Coventry Council is planning a new PSPO that will ban independent political campaigning in the city centre. If it goes ahead, only those who have been formally approved by the council will be able to use amplification or put up a small campaigning stall. This replicates the order in Leicester, which has seen dozens of religious groups given warnings and a pensioner fined for running a campaign against council cuts.
These orders mean that the council gets to decide which causes can be heard or seen in the city – which is a violation of free speech rights and democracy. (See our local free speech campaign page).
Coventry’s proposed order will also criminalise a busker who plays a set of 95 minutes, as well as – bizarrely – criminalising buskers who have not carried out a coronavirus risk assessment. And it will allow a council officer to order you to stop cycling at any time for any reason, and if you disobey it will be an offence.
Our response is below. We support as an improvement the tightening of begging restrictions to include genuinely aggressive behaviour (such as following someone) rather than merely asking for money. However, we object to the inclusion of ‘offensive…language’ as part of the aggressive begging definition.
1. We welcome the refocusing of the begging provision onto aggressive behaviour.
Limiting the restriction to conduct that is genuinely aggressive or pressurising – following someone after a refusal, obstructing their path, persisting after being asked to stop – and expressly exempting people who are merely sitting, standing or passively asking for help, is the right approach. Placing that exemption on the face of the order, rather than leaving it to enforcement discretion, is good practice, and we welcome it. This is also consistent with the statutory guidance and the Act itself, under which a restriction may only address activities that have a detrimental effect on quality of life and are both persistent and unreasonable, a test that a quiet request for money does not meet.
We would raise one drafting point. The second part of this provision, behaviour “likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress” with “offensive… language” given as an example, is considerably wider than aggressive begging, and risks catching speech that merely offends a listener. This could mean that it is illegal for a homeless person to swear, or the fact that they have offended someone means that they can no longer engage in non-intrusive begging. We would encourage the Council to anchor the provision to genuine aggression and intimidation, and to drop “offensive” as a threshold, which is vague and has proved difficult to enforce fairly wherever it has been adopted.
2. We strongly oppose the requirement of Council authorisation for amplification.
As drafted, no one may use a loudspeaker, microphone or megaphone in the city centre unless the Council has given written authorisation, and the categories listed for authorisation are all Council-organised or Council-approved activity (organised events, authorised performances, council-approved promotional activity). There is no exemption for a lone campaigner, street preacher or trade unionist who wishes to address the public. The practical effect is that the Council decides who may be heard in Coventry city centre. That is a serious interference with free expression, and it is not what this power is for (indeed, the legislation requires consideration of convention rights for free expression before drafting of any PSPO).
We have seen this order play out in Leicester, whose city-centre PSPO contains an almost identical requirement of prior authorisation for amplification and stalls. In practice, campaigners found they were unable to obtain permission, dozens of religious groups were issued warning notices, and the order operated as an effective ban on political and religious speech in the centre. We wrote to the Mayor of Leicester to say that the order was drawn so widely as to restrict ordinary democratic campaigning, and campaigners there are now considering a legal challenge on human rights grounds. Coventry should not adopt the same model. If there is a genuine problem with excessive volume, it should be met with a targeted noise-nuisance provision, not a prior-permission regime covering all amplified speech.
3. We strongly oppose the requirement of Council authorisation for stalls and temporary structures.
The same objection applies, and here it is most acute, because the low-key street stall is the basic equipment of democratic campaigning: the table provides a place to put a petition, literature or a banner. One Leicester campaigner said that campaigning without a stall would be like “campaigning with one hand tied behind my back”. The provision as drafted catches “any similar structure designed to facilitate trading, promotion or gathering”, which plainly includes campaign tables, and the only route to lawful use is Council authorisation. Even the exemption for “permitted demonstrations or gatherings” still requires them to be permitted. Requiring prior permission means that only those the Council has approved may campaign in the city centre, and it hands officers discretion over which causes appear on the streets, which includes the possibility for bias given that some of these causes may be critical of the Council itself.
Leicester shows what this means in practice. A pensioner there was fined £100 for putting up an “unauthorised” campaign table against council cuts; she refused to pay, and she had so much public support that the Council was forced to back down and decline to prosecute. This is the predictable result of an authorisation regime, and it carries real legal risk: using a PSPO to require permission for tables, flags and banners engages the rights to free expression and assembly under Articles 10 and 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights.
4. We object to the legal enforcement of the buskers’ performance code.
We object to making the buskers’ performance code a legal obligation. Good will between buskers and the council is better maintained with informal codes, which suggest reasonable modes of performance, but without the threats of sanctions and criminal records or fines. The current wording means that in theory a busker would be guilty of an offence if they played a set for 95 minutes, or if their music could be heard 51 meters away. The elements in the busking code are better acting as guides for thoughtful conduct rather than as criminal lines in the sand.
In addition, the draft prohibits performing contrary to the Council’s Code of Conduct for Performers. That code still requires every busker to “undertake a risk assessment of your performance to ensure it does not encourage the spread of coronavirus.” This is a leftover from the pandemic and is now plainly out of date. The effect is that a street performer who has not carried out a coronavirus risk assessment of their act would be committing a criminal offence, liable to a fixed penalty notice. That is an absurd result, and it shows the danger of creating a criminal prohibition by cross-reference to a separate document that has not been kept current.
5. We oppose the power to require cyclists and skateboarders to dismount on an officer’s judgment.
The draft requires anyone cycling, skateboarding or riding a manual scooter to dismount if an authorised officer asks them to, where the officer judges that continuing “would cause a danger to the public or cause harassment, alarm or distress”, with failure to comply exposing them to enforcement. This makes a criminal matter turn entirely on the on-the-spot judgment of a single officer, against no defined standard and with no independent check. Someone riding carefully and considerately, which the same clause requires of them, could still be ordered to stop simply because an officer forms the view that they might cause alarm, and they commit an offence if they disagree. This places too much discretion in one person’s hands, and it invites arbitrary and inconsistent enforcement. If cycling is genuinely causing danger in particular areas, the order should identify those areas and that conduct precisely, rather than leaving it to officers to decide case by case.
A constructive alternative to amplification/table stalls elements.
We would urge the Council not to adopt an outright authorisation model, but to treat public campaigning as a free-speech right subject only to genuine limits of obstruction, safety and noise nuisance. We have published detailed guidance for councils on how to do this: allowing stalls, leafleting, banners and campaign tables as of right, without prior application or fee, provided they do not block pedestrian flow and keep noise reasonable; no fees for political or religious stalls; and no vetting of the content of literature. A number of councils already take this approach – Birmingham, for example, states that protests, vigils and political campaigning do not need the Local Authority’s permission. The guidance is here, and we would be glad to discuss it with the Council: https://freedomineverydaylife.org/guidance-for-councils-how-to-keep-your-public-squares-open/