Public Order Bill (First sitting)

Anne McLaughlin Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 9th June 2022 Public Bill Committees

[The Chair]

Anne McLaughlin and, if there is time, Rupa Huq, but we have to finish at 12.15 pm.

[Anne McLaughlin (Glasgow North East) (SNP)]

Q Thank you, and good afternoon. I had four questions, but I will keep it to two. I want to look at the offence of being equipped to lock on, which the Bill creates. That is where an individual has an object connected with locking on. How will the police decide what objects are connected with locking on, and could you give me some less obvious examples? A big chain with a padlock is fairly obvious, but there are more everyday items that people could have for legitimate purposes or for locking on. What are they, and how does a police officer decide?

Chris Noble: I do not want to broadcast too easily what people might want to use, but it is a good challenge. There will be very obvious elements, such as bamboo poles or scaffolding, which would probably give us a bit of a hint. But you are right: there are other, more innocuous items, such as bicycle locks—clearly, there are many cyclists around—glue and so forth. It will have to be very context-specific. It may well be relevant to other behaviours at the time—what else is going on, and have we picked up something on social media? It will be down to individual discretion. Again, this is not about criminalising people. The outcome we are looking for is minimising disruption, so the policing focus will be around how we do that, as opposed to how we criminalise someone for having an item that can be very difficult to prove exactly what it is for.

[Anne McLaughlin]

Q I would love to follow on from that, but I will not. The next thing I want to ask about are serious disruption prevention orders. The HMICFRS report said:

“We agree with the police and Home Office that such orders would neither be compatible with human rights legislation nor create an effective deterrent.”

Do you agree with that? If not, could you say why, and how issuing one of these to someone without any criminal conviction is compatible with human rights legislation?

Chris Noble: The language is slightly different, albeit the concept is broadly similar—HMICFRS was looking at and discussing protest banning orders. From a policing point of view, unless we knew the exact circumstances of the individual it would be hard to say how exactly the orders could be justified. As I alluded to earlier, we would see them as potentially being relevant to more persistent and reckless offenders when other methods of intervening were not seen as successful or were not capable. The standard tests on proportionality would be applied, and ultimately it would be a matter for the relevant judge to make a decision as to how they could be justified or not. I would not rule out them ever being used—I see it very much as a top-end tactic or power—but I would not want to preclude the creativity and ingenuity of protesters meaning the orders might well be the only thing left open to us.

[The Chair]

Mr Noble, I wanted to allow you to finish that answer, but that brings us to the end of our allotted time. Thank you.

Examination of Witnesses

John Groves and Nicola Bell gave evidence.

--- Later in debate ---

[Kit Malthouse]

Thank you.

[Anne McLaughlin]

Q Good afternoon to both of you. My question is for John. In your written evidence, you stress several times that the protests that you face are often unlawful. If Nicola agrees, I am happy for her to answer as well. If they are unlawful, that means that the legislation already exists to prevent or stop these protests, otherwise they would not be considered unlawful. In your view, what is it that stops those existing laws being implemented, and what is it about this proposed legislation that will make it more likely to be implemented?

John Groves: I come back to the tunnel point I made earlier. I assume that those that participate in going on to land and trespassing on land and digging tunnels know that they are breaking the law. but they do not see the current law as a significant deterrent to stop them from doing that. The police will always seek the balance between lawful protest and the rights of the landowner or whoever. Invariably, that often means issues with access to sites.

Access to some of our sites has been delayed for about eight hours. We cannot do any work. We cannot move vehicles in or out of our sites, because protesters are sat down outside at the access point, sometimes locked on, sometimes not. The police are there but they will not take action because they are allowing the right to protest. Because the protestors are not on HS2 land, we cannot do anything about that. We cannot move them on—on the public highway, only the police can move them on.

My sense is that this Bill, if enacted, will provide a deterrent effect for the protestors. I come back to the safety point—I am sorry to keep going on about tunnelling. Four people in a tunnel is such a serious thing; I am concerned that we will have a fatality at some point in the future. We have been really lucky. We have had four or five tunnel incidents and we have yet to have any serious injury, but I suspect it will come one day, if it continues in the way it is going. If we look at our data, we are seeing protestors turning to tunnelling more readily. In the operation we have just run, there were four shafts on one piece of land; they moved on to another piece of land very quickly and they started to dig a tunnel. We were able to get in quickly and move them on. That is my principal concern.

[Anne McLaughlin]

Do you want to respond, Nicola? You do not have to.

Nicola Bell: No, it is the same as what I was talking about before. It is about the fact that the police recognised that there was nothing that would stop somebody just keeping on doing this. They could arrest them, but it was a low-level criminal offence and ultimately that was not going to deter what we were seeing, which was pretty unprecedented, really—that level of protest in the south-east of England over the tail end of last year.

[Mrs Natalie Elphicke (Dover) (Con)]

Q My question is to Nicola Bell. The Bill intends to make deliberate interference with key national infrastructure a criminal offence. As we have just touched on, Dover has several pieces of key infrastructure, such as the national strategic road network, the M2/A2 and the M20/A20, and the port of Dover itself, which transits about a fifth of all our goods. In recent years, the port and the strategic road network have been targeted by extremists on several occasions. We have mentioned the 2021 incident, which saw people gluing themselves to tankers and closed down the port and the M2 and M20. Going right back to September 2019, we had a similar incident with extreme protestors that saw the port completely shut down and disruption to and closure of the A20 and M20.

I was hoping you could expand on your earlier answer to give the Committee more of a feel for the impact of this kind of traffic disruption on the Kent and Dover economy and its importance to the strategic network for the nation, and for some of the safety and other challenges in dealing with these incidents that are different from the ordinary traffic disruption that your team deal with on a more regular basis.

Nicola Bell: The bounds of my responsibility would be, for example, the traffic officers that you see as they patrol the network. On the day of a protest, our role would be to try and create a safe space for the police to then get in and do their job. For example, on the day that they protested down in Dover, that was about protecting the area to allow the police to get specialist people in to get protestors off the top of the tanker and to therefore get the port open again and get things running.

On your point about the economy, as I mentioned earlier, 80% of domestic freight still uses road, so that is a pretty big impact on the economy. We know that most of our goods come in and out of the port of Dover, so therefore the roads they take—the M20, the A20 and the A2—are very significant indeed. Ultimately, the cost also relates to people not getting to where they need to be on time—whether that is missed appointments or freight not getting to where it needs to get to on time. I do not have an exact figure for the impact on the economy. I know that some of that has been worked on, and we can perhaps provide that to the Committee in writing afterwards.

--- Later in debate ---

[Andrew Bridgen]

Q My questions are for Mr Groves. I will declare that I am no fan of HS2. Indeed, I voted against it at every opportunity I had in the House. However, as we all know, the majority of the House approved the project. Many of my concerns are about the spiralling cost of HS2. Could you tell the Committee again the costs of security measures for HS2 and removing protesters? Do you have any estimate of what the savings would be to the taxpayer if the Bill is enacted?

John Groves: It is not just standard security for a site, which you would expect to see anywhere. The direct costs of protester activity to the taxpayer up to the end of March were £126 million. We estimate that by the end of next year, that could in a worst-case scenario reach £200 million.

[Anne McLaughlin]

Q My question is for Mr Groves. If tunnelling is the biggest issue for HS2, are you surprised that it has just been added on as an amendment, given that it is so important? What that does is cut out the consultation—there has been no consultation on it —so are you surprised that it has just been added on?

John Groves: Certainly, looking at the Bill when it was published, the things we have seen and discussed today are important. The introduction of the tunnelling amendment is very positive from our perspective. I have not got any comment on the timing of it.

[Anne McLaughlin]

I suppose that is a question for the Minister, but I am not allowed to ask the Minister.

[The Chair]

We are questioning the witnesses at this stage. In due course, I am sure you will have the opportunity to question the Minister.