Police forces will be authorised to consider the 'cumulative impact' of protests, assessing previous activity when deciding to impose limits on protesters.
Police forces will be granted new powers to put conditions on repeat protests as the Home Secretary orders a fresh look at how protests are policed and organised.
The new powers, which will be brought forward as soon as possible, will allow senior officers to consider the 'cumulative impact' of previous protest activity.
If a protest has taken place at the same site for weeks on end, and caused repeated disorder, the police will have the authority to, for example, instruct organisers to hold the event somewhere else. Anyone who breaches the conditions will risk arrest and prosecution.
The Home Secretary will also review existing legislation to ensure that powers are sufficient and being consistently applied. This will include powers to ban protests outright, and will also include provisions in the Crime and Policing Bill, which is currently going through Parliament.
Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood said:
The right to protest is a fundamental freedom in our country. However, this freedom must be balanced with the freedom of their neighbours to live their lives without fear.
Large, repeated protests can leave sections of our country, particularly religious communities, feeling unsafe, intimidated and scared to leave their homes. This has been particularly evident in relation to the considerable fear within the Jewish community, which has been expressed to me on many occasions in these recent difficult days.
These changes mark an important step in ensuring we protect the right to protest while ensuring all feel safe in this country.
The Government will make the improvements by amending Sections 12 and 14 of the Public Order Act 1986 to explicitly allow the police to take account of the cumulative impact of frequent protests on local areas in order to impose conditions on public processions and assemblies .
