Crime and Policing Bill

Committee (11th Day)

Amendment 411

411: After Clause 144, insert the following new Clause— “Stop and searchIn section 60(1) of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 (powers to stop and search in anticipation of, or after, violence)— (a) in paragraph (a) omit “serious”, and(b) in paragraph (aa)(i) omit “serious”.”Member’s explanatory statement This new clause would lower the threshold for stop and search to “violence” rather than “serious violence”.

My Lords, Amendment 411 is in my name and that of my noble friend Lord Cameron of Lochiel and my noble and learned friend Lord Keen of Elie. The amendment was championed by my honourable friend Matt Vickers in Committee in the other place.

The amendment alters the statutory threshold for the exercise of the powers under Section 60 of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994. That section permits a police officer of at least the rank of inspector to authorise stop and search powers within a defined locality for a period of 24 hours. Where such an authorisation has been given, a police officer may stop any member of the public to search them for offensive weapons or dangerous instruments without suspicion of the commission of an offence—so, essentially, it allows for a temporary adjustment to standard stop and search powers.

The current test that must be met is for the officer of sufficient rank to reasonably believe that incidents involving serious violence may take place in any locality in his police area. Our amendment would lower the threshold so that the police would be able to use Section 60 powers where there is a reasonable likelihood of violence, not serious violence. The fundamental principle behind this amendment is that the police should be able to act where there is a threat of violence—any form of violence—without being required to weigh the seriousness of that violence. This would remove the more subjective element of the test.

We know that stop and search powers are highly effective in combating crime and preventing violent offences. In the year ending March 2025, there were a total of 528,582 stops and searches conducted by officers in England and Wales. This represented a slight decrease of 1.4% from the previous year. Of those, 5,572 were conducted under Section 60 powers, which actually represented an increase of 5.4%. This is welcome; I am pleased to see the police making good use of their powers. But, given that there were 1.1 million incidents of violence with or without injury recorded by the police in the year ending June 2025, that the figure that the ONS has given shows no statistically significant change compared with the previous year, and that there were still 51,527 knife offences, there is more work that needs to be done. Lowering the threshold for the use of Section 60 is another tool that the Government could utilise in their efforts to crack down on the use of offensive weapons and the incidence of violence. I beg to move.

My Lords, I support the amendment in the name of my noble friend on the Front Bench. At this juncture, I also thank the Committee for its forbearance when I was not able to move my previous amendment on mobile phone theft. I put on record my warmest thanks to my noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe for moving it so eloquently on that occasion.

This is an issue about the difference between “serious violence” and “violence”, but the wider context is the fact that the UK has a knife crime problem. In London, the number of incidents up to June 2025 was 15,639, which was an increase of nearly 72% from the data recorded in 2015-16. Unfortunately, it has to be said that the number of stop and search encounters peaked at the end of the last Labour Government and dramatically decreased under the two previous Governments. Between 2003 and 2011, stop and search numbers increased, peaking at 1.2 million, but by 2018 this had fallen by 77%. The number of arrests resulting from stop and search encounters had fallen from 120,000 to 48,000.

The fact is that there is significant evidence that stop and search does demonstrably have an impact on the incidence of knife crime, and therefore reduces crime. In a study released in 2025, the two criminologists Alexis Piquero and Lawrence Sherman analysed data between 2008 and 2023, and found that stop and search encounters were successful in reducing deaths and injuries related to weapons. The conclusion of the study was that

“increased stop and search encounters can significantly reduce knife-related injuries and homicides in public places”.

Evidence from a number of bodies and think tanks, including Policy Exchange, suggests that, while there may be a range of causal factors, a link between rates of knife crime and rates of stop and search exists. As the rate of stop and search decreases, the amount of knife crime increases. As stop and search rises, the amount of knife crime falls. The Chief Constable of Greater Manchester, Sir Stephen Watson, said last year:

My Lords, I support my noble friend’s Amendment 411, because it brings clarity and accountability to the exceptional power in Section 60 of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994. This is not a call to strengthen police powers; it is a call to describe them accurately, so the public understand their narrow scope and the safeguards that constrain them.

Section 60 is triggered only when

“a police officer of or above the rank of inspector reasonably believes”

one of a small number of factors: that incidents of violence may take place in a locality; that a weapon used in a recent incident is being carried locally; or that people are carrying weapons without good reason; and that there has already been an incident of serious violence. The statute requires the authorisation to be for

“any place within that locality for a specified period not exceeding 24 hours”.

These are tight operational limits.

Changing the definition from “serious violence” to “violence” keeps all the safeguards that make this power exceptional rather than just routine: the inspector-level threshold; the written and recorded authorisation; the geographic and temporal limits; the ability to seize weapons; and the requirement to provide records to those stopped. Those are not peripheral details; they are the legal guardrails that protect civil liberties while enabling targeted public safety action.

I simply ask: where is the dividing line between violence and serious violence? If someone gets stabbed multiple times and it is life-threatening, we would all agree that is serious violence, but what about the person who gets stabbed once and suffers a non-life-threatening cut? Is that merely violence and so does not count? That is why we have to change this definition to any violence, no matter how serious it may be called. This is not a wide-ranging opening of the stop and search powers applying everywhere for all time. Using “violence” in operational documents with an explicit cross-reference to the Section 60 triggers reduces confusion with broader strategic programmes labelled “serious violence”. It prevents the normalisation of suspicionless searches and makes it easier for Parliament, oversight bodies and the public to scrutinise each authorisation against the statutory test.

My Lords, I agree with the wording as it is in the Bill. The word “serious” is quite important. Stop and search, particularly in the London area, has been abused. You are supposed to stop somebody because of “reasonable” grounds to suspect, but as somebody who was stopped and searched six times, and every time I did not have anything they thought I would have, I see it as a sort of overpolicing.

It is a pity that the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, is not here, because when he became the chief police officer in this place, he realised that some of this was not working and was antagonising communities, not delivering the result that was expected. The Bill is worded in terms of “serious”; the amendment tries to lower the threshold. As the intention of the Bill is to stop serious crime, “serious” to me is quite important. I do not support the amendment and would like to retain the wording in the Bill.

My Lords, I am pleased to follow the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Sentamu, and share some of his concerns about this amendment. Before I share those concerns, I ask the noble Lords opposite to explain the relationship and potential contradictions between this amendment and their amendment in the next group on digital identity. It is a shame that these amendments do not sit in a single group, because it would have been easier to expose the thinking behind and relationship between them. That amendment, prohibiting the police requiring someone to show a digital identity document in the event that they are stopped and searched, could have been drafted by my former colleagues at Liberty. This amendment, on diluting protections against arbitrary stop and search, would certainly not have been drafted by my former colleagues at Liberty, so noble Lords opposite seem to be pointing in two different directions when it comes to the relationship between the citizen and the state on the street.

I am grateful to the noble Lord opposite for setting out his amendment. He spoke about the large number of stop and searches with some precision, but he did not go on to set out the number of those searches that resulted in an arrest, charge or conviction. That is the kind of correlation we need to examine if he wants to justify suspicionless stop and search in particular as a useful tool for preventing very serious crimes. I would be interested in any information that noble Lords have about how many of these searches, particularly suspicionless searches, lead to, for example, a criminal charge. That is the kind of ratio the Committee ought to examine.

Like the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Sentamu, I am concerned about suspicionless stop and search. It is quite a blunt instrument. I am not saying that it does not have a place in the statute book. An obvious example is that when guests come to this Palace, they routinely go through a form of suspicionless stop and search by walking through airport-style security gates and having any bags searched. There is no room for concern or feelings of injustice there, because it is a high-security environment, everybody understands the risk to the Palace and those within it, and everybody is treated in the same way, so there is not this concern about arbitrary or discriminatory treatment. When, for example, under the Terrorism Act, or indeed under other statutes, a place of particular risk and sensitivity is identified in that way, you can see the beginnings of some justification for suspicionless stop and search. However, with respect to the noble Lord, Lord Jackson of Peterborough, when he spoke in support of the amendment, he was almost justifying routine suspicionless stop and search. Why not just have it everywhere in England and Wales if it is so effective? The answer is that, as the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Sentamu, said, if you make it too readily available and have too low a threshold, suspicionless stop and search at large will lead to arbitrary and discriminatory results and to a feeling of distrust between some communities—young black men in particular, but not exclusively—and the police.

As usual, the noble Baroness is making a cogent and persuasive case, but I do not think she concedes that we are not talking about suspicionless searches; we are talking about an expectation that violence will happen—there will be a violent incident rather than a seriously violent incident.

I just leave her with the figures: in London, from 2021, there were 311,352 stop and searches, and they had fallen to 135,739 in 2024. At the same time, there was an 86% rise in knife crime. The argument that those of us on this side are making is that there has to be a balance. None of us wants racially profiled overpolicing, but at the same time, we have to find a reason why when we reduce stop and searches, there is an inevitable increase in knife crime.

I hear the noble Lord, but with respect, this provision relates to suspicionless stop and search. That is a term we use to describe a stop and search power that does not require reasonable suspicion that the person who is about to be stopped and searched is a criminal, is equipped or whatever it is.

The power in Section 60, therefore, is a suspicionless stop and search power, which is why it needs to be circumscribed and why there have to be certain conditions met before an area can be designated, because the normal law of the land, as noble Lords will recognise, is that anywhere in the land a constable can stop and search an individual whom they reasonably suspect of carrying a knife or being otherwise involved in criminality.

Section 60 in and of itself is a special circumstance, so whether it is suspicionless needs to be looked at in that context, and I would just like to offer the noble Baroness this context. There is no such thing as non-serious violence. Let us be very clear, when we are talking about the impact of knife carrying in particular, that any knife that has ended up in the body of a person has been shown to multiple members of the community and been used to create terror before that tragedy has happened. The idea that a stop and search is only potent when it leads to an arrest or a charge is simply incorrect. Having been a youth worker for over 35 years, I have worked with some of the most gang-involved people in the entire country, and they will tell you that they will be armed because they do not believe they are going to be stopped. Every time you do a stop and search, it sends a ripple, particularly to those who need to hear the ripple, that it could happen, so it lowers their propensity to go armed. Just because it does not lead to a charge, that does not mean it has not been effective.

I am grateful to the noble Lord for his intervention, but I return to my central point, which is, as he pointed out in his intervention, that the normal law of the land is for stop and search on reasonable suspicion that the individual in question is a cause for concern: “I have reasonable suspicion that that person may be carrying a knife, et cetera, or otherwise involved in criminality”. These are special powers given to a relatively junior police officer; this is not a chief constable, let alone a magistrate or a judge. It allows a police officer to change the law of the land for a time-limited period for that area, to change what the stop and search regime is in that area. It is quite right that a power of that kind be tightly circumscribed because of the problems that the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Sentamu, spoke about and because citizens do have rights to go about their business without fear of arbitrary stop and search.

This brings me back to my question about the relationship between Amendment 411, which is in this group on its own, and Amendment 415, which noble Lords opposite have in a separate group, and the apparent dichotomy between them. Amendment 415 says that, where there is a stop and search, an officer should not be allowed to require the presentation of digital ID; it does not even say “compulsory digital ID”. So if, as I think the Government now propose, digital ID becomes available to people to partake of, if they want, as a more convenient method of ID, we are going to have circumstances where noble Lords opposite will have more routine stop and search, but when a stop and search happens, an officer would not be able to ask the person searched to identify themselves if all they have with them is digital ID. That seems like a contradiction to me. I, for one, have always been very concerned and opposed to compulsory single identifiers, not least for the reason that they will lead to routine stop and search with people required to identify themselves to the police when they have done nothing wrong. I should be very interested if noble Lords opposite could square the relationship between this amendment and the one that follows.