Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill

Lord Walney Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 24th November 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)]

I am happy to wrap up. I am sorry, I had to read for my noble friend Lord Hendy, who had an amendment, and that took a little time. I beg your pardon; I will be very brief.

I have talked about the past—suffragettes and anti-apartheid, et cetera—and I have talked about Russia and China and the places that we have to persuade, in the current, dangerous world, not to suppress protest. The domestic context is that we have come out of Brexit, which was incredibly divisive; whichever side you were on, we know that it divided communities. I was subject to protesters who were very cross with me, and a little scary, but in the end, I put up with it. We are coming through a pandemic, and people are scared and very worried by climate change. I do not believe that oppressive powers giving this level of discretion to the police to suppress free speech will bring our communities together.

[Lord Walney (CB)]

My Lords, if I may, I will speak succinctly on the noise amendments. I appreciated what the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, said about the two-way street, favourite protests and standing up for all protests, but I wonder about the extent to which we are actually doing that. I listened carefully to the persuasive argument made by the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, in introducing the Opposition amendment on fast-track orders for schools. I also listened to the excellent opening speech from the noble Lord, Lord Dubs; if that is the kind of protest which is being restricted, I am sure that a majority in both Houses would vote against it. Opposition Members have spoken in favour of protections around schools, and I can very much see the case for protecting schools. But are we really saying that untrammelled noise cannot be intimidating and unacceptable, in the manner which the Bill attempts to frame as a problem?

Anti-vaxxers outside schools were given as an example. Are we saying that noise should not be a factor if anti-vaxxers are making a sustained attempt to disrupt Covid vaccine clinics? Another entirely feasible example is a far-right protest that was seeking to intimidate council workers using high levels of noise, because the council was volunteering to bring in refugees and a section of that community did not want that.

The question raised by the noble Viscount, Lord Colville of Culross, was pertinent: is existing legislation sufficient to deal with this? I hope that Ministers will address that point when summing up and in bringing the Bill to Report. I am much less comfortable with the rhetoric which simply cites noise as beyond the bounds of regulation in a legal framework. We all know that many protests are noisy—I would imagine that the majority of us in this Chamber have been on such protests—and that is a good thing. But it is surely not what this legislation is intended to debar.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I support those who oppose the clauses in Part 3 standing part of the Bill, but I will support each and all of the specific amendments that aim to mitigate the most egregious harm to liberty that Part 3 represents. The comments by the noble Viscount, Lord Colville of Culross, and the noble Lords, Lord Dubs and Lord Beith, and the personal remarks from the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, sum up many of my concerns.

I do not agree at all with the sinister reading of the Government’s motives from the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, but I am genuinely utterly baffled as to what the Government intend this part of the Bill to achieve. We are consistently told, I think in good faith, that Part 3 does not threaten the right to protest, but whether that is disingenuous, naive or whatever, it is just not true: it does threaten the right to protest. This part of the Bill weighs the balance of power heavily towards the authorities and will make it harder for members of the public to demonstrate their views and have their concerns heard. It explicitly aims to restrict protest in an ever-wider range of circumstances and, more insidiously, by threats of criminalising, eye-watering fines and imprisonment for an ever-expanding number of types of protesters. That will have a chilling effect.

How would the Government advocate that citizens stand up to the state to make their voices loudly heard or hold the Government to account beyond the ballot box within the prescriptive clauses of Part 3? Surely, this Government have championed popular sovereignty in relation to Brexit, for example. Surely, they will not then be frightened of a lively culture of politically engaged citizens who, on occasion, might have noisy, boisterous protests and demonstrations to effect change.

Having said all this, I am aware that many members of the public—many millions, probably—have become frustrated by some of the recent protests we have seen in the UK. They want the police to deal firmly with these new kinds of protests, which seem less about democratic rights and more about using tactics against the public, almost with the aim of disrupting ordinary people’s lives until they relent and accept their net-zero aims without the bother of winning over the majority by argument. So, I get that the Government and the headlines pose Part 3 as tackling these new-style, seemingly anti-democratic, not anti-power but anti-public protesters.

However, it just is not true that the original Part 3, without the new amendments that are to be added, did not have any elements that would tackle those new types of protests. As I said at Second Reading, laws already exist that are just not being enforced by the police consistently. At the judicial review of the Extinction Rebellion protests across London, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police conceded that she was satisfied that the power in the Public Order Act 1986 was sufficient to allow the police legally to deal with protests that, even in design, attempt to stretch policing to its limits. I suspect that those Insulate Britain protesters in prison now might think that the law is pretty sufficient. Indeed, when Sajid Javid was Home Secretary he admitted that

“where a crime is committed”

during a protest,

“the police have the powers to act”,

and that significant legislation

“already exists to restrict protest activities that cause harm to others.”—[Official Report, Commons, 13/9/18; cols. 37-38WS.]

As Garden Court Chambers notes:

“The suggested ‘gaps in the law’ simply do not exist … These additional powers are designed to make it prohibitively difficult for the public to exercise its right to protest at all”.


As it happens, it seems that the Home Secretary possibly agrees with me—I do not imagine she was influenced by me—that the original Part 3 does not make a blind bit of difference to policing Extinction Rebellion-style protests. That is presumably why Priti Patel announced at the 2021 Conservative Party conference a whole swathe of new amendments specifically to deal with new protest tactics. I might not agree with those new amendments, but at least I understand the logic of creating new offences to deal with things such as the act of “locking on”, which is a new form of protest, or to tackle all those people gluing themselves to highways and so on. But the rest of Part 3 makes little sense if it is the case that the Government are addressing public concern over the new-style protests.

There is loads that I want to say on the detail, but I will not do that. I want to make a couple of points on noise, although a lot has been said. I cannot believe that we in this House have been reduced to looking at what is too noisy. The police have been given such expansive and draconian powers to impose conditions on protests based on interpreting how much noise may have a significant impact, and so on, that I have spent quite a long time researching decibels and statutory noise nuisance laws and much more. Noble Lords will be relieved to know that I am not going to give them any fascinating detail on any of that in this speech. But as I was researching it, I thought, “Oh my goodness, all these police officers who are charged with making judgments on what’s too noisy won’t have my research at their fingertips—rather, they’ll have a nebulous, vague and subjective idea that they’ve got to make a judgment about what noise might be causing unease”.