Parliament Square (Management) Bill [HL]

Lord Cormack Excerpts

Friday 1st July 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Desai]

My Lords, I welcome the efforts of the noble Lord, Lord Marlesford. He and I came to the House at the same time, so we have a special bond of affection. For me, too, this is the fourth or fifth time that I have spoken on this subject. I welcome the Bill because it treats Parliament Square as a particular unit and addresses the current fragmentation of authorities that have bits and pieces of control over the square. The Bill suggests a committee that would co-ordinate what happens in the square.

It is very interesting that Clause 3(b) states that Parliament Square includes,

“the footways that immediately adjoin the central garden of Parliament Square”.

Currently it is the footways that people are occupying: they are not occupying Parliament Square. Finally we have got to a situation where there are restrictions on demonstrating around Parliament Square and where people who want to demonstrate—as they have a perfect right to do—have been pushed to this very scary paved edge of the square. Some of the tents erected are very small, and the variety of protests is quite fascinating. It is not just the old Brian Haw protest about Iraq; there is something about Freemasons murdering somebody and all sorts of interesting things.

Whatever we do to organise Parliament Square, we must foster and encourage people's right to protest. I very much think that we ought not to use these various pieces of legislation as restrictions on people's right to demonstrate. It is a great tribute to our democracy that right across from Parliament people can support causes that often have nothing to do with Parliament but which they feel strongly about and want to bring to Parliament’s attention.

[Lord Cormack]

The noble Lord will remember that only three weeks ago we had a debate on this subject and some of us tried to make the distinction between a place of legitimate protest and a squalid encampment permanently defacing the square. It seems that the elegant solution of my noble friend meets both the noble Lord's concerns and my own.

[Lord Desai]

My Lords, I am coming to that. My background is that of a demonstrator. I demonstrated in Grosvenor Square against the American war in Vietnam, I helped students occupy the LSE and I did various other things.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Lawson of Blaby]

I speak in the gap very briefly. First, I warmly commend my noble friend Lord Marlesford for his persistence in bringing this to the attention of this House and for the elegance of the Bill that he has introduced.

This is an extraordinary business. One reason why I can speak briefly is that the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, said everything that needed to be said quite correctly. The only thing that was missing was that he did not at that moment volunteer to be chairman of the committee. We would have much more confidence in getting the right result if he were to be chairman of the committee—in fact, we probably would not need any other members.

This is extraordinary, because there is no disagreement among all sides on this matter. We all agree that there has to be peaceful protest. We all agree, however, that what is going on is a squalid eyesore and an embarrassment to all of us who come here everyday, an embarrassment in the eyes of everyone else—in the eyes of overseas visitors in particular. This is a very limited problem. People might ask, if Parliament cannot deal with a problem as limited and circumscribed as this one—where there is really no difference among us about what is right and what is wrong, what freedoms have to be preserved but what unplaisances, as I think Stephen Potter called them, need to be done away with—my goodness, what can we deal with? We have far bigger problems to deal with.

I hope that the Government, who are obviously doing their best on this topic with the Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill, but equally obviously have failed, will take on board my noble friend’s Bill. The most elegant solution may be—I am sure that my noble friend will not mind being robbed of it—to have his Bill in place of the comparable clauses in the government Bill, as an amendment to the Bill. Then, at long last, after all these years, we may be able to get a solution to this problem which, as I said, is not merely a physical and visual embarrassment but a legislative embarrassment if we cannot deal with the issue.

[Lord Cormack]

I intervene very briefly not only to endorse the points just made by my noble friend but to refer to another point that came up during our debate three weeks ago on the measure proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Tyler. It is crucial that in tackling the problem of Parliament Square, we do not transfer that problem to Abingdon Green or to the green in front of the statue of George V—I was incorrectly interrupted by the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, and told that it is George VI, but it is, of course, George V—or any of the other adjacent areas. It is crucial that we tackle this problem properly, and I suggest that we tackle it in the clean and clinical way that the noble Lord, Lord Marlesford, has suggested, which the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, underlined in his notable speech.

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara]

My Lords, in my very short time in the House, I have never come across a debate in which we have had more people speaking in the gap than listed on the Order Paper; nor have we ever had the chance to have one or two excellent new points added during those gap speeches. I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Lawson, for giving us a chair for our putative committee. It was an inspired guess, and I think he was right to pick up something that I was rather surprised to hear from the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham: that in his view, a committee could in some sense be a commanding officer. I thought the Army stood for one thing; it does not believe in committees but believes that individuals have to take control. The noble Lord, Lord Lawson, kindly squared that circle for us.

We also heard from the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, on the important question of whether the statue is George V or George VI. I am glad that that has been resolved. The noble Lord, Lord Reay, gave us the context for this discussion by reminding us of other points, such as Somalia, that give us a sense of proportion.

This Bill is one of three opportunities we have to come back to an issue that has been distressing the House for some time. In a debate a few weeks ago, I reflected that if you wanted to list what your Lordships' House is most interested in, you would look at the range of Questions, the topics put down for debate and at Private Members' Bills. Clearly the future of our House is the thing we spend most of our time worrying about. It comes top of all lists, but there would probably be a place for dangerous dogs, which keep repeating themselves, and for summer time saving, which we discussed earlier this morning. Room would have to be found for the future of the Barnett formula, because that seems to come up a lot, but Parliament Square would certainly be there because we come back to it and it obviously needs to be resolved.

In his introduction, the noble Lord, Lord Marlesford, said that this is his first Private Member’s Bill. It is a feature of the way in which we operate in this House that when matters get serious between Back-Benchers and the Government, we get Bills that reflect that annoyance and concern. It is something that the Government need to take account of. When you get a rash of Bills of this nature, clearly you are in trouble.

The issues are very clear. We need some imaginative thinking about the relationship between Parliament, the abbey, the church, the public buildings and the public spaces around those buildings across the various dimensions that have been mentioned in this debate: security, access, traffic, tourism, history, heritage and, of course, demonstrations. The problem is that, as many noble Lords have said, these are not impossible issues to think about and discuss and to come up with proposals about, but we live in iconic buildings in a world heritage area with a world focus. It is something that people in our country want to regard as theirs and to use when they have issues that they wish to draw to our attention, and at the heart of this we are trying to balance rights on the one side and freedoms on the other, which is never easy.

That explains why this is all so difficult, but it does not really explain why it has taken so long. As a number of noble Lords have said, the good thing about this Bill, which was described as ingenious by a noble Lord, is that it has a laser-like focus on the key issues, which we welcome, and it allows, and indeed encourages, the main issues to become clear. We want to have vibrant and responsible demonstrations, but we do not want the square to be left in an impossible condition for people to use and enjoy for whatever purposes.

In a very positive contribution, the noble Lord, Lord Sharkey, tried to add some points of detail to the proposals in the Bill, which most people would accept. It is admirable that it is very narrow in its focus, but it perhaps lacks some of the definition and additional points that will be required if it goes further. Those comments were very helpful because they give us an additional thought about that. The noble Lord, Lord Sharkey, also pointed out the contrast between this Bill and the other two Bills that we are also considering: the Bill from the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, which simply eliminates the current proposals from existing legislation, and the police Bill, which is, as he described it, extremely negative. It says what you cannot do in the square, but it does not try to build up what we want the square to be used for in all the dimensions that I have mentioned.

There are some questions about why we think a committee will be the right solution for what we are doing. A committee may well be the way in which processes need to operate, but we need to know a little bit more about ownership, the rights of those who have an interest in the square, how that is to be resolved, who is going to fund all this work and how it is going to be arranged. Although the Bill’s aspirations are good, we do not really have detail about how it will deliver to the standards that we all somehow understand we want out of this.

There are other contributions I want to mention. My noble friend Lord Desai indicated that he has form on this issue and mentioned that he had spoken on it four or five times. He also admitted quite freely that he has demonstrated in other places, including Grosvenor Square. On the intervention of the noble Lord, Lord Richard, those who were at Grosvenor Square—I think I was one—might not, of course, be able to remember whether they slept there because it was the 1960s and things were different then, but the point was well made.

We approach this from slightly different directions. The noble Lord, Lord Lawson, said that we do not disagree about the issues, and I think that is probably right, but there is a different hierarchy of concerns. When he was speaking, the noble Lord, Lord Sharkey, mentioned “Groundhog Day” as a film that he thought has resonance for this, but I think it is more like “Rashomon”; we all see slightly different things when we look at that square and we have a different order of priorities. When she responds, it will be important for the Minister to give us some sense of how she sees this hierarchy of need and of how the Government’s proposals fit with the views expressed today.

As the noble Lord, Lord Wills, said, and indeed said in earlier debates, this is something that the previous Labour Government grappled with. We would happily admit that we got it wrong in 2005 and we were sad that our proposals in the Constitutional Reform and Governance Bill in 2010 could not be delivered because they fell in the wash-up period.

The sense that I take from our debate, and I leave it with the noble Baroness to respond, is that we all seem to want this to be resolved within legislation that will be effective in delivering the aims. The vehicle could be the police Bill because there are sufficient provisions in it to do that, but we are hearing from the noble Lord who proposed the Bill, and others, that the measures in it may not be sufficient to achieve the aspirations that are rightly high for this wonderful space. I therefore think that it falls to the Minister to take us forward on this matter and to explain how she will resolve the two different strands that are running here. She has clearly compromised because she has a Bill that she wants to get through and I hope that in the spirit that she has previously shown in debates on the Bill in Committee and now on Report she will consider taking further steps to bring into play what is now before her.