Crime bill: Lords defeats for government’s protest clamp-down plans

The government has suffered a series of defeats in the House of Lords over its plans to clamp down on disruptive and noisy protesters.

Opposition peers voted against a range of measures in the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, with Labour calling some of the plans “outrageous”.

Peers also voted to make misogyny a hate crime in England and Wales in another government defeat.

The bill will now go back to the Commons for MPs to have their say.

It cannot become law until both Houses have agreed the changes – and so the bill now faces going back and forth between the Commons and Lords until agreement is reached. The government is likely to continue fighting for its proposals.

The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill is a huge piece of legislation that covers major proposed changes on crime and justice in England and Wales.

The most controversial part of the bill is on the planned changes to protests – which the government proposed in response to environmental activists who have blocked roads, glued themselves to trains and stopped printing presses in recent years.

The government was hoping to get the Lords to support its proposals, but in a series of votes lasting until the early hours of Tuesday morning, the Lords repeatedly voted against the government.

Ministers were defeated, by 261 votes to 166, over plans to give the police new powers to stop protests in England and Wales if they are deemed to be too noisy and disruptive.

And peers also turned down other measures which would make it illegal for protesters to lock themselves to things and to give police officers powers to stop and search people in an attempt to prevent them taking part in illegal protests.

Green peer Baroness Jones described the government’s plans as “oppressive” and “plain nasty”.

“How do you seriously think a protest is going to happen without noise?” she asked.

Labour’s Lord Hain called the move “the biggest threat to the right to dissent and the right to protest in my lifetime” adding that it would have “throttled” protests by the suffragettes.

The government’s Home Office minister in the Lords, Baroness Williams, defended the plans, telling peers that the police would only use the powers where “necessary” and “appropriate”.

She urged peers to consider the different contexts in which a noisy protest could take place.

Throughout the debate, drum noises from a demonstration against the bill could be heard in the Lords’ chamber, but the minister said no-one would try to stop that.

However, she said noisy anti-vaccination protests outside a school or nursing home were a different matter – and that police should have the powers to intervene if necessary.

“A responsible government, one that stands up for the rule of law, must also defend the rights and freedom of the law-abiding majority,” she said. “Their rights cannot and must not be trampled on by a small minority of protesters, who believe they should not be answerable to the law and should be given carte blanche to cause any amount of disruption at any cost.”