Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill — House of Commons, 2022-03-28
Topic: Law and Crime
Sarah Ann Jones (Labour, Centre-left): Perhaps the Minister wants to stand up and make another speech, but I will carry on. The Home Secretary is pushing amendments that the police do not want and did not ask for, and that the public do not want and did not ask for. Why are the Government so constantly out of step with public opinion Part 3 of the Bill targets protests for being too noisy. It provides a trigger for imposing conditions on public assemblies, public processions and one-person protests if a protest is too noisy. It includes vague terms such as "serious annoyance" or the subjective notion of being too noisy, which create a very low threshold for police-imposed conditions and essentially rule out entirely peaceful protests. Lord Coaker in the other place has read the Government’s definitions of "too noisy". Double glazing is a threshold. If someone is organising a demonstration and they are going to be noisy, they need to find areas where buildings have double glazing. You could not make it up, Mr Deputy Speaker One person’s "too noisy" is another person’s "not loud enough". Keeping these provisions on noise will invite all sorts of problems of interpretation for the police in trying to agree on what "too noisy" might mean. The Opposition want these provisions removed from the Bill. Lords amendment 73 removes the trigger on noise related to public processions; Lords amendment 87 removes the trigger on noise related to one-person protests; and we support the leave-out amendment 80 to remove the clause from the Bill altogether, as well as Lords amendment 80G, which accepts a definition of "serious disruption" being added to the Bill, but removes from it any mention of noise The Home Secretary and the Justice Secretary have made one small concession on noise by removing the term "serious unease" from a range of conditions under which police can restrict protest. I am glad that the Government have partially admitted that the term should never have made it on to the statute book. As the hon. Member for Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch East (Stuart C. McDonald) has said, and as Liberty and others have pointed out, however, the drafting has unintended consequences. Now the police will be able to impose conditions on protests that they believe may cause persons to suffer "alarm or distress". There no need for it even to be "serious" alarm or distress. We have a better solution, and a way for the Government to fix this legislative mess. All they have to do is support our amendments. In the MPs’ offices in 1 Parliament Street that look over Whitehall and Parliament Square, MPs—including me and my right hon. Friend the Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper), the shadow Home Secretary—and their staff work with near-constant background noise coming from protests, be it loud music, singing or speeches. Of course it is annoying, and it can be very distracting, but that is the point of protests—to capture our attention, because they have something to say. I urge Members across this House to ask themselves tonight why they would vote for legislation that could criminalise singing in the street At this late stage of the Bill’s journey, we are debating specific amendments. Members all know that voting against the Government’s public order amendment tonight does not mean voting against other measures in the Bill or stopping it from passing. The time for that has come and gone. It would simply mean that Members do not want to vote through measures that restrict peaceful protest based on noise. When Members walk through the voting Lobby this evening, I hope they have the voices of those protesting for Ukraine ringing in their ears.