That is an interesting point. Thank goodness for those protests and for our right to protest in that way. It is not fair and not right to force the police to make political decisions about how much is too much noise. Imagine a scenario where two sides of a public debate are protesting, with one group on a street where there is lots of double glazing and the other on a street where there are old houses and no double glazing. Are we really saying that the police, who might close one protest for being too noisy and not the other, would not find themselves in a difficult political situation, with criticism from the public?
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The Government often point to a report by Her Majesty’s inspectorate of constabulary and fire and rescue services that argued that the police needed to balance better the rights of protesters with disruption to the wider public. It asked for a
“modest reset of the scales”.
However, Inspector Matt Parr, who wrote the report, gave evidence to the Joint Committee on Human Rights in which he said:
“Neither the police nor HMCIFRS called for a new trigger based on the noise generated by demonstrations”.
He also said that he was not even asked by the Government to
“look specifically at whether noise should be included”
or assess whether the change was necessary. The Joint Committee on Human Rights said that there was “no evidence” of a gap in the law that needed to be filled and that there was already a
“range of powers to deal with noise that impacts on the rights and freedoms of others”.
Why on earth is the Home Secretary continuing to push for those powers when the police did not even ask for them?
As the Bill has progressed through Parliament, we have seen many and various attempts to justify the provisions on noisy protest that no one has asked for and no one wants. In Committee, the Minister of State, Home Department, the hon. Member for Louth and Horncastle (Victoria Atkins), said:
“The police will impose conditions on the use of noise only in the exceptional circumstances where noise causes unjustifiable disruption”.––[Official Report, Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Public Bill Committee, 8 June 2021; c. 397.]
The Government also added the caveat of the word “serious”, raising the bar for securing a conviction, and the Minister for Crime and Policing has said a number of times that the power may be used only in the most exceptional circumstances. However, since then, Ministers have taken away the “serious” caveat, so they have lowered the bar. If alarm or distress does not have to be serious, surely the powers may not be used only in such exceptional circumstances.
The Minister talked about Labour’s amendments on public space protection orders outside schools and vaccination centres as if they included noise. However, the word “noise” does not feature in any of them. Our proposal to offer councils fast-track powers to set up protection zones around schools and vaccine clinics is quite different from the Government’s sweeping powers on protest that could criminalise peaceful protesters singing in the street. The truth is, the police have a raft of powers that they can use. We do not need these new provisions, and the Government know it. That is why, in this round of ping-pong, they have tabled amendments to review the changes in two years’ time. However, Ministers are kidding themselves if they expect a review in two years to reassure us. I urge the Minister to scrap this cut-and-paste job of amendments, change the guidance that does not make sense and accept Labour’s sensible amendments.
If I were the Minister, I would not want to be known as the Minister who pushed through these provisions on protest. Is that the legacy that he wants? Think of the freedom songs of the civil rights movement or of the protesters singing the Ukrainian national anthem all over Europe and here on Whitehall. Protests, song and the sounds of protests give voice to the voiceless. Let protest annoy us. Let protest be loud. Let us accept that noisy protest can be uncomfortable.
The conditions in part 3 on noise are anti-democratic and we should all vote to reject them. It would be a great shame if Conservative Members voted to curtail the freedoms that so many before us fought for and which so many more are still fighting for around the world.