As always, it is a great pleasure to follow my constituency neighbour, the hon. Member for Croydon Central (Sarah Jones). She has faced a number of Policing Ministers in her time, and I hope she faces many more during what I hope will be a very long tenure as shadow Minister.
We have heard some extremely thoughtful and well-considered contributions from both sides of the House on quite profound issues, touching as they do on conscience, free speech and a woman’s right to choose in relation to an abortion, as well as slightly more prosaic questions on policing protests. The objective of the Bill is to better balance the rights of individuals to protest—which this Government respect—with the rights of individuals to go about their daily lives without suffering from disruption. Those include the rights of parents to get their children to school, of people to get to hospital for vital treatment and of people to go to work without having their way impeded.
We have seen so many protests impeding the rights of the law-abiding majority, particularly in the latter half of 2022. There were 10-mile tailbacks on the M25. People glued themselves to roads in London and it took a long time to remove them. In December, we saw protesters walking slowly down streets, deliberately trying to cause as much disruption as possible—not so much
exercising the right to protest as seeking to make a point by deliberately inconveniencing their fellow citizens. That is not something that this Government support, which is one reason why we are now legislating. The Metropolitan police have confirmed that between October and December last year they spent 13,600 officer shifts policing such protests, at a cost of nearly £10 million. That is time and money that would be much better spent elsewhere.
6 pm
I turn to the definition of serious disruption in Lords amendment 1. Members across the House agree on the need to define it, and the Metropolitan police and the National Police Chiefs’ Council have argued for such a definition, but we do not think that Lords amendment 1 strikes quite the right balance. Instead, we have carefully studied an amendment tabled in the other place by Lord Hope of Craighead. It included a definition of serious disruption, but it was not voted on because another amendment was voted on first. We think that Lord Hope of Craighead, who is a Cross-Bench peer and a former Deputy President of the Supreme Court, got it right by proposing a threshold of “more than minor” inconvenience. The minor inconvenience that the shadow Minister described would not be caught under such a provision, because the “more than minor” threshold would not be exceeded.
As one would expect of a former Deputy President of the Supreme Court, Lord Hope of Craighead was not simply making the threshold up; he was referring to case law. I refer the House to the Court of Appeal judgment in the Colston statue case. At paragraphs 116 and 121 of his leading judgment, the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Burnett of Maldon, made it clear that where criminal damage is more than “minor or trivial”, it would be acceptable to consider the criminal law to override or trump the rights enshrined in articles 9, 10 and 11 of the ECHR.
Our definition of serious disruption has been proposed by a former Deputy President of the Supreme Court, a Cross-Bench peer, and it enshrines case law handed down by the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales, no less. I therefore feel very comfortable in commending our amendment (a) in lieu of Lords amendment 1.