Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill (Ninth sitting)

Maria Eagle Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 8th June 2021 Public Bill Committees

[Bambos Charalambous]

My hon. Friend makes an excellent point. I remember going on the “grants not loans” demonstrations in the late ’80s. He clearly had incredible persuasion in the demonstration he went on, resulting in the desired outcome, and I congratulate him on bringing about that change.

[Maria Eagle (Garston and Halewood) (Lab)]

I am pleased to hear that one of us at least had an extremely effective demonstration technique. I can recall many people on our side of the debate going on demonstrations and chanting, “Maggie, Maggie, Maggie! Out, out, out!” for years, and she did not move.

[Bambos Charalambous]

Not all demonstrations are successful, but that does not mean that people should not protest.

Clause 55 allows the police to place any necessary condition on a public assembly, as they can do now with a public procession. Clause 56 removes the need for an organiser or participants to have knowingly breached a condition, and it increases the maximum sentences for the offence. Clause 60 imposes conditions on one-person protests. Clauses 54 to 56, and clause 60, would make significant changes to the police powers, contained in the Public Order Act 1986, to respond to protests.

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[Maria Eagle]

I am listening to this exchange with some care. Does my hon. Friend agree that the context of all of this is that there is a fundamental right to freedom of expression and freedom of assembly in this country, which is protected by articles 10 and 11 of the European convention on human rights? It is only lawful to interfere with that where it is necessary and proportionate to do so. And it is within that context, of our having those rights as citizens, that any measures proposed in the Bill should be judged.

[Bambos Charalambous]

My hon. Friend makes an excellent point. These are human rights that have been fundamentally fought for and won. We need to do everything we can to secure them, and they should not be watered down as easily as is being proposed in the Bill.

These powers would also amend the offence of failing to comply with a condition imposed by the police on a protest. It would remove the legal test that requires protesters knowingly to breach a condition to commit an offence. People would commit the amended offence if they disobeyed a condition that they ought to have known was in force. Finally, these powers would allow the police to issue conditions on one-person protests. Currently, protests must involve at least two people in order to engage police powers.

The question we raised about how to ensure that protests are peaceful and how to balance the rights of others to go about their daily business is an important one as the covid crisis eases. We know that the emergency legislation introduced by this place shifted the balance of power away from citizens and towards the state. Organisations such as Liberty, Members across the House, lawyers and others have been concerned throughout that those powers are too great. We gladly handed over those powers, which was the right thing to do, but it is crucial, as we move out of the covid crisis, that we restore those rights with equal enthusiasm.

We need to remember that covid and public health formed the context within which many of the arguments over protests during the past year have occurred. Things have not been as they normally are. Decisions about allowing protests have had an extra layer of complexity, because of the need to protect public health. Decisions have been hampered by the inevitable problems of interpreting exactly what new laws mean, or should mean, in terms of protest. The fact that covid laws did not ban protests has meant that each decision has in part been subjective, putting the police in the firing line for every decision made.

I have heard many times from the police over the past year that they have struggled to be the ones interpreting the law, without the leadership from Government that they needed. The lack of the promised direction from the Home Secretary over the weekend of the Sarah Everard vigil is a stark case in point. The police were seen to be the ones making the political decisions because there was too much ambiguity in the law. That must be a firm lesson for us going forward. It is our job to define the law in a clear way, so that the police are not the ones getting the blame for our law making.

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[Maria Eagle]

Does my hon. Friend agree that the police already have significant powers under the Public Order Act 1986 to impose conditions and to prohibit protests, that they have broad discretion as to how those powers are applied and that that can enable individual officers in charge of these matters to use their judgment? Is it not the case that this Bill is seeking to plug gaps that do not appear to exist?

[Bambos Charalambous]

Again, my hon. Friend makes an excellent point. Good policing is done with discretion. What the Bill tries to do is to look at different ways of making the police do certain things that they may not want to do. I think that discretion is a great tool that the police have at their disposal, and they use it very well in what are often very difficult situations.

The Peelian principles are also:

“To seek and preserve public favour, not by pandering to public opinion, but by constantly demonstrating absolutely impartial service to law, in complete independence of policy, and without regard to the justice or injustice of the substance of individual laws, by ready offering of individual service and friendship to all members of the public without regard to their wealth or social standing, by ready exercise of courtesy and friendly good humour, and by ready offering of individual sacrifice in protecting and preserving life. To use physical force only when the exercise of persuasion, advice and warning is found to be insufficient to obtain public co-operation to an extent necessary to secure observance of law or to restore order, and to use only the minimum degree of physical force which is necessary on any particular occasion for achieving a police objective. To maintain at all times a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and that the public are the police, the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence. To recognise always the need for strict adherence to police-executive functions, and to refrain from even seeming to usurp the powers of the judiciary of avenging individuals or the State, and of authoritatively judging guilt and punishing the guilty. To recognise always that the test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, and not the visible evidence of police action in dealing with them.”

Every word of the Peelian principles holds true today.

It is our belief that the powers in this Bill threaten the fundamental balance between the police and the people. The most draconian clauses are not actually what the police asked for. We believe that these new broad and vague powers will impede the ability of the police rather than helping them to do their job, that these clauses put way too much power into the hands of the Home Secretary and that the powers threaten our fundamental right to peaceful protest. We know that hundreds of thousands of people are very concerned that their democratic right to protest is threatened by these new provisions on public order.

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[Bambos Charalambous]

Again, my hon. Friend makes an excellent point. The lowering of the bar will mean that innocent people will be caught up in something when they have gone to protest about a perfectly valid issue that they are concerned about. They may get caught up in this unwittingly and could end up being criminalised as a result .

[Maria Eagle]

My hon. Friend is being most generous in giving way. Does he agree that this unnecessary criminalisation of dissent, which would happen if the Bill were enacted, goes against the very best traditions of our history and democracy? We have always prided ourselves on enabling people to dissent and on allowing people to express their views in the public space about current laws and things they wish to change. If these provisions were enacted, it would go completely against that tradition.

[Bambos Charalambous]

Again, my hon. Friend makes an excellent point. Many of the rights we have today are hard won and came about through protest. If it were not for those protests, we would not be here today—certainly, there would not be any female MPs if those rights had not been won.

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[Bambos Charalambous]

I use public transport—I am a London MP, so it is easier for me to do that to get here—but clearly MPs should have access to Parliament. I am not disputing that at all because we need to be able to get here to act on behalf of our constituents, but I disagree with what the right hon. Gentleman is saying.

[Maria Eagle]

I understand the point made by the right hon. Member for Scarborough and Whitby. That is a concern, of course. Does my hon. Friend agree that there have been many protests outside here? I have been a Member 24 years and have seen a lot of protests outside Parliament. The vast majority did not in any way at all threaten my ability to get here to vote in Divisions. The issue is proportionality.

Is it right to ban protests because there may have been an occasion when hon. Members were prevented from being able to drive to their place of work because of the way a protest in Parliament Square had been policed? That is an important point. It is about proportionality. We do not ban everything to prevent one instance of an undoubtedly undesirable effect at the far end of the spectrum. Is that not correct?

[Bambos Charalambous]

My hon. Friend is entirely correct. It is a question of proportionality, and we need to make sure that we are allowed to get here as parliamentarians, but also that protesters are allowed to air their views. It is about striking that balance. The legislation goes too far the other way, and does not strike such a balance. It is too much against the right to protest.

The reports by the inspectorate ask for modest changes, but the Government decided to go much further. The Bill targets protesters causing “serious unease”, those being too noisy and those causing serious annoyance. Clause 54 amends section 12 of the Public Order Act 1986 so that police officers can issue conditions on protest marches that generate noise, but may have significant relevant impact on persons “in the vicinity” or that may result in “serious disruption” to the activities of an organisation in the vicinity.

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[Bambos Charalambous]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right that this will be very subjective. I used to play rugby, and this is what we would have called a hospital pass. It is going to put the police in an impossible situation, and they will have to make judgments about what constitutes “significant”, “relevant” and “impact.”

[Maria Eagle]

Does my hon. Friend agree that in addition to putting the police in an invidious position, the measure will promote different interpretations across different forces, and possibly within the same force? The officer on duty who has the obligation to make the call may well have a different view from another officer, on another day. What we are promoting here is confusion rather than clarity.

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Does the Minister agree with the integrated review that we must make sure that we maintain an open society?

[Maria Eagle]

I have already made a number of interventions and do not intend to make an extremely long speech. I want to make some points about what I consider to be wholly unnecessary proposed changes to our right to protest in this country. While it is nice and quiet in this Committee Room while we consider the Bill line by line, it is certainly not the case that these proposals have been greeted quietly in any sense of the word outside in the society on which the Bill seeks to impose its new arrangements.

This part of the Bill has attracted extremely, broad, wide and deep condemnation across a number of sectors. It is important to bear that in mind when we consider whether the Bill offers a reasonable balance. There always has to be a balance between the right to protest and our rights as individual members of society in this democracy, and the wider, broader interests of society in getting on with its business. That has always been a balance that the Government of the day in any democracy have to strike. There is no difference between our current Government seeking to strike that balance now and any Government in the past seeking to do that, because there does have to be a balance.

The question is whether or not the proposals in the Bill that are being brought forward by the Minister are necessary and proportionate; whether or not they actually strike that balance; whether or not our existing arrangements, which have been ongoing for some time, are wholly inadequate enough to need altering. I do not think there is any doubt about the fact that the Bill, as proposed, would make it harder to protest. The question, then, is this: if one accepts that there is a need to alter the situation—which I do not—are these proposals proportionate and do they do what is necessary, even from the point of view of the Government?

The first thing that we need to take into account, as I have said, is that there is a broad set of people and civil society organisations—academics, former Home Secretaries, police chiefs and lots of individuals—who have signed petitions to say that this is entirely wrong and an unwarranted interference in our democratic freedoms. The Bill has been condemned by hundreds of civil society organisations and 700 or so legal scholars who urged the Prime Minister to ditch draconian restrictions on the right to protest, as was reported in the Independent. Some of those 700 legal scholars might be renowned for being able to interpret the proposed wording of the statute in front of us. To find 700 legal scholars saying that this is draconian and unnecessary is something we should consider and take into account.

Petitions organised by various civil society organisations—my hon. Friend the Member for Rotherham referred to at least one of them—have received more than half a million signatures from fellow citizens, calling for this part of the Bill to be removed. That is significant dissent that should be considered and taken into account. Former Home Secretaries and Prime Ministers have expressed concern from across the political parties, not all of them opponents of the current Government and some from within their own ranks. They have expressed, at the very least, concern about the extent of the proposed measures.

The starting point ought to be our democratic rights as individuals to freedom of expression and assembly, protected at present by articles 10 and 11 of the European convention on human rights. The fundamental provision is the right to say what one wants and protest. Obviously, that is always subject to the law, but the starting point is that those rights should be infringed or curtailed only where necessary and proportionate. The presumption ought to be that we protect those rights. The authorities in a democracy such as ours that signed up to the European convention on human rights should have a positive obligation to facilitate those rights for individual citizens.

We have all come across protests that we do not agree with. Members on the Government side might have come across more protests that they do not agree with than I might have. That does not give us the right to ban them. In fact, it is an essential part of our democracy that we should facilitate such activities, particularly if we do not agree with them.

[Mr Goodwill]

I thank the hon. Lady for giving way. Could she point out where the Bill differentiates between protests we agree with and those we do not agree with?

[Maria Eagle]

I am not saying that the Bill does. I am not looking at any particular Member, but I know the attitude of some Members is somewhat determined by whether they agree with the protest in front of them. I have been inconvenienced by protests I agreed with and protests that I did not; the inconvenience is the same. Because of the democratic nature of our society, we ought to try to protect the right to protest and freedom of expression, and subject them only to necessary and proportionate restrictions. We should not let our individual natural feelings impinge on our views on whether they are proportionate and necessary.

[Mr Goodwill]

The hon. Lady makes some reasonable points, but would she agree that, in the case of some of the Extinction Rebellion protests, people who were possibly sympathetic to their views were turned against them by the disruption and problems caused by people climbing on the roofs of trains or gluing themselves to buildings?

[Maria Eagle]

I do agree with that point. One might then have an argument with the organisers about whether the nature of those protests is appropriate. I still do not think that it is a reason to remove people’s fundamental right to protest just because some protests are inconvenient, annoying and noisy.

[Alex Cunningham]

I do not think that the provisions were covered by the European convention on human rights. We have a proud history of demonstrations being effective in this country. May I refer my hon. Friend to the Tolpuddle martyrs? In the 1830s, seven men were arrested for secretly signing up to a trade union, and were eventually transported to Australia. Thousands of people took to the streets across the country, and marched through London demanding that that unlawful conviction be overturned. The seven men who were transported to Australia were eventually pardoned and brought home. Demonstrations bring about change, and we must not interfere with them.

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[Maria Eagle]

I agree. I do not accept that we must not interfere at all, but we must interfere in a proportionate and necessary manner. There is always a balance: freedom of expression is not absolute; freedom to protest is not absolute. There is always a grey area. I am trying to be helpful and not just condemn what the Government are seeking to do out of hand, although I disagree fundamentally with the provisions, which go too far.

Clause 54 amends the Public Order Act 1986 to allow the police to impose conditions if they have a reasonable belief that the

“noise generated by persons taking part in the procession may”—

not “will”—

“result in serious disruption to the activities of an organisation which are carried on in the vicinity”

or

“may have a relevant impact on persons in the vicinity”.

The clause confers a power on the Home Secretary to make regulations. There has been some to-ing and fro-ing in Committee about the meaning of

“serious disruption to the activities of an organisation which are carried on in the vicinity”.

We all have views—and there are different views—about what “a relevant impact” is, and what “serious disruption” amounts to.

We may have a subjectively different understanding of what noise is. My hon. Friend the Member for Rotherham revealed that she has tinnitus, and noise for her is different from noise for me. That is almost certainly the case for all of us, so inherently noise is a subjective issue, which makes it difficult for those charged with these decisions to make them in a coherent, objective—they cannot be objective if they are subjective—and sensible way that means that these laws will not fall immediately into disrepute for being contrary and different when interpreted by different people in different places. Having utterly subjective interpretations that can lead to something as serious as the banning of a demonstration or an arrest or conviction for an offence, when all that the person was seeking to do was protest, which is a democratic right in a fundamentally democratic society, can cause all kinds of difficulties.

That is why I am concerned about some of the provisions. My hon. Friend the Member for Enfield, Southgate has made the point that the provisions tend to lower the threshold at which some kind of action is likely to be taken by the officer in charge of policing the demonstration. That can drag into criminality what was merely righteous anger or proper dissent in a democracy. That is dangerous too.

The power to regulate protests simply because they generate noise presents an existential threat to the right to protest. When it applies even to a single-person protest, it appears to be an attempt to snuff out protest or to enable the police to have the powers to snuff out a protest, even if it is protest by only one person. The police already have powers to impose conditions on protests and to divert, stop or ban protests. I am not arguing that that is wrong. Over time, it has proven to work quite well. We can all come up with instances where the police went too far or did not go far enough and things went wrong, but that is the messy business of living in a democracy, the advantages of which much outweigh the disadvantages. In that sense, I do not mind the grey area.

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[Victoria Atkins]

My hon. Friend makes a very important point. There is a responsibility on all of us in the language we use. I know that in the heat of debate and the joy of advocacy, one can sometimes get a little bit carried away. But I am really keen that in this Committee we understand that the Bill is not about banning peaceful protest, particularly because of the unrest that we have seen in some parts of the country, which I will come on to in a moment.

Another perhaps colourful piece of advocacy that seems to have crept into the debate this morning is that the Bill is somehow about imprisoning more people. That is simply not correct. Indeed, anyone making such allegations should be mindful of the fact that, of course, as with any other criminal offence, the standard and burden of proof remains the same: namely, that it is for the Crown to prove the case beyond reasonable doubt. Those fundamentals of our criminal justice system remain throughout this process.

[Maria Eagle]

I am not saying that clause 56 will send more people to prison, but the Minister will accept that it increases the maximum penalties.

[Victoria Atkins]

It does. I will come to that, if I may, but there is a difference between increasing the maximum and doing this, as some have claimed—I accept that it is in the heat of debate—in order to put more people in prison. That is not the intention.

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[Victoria Atkins]

They would. The hon. Lady may remember that I questioned Mr Wagner about his interpretation of the Public Order Act. We acknowledge, and I think the police have said, how dynamic a public protest can be; it changes very quickly and they have to make decisions very quickly, on the ground. I asked Mr Wagner, because I was slightly concerned about some of the evidence he had given earlier:

“Do you accept that the Public Order Act 1986 is a piece of legislation that has stood the test of time and should remain in law?”

He said:

“I think I would be neutral on that. It is a very wide piece of legislation. Every time I read it, I am pretty surprised at how wide it is already. What I am pretty clear about is that section 12 does not need to be widened.”––[Official Report, Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Public Bill Committee, 18 May 2021; c. 76, Q109.]

Then I asked whether that meant the Public Order Act went too far for his liking. He replied:

“Well, potentially. The proof is often in the pudding. It depends on how the police use it and whether they are using it effectively.”––[Official Report, Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Public Bill Committee, 18 May 2021; c. 76, Q110.]

I agree wholeheartedly with his summation that it is about how the police employ the powers, but we need to just have in mind the range of views that have been expressed by witnesses giving evidence to the Bill Committee, whether in writing or orally. It would appear that there are some for whom the current legislation goes too far, yet we hear of instances such as the “Kill the Bill” protests where very significant harm has been done to police officers. Hon. Members will be able to draw on their own memories of other protests that have resulted in police officers being very badly injured and hurt by the protests of a minority. It shows, again, the need for a balance.

[Maria Eagle]

Is what the Minister says not an argument for banning all protest? It is not at all clear, at the beginning of a protest, which protests are going to go wrong in that way. She said herself that things can change very quickly. It cannot be predicted.

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[Victoria Atkins]

That is one of the things addressed by the Bill’s clauses. If I may, I will go methodically through the examination of the clauses.

There is a reason why we are trying to draw consistency between processions and assemblies. In 1986, the distinction between the two might have been very clear, but we heard evidence from the police that nowadays a protest can become an assembly and an assembly can become a protest. They change, so we are trying to bring consistency between the two forms of gathering, irrespective of the mobility of the participants, so that we have clarity of law as to what applies to participants when they gather together.

At this stage in my submission, I am going to introduce some context. Again, the misunderstanding might have arisen that the measures will apply to every single protest that ever takes place, which is not the case. In his oral evidence to the Joint Committee on Human Rights on 28 April this year, Chief Constable Harrington said that between 21 January and 21 April this year, more than 2,500 protests were reported to the National Police Chiefs’ Council, and of those 2,500 protests, conditions were imposed on 12.

As I develop my argument and talk about these powers being used very carefully by the police, and about the checks and balances within the legislation, I point to how rarely the conditions are imposed in the range of protests that go ahead. Indeed, my right hon. Friend the Member for Scarborough and Whitby might have wished that conditions were imposed in other protests, but we foresee the legislation being deployed rarely and very carefully.

[Maria Eagle]

Does the Minister believe that, were the provision to be enacted and the thresholds reduced, as some of us have argued, more protests would have conditions imposed? Does she have a view on how many more or fewer protests would have conditions imposed?

[Victoria Atkins]

Again, this comes to the checks and balances in the clauses that I will go through in detail. It will be for the officer to make decisions, either on the ground or ahead of the procession, but there have been instances where the police do not have the confidence under the current legislation to impose conditions in relation to noise specifically. When one hears about the problems that residents and others in the vicinity of the noise experience, one can see why they would wish that conditions were imposed. As I say, I will go into more detail in a moment.

To set the context, the recent report on the policing of protests, produced by Her Majesty’s inspectorate of constabulary and fire and rescue services, found that the balance between protesters’ rights and the rights of local residents and businesses, and those who hold opposing views, leans in favour of the protesters and that a modest reset of the scales is needed. Again, this is the messy, grey area that the hon. Member for Garston and Halewood referred to. As with all existing public order legislation, we are making use of the new powers. The police will continue to be required to demonstrate that their use is necessary and proportionate and compliant with the Human Rights Act.