Reply to comment

Published: 7th July, 2011
by TOM FOOT

FLAWED intelligence meant police chiefs were unaware that hundreds of children planned to walk out of Camden schools and join a massive student fees protest in ­central ­London.

It meant that the youngsters – some of them aged just 11 – were treated like adults and “kettled” for up to 10 hours with no food or water and in freezing temperatures.

The use of the police containment tactic has been challenged at the High Court in a potential landmark legal action brought by three Camden teenagers who are calling for new rules that would force police to release under-18s from closed kettles.

Met Police barrister Ivan Hare told the court on Tuesday that police had no idea so many schoolchildren would  join the November 24 protest against cuts to support grants and increasing tuition fees.

“There was no specific intelligence that any school would take part in the protest,” he said. “There was no notification from any school that pupils would attend.”

Mr Hare said school liaison officers had been asked to “feed intelligence” to the Met about whether pupils were leaving Camden schools but that “no specific information emerged from this”. He added: “It can only be right that the welfare of children can be taken into account if there is a trigger. We had no intelligence. There was no trigger.”

Hundreds of children flooded out of schools in a massive teenage rebellion against proposals to treble university fees. The action had been widely publicised on Facebook and Twitter and parents had written letters to headteachers requesting permission for their children to leave school that day.

Adam Castle and his friend Sam Eaton, both 16-year-old pupils at Acland Burghley School in Burghley Road, and Adam’s sister Rosie, 15, from Camden School for Girls, are taking the legal action after taking part in the protest. They were restrained in a police kettle for nine hours in Whitehall.

The experience left them fearful of joining future demonstrations. Adam said: “The UN convention on the rights of a child, with the European convention on human rights and the Children Act 2004, place obligations on police to facilitate children’s rights to pro­test and safeguard their welfare.”

The court heard details from police officers’ log books that “a large group of school kids” were in the kettle, but there were prob­lems identifying them be­cause they had no uniforms on.

The teenagers’ barrister, Martin Westgate QC, said the kettle was unlawful because the Met had no release plan for children, adding: “They had not thought about it at all.” He said it was not necessary to keep children in containment and it was necessary to have a rule about it.

In response, Mr Hare said that the protests had descended into “serious criminality” with fires blazing, a police carrier “destroyed” and scaffolding clips “thrown at the heads of police officers”. 

He said that if released, the teenagers were likely to double back and cause trouble elsewhere. Police did not need a special plan for kettling children, he added, as all officers were already properly trained in containing “vulnerable” people and child protection.

Mr Hare added: “Police know that containment captures people who are going about their business entirely lawfully. Some are exercising their right to protest and some may be children. Unless it is found that containment is unlawful, then we must accept that it may follow that it is indiscriminate who is captured.”

During the kettle, Adam’s father, Tim, a journalist for the news agency Reuters, had been allowed in through the police cordon with his National Union of Journalists press card.

But when he tried to leave with the three children he was told by police his children had no media identification and so could not leave with him. “They were not showing any discretion,” he told the New Journal.

Following the two-day hearing, Lord Justice Christopher Pitchford said it may be early September at the least before a judgment is given.