Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)

My Lords, I want to say a heartfelt thank you to the noble Lords, Lord Young of Acton and Lord Hogan-Howe, for leading on this. It is telling that there is cross-party support for this amendment. The Government should take note of such rich and excellent speeches from across the House. There is widespread concern for all sorts of reasons, and action should be taken. I feel a bit cynical because I have celebrated the demise of non-crime hate incidents on a number of occasions in the past. When the Fair Cop founder Harry Miller won his High Court challenge in 2020, the judge declared that non-crime hate incidents had a chilling effect and unlawfully infringed on Harry’s freedom of speech. I remember that a lot of us thought that would be the end of that. I then listened to a number of Home Secretaries declaring that there was a problem with non-crime hate incidents, and I thought, “Oh, good, something will be done”, because politicians like to do something. But I am most reassured, genuinely, by the present Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, who seems to be determined to get to the bottom of this and to sort it out. Her emphasis that the police should focus on streets and not tweets is quite a good summation of where we are. However, despite that universal acknowledgement that non-crime hate incidents are not fit for purpose in many ways, I worry that, as with the Greek mythological Hydra, all the various attempts at cutting off the monstrous NCHI serpent’s head will result in another couple of heads growing instead. It is important that we do not just console ourselves with getting rid of the name while allowing the sentiment and the politics of it to remain. As somebody who has spoken many times on this issue in this House, often greeted by some eye-rolling but also offered endless assurances that it was all being sorted—not by this Government but by a previous Government—I now believe that assurances are not enough, and we need to make this issue watertight. We need primary legislation as a guarantee that there will be no more non-crime hate incidents and a full deletion of the historic records held by the police. The noble Lord, Lord Herbert, made the point that when there have been changes in the criminal law, records have not been deleted, but these are not crimes, so they should be deleted. Even if they are not used, the idea that the state has a file on hundreds of thousands of people with the words “bigot” or “hate criminals” across them, even if they are hate non-criminal, is not right and they should be deleted.