Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)

My Lords, I strongly support the excellent amendment of my noble friend Lord Young of Acton. I declare an interest as a paid-up member of the Free Speech Union. I was brought up in Plumstead in south-east London, as was Stephen Lawrence. I can absolutely understand the horror and the imperative for action that arose from the disgraceful racist murder of that young man in 1993: there was a clamour to tackle the culture that gave rise to five racist thugs taking that young man’s life. That is a very important context, but I am afraid that things have developed in a way that we did not foresee way back in 1993. In preparing for this debate, I was reminded of the remarks of the Director of Public Prosecutions, Stephen Parkinson, in 2024: “I had to look up what on earth the term”— non-crime hate incidents— “meant—I was puzzled by it”. Coming from the DPP, that reveals a lot about what a strange anomaly NCHIs have been. The idea that there is a kind of police record that can result in ordinary people who have committed no crime being visited by police at their home or workplace because an investigation has been launched into whether their views or attitudes may one day lead to criminal activity should be seen as entirely incongruent with British justice and freedom of expression. It brings to mind the film “Minority Report” and the fictional idea of pre-crime. But this is not fiction: it is the real world. The idea that, in the real world, a person could lose their job because an NCHI shows up on an enhanced DBS check ought to be anathema to us. Mention was made earlier of Allison Pearson. My noble friend Lord Herbert of South Downs is absolutely right: it was the Communications Act or another piece of legislation that was involved when Essex Police visited her on Remembrance Sunday 2024. She has nevertheless raised the public profile of the impact of NCHIs on people and, for that, we should thank her, as we should Harry Miller and others. The Times reported that year that 13,200 NCHIs were recorded by 45 police forces in the 12 months to June 2024. That includes allegations against doctors, vicars, social workers and even primary school children. As we have heard, Policy Exchange calculated that this had amounted to at least 60,000 hours of officer time. It surely was never a defensible use of police time, especially while so many serious crimes such as burglaries and sexual offences remain unsolved and uninvestigated. There are too many stories to tell, but one elderly woman was shocked to find herself the subject of an NCHI after taking a photograph of a sticker which read: “Keep males out of women-only spaces”. She did not even put the sticker up; she just took a photo of it. The 73 year-old received a visit from police officers after she was caught on CCTV taking the photo of the sticker, which someone had put up on an LGBT Pride poster. She said she agreed with its sentiments and wanted to show it to her partner. Apparently, the police thought this made her a likely future criminal. My noble friend Lord Herbert said that these cases have been bad for public confidence in the service, and he is right. It is therefore welcome that over the last year or so there has been a growing realisation and consensus in the Government that there is a need to address the problem. In particular, I welcome the recent press reports that the college and the NPCC are set to recommend scrapping non-crime hate incidents as a result of the review. My noble friend Lord Herbert has promised that there will be a sea change. We must wait and see the final detail on how the changes are delivered in practice. I say this partly because what we are attempting to do in turning policing away from an excessive focus on what we might call DEI issues towards the criminal matters that the public care about goes against the grain of the last two decades of police culture. We have seen before how difficult this is to uproot. The previous Government published new statutory guidance on NCHIs in 2023. Training should have been given to call handlers on the raised thresholds and common-sense tests, and we should have seen a reduction in the number of non-crime hate incidents recorded, but, sadly, the report published the following year by His Majesty’s inspectorate, An Inspection into Activism and Impartiality in Policing, concluded that there was “inconsistency in the way forces have responded to the new guidance” and that “We often found that call takers hadn’t received training about NCHIs, and had limited, if any, knowledge” of the statutory guidance. First, can the Minister say how we will ensure that police training on the new regime is not undercut by an obsession with DEI issues and the politicisation of policing which has clouded police judgments too often in recent years? Secondly, we need to see a clearer commitment from the Government on how they plan to respond to the NPCC report and what the timelines will be. I know there are ongoing reviews into police discretion and hate crime, and I particularly welcome the review by the noble Lord, Lord Macdonald of River Glaven, of hate crime legislation. I hope that he will feel emboldened to address one of the more fundamental issues; namely, the injustice resulting from the creation of a hierarchy of victims by legislating for certain protected characteristics rather than treating all victims equally. However, these ongoing reviews should not be an excuse for inaction. Will the Minister make the commitment that, should the NCHI review require primary legislation to implement its recommendations, this will be done via amendments on Report—a point made by my noble friend Lord Blencathra—preferably adopting my noble friend’s carefully crafted amendment? While I understand the previous Government’s decision to introduce statutory guidance via the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 as a first step towards introducing some common sense in this area, it had the unfortunate consequence of providing a statutory basis for recording NCHIs. If this is to be corrected, the law will need to change. Again, the devil will be in the detail. The NPCC’s final report has not yet been published, but it did publish a progress report last October. There were a number of points where I would want to see improvements in the final report before I could feel confident that the new system will avoid the pitfalls of the current regime. One of those relates to the NPCC’s recommendation that the Home Office introduce a new national standard of incident recording. As I alluded to earlier, the current threshold, which dates back to 2011, is too low and does not adequately cater for contemporary policing demands. We ought to think carefully, too, about any new definition. The current draft proposition put forward by the NPCC defines an incident as “a single distinct event or occurrence which may be relevant to policing for preventing or solving crime, safeguarding individuals or communities or fulfilling other statutory policing purposes”. This helpfully makes it clear that there needs to be a clear policing purpose for this data to be recorded. I am concerned about the words “may be relevant”. At the very least, would it not be better for it to say, “likely to be relevant”? My concern is that an activist police officer would record practically anything on the basis of “may”. We all know hoarders—the kind of people who keep everything because they tell themselves it may be useful in the future. Finally, we need greater clarity on enhanced DBS checks. The progress report recommends that the Home Office consider whether there needs to be further guidance, but key questions are ignored. Will the police delete NCHIs that they have already recorded, and will the new anti-social behaviour incidents be disclosable in enhanced DBS checks? I am pleased to support this very good and sensible amendment.