Policing and Crime Bill

My Lords, last time we were in Committee on this Bill, we were discussing injunctions and the effect that they could have on the liberty of innocent people. We debated the issue at length. These amendments relate to a different interference with people who have faced no charge and no trial process. The amendments are to enable discussion of those issues and to suggest two particular amendments that the Government might feel inclined to take up. These amendments were provoked by events in April, when two protestors from Climate Rush, the climate change organisation, glued themselves around a statue in Parliament. In fact it was a statue of an ancestor of my noble friend Lord Falkland. They glued themselves to each other; there was no damage to the statue and no other damage. They were arrested under the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005 and were given pre-charge bail conditions which stipulated that they may not talk with one another, even though they were clearly friends, and may not come within l kilometre of Parliament. The difficulty with that is that they were treated as guilty of something before that had even been established. These amendments deal with three kinds of bail: first, pre-charge bail at a police station, when there is enough evidence to charge under Section 37(7) (a) or (b) of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984; secondly, pre-charge bail at a police station when there is not enough evidence to charge; and, thirdly, "street bail"—pre-charge bail given by a constable away from the police station under Sections 30 to 30D of PACE. I am particularly concerned about the power to apply conditions to pre-charge bail, because pre-charge bail conditions are control orders by another name. The power to impose bail conditions has grown steadily over recent years. They were introduced under the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994. I would not dispute the fact that bail conditions for serious crimes are necessary. However, these powers were extended to pre-charge bail under the Criminal Justice Act 2003—but only in cases where there is sufficient evidence to charge an individual, so that was still probably within the bounds of reasonableness. Finally, the Police and Justice Act 2006 extended it to all cases where a person is bailed before charges are brought, even when there may not be sufficient evidence to charge them, including street bail. The Minister will remember that, in June, I tabled a series of Written PQs to ask how often pre-charge bail conditions are used and how often successful applications are made to vary conditions. He may remember his reply, that: ""The information requested is not collected centrally".—[Official Report, 23/6/09; Col. WA265.]" However, I did some research and it seems that the police are using these powers more, because at Westminster magistrates’ court there have seen an increasing number of applications to vary pre-charge bail conditions in the past six months. That suggests either that more conditions are being imposed or that more unreasonable conditions are being imposed, as in the example I gave of the two friends who were not even able to talk to each other after being arrested. The Westminster magistrates’ court also explained that no legal aid is available for applications to vary pre-charge bail conditions, so it is very expensive—indeed, it is impossible for people of limited means—to try to change the restrictions. Neither is there a statutory time limit on how long such conditions will last, nor any explicit restrictions on the sort of offences that they can apply to. The minimum restrictions that the Committee should expect the Government to put into statute are the length of time the conditions would last, and explicitly on applicable offences. A date must be given for a return to the police station, with conditions applying until that date. However, if the subject returns at the appointed date and the police have not completed their investigations, the conditions can be extended. I turn to street bail, which is a particularly worrying aspect of this. When bail is granted at the police station, the custody sergeant takes on a semi-judicial role in approving bail conditions. A custody sergeant has much more expertise and has had specific training, but an officer on the street is in the thick of it. He may not have had that training, and at that moment he may, indeed, not be able to make an objective judgment about the situation. It appears that some police forces agree with this assessment. Hampshire constabulary, for example, states in its procedural guidelines that, ""Whilst the legislation has been amended to allow for conditions to be imposed upon ‘street bail’ this facility is not available within the Hampshire Constabulary area and officers may not impose conditions on such bail"." Hampshire police say that they made a strategic decision not to use the powers to attach conditions to street bail because, without extensive training, officers would not be able to use the power proportionately—a very telling statement, and one that I hope the Minister will weigh. The officer also thought that a number of other forces have made the same decision not to allow officers to apply conditions to street bail. Thus, by using these powers to curtail peaceful protest—an issue we shall come back to in discussing some of the amendments on protest—the Met are completely out of step with how other forces are acting. My amendments put forward three different ways to deal with what is at present an unacceptable power. The common intention behind the three is to prevent the conditions from being used as a kind of improvised punishment or deterrence for people that the police simply feel are doing something wrong, instead of making them face a criminal charge and prosecution. Amendment 152ZB would limit the use of pre-charge bail condition to cases where an officer has reason to believe that a serious offence has taken place or is likely to do so. These are important amendments. During the passage of the Bill that relaxed these provisions, my noble friend Lord Dholakia said: ""The conditions themselves could have a more severe impact on the suspect than any sentence imposed for the minor offence … there is a risk that these conditions could be used in lieu of a criminal charge and prosecution. If reasonable time limits were imposed, it would remove that risk, requiring the police to investigate the case as quickly as possible and to decide whether to charge the suspect".—[Official Report, 4/7/06; col. 192.]" My noble friend was absolutely right. It is a pity that we did not manage to persuade the House of the validity of his argument. However, on the basis of the further examples that I have given, I hope that the Committee will now rethink the issue. I beg to move.