Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill

Lord Walney Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 14th September 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Walney (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, the measures relating to protest and public order in Part 3 of the Bill are of interest to the wider review that I have been asked to undertake for the Government in my role as their independent adviser on political violence and disruption. I am consulting widely on that review, analysing a call for evidence at present, and undertaking measures to understand the public’s wider views on the issues of political violence and the balance with freedom of speech. I am also listening carefully to your Lordships’ views as expressed today, and, no doubt, through Committee. I do not intend to pre-empt the review, which will be handed in shortly and, I hope, published soon after that, but I will make just one general point on this issue.

My observation is on the relative absence from this discussion of the primacy of Britain’s democratic process, of which, of course, the other place in particular—this House is a revising Chamber—is a central part. It is also about the potential for physical acts of disruption, which could be described as physical force in one form or another, to run counter to the expression of public will through the ballot box, or for making your views known in non-physical ways.

I listened carefully to what the noble Lord, Lord Oates, who is not now in his place, evocatively described when he was talking about climate change. Indeed, I spoke to representatives of Extinction Rebellion as part of the review. The fragility of the democratic process to be able to enact what growing numbers believe is needed—indeed, there is now scientific consensus—should surely be deeply troubling to all of us. One point that I put to the members of Extinction Rebellion on the Zoom call was that the problem might not be the lack of sufficient channels, or the fact that the channels had been corrupted by terrible capitalism or vested interests. I said that the problem might be that the public might not be willing to enact the measures that the XR members—and indeed, increasingly myself, and many of us in this House—believe are necessary. That is a huge tension within our democracy, but it is not necessarily solved by ever more disruptive protests.

Part of my review is taking the public’s views, and noble Lords may not be surprised—certainly, those who have been in the other place and listened to our constituents talking about such measures will not be surprised—by the kind of views that the public have on such matters.

I shall devote the rest of my time to something that has been raised effectively by a number of noble Lords: the need for stronger measures to tackle the scourge of domestic abuse that is wrecking—and indeed taking—so many lives in this country. As others have said, Nicole Jacobs, the Domestic Abuse Commissioner for England and Wales, is surely right to say that the vital progress the Government are securing in the Domestic Abuse Act, and the strategy on violence against women, will be undermined if the proposed serious violence prevention duty in Part 2 of the Bill does not explicitly include domestic homicide, domestic abuse and sexual violence.

The Government appear to wish to give local police forces the flexibility to include these matters explicitly in their own strategies. However, it is unclear to me, as it is to the noble Baroness, Lady Greengross, what case any force could make for not making the prevention of serious violence a central part of its duty, given the grim annual toll of women’s lives taken by their partners, and the other violence committed by those partners. If we cannot make that case, surely the amendment that the noble Baroness, Lady Bertin, and others will be tabling should be seriously considered by the Government.