Contribution
My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lord Jackson on the quality of the amendment he drafted. I also congratulate my noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe on the superb speech she made setting out why this amendment is necessary. As we know, it addresses one of the fastest-growing forms of organised crime in the UK: the theft and rapid export of mobile phones—thousands and thousands of them. These are no longer opportunistic street offences. As noble Lords have said, they are part of a highly profitable, highly mobile criminal market that depends on one thing above all else: the ability to reactivate and resell the stolen devices abroad.
A couple of years ago, I was outside Victoria station, at the end of Victoria Street, waiting to cross the road. I saw a woman waiting for the pedestrian lights to change, holding her mobile phone out—I think she was trying to read the map—almost like a Geiger counter. Then I saw two guys on a motor scooter coming around the corner and I tried to shout to her to put her phone away, but too late—it was snatched in seconds.
That was a couple of years ago, when I think there were motor scooter gangs doing it. Now, as we have seen—we were talking about the e-bike problem in our debates on the Bill before Christmas—there are lots of videos of these guys on their very fast bikes, snatching phones, and I believe the Met now has a response squad on those high-powered bikes chasing the phone thieves. So it is a big problem, particularly in London.
At present, our defences are simply not keeping pace. IMEI blocking helps, but criminals now routinely bypass it by altering identifiers or moving devices to jurisdictions where UK blacklists are ignored. What they cannot bypass is the cloud. As noble Lords have said, modern smartphones are useless without access to the cloud-based services that power authentication, updates, storage and app ecosystems.
The amendment therefore introduces a very simple, proportionate requirement. When a user reports their phone lost or stolen, cloud service providers must take reasonable steps to block that specific device from accessing their services. If a stolen phone cannot be reactivated, it cannot be resold. If it cannot be resold, it is not worth stealing. It is as simple as that.
My noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe hinted that the phone companies may possibly have a financial benefit from not co-operating here. The noble Lord, Lord Hogan- Howe, was more blatant. I will be more blatant still. I am absolutely certain that they are conspiring not to co-operate so that they can sell more phones. We were discussing all-terrain vehicles a couple of hours ago. When the Equipment Theft (Prevention) Bill was going through, the police officers who were advising us said that they had heard from some of the big manufacturers of ATVs—the ones which make motorbikes with locks you cannot penetrate—that they were deliberately putting rubbish locks on the ATVs because when the £8,000 quad bike was stolen, the farmer immediately replaced it. They saw a market in goods being stolen. I think the big phone companies see exactly the same thing: there is a market in replacement phones.
The noble Lord asked: why do the British Government not do something about it? I suspect it is mega US-UK politics. If we said we were going to restrict the ability of Apple, Google and others to sell their phones here, I think we would have Mr Trump seeking to invade us next week, so I suspect there are geopolitical problems there.
The amendment also ensures proper safeguards: verification before blocking, a clear appeals process, and a role for the Secretary of State in setting technical standards. It strengthens law enforcement by requiring timely notification to the National Crime Agency and local police, giving them valuable intelligence on organised theft. This is not about burdening industry. It is about ensuring that all providers meet a consistent baseline of responsible behaviour—one that many already follow voluntarily, but which criminals exploit when it is not universal.
I conclude by saying that we have an opportunity here to collapse the economic incentive that drives mobile phone theft. Cloud-based blocking is practical, proportionate and overdue, and I commend the amendment to the Minister.