Crime and Policing Bill

Richard Burgon Excerpts

Consideration of Lords amendments
Tuesday 14th April 2026 Commons Chamber

[Sarah Jones]

Let me just finish explaining what we are doing and then I will come on to picketing.

If there is a risk of serious public disorder, senior police officers can impose conditions. At the moment, they can consider cumulative disruption as one of the aspects they take into account when deciding whether to impose conditions. To be clear, imposing conditions means things like moving where a march is going, limiting the hours that it can work under or limiting the number of people. They can already take into account cumulative disruption, but we are changing that so that they must take that into account—they must think about it. That does not change the guardrails of sections 12 and 14 of the Public Order Act; it just says that at the moment they can consider cumulative disruption, but in future they will consider it. That is the amendment.

On this Government’s belief in the right to strike and to protest, of course that is sacrosanct and nothing has changed in our view on that. We do not believe that this legislation will stop the right to picket. I know that lots of Members will have views on that and will not be satisfied, but we will always defend the right to strike, and we have absolutely no desire to infringe lawful picketing at all.

[Richard Burgon (Leeds East) (Lab)]

Is the Minister aware of the deep alarm, both on the Back Benches and outside Parliament, at what amounts to a further draconian attack by the Government on the right to peaceful protest, which is a civil liberty, and about the fact that the Government are trying to push the measure through without a proper vote for MPs, as they did when they made the huge error of proscribing Palestine Action?

[Sarah Jones]

I do not agree with my hon. Friend. This was announced by the Home Secretary after the Heaton Park attack, when lots of protests took place immediately after the attack. The cumulative disruption and the impact that had was there for all to see. We have no desire to reduce people’s right to protest, and nor would we ever. There is a lot of misinformation about this change in the law, implying that we are in some way increasing the bans on protest. To be clear, the rules on banning protests are very strong, and bans can be introduced only in very significant circumstances. Indeed, we have no rules to ban assembly, so the idea that we are banning protest is just wrong.

We are responding to communities who have recently been feeling the pain of repeated protests, sometimes outside faith organisations—synagogues, in particular. In those cases, we believe that the police should look at the impact of cumulative disruption when they, and not the Government, are deciding whether to impose conditions on those marches.