Electronic Passport Control Systems

Lord Cormack Excerpts

Wednesday 7th June 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Murray of Blidworth (Con)]

I do not have those statistics to hand—I will of course find them and write to the noble Lord in respect of them—but, as your Lordships will recall, there was an SI approved by this House to lower the age at which children could use e-gates from 12 to 10. I am pleased to report that the pilot was incredibly effective and that it will now be rolled out across the e-gates by the end of July, so 10 year-olds across the country will be able to use them. This will increase the flow through airports, particularly during peak periods of half term and holidays.

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

Will my noble friend point out to the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, that he was maligning King Canute? King Canute sat at the water’s edge to prove that he could not rebuke the waves, not that he could.

[Lord Murray of Blidworth (Con)]

I expect my noble friend does not really expect an answer to that.

Illegal Migration Bill

Lord Cormack Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 5th June 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Carlile of Berriew (CB)]

My Lords—

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

My Lords—

[Lord Murray of Blidworth (Con)]

I think I have taken enough interventions.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Murray of Blidworth (Con)]

As I say, I am afraid the impact assessment will be published in due course.

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

My noble friend must accept that the Bill can be expedited and the House can be satisfied if a proper impact assessment is produced in time for Report. The whole purpose of Committee is to probe, as we are doing this afternoon and so on. However, when it comes to Report, when the House has to make significant decisions on the most sensitive piece of legislation that has been before Parliament for a very long time, it is crucial that we have all the facts at our disposal.

[Lord Murray of Blidworth (Con)]

Of course, I hear what my noble friend says.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Kerr of Kinlochard (CB)]

My Lords, it is a challenge for a mere male to follow the three previous speakers, but my name is on Amendment 22, so I must attempt it. Amendment 22 would prevent unaccompanied children being automatically deemed inadmissible if they came by an irregular route.

Overall, 86% of the unaccompanied children currently going through the asylum process are given permission to stay, including nearly 100%—over 99%—from Afghanistan, over 99% from Eritrea and over 96% from Sudan. But only 6% of these children granted protection and found to have a valid case for asylum here came through the official government schemes. They had to come by an irregular route because there was no other way for them. Putting these two facts together, the Bill asks us to rule out the possibility of even considering the vast majority of unaccompanied children’s cases. That seems not to be in keeping with British tradition, and it is certainly not in keeping with Articles 3 and 22 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child 1989.

Therefore, although I support all the amendments in this group, I strongly support the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, to which I added my name.

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

My Lords, the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, spoke movingly about her connections with the Conservative Party. Along with my good and noble friend Lord Tugendhat, I was privileged to enter the other place on 18 June 1970, almost 53 years ago, along with her brother Michael Havers, who of course became a distinguished Lord Chancellor and, tragically, died very young. But, when she made those references, I thought of him and us, and I thought that our motivation could be summed up in that well-known term “one-nation Conservative”. I am extremely proud of what my party has done over the centuries—it has a long history—and I am troubled about some of the Bill’s implications.

I apologise for not being able to take part at Second Reading, because of my wife’s illness. This is my first full day back, as it were, although I will be off again soon. I thought of those great figures of the past: my parliamentary hero, William Wilberforce, as well as Shaftesbury and others. They could not have signed up to what is before us today.

--- Later in debate ---

[Noble Lords]

He’s not listening!

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

I hope my noble friend is listening, because I hope he will realise that he too is an inheritor of a great Conservative tradition; we must not be a Government who turn our back on that. Of course, the problem that the Bill is seeking to deal with is real, but it can be dealt with using a greater degree of sensitivity, generosity and, I dare say, Christianity. I urge him to take on board the points that have been made this afternoon, particularly by the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss.

[Lord Dubs (Lab)]

My Lords, I will return to the amendments, particularly Amendment 22. I think that the Committee will permit me to refer briefly to the impact assessment argument, because it has a particular relevance to Amendment 22. The charity Safe Passage, some time after the Bill was first published, sent a freedom of information request to the Home Office to ask about the number of unaccompanied children who would be affected by the Bill—that is to say, those arriving in the UK through irregular means, including via small boats. The response stated that

“the Home Office does not hold the information you have requested. Whilst our reporting centres can ascertain the age of someone at the point of an event, we cannot establish from our electronic datasets who is accompanied or unaccompanied”.

That means the Government have no idea of the number of unaccompanied children that will be impacted by the provisions of the Bill.

I do not think that I need to say any more—because the argument about the impact assessment has been well aired already—except for one further thought. If the Government have no idea what the effect of the Bill will be, or any particular part of the Bill, I do not understand why they are putting it forward. That point has already been made, but it still puzzles me.

The point of my amendment is to exempt from inadmissibility claims for unaccompanied children, as has already been referred to in some of the other amendments. Under Clause 4(2), those claims will not be considered; they will have no right of appeal; and there will be no possibility of considering such a claim. Although the argument has already been put forward in some of the other amendments, it is a fundamental point, because the children from the countries with very high grant rates for refugee status are forced to make dangerous journeys because there are very limited options for safe routes to the UK. Many of the children come from those countries, and, of those children who have had their cases determined, the vast majority were permitted to stay and rebuild their lives in the UK under the present legislation. That means that the equivalent of those children who are now coming would not be allowed to stay, regardless of the merits of their claim under either the 1951 Geneva convention or the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

I want to make two or three other points. If a child is to be removed on reaching their 18th birthday, unless they are actually in detention they will quite sensibly say, “I do not want to go back. I am frightened of going back to where I escaped from”. They will disappear—of course they will. We would all do that if we were in their position; we would not hesitate. It seems to me that we are in danger of saying that we are going to lock them up until their 18th birthday before removing them. It is a preposterous policy.

The Government’s history on children has been somewhat mixed. I remember in the 2016 Act I put forward an amendment for unaccompanied children to come here, and it eventually passed both Houses—it went back once or twice—and became part of the Act. The Government then said: “Ah, but it applies only to 480 children”. That was an arbitrary figure, plucked out of the air, for which there was no rationale at all, except that the Government said that local authorities could not provide foster places, which was quickly disproved.

We then got on to the 2017 Act, at the time when the future of the Dublin treaty—or certainly the parts under which asylum-seeking children in one EU country could claim to join their families in another EU country—was in jeopardy. We passed an amendment in this House that the Government should negotiate to retain the provisions of the treaty. That was eventually accepted, having gone through both Houses. In the 2019 Act, the Government simply removed it. Without wishing to go into long periods of history, I was incensed about all these things but particularly incensed about that.

An upshot was that I was invited to a meeting with three government Ministers and seven officials, including one from the Cabinet Office, to engage in a discussion about the rights of children. I found that quite flattering—I thought the odds of 10:1 were quite favourable to me, given who was on the other side. I was given assurances. One of the Commons Ministers said: “Don’t you trust me?” I looked him in the eye and I lied: “Yes, I trust you, but I don’t trust the Government”—so it was half true—“And anyway, who is to say that you will be in your job in few weeks’ time?” He was not; he was moved on, and I am not sure whether he is in the Government now or not. But I was given certain assurances that were not adhered to, and the number of unaccompanied children who came fell rapidly from that point on.

The Government have in the past given assurances about unaccompanied children and they simply have not stuck to them. That is why I believe that this amendment is important. It will protect the rights of some of the most vulnerable young people fleeing from appalling horrors such as war, enforced conscription into armies, threats of torture and parents being killed. These are terrible things, and we are saying to them that it they get to this country other than by a prescribed route, of which there are hardly any, we will not consider their claim. That is appalling.

Former Chief Constables: Gross Misconduct

Lord Cormack Excerpts

Monday 22nd May 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Sharpe of Epsom (Con)]

I join the noble Lord in praising my noble friend’s commendable tenacity on this subject. Regarding the circumstances the noble Lord describes, I was not aware of them. Of course, he will also be aware that we have launched a review, which concludes this month, into the whole misconduct and dismissals process. With a bit of luck, it will report back in the next month or two, according to the Policing Minister in the other place. It will include a number of these issues, and I hope that will be dealt with then.

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

My Lords, if there were a gold medal for stonewalling, my noble friend would deserve to win it. The answers that he gives are obfuscatory and reveal nothing. Will he please consider again the questions asked by both my noble friend Lord Lexden and the noble Lord, Lord Bach? Will he also reflect on the point that came up during the debate we had in the Moses Room a week or two ago? I suggested to him, and he completely ignored the suggestion, that we should have a police ombudsman in this country: somebody who can exercise the sort of authority—dispassionate and impartial—exercised by the noble Baroness, Lady O’Loan, in Northern Ireland.

[Lord Sharpe of Epsom (Con)]

I thank my noble friend for his praise, which is very welcome. I remember that debate in Grand Committee and I am afraid I did not ignore his suggestion; I dismissed it. In fact, a number of bodies oversee policing, including the College of Policing, the IOPC, HMICFRS and a variety of other alphabet-soup organisations.

Police: Restoring Public Confidence

Lord Cormack Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd May 2023 Grand Committee

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

My Lords, it is a real privilege to follow the noble Baroness’s thought-provoking speech. I first had the pleasure of knowing her when, as chairman of the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee in the other place, I visited Northern Ireland on a frequent and regular basis for some five years. I developed admiration for the way in which she operated with real impartiality. During most of my time there, she was helped a great deal by the fact that there was an admirable chief police officer in Northern Ireland, Sir Hugh Orde, from whom a lot of people could learn a very great deal.

As the noble Baroness spoke, I felt that we really have a solution here, because we ought to have a police ombudsman in England. It is not a difficult thing to do but we need a respected figure—not, as my noble friend Lord Hunt put it, people from the police marking their own homework. To have somebody of real distinction, with a real knowledge of the law and of how policing works, could be very helpful indeed. I ask my noble friend the Minister to discuss that with the Home Secretary and his colleagues. It is an initiative that could come out of this debate, which was so admirably introduced by my noble friend Lord Lexden, for whom we all have great admiration because of his tenacity and persistence, particularly on the area on which my noble friend Lord Hunt of Wirral spoke. If ever there were something that besmirched—I use the word very deliberately—the reputation of the police in this country, it was the way in which the basic presumption that a man or woman is innocent until proven guilty was completely swept aside.

A number of great public servants—three in particular —were themselves besmirched. The first was the great Lord Bramall, whose memorial service was held only a few days ago in Winchester Cathedral; I gather that it was a most moving occasion.

The second was Leon Brittan—Lord Brittan—a colleague of mine and of my noble friend Lord Hunt in the other place. He was the personification of integrity. That does not mean that he was always right, but he was a man of absolute honour. His last days were made miserable, not just by his grave illness but by the way his reputation was traduced. What is more, and in a sense even sadder, was that his wife—now his widow—had to live with it.

The third was, of course, Sir Edward Heath, about whom my noble friend Lord Hunt spoke movingly. He was an extraordinary man. I was one of those elected to the 1970 Parliament when he became Prime Minister. Since then we have had a number of Prime Ministers, but none more honourable than Edward Heath, or more determined to serve his country by doing what he thought was the right thing for it.

I have to say that it is an absolute scandal that this has been so badly handled by successive Home Secretaries. I make a plea, endorsing that made by my noble friend Lord Hunt of Wirral: the Government must now pull their finger out and establish a time-limited inquiry under a lawyer of real eminence—possibly a former member of the Supreme Court—given 12 months in which to report back to the Government and Parliament. I hope that my noble friend Lord Sharpe of Epsom will take that request away from this debate and make a positive report.

We have talked about the Met. I read something in the Times the other day that encapsulated what we are dealing with. We have referred to the appalling Wayne Couzens and the ghastly crime that he committed against an innocent woman, Sarah Everard. We have talked of other police officers who have transgressed. I pay tribute to Sir Mark Rowley, who is clearly trying his best to re-establish the Met, in effect, so that it again becomes a respected institution. But the other day the Times reported about a woman, a property owner, who was disturbed about some threats to the square in which she lived and put up a handful of little notices. The police told her that she should not have done that, but they also said:

“Next time it ends in handcuffs”.


Is that really the way you treat people for a minor transgression?

In recent years, the police have gone right over the top when pursuing so-called hate crimes—not just in London; we had a notorious case in Lincolnshire just a couple of years ago. What people want from a police force is the knowledge that they are a body people they can respect who will help to ensure that their property is safe and, if it is broken into, the crime will be thoroughly investigated. That is what people want. They also want to know that their women can walk safely on the streets. For example, just a few weeks ago a London taxi driver told me he was upset because various road closures and diversions at the end of a street in one of the London boroughs—I think it was Hackney—meant that he had to drop people off at a corner to walk 100 yards or so. He told me, “That’s inconvenient enough in the rain, but the other night I had a young lady, and I stayed in my cab and watched that she got to her door”.

That is not the atmosphere in which we wish to see the police operating. We wish to see them bringing structure by their presence; my noble friend Lord Lexden referred to the bobby on the beat. He, like me, probably remembers “Dixon of Dock Green”—as surely we all do—and the local police station, which gave real comfort and encouragement to people.

Of course, one of the problems that we in this place have to face up to is that there has been a very real sea- change in society. When I was brought up, we accepted that certain things were right and certain things were wrong, and they were really moulded on Judeo-Christian civilisation. We all committed sins. We all did wrong, but at least we knew we had done it. It is not like that today. “You have your truth, I have my truth”; what nonsense. There ought to be certain accepted standards within which society can operate because, if there are not, society cannot properly operate. That is one of the problems that face the police, because people do not automatically accept that a certain thing is wrong. It is also one of the reasons why we have had all these problems within the police. We have clearly had within the police—especially within the Met, as so graphically illustrated recently in the report by the noble Baroness, Lady Casey—officers who have conceded to your right and my right, your truth and my truth and your wrong and my wrong, and they have not been operating within a consensual society.

What is the answer? Of course there are many but, in the context of today’s debates, one answer is “Dixon of Dock Green”—having units within the Met and in our other towns and cities where it is accepted that there are people there who will bring a sense of cohesion. Remember the cry some years ago in the NHS, “Bring back matron”? We want to bring back the superintendent in the regional or borough office. We want to bring back people who have a degree of real authority, answerable to somebody with supreme authority.

I come back to where I began. I am sorry for speaking my mind in this way. I have thought a lot about this, but I did not prepare a speech for this debate because I wanted to reflect on what others have said. I come back to where I began: I believe that one of the answers could lie, in England—it is for the other nations of the UK to determine how they go forward—with a police ombudsman who would be able to give a degree of confidence to the general public that, where there were real complaints against the police, those would be thoroughly, impartially and scrupulously investigated and fearlessly reported on. I commend that suggestion especially to your Lordships this afternoon.

Migrants: Housing

Lord Cormack Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd May 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Murray of Blidworth (Con)]

The answer is that the Government will keep the situation under review and see how many places are required, because the effect of the Bill, when it is passed through this House and the other place, will be to deliver a deterrent effect. Furthermore, those who cross the channel illegally will be removed within 28 days, as is planned in the structure of the Bill. Therefore, the need to detain people will be kept under review and, it is hoped, be limited in number.

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

My Lords, if the Government are going to keep things under review, will the Minister please review Scampton in Lincolnshire? It is a historic airfield from which the 617 Squadron flew in the last war. We have plans in Lincolnshire to transform it, now that the Red Arrows have gone, into both a museum and a site of industrial production of the technological kind. The Home Secretary has ridden roughshod over the feelings of local people and plans to desecrate a lovely part of Lincolnshire—can that please be put under review immediately?

[Lord Murray of Blidworth (Con)]

I hesitate to disagree with my noble friend but the site in Scampton is well-suited for the purpose of housing asylum seekers. The heritage buildings at Scampton will of course be preserved. While the Home Office listens intently to all representations about the locations of asylum accommodation facilities, it is the case that Scampton is a suitable site and we intend to begin using it.

Shamima Begum

Lord Cormack Excerpts

Monday 27th March 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Murray of Blidworth (Con)]

Clearly, the Secretary of State for the Home Office has to evaluate the balance of competing interests. Surely the principal interest and the principal duty of government is to keep the people safe. I can reassure the noble Lord that the United Kingdom takes very seriously its obligations under the UN statelessness convention. Decisions to deprive individuals are taken in circumstances where they would not be left stateless. This applies in all cases where decisions to deprive are made. In all cases, there is further detailed consideration as to the applicability of Articles 2 and 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights in relation to deprivation decisions. The Government are satisfied that all those deprivations have been actions which are compatible with our obligations under that convention.

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

My Lords, would my noble friend reflect that, if a 15 year-old child commits a murder in this country, they remain anonymous? We do not know the name of the person, and he or she is dealt with appropriately. Is that not rather in contradiction to the line that has been taken in this case?

[Lord Murray of Blidworth (Con)]

The slight difficulty the noble Lord has is, obviously, the incomplete picture of information, which is, unfortunately, the consequence of the nature of these types of decisions. The evaluation is made at the time of the deprivation decision, which in this case was in 2019. At that stage, the subject of the decision was not a minor, but obviously I cannot venture further into the facts of the case.

Baroness Casey Review

Lord Cormack Excerpts

Tuesday 21st March 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Sharpe of Epsom (Con)]

I certainly agree with the noble Baroness’s latter point. During my response I omitted to mention the review into police dismissals. Obviously, that is ongoing. It started on 17 January and is expected to last four months and conclude at the end of next month. I cannot imagine for a moment that it will not address many of the more pertinent points made by the noble Baroness, Lady Casey. I quite expect that I will be up here discussing the findings of that review in due course.

As regards the institutional racism and so on, like Sir Mark Rowley I probably would not use that description because it can be misused and risks making it harder for officers to win the trust of communities, but I of course acknowledge the noble Baroness’s point.

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

My Lords, does my noble friend accept that a particular responsibility rests on the Home Office here? Will he take away an idea and discuss it with his colleagues? Namely, there should be a Minister of Cabinet rank within the Home Office, or maybe detached from the Home Office, whose prime, indeed sole, responsibility should be to be stationed at Scotland Yard supervising what goes on, and answerable to both Houses of Parliament. This is a shameful day for us all, and the Home Office cannot escape its share of the blame.

[Lord Sharpe of Epsom (Con)]

My noble friend makes an interesting suggestion. There is already a Policing Minister. My personal view is that it would be difficult to station a Minister in a police station, which is effectively what he is suggesting. We need to be very careful to make sure that political oversight and operational responsibility, as the noble Baroness, Lady Casey, calls it, are clearly delineated. I am sorry if he does not like the fact that the noble Baroness pointed to the Mayor of London’s responsibility for the political side of policing in London, but that is what she did in chapter 8.

Police and Crime Commissioners

Lord Cormack Excerpts

Monday 20th March 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Sharpe of Epsom (Con)]

The noble Baroness asks a good question. As she will be aware, we have passed secondary legislation to enact changes to the PCC voting system. This reform will clarify and simplify it and make it easier for the public to hold their PCCs accountable at the ballot box. We are increasing the transparency of PCCs by amending the specified information order so that PCCs are now required to publish additional information to allow the public to hold them to account, including their progress against the Government’s national priorities for policing, recent HMICFRS reports and additional complaints information. There are also recommendations to improve scrutiny, which I can go into. A lot has been done.

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

My Lords, month after month and year after year, Ministers stand at that Dispatch Box and give wholly unsatisfactory answers. There is deep concern, as my noble friend Lord Deben made plain a few moments ago, and as my noble friend Lord Lexden has made plain time after time. If the rules prevent my noble friend the Minister giving a satisfactory answer, one is tempted to quote Mr Bumble: if the law says that, the law is an ass. Will my noble friend try to do something so that, when he comes to the Dispatch Box next time, he can give a sensible and meaningful answer?

[Lord Sharpe of Epsom (Con)]

My Lords, I am sorry that my noble friend finds it unsatisfactory. I think it would be unsatisfactory for me to stand here and make a comment that might prejudice a judicial inquiry. I am not going to do that.

Public Order Bill

Lord Cormack Excerpts

Consideration of Commons amendments
Tuesday 14th March 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, one thing that is significant is when the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, congratulates the Government. I think that is a significant and not minor moment. But she was right to do so; the importance of journalistic freedom cannot be overestimated, and I would like to thank the noble Lords who put that amendment forward on this Bill and turned something which has been discomfiting into something positive at the end of it all. So that is very positive.

I also want to note that, when I was considering how I was going to intervene today, I actually said to colleagues that it was terrible that the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, would not be with us, because I would have been relying on him to give us a steer. Then I walked in and he was in his place, and I would like to pay tribute to his courage for being here and the reassurance it gives many of us. That really takes some courage.

On the substantive point, I think that the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, did us a great service when he spent his weekend not demonstrating but looking at everybody else’s demonstrations on an average weekend, as it were, and laying them out for us. They were not particularly big, glamorous or headline-grabbing demonstrations, but all of them undoubtedly caused disruption to the people in the local area, in the way that he explained, and blocked roads quite substantially.

That is important because, throughout the discussions on this Bill, it has always felt as though we have had in our sights the likes of Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope, explained well that their aim is to disrupt, not even to protest. That is their tactic and their raison d’être. It has caused a lot of problems for me as somebody who supports the right to protest very strongly, and it has certainly aggravated the British public in all sorts of ways.

The reason the intervention from the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, was so useful was that it remembered the laws of unintended consequences. I say to the Government that those groups are not the only people who are going to be caught up by this law, which is why I would like us to make the threshold higher. The Government will not always be the Government—if we are talking about things being “prolonged”, it might not be that long. There will be all sorts of different people out on streets protesting. Sometimes it might even involve members of the Government at the moment and their supporters.

All the protests the noble Lord described covered all types of members of the British public who felt the need to take to the streets one way or another. They are voters of all parties and voters of none. They might well be disruptive, but they are certainly not using disruption as a tactic. My concern, straightforwardly, is that they are not criminalised by this law in an unintended way because we had one group of protesters in mind and forgot the wide variety of protesters who support all parties across the board. I anticipate there will be more protesters in turbulent times ahead.

My final point on Motion A1 is, as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope of Craighead, said, when you are making laws, you cannot use algorithms or numbers, so you are using words. We are having an argument about words. It is tricky and I cannot pretend that, when I hear the noble and learned Lords speak, I always understand the way language is understood by courts. However, I was thinking about how language might be understood by the police. They are the people who will potentially, as has already been explained, look at a bunch of tractors or what have you and say, “That is capable of causing disruption which is more than minor”. This seems to be a much lower threshold than thinking it will cause “significant” disruption. I would like the word “significant” there so that the police pause and do not just say “It’s more than minor: let’s stop it”. They should pause and think that something has to be quite serious. Is that not the way the language will be understood? As a consequence—maybe I am wrong, and they are all legal scholars—my fear is that they will read those words and see it in a particular way. Therefore, there will be the unintended consequences of sweeping up people who, after all, are democratically demonstrating.

Finally—because I realise that this is what is done and so that I do not speak on Motion D—despite supporting wholeheartedly the Labour amendment, I am disappointed with Motion D1 from the Labour Party. I think I understand what is meant by conduct which is

“frivolous or vexatious, beyond a genuine expression of their right to protest.”

However, it seems to be an unnecessary concession and I will find it very hard to vote for. Beyond that I urge everyone to support the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, in this group.

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

My Lords, I will be very brief. I want to thank my noble friend on the Front Bench for the way in which he reacted to what I will always refer to as the Charlotte Lynch amendment. It was moved very elegantly by the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, and the Government listened.

This amendment is an illustration of the value of your Lordships’ House and of the fact that there is no point or purpose to your Lordships’ House unless, from time to time, the Government are indeed defeated, are obliged to take a very serious view of a serious defeat and react accordingly. My noble friend has reacted accordingly and graciously, and, for that reason, I am extremely grateful that a most important amendment is now part of a very important Bill.

[Lord Paddick (LD)]

My Lords, with the leave of the House, before I start, I thank all noble Lords from all sides of the House, the doorkeepers, the attendants, the security and the police officers, who have shown such kindness towards me following the sudden, unexpected and so far unexplained death of my husband. I am very grateful.

As the Minister and the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, have explained, the definition of “serious disruption” underpins the entire Public Order Bill. It is an element of many of the new offences and the trigger for the use of new draconian police powers, which we will debate in the next two groups. The police asked for clarity, as there was no definition of “serious disruption” in the Bill that originally came to us from the other place, and we joined forces with His Majesty’s Official Opposition to provide a reasoned and reasonable definition of “serious disruption” that gave clear guidance to the police—Lords Amendment 1—which was agreed by this House. The Commons disagreed with our amendment and substituted Amendment 1A as an amendment in lieu.

On the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Wolfson of Tredegar, about the problem with ambiguity around the word “significant”, the fact is that the original amendment this House passed had examples clearly explaining to the police what we meant, so that ambiguity was not there in the original amendment passed by this House.

Instead of defining “serious disruption” as causing

“significant harm to persons, organisations or the life of the community”,

which would include, for example, preventing an ambulance taking a patient to a hospital, the Government have substituted, as we have heard,

“more than a minor degree”

for “significant harm”. With the greatest respect to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope of Craighead, and to address the concerns of the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, I will repeat what I said on Report: on a spectrum of seriousness, “minor” is at one end and “serious” is at the other. I say that as a former police officer speaking about how the police might interpret the legislation. For example, a minor injury is a reddening of the skin, and a serious injury is a broken limb or inflicting a fatal injury. My interpretation, as a former police officer, of what is being said in the Bill is that disrupting to

“more than a minor degree”

cannot reasonably be said to be “serious disruption”; it is far too low a threshold. While I understand that the noble and learned Lord wanted to establish a threshold—the exact point at which the law would be broken—our argument is that that point is far too low. We therefore support Motion A1 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, and we will support him if he decides to divide the House on his Motion A1.

I join the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, in saying that I am grateful to the Minister for Amendment 17A, mentioned in Motion C, which we support. It is right to protect observers of protests from being prevented from carrying out their work by the police.

Finally, I thank the noble Baronesses, Lady Chakrabarti and Lady Fox of Buckley, for their kind words about my public service, but I reassure the House that this is not my valedictory speech.

EU Settlement Scheme

Lord Cormack Excerpts

Monday 13th March 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Murray of Blidworth (Con)]

I can certainly confirm that it is our intention to abide by the judgment. We work very closely with the IMA and will continue to do so.

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

My Lords, has not the Prime Minister, two weeks ago over the Northern Ireland protocol and last week with a highly successful visit to France, shown the tone that we should now adopt towards our European friends and allies and former partners in the EU?

[Lord Murray of Blidworth (Con)]

Yes, indeed. It is in that spirit of co-operation that the Government have determined that the appropriate method of resolving this case is to accept the present position—notwithstanding that permission to appeal was granted—to accept the judgment of the court and to make arrangements so that the scheme matches the findings of the court.