Lord Young of Acton (Con)

My Lords, I support Amendment 86, in the names of my noble friend Lord Jackson and the noble Baroness, Lady Fox of Buckley, and will respond briefly to some of the points that the noble Lord, Lord Marks, just made in opposing that amendment. It might be relevant here to consider the interim guidance published by the National Police Chiefs’ Council on 13 August, following consultation with the Home Office and the Crown Prosecution Service, to encourage police forces to disclose the ethnicity and nationality, although not the immigration status, of suspects charged in high-profile cases. That interim guidance is currently the subject of a consultation being carried out by the College of Policing, which is trying to decide whether to make the guidance permanent or to withdraw it. The Runnymede Trust and other charities have written an open letter to the Home Secretary and the chair of the National Police Chiefs’ Council making many of the same arguments that the noble Lord, Lord Marks, made, opposing the interim guidance that publishing the ethnicity and nationality of suspects in serious high-profile criminal cases is dangerous, that it can lead people to draw the wrong conclusions and that it can fuel the rise of populist parties and so forth. However, the reason for the introduction of this interim guidance was the speculation and misinformation about the suspect in the Southport attacks in the summer of 2024. The object of advising the police to publish information about ethnicity and nationality of suspects in high-profile criminal cases is precisely to avoid people speculating in that way and drawing the wrong conclusion, giving them the information to fill the vacuum that would otherwise be filled by speculation. The same arguments can be made in favour of Amendment 86. If the courts—