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.

No 10 said it was disappointed peers voted against measures to combat the "guerilla tactics" of some protesters.

The bill now faces going back and forth between the Commons and Lords. The government is likely to continue fighting for its proposals.

The 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 it 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, peers 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 the Lords also backed, by 238 votes to 171, a Liberal Democrat amendment to strip out the power to impose conditions on protests on noise grounds.

Asked if measures against noisy protests would be reintroduced in the Commons, Mr Raab told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: "We'll look very carefully at all of that, but, yes, absolutely.

"In relation to noise, of course we support the right of peaceful and rambunctious protest, but it cannot be allowed to interfere with the lives of the law-abiding majority."

The prime minister's official spokesman said it would "reflect" on the votes before the bill returned to the Commons.

He added: "It is disappointing the Lords did not back the public order measures that will ensure the everyday lives of the overwhelming majority are not disrupted by a selfish minority of protesters whose actions endanger lives and cost the public millions of pounds."

It was a drubbing.

The government lost 14 votes in the House of Lords on the detail of the Police, Crime Sentencing and Courts Bill on Monday night, to add to the five previous defeats in earlier debates.

Most of these are reversible in the Commons because they represent changes to the bill, but the government was also trying to add in some changes of its own, introducing a series of new public order offences aimed at preventing a recurrence of last year's Insulate Britain and Extinction Rebellion protests.

Because the Lords blocked these from becoming part of the bill, they won't be sent back to the Commons.

Labour had approached this issue warily, conscious that they could be accused of allowing the rights of protesters to trump the rights of ordinary people to go about their lives, so they proposed what they regarded as a more focused alternative - but ended up helping vote down the government's new clauses as unacceptable on civil liberties grounds.

My best guess is that the government's proposals will resurface as a free standing public order bill, when the new Parliamentary year begins in April.

Other amendments on subjects like misogyny, noise at demonstrations, drink-spiking, the Police duty of candour, the repeal of the Vagrancy Act and many more, will have to be agreed by MPs.

This is what's known as "Parliamentary ping pong", in which a bill bounces between the Commons and the Lords until both have agreed on its final form, and it can run on for quite a while.

It will have to be completed before the end of the current parliamentary session, expected in late March or April.

Peers also voted against 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.

But 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 outside Parliament 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.

The government also suffered a defeat over a separate issue when peers voted to make misogyny a hate crime in England and Wales - a move that would enable judges to impose stronger penalties if prejudice against women is proved to be the motivation.

The proposal was added to the bill as an amendment against the government's wishes and led by Conservative peer Baroness Newlove - a former victims' commissioner.

Baroness Newlove said: "As a society we have rightly taken steps to acknowledge the severity of racist or homophobic crimes, but have not yet acted on crimes driven by hatred of women."

Crossbench peer Baroness Fox, the former Brexit Party MEP, argued against the proposal, saying the data collected would be "almost entirely based on subjective perceptions" of what constituted misogyny.

She warned that police resources would be wasted if they got "tangled up in the reporting and monitoring of stats and data which I do not think is reliable".

Home Office Minister Baroness Williams pointed to a report by the Law Commission last year which concluded that making misogyny a hate crime would not solve the problem of hostility towards women.

The amendment had support from Labour and the Liberal Democrats and it was backed by 242 votes to 185.

Peers voted against the government's plans to:

Peers voted for new amendments to the bill that would: