Sarah Jones
Main Page: Sarah Jones (Labour - Croydon West)Public Order Bill (Second sitting)
Sarah Jones Excerpts(2 years, 6 months ago)
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Sarah Jones (Croydon Central) (Lab)
Q
Elizabeth de Jong: Our experience of protests until April this year was that they were mainly peaceful and occasional. However, their nature changed considerably in April; they have become more widespread, longer and more confrontational. Our main concerns include the safety of staff and protestors. There are significant safety risks, an impact on fuel supply, and increased costs.
In April 2020, 11 terminals were targeted for a number of days, and two forecourts suffered damage and were blocked. A significant number of arrests were made during that period. We followed the tweeting of Essex police, and halfway through April, they were talking about almost 500 arrests; some 12% of those arrested were arrested multiple times.
On the types of activities and the safety risks, there has been locking on, which is dealt with in the Bill. We have seen people lock themselves on, or attach themselves, to the top of stationary tankers, even when they are full, and when asked, they have not moved to empty ones, which would be safer. We have also seen locking on at height, which is when people attach themselves to machinery, pipes or vehicles high up, which means a risk of falls. People have even made their own stretchers to attach themselves to, which can be difficult to deconstruct safely. We have seen smoking on terminal storage tanks, with the safety risks that go with that. Cables have been cut on road tankers, which affects braking, and roads have been undermined—networks of tunnels have been dug under roads, affecting main and emergency access roads.
That causes great concern about safety. Refineries and terminals, as I am sure you can imagine, store potentially dangerous substances such as oil, other flammable substances, and substances that can cause chemical burns and can generate extreme heat. There can be a real danger of explosion and of falls from buildings. The activities on such sites are strictly regulated under COMAH—the Control of Major Accident Hazards Regulations 2015—and of course protestors are not following those regulations; they are putting themselves and staff in danger. There have also been impacts on fuel deliveries and costs to companies.
On what the police can do and what the response has been, the industry has increased security staffing at some sites. There is already fencing and closed circuit television, and there are inspections by operational staff. Some sites have increased security around the clock. However, security staff have limited powers; they can only ask people to leave. Companies have also taken out civil injunctions, which is an option open to them; a number of our members have done so. That is of limited effect, because they do not come with powers of arrest and they take time to put in place, which allows people to come back and target the locations while the injunctions are being put in place. We have encouraged local authorities to take out injunctions, which are a more powerful tool, but, again, they take time to put in place and are costly. During the protests in April, two were put in place, in Essex and Warwickshire.
Steve Griffiths: From my experience as an operator of Stansted airport, which is clearly very much a live operational environment where there are complex, high-risk operations, any protests pose a serious risk to human life—the lives of our staff, our customers, the travelling public, and the protesters—and cause major disruption to the operation.
Our last major significant event was back in 2017, and it related to a deportation flight to Africa. The protesters cut through the security fence around the airport, which ensures its safety and security, using bolt cutters, and breached the airfield. Fourteen protesters then locked themselves around a Boeing 767 jet, which was due to fly the deportation flight to Africa. The impact of that was that the runway was closed for approximately one hour. This was at night time, so there was no daytime visibility, and incoming and departing flights were grounded during that period. Approximately 25 flights registered delays during that hour, and 11 were cancelled, including the flight in question, which was due to fly to Nigeria. We estimated that about 1,700 to 1,800 passengers were impacted by that disruption.
The protesters were arrested by the police, but were ultimately acquitted. We understand from media reporting of the case that they were charged with intentional disruption of services at an aerodrome under the Aviation and Maritime Security Act 1990, but the court acquitted them because the offence requires some element of terrorist activity, which was not deemed to be present in this event. We understand that the Crown Prosecution Service charged the protesters with that offence because other offences that the perpetrators may have been charged with did not carry sentences that adequately reflected the seriousness of the circumstances that we experienced on that night—of forcibly gaining access to a security restricted live airport operation. That is the direct impact of the last major event.
Clearly, we support the right to protest at the airport, and we have designated areas, but this is about cases that infringe on parts of the airport outside those designated areas. I can talk only on behalf of London Stansted, but events have happened across UK airports.
Sarah Jones
Q
Elizabeth de Jong: Yes. I can see a direct reference to locking on. There are a number of elements in the Bill that will be helpful. These are new challenges for us, and the Bill makes a number of enhancements to mechanisms that will be available to the police. The police will, of course, give their view about whether they will help or not.
From what I have read, the Bill will give the police a power to arrest in a timelier and more straightforward way. The current way of giving powers through injunctions could lead to a patchwork of different injunctions in different places, and be confusing, which would mean that police felt less confident in making decisions. The Bill specifically refers to two things: locking on—that looks as though it will be potentially useful—and the definition of key national infrastructure; again, that would enhance the powers and make their use more practicable.
Sarah Jones
Q
I guess my question is whether an offence of locking on—I think that it has its own problems because of the very broad way it is drafted—will be any more helpful than those 500 arrests that the police made; you are talking about people who just come back afterwards.
Elizabeth de Jong: My understanding is that the legislation will reduce the time and cost spent getting the injunctions that allow the arrests. It clearly says, “This is an offence. We don’t need to go through the injunction process.” The issue is the time it takes to get the injunctions; that allows people to reoffend. There might be an opportunity for faster processing as well, but clearly local authority injunctions will allow court appearances to take place sooner.
Steve Griffiths: There is nothing I could add to that. I am really here to talk about the impact of disruption, and I am probably not qualified to comment intensely on the Bill; I leave that to the police.
Tom Hunt (Ipswich) (Con)
Q
Elizabeth de Jong: The particular areas are Kingsbury and Esso Purfleet; it has been around Essex and Warwickshire. It has also been nationwide, but those are the current ones that have been focused on.
Kit Malthouse
Q
Elizabeth de Jong: Indeed.
Sarah Jones
Q
Also, there seem to be slightly different issues. The issue with the flight was a slight one-off, in that people were objecting to that particular flight going away. There is a particular problem, it seems, with people trying to block entire infrastructure programmes across the country. They are two quite different things and I think they need a slightly different response.
I want to confirm with you, Mr Griffiths, that the police arrested the people but that the issue was that the charge was not right. It was not that they were not arrested and taken away; it was just that the charge did not stick because the right charge was not there, if you see what I mean.
Steve Griffiths: Yes, you have the fact that the incident occurred in the first place and then, as you say, the perpetrators were arrested, but then the subsequent charge fell apart because of, presumably, a gap in legislation, in that the route taken for prosecution did not stand up. On your first question, I do not have that answer with me today.
Elizabeth de Jong: I have some information on the first one. We received police intelligence about the attacks and that intelligence was broadly correct.
The Chair
If there are no further questions from Members, I thank our witnesses for the evidence. We will move on to the next panel.
Examination of Witness
Adam Wagner gave evidence.
The Chair
We will now hear oral evidence from Adam Wagner, a barrister at Doughty Street Chambers. We have until 3.5 pm for this session. Will Mr Wagner introduce himself for the record?
Adam Wagner: Good afternoon. My name is Adam Wagner and I am a barrister at Doughty Street Chambers. I practice in human rights law and public inquiries, and I do a lot of work on protest law.
Sarah Jones
Q
Adam Wagner: Okay. I will start with the general question about what I think of the legislation. It is important to frame this debate properly. In this country, our tradition is that protest is something that is permitted. It is not seen as a social evil; it is seen as a social good. A certain level of disruption is inevitable in any successful protest. That is how you get people’s attention: you disrupt, and you put yourself in front of them. That is not a new thing; it is very old. It goes back to the suffragettes, who I am sure many people giving evidence will mention.
Every social movement in history that has a protest element has always used an element of disruption, and there will of course be times when disruption steps over the line into violence and such serious disruption that society will not tolerate it. At that point, the criminal law will intervene, and there is always an uneasy balance between where you put the line, because you accept that conscientious protest about important issues is something that democracy needs for the public to communicate directly to the rest of society and to you—the people who are in charge. That is always the context.
All the court authorities on these kinds of issues recognise that protest is disruptive, unruly and something that annoys people, particularly if they do not agree with the views. If somebody does not agree with a view, that is a very good reason to not allow them to be in charge of whether the person can be express it. That is why it is very dangerous to start tinkering with a law because of views you do not approve of, because the next lot will come along and do the same for the views you do approve of. So we keep a level of tolerance towards protest—that is the way I would frame it.
For the most part, the mechanisms that the Bill puts in place essentially criminalise peaceful protest. That is what the Bill does: it criminalises peaceful protest in a way that has not been done before. It treats peaceful protest like knife crime, drug dealing or terrorism. I do not mean that metaphorically; I mean it directly. Serious crime disruption orders and terrorism disruption orders stop people doing something in future—those are the kinds of methods we have used to disrupt terrorism, knife crime, drug dealing and gang violence. I have been involved in lots of cases involving those kinds of orders. If the Bill is used by police—they will be under pressure to use it in particular instances—the end result will be lots more protesters in the criminal courts, in very long and complicated trials that involve looking at the proportionality of the protest in question, as we saw with the Colston statue case. But it will be 100 times more, because all these offences have a reasonable excuse—I can come to that. I think that is one thing you will see.
The other thing you will see is a lot more protesters in prison—and a lot more peaceful protesters in prison. I do not have any issue with, and I do not think human rights law has any issue with, violent protesters being treated as criminals—the European convention on human rights entirely accepts that violent protest does not fall under the protection of the right to protest—but all these provisions are about peaceful protest, and it will end up with hundreds and hundreds of protesters in the prison system. I see that from my own work. An increasing amount of protesters are going to end up in prison because of the injunctions. That is my general view, but I can talk about specifics.
Sarah Jones
Q
Also, we heard from previous witnesses about cases in which people have glued themselves to motorways in a dangerous way, and about people locking themselves on and tunnelling under things—doing things that are criminal and dangerous. That is the problem that the Bill is seeking to tackle: the small number of people who are repeatedly doing things that are dangerous for themselves and others. It would be helpful for you to explain how that marries with your view that the Bill will affect loads of peaceful protesters.
Adam Wagner: Hard cases make bad law, is the aphorism. I think that is true. I listened to a previous witness say that locking on is a new phenomenon; the suffragettes were locking on and Gandhi was locking on—these are very old protest methods. Anybody that breaks into an airport or an oil refinery, or blocks a motorway, can be arrested and charged under existing criminal law. That is absolutely uncomplicated.
One of the misapprehensions about the Insulate Britain protests—I read it in the newspapers—was that the police could not arrest people until there was an injunction in place. That is completely the wrong way round. Injunctions do not give powers of arrest to the police; court enforcement officers gain powers of arrest from injunctions, but the police can arrest people for obstruction of the highway in the same way that they have been able to for a long time. There are all sorts of other criminal offences that can be used—aggravated trespass is the other catch-all one. When someone is on the road they can still be trespassing if they are not using it for a permitted purpose. Aggravated trespass applies to any private land, including airports, oil refineries and petrol stations.
In terms of dealing with the issue at the time and on the ground, the Bill is not going to make any difference at all. The police can go in and arrest people—there is nothing stopping them. They can use reasonable force to unlock people who are locked on. The police will have exactly the same powers to do that under all these new offences. The difference—to use a term that has come up—is the downstream. Instead of those people potentially going to prison for a bit, or not going to prison at all, they will end up going to prison for a long time. The clauses of the Bill create a culminative effect—it is like being a petty criminal: once you start and are in the criminal justice system, you get longer and longer sentences and everything stacks up, one after the other. The courts have more and more draconian powers that they can use against you. The Bill creates that culminative effect for peaceful protesters.
Sarah Jones
Q
Adam Wagner: A serious disruption prevention order follows the model of lots of other such orders in our laws, such as serious crime prevention orders, gang orders and drug dealing prevention orders. It is the same exact model. As drafted, a serious disruption prevention order allows a court a power if someone is convicted of any offence under the new offences.
For example, having superglue in their pocket would be an offence under the regulations, because it could be used for a lock-on. Arguably, too, a bicycle lock on their bicycle could be used for a lock-on. Once that is triggered and they get convicted of an offence, the court can then look at their background and, if they have been involved in a protest that even potentially might cause serious disruption, that is all that is needed—
“capable of causing serious disruption to two or more”—
and could trigger the power for the judge to impose an order of up to two years that prevents them from doing all sorts of things. They might not be allowed into a town centre for two years, or to associate with particular people, or they could be given electronic tagging requirements. Once that is in place, they could be dragged back in if they breach a requirement and be given a prison sentence as a result. It is a protest banning order, effectively.
In fact, there are two different kinds of order: clause 13, which is the serious disruption prevention order, and then another one, whereby a police officer—even if the person has not been convicted of an offence, but just so long as they have participated in a protest and the judge thinks they might participate in another or maybe take some superglue along with them—can prevent them from going into a town centre or associating with particular people. The orders can even be applied to organisations, so it is not just individuals; it could be a charity or a campaigning organisation. It is a really huge expansion of court powers against protesters.
Let me talk a bit about the psychology of some of the people I represent, who are some of the more hardcore protesters who are at the centre of a lot of these movements. They will not be deterred by this legislation. If we look at Insulate Britain, which I guess is on the extreme end of disruption versus expressing the right to protest—it is not directed; the people they were disrupting were not the people they were protesting against, which makes the courts the least sympathetic to those actions—a lot of them said, “Well, I will go to prison for the cause.” A lot of environmental and Black Lives Matter protesters—whichever cause you think of—will say, “It’s going to be a badge of honour to go to prison.”
The prison system will start to be full of those people. It will not deter them; the people it will deter are the people who are not willing to go to prison, but who will also not be doing anything illegal at protests. They will just not want to go along, “Because I don’t want to be caught with a bicycle lock. I have a bicycle outside; I don’t want to be caught with a bicycle lock. What happens if I get arrested because I have a bicycle lock? I didn’t know one of these orders allowed police to do suspicionless search.” It will deter those people; it won’t deter the people you are worried about or the previous witnesses were worried about. It will deter lots of other people who you are not worried about, but you should be worried about.
The Chair
Q
David Dinsmore: I am David Dinsmore, chief operating officer at News UK. For the purposes of this, News UK is the owner of Newsprinters Ltd, which prints a lot of the newspapers in this country.
Sarah Jones
Q
David Dinsmore: This started on the evening of 4 September 2020 and continued to midday on the 5th. We have three print sites across the UK: one at Broxbourne to the north of London, one in Knowsley in Merseyside, and one at Eurocentral, between Glasgow and Edinburgh. At the Eurocentral site, there was a small, peaceful protest that broke up very quickly and did not get in the way of any of our business. However, at both Broxbourne and Knowsley, starting at about 9.45 pm, a collection of vans, boats on trailers and a bamboo superstructure were put in place at the exits to the plants. In the Broxbourne case, 50-plus people got on to those structures, many of them locking themselves on. At Knowsley, I think the number was about 30. Certainly, there were 51 arrests at Broxbourne, and 30 arrests and 28 charges at Knowsley.
The police were called immediately and were on the scene within half an hour, but they did not start removing people properly until 4 am at Broxbourne and 11 am at Knowsley. Both sites were finally cleared at midday on the 5th. This was a Friday, into Saturday. Saturday is the biggest newspaper sale of the week. Between The Sun and The Times, we would normally expect to sell about 2 million papers that day. We also print for The Daily Telegraph. We print some of the Daily Mail and some of the Financial Times, and we also deliver a direct-to-consumer service, although we do not print them, for The Guardian out of the Broxbourne site, so you will see that we are at the heart of the news industry in the country, whatever your flavour may be.
All the exits were blocked, which meant that all our trucks and drivers were blocked inside. Although we printed the run of about 2.5 million papers, they all had to be pulped. We had to use other print sites around the country to print those newspapers, and we delivered from them. The net result was that we lost a significant sale, as we did not get to many newsagents until past midday. The cost to us as a company was about £1.2 million. I would say we had 155 staff who were trapped on site until midday the following day, and we still have senior staff attending court hearings. They have had to block out of their diaries about 150 man/woman days—they are not having to attend court, but there is definitely serious disruption.
The final point I would make is that those 51 people at Broxbourne were all charged under obstructing highways, and those at Knowsley were charged under the aggravated trespass legislation. Some of the people at Knowsley have been found not guilty because it was not clear whose land they were trespassing on, and at Broxbourne, most people who have been found guilty have been given conditional discharges—costs of £150. One of them even glued himself on to the court table and still got a conditional discharge.
It feels to us to be a major, serious and co-ordinated attack. It caused considerable material disruption and continues to do so. The legislation is not in place to provide a deterrent to this. There is not even a catch-all law that people can be charged under, even if they do commit the crime. It felt like we were powerless to do anything other than work around this huge disruption, which had a massive impact. There is another impact worth mentioning. We go to wholesalers, who were hugely disrupted, and then we go to 44,000 retailers, who were similarly disrupted. That ends up with 2 million or 3 million customers who cannot get their paper when they turn up to buy it in the morning. The disruption to freedom of speech and our democracy in this instance was huge.
Sarah Jones
Q
David Dinsmore: My understanding is that you need specialist teams to remove protesters who are locked on at a height.
Sarah Jones
Q
David Dinsmore: It was chains. At Broxbourne, they brought a purpose-made bamboo super structure, which they were able to erect at speed and put themselves on to.
Sarah Jones
Q
David Dinsmore: We call it the nightly miracle that we get from literally a blank sheet of paper at 9 o’clock at night to 44,000 retailers at 6 o’clock the following morning around the country. While I like the aspiration, the idea that we could get specialist teams there and remove blockages and get all that cleared without having significant disruption to the network and that delivery is, I think, pretty ambitious.
Sarah Jones
Q
David Dinsmore: Indeed.
Anne McLaughlin
Q
Wendy Chamberlain
We shall find out from the Minister why he has changed his mind.
Sarah Jones
Q
Sir Peter Martin Fahy: You mention the level of resources. Certainly, when you look at the number of officers per head of population in the UK roughly compared with France, Italy and Spain, you see that we have about half the number that they have. Why is that? Because they have national police forces and paramilitary police forces that essentially are part of the military, live in barracks and are able to respond in that militaristic way. That is not our history whatsoever and I would absolutely not want it to be, but it possibly gives you some indication of the level of resource.
Even if the chief superintendent had double the number of officers, I am not sure that he would necessarily want to put them into this form of policing, because he is absolutely right that when officers had to be on motorway bridges at the time of Insulate Britain to try to be available to clear the protests, they were officers who would have been investigating rapes, burglaries or whatever. There is a practical issue here: could we ever have the level of resources to be able to effectively—? The fact is that the protesters will always be fleeter of foot than the police, because they have the element of surprise.
In terms of what can be done to help people like Newsquest, Morrisons and other people I have dealt with who were absolutely very concerned about the future of their businesses, for me it is about being prepared to look at issues like bail. In the more immediate sphere, it is for the courts to be able to keep people in custody, rather than having to wait for a court case a few months down the line, or for one of these particular orders.
I would still doubt whether the appetite would be there—the judicial appetite. Police officers are very wary, and you heard the exact reason for that from Newsquest: when cases get to court, the judiciary or the magistrates often give out very minor sentences—whatever might be allowed in the legislation. They find, as happened with the Sarah Everard case, that higher courts then disagree and bring in human rights legislation, or bring in a different interpretation that is in the legislation, which then completely takes the legs of the police from underneath them.
That can only really be covered partly by legislation but essentially by judicial practice, because you can bring in all the laws you like—it will not actually solve those practical issues that the police face. There is also a real difficulty with definitions. This Bill talks about “protests”. Previous legislation, such as the Public Order Act 1986, talks about “gatherings”. We seem to have brought in this word “protests”, and I am not sure there is a legal definition of what is a protest.
The 1986 Act uses the phrase,
“serious disruption to the life of the community”.
I dealt with a really difficult protest in the centre of Manchester, which essentially put the Jewish community and the Muslim community at odds. I actually contacted the Home Office and said, “Please can you tell me the definition of serious disruption to community life?” They said, “The legislation’s never been used. We can’t tell you.” I was left wondering whether I should go around the shops of Manchester and try to work out whether their takings were up or down as a result of the protest.
With words such as “serious disruption”, on the face of it, yes, they are common sense and everybody knows what it looks like. In reality, however, when it gets into the courts that is exactly where the lawyers make their money from, but it absolutely undermines the police action and seriously means that police forces may be sued for unlawful arrest, and officers may be more liable to receive complaints because the conviction was not secured. It is a really complex issue, as Matt has said, and it needs a range of things, but just having more legislation without dealing with those other issues—you would certainly need an absolutely huge investment in training.
That would be my concern about this legislation. It is quite complex legislation. How, for instance, are West Midlands police supposed to train that, with all the day-to-day of policing? There is no time in policing for training. Again, those officers who are going to be on training courses have to be taken away from other duties. In my time, in my early stage there was very little change to the law. It is now changing almost month by month, and trying to keep police officers—who, with due respect to them, do not have the sort of professional background on how to interpret legislation—up to date with that is really difficult, because we are putting them into a totally different scenario, in terms of their level of accountability and the level of transparency that has now come from mobile phones and social media.
Sarah Jones
Q
The third question is just about any thoughts you might have on things in the Bill that you have not looked at. You might not have had thoughts because the Government have not asked you to do a report on it—I think I am right that they have not asked you. Do you have any thoughts on things that you have not looked at before?
Matt Parr: I will deal with the easiest one of those questions first. The policing response to our report has been possibly the most professional and thorough response that I have seen in any report I have done in six years as one of Her Majesty’s Inspectors. The then National Police Chiefs’ Council lead picked it up, gathered a group together, and it has been a model of how policing as a whole should respond to a report. That has been really good. We have not been back to inspect, but I am pretty confident that progress has been made against every recommendation we made. I think they have almost all been ticked off. That is very encouraging. That is not standard fare with reports from us, sadly.
On your point about what bits of the legislation we looked at, we were asked to look at five changes. The history of this is that in 2019 the Home Secretary wrote to the commissioner of the Met, and the commissioner then wrote back with a series of 19 potential changes to the law. There was a big roundtable involving the Home Office and lots of people in policing in mid-2020. After that it was decided that they would take forward five. We supported all five of those—with a little bit of teeth-sucking about a couple. Generally, we thought that they all had the potential to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the policing of protests, and would help achieve the “modest reset” I referred to in the report.
The Bill contains one of those changes, and that is the one about extending stop and search to look for lock-ons. It contains other changes that were not in there: obstructing major transport works; interference with key national infrastructure; serious disruption prevention orders, which we have already mentioned; and, lastly, lowering the rank in the Met for authorisations.
On extending stop and search, we said that because of its preventive nature it has the clear potential to enhance police effectiveness. It would also act as a deterrent. We recognised it was controversial, and we registered concerns about modelling it on current section 60 legislation—we thought that was potentially problematic. It is trying to achieve two very different things. We were nervous about a potential effect on minorities, and therefore we would like to see strong safeguards around that.
Finally, we said there must be appropriate thresholds and correct authority levels. I think the Bill says inspector, which is probably as low a rank as I would want to go. However, in general we remain supportive. There was broad support for the stop and search proposal from across the National Police Chiefs’ Council, and policing generally. Some people raised some difficulties, but we concluded:
“our view is that, with appropriate guidance and robust and effective safeguards, the proposed stop and search powers would have the potential to improve police efficiency”.
I have mentioned that we were not supportive of SDPOs. We did not really look at the others. I will touch on changing the minimum rank of assistant commissioner to commander in the Met. That strikes me as entirely pragmatic. If you look at the Met, the real expertise in public order tends to be at commander rank, rather than above, where people get a bit more generalist. The deep professional experts in London, in my experience, are the commanders. That strikes me as perfectly sensible. The other two changes we simply have not looked at. I would say that they strike me as consistent with the aim I was in support of. Currently, the balance is not being got right on a regular basis; the level of disruption between those who have a right to protest, and those who are bystanders and affected by protest, is not in the right place. Those changes strike me as consistent with resetting that balance.
Everybody I talked to in the course of this inspection or since—every police officer and everybody involved in this—absolutely recognises the right to protest. There is no question about that. Frankly, I think some of the criticism of the Bill, and some of the interpretation of it, goes too far. It is not a police state.
Sarah Jones
Q
Matt Parr: Both. Any changing of where the pendulum sits does not automatically mean the introduction of a police state. To me, they look like sensible measures to redress the balance. I note that the Government’s note accompanying the Bill links to a YouGov survey that shows where the public are on this issue, and those findings were entirely consistent with the survey we did as part of the Bill. To be honest, I was quite surprised at the time, but the YouGov poll is in exactly the same place.
Sarah Jones
Q
Phil Dolby: No one protest is the same as any other, even if it might be about the same cause. Some of the most challenging ones we have had have not necessarily been Extinction Rebellion or High Speed 2. The issues in Gaza led to some go-slow protests that were going to churn up the city, which I had to deal with.
Another protest was in the paper a few years ago. A school was hoping to do a teaching element about same-sex relationships, and some of the local Muslim community were upset about that. We have also had Sikh tensions at the Indian consulate general, the Kisan protests and so forth. Sometimes you can start your tour of duty and something appears on Al Jazeera—suddenly, you can feel the tension rising during that same tour of duty.
The first thing is very much: what relationships do we have with communities before there is a protest? What kind of neighbourhood local policing service do we have? What is our community engagement across the spectrum of age, ethnicity, communities and so on? That is the most important. One of the most important briefings I give to everyone—including protesters—at the beginning of any operation, be it pre-planned or spontaneous, is always about the style and tone of what we are about to do. That is about being a fair service that is not afraid to make decisions when it needs to.
I will give you a couple of quick examples, starting with when we had the go-slow. Like most cities, Birmingham has a ring road, and it does not take much for that artery to suddenly be blocked, which means that nobody is going anywhere. We had a protest about Gaza whereby they were going to do a go-slow with their vehicles and do a circuit around the city. Because it kept moving, we tolerated that. We did some traffic management around it, kept the city moving and made sure that really important things, such as hospitals and so forth, were not affected. They then went for a second lap, and that was where I had a threshold with a gold commander who had given me a strategy that said, “That’s enough now, because everyone else in the city has the right to peaceful enjoyment of the transport system and to get around.”
We currently have a power under section 12 of the Public Order Act 1986—this goes to Sir Peter’s point—that already has the term “serious” within it. There is a test called 3DI—serious damage, disorder, disruption or injury —but the definition of “serious” is still quite open to interpretation. You also need to have an organiser. During the pandemic, people did not want to show that they were organisers, because they would then be potentially prosecuted under the coronavirus regulations. That has kind of stayed. Before then, people were quite happy to say, “I was the organiser,” but that is less so now.
The go-slow had no clear organiser, but through the CCTV around the city, I was able to see who the organiser was. There were probably about 200 vehicles involved in it, and I just gave a warning about the police’s power to who I was evidentially satisfied was the organiser. I negotiated and said, “Look, I’ve got this power. It’s ready, and here it is. Do you want to carry on, or can I encourage you to stop? You have had your opportunity, and you need to move on.” There was a negotiated approach that I thought tried to keep the balance for everyone.
Similarly, Extinction Rebellion recently blocked a fairly minor road. We were a little confused about the road they chose. If we had been doing it, we would have chosen a different one. They had a tactic whereby instead of staying in the middle of the road all the time, they would use the pelican crossing but let the traffic stop by the traffic furniture. They would then occupy the road for about five minutes and when the traffic built up, they would move away. That was an interesting application of the law but, again, what we did was start negotiations with them.
We have our protest liaison teams, and there is a five-step appeal that officers go through, which we document and fill, giving every opportunity for the protesters to reach the decision themselves. Eventually, I said, “Okay. There is a power here to stop you. This is an unlawful assembly because it is now causing serious disruption. There’s a children’s hospital that is starting to be affected, so now that’s enough.”
I brought forward the van that is a mobile prison cell—kind of a show of strength, really—and said, “That is what I am prepared to use”. They said, “Okay”, and that was enough. Again, both the powers were available to us. They were being prepared to be used. We were not just tolerating it; there was a negotiated approach, and both of those are examples of where that has been successful. On the serious disruption element in the Bill, I would encourage as much precision for that definition as possible.
Mrs Elphicke
Q
Matt Parr: We made that point in the report. There are certain things that probably would have a deterrent effect—the £37 million is something that we referred to. I think it is relevant. It is difficult to say that you cannot put a price on articles 10 and 11 and, of course, you are right. However, just for context, the two operations we looked at in London cost £37 million. That is twice the annual budget of the violent crime taskforce, so it does have a significant effect.
The other general observation I would make is that protest has been increasing and the complexity and demand on policing has increased. It does not seem likely to us that it will go in a different direction in the years to come, so something has to be done to prevent it becoming too much of a drain. Yes, I think that some of these act as a deterrent, of course. It rather depends on how they end up progressing through the courts—if, indeed, they are brought to court—and if it turns out that they are not meaningfully prosecuted and there are not meaningful convictions, any deterrent effect will pretty soon dissipate after that, I would have thought.
Sir Peter Martin Fahy: I would make the same point. Anything that could be put in the legislation to clarify the issue about “serious”, which absolutely could be some financial calculation, would be extremely useful. You have to remember that it was quite clear that the vast majority of people thought the Insulate Britain protests were extremely disruptive and pointless.
There are certainly some protests where you have two sides. Therefore, you will get pressure from one side to use this legislation, and we should not be naive about the pressure that police leaders come under from local politicians to do that. I will be honest: they were some of the most uncomfortable times in my police career when that happened. Therefore, having clarity about the legislation is really important, as is anything that can be put in to help that.
I do not know whether there is actually any evidence that people are deterred. Common sense says that some people will be deterred by harsher sentences and the threat of a conviction in court, but clearly some people are so determined, and have a certain lifestyle where it does not really have any consequence for them, that—if anything—it makes them martyrs. Certainly, as Matt said, if they are not convicted or get found not guilty, if anything that gives them a greater status as a martyr and leads to further criticism of the police.
Phil Dolby: I want to make a point on the precision of the legislation. When looking to consider stop and search without suspicion, I think no matter how hard you try, there will be a complete, solid line in the public discourse between that and section 60, which is the existing power to have targeted stop and search around violence principally. That is a tool that is being used increasingly with the challenges we are all facing around youth violence and knife crime. It is also something around which communities have not always necessarily experienced fair treatment.
With all that we are trying to do now, it is still a key point of discussion and, sometimes, contention. We have the community coming in and scrutinising how we have used it. They watch our body-worn video of what we tried to do. We have even got youth versions of that for young people. I do not know how you would do the same kind of thing with protest. I think there is something that needs to be done there. There is best practice advice on how to conduct stop and search, and I think there is potentially some real thinking if those go ahead to start with that position as opposed to learning those lessons as we go along.