Water Cannons

Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb Excerpts

Wednesday 12th February 2014 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what plans they have to license the use of water cannons on the United Kingdom mainland.

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, I am very grateful to have secured this debate and to noble Lords who are participating. My standing up to speak does not normally empty a room quite as fast, but I realise that this issue may not affect everybody.

This debate is about securing the licensing of water cannon for London, or perhaps for the whole of Britain—we do not know yet. I and many others have a lot of concerns about the use of water cannon. It is important to recognise that it is not just a London issue; it is of national importance. It could have an impact on many people UK-wide.

Boris Johnson, as the notional police and crime commissioner for London, is running an engagement with Londoners about water cannon, explaining why they are necessary, but his office has made clear that the response will not change the outcome. That is, the Met has asked for them, so the Met shall have them. In a recent letter, the Home Secretary appears to be under the impression that a proper consultation is going on with Londoners, but there most definitely is not. I would not want the Government or your Lordships to be misled on that.

I shall talk about three things—cost, use and potential targets—and I will pose three questions for which I should be grateful for an answer. In a sense, cost is not that much of an issue, because the Met budget, although reduced, is still £3.25 billion. I have been told that the Met hopes to buy second-hand from Germany at a cost of only about £30,000 each, so I guess that the total cost would be about £100,000, expecting the water cannons to last two to three years. New machines cost about £1 million each. However, then there is the cost of training, which must be ongoing over the years, plus storage in central London, plus maintenance. The Met recently had to be coerced into funding a £100,000 budget to continue the work of the Wildlife Crime Unit, which fights international organised crime networks that traffick endangered animals or parts of endangered animals.

Your Lordships may know that today, the UK is hosting a two-day international conference on the illegal wildlife trade, involving two future Kings of our country and world leaders from 50 nations invited by the Prime Minister, but the Met police has a team of five people going up against an illegal trade estimated to be worth £19 billion a year. If there is some spare cash in the Met budget, why is it prioritising a weapon that it will hardly ever use over a global economic crime with links to trafficking of drugs and people and even to terrorism, not to mention threatening some of the planet’s most iconic animals with extinction? I suspect that a lot of people would rather that it was spent there than on water cannon—or even on another priority altogether. I would be interested to know the Government’s view about the Met’s priorities.

As to the use of water cannon, what is their tactical potential and tactical limitations? Hugh Orde, who is president of the Association of Chief Police Officers and one of only two officers to have deployed water cannon says:

“Water cannon could act as an effective deterrent to stop protests gaining momentum … What it does, is buy you space, it keeps people apart, and people at distance”.

Is that really what London needs? In Northern Ireland, there was disputed territory of which two or more groups wanted possession to march in. That simply is not true of London. The sort of disorder that has happened in the past few years often involves small groups of people moving quickly, staying in touch by mobile phones and social media. Water cannon would be useless in that situation, as the police themselves have admitted. These machines are slow and not very manoeuvrable within our mostly narrow streets. They are heavy and take some stopping. They need wide roads or spaces to be effective.

There is a very big civil liberties concern. My fear is that innocent people will be affected, if not by being hosed down with water at a few degrees above freezing, perhaps by being deterred from protesting at all. Water cannon could stifle attendance at legitimate democratic protests, which the Met has a duty to protect.

Please do not believe anyone saying that they are not dangerous. In one famous example in 2010, pensioner Dietrich Wagner was permanently blinded by water cannon in Germany. He was part of a protest ride to prevent developers cutting down some trees. As well as suffering major bruising, Wagner’s eyelids were torn and on one side, part of his orbital bone, the bone which protects the eye, was fractured. He hopes to be here in London next week to speak out on the use of water cannon.

When would water cannon be used? Who would be the targets? We have been hearing that water cannon would be rarely seen and rarely used. When asked exactly when they would be used, the Met answers that they would not be used against peaceful protesters and they are obviously not for small-scale violent rioting in narrow places. They would be for people throwing petrol bombs, who obviously would not hide themselves in a large crowd of peaceful protesters, or the Met could pick them off, or something—a highly speculative scenario.

The Met have also claimed that water cannon could have saved the Reeves furniture store in Croydon, but that night there were fires in Clapham, Enfield and Peckham, plus rioting in a total of 22 boroughs. One set of three water cannon, broken up or deployed as a threesome, might have been deployed to one of the fires and may have got there in time to be useful, but would the Met have been able to use them to do very much else? That seems unlikely because of the travelling time alone, let alone co-ordinating with local police command and the fire brigade about the exact needs.

There is quite a lot of opposition to the use of water cannon, not all from the usual suspects. Of course, there is opposition from organisations such as Liberty but also from senior police officers. Five of the six largest forces in England and Wales said that they were against deploying water cannon on their streets and one police and crime commissioner dismissed them as being,

“as much use as a chocolate teapot”,

for quelling disorder. The noble Lord, Lord Blair, former Met commissioner, has written to me and has allowed me to read out the contents of his letter:

“Since I left office, I have deliberately not commented on matters which are for decision by my successors but in this case I am prepared to do so. Water cannon have proved useful in Northern Ireland to keep two identifiable and violent factions apart or to protect public buildings or particular community enclaves from sectarian attack. In my opinion, much more explanation needs to be given as to how they would be of use in public order situations including violent and non-violent participants or in deterring very mobile rioters carrying out widely dispersed attacks as in the 2011 riots. I am not suggesting a case cannot be made: but I do not believe it has been so far”.

The Government will probably say that this is an operational issue and they therefore have to listen to police advice. I realise that it is very hard for a party that is—or expects to be—in government to appear to look soft on law and order, and it is true that deploying these weapons will be an operational decision for the police forces owning them. Licensing them is most definitely a political decision, though, and doing a Pontius Pilate on this is really not good enough. So I ask the Government when they think these machines will be used.

There is something very ironic about the Met police justifying the purchase of these water cannon because of the 2011 riots, when it was Met actions that triggered the disorder. If the Met had not shot an unarmed man and had treated the Duggan family with more respect and professionalism, those riots may never have been sparked and the grumbling discontent of poverty and hardship may never have broken the surface in London and other parts of Britain. However, the Met did shoot an unarmed man, did not treat the Duggan family well and the rest is history, but water cannon would probably not have helped in any way.

We are told that the Met want water cannon by the summer, yet they admit that they have no intelligence about possible disturbances. Do the Government have such intelligence, or do they think the case has been made for the use of water cannon? My view is that the case has not been made, and the public must be convinced to be taken with the police, if we are still to have policing by consent. I urge Her Majesty’s Government to pause before licensing water cannon for anywhere on the British mainland.

Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Bill

Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb Excerpts

Monday 20th January 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hope of Craighead (CB)]

My Lords, I wish to raise a point on the wording of the amendment. Three definitions are set out in subsection (5), one of which is “relevant judicial authority”. I have no complaint about the definition itself, but I cannot find anywhere in the proposed new clause where that phrase is used and is in need of definition. I may be wrong. Obviously, this comes after a section where independent approval may be needed, but I would like to be persuaded that the definition in the subsection is relevant to the clause we are being invited to approve.

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, although I have not been involved in these cases, I have been involved in the examination of these kinds of cases when I was a member of a police authority in London for 12 years and I still sit on the police committee at City Hall.

Something like the amendment is absolutely necessary because, putting aside the civil rights, human rights and civil liberties of the women and the people involved in the environmental movement whose lives have been trespassed upon for no information and without subsequent charges against them—these were innocent women who were trespassed against—you have to think about the civil liberties and human rights of the police officers involved. Again and again, officers were embedded within environmental groups for long periods of time. It was not like getting into a drug cartel or organised crime of some kind; this was a quite different kind of policing. The police officers have suffered quite deeply afterwards. It is very easy when you are embedded for three months or six months to get to like the people you are working with and to understand what their motivation is, and many officers have come out of this quite damaged and unable to work any further.

There is also an argument about the cost of the court cases in which some of these police officers were involved—they went to court and were charged as protestors and were either convicted or not convicted—because those cases are now being overturned. Two cases will be coming up in the next two weeks in London on this issue. It is costing us a fortune and justice is not being done. We need an independent way of judging and assessing whether or not this kind of action is necessary. It is time that the Metropolitan Police understood how important this is and I hope that the Government will approve the amendment.

[Baroness Hamwee (LD)]

My Lords, we had the opportunity to consider the Regulation of Investigatory Powers (Covert Human Intelligence Sources: Relevant Sources) Order 2013, which the Minister sent round after the previous debate and is now in force, as I understand it. Any of us could have prayed against it.

We need to understand as a House that we are not at the point in the development of this—“work” seems to be the wrong term—matter that one might think from looking at the amendment. That is not to say that I do not have sympathy with the amendment. One of the times when I was most shocked at work since becoming a Member of your Lordships’ House was on hearing recordings of the testimonies of women, and their families, who have been affected by activities under CHISRS. I remember the family of one woman saying, “We treated this man as our prospective son-in-law; we welcomed him into our family”. It was very moving.

That causes me to say that what matters more than anything—although I do not know how you deal with it other than by putting formal technical oversight in place—is a change in practice and culture. The police need to take that matter on board but you cannot write that into legislation in that way.

The 12-month period for approval before review is required seems on the long side and I look forward to the Minister explaining it to the House. As I say, we should have questioned some time ago—I am as much at fault as anyone—why 12 months was chosen, rather than six months or even three months.

Police: Public Trust

Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb Excerpts

Thursday 28th November 2013 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, 100 years ago last month, my father’s father, Thomas Jones, was killed in the Senghenydd mining disaster in south Wales, along with 438 other men and boys. It is still the worst industrial accident ever to happen in these islands. It left hundreds of widows and orphans, including my grandmother, Polly, who had seven children, including my father, Percy, who was eight. The mine owners paid out something like £26 in total for all those men and boys. My dad therefore grew up in abject poverty. He and one of his brothers had to share a pair of shoes; one of them would wear them one day to school and the next day the other would wear them. After the First World War, when my father left school, rather than work down the pit that had killed his father, he and a brother walked all the way from Abertridwr in south Wales to London to find work. They slept in Hyde Park on benches until the Salvation Army found them and fed and sheltered them.

My dad found work in London and then moved to Brighton, where he met and married my mother, Christine. She came from a staunch Labour Party family. Her granddad, Will Evans, was the first Socialist—no Labour Party back in the 1890s—councillor on Brighton Council. He was a strong supporter of trade unions. During the Second World War, my dad was a cook with the RAF while my mother painted railway engines. When the war was over, they moved to a new suburb of Brighton, Moulsecoomb, which was part of the Homes Fit for Heroes project. I grew up very happy and secure, with my brother Allan, not realising that we were quite poor and the last in our road to get a fridge, a phone or a TV.

Having known hard times, my parents were big fans of the welfare state. They both knew a Britain where it did not exist. So my upbringing was full of gratitude and awe about free education, free medical help and an understanding that you have to help the most vulnerable in society because how you help the poorest is the mark of civilisation. I will skip over the next 40 years, which involved marriage, two wonderful daughters, some travelling, archaeology and lots of very deep-Green politics, and say that I am astonished to be here, but perhaps not as astonished as others. Considering that I have done nothing but talk abolition since my appointment, I have received a very warm welcome, for which I am very thankful.

On the issue of this debate, I would like to say trust in the police has always ebbed and flowed, but “plebgate” has caused a flurry even among the usual supporters of the police. Even the middle classes are saying, “If the police might do something like this to a government Minister, what chance does a working class youth have on a council estate?”. I have been working on the issue of trust in policing for more than a decade. I published a short report this year that looked at the levels of trust among young Londoners and the Met. I went and talked to young people and listened to them, and I found out what they thought. It was very marked that they did not trust the police. It was also marked that they differentiated between different parts of the police. Local police they accepted and saw as doing a generally good job, but the TSG—the Territorial Support Group—for example, was heartily disliked. Young people talked about “bully vans”, and about how the TSG would come into their streets, cause problems, make messes and then leave the sorting out to the local police.

The worst reaction seemed to be a result of stop and search. Although most young people could actually see a use for it, and felt that it might make them safer sometimes if the police found weapons on others, they disliked the way it was done. Again and again, Met officers managed to mess things up because they did not show professional politeness and did not communicate properly.

My years of Met scrutiny, first on the Metropolitan Police Authority and now on City Hall’s Police and Crime Committee, have led me to the conclusion that the police’s biggest problem is communication. If forces could communicate better, they would hear more useful intelligence from communities, and get more support on the streets and fewer attacks in the press, which would raise morale internally and improve the public’s confidence. For example, recently I complained that the Met was reducing its training of armed officers. Now this really is an area where you would think that you need the maximum amount of training, the highest level; there are already enough incidents and we do not want any more. It was explained to me by the Met that the training had reduced slightly but appeared to be generally better for officers and their skills. But the Met had not bothered explaining the changes to anybody. They had not communicated properly, which wasted my time, their time and actually gave them some unfavourable publicity.

Then there are the undercover police, spying on and sleeping with their targets, particularly in environmental organisations. Remember, these targets are people—women—who are innocent and who have not committed a crime. The officers have intruded in their lives to the most astonishing degree. One of them even fathered a child—and then vanished, of course. The Met seems strangely mixed up about this. In public the Met Commissioner has told me that such activity, sleeping with targets, is never authorised. In court, the Met lawyers claimed that the police who were charged had been authorised. At some level, there is a deep amount of confusion about this. It really does need cleaning up.

Of course, I have taken this seat courtesy of the Green Party, whose members voted for me and whose policies I shall do my best to promote.