My Lords, I start by quoting the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Bristol, who said that good debate relies on good listening. I hope that noble Lords will listen, as they did in the previous group, to what I have to say.
My noble friend Lord Deben and the noble Lords, Lord Hain and Lord Coaker, were all in agreement that many of them would have been in breach of these provisions in protests that they took part in. No. I disagree with that; the police rarely impose conditions on a protest, and we expect that to continue to be the case.
I thought the noble Lord, Lord Walney, made some compelling arguments about how lucky we are to live in a democracy and how much we value protest—we can hear the drumbeats outside, which no one is going to stop. To answer the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leeds, the provisions are not new today; they have been in the Bill from the start.
The government amendments give effect to the recommendations made by both the DPRRC and the Constitution Committee. Under the Public Order Act 1986 as amended by the Bill, the police may attach certain conditions to a public procession, public assembly or one-person protest, including where that is necessary to prevent serious disruption. The Bill enables the Secretary of State to define the meaning of “serious disruption” in regulations, and we have published an indicative draft of such regulations.
However, both the DPRRC and the Constitution Committee argued that definitions should be in the Bill, although the DPRRC agreed that there should be a power to amend the definition by regulations subject
to the affirmative procedure. The government amendments therefore take the definitions as set out in the draft regulations and write them into the Public Order Act. Again, I express my thanks to my noble friend Lord Blencathra—although I do not see him in his place—the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor of Bolton, and the other members of the DPRRC and the Constitution Committee for their scrutiny of the Bill. I trust that the amendments will be acceptable to them and indeed to the House as a whole. The word “significant” is lifted from the draft regulations that the Constitution Committee said were not unreasonable.
Amendment 115, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, would remove the new noise triggers for the police to impose conditions on public processions. Amendments 123, 124, 125 and 147 would collectively do the same for public assemblies and single-person protests. In response to those amendments, I reiterate to the House that noise generated by protesters can have a significant and detrimental impact on the wider public. It is unacceptable, as my noble friend Lord Hailsham says, that certain protests can seriously disrupt the lives of ordinary people.
It is absolutely right that the Government give the police the tools that they require to tackle disruptive protests. As the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, stated during the debate in Committee on these measures,
“noise can be more than an irritant.”—[Official Report, 24/11/21; col. 944.]
In some contexts, it can be tortuous, and it is important to contextualise the different situations in which it can happen, such as the time of day or where it takes place. Is it outside an old people’s home, or is it in Parliament Square? Is it anti-vaxxers outside a school, or in St Ann’s Square in Manchester?
8.15 pm
It is completely right that the police should have the powers to intervene in exceptional cases where the noise generated by a protest is such that it is injurious to others. As with all conditions, police will only impose conditions on noise where necessary and proportionate and where they have carefully considered protesters’ freedoms of expression and assembly. Of course, they can rightly be challenged in court if they do not. I note that the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, said only last week that, generally speaking, the police are very averse to making political decisions and siding with one particular protest group against another, so that is a significant safeguard. Indeed, it is.
Amendments 132 and 133, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, would strike out Clauses 57 and 58 from the Bill. In extending the full range of conditions available to the police for safely managing public processions to public assemblies, the Government are acting on the recommendation of Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services, which argues that the challenges of safely policing an assembly are inherently no different from those of policing a procession—a point that has also been made by Chief Constable Harrington, the NPCC public order lead.
Additionally, Clause 58 closes a loophole through which some protesters had been escaping conviction for breaching protest conditions, as the law requires an
individual to have knowingly breached conditions to secure a conviction. Clause 58 provides that someone “ought to know” about the conditions, removing the loophole where some protesters deliberately avoid knowledge of the conditions the police have placed on their protests. The inspectorate also expressed support for this proposal in its inspection report on the policing of protests.
The provisions in Clauses 56 to 58 and 62 have been repeatedly and often deliberately mischaracterised by commentators and others. The policing of protests has always involved balancing the rights of protesters with those of the wider public who may be adversely affected by a protest. These measures do not stop noisy protests—far from it. The overwhelming majority of protests will continue, as now, without any conditions being attached, whether in relation to the generation of noise or otherwise. But it is right that, where a protest crosses the line in terms of causing disproportionate harm or disruption to others, the police must have the necessary powers to take effective action. My noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe talked about some of the problems on trains, the Tube and other places, and we will get on to those later, but these clauses do just that and no more—updating laws that are now more than 35 years old.
We have listened to the concerns raised by noble Lords about the regulation-making powers in these clauses and have amended the Bill accordingly in line with the recommendations from the DPRRC and the Constitution Committee. I ask noble Lords that, with these changes, the House now supports these clauses and rejects Amendment 115.