Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill

My Lords, I follow that by saying that this is a particularly important section of the Bill. My noble friend Lady Hamwee laid out a little bit of the history of this legislation. Last time, with the SOCPA provisions, which are now being repealed, Parliament got it very wrong—although it got it wrong in a panic, as a reaction to terrorism. There are still things in the Bill that are deeply worrying, which is why it merits scrutiny. Having said that, I welcome the fact that the Government are repealing the SOCPA clauses. In speaking to Amendment 244ZZA, I shall give an example of one thing that should really worry us. My amendment suggests that we should remove from the Bill the words ““or is about to””. If somebody is doing a prohibited activity, it is quite plain that the police can give them a direction to stop them doing it. However, how will the police know that the person is about to do a prohibited activity? Is the policeman a mind reader? Can he or she guess what that person is about to do? There is something slightly more worrying behind these words. It disguises what we now have in this country—that is, two classes of citizen. The vast majority of the country do not fall into this class, but there is a second bunch of people who are classed as domestic extremists. Some of them may be in your Lordships' House, because to be a domestic extremist, for which there is no legal definition, you simply have to be somebody whom the police think has regularly gone on protests. I do not know the rest of the criteria that the police use to judge, and I do not believe that the Home Office is very aware of them, because when I asked a series of Written Questions about this to the Minister’s predecessor I was told that there is no legal definition. There is a database, and people can find out if they are on the database if they apply under the Freedom of Information Act. However, of course they would not know to apply, because most people would not suspect that they were on it. This year we have also had the issue of the somewhat out-of-control undercover surveillance of activists. I am very glad that HMIC is currently carrying out a review of operational accountability of undercover work of the national public order intelligence unit, but we have not had the results yet of that review. In addition, the Metropolitan police force has just acquired some suspect-mapping software called Geotime, which can take account of the activity done by domestic extremists in their everyday lives. For example, it can follow social networking when they use their sites, as well their mobile use, cash withdrawals and sat-nav use. The police can build up thus an entire picture of somebody who is not a criminal or somebody who has been convicted of anything but someone who is classed as a domestic extremist, for which, as I say, there is no legal definition. It is quite worrying. Those people, the domestic extremists, have not necessarily done anything criminal—nothing except to be known protesters and activists. In other words, they are people who might do something. That is what worries me about the wording, "““or is about to do””." What particularly concerns me is that if that class of person appears in Parliament Square, they will be given a direction not even to put their blanket down and not to do any of the things that could be classed as a prohibited activity and will be subject to a certain degree of judgment by the police. Why is this particularly important? It is important for all the reasons that my noble friend gave in introducing this group of amendments: Parliament Square is an iconic place in which to protest and to demonstrate. More than that, it is an extremely iconic place internationally. At a time when the rest of the world is seeing protests put down in incredibly violent ways, it is incumbent on us to make sure that, being a flagship of democracy, we can demonstrate freely—and that we, as the legislature, demonstrate that we take incredibly seriously the rights and freedoms of our citizens. I do not want to see in the Bill little weasel words such as, "““or is about to do””." We need this legislation to be as clear as possible and for the freedom to demonstrate to be as enabled as possible.