than 1,700 drone incidents in a single year. That fuels violence and instability across the estate. However, as the Justice Committee pointed out last October, the problem is not only the drones but the conditions that allow them in: broken windows, unmaintained netting and faulty CCTV. Creating a new offence may have value, but it cannot by itself remedy years of underinvestment in the prison system. I want to raise two further concerns. The first is an operational one. With core capital grants under severe strain, how can we realistically expect overstretched forces to invest in drone detection and countersurveillance technology? Secondly, until national integration plans are fully delivered, data on drone incursions will remain largely trapped in 43 police silos, leaving us blind to the wider intelligence picture.