My Lords, we have been detained for something over two hours and I shall take no more than a couple of minutes of your Lordships’ time to say what I have to say. First, I sincerely thank all those who have spoken in this debate, particularly the three signatories to my amendment and the Minister, who has had to sit through a varied and interesting debate.
Secondly, I want to pick up on the chilling effect. The experience with the word “insulting” in the Public Order Act is sufficient in itself to indicate what front-line practitioners will do. Governed as they are by very well-oiled complaints machinery, they will undoubtedly be faced with many examples when a set of circumstances are produced for them, and they will be virtually pressurised into taking some sort of action, to pursue the case and push it through to the courts to decide. That is the easy option, and it is what happened all too often with “insulting”. To take an exercise in discretion and turn around to the complainant and say, “Frankly, I think we should let this one go by”, is not an option that they will take willingly. That is undoubtedly why the Association of Chief Police Officers as one group has said that it thinks that “nuisance and annoyance” is wrong and that we should stay with the well tried formula of “harassment, alarm or distress”.
The choice between those two wordings is the pivotal point of the legislation—the absolute foundation on which everything else hangs. We can talk for as long as we like about reasonable, just, convenient, necessary and all those adjectives, and try to make it work but, if the pivot does not work, all the rest falls away. The pivot suggested by the Government is “nuisance and annoyance”. We have no knowledge of what will happen if that comes into play, but we know what will happen with “harassment, alarm or distress”; it is well proven, well tried and respected, and has never been faulted. To move way from that is a step into the dark.
We have had no examples whatever of the sort of conduct that “nuisance and annoyance” seeks, rightly, to address. I pay great tribute to the Minister, for whom I have a huge liking and respect, but unless he can satisfy me—and I suspect that this is the case with others in the Chamber, from what I pick up from the atmosphere—that he is willing to move immediately to “harassment, alarm or distress”, I must seek to divide the House. I invite him to respond to that.