16
Examination of witnesses
Paul Parker, Raj Chada, Sir Andy Cooke and Akiko Hart.
Q1 Chair: Order. Order. Good afternoon. Welcome to the Joint Committee on Human Rights. We are made up of six Members of the House of Commons and six Members of the House of Lords and, as the name implies, even though we come from diverse political backgrounds, we have a passion collectively for the human rights of British citizens, and that is the mandate of this committee. We run a number of concurrent and previous inquiries, which can be found on our website.
Today is our first oral session in our inquiry into protest rights, scrutinising how the Government and legal system strike the balance between the duty to protect the public and the duty to respect individual rights to protest. This inquiry is going to be framed by established human rights standards, in particular free speech and assembly, as well as the right to respect private life. We are going to have two panels today and the sessions will give and gather evidence for us as to whether the Government’s claim that protest activity has become faster, more decentralised and more disruptive accurately depicts the current nature of protest and, if so, what has changed. It will also consider how protesters and those who campaign for the right to protest see the current state of protest in the UK.
In this first panel, we have Paul Parker, who is the recording clerk for Quakers in Britain; Akiko Hart, who is the director of Liberty; Raj Chada, who is the partner and head of crime at the financial and regulatory department of Hodge Jones & Allen solicitors; and Sir Andy Cooke, formerly, until very recently, His Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Constabulary and Fire and Rescue Services and, before that, chief constable of Merseyside Police. All four of you are extremely welcome. Let me kick off, if I may, by simply asking you a sort of curtain-raising question where you can set out your store before we delve deeper into more granular detail. What is the nature of protest? How would you define the value of protest? Let us start, if we may, with Akiko Hart.
Akiko Hart: Protest is a fundamental part of our democracy. It is also part of the fabric of British history: from Peterloo in the 19th century, to the suffragettes, to the hunger marches of the 1930s. It is part of our civic life, as many of you will have experienced walking through Parliament Square on the way here this morning. The right to protest is underpinned, of course, by Articles 10 and 11 in the European Convention on Human Rights, enshrined in our Human Rights Act and freedom of expression and freedom of assembly. These rights are not just rights for us to enjoy as individuals. They are also rights that the state, including the police, have a positive obligation to protect.
However, the right to protest is not unfettered. It never has been. It is not now. It will not be in future. It will always be bound by certain restrictions. This is some of the balancing act that you, of course, will be discussing over the next few months. Any restriction must be provided by law, pursue a legitimate aim and be proportionate. What we have seen in the past five years has been swathes of new legislation around protest, from the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022, the Public Order Act 2023, the regulations in 2023, since quashed, and, of course, the Crime and Policing Bill making its way through Parliament at the moment. This legislation has increased state powers, increased criminal sanctions and lowered the threshold for police intervention.
Behind the legislation, what we have also seen is that certain causes have become more polarised, as I am sure we will be discussing. As a result, there has been a change in narrative around risk and protest. The legislative changes that we have seen have been piecemeal and cluttered. They have been conceptually and legally unclear. In short, what we have seen is a series of poor legislation. Poor legislation is, of course, unwieldy and unenforceable. What we have seen—I am sure we will hear more about this—is protest being much more difficult to police and protests being much more difficult for protesters to know how to protest safely and lawfully. Legal tests, which should set clear boundaries, have become moving targets. Nowhere has this perhaps been more clear than when the then Home Secretary tried to change the definition of serious disruption—the point at which the police can intervene in a protest—to more than minor. Liberty, of course, intervened in this case and we won.
Uncertainty has become a defining feature, not a bug, of protest and has functioned as a deterrent. I am sure my fellow panellists will be talking about the chilling effect. To conclude, we really welcome this inquiry and of course, the Lord Macdonald review, because we believe that protest legislation needs to be reviewed, clarified, simplified and reduced.
Chair: Of course, we will not try to pre-empt Lord Macdonald’s review, which we all look forward to hearing the outcome of. You talked about the challenges that the police face, which is also the other side of this coin about the value of protest. Who better to give a reply to that than Sir Andy?
Sir Andy Cooke: I give just a couple of figures to start with. In the summer of 2023, there were 928 protests, according to the National Police Chiefs’ Council; in the summer of 2025, there were 3,081. That is a massive increase and has a massive impact on police resources. Now, like Akiko says, absolutely the police’s job is to facilitate lawful and peaceful protest—undoubtedly—and police will continue to do that and try to get the right legitimacy, proportionality and balance in doing so. The new legislation, or the legislation over the last 10 years, are 10 different Acts now, which directly impact upon public order policing. It is complex for policing also. That complexity of different laws and how to get that consistency and application, not just to the different laws themselves but with 43 police forces, is difficult. It is often said now that it used to be senior detectives who had to be the cleverest people in the room. Now it is public order commanders, because it is really difficult on occasion to get that balance right.
However, consistently, what we have seen over the last few years is policing trying its best to get that balance. It has not always succeeded in doing that; I think that is fair to say. But part of that is down to the complexity of the current law. I do not disagree because the balance has got to be protest versus community, and that balance is really important. What we have seen more recently is a massive increase in hate crime. Against the Jewish community, 106 people of every 10,000 population has submitted a hate crime. That has gone up disproportionately. When you see some protests, like the protest we saw at St John’s Wood synagogue, where there was projection on to the synagogue itself and hateful chants being done by those who were present, that is when we have to consider very carefully what element we should be considering is the right thing for this democracy. I always support peaceful protest, as a former police officer and the head of the inspectorate. But there is a very careful balance here and I do not envy you your task in that.
Q2 Chair: You are quite right. It is going to be quite a challenge but you set the scene for us brilliantly. There is probably no organisation that knows more about the value of protest than the British Quakers, who have said more about the nature of things like hate speech, which Sir Andy has just referred to. So, tell us, Mr Parker, what is the value then, of protest?
Paul Parker: It is important to say a little bit about where Quakers come from on this. It is an imperative of Quaker faith that we listen in our silent meetings for worship for the will of God, and seek to follow it in our words and actions. That has meant that, since the 17th century, Quakers have been led by faith to bear witness and take action against unjust laws and practices and injustice where they see it. So Quakers were part of the anti-slavery movement in the 19th century, the movement for nuclear abolition in the 20th century, and indeed the 21st, and the campaign for same-sex marriage a decade or so ago, as well as having a long-standing concern for peace around the world and particularly, at the moment, with a focus on Israel and Palestine, where we have connections and a programme.
For us, being able to protest is something that is part of who we are, as part of the identity of Quakers. We have seen a significant change in people’s experience of taking part in protest and being increasingly feeling fearful to take part in protest. A big change has happened over the last few years, to the extent that our national representative body last year identified that we were slipping into a state of creeping repression. This is a matter of concern for us as a community which is experienced in protest but also experiences the changes in policing that are happening. We have also been part of the changes in society that result from successful protest.
For us, protest is inherently a non-violent activity because all Quaker activity is inherently non-violent. It is rooted in love and compassion. What we think we are seeing at the moment is the state seeking to interfere in individuals’ ability to follow the promptings of love in their hearts as part of their faith. So it is very significant. I have a number of stories from individuals that we can come to. This is also, for us, part of a wider pattern. I also convene the Civil Society Voice Group of civil society leaders who are concerned about the peeling away of opportunities for the public to hold the Executive accountable where they see injustice or poor policy. That includes all sorts of things about charity regulation, anti-advocacy clauses in grant standards for government contracts and a whole range of things. So it is important to see what is happening around protest as part of a wider picture, which is about a loss of accountability for the public.
I want to say two more things quickly. One is that these changes are real, and we see evidence of a right that is being eroded and affecting exactly the people you would expect to see affected first—marginalised people, minoritised people. That is where you would expect to see indicators of a real problem, and that is what we are seeing.
Secondly, these are ordinary people. I am not sure I accept the framing that protests and communities are in opposition to each other. Any of us can be protesters, and we are all members of communities. I want to mention two people who have been in my mind as I have been preparing for this session. When the riots were happening two summers ago, they took it upon themselves to turn up on their mobility scooters outside their local mosque and keep vigil during Friday prayers as a symbol of solidarity and to protect the community inside that mosque from the potential that they would be interrupted during their prayers. Those people are hugely valued in their local community for doing that and much loved by the worshippers at that mosque. They are the same people who have been arrested five times from their mobility scooters in Parliament Square for sitting silently holding a placard, and are now apparently sufficiently dangerous to the state that they have been charged with terrorism offences. I invite you to hold those two facts in tension with each other and ask yourselves whether we have that line in the right place.
Q3 Chair: You have certainly given us some questions to think about there, so thank you very much, Mr Parker. Mr Chadha, before we turn to Lord Rook for the next question, could you give your curtain-raising response to that question about the value of protest?
Raj Chada: On the value of protest, there are two particular issues that I want to raise. First, we call it the marketplace of ideas—things that may not be in the mainstream which people can go out on to the street and protest may become the mainstream in a number of years. Secondly, a point that is often overlooked but is referred to by a number of court cases, is that it acts as a safety valve so that change can occur by peaceful means rather than simply violent means. Those are two incredibly important policy considerations in relation to protest.
I want to challenge a bit about how protest has changed. Each generation faces particular peaks and troughs in protest. During the miners’ strikes, there were upwards of 10,000 arrests in a very short space of time. We went through the protests during the 1960s over the Vietnam War and a number of other protests. Because it is topical, there were many protests during the second Iraq War that sought to incur on to airbases. The response from the state now compared to the response from the state previously has been completely different and has led to a position where, when I travel to conferences in Europe, the UK is seen as a complete outlier in relation to the right to protest and human rights. Lawyers say, “What is going on in the UK?” They are surprised and shocked at the level of sentences.
There are three broad areas that I think the committee should look at. The first is the restrictions on protest and conduct that used to be acceptable but no longer is, and that comes in from a range of legislative changes. The second is what is happening in the courts and the fact that defendants are often no longer allowed to explain themselves as to why they conducted the action that they did. Indeed, some defendants were imprisoned for mentioning the phrase “climate crisis” following their arrest in relation to a climate crisis protest.
The third is sentencing, and that is where perhaps it has kicked in the most. I have been doing this job for around 15 years, and until 2020 I never had one client in prison. Now I have numerous clients in prison, and in many cases the conduct has not changed; it is the state response that has changed.
Lastly, in relation to the issue of balance, of course there is some sort of balance—the right to protest is not an unfettered or absolute right—but the key is how you strike the balance and who strikes it. The UK has found itself in a very worrying position, away from the rest of Europe, that the balance is struck by Parliament alone and you do not look at individual circumstances in particular cases and allow the courts to assess the balance in that situation. You will find challenge after challenge before the European Court of Human Rights in relation to where the UK has found itself.
Chair: Thank you. You have given us lots to think about, and that is a good start to this session. I am going to turn to Lord Rook, who will direct a question to one member of the panel, and after that we will turn to Sir Desmond Swayne, who will do the same thing with his questions. If other members of the panel would like to add something then they should by all means try to catch my eye, but time is ticking away against us, and another way to add to this is in writing after the session is over, because we need to try to get through as many of the questions as we can. That is not rudeness on our part; it is just the dictation of the clock and the unremitting nature of parliamentary business going on elsewhere in the House.
Q4 Lord Rook: Sir Andy, my question comes to you. The terms of reference for the independent review of public order legislation launched in December began by saying, “Recent protest activity has become faster, more decentralised and more disruptive”. You have already alluded to an increase in the number of protests. We are interested to know whether the nature of protest has changed and, as a result of that, whether there is now a different way in which the police are responding to those protests.
Sir Andy Cooke: I do not think the nature of protest has changed. You must bear in mind that the vast majority of protests are peaceful. They are deliberate organised civil disobedience but peaceful protests, and that has to be borne in mind throughout. Undoubtedly, now, the ability to mobilise, the fact that they are spreading more widely and the escalation that is largely due to online platforms causes policing problems because of the speed at which the police need to mobilise.
There is an element of less formal organisation than we used to see in protest. The police would know who to liaise with about protests to set out the ground rules, as it were, but that is becoming more and more difficult at times now. We also cannot forget either that there has been a real drift to repeated and rolling protest. Whereas there used to be one protest, now there is protest after protest.
I mentioned the impact on policing and local communities. I fully accept that protesters are part of the local community as well, but that creep of real disruption to communities that we have seen and to the ability of police to deal with other issues that they need to deal with cannot be forgotten. The number of personnel directed towards protesting in the Metropolitan Police, for instance, is massive, and that takes them away from keeping people safe elsewhere. So that is a massive issue in relation to it.
I come back to the point that these are mainly peaceful protests, but for me it has changed. I accept the points made in relation to the miners’ strikes and others, but this has been a long period of consistent protest—as I said, more than three times last summer than the summer two years previously—and the impact of that is immense. There is also no doubt in my mind that it is linked to the increase in hate crime that I mentioned previously. Some of our communities feel fear as a result, and that is understandable.
There are a lot of issues there to consider. As I said at the start, I will always support the right to lawful protest, and policing should always facilitate that. But there have to be some ground rules. It has been mentioned that the approach of the Government is getting harder, but the approach of policing, compared to some of our European counterparts that have been mentioned, is very different. Policing takes a very different approach to a lot of this protest; we do not see the water cannons or some of the baton charges that you see elsewhere. It is very much about facilitating protest.
Baroness Chakrabarti: I have a brief supplementary for Sir Andy in relation to his last answer. I declare that I was once a director of Liberty—that is not a strict interest, but it may be of interest to people watching online. You mentioned a link between protest and hate crime. Because that is such a significant statement to make, could you explain it? Are you talking about hate crimes that take place during demonstrations, or are you suggesting that protests, by existing, somehow inspire hate crime?
Sir Andy Cooke: It is difficult to be specific on either. However, from the inspections that we have done previously, what we get back from IAGs and others is that the number of protests, and some of the things that are said on the protests, inspire fear in others, and that leads to a rise in the number of hate crimes that are being reported—a disproportionate rise at the moment, it has to be said.
Q5 Sir Desmond Swayne: Sir Andy, what discretion is available to police officers in enforcing the law where, although a protest may be peaceful, it deliberately sets out to break the law?
Sir Andy Cooke: Obviously Parliament makes the law, and the police are there to enforce it. There is a degree of operational independence that is sacrosanct in British policing in how that is dealt with. As a result, we have seen some inconsistency in how different police forces have dealt with some of that legislation. It is for the individual chief to answer the question of whether they have done the right or wrong thing, not me. The Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police decided to arrest numerous people, but different chief constables around the country have taken a slightly different approach. Both are the operational decisions of those chief constables, so I am not going to choose a side in relation to them.
Sir Desmond Swayne: Do you accept that there is an absurdity in something that flies in the face of common sense—for example, the arrest of someone praying silently within 109 yards of an abortion provider or someone sitting silently carrying a notice saying that they support Palestine Action, being an elderly person or whatever? Clearly there has to be a difference in the police response when someone is using a hammer to deliberately create criminal damage.
Sir Andy Cooke: The police are there to enforce the law. The powers are given to the police by Parliament and, as I say, different chiefs will use different discretionary techniques to deal with those issues. Please, it is not for the police to use their own value judgments in enforcing the law. The police are not there to make the law.
Sir Desmond Swayne: But that is what you are saying. Clearly, in exercising his discretion, the chief constable is exercising a value judgment, is he not?
Sir Andy Cooke: That discretion means that they may not arrest at the time but that person will be reported and dealt with later in court. It is just a different tactic for dealing with the issue.
Q6 Sir Desmond Swayne: I have a question for Liberty. How should we respond in terms of the balance of proportionality with respect to the right to protest against the utter inconvenience of some protests for ordinary people going about their lawful business? How do you get that balance right.
Akiko Hart: With difficulty, to some extent, but we need to remember that protests are by definition going to be disruptive. If they are going to be successful, they are going to be noisy, they are often going to happen multiple times and they are going to be disruptive.
Sir Desmond Swayne: So there are a number of things that one could do that might satisfy the thirst, the lust, for such protest—for example, it would be much easier to reduce the inconvenience by having a static protest rather than a marching one. Would that be a reasonable requirement to place on a protest in order to minimise the disruption to ordinary people going about their business?
Akiko Hart: It would depend on the circumstances, but in most instances probably not. I spoke at the beginning about how the framing around protests has changed and has become much more risk averse. It feels like your starting point might be that protests need to be quiet, take into other people into account and not be disruptive at all, but that flies in the face of what protest is trying to achieve. So it depends on what your starting point is, and my starting point is that protest is an inherently democratic exercise of voice, and some of it will occasionally be disruptive. That is in its nature.
Sir Desmond Swayne: So it is down to how often it happens and how much we have to put up with.
Akiko Hart: It becomes about how we recognise voice in our society. We do not just express our opinion at the ballot box every five years. There are multiple ways in which we can express our views, and this is one of them.
Chair: I know Mr Chada and Mr Parker will have views on this as well, so I suggest that you combine your answers to the next question with a response to some of the points that Sir Desmond has just made.
Q7 Afzal Khan: There has been a lot of legislation focused on public order and protest over the past six years or so. Has this resulted in the criminalisation of protest activity that would previously have been routine? Do you feel there has been a chilling effect on protesters as a result of this legislation?
Raj Chada: Yes, there absolutely has been criminalisation of protest, conduct and movements that there would otherwise not have been. An example is the protest tactic of slow walking, which has been in existence for many years. A slow walk that takes maybe five minutes on a London street is now imprisonable. That is the level of change that we have got to. Whereas in previous years that might not have even been arrestable, now many people can go to prison for it. That is one example; the other, although I will not go into too much detail about it, is the issue of proscription. We have heard about the holding of signs, conduct that obviously was entirely lawful 12 months ago but is not lawful any more—in fact, not just not lawful but deemed to be a terrorism offence.
I shall deal with the consequences of an arrest before I deal with the discretion point. The consequence of an arrest for many protesters has been the freezing of bank accounts, the inability to travel, and employment and education issues. That arises from the decision of the Met to arrest. Every single public authority, including the Metropolitan Police, Parliament and the courts, is under a duty to consider proportionality, and that means a duty to consider proportionality before they make a policy decision and on an individual arrest. I am afraid I do not accept the idea that there is no discretion. Obviously, we want guidance so we do not have different results in different places. Indeed, there is some guidance; there is a CPS guidance document on protest—it was introduced originally by the current Prime Minister—but it is now routinely ignored. The question is: what has happened to the proportionality that is meant to be exercised by every state body, including the police, and what guidance can be introduced to ensure some level of consistency but also some level of discretion?
Chair: I know Mr Sobel has another question about recent changes but I think he wants to come back to you, building on the point that Mr Khan has just made.
Alex Sobel: You have just said that until a year ago the holding of signs in support of a proscribed organisation would not have led to arrest but now it does. I am just checking—because Palestine Action is not the first organisation to be proscribed; Hamas has been proscribed for many years—are you saying that people who held signs or showed support for Hamas prior to that would not have been arrested in a non-violent way?
That then rolls into my question. Sitting here in Parliament, it appears to us that that the frequency and scale of protest have risen in previous years, particularly in London. Barely a day goes by when we do not have a protest in Parliament Square, of varying sizes, and a month does not go past where there is not a major protest in London of one type or another. How important are regular or repeated gatherings and marches for protesters and their causes, compared to just having one-off events or even annual events? That is part of the Government’s thinking now in terms of how they legislate for protests. Maybe we will start with you, Raj, because obviously you want to address the first point as well.
Raj Chada: The first point has been highlighted by Palestine Action. Obviously it was always a criminal offence to show support for a proscribed organisation, but there were not many people showing support for other proscribed organisations. When you seek to proscribe an organisation that has the level of support that Palestine Action has, you end up in the mess that we are in where hundreds, indeed thousands, of people have been arrested and prosecuted, and there are no safeguards in relation to that which are being effectively exercised. There is meant to be the Attorney-General’s consent for a prosecution so that a prosecution will proceed only if one is appropriate, but the Attorney-General has rubber-stamped prosecutions in relation to a granny holding up a sign. So I ask Members of the legislature: what is going on there?
Paul Parker: I want to come back to the point about disruption, which I hoped to come in on earlier. We tolerate disruption from all sorts of other causes without worrying about it as much as we do from protests. I will not be the only person who has queued for hours through bits of London because there is a football match on, for example, or sat behind 500 tractors that have been driven into central London without any arrests at all in either of those cases. So we have to ask ourselves what it says about us as a nation if we will tolerate certain kinds of disruption and not others.
We also need to ask ourselves what democracy actually looks like when it is working. I believe it is quite a noisy and inconvenient business that involves taking on board lots of different and dissenting voices. The suffragettes and the marchers at Selma were deeply inconvenient and disruptive to people who were trying to get on with their day. No society has really made progress on the things that matter by politely waiting our turn, not bothering anyone and protesting neatly in a box on the sidelines. We have to ask ourselves: if the only protest that we are prepared to tolerate is protest that no one notices, what exactly are we protecting? It is just a performative version of democracy. It is not democracy itself; it is not a healthy right to protest.
On the chilling effect, I want to read a couple of testimonies from Quakers as we have been collecting examples of this. Here is someone who writes: “As a registered Paramedic working in the NHS, I have felt significantly inhibited from attending protests since the introduction of the Public Order Act 2023 and related legislation. A criminal conviction would have serious implications for my professional registration and career, and the broad nature of offences … has created considerable uncertainty about what might now be criminalised … The chilling effect of these laws means I am effectively self-censoring my participation in legitimate democratic protest due to professional and personal risk”. Another person says: “I would attend peaceful protests in the past. I am now much less likely to, since the changes in the laws around protest. As someone with a chronic illness, I am scared of getting arrested just because I am in the ‘wrong’ place. My health is such that even being arrested and kept for a few hours might be very difficult for me to cope with, as attending a protest and travel would already be a challenging thing to do”
What we are seeing there is a right beginning to be eroded because there are certain categories of people who cannot participate in it. The right to protest should be a universal right, albeit qualified, but we are seeing people telling us that it is already no longer a universal right.
Q8 Baroness Hamwee: This is another question about proportionality. Even if you have a large-scale protest with most people behaving “well”, no large group of people is going to exclude everyone who will break the law. You always get someone who will break the law in a major or minor way. I would like to ask Sir Andy about how the police approach demonstrations where most people are peaceful but some are not, and perhaps Paul can talk about what precautions organisers take to minimise that sort of activity.
Sir Andy Cooke: The first thing to say is that the police treat every protest on its merits, so to speak. They will look at what previous and current intelligence is saying. If it is a largely peaceful protest then they will deal with it in a different way from those that we saw, for instance, in the disorder of summer 2025. Very few of those protests were peaceful; they were very much with the intent of causing harm and injury to others. The vast majority of protests are peaceful. Police commanders have difficult decisions to make to identify that and sometimes, using intelligence and sometimes using intuitive methods, to prevent people from attending.
Baroness Hamwee: Is it a decision made on the ground as to whether an individual or two or three people causing a ruckus are likely to escalate the situation?
Sir Andy Cooke: Yes. You will have seen the tactics that police use. If it is a peaceful protest then often there will be no intercession from police officers. If there are a small number of violent protesters, you will see a different tactic, where you may get numbers of police officers going into the crowd to remove those individuals out of harm’s way and to prevent it spreading further. That is a fair tactic, but it is always done based on intelligence and on the harm not just to wider members of the public but to other people who are in that protest, because if it becomes large-scale disorder then it is hard to tell who is causing the trouble and who is not. So it is a difficult decision for the police how to intercede.
Baroness Hamwee: Mr Parker, can you help about the organisation of this?
Paul Parker: It is clear from case law around Article 11 of the ECHR that participants in a peaceful demonstration do not lose their protections if small sporadic groups start engaging in violence or hateful activity. The police can and are prepared to identify and deal with outbreaks of violence at a demonstration without impeding on the rights of the rest of the crowd to demonstrate peacefully.
It is important to distinguish between non-violent groups and groups that set out to intimidate or cause harm. No one has really mentioned the question of intention but it is an important one, and the police already have access to laws that allow them to impose conditions on protesters who engage in hateful or intimidating behaviour. There is what happens in policing on the ground, but there is also a risk that this sort of thing happening at protests provides cover for the imposition of much broader-reaching draconian powers to close down protests, which reaches everyone who is involved in those demonstrations, not just those who are abusing that right.
On the responsibility of organisers, Quakers are always clear that we are non-violent people and that the activities we organise are non-violent and would never set out to be hateful. That is very deep in our faith tradition, and I hope we try hard to honour that. We are clear in communicating about anything we are organising what values underpin the activities that we are organising. Now, organisers have limited control over who turns up at events. We have seen the ability of groups to organise attendance at things in order to disrupt, and that applies as much to disrupting the peaceful protest as it does to disrupting the lives of ordinary people going about their business. So that is a tricky thing for protest organisers to manage. It is not reasonable to expect them to control the wider public.
Chair: I think we have more questions on the role of organisers.
Q9 Peter Swallow: I would like to ask you the counterpoint. You have mentioned the scenario where organisers are peaceful but cannot always control who turns up, but we have seen lots of examples where well-meaning individuals attend a protest in order to be peaceful but that protest has been organised by an organisation whose intentions, as you say, are not benign. Could you talk about the challenges there?
Paul Parker: I am not sure I have a lot to say on that. It points to the need to deal with individual behaviour rather than dealing with a crowd as a crowd, because those rights pertain to individuals. If organisers are organising something that should not be organised, deal with them. If people are turning up at a protest and behaving in ways that are not acceptable, deal with them. Do not roll it all together and conflate different things. Throughout this process, we have seen a bit of conflation of stuff around hate crime with peaceful protest. The most egregious examples of hate crimes that we have seen in the last year or so were not committed by protesters at all; they were committed by people with hate in their heart who set out to cause death and destruction. We should not let that get in the way of having a decent conversation about legitimate protest.
Peter Swallow: The challenge that you raise there is that you say, “When organisers are the problem, deal with the organisers”, but that does not just limit the right of the organisers. It limits the right of the individuals who wanted to take part in that protest.
That is an excellent segue into the question that I actually wanted to put to Sir Andy about how police and protest organisers can, in the best circumstances, work together to ensure that protests can go ahead smoothly in a way that respects everyone’s rights. From your professional experience, what are the most useful aspects of co-ordinating between police, protests and their organisers?
Sir Andy Cooke: When there is a good relationship between organisers and police—they do not have to love each other, but a good relationship—and the protest is well organised and stewarded, people are properly briefed and stewards are there not to obstruct policing but to assist policing when necessary, that can work very well. We have seen on many occasions that protests that work well will pass off peacefully. A lot of that depends upon the attitude of the organisers and their willingness to work with police so that the protesters can get their point across without any harm to the local community or to others involved, in a way that means counter protests can be dealt with calmly as well. When that works, it works very well.
A problem that I mentioned earlier is that there used to be specified individuals in relation to a lot of the protests that went on. Now, because of social media, you get crowds just arriving at a location on occasion. That is far harder to police because there is no individual in charge that you can speak to, reason with, rationalise and get some order.
Peter Swallow: Do you think there is enough public awareness of the good organisation that goes into some of these protests? Do you think your average member of the public who wants to turn up to a protest always understands the amount of engagement that has gone on between the police and the organisers in order to keep them safe and to allow them to exercise their freedom to protest?
Sir Andy Cooke: I am sure that lots of people present will not understand how much work has gone in prior to a demonstration or a protest, but it is invaluable for everyone’s safety that there is good liaison between both.
Chair: I am keen that Akiko Hart has a chance to come in on some of the points that have been made. You might like to wrap them into one of your responses.
Q10 Tom Gordon: As we heard earlier, part of the nature of protest is about inconvenience. Quite often, protests can be in response to international or domestic events that happen quite quickly, so the six-day notice period that is required before the police can allow a march to take place is not reasonably practicable. How do you see the balance between effectively policing event safety and the need to allow people to express a view on things that are happening quickly? Perhaps you would like to start, Sir Andy.
Sir Andy Cooke: The six days is there for public safety, to allow police an opportunity to make sure that routes are the right routes and that local communities will be able to carry on as much as possible with normal business. I do not think six days is a long time: I am very supportive of that. To make it shorter is a mistake.
Akiko Hart: Perhaps I might come in briefly on that. We have seen attempts to make it longer, which we would oppose. There does need to be a balancing act: we would agree with that. Is the number of days right? There is a conversation to be had around that, but it should certainly not be any longer.
Perhaps I could come in on the proscription of Palestine Action and how those protests have been policed. As indicated earlier, they have been policed in different ways, both around the country and by specific forces. The Met Police, at the point the proscription of Palestine Action was judged to be unlawful, decided not to arrest people who were expressing support for it, and instead just took down details. Yet, a month later, we have seen almost a flip-flopping of that position, which I think has added to the confusion around it. I would also note that similar protests in Belfast have not been policed in the same way: people expressing support for Palestine Action in Belfast have not been arrested under the Terrorism Act. So there have been some huge discrepancies that have added to the confusion around this.
Chair: Inconsistencies that do have to be addressed. That is very helpful: thank you. I will turn to Juliet Campbell for the penultimate question and then we will hear from Baroness Chakrabarti for the wrap-up.
Q11 Juliet Campbell: Thank you. I am going to go back a little bit to peaceful protests and people who get involved in protests. Work happens before a large protest: people go to the police and talk about what they are protesting about and what they want to do. All the groups may then come along and be involved in that: they could be peaceful or they could be not peaceful. My question is around those people who are attending who come in different groups and may come for different reasons. Do you think that the line between lawful and unlawful protest is sufficiently clear and accessible to protesters? My question is to Mr Parker and then to Akiko Hart.
Paul Parker: It is a really tricky question, because a lot of civil society activity happens in the form of coalitions, where groups work together. Also, as I said earlier, it is very difficult for organisers of a protest to control who comes and who does not. You cannot on a public street tell people that they cannot be there. One of the difficulties around the current frame of legislation, on the question of whether it is clear enough, is that the police have the power to impose conditions around the size of a protest, and indeed the noise level, but how do you as an individual turning up know whether you are the 2,001st person to arrive at a protest that has been limited to 2,000? How do organisers police that? So we have to look at the reasonableness of these provisions and make sure that we are not expecting things that are just impossible to manage.
There is something in there as well about lawful and unlawful, which is an interesting way of dividing it up. I am not sure whether, if you are a concerned member of the public, that is a question you ask yourself. You might ask yourself, “Is there a risk I’ll get caught up in something that’s got consequences I didn’t expect?” That is the chilling effect I talked about earlier, and there are more examples than the ones I read. I do not think your average member of the public understands in the slightest the 10 Acts of Parliament that Andy mentioned. They are reliant on organisers to say, “Well, here are the risks we think you will run by coming”. Most organisers would like to be able to say, “Please come. There’s no risk of you being arrested. We want you to be able to express your point of view here”. That has become much more difficult for organisers to state confidently.
We organise with a grass-roots Quaker group an event that happens at the time of the DSEI arms trade fair that is held every two years in east London. As part of that, we have historically brought along young people—teenagers—as part of their ability to exercise their faith and express their concern for peace. The risk assessment for them to take part in a peaceful protest where we have always done it is 10 times longer than it was, to the extent that I feel we are at the point where it is really hard to say to parents, “This is a safe activity for your young people to be involved with”. Their right has been taken away, in effect. If the line between lawful and unlawful is hard to define, coming at that from the perspective of the risk to the individual, it is a meaningless line, because people just have to interpret it right over at the cautious end if they want to avoid risk. In terms of exercising their right, that is the problem.
Akiko Hart: It is very confusing for people, because each piece of legislation that we have mentioned has introduced new offences, new conditions and new threshold tests, often reusing language in slightly different ways. What protesters and organisers consistently tell us is that they cannot reliably predict when conduct will cross the threshold into criminality, serious disruption or intimidation—the word “serious” is used differently across different statutes—or when conditions will be imposed. The tests are fragmented across multiple statutes at this point, and multiple guidance documents that are not always read and have been changed several times in quick succession. It has been intensely confusing for organisers and protesters on the ground, despite organisations such as Liberty, the Quakers and others producing all sorts of explainers, bust cards, et cetera, for protesters.
Juliet Campbell: I have one follow-up question. I will not comment on that one, but I do have a question for Sir Andy. Is it sufficiently clear to the police for them to be able to police protests effectively?
Sir Andy Cooke: No. It is very complex for police officers, certainly for those who are commanding policing operations at the moment. The new Acts and legislation have been brought in for the right reasons, to do with different tactics and the actual number of demonstrations taking place. But I think policing would welcome a cumulative effect, to make the whole law around this less complex. That might stop the inconsistency of approach that we see. Policing does not always get it right, but that is understandable on occasion, because there is that much legislation around this, in so many different ways and with so many different parts, that it is very difficult to do this. Reducing that complexity is essential, and bringing together all the laws in an overarching law.
Chair: Consolidation is something that you have agreed across the panel, so thank you very much. It is a very important point and we are very appreciative of that. I am pressing on because I am conscious that there is going to be a vote soon, so I come to Baroness Chakrabarti.
Baroness Chakrabarti: Unless I am corrected by Sir Andy, I am taking that last comment as a call for a consolidation of police public order powers: clarification and consolidation, perhaps post Lord Macdonald’s review.
Sir Andy Cooke: Yes, post Macdonald’s review. It is complex for police commanders: too complex.
Q12 Baroness Chakrabarti: That is super-helpful. I just wanted that to be clear for the record. My question is primarily for Raj Chada and Akiko Hart, but anyone may have a view. Some people suggest that, even though we know that the right to protest is protected by Article 10 and 11 expression and association rights under the convention, the right to protest would be better understood or protected with a new, free-standing right to protest in statute. I have to confess to being slightly cynical about what that would add, but what do you think, Mr Chada, based on your experience?
Raj Chada: I do not think it would add much: it depends on what the new legislation would say and whether it would go beyond what Articles 10 and 11 say and what the restrictions are. Articles 10 and 11 form a good and accepted basis on which to strike a balance: a guide to policymakers to strike the balance. That is why I think it is quite valuable.
There is also still English common law, which the courts have said marches in time with convention rights. So I am not sure we need anything new; we just need clarification on how the law should be used.
Akiko Hart: I feel exactly the same: like you, I have not seen any compelling argument for it. What we have is sufficient.
Chair: Well, you have certainly set the scene for us, in every way that we might have hoped for. We are deeply appreciative. I speak for the whole committee in thanking you for generously giving us your time and experience today and setting us quite a task ahead. I thank Sir Andy, Akiko Hart, Mr Chada and Mr Parker for being here. With those words—order, order—I close this first session.
