Contribution
My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Cash, for her Amendment 438B and the subsequent Amendment 438EF, which seek to mandate the collection of sex data on perpetrators of crime. I thank everybody who spoke with some force and passion on a debate that certainly was not dry and simply about data. We heard the views of my noble friend Lady Chakrabarti, the noble Baroness, Lady Fox of Buckley, the noble Lord, Lord Jackson of Peterborough, and the opposition Front Benches.
Before I go any further, as referred to by a number of noble Lords, particularly the noble Baroness, Lady Cash, we are absolutely resolute in our goal, expressed in the violence against women and girls strategy published before Christmas, to halve violence against women and girls over the decade. We recognise that it takes a whole-government, indeed a whole-society, approach, but we are resolute in doing that and the issues that we are discussing in this group are germane to that effort.
However, there are already powers available to the Home Secretary to obtain data from police forces. The question is whether these are adequate. Section 44 of the Police Act 1996 gives the Home Secretary powers to obtain relevant data from chief constables. This power, which noble Lords have mentioned in the debate on this group, is exercised through an annual data requirement which sets out what data should be recorded and provided to the Home Office. Such data is routinely published as official statistics to provide a window on the work of government and the police service.
The content of the annual data requirement is reviewed annually and, where new requirements are made out, it allows collections to be added or existing ones amended. However, we accept that these powers fall short of what is required. Not to presage the next group too heavily, the noble Baroness, Lady Cash, will be aware that, in December last year the Home Secretary announced that we will legislate to mandate the recording of suspects’ ethnicity data. This will happen at the earliest opportunity as part of our wider legislative proposals on police reform, which we announced in the White Paper on police reform published yesterday.
As announced in that White Paper, we are introducing key proposals to address the fragmentation of data across police forces and recording formats. In that White Paper, which I commend to your Lordships, we say that we will work with the police to introduce a number of measures around data—for instance, developing new technology to integrate data nationally; mandating national standards on data to create consistency in recording data across police forces and improve the quality of datasets; introducing a single national decision-maker with authority over key national datasets; and removing unnecessary barriers to data sharing across police forces and agencies. This will provide the necessary statutory powers to ensure the delivery of recommendation 4 of the National Audit on Group-Based Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse by the noble Baroness, Lady Casey, and will improve the integrity of the data that the police use, collect and analyse.
Furthermore, I agree that consistent and accurate data on sex needs to be recorded, and we are carefully considering the implications of the Supreme Court ruling that clarified the definition of sex in the Equality Act.
In replying directly to my noble friend Lady Donaghy’s question about thinking about it from the individual’s perspective, and what they may or may not want to happen in terms of their gender identification, it is still fair to say that the data collected will be anonymised and treated as per current GDPR and other data protection terms. This is about collecting data for wider analysis rather than thinking about what might happen to that individual from the way that that data is collected.
I hope I have reassured the noble Baroness, Lady Cash, of the work going on in this area. In light of this and our commitment in the White Paper to bring forward legislation in the context of our wider reforms to policing, I ask that she withdraws her amendment.