Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill

Lord Oates Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 24th November 2021 Lords Chamber

So it is a complete waste of police time to ask them even to consider the ludicrous basis for assessing whether a demonstration should take place or not, based on noise. In the very good examples given by the noble Lord, Lord Walney, of when noise is horrible, he was talking about unpleasant political views—and, to be honest, whether you shout or whisper them, they are unpleasant: the issue is not the noise but the views.

[Lord Oates (LD)]

My Lords, I speak particularly to Amendments 294, 299, 303 and 305 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, and other noble Lords. I have added my name, but I want to speak in support of the wider amendments in this group. In doing so, I declare my interests as co-chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Zimbabwe.

As we have heard, the amendments tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, take up recommendations from the Joint Committee on Human Rights to remove the trigger for imposing conditions on protests based on noise. In her brief remarks about Part 3 of the Bill at Second Reading, the Minister stated:

“The right to peaceful protest is a fundamental part of our democracy”.


She went on to say that Part 3 was

“not about stifling freedom of speech and assembly”.—[Official Report, 14/9/2021; cols. 1281-82.]

The noble Baroness, Lady Stowell, said earlier in this debate that nobody wants to undermine the right to protest, and complained about hyperbole. I might make a complaint on the other side about complacency. If it was really the intention of the Minister, the Government and Government Back-Benchers not to impact on protest, they really should have brought another Bill forward, and they should talk to the drafters, because the right to peaceful protest is clearly under attack in this part of the Bill, as the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, said.

Noise is fundamental to peaceful protest, as is impact —not least because protest is about making one’s voice heard when it would otherwise be ignored. As the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, said, what on earth would be the point of a protest if you were not heard and if you did not have an impact? So any measure that makes the level of noise and its impact on others an arbiter of whether or under what conditions a protest may go ahead is, quite apart from being an absurd road to go down, self-evidently an attack on the right to peaceful protest that the Minister has told us is such a fundamental part of our democracy.

Do we really think that a senior police officer should be put in a position where they have to take on the responsibility of determining whether a protest should go ahead at the place proposed or on the route planned on the basis of the noise that protest may generate and the impact that it may have on people?

The noble Baroness, Lady Stowell, said that there was a new fashion in protests, but I do not think there is a new fashion for protests to be noisy. All the protests I have ever been on in my life have I think been noisy.

[Baroness Stowell of Beeston (Con)]

I did make the point that I was not wholly comfortable with what was being said about noise in the legislation, and I was looking to my noble friend the Minister for some comfort—but I do think there is a new fashion of protest, which the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, also referred to, which is very different from that which we have seen before and is causing a huge amount of disruption, which people find unacceptable.

[Lord Oates (LD)]

I thank the noble Baroness for her clarification, but I have to say to her that noise is absolutely fundamental to the issues that we are debating now. As the noble Viscount, Lord Colville, said, in relation to the other protests and the obstruction of highways et cetera, the powers exist already in the Public Order Act and in other places to deal with them. So the question now is whether we should have the new, very restrictive curtailments on the right to protest proposed in this Bill which are about noise and its impact, and that is what I am addressing.

Not only is it a terrible idea which will place the police in an impossible situation, but the Bill compounds their difficulty by failing to provide any definitive criteria by which the police can determine whether the level of noise or its impact on others is sufficient to trigger their powers. The noble Baroness, Lady Fox, raised this issue. No decibel level is defined in the Bill; no definition of intensity of impact, which the police are supposed to take into account, is set. As a result, the police will be dragged into areas of heated political controversy on which they will have to make entirely subjective decisions—except in the cases where the Home Secretary will help them out by making her own entirely subjective decisions—deciding that one protest may go ahead in a certain way and a certain place but having to decide that another may not. Presumably the police’s decisions will be open to challenge by protesters on the one hand and those who wish to curtail protest on the other. It is hard to think of a better way to undermine trust in the impartiality of our police services.

As I mentioned at Second Reading, and as the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, has also mentioned, many noble Lords will have taken part in the protests outside South Africa House against the apartheid regime. It was the express intention of those protests to generate noise and, doubtless, the agents of the apartheid state were impacted, and they may well have genuinely felt serious unease as a consequence, but, as long as those protests remained peaceful, it was surely no business of the state to protect them from the impact of that noise or any serious sense of unease that it may have caused.

That is an example from the past—it would be interesting to know how the Minister thinks the powers would be applied in that case—but let me take one from the present. Currently, a fortnightly vigil for democracy and human rights is held outside the Zimbabwe embassy on the Strand. The vigil is not normally loud, but, on occasion, when the Zimbabwe Government are involved in particularly egregious violations of human or political rights, it can be noisy and, without doubt, it has an impact on people in the vicinity. People are understandably angry in such circumstances, particularly in circumstances where protesters have been gunned down in Zimbabwe, and the noise that the protesters here generate will certainly have an impact on and may cause serious unease to embassy staff. But again I ask: if the protest is peaceful and orderly, is there any reason to prevent it happening?

As evidence to the Joint Committee on Human Rights highlighted, police will inevitably be faced with pressures from certain embassies to ban protests outside their premises on the grounds of noise or serious unease. Can the Minister expressly address this issue in her summing up? Do such embassy protests fall under the powers of this Bill? Could a senior officer, for example, direct protestors not to protest outside the Zimbabwe embassy if he was convinced of serious unease being caused to embassy staff? How would the police assess evidence of the threat of serious unease in court? I hope the Minister will not tell the House that she cannot envisage the police using such powers in these circumstances, because that would only highlight how this part of the Bill will entangle the police in decisions they simply should not have to make.

If those are some of the potential, but hopefully unintended, consequences of this part of the Bill, what of the intended consequences? We know that the public protest clauses and proposals contained in Part 3 and in the government amendments, which will be debated in a later group, are deliberately aimed at environmental protestors, whether Extinction Rebellion or Insulate Britain, because the Government have basically told us that they are. Many of the people involved in these protests are young people who are protesting against an existential threat to their futures. The noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, made a very powerful speech in this regard. What is the reaction of the Government to these tiresome people who have the temerity to demand a future for themselves and their children and who understandably will not be bought off by the long-term promises so casually given out by the Prime Minister and so nakedly betrayed by his failure to take the action now to realise them? To deal with them, the Government propose using these wholly disproportionate powers.

What do these people want? They want us to insulate Britain. It is hardly world revolution. Yet in the face of an unprecedented climate emergency, we cannot even do that. No wonder they are angry. No wonder they despair of politics as usual. Instead of consuming a lot of time and energy banning their protests, because they are noisy or might have some impact, perhaps it would be better to have an infrastructure Bill with a long-term programme to tackle the problem of our energy-leaking and climate-threatening buildings. At least that is a problem we know how to deal with and could if we had the will. Certainly, it would be a better use of time, because if the Government think that these measures to curtail protests on the spurious grounds of noise and impact and to jail more people for a longer time will stop these protests, they are sadly mistaken.

Those who face an existential threat do not just buckle under, no matter the level of restriction or curtailment of their rights. If you doubt that, look at a history book. Look at the civil rights movement which the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, mentioned, or the suffragettes, as the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, highlighted. These people were protesting in the face of laws far more extreme than even this Government would contemplate. Bringing in unjust laws to deal with this situation does not stop protest. You deal with it by addressing the issues fairly. These measures will only further embitter the protests. Far from what the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell, hopes for, it will not bring about any greater sense of unity, and it will not only further embitter the protest but embroil the police in unending controversies which, as far as I understand, they have no desire to be dragged into. Also, they have been provided with no objective criteria on which they can adjudicate such controversies.

The amendments in this group will remove some of the most objectionable aspects of this attack on peaceful protests. I hope that the Minister gives serious consideration to the powerful arguments that have been made by noble Lords on all sides, but really this part should come out of the Bill completely.

I conclude by saying that I am very pleased to say that we are a long way from the situation in Zimbabwe, where a youth leader languishes in jail in appalling conditions for more than 200 days, charged with blowing a whistle at a protest, where the police have become so embroiled in political controversy that they are no longer trusted by the public at all, and where public safety and public order are consistently deployed as reasons to stifle the most modest of protests. But those who courageously struggle in such situations look to our democracy, with our traditions of free and raucous protest, as a beacon. We should remember that. Every time we take a step away from them, we dishearten democrats around the world and give succour to those who oppose them.

--- Later in debate ---

[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.