Water Cannons

Lord Paddick Excerpts

Wednesday 12th February 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Paddick (LD)]

My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, for enabling us to debate this issue. I agree with a number of remarks made by the noble Lord, Lord Harris of Haringey, although unlike the other two previous speakers I shall try to avoid making party-political points.

During my 30 years of service for the Metropolitan Police I was involved in public order policing at every rank. I started off with the Grunwick trade dispute, was involved in the Lewisham, Southall and Brixton riots, and was later trained as one of a cadre of advanced, trained public order senior police officers. Not only was I trained in dealing with serious public disorder, but I have been involved in it.

It was following those incidents to which I have referred that the Metropolitan Police acquired and tested water cannon at its public order training centre, at that time in Greenwich, in the 1980s. We found that the water cannon we had were too slow and lacked manoeuvrability. They took too long to fill up from the mains water supply and, once full, the water lasted only a few minutes in use. It was decided that water cannon was not a practical option and the idea was abandoned.

There is one, and only one situation, where, in my professional experience, I believe that water cannon may be of use to the police service, and that is to create distance between large stationary crowds throwing missiles at, or in hand-to-hand combat with, police officers who are trying to hold a line. The only significant example I can think of, as mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Harris of Haringey, is the Countryside Alliance protest of 2004 where, in order to try to create distance between police officers and protesters who appeared to want to invade Parliament, terrible injuries were inflicted on the crowd by officers using batons. Water cannon might have been effective in reducing those injuries in those circumstances. While the injuries were regrettable, Parliament being prevented from carrying out its democratic functions when in session would have been worse.

However, the question has to be asked whether water cannon would have been used in such a situation, even if the Met had them available. As the noble Lord, Lord Harris of Haringey, rightly pointed out, the police on that occasion were caught out by the strength of feeling and the ferocity of the attack on their lines. They had no idea that what they believed would be a peaceful protest would result in such a determined effort to overrun them. If they had thought this might happen, they would have put police cordons at the entrances to Parliament Square and across Abingdon Street, and used a network of barriers as well as police lines to split and contain the crowd. If the crowd had been kept at some distance from its target, it would probably not have been so determined to surge into Parliament. My point is this: rarely do events happen on the UK mainland where water cannon would be useful. Those situations usually result when the police are surprised by the ferocity of the situation, and in such situations water cannon would not be deployed in any event.

We are supposed to be reassured by the Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis and the Mayor of London’s comments that water cannon would be,

“rarely used and rarely seen”.

However, as the noble Lord, Lord Harris, said, if they are rarely to be seen, they will not be on standby at every demonstration in case things get out of hand. This begs two questions: why, then, are water cannon used by the Police Service of Northern Ireland and why is the Metropolitan Police Service asking for them now? I come to somewhat different conclusions on that from those of the noble Lord, Lord Harris. Water cannon are used in Northern Ireland reluctantly when, all too frequently, the police come under attack trying to enforce the route of a march, or when two communities attack each other at well known, traditional flashpoints. Such situations are, sadly, not rare and, sadly, predictable.

As Sir Hugh Orde, the former chief constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland, and now the president of ACPO, said in 2011, he used water cannon in Northern Ireland “with a heavy heart” when his officers were,

“being attacked by blast bombs and live fire”.

Quite frankly, even in the riots that swept London and some other cities in 2011, we did not see the level of violence that has been seen in Northern Ireland, and what we need is a proportionate response to violence on the streets. In 2011, Sir Hugh Orde said:

“What we have seen so far from these riots, involving fast moving and small groups of lawless people, is a situation that merits the opposite end of public-order policing”,

from the use of water cannon. I agree.

Sir Hugh Orde has carried out a rapid U-turn—something a water cannon is incapable of doing—by now supporting the use of water cannon on the UK mainland. Appearing before the London Assembly recently, he still described water cannon as “unwieldy” and “huge lumps”, but said that they could be used only in certain locations, such as:

“In Whitehall, outside Downing Street, the Houses of Parliament, there are places where they can be used in terms of geography”.

The whole premise for the introduction of water cannon is to prevent the sort of disorder we saw in the 2011 riots. Mark Rowley, assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, who has already been mentioned, said that water cannon would be of particular use when there was a clear target, citing the burning of shops in Croydon during the riots and scenes in Millbank during the student protests as examples. The Mayor of London, in the same meeting, in flat contradiction to the assistant commissioner, when asked about the London riots and water cannon, said that it,

“would not have made a blind bit of difference”.

Nor would he have authorised their use during the student protests. Despite this, he supports and is prepared to pay for Metropolitan Police water cannon. That does not seem to make much sense.

Let us be clear, policing in this country is based on consent—on the public co-operating with and working with the police. The police must do all they can to appear approachable, to be as much like ordinary people as possible, and to be citizens in uniform doing what we would do if we had their powers and training. What they must not do is appear to be some alien force that has so little respect that the only way they can maintain order is by force and the use of such weapons as water cannon.

Water cannon could usefully be deployed only in very rare situations, and even then the police are unlikely to have them available because these are situations that they were not expecting. Almost without exception, conventional public-order tactics coupled with good intelligence and pre-planning have been and will continue to be successful. Licensing the use of water cannon, their purchase and use on the UK mainland would be disproportionate and damaging to the reputation of the police service. Whichever way we look at it, water cannon are just not worth it.