Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill

Lord Paddick Excerpts

Consideration of Commons amendments & Lords Hansard - Part 2
Tuesday 22nd March 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Paddick (LD)]

My Lords, I will speak to my Motion F2 and the other amendments in this group. I start by joining the Minister in paying tribute to the selfless actions of PC Keith Palmer, who tragically died five years ago today.

I apologise for the length of my remarks, but there are numerous important issues contained in this group. I promise not to spend an average of more than two minutes on each Motion. There are few subjects on which I am an expert, but the policing of public order is one. I was one of a small cadre of advanced trained public order senior officers, and I have extensive experience of policing events. I remind the House that the majority of police forces outside London told HMICFRS that they did not need new public order legislation, and that the limiting factor in policing protests was the number of public-order-trained police officers they had to police protests. A whistleblower who worked for HMICFRS said that the conclusions in its review of public order policing did not reflect the evidence that the inspectorate had gathered. Having read the report in full, I agree. There is no justification for more public order legislation.

In relation to Motion E, the police already have powers to impose any conditions necessary—including an outright ban—on public processions, if a senior police officer reasonably believes that it will result in serious public disorder, serious damage to property or serious disruption to the life of the community, or if the purpose is to intimidate others. Adding a noise trigger to those powers will do more harm than good. As I said in Committee, from my experience, the more conditions you impose on a procession, the more likely those conditions are to be resisted and, therefore, the more police officers you will need to enforce them. As I have said, police forces already say that they do not have enough public-order-trained police officers.

A peaceful protest with no anticipated violent infiltrators and an agreed route—however large—can be policed with a minimum number of police officers and a lot of traffic cones and miles of white tape. Imposing conditions which the organisers are resisting is likely to require between double and five times the number of police officers. This is because confrontation must be anticipated, and the conditions may have to be imposed by force—such as a march wanting to take a different route. An outright ban on a protest, as well as being unlikely to be successful—as we saw with the Sarah Everard vigil on Clapham Common—requires about 10 times as many police officers as are required for a compliant, peaceful demonstration. How many police officers would it have taken to police the Sarah Everard vigil, in the middle of a common, if there had been agreement between the police and the organisers? The more conditions which can be imposed, and the more draconian those conditions, the bigger the drain will be on already overstretched police resources.

The second issue is the impact on trust and confidence in the police, as the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, has just said. The impact of the policing of the Sarah Everard vigil was hugely negative, and the government proposals will simply increase the potential for, and frequency of, such scenes. By banning some demonstrations on the basis of anticipated noise, and not others, the police will be subjected to accusations that they are being political rather than practical. They will be accused of being selective about which protests can take place for political reasons—such as banning demonstrations against war, as they are likely to be enormous and noisy, but allowing demonstrations in favour of war to go ahead, as they are not likely to be very well supported, to take a Russian example. Such a change in the law is likely to draw the police reputation into even more disrepute. In addition, I ask how many times the business of this House or the other place has been disrupted because of noise by protestors. I suggest none —and I do not believe that the House has double glazing. In any event, the police can always divert disruptive demonstrations away from sensitive areas. This change—the noise trigger—is unnecessary and damaging, and we will be voting to support the Labour amendments.

Motion F is about maintaining the current position, where the police can impose conditions on those holding an assembly, a static protest or a meeting but cannot ban it altogether. The Government argue that their proposals simply bring assemblies into line with the powers that the police have in relation to processions, but there are very good reasons why the two should be treated differently.

As I said in Committee, on 13 January 1986 in the House of Commons, the then Conservative Home Secretary, later Lord Hurd of Westwell, explained why processions were being treated differently from assemblies:

“We stopped short of a power to ban”


assemblies

“because we believed that that would be an excessive limit on the right of assembly and freedom of speech. For this reason, clause 14 does not permit the police to impose conditions changing the date and time of an assembly.”—[Official Report, Commons, 13/1/1986; col. 797.]

We agree, and the effect of my amendment is to achieve the same result.

Already, if a senior police officer reasonably believes that an assembly may result in serious public disorder, serious damage to property or serious disruption to the life of a community, or that the purpose of the assembly is to intimidate others, he or she can, under existing legislation, impose conditions on where the assembly takes place; tell an existing assembly to move somewhere else; limit how long it goes on for; and/or limit the numbers attending. The wording of my Amendment 80G in Motion F2 is different from simply insisting on the amendment we made to remove the new provision proposed by the Government on Report —as Motion F1 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, does—but the effect is the same.

The only thing the police cannot do under existing legislation is to ban a static protest altogether. The police already have all the tools they need to deal with unlawful assemblies, but to give the police the power to stop people protesting at all smacks of Putin’s Russia, not the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. I will seek the opinion of the House on Amendment 80G in Motion F2.

On Motion G, we share the concerns of others that all large demonstrations that have the potential to spill over into the road and, either by accident or design, impede vehicular access to Parliament could be banned even when Parliament is not sitting. We believe that this is legislative overreach, relying as it does on the discretion of the police to enforce it or not. However, we do not agree that the police should be able to give permission to allow entrances to Parliament to be blocked when Parliament is in session, so we do not insist on Lords Amendment 82.

On Motion H, we share the concerns of others that those who engage in peaceful sit-down protests, however short the duration, should face the potential penalty of imprisonment for highway obstruction where previously they could have been only fined. As we saw with the Insulate Britain protests, existing legislation, including the application for and enforcement of injunctions, can be successfully used to deal with persistent offenders, including imprisonment for those who breach injunctions. However, with the undertaking given by the Minister at the Dispatch Box that imprisonment is intended to be used only in the most egregious cases, we hope that this increased penalty does not have the chilling effect it may otherwise have done on peaceful protest.

On Motion N, we are grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, for raising the issue and for the Government’s response.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I regret that we heard the Home Secretary and now the Minister accept the principle of the Opposition’s fast-track public space protection orders in relation to Motion H and use that to justify broader anti-protest amendments as a balance in protecting non-protesters. I regret it but I am not surprised. The danger of advocating any measures that strengthen anti-protest measures is that it sets a tone that suggests that some protesters are good and some are bad, which politicises a general and universal right that I think we should defend. Putting that to one side, I want to oppose the Government’s doubling-down on a noise trigger and follow on particularly from the remarks made by the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, and others who have expressed their opposition so well.

I want to nod to the democratic dilemma of this ping-pong and whether we are actually blocking democracy. When summing up the rejection of the second tranche of anti-protest amendments on Report, the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, chided all of us who opposed them for ignoring the public’s demand that authorities deal with new forms of protest activities such as those we have seen used by Extinction Rebellion and its offspring, such as Insulate Britain.

I disagreed that those amendments would have dealt with those new forms of protest. I thought they were so broad as to sweep up all and any protests, including anyone who might have wanted to protest against net zero, to take an example of a different political side. The state also already has huge powers, whether the Emergency Workers (Obstruction) Act or the Public Order Act, as we have heard, that could have been used to deal with these forms of protest which are a particular nuisance, as the public would have it. Despite that, I felt the Government were at least responding to a particular form of protest about which there has been some public agitation and concern. Therefore, that chiding was listened to.

But now, here we are with government amendments on protest that bear absolutely no relation to the Home Office’s motivation on new forms of protest. I do not think the Government have a democratic mandate for these amendments. Fundamental and foundational democratic rights, such as the right to assemble or protest or the right to free speech, should be protected by an iron curtain. If there is any attempt to undermine them, the presumption must rest with the Government to justify in absolutely clear terms, with a sense of the absolutely exceptional reasons for the proposed changes, any more draconian measures being brought in.

It just does not add up. As I have noticed before, even these new types of protest that apparently upset the public are often silent, so the noise trigger does not apply to them in any way whatever. The authorities should consider proposing accruing further power when limiting the right to assembly, and ultimately the right to free speech, only ever in exceptional circumstances. In this instance, those exceptional circumstances are just not there.

Even more galling is the smoke and mirrors of posing these proposals as protecting the public from the consequences of protest. The public are described as “non-protesters”; as I think the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, pointed out, this turns the public into two different groups of people, but actually the public are the people who go on protests. They might not go on all of them all the time, but it is their right as the public that we are talking about. There is an Alice in Wonderland approach here that gets the issues upside-down and implies that the Government are far removed from the reality that free protests have been crucial for the public over centuries. The denial of that right, whether in Putin’s Russia or China’s Hong Kong, should be a visceral reminder to us here of why protest —warts and all—matters.

Of course not all protests are popular. Many of the modern protests I have mentioned, such as those by Extinction Rebellion, I do not support and they irritate me but, as with all fundamental democratic rights—free speech, free association and so on—it does not matter whether they are annoying, unpleasant or objectionable, or even if those demonstrations are directed in a hostile way against what you believe to be true.

We cannot pick and choose which speech or which protest we agree with and then endorse only the ones that we like. We have to make sure that we do not let those kinds of political prejudices get in the way. We are bound to feel uncomfortable at times when people protest for things that we disagree with, but that is freedom for you. It has never been claimed that living in a free society is safe and cosy. It is designed to make you, on occasion, feel uncomfortable. But there are principles here. As the Court of Appeal notes:

“The right to protest becomes effectively worthless if the protesters’ choice of ‘when and where’ to protest is not respected as far as possible”,


and I stand by that.

--- Later in debate ---

Motion F2 (as an amendment to Motion F)

[Lord Paddick]

Moved by

Leave out from “House” and insert “do insist on its Amendment 80, do disagree with the Commons in their Amendments 80A, 80B, 80C, 80D, 80E and 80F, and do propose Amendment 80G instead of the words so left out of the Bill—

80G: After Clause 55, insert the following new Clause—


“Imposing conditions on public assemblies

(1) Section 14 of the Public Order Act 1986 (imposing conditions on public assemblies) is amended as follows.


(2) After subsection (2) insert—


“(2A) For the purposes of subsection (1)(a), the cases in which a public assembly in England and Wales may result in serious disruption to the life of the community include, in particular, where—


(a) it may result in a significant delay to the supply of a time-sensitive product to consumers of that product, or


(b) it may result in a prolonged disruption of access to any essential goods or any essential service, including, in particular, access to—


(i) the supply of money, food, water, energy or fuel,


(ii) a system of communication,


(iii) a place of worship,


(iv) a transport facility,


(v) an educational institution, or


(vi) a service relating to health.


(2B) In subsection (2A)(a) “time-sensitive product” means a product whose value or use to its consumers may be significantly reduced by a delay in the supply of the product to them.”


(3) After subsection (10A) (as inserted by section 57(11)) insert—


“(11) The Secretary of State may by regulations amend subsection (2A) or (2B) for the purposes of making provision about the meaning for the purposes of this section of serious disruption to the life of the community.


(12) Regulations under subsection (11) may, in particular, amend either of those subsections for the purposes of—


(a) defining any aspect of that expression for the purposes of this section;


(b) giving examples of cases in which a public assembly is or is not to be treated as resulting in serious disruption to the life of the community.


(13) Regulations under subsection (11)—


(a) are to be made by statutory instrument;

(b) may apply only in relation to public assemblies in England and Wales;


(c) may make incidental, supplementary, consequential, transitional, transitory or saving provision, including provision which makes consequential amendments to this Part.


(14) A statutory instrument containing regulations under subsection (11) may not be made unless a draft of the instrument has been laid before and approved by a resolution of each House of Parliament.””

[Lord Paddick (LD)]

My Lords, because the police will otherwise have the powers to ban assemblies, I beg to move Motion F2.