My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Sharpe, for his continued engagement over this difficult issue and indeed the further concessions that he has clearly made. I am sure they are very welcome as part of the deliberations between us.
We need to start by considering why we are here and what today’s debate is about. First, it is not about not having suspicionless stop and search. We believed, as did many in this Chamber, that the whole of Clause 11 should have been taken out—that suspicionless stop and search for protests should have been taken out of the Bill. But we lost that; that vote was lost. With this being a revising Chamber, we believed it was necessary to consider whether further mitigation of Clause 11 was therefore needed, given that it was going to stay in the Bill.
But the Government threw out our mitigation completely, although the Minister has now come back with some words about communication. We wanted that point about communication in the Bill and said that the seniority of the officer allowing the suspicionless stop and search should be increased, but that was thrown out. The noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, can no doubt speak for himself but I remind the Minister, who prayed him in aid, that the noble Lord voted for my amendment at our last debate—the Minister can check Hansard. He ought to recognise that. After the Government threw out our mitigation, the Casey review and the report from the Children’s Commissioner into stop and search of children came along.
Let me deal with some of the things that I think the Minister will say in response. He will throw up smoke—when in trouble, the Government always do. I suspect there has been a huge debate in the Home Office on suspicionless stop and search at protests, and the
Government have conceded that they perhaps ought to communicate a bit better. As he has said when we have debated this before, the Minister will no doubt say that the public support stop and search for knife crime, gun crime and so on. This Bill has nothing to do with that at all. Of course I support suspicionless stop and search if it stops stabbings, murders and serious violence, but Section 60 of the 1994 Act is completely irrelevant to the Bill. Yet the Minister in the other place used the public support for stop and search because it stops serious violence as a reason for including suspicionless stop and search in the Bill. It is completely irrelevant.
As was raised in a previous debate, even the Conservative- led Government in 2012 changed suspicionless stop and search in respect of terrorism because they believed that the power in the 2000 Act went too far. To their credit, the then Prime Minister Cameron and Home Secretary Theresa May said that it had gone too far and that they would restrict it, narrowing the criteria even for terrorism. I have not checked who was in the Committee that passed it, but some noble Lords sitting on the Conservative Benches will have voted for it in the other place—quite rightly; it should be a matter of pride that they did so, even for terrorism.
This suspicionless stop and search power does not relate to terrorism or serious violence. It relates to protest —whether someone has a padlock or some glue. If it has been agreed by an inspector, not the chief superintendent, you can search people without suspicion on the basis that they may have those things in their pockets. It is a complete overreach of the law, one of the most serious powers that this Parliament can give the police to use on the streets. I cannot believe that anybody thought it would be used for protests. If the British public, all of sudden, not just around Parliament but in the middle of another city or wherever, find themselves being searched on the basis of suspicionless stop and search, they will just not believe that it is because they are at a protest, and neither will their friends, parents or family.
The Minister will no doubt say that this is all covered by PACE Code A, and indeed he has said that there will be some changes to that code. That is a complacent response to the scale of what we are facing. It ignores the evidence that those two recent reports have put before your Lordships; it flies in the face of those reports.
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My Motion A1 has laid out all the recommendations in there, based on the Casey review. If I were the Government I would have said, as a statement of intent and good will toward the Casey review, and as a Government who are using that review, “We are shocked by its findings. We want to support the vast majority of hard-working police officers, and to do that we as a Government are going to make a statement of intent that this is a line in the sand and the way we will go forward to support the police in a better future”.
We cannot ignore statistics—others will no doubt speak more movingly about some of them—and it is worth reminding ourselves of some of the statistics in the Casey review. Sir Mark Rowley is not ignoring them, and police officers will not ignore them, but they are worth stating given the current situation with
stop and search. It is relevant to this because they show the disproportionality under existing stop and search regulation and law, and we are seeking to expand that with respect to protests. The recent reports examining every year since 2016 show that those between 11 and 61 who appear to be black have been at least five times more likely to be stopped and searched by the Met than their white counterparts. This is unacceptable, and we propose to extend suspicionless stop and search for protests? I do not believe that. Stop and search for serious violence? Yes, do that, I understand that—but where are we going with this?
The Government have accepted the Casey review; they have quibbles about one or two bits of it, but they have accepted it. A recent report examining the experience of black communities nationally regarding stop and search says that while 77% of black adults support it in relation to suspicion of carrying a weapon, less than half of those who have been stopped and searched felt that the police had communicated well enough with them. The Government are seeking to do something about that, but you can go on—statistic after statistic laid out in the Casey review highlights the disproportionality of stop and search. What my Motion seeks to do is to build on the recommendations in the Casey review which seek to do something about this, and I would have thought the Government would have embraced that. We have also had the Children’s Commissioner’s report, which as we know came out a couple of days ago. It listed the number of strip-searches of children and some of the issues raised by that.
I have laid out the Motion before you. The Minister says that everything is in PACE Code A, and I am sure others will also say that. All that my Motion seeks to do is to say that such is the importance of this, and such is the necessity for us to draw a line in the sand, that it must be put on the face of primary legislation. It should be not in statutory guidance tucked away on page 602, but on the face of the Bill. Do not say that it is in PACE Code A because, if so, why does the noble Baroness, Lady Casey, say that there is a need for all the recommendations that she has put forward? Why are they necessary if they are already all covered? Proposed new subsection (7A)(a), (b), and (c) to Clause 11 is lifted straight from her report, yet the Minister will say, “It is okay, we do not need it because it is in PACE Code A”. I am lifting this out of the Casey review to say, “This is what is needed, and this is what she recommends”—and that is what I am saying to this Chamber that we should vote on.
The other points are about establishing communication and consulting with various communities and looking at the figures on how this is doing. I highlight proposed new subsection 9B(c), which says that the charter must
“explain how Body Worn Video footage will be used.”
I will not go through each one, but one of the reasons I put that in there is because the Casey review said that there are stop and searches taking place where cameras are not turned on. It may be in the PACE review that they should be turned on, but sometimes they are not. We should put this in the Bill, in primary legislation, and take it forward.
No doubt many others wish to contribute. I finish where I started: this is about suspicionless stop and search, which in certain areas to do with serious violence or terrorism may be necessary. It cannot be
necessary in a free and democratic society to have suspicionless stop and search for protest-related offences. This is overreach by the Government, and noble Lords should support my Motion as a further way to try to mitigate the impact of a clause that should not really be there in the first place.