My Lords, before I say anything substantive about this amendment standing in my name and the names of the noble Baronesses, Lady Morris of Yardley, Lady Grey-Thompson and Lady Ludford—who apologises for not being in her place this evening—I apologise to the House myself for having been unable for medical reasons to attend the Second Reading of this important Bill. However, I watched the debate with much interest, and was impressed by the wide range of issues raised and the very strong feelings with which many of those issues were discussed.
For me, the key point at Second Reading was made by the Minister, my noble friend Lady Williams of Trafford, who, when introducing the debate, described the Bill as having one overarching objective; namely, to keep the public safe. I have devoted almost the whole of my professional life to advancing this objective, both in this country and abroad, and it is for this reason that I enthusiastically welcome the Bill and welcome the opportunity to speak to this amendment.
If I were asked to name the most important lesson I learned from my long experience of policing, on both sides of the Atlantic, I would say that it is the importance of accurate, timely and comprehensive information in reducing crime and making communities safe. Without
such information, policing and crime reduction become simply a matter of guesswork and luck. With such information, however, our police forces and those who advise and assist them can begin to understand why, when and where crimes occur, and to develop effective evidence-based plans, strategies and tactics for tackling them. In a nutshell, the more comprehensive, consistent, timely and accurate the information available to our police forces, the more effective their efforts and the safer our communities will be.
Everyone who cares about policing and public safety recognises this, and it is this concern for consistent, accurate and comprehensive national information which accounts for Section 44 of the Police Act 1996, which gives the Home Secretary the power not only to require all forces in England and Wales to collect, maintain and return information about criminal behaviour and policing but to
“specify the form in which information is to be provided.”
It is this power to specify the form of the information to be provided that makes our national collection of criminal statistics so useful, because it permits the Home Office to issue its so-called counting rules—a set of memoranda that spell out in detail what information is to be collected by individual forces. These rules, which are kept regularly up to date to reflect new crimes and other changes in legislation, ensure that our national collection of criminal information is accurate, comprehensive and timely, rather than a set of random figures that reflect the whims and preferences of individual chief constables or police and crime commissioners.
I am making something of these Home Office counting rules because I want noble Lords to appreciate that there are already in place tried and tested arrangements to collect information from the police and to ensure that these collection arrangements are easily amended in the light of practical experience on the ground. For this reason, I very much hope at this late stage of this evening’s debate to concentrate on the main proposals of the amendment and not get bogged down in discussing the modalities of how this information should be collected. These are matters of detail for practitioners to consider in the light of the general principles that Parliament lays down for them, and not really matters for primary legislation.
Let us turn, therefore, to the heart of the amendment. It aims to fill a serious gap in our national collection of criminal statistics caused by the fact that, at present, police forces are not routinely or consistently required to collect data on the sex of all alleged victims or perpetrators of crimes. As a result, practice on the collection of sex data varies across forces and, in recent years, there has been a confusion with gender and related concepts, such as gender identity, which have been compromising the accuracy of our national data relating to sex. For example, most police forces currently allow biologically male alleged perpetrators to self-identify as women, even when charged with rape, and will then record the crime as carried out by a woman.
As is obvious from this example, our present laissez-faire attitude to how sex is recorded by forces across England and Wales has important practical consequences.
It deprives policymakers and police practitioners of accurate and consistent national statistical data about discrimination on the basis of sex. It thus makes it very difficult, if not impossible, to develop effective evidence-based policies for fighting these crimes, especially crimes relating to violence against women and girls—the tackling of which is one of the Government’s principal objectives and one to which they are committed by international agreement.
The amendment aims to fix this problem by amending the Police Act 1996 to require all forces to collect, for
“each person who is … the alleged victim of a crime reported to that police force, or … arrested for a crime by a member of that police force”,
at least one and in some cases two pieces of personal information. The first is the sex registered at birth of the alleged victim or arrestee, and the second is the acquired gender of that person, provided that he or she has a gender recognition certificate—known as a GRC—which legally recognises their acquired gender in the UK. I am sure some noble Lords would wish to argue that neither of these categories is appropriate in the context of the criminal justice system and that forces should collect only information on alleged victims’ or arrestees’ gender identity as he or she declares it to be. Let me deal with this argument in stages.
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As for the requirement that forces should collect information about the sex registered at birth, I should have thought the case was obvious. Since criminological research began, information about the sex of victims and arrestees has been collected and analysed across the globe by sex registered at birth. In my view, it would be nothing short of vandalism to permit forces, of their own volition, to stop collecting such information. This would at a stroke destroy the essential consistency, and therefore usefulness, of our national collection of criminal statistics.
Another, more detailed argument for collecting information about sex registered at birth is that because of the special arrangements whereby people with GRCs receive a new and altered birth certificate, not recording sex registered at birth could compromise accurate sex data. I appreciate that the number of people with GRCs is currently small, but all forecasts are for it to grow significantly over the coming years.
Yet another reason for collecting this data about the possession of a GRC is that experience has shown that it is very useful for overall sex data to be disaggregated, so that both sex registered at birth and acquired sex can be interrogated as separate data fields in research. This is essential for the protection of both women and those who have GRCs.
What about a person’s self-declared gender identity? Why do we not simply require forces to collect this information rather than the sex at birth or the acquired gender of those with a GRC? The simple reason is that at present, in this country, the concept of gender identity is neither definable nor defined clearly enough in our law to form the basis of reliable, accurate, long-term national information for use in internationally recognised criminological research, or even as the basis for policy-making at home.
This leads me back to the issue of collecting information on those with GRCs. There has been much passionate discussion in recent years, particularly on social media, about how trans people are treated by the police and other parts of the criminal justice system. But because forces are not recording accurate sex data or data about people in possession of GRCs, much of this debate is based not on accurate information but on anecdote. This cannot be a sensible way to debate important societal problems or to develop effective policies for tackling them; hence the case for this amendment, which would give us reliable, timely, consistent national data about whether the victims and perpetrators of crimes are male or female—a question which presently cannot be answered with confidence. For these reasons, I commend this amendment to the Committee. I beg to move.