Public Order Bill (Second sitting)

(Limited Text - Ministerial Extracts only)

Committee stage
Thursday 9th June 2022 Public Bill Committees

[Matt Vickers]

Q When you look at what is proposed in this Bill, are we going far enough? Is there anything that you would like to see added to the mix?

Steve Griffiths: I am here to talk about the disruptions; I cannot really talk about the policy itself.

Elizabeth de Jong: The areas we have focused on are the definitions of key national infrastructure. Locking on is important, and it is important that petrol stations are included. We do not have views on the other areas of the Bill, around stop and search for example. That is for people who have studied and are expert in what deters people or does not deter people.

[The Minister for Crime and Policing (Kit Malthouse)]

Q I have a couple of questions. In response to Ms McLaughlin’s point about protest, presumably the most direct thing these protesters could do is not buy your products—not drive a car, not use gas in their cookers, not fly on holiday. That consumer behaviour would have an impact on the way you run your businesses.

Steve Griffiths: That is clearly one obvious option, yes.

[Kit Malthouse]

Q I want to ask a little bit about pre-emption. You talked, Mr Griffiths, about the breach of your fence. Do you think it would have been helpful for the police to have the powers to identify and stop somebody and possibly search them on approach to the airport to see if they were in possession of, say, bolt cutters, and remove them before they were able to reach the perimeter?

Steve Griffiths: Yes, certainly. We work with the police on intelligence and they do a lot of scanning to try to look at risks that are presented at the airport, but certainly, having those facilities to stop people directly and search them would be helpful.

[Kit Malthouse]

Q Presumably, in both circumstances, your members now are much more attuned to the notion of hostile reconnaissance and the notion that that needs to be detected on a pre-emptive basis to get ahead of some of these protests.

Steve Griffiths: Yes, we have a very well-defined plan that is a joint plan between the airport, the airport police and Essex police. That is really around the seriousness with which we take breaches on the airport. We have to have a very clear escalation plan and very clear, constant monitoring in place, because the seriousness of the disruption it causes, and also the threat to safety, is significant to us as an operating airport.

[Kit Malthouse]

Q Ms de Jong, is that the same now with petrol dumps?

Elizabeth de Jong: Yes. Site security and risk assessment per se, given that we work in such a tightly regulated and potentially dangerous environment, are very much at the core of all operations throughout the downstream oil sector.

[Kit Malthouse]

Q Finally, for clarity, Ms de Jong, to confirm what I think you said a couple of times, during the Just Stop Oil protests, when they breached the perimeter of some of those places, there could quite easily have been a catastrophic and very large explosion.

Elizabeth de Jong: Indeed.

[Sarah Jones]

Q I have a couple of quick follow-up questions. You might not know the answer to the first one, but I am interested to know whether you were aware in either case of whether there was any police intelligence that the protests were going to happen before they did.

Also, there seem to be slightly different issues. The issue with the flight was a slight one-off, in that people were objecting to that particular flight going away. There is a particular problem, it seems, with people trying to block entire infrastructure programmes across the country. They are two quite different things and I think they need a slightly different response.

I want to confirm with you, Mr Griffiths, that the police arrested the people but that the issue was that the charge was not right. It was not that they were not arrested and taken away; it was just that the charge did not stick because the right charge was not there, if you see what I mean.

Steve Griffiths: Yes, you have the fact that the incident occurred in the first place and then, as you say, the perpetrators were arrested, but then the subsequent charge fell apart because of, presumably, a gap in legislation, in that the route taken for prosecution did not stand up. On your first question, I do not have that answer with me today.

Elizabeth de Jong: I have some information on the first one. We received police intelligence about the attacks and that intelligence was broadly correct.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Chair]

We have limited time, so I will allow the Minister to ask his questions.

[Kit Malthouse]

Q I think we are clear on your view of the Bill, and I gather that you were clear on your view of the Bill on social media before you appeared. Those sweet likes are so gratifying, are they not?

I want to ask you a couple of questions. First, you seem to be quite happy for those who profess to be protesters to go to prison in certain circumstances. So, if someone glues themselves on to a fuel gantry, bringing themselves and others into danger, you are quite happy for those people to go to prison—the only question in your mind is for how long. I presume you accept that part of the role of sentencing is not just to punish, but to deter. In circumstances where somebody is persistently committing those offences, whether or not they are subject to the order that you talked about, would you not expect them to get increasing sentences as they reoffended?

Adam Wagner: The first thing I would say is that I have come here voluntarily. I did not come here to have someone be personally rude to me, and I really do not appreciate it. I do not understand the benefit of that to anyone.

The second point is that I am not happy for any protester to go to prison. That is the criminal law as it is. The question this Committee is asking is: does the criminal law need to change to deal with the problems that the Bill is supposedly dealing with? I just do not think it does. If the aim of the Bill is to send a lot of peaceful protesters to prison, it will do that. By peaceful, I mean non-violent. Locking on to something is not a violent protest. It is disruptive and annoying for the people who are trying to do whatever they are going to do in the location the protester has locked on to, but it is a classic form of protest. It is something that has always been used. It is something that society generally tolerates.

If we want lots more people like that to go to prison, this is the Bill to do it. However, if you want to stop people blocking roads, oil refineries or fracking sites—whatever the cause at the moment is—this is not the Bill to do that. I can tell you that, because I know these people; they will continue doing what they are doing. The difference is that they will end up in prisons all around the country, and I am not sure that is a good look for the country.

[Kit Malthouse]

I understand. I apologise if I was rude before.

Adam Wagner: Thank you.

[Kit Malthouse]

Q I was trying to be wry; my apologies. I do not know whether you are familiar with Scottish law, but I want to ask you about the comparison with that. In Scotland, we are seeing fuel protesters being charged under what is called malicious mischief, which is an offence that attracts an unlimited sentence—subject, obviously, to judicial oversight. Presumably, you think that if that is being used significantly against protesters in Scotland, prisons there will similarly fill.

Adam Wagner: First, it depends on whether the police are charging under that. I have not really talked about the relationship between the police and the public. The police will have to think really carefully about whether they want any of the aggravation of having to recommend for charging people who are not violent criminals, but are, in fact, peaceful protesters expressing their views.

Secondly, you cannot guarantee at all that the judges will send people to prison. There has been a step change through Insulate Britain. I have acted in a lot of these contempt cases—where people breach injunctions. The big difference with Insulate Britain is that these people are being sent to prison, and the courts’ reasoning, as I said, is that the protest is not directed at the social evil that the protesters are protesting. They are blocking the highway, and not blocking anybody who is insulating or not insulating anything. That is why they are sending people to prison.

However, what the judges have not done is send to prison people who, like my clients, were protesting at the entrance of a fracking site in Blackburn at Preston New Road, or people protesting on the HS2 line. The courts have said very directly: “We tend not to send people to prison for that.” It is quite possible that the courts will not oblige. Who knows? The powers will be there.

[Kit Malthouse]

Q This is the final question from me. We are seeing an increasing use of civil injunctions in these circumstances where protesters are going to prison. In your view, are there more protections for the individual through the criminal courts than through the civil courts? If you were acting for a protester, would you rather be subject to criminal or civil proceedings, from the point of view of civil liberties and protection of the individual?

--- Later in debate ---

[Mrs Elphicke]

Q I want to follow up on that very point. On a number of the other disruptions that we have seen, what is disrupted cannot be delivered in another way: the roads, ports, fuel and so on. But, as you say, minute-by-minute news is doing its stuff. If I understand the reason that you were targeted, it was that there was a view about what the political representation of the group was, rather than what was necessarily going on at the plant itself. I think you mentioned The Guardian, among other things. Do you think that the measures should be widened to give greater protection to organisations that are targeted, not because of what they are doing but because people just want to disrupt that business, organisation, or person’s life to make a political point in an unacceptable way?

David Dinsmore: I do think that the way the law is structured protects the rights of the few against the rights of the many. That feels to me to be anti-democratic. So, without going into the specifics of it, yes, I do think that. On that point of “you can get it online”, there is still a significant cohort in the community—principally older readers—who cannot or do not get it online, and do get their news in print.

[Kit Malthouse]

Q I want to underline that point. Do you believe that the reason you were targeted was the political and social posture of your publications, and that those protesters were effectively trying to silence your point of view or the point of view of your publications?

David Dinsmore: I do not know if we know for a fact that that is the case. However, certainly, in a lot of protests that we see—and believe you me, we see a lot of protests—an anti-Murdoch element always comes out. We are big, grown-up girls and boys, and we deal with most of that in our daily work, but on that occasion, the level of disruption caused was well beyond what would be acceptable.

[Kit Malthouse]

Q In that specific protest, was there no publicly declared reason for the protest?

David Dinsmore: Apart from the fact that it was Extinction Rebellion, I would need to go back. I think there was a lot of assumption about what it was against—I think they did some tweeting at the time, but I will need to come back to you with the specifics around what was actually said and claimed at the time.

[The Chair]

Do any Members wish to ask further questions? On that basis, Mr Dinsmore, I thank you for your evidence.

Examination of Witnesses

Sir Peter Martin Fahy QPM, Matt Parr CB and Chief Superintendent Phil Dolby gave evidence.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Chair]

Q Did you wish to say something, Ms Needleman, or was I misinterpreting you?

Stephanie Needleman: Yes, please. I want to add that when we talk about what these protest banning orders do, we should note that they do not necessarily just ban people from attending or organising protests. They have significantly wider, far-reaching applications into everyday aspects of people’s lives. As long as they are imposed for one of the purposes listed, the conditions that can be imposed when someone has been given one of these orders can be anything. Look at the conditions listed in the Bill: they can prevent people using the internet, associating with particular persons or participating in particular activities. It is not necessarily limited to protest. We are talking about activities that are far, far broader than just being prevented from attending protests.

[Kit Malthouse]

Q For precision, we should be clear that the measure that was previously considered, which you referred to, Ms Spurrier, was a protest banning order that was an absolute ban, which you rightly did not support. However, this measure is a conditional order, which may place restrictions or conditions on somebody’s ability to operate in a protest environment. For example, a Just Stop Oil person may be banned from coming within half a mile of an oil terminal, but could still attend a protest in central London outside this building about the same issue. That is the difference between the two, is it not?

Martha Spurrier: Well, there is a potential difference in how it would be applied, but the serious disruption prevention orders have the capacity to be absolute bans in the same way as the protest banning orders.

[Kit Malthouse]

Under judicial supervision.

Martha Spurrier: Yes, under judicial supervision—but, as we have said, to a low standard of proof, based on no criminal conduct.

[Kit Malthouse]

Q Would the same effect currently be achievable through an injunction against an individual through a civil route?

Martha Spurrier: I don’t think so, because I do not think you could attach the same invasive conditions. I do not think you could have electronic monitoring, for example, if you had an injunction. That is my understanding.

[Kit Malthouse]

Q But you could, through a civil injunction, stop somebody attending a particular place at a particular time, or associating with particular people or, for example, coming near an oil terminal. There are wide—basically unlimited—powers to impose conditions through an injunction.

Martha Spurrier: I would not describe them as unlimited powers, but judges absolutely can impose injunctions. It goes to the broader point of whether these additional powers are needed, and I know that there have been people giving evidence that—

[Kit Malthouse]

Q I do not mean to rush, but we are short of time. From a human rights point of view, if you were a protester subject to some kind of control or sanction for your activity, would you rather go through a civil procedure or a criminal procedure, based on the protections that would be available to you as an individual —access to a jury trial, supervision by a judge, the level of proof and all those kind of things?

Martha Spurrier: I do not understand the question. A civil injunction and an SDPO are both civil procedures with criminal sanctions attached.

[Kit Malthouse]

Q Sorry, I was not necessarily referring to SDPOs. I meant more widely. At the moment, we have a situation where we see people go to prison in this country for so-called protest activity through a civil route, because the criminal route is not deemed enough of a deterrent or is too slow. The contrast between the two is presumably that in the criminal system, there are quite strong protections, including the right to a jury trial and others, that do not apply in a civil situation. If the end result is that you are going to end up guilty of a particular offence, surely you would do it through the criminal route, rather than the civil route.

Martha Spurrier: If you are going to face imprisonment, you will always have access to counsel—to legal aid. You may face those sanctions either directly from a breach of the criminal law or, if you are under a civil order that has criminal sanctions attached to it, from breaching that civil order. I cannot see an argument that any person is better off having an SDPO, as opposed to an injunction or any other offence. The fact of the matter is that an SDPO is a novel legal provision that, for all the reasons we have gone over, captures non-criminal conduct as well as criminal.

[Kit Malthouse]

Q But nevertheless, the impact or effect of the two is not dissimilar.

Martha Spurrier: Well, the impact of an SDPO is much, much wider, because you could end up having a civil order attached to you that has invasive conditions, such as electronic monitoring, that could be renewed indefinitely, and if you breach them you could face almost a year in prison and an unlimited fine. I do not think they are comparable at all. We do not have anything like that currently, whereby, for non-criminal acts, you could face that kind of civil or criminal sanction.

[Kit Malthouse]

Q I thought that for a breach of an injunction, you could face up to two years in prison.

Martha Spurrier: You can. What I am saying is that you would not currently have an injunction based on non-criminal conduct—the kind of non-criminal conduct we are talking about with this Bill—that then has attached to it invasive conditions such as electronic monitoring. There is no comparison with what this Bill is doing.

[Kit Malthouse]

Q Okay, thanks very much. Mr Sprague, I want to ask you about other jurisdictions—most notably, Scotland. My perception is that Scotland has more draconian sentencing powers in these circumstances. For example, we referred earlier to the offence of malicious mischief, which carries an unlimited prison sentence when presented in front of a judge. Just last month, the organiser of a protest in Glasgow was arrested on the grounds that the protest had not been authorised by the city council. Are you engaged with the Scottish Government over concerns about that situation, or do you think it is a very settled legal situation that has been there for some time, so that is an acceptable bar?

Olly Sprague: I do not want to give a non-answer here. Obviously, policing is a devolved matter, so our offices in Scotland have an equivalent of me. They are involved in a number of policing and scrutiny panels, and they are actively involved in the human rights framework around public order policing. They were involved in a scrutiny panel for the COP protests, for example. These are discussions that our colleagues have with the Scottish Government all the time. I am not fully abreast of the details of those, but I can tell you that we have them. Where we are critical, we make that known.

[Kit Malthouse]

Q The hon. Member for Ealing Central and Acton has been campaigning for some time on buffer zones around abortion clinics, which would obviously impact individuals’ rights to protest. As organisations, do you support the principle of buffer zones in such circumstances?

Martha Spurrier: Liberty’s position on buffer zones is to support as limited a buffer zone as is possible to protect access to reproductive rights for the people who need to use the services of the clinic, while also protecting the right to protest. One of the amendments proposes a 150-metre buffer zone, and we think that that limit is acceptable, although it should be dependent on circumstances—if a narrower one is possible, that should be used. There are some aspects of the amendment that we agree with, and some that we think are too broad and could infringe the right to protest. I have to say that of all our concerns about this Bill, buffer zones around abortion clinics are not high on the list. There are much more egregious interferences with the right to protest in this Bill than those proposed in that amendment.

[Kit Malthouse]

Q Okay. Do any of the other witnesses wish to comment on buffer zones?

[The Chair]

Ms Needleman, would you like to comment?

Stephanie Needleman: Sorry; I could not hear very well. Were you asking me whether I wanted to comment?

[The Chair]

Order. I am going to come to you, Dr Huq, but I will decide who speaks and when. The Minister is currently speaking, and we are asking Ms Needleman, who is joining us by Zoom, whether she wishes to give a response.

Stephanie Needleman: I do not think I have that much to add—Justice, as an organisation, does not have a formal position on this—but I agree in terms of protecting the rights of women to access abortion services, obviously, and that should be done in a way that does not infringe the right to protest. The right to protest is not an unlimited right, so there is scope to do something, but it needs to be limited so that it is within the bounds of articles 10 and 11.

Olly Sprague: We agree totally with that. In general, we would take a very dim view of the idea of protest buffer zones, unless there are exceptionally good reasons. We would be looking at things like drawing on existing regulations around incitement to hatred and privacy rights—those sorts of things. A way of protecting rights on both sides would be seen as important. As Martha said, what mitigation could be allowed to make sure that one right does not overshadow the other, if that makes sense? But, obviously, this is an incredibly sensitive and difficult area.

[Kit Malthouse]

Q Obviously it is, and the reason why I raise it is to illustrate the subjective nature of the judgments about where the line is drawn when balancing rights between competing groups. I guess that that leads to my final question. I am not trying to be provocative, but I would be interested to know whether there are occasions in your organisations’ histories when you have campaigned for the rights of those who are affected by protest but not participating in it—the rights of the majority to go about their daily lives. If so, are there things we should be doing to restrict particular protests—for example, for persistent protestors who cause enormous damage or danger to others—that you think should be in the Bill?

Martha Spurrier: Liberty has a long history of working on the right to protest, both in terms of protestors and members of other communities. For example, we have a rich history of tackling the difficult issue of far right protest and incitement to hatred, where Liberty has very much supported the idea of communities needing to be protected when they are faced with far right, extremist protests. One of the other things that article 10 does, and that policing has had to grapple with since the advent of the Human Rights Act, is to protect counter-protests and protests. You very often have two protests going on at the same time where there is a clash. Again, Liberty has done lots of work to make sure that both protest groups, acting within the law, are protected with their article 10 rights upheld, in so far as that can be done, compatibly with each other.

I absolutely refute the idea that this is subject-specific. The abortion buffer zones case is a really good example. As with many other cases, it is a fact that we have public order laws in this country and we accept that things such as preventing violence and preventing incitement to violence, for example, are an important infringement on protest. Many of those considerations are in play when you think about abortion buffer zones. It is when you are dealing with rights that butt up against other rights that you have to make difficult calls, for sure, but we are saying that the Bill fundamentally gets the balance wrong.

I do not know whether we will have time to get on to the stop-and-search proposals or the offence of locking on. However, thinking about locking on as an example, just very briefly, those who are policing a protest are confronted with a dynamic situation. They are trying to work out at what point that crosses the line and might need to be shut down. If someone locks themselves to an animal testing centre—let us take it out of modern, current examples—the police have to work out at what point that person’s right to lock themselves to the testing centre becomes an infringement of other rights. It might be that the police think, “Actually, that guy can be there for two days and it doesn’t really matter. It’s a perfectly lawful and acceptable exercise of his protest rights. But, at a certain point, it is going to become a problem and we are going to consider removing him.”

If you create an offence of locking on—if you criminalise such specific protest tactics—the minute a man puts his padlock around that testing centre, he has committed a crime. There is no ability for the police to act in a dynamic way, to assess, and to do the balancing act of comparing competing rights. That is it: the tactic is criminalised and that man can be removed immediately, regardless of whether there is any impact on other people.

Of course, any of us who work in this area are really adept at trying to manage competing rights, and that is what the police have to do all the time. But the proposals in the Bill are blunt instruments that will criminalise hitherto lawful activity. They will have a chilling effect on the ability to protest, and they will not deter normal people who want to make their voices heard from trying to do so—instead, the Bill will just criminalise them. It will not deter the hard core, who have breaking the law as one of their tactics, because the provision just falls into what they already do.

[Kit Malthouse]

Q What should we do about that?

Martha Spurrier: What should we do about protests?

[Kit Malthouse]

No, what should we do about the hard core that you are talking about?

Martha Spurrier: What about the hard core we already have? The police already have a whole range of measures to deal with hard-core protesters. We have criminal offences and we have specially trained police officers dealing with those people. Someone earlier talked about not living in perfect harmony. A measure of disruption and nuisance is going to be a factor of any protest about any hot political issue at any one time, whether you are talking about the civil rights movement in America, the movement for votes for women with the suffragettes in this country, or the climate justice movement now. You cannot take the sting out of it entirely, because then there would not be protest, and then we would not live in a democracy any more.

[The Chair]

Ms Needleman, do you wish to say anything?

Stephanie Needleman: On the measures that already exist, there is obviously the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022, which has literally just been passed, which includes measures—the expanded circumstances —under which the police can impose conditions on protests. That just adds to the existing measures. I do not think these new measures have even come into force yet, so we do not know what effect they will have. There is no evidence base that further measures are needed.