Government defeated as Lords vote to make misogyny a hate crime

The government has suffered a defeat in the House of Lords as peers voted to make misogyny a hate crime in England and Wales.

The move would enable judges to impose stronger penalties if prejudice against women is proved to be the motivation.

A Home Office minister argued that making misogyny a hate crime would not stop hostility towards women.

Peers also blocked ministers from introducing new powers to curb noisy protests.

The votes came during a debate in the House of Lords on the Police Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill.

Once the Lords have completed their scrutiny of the bill it will return to the House of Commons where MPs will have their say.

The bill cannot become law until both Houses have agreed the changes.

The drive to amend the bill to make misogyny a hate crime was led by the Conservative peer Baroness Newlove - a former victims' commissioner.

As well as introducing stricter penalties, her amendment would also require the police to record where crimes are motivated by hatred of someone's sex or gender.

Baroness Newlove said: "It is perverse that, despite three million crimes being committed against women in just three years, our legal and policing systems do not routinely recognise what we all know is blindingly obvious: the deep-rooted hostility towards women that motivates many of these crimes.

"As a society we have rightly taken steps to acknowledge the severity of racist or homophobic crimes, but have not yet acted on crimes driven by hatred of women.

"Too often when it comes to violence against women, society demands the perfect victim before we act," she argued, adding that her amendment sought to "flip the script".

Baroness Fox argued against the proposal, saying the data collected would be "almost entirely based on subjective perceptions" of what constituted misogyny.

She warned that police resources would be wasted if they got "tangled up in the reporting and monitoring of stats and data which I do not think is reliable".

Home Office Minister Baroness Williams pointed to a report by the Law Commission last year which concluded that making misogyny a hate crime would not solve the problem of hostility towards women.

However, the amendment had support from Labour and the Liberal Democrats and it was backed by 242 votes to 185.

The government was also defeated, by 261 votes to 166, over its plans to give the police new powers to stop protests in England and Wales if they are deemed to be too noisy and disruptive.

Green peer Baroness Jones described the government's plans as "oppressive" and "plain nasty".

"How do you seriously think a protest is going to happen without noise?" she asked.

Labour's Lord Hain called the move "the biggest threat to the right to dissent and the right to protest in my lifetime" adding that it would have "throttled" protests by the suffragettes.

Baroness Williams defended the government's plans, telling peers that the police would only use the powers where "necessary" and "appropriate".

She urged peers to consider the different contexts in which a noisy protest could take place.

Throughout the debate, drum noises from a demonstration against the bill could be heard in the Lords' chamber, but the minister said no-one would try to stop that.

However, she said noisy anti-vaccination protests outside a school or nursing home were a different matter - and that police should have the powers to intervene if necessary.