My Lords, we are now on to arguably the most controversial aspect of the Bill—the public order measures. The debate began at 8.30 pm and is made even more controversial by the Government tabling more than 18 pages of new amendments last week, creating new offences and draconian new powers for the police that the other place was not even aware of when it passed the Bill. Not only that, but debate has been concertinaed into one day, on both the existing and the new measures, and, with the collusion of the Official Opposition, the vital two-week gap between Committee and Report is being shortened, further curtailing proper scrutiny. This Government are behaving unacceptably and Labour are letting them get away with it. Of course, I make no criticism of my hard-working and conscientious comrades on the Labour Front Bench, nor indeed of the government Ministers on the Bill, who will no doubt say they are just following orders; the criticism is of the usual channels.
I am speaking on every group today, bar one, so I have been unable to eat or have a proper break; it is a bit like being back on the Job—with a capital J, for the benefit of Hansard. No wonder observers think I look knackered, to use the words of the noble Lord, Lord Dubs.
As other noble Lords have said, this legislation should be a separate Bill because of the many fundamental issues around people’s human rights. I said last week
that my comments on serious violence reduction orders were the longest I had made in eight years in the House. I am going to exceed that, and I will explain why—it will become clear.
It was gone midnight on another day of Committee when the Minister said four times that he would keep his remarks short because of the lateness of the hour. My response was that the Bill needs to be properly scrutinised and I do not care what time of night it is. I promise not to speak for more than two minutes on each amendment in this group, so, if noble Lords will give me 54 minutes, that should be enough.
For the information of the Committee, I was involved in public order policing throughout my policing career. I was deployed at Notting Hill Carnival in various roles for seven consecutive years—I can still hear—and at the Grunwick trade dispute, and the Lewisham, Southall and Brixton riots, as a senior officer, as the officer in overall command, and as gold commander at numerous events, having been selected and trained and regularly retrained to maintain my position in the small cadre of advanced trained senior officers in public order policing. This involved practical exercises, in riot gear, with commanding officers, and involved missiles and petrol bombs, as well as weekend table-top exercises with people from the media and community groups, looking at the practical consequences of banning or imposing conditions on protests.
I was, however, fortunate to spend time away from operational policing, being sponsored to undertake a full-time degree course during the miners’ strike, in which I took no part, other than to give money to support miners’ families. I think it is important that the House understands where I am coming from. I am also grateful to Liberty for its briefing.
I start with Amendment 293, in the name of the noble Lord, Lords Dubs, which I have signed. Not only is the right to protest a human right enshrined in the Human Rights Act but it is a right that British people have had for centuries. The police have recent history that is relevant here. Up to and including the early 2000s, the police had been taking an increasingly hard line with protestors, frequently using techniques such as kettling—which the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, mentioned—where protestors, and many innocent bystanders, were contained in a small area and not allowed to leave except in groups of two of three, sometimes requiring those leaving to be photographed and to give their names and addresses.
As a result of violent incidents in 2009 at the G20 London summit protests, the Independent Police Complaints Commission concluded that the Metropolitan Police should review its crowd-control methods, including kettling. As a result, the Metropolitan Police, for a while at least, changed emphasis, stating that the police role was to facilitate peaceful protest, and, interestingly, putting women senior officers in charge of some of the most controversial protests. This amendment is an important reminder of the recent history of policing protest in this country, and the dangers of the emphasis being placed on controlling protest rather than facilitating protest.
It is also important to comment on the origins of this legislation in connection with this amendment. The Home Secretary asked Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services to look specifically at whether new legislation, further offences and stronger police powers were necessary. Her Majesty’s Inspector of Constabulary, Matt Parr, a retired Royal Navy rear admiral, conducted the review.
I read the report with interest because, as the Guardian reported on 31 March this year:
“The official policing inspectorate showed repeated bias in favour of the police and against peaceful protesters as it compiled a report which backed a government clampdown, a whistleblower has alleged.”
The allegations were that HMICFRS wrote to the Home Secretary five months before the report was published, saying that it backed the need to change the laws. The Home Secretary replied—again, I quote the Guardian:
“Protests have proved a significant challenge over the last year and I am keen to ensure that the police have the powers and capabilities they need to help address the disruption they face. Your findings will help me to do that.”
The whistleblower, who had worked for HMIC for more than five years, said:
“The purpose of the report was not to collect evidence and then make a decision, but rather to collect evidence to support the decision that had already been made”.
I have read that report. I have also read the report into the Sarah Everard Clapham Common vigil by the same author. I agree with the whistleblower that the contents of both reports do not match the conclusions.
Almost all police forces outside London said that the limiting factor on policing protest was the number of police officers available to enforce existing laws, not a lack of legislation. Indeed, as we will see—yes, I am only just getting started—despite what the Government say, these proposals are based on a false premise. The Police Federation, which represents 130,00 front-line police officers, was not even consulted about these proposals. In my discussions with the federation, it is, to say the least—and to use a word that has been popular this evening—uneasy about them.
Amendments 294, 295, 299, 300, 303, 305 and 306 refer to new powers to control protests on the basis of them being too noisy, marking a significant expansion of police powers. As other noble Lords have said, protests are by their nature noisy, and threatening to curtail or close down protests because they are noisy is threatening to close down protest full stop. HMICFRS did not comment on the noise proposals in its report. Again, noble Lords are being asked to sign off on open-ended legislation because these half-baked proposals have to relegate important aspects of the proposed legislation to regulations that this House will not see until after the Bill receives Royal Assent.
Amendments 297 and 307 from my noble friend Lord Beith probe what “unease” means. The Joint Committee on Human Rights goes further, saying that it places too much into the hands of the police officer at the scene and that
“What one person considers to be noise sufficiently ‘intense’ to be likely to cause ‘serious unease, alarm or distress’ may be very different to what another person would believe meets this threshold.”
Amendment 302 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, rightly seeks to limit the conditions that can be imposed on an assembly for the reasons why they were restricted when the original legislation was debated. On 13 January 1986, in the House of Commons, the then Conservative Home Secretary said:
“We stopped short of a power to ban because we believed that that would be an excessive limit on the right of assembly and freedom of speech. For this reason, clause 14 does not permit the police to impose conditions changing the date and time of an assembly.”—[Official Report, Commons, 13/1/1986; col. 797.]
We think that Lord Hurd of Westwell was right.
We support all the amendments in this group but, to continue, Amendments 309 to 312 refer to disobeying conditions imposed on protests by the police. Not for the first time in the Bill, the hideous phrases “ought to know” and “ought to have known” appear. I understand that in the past some protesters have put their fingers in their ears or made a lot of noise so that they could not hear what conditions the police were imposing on them, but Amendments 309, 310 and 312 contain the much-preferred wording
“deliberately or recklessly avoided gaining knowledge that the condition has been imposed”.
Amendment 311 removes the increased penalties for disobeying conditions; we agree that non-violent civil disobedience should not face harsher penalties.
I stand alone with Amendment 318, requiring the most senior police officer present at a one-person protest who wants to close it down to hold at least the rank of inspector. It is a rank of officer who is on duty and available in every police area 24/7. It is a serious claim to make, that the decision on the level of noise or disruption caused by a solitary individual peacefully protesting should not be made by a police officer, no matter how junior. In fact, we do not believe that one-person protests should be subject to any conditions and we oppose Clause 61 standing part of the Bill.
I will talk now about the impact of these proposals on the police, in terms of both resources and public trust and confidence in them. In so doing, I will address my Amendments 296 and 301. The first thing to say, from my professional experience, is that the more conditions the police impose on a protest, the more police officers are needed and the more likely those conditions are to be resisted. Taking the point of the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, it is not right that lots of police resources should be taken from the suburbs of London, for example, to police protests in central London, but the more conditions you impose, the more police officers you will have to take from the suburbs to police that demonstration.