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Human Rights

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr. Streeter. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Hendon (Mr. Dismore) on the work carried out by the Joint Committee on Human Rights in respect of policing and protest and particularly on the Committee's deft ability to produce a report and still take account of an event that took place a day or two after it was published. We heard that the Committee took written and oral evidence from a wide range of witnesses and examined the way in which protests are policed in a number of other countries. That detailed evidence gathering is reflected in the tenor of the report. Some Ministers may find scrutiny uncomfortable, but it is an essential process, especially in the area of policing. If the police service and the Government are to learn lessons, particularly when things go wrong, we should not be afraid of scrutiny. Personally, I welcome it, and I know that my right hon. Friend the Minister for Policing, Crime and Counter-Terrorism does too. He and my hon. Friend the Member for Tynemouth (Mr. Campbell), the Under-Secretary of State, give their apologies for not being here today. They are busy in Committee. The management of House of Commons business, which was raised by some Members, is a matter for the usual channels; the Home Office has less power in that regard than we do as individual Members. None the less, I am confident that there will be time to debate in that Bill some of the other matters that were raised today. How officers police protests is hugely important, and the issue has attracted considerable interest in recent months. As the hon. Member for Bury St. Edmunds (Mr. Ruffley) said, in the vast majority of cases the police get it right. None the less, all it takes is one wrong move for the public, understandably, to lose confidence. When the public lose confidence in the police, it can undermine the British policing model, which is built on the principles of policing by consent and community policing. We have seen such principles amplified in our approach to neighbourhood policing, in which police officers are very much embedded in the community, rather than appearing only when a crime is committed. Such an approach should not be different when it comes to policing protests. We have a close communicative approach to policing protests rather than the distance approach that is seen in some other countries. I know that my right hon. Friend the Minister and my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary would back me very firmly in my view that we have the best police service in the world. We must nurture it. As the Committee will be aware from the letter of 13 January, my right hon. Friend the Minister welcomed the Joint Committee's report on behalf of the Government, as well as the other reviews that have been published on this issue in the past year. Our response to the Committee's recommendations is based on the HMIC report, "Adapting to Protest: Nurturing the British Model of Policing". That title sums up the sentiment at the core of the Home Office's attitude to policing. The report was published last November, and the Government's position on the policing of protests was set out in the White Paper "Protecting the Public: Supporting the Police to Succeed", which was published in December. As we said in the White Paper, the public have the right to expect the highest standards of policing, and we have to support every officer in delivering those high standards. None the less, it is important to put the policing of protests into a proper context. The overwhelming majority of officers do a professional job in what can be testing circumstances. Examples of good practice include the sensitive policing of the Tamil protests around Parliament. Difficult challenges were presented by the English Defence League demonstrations, which saw thousands of people gathering in some of our cities. As the Government made clear in the White Paper, we welcome the HMIC report as a major contribution to the future direction of the policing of protests. We are committed to working with the police and others to ensure that the recommendations are properly acted on. The White Paper endorses the values championed by the HMIC review and reaffirms the key principles of the British policing model. As I have said, community policing and policing by consent underpin the policing of protests as well as our general approach to policing. We agree with the Joint Committee that human rights awareness must be a core part of policing protest. A human rights-based approach, however, is not a soft option; it does not mean anything-goes policing. It upholds our democratic principles, supporting the founding tenets of British policing and, crucially, providing a practical framework for the police to resolve any areas of conflict.