Public Order Bill

Baroness Chakrabarti Excerpts

Consideration of Commons amendments
Tuesday 28th March 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Sentamu (CB)]

My Lords, I stand only to amplify what the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, has said. Anybody who reads the Baroness Casey Review: Final Report will find it a great shock. The noble Lord, Lord Coaker, has tried to put her words very simply. Paragraph 10 in one of her recommendations says:

“The use of stop and search in London by the Met needs a fundamental reset.”


We cannot simply go back and say, “We’ve been doing it this way”. She goes on:

“The Met should establish a charter with Londoners on how and when stop and search is used, with an agreed rationale, and provide an annual account of its use by area, and by team undertaking stop and searches. Compliance with the charter should be measured independently, including the viewing of Body Worn Video footage. As a minimum, Met officers should be required to give their name, their shoulder number, the grounds for the stop and a receipt confirming the details of the stop.”


At the end of our Stephen Lawrence inquiry, we talked about stop and search. We said that stop and search should be retained because it is a useful tool for preventing crime, but we had a similar attitude and gave similar statements to the noble Baroness, Lady Casey. John Grieve was tasked by the then commissioner of the Met to carry out work on how this could be done. There was a pilot. It worked, but of course some newspapers did not like it and saw it as bureaucracy that prevented the police’s work too much, and it was then stopped. This has now come home to roost. Had we sustained what was started by Sir Paul Condon, we would be in a very different place, but we are not. We have a review suggesting that what is in Motion A1 would be a good thing. I do not see how that could go wrong.

Finally, as I said in the last debate on this, if the Bill is about public order, we have extended stop and search beyond belief. People are protesting—let us say young people—about climate change, injustice and unfairness. There is really no need for it; I cannot see why they should be stopped and searched. Most of all, these protests are at the heart of being in a free society. Most of us did not want Clause 11 but, now that it is in there, these provisions would be a safeguard so that the extension of stop and search does not do greater damage and hurt to our young people, who really want to protest.

Remember when they left school for a day to protest about global warming. If you stopped and searched them because you believed there was a reason to do so, most parents would have been offended. I would have been. Stop and search has been extended in the Public Order Bill and not for the rest of crimes, which I would wholeheartedly support. In many ways this amendment would limit the abuse that could occur because we went for believing as opposed to having grounds to suspect.

[Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)]

My Lords, this Bill was always about political signals, not sensible policy. Finally, even signals must change. I respect the Minister, but others in the Home Office have been slow to respond to the concerns of the British public about abuses of broad police powers.

Much has happened and even more has been exposed since this Bill began its passage last May. Last July Wayne Couzens lost an appeal against a whole life sentence for the abduction, rape and murder of Sarah Everard while he was a serving police officer, after a purported stop and arrest for breach of lockdown laws in March 2021. Last month David Carrick was imprisoned for 30 years for an unrestrained 18-year campaign of rape and abuse while he was a serving police officer.

Also last month, YouGov reported that 51% of Londoners do not trust the Metropolitan Police very much or at all. Last week, as we have heard, the noble Baroness, Lady Casey, called for a “fundamental reset” of the use of stop and search, which she said is

“currently deployed by the Met at the cost of legitimacy, trust and, therefore, consent.”

Just yesterday the Children’s Commissioner, Dame Rachel de Souza, found that nearly 3,000 children aged between eight and 17 had been strip-searched under stop and search powers between 2018 and 2022. Nearly 40% of them were black. Half of those strip searches had no appropriate adult present.

All this relates to the use and abuse of current police powers. Still, today we are being asked yet again to green-light new powers to stop and search peaceful protesters without even a reasonable suspicion of criminality. When trust in policing and the rule of law is in jeopardy, if this House does not exercise its constitutional duty to say “enough”—no more power without at least the modest statutory responsibilities set out in Motion A1 in the name of my noble friend Lord Coaker—what are we for?

[Lord Sandhurst (Con)]

My Lords, I had not planned to speak, but it is important to remember that we are not dealing simply with peaceful protests. I remind the House of what I said on a previous occasion in respect of these amendments. We are dealing with organised, large-scale disruption, using implements. The purpose of the disruption, as the disrupters make plain, is not simply to protest but to stop citizens going about their lawful business for a disproportionate length of time. As I reminded the House previously, the European Court of Justice in Strasbourg has said more than once that such activity is unlawful and that protests that go beyond merely protesting can legitimately be stopped by government.