Public Order Bill

Commons Amendments and Reason

Motion A

That this House do not insist on its Amendments 6B, 6C, 6D, 6E and 6F to which the Commons have disagreed for their Reason 6G.

6G: Because it is not necessary to amend the stop and search powers contained in Clause 11.

My Lords, the Public Order Bill is about giving the police the tools they need to tackle the highly disruptive protest tactics we have seen in recent months which have blocked ambulances, delayed passengers from making important journeys and held the capital to ransom. We have had a fruitful debate over the course of the last few months about the contents of the Bill. Your Lordships have undoubtedly given the Bill the scrutiny the British public want and expect, and important compromises have been made along the way which I hope have satisfied the House. I do not intend to detain noble Lords for longer than necessary by repeating those debates. The British people are fed up with inaction and it is time that the Bill became law.

As your Lordships will be aware, this House voted to amend Clause 11—

“Powers to stop and search without suspicion”—

in a variety of ways. As I explained when those amendments were first considered, we cannot support them. This has been reiterated by the other place, and it is why we have brought Motion A. The amendments, among other things, vary the timescale and authorisation threshold for the powers, thereby creating inconsistency with the Section 60 stop and search powers which the Bill’s measures are modelled on.

I understand the argument put forward by the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, in seeking these changes—that by limiting the scope of the power you can attempt to address the disproportionality attached to it—but as the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, pointed out during the previous debates, this power “has to be practical”. With respect, I cannot see how not establishing parity with existing Section 60 powers supports that, with the unintended consequence likely to be confusion for the officers who will be using them.

Turning to Motion A1 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, which seeks to further alter the Bill’s powers to stop and search without permission, first, I remind the House about the legal framework that already exists for all stop and search powers. Under Section 3.8 of PACE Code A, the code of practice for powers to stop and search, officers have to give their name or identification number, police station to which they are attached and grounds for every search. These criteria are also covered in the “GOWISELY” mnemonic drilled into every officer.

Secondly, concerning the requirement for police forces to establish a charter on the use of powers, it is our view that this would cause unnecessary burden on police forces and officers. Plenty of long-established safeguards already exist for stop and search powers. Additionally, we have supported the National Police Chiefs’ Council in its publication of national guidance on the use of body-worn video. This includes encouraging forces to share footage with external scrutiny groups to support transparency and reflective practice and learning.

Moved by

At end insert “and do propose Amendments 6H and 6J in lieu—

6H: Clause 11, page 13, line 30, at end insert— “(7A) Officers exercising the powers conferred by subsection (6) must give to the subject of a search— (a) their name, (b) their badge or shoulder number, and (c) any details of the stop the officer considers relevant.”

6J: Clause 11, page 13, line 37, at end insert— “(9A) Within one year of the passage of this Act, all police forces must establish a charter on the use of the powers in this section, setting out how, when and why they will be used. (9B) The charter must— (a) be drawn up in consultation with local communities, (b) be evaluated independently, and (c) explain how Body Worn Video footage will be used. (9C) Each police force must produce an annual report on the use of the powers over the year, broken down by location. (9D) Within one month of the powers in this section being used, the authorising officer must publish a statement giving reasons.””

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.

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.