Public Order Bill

Baroness Fox of Buckley Excerpts

Consideration of Commons amendments
Tuesday 14th March 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Faulks (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I respectfully agree with what the noble Lord has just said. The House may remember that the whole question of the definition of “serious disruption” emanated in part from a recommendation of your Lordships’ Constitution Committee. I supported an amendment put down by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope. I think the Opposition then accepted that it would be useful to define “serious disruption”. So, there was a measure of agreement, and what we were concerned with was where the threshold lay.

It is clear that the amendment the Government are seeking to put into the Bill is lawful. There had been some doubt, but various decisions, including the decision on Ziegler and the subsequent decision in the Northern Ireland case, show that this is well within the legality required by the European Court of Human Rights. The question is: how do you balance the undoubted right to demonstrate—I do not think there is any doubt that everybody in this House accepts the fundamental importance of that right—against the rights of others to go about their business, to go to hospital, to go to school and to do all the other important things? They must put up with inconvenience, but whether their lives should be seriously disrupted is a different question.

What worries me about the amendment put forward by the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, is that, for example, it would require there to be a “prolonged disruption” before we get to the stage that an offence has been committed or, more realistically, that the police can do anything about it. Imprecision in adjectives is of course inevitable, but “prolonged” worries me. We have to achieve a difficult balance in this legislation, and it seems to me that that put forward by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope, is the right one.

[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.