Police are unable to clear London roads blocked by Just Stop Oil campaigners because the protests are not passing the legal test of causing “serious disruption”, the Met Commissioner admitted on Wednesday.
Sir Mark Rowley said he was annoyed and “frustrated” that officers could not to do more and that the protests were diverting police from tackling knife crime, violence against women and girls and other offending.
But he said that despite reports of ambulance being blocked, the advice that the Met was receiving from Transport for London, local councils and the emergency services was that the “serious disruption” threshold set by Parliament for police intervention had not been crossed.
Sir Mark, who was speaking to City Hall’s Police and Crime Committee, said that as soon as it was police would be “straight in” and that he understood the public frustration with what had been happening since the protests started 11 days ago.
“I’m frustrated that we haven’t done better for London,” Sir Mark said. “The law is very clear that just blocking a road in itself isn’t automatically serious disruption and whilst it’s creating some offences in terms of obstruction of the highway those aren’t prosecutable if it’s a lawful protest so long as it doesn’t exceed reasonable bounds.
“The fact that I’m putting 200 officers a day into policing this, I don’t welcome that, that’s not good for London’s communities and I would love to be able to close these down more quickly.
“As soon as the partners who have the expertise to assess the impact on the road network and the emergency services say it is heading towards crossing the line we will be in there straight away.
“But until that point I don’t have the legal power to do that. As soon as we have evidence of that serious disruption we will be more assertive.”
