Crime and Policing Bill

Debate between Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb and Lord Anderson of Ipswich

Report stage
Wednesday 18th March 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendments 420 and 422B, both of which I have supported. I go to a lot of events where the right to protest is debated, and people are quite shocked when I describe how this Government bundled three organisations together so that they could push through the proscription of Palestine Action. It does not look just or fair. They do not even have to be similar or connected, as these three were not. It was interesting to listen to the entertaining noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, running through the debate on whether to proscribe Palestine Action.

These amendments are about the process: about how it is done and whether it is done in a proper way. It is not proper scrutiny and it is not what this House is for when we have a blunt choice to accept or reject all three. That is not a sensible system. Proscription is a really serious step: it criminalises people for association, for support and even for what they say. Such decisions deserve to be looked at carefully, case by case, and not rushed through or passed in a job lot. If the Government are confident in their decisions about what is and is not a terrorist organisation—I assume they were confident about Palestine Action—they should have no problem with each one being judged on its own, not in a job lot.

The amendment from the noble Viscount, Lord Hailsham, comes down to something quite simple. These are very big decisions that can criminalise association, affect livelihoods and follow someone for years. If we are being asked to approve that, we should be properly informed—but we were not; we had to take the Minister’s word for it and we did not have the information. We are asked to nod things through without seeing the full picture. I do not think that is a very comfortable position for your Lordships’ House to be in.

Ensuring that Parliament has a clear and well-informed picture is the whole point of this. It also adds a bit more balance. At the moment, these decisions are taken by Ministers. It need not get in the way of a fair decision, or allowing things to move quickly. If there is urgency the Government can act, but they still have to come back and justify that decision properly afterwards. It is about making sure that when we take serious decisions, they are justified on the facts, not just on suppositions.

[Lord Anderson of Ipswich (CB)]

My Lords, I add a few comments in support of the noble Lord, Lord Pannick—but without repeating him—on the proposed ouster clause suggested by the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, in his Amendments 421 and 422DA. The schedule of proscribed organisations is often added to and rarely subtracted from. At present it has about 98 entries, if you include Northern Ireland as well as the rest of the world. That includes a number of nationalist movements from around the world that are, or have in the past been, committed to violence in pursuit of their aims.

Despite the recommendations of successive Independent Reviewers of Terrorism Legislation, the annual review of proscribed groups by the Home Office and the NIO was discontinued in 2014. As far as I know, that automatic annual review has not been reinstated. There is no requirement in law that proscription should have to be renewed every three or five years, or indeed at all. In my report on the Terrorism Acts in 2016, at paragraph 5.24, I recorded the Government’s admission, which I found breathtaking, that no fewer than 14 groups on the list no longer satisfied the statutory requirements for proscription. Even more breathtakingly, they did not try to stop me saying it. There were almost certainly other groups in respect of which the same thing could have been argued, yet most of those groups remain on the list.

One group, the al-Qaeda offshoot to which the current President of Syria belonged, was recently deproscribed on the initiative of the Home Secretary. But if an application to the Home Secretary is turned down, it then takes money and determination to challenge a proscription in POAC—the tribunal that exists for this purpose. A handful of applications have been made by organisations that have definitively rejected violence, and these have been successful. With great respect to the noble Lord and without reference to the Palestine Action case, I am not persuaded that there is any good reason to block this necessary avenue for recourse.