Public Order Bill

Debate between Lord Hogan-Howe and Lord Paddick

Consideration of Commons amendments
Tuesday 28th March 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Paddick (LD)]

My Lords, I will not repeat what I said last time, but since last time, as the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester, said, we have had the Casey review. The noble Baroness, Lady Casey of Blackstock, is quite clear about what she thinks about stop and search. In that review, she says, as the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Sentamu, has already said:

“The use of stop and search in London by the Met needs a fundamental reset. The Met should establish a charter with Londoners on how and when stop and search is used, with an agreed rationale, and provide an annual account of its use by area, and by team undertaking stop and searches”.


It is unfortunate that the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, disagrees with the noble Baroness, Lady Casey, in coming to that conclusion. Elsewhere in the report she says:

“Stop and search—”

[Lord Hogan-Howe (CB)]

I think I am entitled to my opinion and to make the point which I made. I explained that I could live with a national charter, but I dispute the need for a local one, which ends up with the possibility, even if it is nitpicking, of inconsistency across the country, where we expect consistency. That was merely my point.

[Lord Paddick (LD)]

The noble Lord is of course entitled to his opinion, and so am I. I said it was unfortunate that the noble Lord disagreed with the noble Baroness, Lady Casey. That is my opinion.

Elsewhere in the report, the noble Baroness says:

“Stop and search and vehicle stops are justified


—she meant by the police—

“through their compliance with the law, ignoring how such incidents are perceived, the impact on individuals, and the wider corrosive impact of trust in the police.”

The Minister mentioned body-worn video and so does the noble Baroness, Lady Casey. She says that the police want to use body-worn video to justify continuing to do what they have done in the past rather than what she says is needed, which is a fundamental reset. Body-worn video is not the answer. That should not be used by the police to justify continued disproportionality in their use of the power.

The noble Baroness further states:

“Black Londoners are under-protected—disproportionately the victims of homicides and domestic abuse; and over-policed—facing disproportionate use of stop and search and use of force by the Met. A huge and radical step is required to regain police legitimacy and trust among London’s Black communities.”


“Overpoliced and underprotected” is what a black policeman said to the Macpherson inquiry 25 years ago. It was not the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Sentamu, but another black churchman giving evidence to that inquiry; here we are with another inquiry saying exactly the same thing 25 years later.

The noble Baroness, Lady Casey, cites a Home Affairs Select Committee report from 2021, which reported that, in the previous year, the equivalent of one in four black males aged 15 to 24 in London were stopped and searched in a three-month period. The noble Baroness says:

“The facts relating to stop and search are … around 70 to 80% lead to no further action … the more stop and searches are done, the greater the proportion of no further actions.”


The noble Baroness cites a 2019 research study that questioned the efficacy of stop and search as a tactic of policing. She quotes from that report, as do I. It says:

“Overall, our analysis of ten years’ worth of London-wide data suggests that, although stop and search had a weak association with some forms of crime, this effect was at the outer margins of statistical and social significance.”


The Minister repeatedly says that the power that we are debating today—the power to stop and search without suspicion—is based on the existing power under Section 60 of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994. The 2019 research goes on to say:

“When we looked separately at S. 60 searches, it did not appear that a sudden surge in use had any effect on the underlying trend in … violent crime.”


The noble Baroness, Lady Casey, concludes:

“Stop and search is currently deployed by the Met at the cost of legitimacy, trust and, therefore consent. … It has damaged trust. If the Met is unable to explain and justify its disproportionate use and the impacts of these, then it needs a fundamental reset.”


The majority of stop and search nationally—between 50% and 60%—is carried out in London. The majority—over 60%—of protests happen in London. The majority of times these powers are used will be in London. Stop and search in London needs a fundamental reset, and yet this Government have ignored this House and are giving the police even more opportunity to undermine their legitimacy, trust and, therefore, consent, by giving the police more powers to stop and search.

Without consent, the whole system of policing in this country is undermined, and that is what this Government risk with this legislation. We support the Motion in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, and will vote for it, but we believe these new stop and search powers should not be part of the Bill. That is what we have always said and what we maintain.

The noble Lord, Lord Sandhurst, cited various examples of what I think he called “disproportionate protests”. All the examples he gave are of criminal offences for which people can be arrested. The police do not need stop and search powers in addition to those powers of arrest.

The noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, cited the 2017 riots and his view, his opinion, was that they were aggravated by the police use of stop and search. Lord Scarman said exactly the same thing about the 1981 Brixton riots. Will we never learn? I urge this House to vote for Motion A1.

Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill

Debate between Lord Hogan-Howe and Lord Paddick

Report stage
Monday 17th January 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Paddick (LD)]

My Lords, as a former police officer, I must tell the House that leaving the failure to abide by such a duty of candour to the police misconduct process, as the Government are asking us to do, is inadequate, as the decision on whether to investigate or take misconduct proceedings will be left in the hands of the police themselves.

If it is in the interest of the police that something is covered up, they will not investigate and they will not take action against the officers responsible. As the noble Baroness, Lady O’Loan, has just explained, her experience of the inquiry into the Daniel Morgan murder demonstrates beyond reasonable doubt the need for this amendment, and we support it.

[Lord Hogan-Howe (CB)]

My Lords, I have not thought an awful lot about this, but the principle, which seems unarguable, is that police officers should have a duty of candour. They are not the only ones who should; many other groups might want to adopt a similar approach, but so far as the police service is concerned, which is what this amendment is about, it is rather unarguable. How it works ought to be clearly thought through, which I guess is why the Government are consulting on it. The only question I had, which I have just discussed briefly with the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas, is how this would work with the criminal disclosure process and how that would impact on any ongoing prosecution or, obviously, any separate public inquiry. However, that is a matter of implementation rather than of principle. In general terms, I see no reason why it should not be implemented for the police; perhaps others may consider it too.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Hogan-Howe (CB)]

If someone is stopped and searched without good cause, either maliciously or for any other reason, I do not care whether they were a criminal in the past or a good person; it is a bad thing. Regardless of their background, there has to be a good cause for that stop and search unless the law says that it should be done without cause.

As I was saying about prevention orders, the reason that they were considered was that the rate at which people were being released from bail to return to the protest was overwhelming the ability of the police to deal with the disruption. That is what is being looked at, to see whether there is a possibility of exerting some inhibiting behaviour on the protesters. It would still not be easy. If protesters turn out in sufficient numbers, they will always overwhelm the police—that is the nature of a democracy—but in these disruptions, quite often relatively small numbers have disrupted many people and, frankly, put their lives at risk. So in fact it is a serious matter and the Government’s proposals are fairly reasonable. There may be things that people can argue at the edges, but I do not object to this and I support the Government’s proposals.

[Lord Paddick (LD)]

My Lords, perhaps I could deal with the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, to begin with. My recollection is that the report on public order from Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services showed that many officers did not want additional powers to deal with locking on. That is in the report. My experience is that the police are getting better and better at dealing with locking on, particularly people supergluing themselves to roadways—people are not now glued to the roadway for very long.

On hospitals that are on minor roads, the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, made it quite clear that he wanted the increased penalty of imprisonment for highway obstruction on the strategic road network where there is no realistic way around a blockage that has been put in. A hospital may be on a minor road, but there are other ways of getting to it, and I do not feel that that argument holds water. I will come to the noble Lord’s comments about the serious disruption orders shortly.

The Minister said that these amendments were debated in Committee. That debate started at 11.50 pm. The Minister stood up to make her closing remarks at 1 am. Does she really think that that is serious consideration and debate of these measures?

These government amendments were a hurried response to the Home Secretary’s knee-jerk, populist reaction to Insulate Britain protests at the Conservative Party conference. Consideration of this part of the Bill had to be taken out of order, to give civil servants time to cobble together these last-minute, ill-conceived, badly thought-through acts of desperation, introduced into this House late at night on the last day of Committee without any consideration by the other place. If the Government are determined to bring in these draconian, antidemocratic laws, reminiscent of Cold War Eastern bloc police states, they should withdraw them now and introduce them as a separate Bill to allow the democratically elected House time to consider them properly.

We oppose all these government amendments, for the reasons I set out in Committee—albeit in the early hours of the morning—and I refer noble Lords to the Official Report. Given the hour, we will vote against the most egregious measures: Amendment 151, which is clearly targeted at climate protesters; Amendment 155, which gives police the power to stop and search anyone and everyone in the vicinity of a protest, including innocent passers-by; and Amendment 159, by which the police can apply for an order to ban people from their democratic right to protest, even when they have never been to a protest in their life, let alone been convicted of any offence in connection with a protest. That is the power in these measures—you do not even have to have been to a protest to be banned from future ones. You do not even have to be convicted of an offence in connection with a protest before you can be banned from going to protests.

If the Official Opposition decide to vote on Amendment 148, on locking on, we will support them. We will also vote in favour of Amendment 150A, to restrict imprisonment for highway obstruction to blocking motorways and other parts of the strategic road network.

The anti-protest measures in the original Bill were dreadful. These measures, and the way they have been introduced, are outrageous.

Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill

Debate between Lord Hogan-Howe and Lord Paddick

Committee stage
Wednesday 24th November 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Paddick (LD)]

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.

[Lord Hogan-Howe (CB)]

I think the noble Lord will agree that the number of officers put into an event is usually down to intelligence about the nature of the event, which leads to the conditions, which then leads to the numbers. I am not sure it is down to the conditions; in my view, the conditions are always subject to the character of the protest.

[Lord Paddick (LD)]

I understand what the noble Lord is saying, and I shall develop my argument further.

I have referred to away-weekend table-top exercises that I attended as part of keeping my “certificate to practise”, if you will, my continuing professional development as an advanced trained public order senior officer. We were told the maximum number of police officers, horses and so forth that were available to us and we were often presented with scenarios where the level of disorder anticipated led one to contemplate banning the protest entirely or imposing severe conditions. We were divided into syndicates which separately presented their proposals for dealing with the scenario. Invariably, syndicates that advocated an outright ban or severe conditions found that they ran out of resources to implement the plan. I do not know whether the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, has benefited from this sort of advanced public order training, but that is my experience. He has his experience, and I have mine.

[Lord Hogan-Howe (CB)]

I am not quite sure of the noble Lord’s point. I go back to my original point: the nature of the intelligence tells you what the event is going to be, which drives the conditions and the number of officers. Nothing he has said has changed my view.

[Lord Paddick (LD)]

My Lords, a peaceful protest with no anticipated violent infiltrators and an agreed route, however large, can be policed with a minimum number of police officers, a lot of traffic cones and miles of white tape. Imposing conditions that the organisers are resisting is likely to require double to five times as many police officers, as confrontation must be anticipated and the conditions imposed by force if required, such as a march wanting to take a different route.