Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill

Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 24th November 2021 Lords Chamber

[The Minister of State, Home Office (Baroness Williams of Trafford) (Con)]

My Lords, I have not heard the rumour about keeping comments short. We are about to begin the 11th day in Committee of this Bill. In total, this House has sat for 60 hours in Committee, including starting early and going beyond 10 pm, as well as allowing three extra days. By the time when we finish today—and we intend to do so—we will have considered and debated more than 450 amendments.

As for the new clauses, they have been agreed with the usual channels and with the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy. I would say to noble Lords who have spoken that we intend to finish Committee today.

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

I support the noble Lords who have spoken. Quite honestly, this is no way to treat the House of Lords. Especially as we get older, we do not want to stay up until 2 am—and, quite honestly, this Bill should have been four Bills. I think that everybody on the Government Benches knows that. Therefore, the 60 hours of debate and 400 amendments is not that that unusual. Bringing in these amendments at the last minute is really scandalous, and very typical of an arrogant attitude towards your Lordships’ House.

[Baroness Williams of Trafford (Con)]

I no more want to stay until two in the morning than does the noble Baroness. We will get to the public order new measures later on. I understand that the Liberal Democrats wish to vote against them, and ultimately I shall introduce them but will withdraw them, so there will be another occasion on Report to discuss them as well.

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[Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)]

My Lords, I do not want to elongate this procedural debate before a lengthy debate that we are debating the length of, but the protest provisions in this Bill have been some of the most contentious—and not just in your Lordships’ House but in the country. They are not the final provisions or the final part of this Bill, even, yet they have been saved for the latter stages of this Committee, and the later hours of this last day will include this raft of new and even more contentious amendments. That is the reason for this suspicion and the concern that your Lordships’ House has not been shown the appropriate respect of a second Chamber in a democracy, when dealing with provisions that are, arguably, contrary to the human rights convention, and are certainly thought to be very contentious and illiberal by many communities in this country.

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

Something that we did last week was to start early. Why could we not start earlier today so that we did not need to go into the early hours of the morning? We could have started at 10, which would have been a reasonable start for most people.

[Lord Ashton of Hyde (Con)]

Because when we started three hours earlier, the usual channels asked us to finish three hours earlier—so it did not achieve anything.

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So there is a persuasive argument for the Government to introduce a statutory duty on local authorities, the NHS and the police to improve long-term outcomes for children in their areas and to ensure that early help is provided to children living in families with serious parental addiction or domestic violence concerns, or parental mental ill-health, to those who are at high risk of criminal exploitation and to young carers. When we think about what this Bill seeks to do, I can think of no better way to try to prevent people going into the criminal justice system than to invest more in vulnerable children. I hope the Minister can respond positively.

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, I support Amendment 292H in particular. It is a bit of a stretch to have included Amendment 292J, which has been clearly explained, in this group, but I support it as well. I am afraid the inclusion of Amendments 320 and 328 has caught me out, because I know that my noble friend Lady Bennett would have liked to have spoken on those.

On Amendment 292H, it has been extensively reported that, despite the Protection from Eviction Act, the police routinely fail to assist tenants against illegal evictions. Part of this, as the noble Baroness said earlier, is lack of police, but it is also lack of training on this Act. Many police wrongly conclude that this is a civil matter and not a criminal one. As we know, this could not be further from the truth, and I hope the Minister can confirm that the police have power of arrest to prevent an unlawful eviction, so that we are all completely clear.

This has been a problem for quite some time, and it will only get worse in the coming months as winter comes on and Covid protections against evictions lift. Many frustrated landlords will want to kick people out of their homes, and some will knowingly or unknowingly try to evict without following the correct procedures. So I hope the Minister can confirm that police have power of arrest and that the Government will outline what is being done to ensure that the police properly protect tenants.

[Baroness Kennedy of Cradley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I support Amendment 292H and declare my interest as director of Generation Rent. I also add my voice in support of Amendment 292J in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, and others. As my noble friend Lady Blake of Leeds said, it is a criminal offence under the Protection from Eviction Act 1977 for a landlord to try to evict a tenant themselves. Local authorities and police officers have a crucial role to play and have the powers to stop illegal eviction and to prosecute offenders. However, the law on illegal evictions is not enforced nearly as much as it should be. Generation Rent research has shown that less than 2% of cases result in a prosecution.

As the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, said, there are too many instances where a tenant calls the police for help with an illegal eviction, only to find that the police officer dismisses the issue as a civil matter, despite it clearly being a criminal act. This was highlighted very well in a 2020 report by Safer Renting, a charity which helps tenants enforce their rights. If the Minister has not read it, I urge her to do so. In London in 2018, for example, there were 130 cases of homelessness due to an illegal eviction, but only 14 incidents were recorded by the police.

We need a stronger partnership between the police and local authorities to combat this serious crime. Requiring co-operation and sharing of relevant information by police forces is necessary. This amendment will help secure that co-operation. In addition, more needs to be done to reset police attitudes to illegal evictions, with better training of police officers and call handlers so that they know how to respond correctly when a renter is being illegally evicted. We need better data recording and the publishing of that data on incidents between landlords and tenants. Authorities need the powers that currently exist with regard to enforcing safety standards and licensing to demand documents from parties of interest to cover investigations into illegal evictions. The sentencing guidelines should also be addressed; only two of the 10 fines handed down in 2019 were of more than £1,000. Fines can even be lower than the £355 it costs to make a legal claim for possession through the courts. They are far too low to act as any real deterrent to the crime.

Illegally evicting someone is a grave offence, and it affects the most vulnerable renters. Amendment 292H is a step forward. It will improve enforcement of this crime through ensuring that closer working relationship between the police and local authorities which is necessary for proper enforcement and prosecution.

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[Lord Beith (LD)]

My Lords, I will speak to two amendments in my name. By way of preface, I must say how much I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, in his masterful presentation of the case against what the Government are doing, and of the observations of the Joint Committee on Human Rights.

The noble Lord mentioned proportionality. Proportionality was central to the case of Ziegler and others in the Supreme Court back in July. I thought the wording it used, as reported by the Times, summed up my feeling in a way:

“Peaceful protest was capable of constituting a ‘lawful excuse’ for deliberate physical obstruction of the highway … There had to be an evaluation on the facts of each case to determine whether any restrictions on the protesters’ rights to freedom of expression and freedom of peaceful association was proportionate. There should be a certain degree of tolerance to disruption to ordinary life caused by the exercise of those freedoms.”


I do not think the Government like the concept of proportionality, and the whole direction of these clauses—and those in the subsequent group, more recently tabled —illustrates that.

The amendments I have tabled are probing one feature, which is the word “unease”. They are Amendments 297 and 307. In the new subsection that the Government propose, which is about

“the noise generated by persons taking part in”

an assembly, there is reference to the impact it may have on “persons in the vicinity” of that assembly

“if … it may result in the intimidation or harassment of persons of reasonable firmness with the characteristics of persons likely to be in the vicinity”.

A court is going to have some fun working out what the characteristics are of people likely to be in the vicinity, but that is another part of the story.

The subsection also applies if

“it may cause such persons to suffer serious unease”.

That is a very low bar indeed. It made me think of the Governor of the Bank of England speaking to the Treasury Committee a couple of weeks ago. He said that he was “very uneasy” about the inflation situation¸ but not so uneasy that he sought to raise the interest rates. In his view of vocabulary, “uneasy” is clearly nowhere near the top at all.

It is the purpose of numerous protests to make people uneasy; I have been made uneasy by both the intensity and subject matter of protests. The protests that went on in Glasgow were designed to make people feel uneasy about what is happening to the planet, and to do so in ways which might even more directly make them feel uneasy, by noticing that such a large number of people are involved and making such a lot of noise.

However, it has always been so. John Wesley and his followers made people uneasy, by preaching loudly out in the open air and singing loud hymns. It was to make them uneasy about the life they were leading and trying to cause them to change their way of life. I have been confronted in my time by all sorts of demonstrations and protestors, putting forward views which I sometimes agreed with and sometimes did not. But being even seriously uneasy does not seem any reasonable basis on which to restrict the rights of protest. I simply cannot conceive that the Government have any other intention than to make protest much more difficult, even in circumstances which most people, on reflection, would accept were reasonable.

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, we have had some powerful speeches already and it is a real pleasure to hear them. This was supposed to be the worst bit of the Bill. It is a terrible Bill but this was meant to be the absolute pits. However, the Government have made things worse by bringing in the latest amendments, so this is not the worst bit any more; it is just the next worst bit.

I have signed about a dozen amendments in this group. I could have signed them all and definitely support them all. Many of them are good, and worth raising, but the only real way forward is to remove these clauses altogether. I hope that opposition parties can join together to do that on Report, because our civil liberties and human rights are far too important to be negated in this way.

Amendment 293 from the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, sets the scene perfectly because it stresses the importance of the right to protest in a free country. We always look down our noses at all these illiberal countries abroad who suppress their citizens—their human rights and liberty to protest—but this Government are trying to do exactly the same. Any restriction on the right to protest has to be really carefully considered, not rushed in with 18 pages of amendments at the last minute and without any proper discussion.

There is a balancing act between the rights of individuals and those of wider society. The balancing act already happens because there is a great number of restrictions on protest in this country. The police have many powers, which they use, and many tactics—some of which go too far, such as kettling. The Government want to ramp up these restrictions even more: being noisy or annoying could be banned. Some Peers could be banned because they are annoying. We could end up with the only protests, as has been said, being the ones that are so quiet and uneventful that they achieve absolutely nothing.

This is deep, dark politics. This is about a Conservative Government wanting to rewrite completely how we operate within society, as individuals against the state. I think they are planning, or hoping, to remain the dominant political party for generations to come. That is what could happen through these terrible amendments.

If you make protests impossible to perform legally, criminalise non-violent direct action, abolish or restrict the ability of citizens to challenge the Government in court through judicial reviews, turn people against lawyers, gerrymander the election boundaries and dish out cash in the way that looks best for Conservative MPs, that is deep, dark politics. Many of us here are not particularly political and perhaps do not see the dangers inherent in what you, the Government, are doing. It all seems like a calculated ploy to turn all the cards in favour of an unaccountable Government that cannot be challenged in the courts, at the ballot box or on the streets. We all have to unite against this and deleting these clauses from the Bill is the beginning of that fight.

I have a tiny quibble on the issue that noble Peers have mentioned about the survival of the planet. The chances are that the planet will survive. What we are doing in this climate crisis is destroying the little bit of ecosphere that supports human life, so that is what we have to think about. It is not about survival of the planet but about survival of people.

[Baroness Stowell of Beeston (Con)]

My Lords, I may be able to tone down some of the hyperbole. Let’s go back to first principles on what this Bill is about. I think we are all united in this country in support of our right to protest. That is a very precious right that we all feel strongly about. Nobody wants to put that at risk and nobody is trying to put that at risk.

In a world which is becoming more divided, with people having very strong, trenchant positions in the views they adopt, we are trying to ensure that it is possible for people to express their views in a way which does not undermine some of the other social norms in our society which allow us to disagree but be united at the same time. Over the last few years, we have seen a new fashion of protest which is carried out in a way that is unacceptable to other people in its disruption; whether they agree with the matter in question or not is almost irrelevant. We need to try—I believe this is what the Government are trying to do through this Bill—to make it possible for protests to continue in a way which does not divide society further.

I do not support the amendments, but I agree with one point, made earlier by the noble Lord, Lord Dubs. We have to be very careful on the issue of noise. It is impossible for people to protest silently and I will look to the Government for reassurance on that matter when the Minister comes to respond.

Let’s not forget what we are trying to do here: allow people to disagree in a way which does not divide us further. I worry that some of these amendments will perpetuate a division which we do not want to see happen in this country.

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[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

Perhaps the Government could decide not to bring huge Bills such as this, so that we are forced to sit late at night.

[Baroness Evans of Bowes Park (Con)]

This is the 11th day in Committee on the Bill; I think we have given it due course. I am sorry, but I do not accept the noble Baroness’s views. Perhaps we can all respect each other and move on. Noble Lords have very important points to make, but if we can make them succinctly, that will be very helpful.

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

Respect goes both ways. The Government are not respecting this House.

[Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)]

I am happy to wrap up. I am sorry, I had to read for my noble friend Lord Hendy, who had an amendment, and that took a little time. I beg your pardon; I will be very brief.

I have talked about the past—suffragettes and anti-apartheid, et cetera—and I have talked about Russia and China and the places that we have to persuade, in the current, dangerous world, not to suppress protest. The domestic context is that we have come out of Brexit, which was incredibly divisive; whichever side you were on, we know that it divided communities. I was subject to protesters who were very cross with me, and a little scary, but in the end, I put up with it. We are coming through a pandemic, and people are scared and very worried by climate change. I do not believe that oppressive powers giving this level of discretion to the police to suppress free speech will bring our communities together.

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[Lord Dubs (Lab)]

My Lords, I support what my noble friend Lord Coaker has just said, but perhaps I may say a brief word about Amendments 315 and 316. They are there to improve the drafting of the offence to make it clear, first, that it is committed only when serious harm is done to the public, rather than to any one person, which is what the Bill’s wording is now, and, secondly, that when considering the reasonable excuse that the defence supplies, the court should take into account the importance of the rights guaranteed by Articles 10 and 11 of the ECHR. In other words, put simply, it is not about any one person but the public, and the courts should look at Articles 10 and 11 when coming to any decision about whether an offence has been committed.

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, for me, this is getting like election night. Any politician in the room will tell you that it is when you are really tired but you are so wired that you cannot possibly sleep anyway.

I have signed three of these amendments but I wanted to speak mainly to Amendment 315A. I am concerned about this whole part of the Bill, because it is far too broad and risks criminalising a host of innocent behaviour. We heard earlier about the right to move around. Today, I was stopped by the police outside and could not go for nearly 250 yards on the pavement because a band was going through. I love an Army brass band—it is absolutely fine—so I joined the crowds on the other side of the road who were all pushing and shoving. We often take away the right to move around, sometimes for good causes. I would argue that protest is a good cause.

As regards stopping traffic, let us remember that traffic jams cost us billions of pounds every year and millions of people are inconvenienced, with long times added to their journeys to work—working people who are delayed by traffic jams. This morning outside the Marlin Hotel on Westminster Bridge Road, three Mercedes were parked in the bus lane. The buses had to go around them, slowing all the traffic. What are the Government doing about that sort of thing? I contacted the police and sent them the registration numbers, so let us hope that they were caught.

The definitions in the Bill of serious harm are a mess because serious annoyance cannot be a crime—it is too difficult to define. You cannot put people in jail for just being annoying. I am sure that sometimes we would all like to, but you cannot do it. I am particularly worried, after the way in which Covid was policed early on, about the inclusion of disease in the new public nuisance offence. At the start of Covid—and possibly all the way through—every prosecution was wrongful. That was partly because—and I will be generous to the Government for once—the Government were confused and blurred the lines between law, guidance, advice and so on. As I have said before in your Lordships’ House, it was hard for the police because they did not know what they should be doing and became a bit overzealous. That may have been well intentioned but it was not appropriate. There were wrongful prosecutions and convictions as a result. Let us be a bit more careful about the definitions in the Bill, because I think that they will cause more problems.

We are all boasting about our qualifications for going on demonstrations and that sort of thing. My first demo was in 1968 for CND, of which I am still a member, and we are still fighting nuclear weapons—but that is another issue. I argue that the Government are taking chaos and ambiguity to new heights and I urge them not to allow the dangerous and confusing language in the Bill to go through because it is certain to lead to injustice.

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[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, the Minister gave a powerful justification for upgrading and updating the criminal law to deal with these new forms of protest. She made the point that the general public have had enough, and we recognise that. We have all seen instances of workers begging protesters to let them through to go to work, parents trying to get ill children to hospitals and so on. We have seen frustration turn to fury and people often taking action on their own, dragging protesters away as the police have stood by. At least this section of the Bill makes sense to me based on that motivation, but we have spent hours and hours on previous sections on banning the types of protest in Part 3, which was justified on the basis that it was dealing with those kinds of actions, when in fact none of the measures that we previously discussed would deal with them at all.

The measures that we previously discussed in Part 3 elicited some very fine speeches about the right to protest. I was struck most recently by the speech by the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, which I related to. We were probably on the same miners’ demos. It properly and entirely understood why people were demanding the right to protest. All those fine words were effectively shot down by the Minister on the basis that these are things that we need to do to deal with Extinction Rebellion and these different kinds of protest. In fact, the only dealings that I had when I got caught up in an Extinction Rebellion protest—I mean that I was trying to get through it, rather than that I was on it, in case anyone panics—was when they were doing a five-hour silent vigil in mime. There was no noise involved. But we have spent all that time discussing how noise is going to trigger the police having a huge amount of power to deal with those people.

I find it utterly galling, because now we have a set of amendments, and at least I can understand why the Government have brought them in—and the public will think that they will tackle what they are furious about—and we should therefore, in this House, be able to scrutinise them line by line, as has been explained. People will probably like the locking-on offence—I say “people”, meaning that there might be popular support for it. But the noble Lords, Lord Paddick and Lord Beith, have done a really good take-down of what the consequences of these measures would be beyond the headlines, and people might be less keen on the equipped to lock-on offence. Certainly, when they work out the frightening aspects of the serious disruption prevention orders, they might want to think again. The “causing and contributing to” aspect, as the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, noted, really is a very serious threat to free speech—absolutely. And this is a Government who claim all the time that they are here to defend free speech, but they are introducing, without even casually noting it, something that would absolutely have a damaging effect on free speech.

Maybe I am wrong, and maybe the Government could persuade us that these special kinds of protests need special laws, in which case we should have hours and hours to discuss it. Instead, here we are, fed up, having discussed a whole range of other legislation that was supposed to deal with these issues when in fact, it did not; and now, the things which might deal with those issues we do not have time to discuss. It is frustrating for all of us.

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

When Boris Johnson was Mayor of London, he brought in a rule about not drinking on the tube, which was a solution in search of a problem—because it was not a problem at the time. But it immediately made me want to run out, buy a bottle of gin and go drinking on the tube, because it was such a stupid rule. This provision is a little bit like that: I do not really want to carry a tube of superglue around, but I have on many occasions carried a bike lock. It is absolutely ludicrous.

When the Minister read out the list of amendments, my heart sank. Although I had looked at them all individually, somehow hearing them one after the other made me feel that this is totally wrong. If the Government do not withdraw all these amendments, we should vote against the Bill in its entirety.

The Minister talked about protestors, referring to the issue of whatever their cause may be. But the HS2 protestors, of whom I consider myself one, have actually been trying to save precious things for the nation. It is not fun to be out on a picket line, being shoved around by security guards and hassled by the police constantly. I was standing next to one man on a picket line who said, “I retired last year and I thought I would be birdwatching, but here I am holding a placard”. Those are the sorts of people who have been protesting about HS2; they have been trying to save precious eco-systems for the nation, for all of us, and to prevent the chopping down of ancient woodlands. We really cannot dismiss these people as troublemakers, deserving of all these amendments. I admire the attempts of the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, to improve these measures, but it is a hopeless case.

The Government are very quick to talk about the views of the public and what the public want, perhaps from a few clips on TV and a few emails, but on the sewage amendment to the Environment Bill, they had thousands and thousands of emails, but they absolutely ignored them and carried on allowing sewage to be pumped into our rivers and on to our coastline. So please do not tell me that the public want this. The public did not want sewage, but the Government ignored that. The Government pick and choose to suit themselves what they design legislation around.

As the noble Lord, Lord Beith, mentioned, there is also the late tabling of these amendments. It is a democratic outrage. They are of such legal significance and such a threat to people’s human rights that they should be the subject of a whole Bill, with public discussion about it, public consultation, human rights declarations and equalities impact assessments. Every MP should be furious that they have been bypassed, because the only scrutiny they will get is, if they are lucky, a quick 20 minutes during ping-pong to find out what they are all about. Because they are whipped, they will probably not pay any attention to it anyway. This is nothing more than a naked attack on civil liberties and a crackdown on protest, and we must oppose it for both what it is and how it is being done.

[Lord Oates (LD)]

My Lords, I will speak specifically to government Amendments 319F to 319J on powers to stop and search without suspicion, and Amendment 319K and subsequent amendments on serious disruption orders. Before I do, I add to the comments made by just about all noble Lords on the outrageous way in which the Government have proceeded in this matter. To bring this number of amendments, introducing, as they do, among other things, unlimited fines, wide-ranging suspicionless stop and search powers, the creation of criminal liability on the basis of the civil burden of proof, with powers of indefinite renewal, at such a late stage in the Bill and at this time of night amounts to absolute contempt of Parliament. I may not get to say this often when we are in Parliament together, but on this matter I agree with every word that the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, had to say.

I turn to powers to stop and search without suspicion. As the Minister explained it and as other noble Lords have commented, this provides an extraordinary power, exercisable by any police officer in an area where an inspector or above has delegated that locality, under a whole series of offences. We already know how stop and search powers are abused. We know how disproportionate they are. My noble friend Lord Paddick set out the stark figures.

You do not have to take it from the Liberal Democrat Benches or the other Opposition Benches. We have heard a lot quoted from the former Prime Minister and Home Secretary this evening, but it is worth reminding the Committee of the issues that she has highlighted over suspicionless stop and search and the dangers that causes: the undermining of trust in the police and all the problems that come with that.

The noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, raised the important point that people on bicycles travel with locks. We all have locks on our bicycles. I should be interested to know the Government’s answer. Government Amendment 319J provides for 51-week imprisonment—nearly a year—for anyone who obstructs a police officer who, without suspicion, demands the right to search them. This is not how you stop protest; it is how you cause it.

As if that is not enough, we have heard about government Amendment 319K, which introduces serious disruption prevention orders, creating criminal liability based on the civil burden of proof, and imposing a series of potential restrictions on individuals. The penalty for breaching any of those conditions is imprisonment. As my noble friend Lord Paddick said, these are protest banning orders, and they have no place in our society.