R (Kay) v Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis
| Jurisdiction | England & Wales |
| Judgment Date | 27 June 2006 |
| Neutral Citation | [2006] EWHC 1536 (Admin) |
| Date | 27 June 2006 |
| Court | Queen's Bench Division (Administrative Court) |
QUEEN'S BENCH DIVISIONAL COURT
Before Lord Justice Sedley and Mr Justice Gray
MONTHLY campaigning cycle rides through central London were customary events, not notifiable processions.
The Queen's Bench Divisional Court so held in a reserved judgment, on an application for judicial review by Desmond Woolf Kay of the decision of the Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis, communicated by letter dated October 21, 2005, that the monthly critical mass cycle rides through central London were processions of which the organisers were required to give the police prior notice under section 11 of the Public Order Act 1986.
Mr Michael Fordham for Mr Kay; Mr Jason Beer for the commissioner.
LORD JUSTICE SEDLEY, giving the judgment of the court, said that critical mass was an event in London. Since April 1994 cyclists gathered early in the evening of the last Friday of each month for a mass ride through the streets.
They gathered on the South Bank near the National Film Theatre. The routes were not fixed. The numbers rarely fell below 100 and commonly three or four times that.
Section 11 of the 1986 Act provided that written notice should be given by the organisers of a procession to the police of any proposal to hold a public procession with a relevant intention bringing it within section 11(1). Section 11(2) provided that the requirement to give notice did not apply where the procession was one commonly or customarily held in the police area.
The issue was whether section 11 of the 1986 Act applied to critical mass.
His Lordship rejected Mr Kay's argument that procession with no planned route and no organiser could not be subject to a requirement to give notice. The court further declined to hold that critical mass had no collective intention bringing it within section 11(1).
Their Lordships went on to decide if critical mass was commonly or customarily held within section 11(2) and therefore exempt from the requirement to serve notice.
There was nothing in the subsection, or in...
To continue reading
Request your trial
-
Rolls Royce Plc v Unite the Union
...as a test case. 40 An example of the latter seems to me to be the recent decision on the House of Lords in Kay (FC) v Commissioner of the Police of the Metropolis [2008] HL 69, which, when it was in the Divisional Court ( [2006] EWHC 1536 (Admin)), Sedley LJ described as “a friendly action......
-
R (Kay) v Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis
...EWCA Civ 477 [2006] EWHC 1536 (Admin)" class="content__heading content__heading--depth1"> [2007] EWCA Civ 477 [2006] EWHC 1536 (Admin) IN THE SUPREME COURT OF JUDICATURE COURT OF APPEAL (CIVIL APPEALS DIVISION) ON APPEAL FROM THE HIGH COURT OF JUSTICE QUEEN'S BENCH DIVISION ADMINISTRATIVE C......
-
Public Prosecutor v Chong Kai Xiong and others
... ... The purpose of this rule is to give the police notice of such events so that the police may exercise its discretion to ... The ambivalent comments in the judgments in Regina (Kay) v Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis [2008] 1 WLR 2723 (citing ... ...
-
Kay v. Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis, [2008] N.R. Uned. 277 (HL)
...court, Sedley, L.J., commented "there is not complete agreement as to whether the choice of route is truly spontaneous."([2006] EWHC 1536 (Admin), para. 6). It may be that there were organisers who planned the original Critical Mass in April 1994. Today, however, the agreed facts ......
-
Public Order: Processions; Notice Requirements
...1986 as its organiser(s) had not providedthe requisite notice of the procession (s. 11(1)). This led to what theDivisional Court ([2006] EWHC 1536 (Admin)) termed a ‘friendlyaction’ (at [1]) to determine whether or not the cycle ride fell withins. 11 and was thus subject to a requirement of......