Public Order Bill

Debate between Lord Skidelsky and Lord Paddick

Committee stage
Tuesday 13th December 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Paddick (LD)]

My Lords, Amendment 128 is in my name, supported by the noble Lord, Lord Skidelsky, the noble Baroness, Lady Fox of Buckley, and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans. I will also speak to Amendments 129, 130, 133 to 136, and 139 to 142 in my name and to the other amendments in the group; and I will oppose Clauses 19 and 20 standing part of the Bill.

Serious disruption prevention orders are modelled on the orders given to terrorists and knife carriers, with similar draconian provisions, yet these are to be imposed on peaceful protestors, some of whom will never have been convicted of a criminal offence and some of whom will have never even attended a protest. These orders will effectively prohibit British citizens from exercising their human rights of free expression and assembly. They include the possibility of electronic tagging and restricting people’s use of the internet.

Liberty gives an example, which, in my own words is of someone who could be subjected to an SDPO, who has never been convicted of an offence, who attended two protests in the last five years and who, at those protests, based on inadmissible hearsay and on the balance of probabilities, contributed towards someone else doing something that was likely to result in serious disruption. The purpose of the order would be to prevent the person subject to the SDPO from contributing towards another person doing something that was likely to result in serious disruption at some point in the future.

HMICFRS says of serious disruption prevention orders:

“Such orders would neither be compatible with human rights legislation nor create an effective deterrent. All things considered, legislation creating protest banning orders would be legally very problematic because, however many safeguards might be put in place, a banning order would completely remove an individual’s right to attend a protest. It is difficult to envisage a case where less intrusive measures could not be taken to address the risk that an individual poses, and where a court would therefore accept that it was proportionate to impose a banning order”.


In the same report, senior police officers are quoted as saying that SDPOs would

“unnecessarily curtail people’s democratic right to protest”;

that such orders would be a “massive civil liberty infringement”; and that,

“the proposal is a severe restriction on a person’s rights to protest and in reality, is unworkable.”

That is the police’s view. They added that it appeared unlikely that the measure would work as hoped, because a court was unlikely to impose a high penalty on someone who breached such an order if the person was peacefully protesting, to which HMICFRS said:

“We agree with this view and that shared by many senior police officers.”


It is what we would expect in Russia or Iran, not in the United Kingdom.

These orders can also be imposed on those convicted of public order offences, and although we impose their imposition on anyone, it cannot be right that a person can be convicted of a criminal offence of breaching a serious disruption prevention order and sentenced potentially to a term of imprisonment, on the basis of an order imposed on the balance of probabilities, potentially based on evidence such as hearsay that would not be admissible in a criminal trial. I have rehearsed these arguments time and again in relation to similar orders in the past.

The origins of this type of order are to be found in anti-social behaviour orders—ASBOs—another order imposed on the balance of probabilities but with criminal sanctions for a breach, which Parliament decided was unfair and unreasonable, and so replaced with an entirely civil-based, non-criminal approach. In the case of knife crime prevention orders, the Government used the argument that the police had advised them that knife carriers would not take the orders seriously if no criminal sanctions were attached to them. Even if noble Lords had some sympathy with that approach in relation to the potentially fatal consequences of knife crime, surely serious disruption prevention orders are far closer to ASBOs than to knife crime.

The noble Baroness, Lady Fox of Buckley, and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans have added their names to my Amendments 128, 129 and 130; and the noble Lord, Lord Skidelsky, has also added his name to my Amendment 128. The amendments require a court to be satisfied “beyond reasonable doubt” —the criminal standard of proof—before imposing a serious disruption prevention order, rather than depending on the civil standard of “on the balance of probabilities”.

We support Amendment 131 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Hendy, which states that participation in a lawful trade dispute should not result in the imposition of a SDPO. I can see what the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, is doing with her Amendment 132, and, if she were here, I would have looked forward to her explanation of it to the Committee.

Although electronic tagging is limited to 12 months, serious disruption prevention orders can be imposed for up to two years—but they can also be renewed indefinitely. That means that someone who has never been convicted of an offence can be prohibited from being in or entering a particular area indefinitely, prohibited from being with particular people indefinitely, prohibited from engaging in particular activities indefinitely, and prohibited from using the internet for particular purposes indefinitely. Can the Minister explain how that provision would be enforced, if they could use the internet for some purposes and not others? My Amendments 133, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141 and 142 would prevent serious disruption prevention orders being renewed, effectively placing a maximum limit of two years on their imposition.

Someone who breaches a serious disruption prevention order can be sentenced to a maximum of 51 weeks in prison and an unlimited fine. My Amendment 134 questions whether an unlimited fine is appropriate for such an offence, for the reasons I have argued in previous groups.

Most of those amendments should be redundant, because I urge all noble Lords on all sides of the House to join me and the noble Lords, Lord Ponsonby of Shulbrede and Lord Anderson of Ipswich, and the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, in opposing the proposition that Clauses 19 and 20 stand part of the Bill. I beg to move Amendment 128.

[Lord Skidelsky (CB)]

My Lords, I enthusiastically support the amendment moved by the noble Lord, Lord Paddick.

I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, that we are not living in a totalitarian state, but George Orwell also warned of the slide from democracy to despotism: it becomes invisible so that, in the end, you cross a border without really knowing that your freedom has been taken away because you do not want to do anything that might lead to anyone wanting to take it away. We have not got there yet. Nevertheless, it seems that we are discussing areas of legislation in which we find, as the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, said, blocks of words being transferred mindlessly from one set of offences to another set of offences, rather like prefabricated hen houses. One has to guard against that, because the offences are of very different gravity and one must not use the same language when talking of one rather than the other.

Part 2 introduces the serious disruption prevention order, described by Liberty as a protest banning order, which gives police the power to ban a person who has not been convicted of any offence for up to two years from attending any protest, together with extraordinary powers of surveillance, including electronic surveillance. Now I am against prevention orders on the whole, because they tread the path of stopping the liberties of people who have not been convicted of any offence. That is the road down which they lead, so I am suspicious of that in principle.

Here, we have a penalty which can be imposed on a civil standard of proof, meaning that the conditions needed for being given an SDPO need to be proved only on a balance of probability. That compounds the offence. The Government are not only taking powers to inflict extraordinary penalties on someone who has not been convicted of anything, they are also claiming the power to do that on a balance of probabilities, rather than on having reasonable suspicion. That is what this amendment wants to remove and there are subsequent amendments to which the same logic applies. We need to put in a requirement of reasonable doubt into the whole series of these preventive disruption orders.