Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill

I shall be very brief and make only a couple of comments, because the Minister will need a few minutes to speak, and my hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) will no doubt wish to respond to the debate for a couple of minutes before 5 o'clock. This has been a good debate—we also had one in Committee, when hon. Members on both sides raised many of the issues that we have debated this afternoon. The Opposition support the Government in the repeal of the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005 provisions. On both sides of the House, there is a general recognition that despite the intention, those provisions went much further than any of us would have wanted. For example, a woman was arrested for reading out the names of the war dead. Many of us—perhaps all of us—thought that inappropriate. The Opposition agree with the repeal of the SOCPA provisions, but our position has always been that there is a need to balance the right to protest with the right of others to enjoy Parliament, and to protect their freedom, as the hon. Member for Cities of London and Westminster (Mr Field) said. We want to balance freedoms and to protect the right to protest. In Committee, we concentrated on the workability of the Bill. I say to the Minister that considerable problems remain. I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington and my hon. Friends. He has carefully drafted, obviously with some help, a set of alternatives. I do not agree with his alternative, but he has also sought to address some of the problems that the Government seek to address. I am surprised that the Minister has tabled only two Government amendments—57 and 58—to deal with one of the major problems with the Bill, namely that reasonable force can be used not only by a constable, but by an authorised officer of the council. In the Opposition's view, the amendments simply do not go far enough. If my hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington were minded to press amendment 185 to a Division, he would find support on the Opposition Front Bench. Why do the Government amendments not go far enough? The Bill still allows an authorised officer to do all sorts of things with respect to activities in the prohibited area of Parliament square. The hon. Member for Cambridge (Dr Huppert) pointed out that even with the Government amendment, the Bill still gives the authorised officer—the council employee—significant powers to seize and retain property in the area described in clause 144(1). That is an extension of the power that one would expect authorised officers to have in any circumstances. This is the policing of public protest—not littering, loud music or neighbour nuisance—and the involvement of anybody other than a warranted police officer would be a dangerous extension of power to people who are not servants of the Crown. The devil will be in the detail. There is still not an adequate definition—the hon. Member for Northampton North (Michael Ellis) and I debated this in Committee—of ““sleeping equipment””. Lawyers will have a field day over this. The hon. Gentleman is right that we would expect an officer to act reasonably and so on, but there will be endless litigation over what reasonableness means in the Bill. What does ““sleeping equipment”” mean? Sleeping out? Sleeping on concrete? Is the concrete ““sleeping equipment””? That is the sort of debate that we have started to get into? What would be the consequences of displacing this sort of activity? My hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington made this point. The hon. Member for Cities of London and Westminster will find that if we deal with the protest outside, it will simply move across the road or down the road, and similar problems will persist. In repealing the legislation—we support the repeal of SOCPA—the Government need to be extremely careful that they do not find themselves in exactly the same situation as the previous Government: with unworkable legislation that simply results in many court actions as people seek to exercise their right to protest.