My Lords, the duty of any Government is to protect the safety and interests of the law-abiding majority. This means working to prevent and reduce crime, giving the police the tools they need and ensuring that those who break the law
face proportionate consequences of their actions. Fighting crime and keeping communities safe is at the forefront of the Government’s agenda. That is why we have invested £17 billion in policing. It is why we are running a police uplift programme that is well on the way to recruiting 20,000 additional officers, and why we introduced the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act, which received Royal Assent in April.
While that Act has given the police some of the tools they need better to manage disruptive protests, we were frustrated in our attempts to implement the full suite of measures needed to ensure that the public can go about their daily lives free from serious disruption or harm. The Public Order Bill therefore builds on the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act to bolster our ability to crack down on disruptive and dangerous tactics of the kind we are seeing deployed all too frequently.
Specifically, the Bill targets acts by a minority of people that cause serious disruption to the hard-working majority, such as those we have seen in recent months that have brought roads to a standstill, blocked emergency services and forced thousands of police officers away from the critical work of protecting their communities. In October alone, the Metropolitan Police made more than 650 arrests in relation to Just Stop Oil activity in London.
When speaking about some of this disruption, Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley noted that his force’s response over 11 days of protests had been the equivalent of more than 2,150 officer days. That, I am sure noble Lords agree, is a striking number. It encapsulates why it is so crucial that we act. The police perform a unique role in our society; theirs is undoubtedly a job with many different strands. These include public order, but it cannot be right that so much of their time and resources are taken up by tiresome and disruptive stunts that, far from advancing the protesters’ cause, serve only to infuriate everyone else.
Peaceful protest is a fundamental part of our democracy. We will never agree on everything, which is why vigorous but sensible debate is something we hold so dear. What we cannot and should not accept is a situation in which the lives and livelihoods of decent, law-abiding citizens are impeded by the actions of a selfish and reckless few. The public are fed up with what they see happening day after day, and who can blame them? It is now up to us, as parliamentarians, to act in their best interests and get this crucial Bill on the statute book.
I will now speak to the measures set out in the Bill. First, the Bill introduces a new criminal offence of locking on, accompanied by a further criminal offence of going equipped to lock on, criminalising the tactic of intentionally causing disruption by locking on to busy roads, buildings or scaffolding. Locking on is as risky as it is disruptive, endangering not only the protesters but the police removal teams. I was therefore pleased to hear the leader of the Opposition confirm last week that his party would press ahead with tougher prison sentences for protesters who glue themselves to roads.
Secondly, the Bill introduces a new criminal offence of tunnelling, being present in a tunnel and going equipped to tunnel, making it clear that the protest
tactic of building and occupying tunnels in order to disrupt legitimate activity will not be tolerated. HS2 has been targeted on multiple occasions with tunnels that have caused enormous cost to the project, with three removal operations alone costing in excess of £10 million. But it is not just about the costs. Tunnelling is dangerous and reckless, endangering not just those who occupy the tunnels but the responding emergency workers. We cannot wait to act until someone is seriously injured or worse.
Thirdly, the Bill establishes new offences for obstructing major transport works and interfering with key national infrastructure, reflecting the serious impact of such acts and our determination to tackle them. I have already touched on some of the disruption to projects such as HS2. HS2 estimates that sustained protester action has led to additional costs to the project of more than £146 million, an amount projected to rise to £200 million by the end of next year. The offence of obstruction of major transport works therefore ensures that all stages of construction and maintenance will be protected from disruptive action, while the key national infrastructure offence will ensure that our major transport networks, energy and fuel supplies are protected.
The new offences in the Bill are accompanied by an extension of stop and search powers for police to search for and seize articles connected to protest-related offences such as locking on and tunnelling.