The sections of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts (PCSC) Act 2022 which affect our right to protest became law on 28 June. This does not mean that people will cease to protest, but it widens the range of measures which the state and its police force have at their disposal with which to criminalise protest and to attempt to render it more docile and less effective.
The main changes are:
- The same wide range of conditions which can already be imposed on marches can now also be applied to static demonstration.
- These conditions can be imposed if the event is considered likely to cause ‘serious disruption to the life of the community’. This was always grounds for putting conditions on a march, but now there is a new definition of ‘serious disruption’, which includes ‘significant delay to the delivery of a time-sensitive product to consumers of that product’ or ‘prolonged disruption of access to any essential goods or services, such as money, food, water, energy, or fuel, among others’.
- Conditions can be put on protests on grounds of noise, if the police consider that either the noise is causing ‘serious disruption’ or it is causing ‘harassment, intimidation, alarm or distress to people in the area’.
- The government retains the right to change the definition of ‘serious disruption’ if it feels the need to, meaning an activity not labelled disruptive might suddenly become so.
- It is no longer a defence if you are charged with disobeying a condition that you did not know it was in place, as the law now says that you are guilty of an offence if you fail to comply with any conditions imposed on the protest, and you ‘know or ought to know’ that the condition has been imposed.
- There is a new criminal offence of ‘causing a public nuisance’ for which you can be imprisoned for up to ten years.
- The offence of ‘wilful obstruction of the highway’, which used to be punishable only by a fine, can now result in up to a year’s imprisonment.
More to come
As we reported previously in FRFI, as the PCSC Bill was going through Parliament and had reached the House of Lords, the government tried to add in a whole series of new anti-protest measures. Although none of the other attempts by the Lords to change the Bill were successful, they did succeed in vetoing these new sections. Predictably, they have now been reintroduced in a separate piece of legislation, the Public Order Bill. This had its first reading in the House of Commons on 11 April and is now at the Committee stage. The key points of the Bill are:
- New criminal offences of: ‘locking on’ (eg engaging in direct action which involves physically locking yourself to other protesters or to objects or buildings) or ‘going equipped for locking on’; ‘obstruction of major transport works’; ‘interference with key national infrastructure’ and tunnelling.
- Powers to stop and search, with or without suspicion in relation to the possible commission of protest-related offences.
- Serious Disruption Prevention Orders (SDPOs) – a preventative measure to ban people convicted of protest activity from future protests for up to two years. An SDPO can include a range of conditions, such as prohibition from being in a particular place, being with particular people, having particular articles in your possession or using the internet to facilitate or encourage people to commit a protest-related offence. The court may also require a person subject to a SDPO to wear an electronic tag. Breach of an SDPO is a criminal offence carrying a maximum penalty of six months’ imprisonment, an unlimited fine, or both.
Home Secretary Priti Patel claims all this is necessary because of the recent ‘rise in criminal, disruptive and self-defeating guerrilla tactics, carried out by a selfish few in the name of protest’. She specifically namechecks the groups who have caused this mayhem, linking each to the estimated amount of money they have cost to the police: Insulate Britain £4m, Just Stop Oil £5.9m and Extinction Rebellion £37m (in the April and October 2019 rebellions alone). Additionally, Patel reports that HS2 Ltd estimated in October 2021 that ‘sustained protester activity at some sites’ had cost the rail extension project up to £80m.
Nicki Jameson
