Kit Malthouse
Main Page: Kit Malthouse (Conservative - North West Hampshire)(2 years, 2 months ago)
Public Bill CommitteesQ
Steve Griffiths: I am here to talk about the disruptions; I cannot really talk about the policy itself.
Elizabeth de Jong: The areas we have focused on are the definitions of key national infrastructure. Locking on is important, and it is important that petrol stations are included. We do not have views on the other areas of the Bill, around stop and search for example. That is for people who have studied and are expert in what deters people or does not deter people.
Q
Steve Griffiths: That is clearly one obvious option, yes.
Q
Steve Griffiths: Yes, certainly. We work with the police on intelligence and they do a lot of scanning to try to look at risks that are presented at the airport, but certainly, having those facilities to stop people directly and search them would be helpful.
Q
Steve Griffiths: Yes, we have a very well-defined plan that is a joint plan between the airport, the airport police and Essex police. That is really around the seriousness with which we take breaches on the airport. We have to have a very clear escalation plan and very clear, constant monitoring in place, because the seriousness of the disruption it causes, and also the threat to safety, is significant to us as an operating airport.
Q
Elizabeth de Jong: Yes. Site security and risk assessment per se, given that we work in such a tightly regulated and potentially dangerous environment, are very much at the core of all operations throughout the downstream oil sector.
Q
Elizabeth de Jong: Indeed.
Q
Also, there seem to be slightly different issues. The issue with the flight was a slight one-off, in that people were objecting to that particular flight going away. There is a particular problem, it seems, with people trying to block entire infrastructure programmes across the country. They are two quite different things and I think they need a slightly different response.
I want to confirm with you, Mr Griffiths, that the police arrested the people but that the issue was that the charge was not right. It was not that they were not arrested and taken away; it was just that the charge did not stick because the right charge was not there, if you see what I mean.
Steve Griffiths: Yes, you have the fact that the incident occurred in the first place and then, as you say, the perpetrators were arrested, but then the subsequent charge fell apart because of, presumably, a gap in legislation, in that the route taken for prosecution did not stand up. On your first question, I do not have that answer with me today.
Elizabeth de Jong: I have some information on the first one. We received police intelligence about the attacks and that intelligence was broadly correct.
Q
I want to ask you a couple of questions. First, you seem to be quite happy for those who profess to be protesters to go to prison in certain circumstances. So, if someone glues themselves on to a fuel gantry, bringing themselves and others into danger, you are quite happy for those people to go to prison—the only question in your mind is for how long. I presume you accept that part of the role of sentencing is not just to punish, but to deter. In circumstances where somebody is persistently committing those offences, whether or not they are subject to the order that you talked about, would you not expect them to get increasing sentences as they reoffended?
Adam Wagner: The first thing I would say is that I have come here voluntarily. I did not come here to have someone be personally rude to me, and I really do not appreciate it. I do not understand the benefit of that to anyone.
The second point is that I am not happy for any protester to go to prison. That is the criminal law as it is. The question this Committee is asking is: does the criminal law need to change to deal with the problems that the Bill is supposedly dealing with? I just do not think it does. If the aim of the Bill is to send a lot of peaceful protesters to prison, it will do that. By peaceful, I mean non-violent. Locking on to something is not a violent protest. It is disruptive and annoying for the people who are trying to do whatever they are going to do in the location the protester has locked on to, but it is a classic form of protest. It is something that has always been used. It is something that society generally tolerates.
If we want lots more people like that to go to prison, this is the Bill to do it. However, if you want to stop people blocking roads, oil refineries or fracking sites—whatever the cause at the moment is—this is not the Bill to do that. I can tell you that, because I know these people; they will continue doing what they are doing. The difference is that they will end up in prisons all around the country, and I am not sure that is a good look for the country.
Q
Adam Wagner: First, it depends on whether the police are charging under that. I have not really talked about the relationship between the police and the public. The police will have to think really carefully about whether they want any of the aggravation of having to recommend for charging people who are not violent criminals, but are, in fact, peaceful protesters expressing their views.
Secondly, you cannot guarantee at all that the judges will send people to prison. There has been a step change through Insulate Britain. I have acted in a lot of these contempt cases—where people breach injunctions. The big difference with Insulate Britain is that these people are being sent to prison, and the courts’ reasoning, as I said, is that the protest is not directed at the social evil that the protesters are protesting. They are blocking the highway, and not blocking anybody who is insulating or not insulating anything. That is why they are sending people to prison.
However, what the judges have not done is send to prison people who, like my clients, were protesting at the entrance of a fracking site in Blackburn at Preston New Road, or people protesting on the HS2 line. The courts have said very directly: “We tend not to send people to prison for that.” It is quite possible that the courts will not oblige. Who knows? The powers will be there.
Q
Q
David Dinsmore: I do think that the way the law is structured protects the rights of the few against the rights of the many. That feels to me to be anti-democratic. So, without going into the specifics of it, yes, I do think that. On that point of “you can get it online”, there is still a significant cohort in the community—principally older readers—who cannot or do not get it online, and do get their news in print.
Q
David Dinsmore: I do not know if we know for a fact that that is the case. However, certainly, in a lot of protests that we see—and believe you me, we see a lot of protests—an anti-Murdoch element always comes out. We are big, grown-up girls and boys, and we deal with most of that in our daily work, but on that occasion, the level of disruption caused was well beyond what would be acceptable.
Q
David Dinsmore: Apart from the fact that it was Extinction Rebellion, I would need to go back. I think there was a lot of assumption about what it was against—I think they did some tweeting at the time, but I will need to come back to you with the specifics around what was actually said and claimed at the time.
Do any Members wish to ask further questions? On that basis, Mr Dinsmore, I thank you for your evidence.
Examination of Witnesses
Sir Peter Martin Fahy QPM, Matt Parr CB and Chief Superintendent Phil Dolby gave evidence.
Q
Stephanie Needleman: Yes, please. I want to add that when we talk about what these protest banning orders do, we should note that they do not necessarily just ban people from attending or organising protests. They have significantly wider, far-reaching applications into everyday aspects of people’s lives. As long as they are imposed for one of the purposes listed, the conditions that can be imposed when someone has been given one of these orders can be anything. Look at the conditions listed in the Bill: they can prevent people using the internet, associating with particular persons or participating in particular activities. It is not necessarily limited to protest. We are talking about activities that are far, far broader than just being prevented from attending protests.
Q
Martha Spurrier: Well, there is a potential difference in how it would be applied, but the serious disruption prevention orders have the capacity to be absolute bans in the same way as the protest banning orders.
Under judicial supervision.
Martha Spurrier: Yes, under judicial supervision—but, as we have said, to a low standard of proof, based on no criminal conduct.
Q
Martha Spurrier: I don’t think so, because I do not think you could attach the same invasive conditions. I do not think you could have electronic monitoring, for example, if you had an injunction. That is my understanding.
Q
Martha Spurrier: I would not describe them as unlimited powers, but judges absolutely can impose injunctions. It goes to the broader point of whether these additional powers are needed, and I know that there have been people giving evidence that—
Q
Martha Spurrier: I do not understand the question. A civil injunction and an SDPO are both civil procedures with criminal sanctions attached.
Q
Martha Spurrier: If you are going to face imprisonment, you will always have access to counsel—to legal aid. You may face those sanctions either directly from a breach of the criminal law or, if you are under a civil order that has criminal sanctions attached to it, from breaching that civil order. I cannot see an argument that any person is better off having an SDPO, as opposed to an injunction or any other offence. The fact of the matter is that an SDPO is a novel legal provision that, for all the reasons we have gone over, captures non-criminal conduct as well as criminal.
Q
Martha Spurrier: Well, the impact of an SDPO is much, much wider, because you could end up having a civil order attached to you that has invasive conditions, such as electronic monitoring, that could be renewed indefinitely, and if you breach them you could face almost a year in prison and an unlimited fine. I do not think they are comparable at all. We do not have anything like that currently, whereby, for non-criminal acts, you could face that kind of civil or criminal sanction.
Q
Martha Spurrier: You can. What I am saying is that you would not currently have an injunction based on non-criminal conduct—the kind of non-criminal conduct we are talking about with this Bill—that then has attached to it invasive conditions such as electronic monitoring. There is no comparison with what this Bill is doing.
Q
Olly Sprague: I do not want to give a non-answer here. Obviously, policing is a devolved matter, so our offices in Scotland have an equivalent of me. They are involved in a number of policing and scrutiny panels, and they are actively involved in the human rights framework around public order policing. They were involved in a scrutiny panel for the COP protests, for example. These are discussions that our colleagues have with the Scottish Government all the time. I am not fully abreast of the details of those, but I can tell you that we have them. Where we are critical, we make that known.
Q
Martha Spurrier: Liberty’s position on buffer zones is to support as limited a buffer zone as is possible to protect access to reproductive rights for the people who need to use the services of the clinic, while also protecting the right to protest. One of the amendments proposes a 150-metre buffer zone, and we think that that limit is acceptable, although it should be dependent on circumstances—if a narrower one is possible, that should be used. There are some aspects of the amendment that we agree with, and some that we think are too broad and could infringe the right to protest. I have to say that of all our concerns about this Bill, buffer zones around abortion clinics are not high on the list. There are much more egregious interferences with the right to protest in this Bill than those proposed in that amendment.
Ms Needleman, would you like to comment?
Stephanie Needleman: Sorry; I could not hear very well. Were you asking me whether I wanted to comment?
Order. I am going to come to you, Dr Huq, but I will decide who speaks and when. The Minister is currently speaking, and we are asking Ms Needleman, who is joining us by Zoom, whether she wishes to give a response.
Stephanie Needleman: I do not think I have that much to add—Justice, as an organisation, does not have a formal position on this—but I agree in terms of protecting the rights of women to access abortion services, obviously, and that should be done in a way that does not infringe the right to protest. The right to protest is not an unlimited right, so there is scope to do something, but it needs to be limited so that it is within the bounds of articles 10 and 11.
Olly Sprague: We agree totally with that. In general, we would take a very dim view of the idea of protest buffer zones, unless there are exceptionally good reasons. We would be looking at things like drawing on existing regulations around incitement to hatred and privacy rights—those sorts of things. A way of protecting rights on both sides would be seen as important. As Martha said, what mitigation could be allowed to make sure that one right does not overshadow the other, if that makes sense? But, obviously, this is an incredibly sensitive and difficult area.
Q
Martha Spurrier: Liberty has a long history of working on the right to protest, both in terms of protestors and members of other communities. For example, we have a rich history of tackling the difficult issue of far right protest and incitement to hatred, where Liberty has very much supported the idea of communities needing to be protected when they are faced with far right, extremist protests. One of the other things that article 10 does, and that policing has had to grapple with since the advent of the Human Rights Act, is to protect counter-protests and protests. You very often have two protests going on at the same time where there is a clash. Again, Liberty has done lots of work to make sure that both protest groups, acting within the law, are protected with their article 10 rights upheld, in so far as that can be done, compatibly with each other.
I absolutely refute the idea that this is subject-specific. The abortion buffer zones case is a really good example. As with many other cases, it is a fact that we have public order laws in this country and we accept that things such as preventing violence and preventing incitement to violence, for example, are an important infringement on protest. Many of those considerations are in play when you think about abortion buffer zones. It is when you are dealing with rights that butt up against other rights that you have to make difficult calls, for sure, but we are saying that the Bill fundamentally gets the balance wrong.
I do not know whether we will have time to get on to the stop-and-search proposals or the offence of locking on. However, thinking about locking on as an example, just very briefly, those who are policing a protest are confronted with a dynamic situation. They are trying to work out at what point that crosses the line and might need to be shut down. If someone locks themselves to an animal testing centre—let us take it out of modern, current examples—the police have to work out at what point that person’s right to lock themselves to the testing centre becomes an infringement of other rights. It might be that the police think, “Actually, that guy can be there for two days and it doesn’t really matter. It’s a perfectly lawful and acceptable exercise of his protest rights. But, at a certain point, it is going to become a problem and we are going to consider removing him.”
If you create an offence of locking on—if you criminalise such specific protest tactics—the minute a man puts his padlock around that testing centre, he has committed a crime. There is no ability for the police to act in a dynamic way, to assess, and to do the balancing act of comparing competing rights. That is it: the tactic is criminalised and that man can be removed immediately, regardless of whether there is any impact on other people.
Of course, any of us who work in this area are really adept at trying to manage competing rights, and that is what the police have to do all the time. But the proposals in the Bill are blunt instruments that will criminalise hitherto lawful activity. They will have a chilling effect on the ability to protest, and they will not deter normal people who want to make their voices heard from trying to do so—instead, the Bill will just criminalise them. It will not deter the hard core, who have breaking the law as one of their tactics, because the provision just falls into what they already do.
Q
Martha Spurrier: What should we do about protests?
No, what should we do about the hard core that you are talking about?
Martha Spurrier: What about the hard core we already have? The police already have a whole range of measures to deal with hard-core protesters. We have criminal offences and we have specially trained police officers dealing with those people. Someone earlier talked about not living in perfect harmony. A measure of disruption and nuisance is going to be a factor of any protest about any hot political issue at any one time, whether you are talking about the civil rights movement in America, the movement for votes for women with the suffragettes in this country, or the climate justice movement now. You cannot take the sting out of it entirely, because then there would not be protest, and then we would not live in a democracy any more.
Ms Needleman, do you wish to say anything?
Stephanie Needleman: On the measures that already exist, there is obviously the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022, which has literally just been passed, which includes measures—the expanded circumstances —under which the police can impose conditions on protests. That just adds to the existing measures. I do not think these new measures have even come into force yet, so we do not know what effect they will have. There is no evidence base that further measures are needed.