Crime and Policing Bill

Baroness Cash Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 13th January 2026 Lords Chamber

to make the decisions about protests. There is some unease from some people about giving them that power. So I ask the Minister reflect on whether that is still the appropriate person to make the final decision, given the recent behaviour of some police officers, albeit a very small minority, and to be given total discretion on taking action?

[Baroness Cash (Con)]

My Lords, I am very grateful to the noble Lord for raising the issue of Miznon and Erev in Notting Hill. There have been a number of protests outside that restaurant, which is actually on my street. The owners of the restaurant and the residents who use it, including me, have been subjected to the vilest form of antisemitism, and the police have done nothing.

So I support this and will ask the Minister a number of questions about it. It is not enough to say that the senior officer should be responsible for this; much clearer principles and rules are needed around what is and is not acceptable, if the police are evidently—based on recent events—not capable of exercising that judgment themselves. So I support this and hope that the Minister will take it seriously.

[Lord Marks of Henley-on-Thames (LD)]

My Lords, I will confine what I say to a few points in response to some of the speakers we have heard from.

I found myself in considerable agreement with the general concerns about balance expressed by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester. It seems to me that, in some of the consideration of these clauses, we have lost sight of what we agreed in Committee last week. Everybody agreed that questions for the courts and others about considering breaches of public order law—as well as the introduction of new public order provisions—do raise the question of balance between, on the one hand, the right to protest and, on the other, the rights and freedoms of others.

I will resist the temptation to respond in detail to the amendments from the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, in spite of his claim that he relished the Minister’s demolition of my arguments about stress-testing this legislation for the future and not relying on the benign intentions of this Government. I have concerns about the noble Lord’s amendments; I am sure that the Minister will deal with them. They include questions about what “serious disruption” is and what should amount to “essential services” within the meaning of the Act, as well as he whole question of cumulative disruption, to which we will turn later.

Those concerns—and the Minister’s comments in the previous group on the publication of the review of the noble Lord, Lord Macdonald of River Glaven—raise an important issue about the timing of this legislation, compared with the timing of the noble Lord’s expected report. I share the confidence that he will consider all these issues with great care, but might it not have been better had the review come first and the introduction of this legislation and its consideration in this House come second? From what the Minister said in his speech on the previous group, I take it that it is the Government’s present intention to give further consideration to public order law in the light of the noble Lord’s expected report. If that is the case—and if that attention will be given objectively and carefully, and then lead to such legislation as is necessary—that may be the best we can do with the timing that we have now. But my comments stand about the order in which this has been done stand.

I turn to the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe. I do not propose to give him many hours of pleasure in listening again to arguments about balance as a matter of law; however, I do repeat the question asked by the noble Lord, Lord Leigh of Hurley, about how confident he is that police officers, including senior police officers, always get the balance right. That is a difficult assertion to make or defend. I am not suggesting that he went as far as that, but it is very important, not only for the Government but for us as parliamentarians, to consider the possibility that police officers sometimes fail to get the balance right.

I take the point that the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, made that it is often a very difficult balance to strike. We need to be very careful in commenting on how the police should strike it and not place too much confidence in the police in the future and, in particular, in the event of changes in government that, as the noble Lord recognised, might be unwelcome to many of us. Nevertheless, they could be changes of an elected Government.

That brings me to Amendment 382H, which was welcomed by the noble Lord, Lord Murray of Blidworth, and elegantly presented by the noble Lord, Lord Faulks. I will draw the Committee’s attention to one problem. Proposed new subsection (5) is not simply definitional; it is designed to act—and would act, in some sense—as an ouster for the purposes of domestic courts of the effect of the convention rights. It uses the language of Article 11 when it states:

“For the purposes of the Human Rights Act 1998, this section must be treated as necessary in a democratic society for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others”.


Article 11 requires that the rights that are respected

“are necessary in a democratic society … for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others”.

If Parliament legislates that a section must be treated as necessary, it precludes within this jurisdiction any testing of the proposition that such provisions, as interpreted, are necessary in a democratic society for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others. That is the province of the European Court of Human Rights to consider. It is a requirement of the Human Rights Act that domestic courts here give effect to the European convention and interpret legislation, where they can, as compatible with the convention.