Baroness O’Grady of Upper Holloway (Lab)

My Lords, I support what I understand to be probing amendments in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Blower, but first I want to seek clarification from my noble friend the Minister on government Amendment 372. I do so from the perspective of someone who had direct responsibility for organising mass demonstrations when I was at the TUC, which now could be caught in this net. First, can the Minister clarify the definition of disruption and whether that applies to conduct or location, and the safeguards that will be applied under “cumulative impact” to ensure that any restrictions and conditions imposed by the police are proportionate? As cumulative impact, as we have heard, will be applied collectively to demonstration organisers, this could lead to a rationing of protests in a particular area, presumably even when they are entirely peaceful. In practical terms, can the Minister explain how such a ration would be distributed between, as we have heard, potentially very different organisations with very different aims? Who will decide and on what basis or are organisations supposed to figure it out for themselves? In central London, there are really only one or two routes, which have viable assembly points at the start and finish, available for very large demonstrations. How realistic is it for the Home Office to suggest, as it did in a press release, that the police could instruct organisers of national demonstrations to divert their demonstrations to alternative routes when in central London there may be none? Crucially, can the Minister tell us whether consideration of the cumulative impact of demonstrations will be weighed against the public’s right to protest in response to the cumulative impact of real-world events? For example, hundreds of thousands of people turned out for successive TUC marches through the 2010s—I recognise that not everybody here may have joined them, but plenty did—in response to the mounting harm that austerity and public service cuts were inflicting on workers, families and communities. More recently, hundreds of thousands have joined demonstrations in solidarity with the Palestinian people. Again, the frequency of these very large protests is not happening in a vacuum, nor is it divorced from the strength of public feeling. While the International Court of Justice may not reach its verdict on genocide in Gaza for some years, much of the UK population, according to a YouGov poll published in June last year, has already made its mind up. Have the Government really considered the societal impact of making expression through peaceful protest much more difficult?