Public Order Bill

Lord Kerr of Kinlochard Excerpts

Report stage
Tuesday 7th February 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)]

My Lords, I rise in support of my noble friend Lord Coaker and of my friend the distinguished former police officer and consistent advocate for rights and freedoms, the noble Lord, Lord Paddick. Stop and search is always a vexed question; even stop and search with reasonable suspicion is a vexed question. Of course, we must sometimes have it in a democracy, when people are reasonably suspected of various crimes, but even that becomes difficult because the threshold of reasonable suspicion is so low. Stop and search with reasonable suspicion in this Bill is problematic because certain offences in it, for example locking on, are so vague. Therefore, the range of items for which you could be stopped and searched on reasonable suspicion include, as the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, pointed out, things that you might pick up in John Lewis. They could include, for example, your mobile phone if that might be used in connection with the offence of locking on, and so on.

However, my priority is of course stop and search without suspicion. As the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, has rightly pointed out, this has classically been for things such as terrorism and carrying weapons, rather than carrying things such as bicycle chains or mobile phones. Noble Lords will see the problem, which is particularly vexed in the context of the statistics, year on year, on the disproportionate numbers of black and brown people who will be subject to stop and search. Too many young people, boys in particular, have had their first experience of the state and the police service via a racially discriminatory stop and search, because that, unfortunately, has been the culture of policing for too long. We now add a new layer: that there will be lots of young women, not least today, who are particularly concerned about being stopped and searched by the police. That is not a happy thing to have to report, but I am afraid it is the reality.

When I was a young director of Liberty, the National Council for Civil Liberties, almost exactly 20 years ago, what was then Section 44 of the Terrorism Act allowed suspicionless stop and search where it was considered expedient to preventing acts of terrorism. When an arms fair took place in Docklands, large numbers of protesters, not terror suspects but protesters, were prevented from getting anywhere near that fair. They were hassled and detained, sometimes under Section 44 of that Act. Initially, the Metropolitan Police denied that they would ever use such powers in such a way, until questions were asked in Parliament, including in your Lordships’ House.

I sent a young lawyer from Liberty down to Docklands; he came back with large numbers of notices that had been issued to protesters and journalists, and predominantly to black and brown people, under Section 44 of the Terrorism Act. That was stop and search without suspicion. It took many years to take that case all the way to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, where of course it was found that that power was just too broad. Suspicionless stop and search is very ripe for abuse, so I urge—

[Lord Kerr of Kinlochard (CB)]

I have great sympathy for the noble Baroness’s argument and that advanced by the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, but could she explain whether her objection to Clause 11 would be removed if subsection (7) were removed? It is in Clause 11(7) that what seems to be highly objectionable language occurs. It says that the constable

“may … make any search the constable thinks fit whether or not the constable has any grounds for suspecting that the person … is carrying a prohibited object”.

Supposing that that provision were not in the Bill—is the rest of Clause 11 objectionable?

[Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)]

This being not Committee but Report, the simplest and speediest answer that I can give to the noble Lord’s question is that Clause 11 is about suspicionless stop and search. He has picked out a particular subsection in the scheme, which would have been interesting in Committee. But the crucial thing is that Clause 11 is on stop and search without suspicion, not in the context even of terrorism, where it can come with greater justification—for example, when everybody is stopped and searched on their way into the Peers’ Entrance if they are not a Peer, or at the airport, where everybody is treated the same. But, by definition, that will not be the case in this scheme. This broad power will be used against young people all over London on the day of a protest. It will cause such strife and will poison relationships between the police service and the people it serves. For that reason, I urge all noble Lords to reject in particular this power to stop and search without suspicion even of the protest offences to which I object in the Bill.