The Church of England in Parliament

The Bishop of Manchester spoke in response to a government statement on the Huntingdon Train Attack on 4th November 2025, asking about bias in surveillance technology and methods of deterrence for knife crime:

The Lord Bishop of Manchester: My Lords, these Benches pay tribute to the train crew and others who responded so heroically. Our thoughts and prayers remain with all those who have been impacted. The traumatic effects of being involved in an incident like that, in an enclosed space, do not just go away after a short period of time. I declare my unpaid role as co-chair of the national police ethics committee. I am grateful that information about the perpetrator was got out early, and not just the fact that it was not terrorism. Since Southport last year, we have known that releasing other information is vital to calming some of the public’s fears. That is something that my ethics committee has been discussing at length in recent times.

Like many noble Lords—I am looking at the noble Lord, Lord Goddard, who may want to intervene shortly—I travel a lot on trains that do not stop for quite a long distance and which have many carriages. I could have made some of the points that have already been made about this. It is about having enough first responders, who are equipped to respond effectively, on those trains throughout the journey.

My trains have CCTV in every carriage—it usually works. That helps. I think facial recognition technology has been referred to. That needs to be managed very carefully. Many of the models that I have seen still have an in-built ethnic bias, inherited from the fact that the original training of their algorithms is often based on the faces of white men such as me. These models sometimes struggle to distinguish people from other groups within society, leading to too many false positives and causing people who are entirely innocent to have their lives interrupted by being stopped and accused of an offence. If we are to increase stop and search, there is no problem with that as long as we ensure that the officers involved are trained in unconscious bias so that they are not carrying it out in a way that is unfair.

Finally, does the Minister agree that deterrence for knife crime and other crime is driven much more by fear of detection and arrest than by the theoretical length of a maximum sentence?

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