THE leaders of Free Churches in the UK have raised the alarm about the Government’s move to require the police to consider previous and planned protests in the same area when deciding whether to impose conditions on a demonstration.
The Crime and Policing Bill, which went through its final parliamentary stages this week, states that, in considering whether a public procession in England and Wales may result in serious disruption to the life of the community — and thus whether to impose conditions — the police must, rather than can, “take into account any relevant cumulative disruption” (Comment, 20 March). The meaning of “cumulative” is not defined.
The joint letter, co-ordinated by Quakers in Britain and signed by leaders of the United Reformed Church, the Methodist Church, and the Baptist Union, warns that the clause “undermines our right to peaceful protest. It is vague and broad, meaning that it could affect a huge range of protests. It could mean that we are stopped from demonstrating because another protest previously took place in the same area, even if it was on a completely different issue”.
Other signatories include the General Secretary of Churches Together in England, the Rt Revd Mike Royal, and the Secretary Seneral of the Muslim Council of Britain, Dr Wajid Akhter. No Anglican bishops are among the signatories, although the Vicar of St John’s, Waterloo, Canon Giles Goddard, is.
The clause was introduced by the Home Secretary through an amendment in the House of Lords after the fatal attack on the Heaton Park synagogue last year (News, 3 October 2025). In the House of Commons on Wednesday, the minister responsible for the police, Sarah Jones, said that many protests had taken place immediately after the attack. “We are responding to communities who have recently been feeling the pain of repeated protests, sometimes outside faith organisations — synagogues.” She spoke of a 600-per-cent increase in the number of protests during the past two years.
The Government faced opposition from its own backbenchers on Wednesday. The MP for Leeds East, Richard Burgon, spoke of “a further draconian attack by the Government on the right to peaceful protest”, and the MP for Poplar and Limeshouse, Apsana Begum, said that she had been proud to take part in protests “demanding an end to the genocide in Gaza”.
“Change comes when that expression is repeated, sustained, and cumulative —when it builds pressure over time until it cannot be ignored,” the MP for Middlesbrough and Thornaby East, Andy McDonald, said. He pointed out that the previous government’s attempt to introduce a similar clause had been defeated in the Lords, with opposition from Labour.
The clause was vigorously challenged in the Lords earlier this year. “It was precisely cumulative disruption over many years that made early trade unionists, the suffragettes, and the civil-rights and anti-apartheid movements so effective,” Lord Hain, a veteran anti-apartheid campaigner, said. “No protest movement has ever brought about change through a single demonstration: it is through cumulative protests. To criminalise that principle is to hollow out that very right itself.”
The Liberal Democrat Lord Marks of Henley-on-Thames, a KC, tabled an amendment in March to introduce an express statutory right to protest and to impose on public authorities a duty to respect, protect, and facilitate this right. The Bishop of Norwich, the Rt Revd Graham Usher, voted in favour of this amendment, but it fell by 190 to 75.
“Noisy protests — of which we have heard many — repeated protests, and protests on unpopular causes are, and have been for centuries in this country, part of the stuff of life in our democracy,” Lord Marks said. “The more justified the protest, the more likely it is to be effective, and the more likely it is to be repeated and repeated in the same area.”
In January, the Bishop of Manchester, Dr David Walker, expressed concern that governments had “successively tightened up regulations around protests, including quite peaceful protests, making it harder and harder for people to express publicly their deep concerns around a whole range of issues”.
He was “concerned a little about cumulative impact,” he said. “I see that we cannot necessarily have counter demonstrations too close to each other, but I am not sure that saying ‘This area has had enough demonstrations for a while, they need to move somewhere else,’ finds the mark.”