House of Lords members faced calls to raise their hands if they had been stopped and searched by the police, as they debated Government plans to introduce new voter ID ato enter a polling station which was defeated on Thursday.
Independent crossbench peer Lord Woolley of Woodford asked peers to raise their hands as he questioned whether the new identification requirement in the Elections Bill would be “abused” by the authorities to “target” people from minoritised backgrounds.
Lord Woolley, founder and director of the campaign group Operation Black Vote, told peers on Wednesday: “When people talk about identification cards, ID cards, let me ask you in this House straight, how many of you here, raise your hands, have been stopped and searched by the police?”
Several peers could be heard telling him “you can’t do that”, but others around the House reportedly raised their hands, including Lord Woolley himself.
Lord Woolley also raised his own hand after asking: “How many of you here have been stopped and stripped-searched?”
The peer then addressed laughter that could be heard in the chamber, saying: “I am sorry if you find this funny, my lord, this really isn’t funny. You ask Child Q if it is funny. Ask her.”
The case of Child Q – a 15-year-old black schoolgirl who was strip searched by police while on her period after being wrongly suspected of carrying cannabis – has drawn outrage from the public and politicians.
The search, by two female Metropolitan Police officers, took place in 2020 without another adult present and in the knowledge that she was menstruating, a safeguarding report found las month.
The Local Child Safeguarding Practice Review, conducted by City & Hackney Safeguarding Children Partnership (CHSCP), concluded the strip-search should never have happened, was unjustified and racism “was likely to have been an influencing factor”.
New data revealed that most children in London who were strip-searched by the police in the last three years came from ethnic minority backgrounds.
Lord Woolley also challenged claims by Conservative former minister Baroness Verma, who said she had spent weeks talking to people from all backgrounds in Leicester, including black, Asian, minority ethnic and poor communities, and not one had objected to the plans for a voter ID card.
He said: “Because our worry, Baroness Verma, in the hands of the authority, that they will use identification cards to target us, because that is our lived experience, and so we worry. We worry will it be abused?
“Will we be harassed and humiliated? I know it is a digression but the subject came up and I wanted to knock it on its head.
“I am also from Leicester and I know the young Africans and Muslims there and they are worried about what we do here.”
He concluded: “That is why I am worried, that is why I have been worried about photo ID. I want to make it work. I want to bring people in, not lock people out.”
The peer had earlier claimed that a pilot of voter ID in Derby showed that “disproportionately black and brown people didn’t come back to exercise their franchise” once they had been turned away with insufficient identification.
He added: “If you calculate the number, the number was between 0.5% and 0.7% of those that came to the polls, turned away and never came back.
“If that translated to the general population we would be looking at hundreds of thousands, if not more than a million people, being turned away for exercising their franchise.
“Are we happy to accept that? Are we? Ask yourself that one question.”
Lord Woolley withdrew his amendment aimed at removing the requirement for voter ID from the Bill but, as it happens, the House of Lords inflicted a defeat on the bill on Thursday.
Peers voted 199 to 170, majority 29, to expand the list of accepted identification to include non-photo documents such as birth certificates, bank statements, council tax demands and library cards.
People would be required to show an approved form of photographic identification before collecting their ballot paper to vote in a polling station under measures contained in the Elections Bill - a move which campaigners argue will disproportionately disenfranchise Black and Asian voters who are less likely to be able to meet this requirement.
