Legalize
Legalize / United Kingdom / Statutory-Instrument

The Public Order Act 2023 (Commencement No. 5) (England and Wales) Regulations 2024

Type Statutory-Instrument
Publication 2024-10-21
State In force
Department King's Printer of Acts of Parliament
Source legislation.gov.uk
PDF Download
articles Not indexed
Reform history JSON API

Made: 21st October 2024

The Secretary of State makes these Regulations in exercise of the power conferred by section 35(5) of the Public Order Act 2023[^f00001].

Citation and extent

1

Commencement

2

Section 9 of the Public Order Act 2023 (offence of interference with access to or provision of abortion services) comes into force on 31st October 2024.

Signed

Diana Johnson — Minister of State — Home Office — 21st October 2024

Explanatory note

(This note is not part of the Regulations)

EXPLANATORY NOTE

These Regulations bring into force provisions of the Public Order Act 2023 (c. 15) (“the Act”). They are the sixth commencement regulations to be made under the Act, but the fifth which extend only to England and Wales.

Regulation 2 brings into force section 9 of the Act.

Section 9 of the Act establishes “safe access zones” around abortion clinics. It makes it an offence within a safe access zone to intentionally or recklessly influence, obstruct, or cause harassment, alarm or distress to any person in connection with their decision to access, provide, or facilitate the provision of abortion services at an abortion clinic. It defines the boundaries of safe access zones and outlines exceptions, such as for activities inside dwellings or places of worship. It also specifies the maximum penalty for the offence, which is an unlimited fine.

A full impact assessment has not been prepared for this instrument as the Regulations themselves have no impact on the private, voluntary or public sector. A full impact assessment has been prepared in relation to the Act, and a copy is available at https://bills.parliament.uk/bills/3153/publications. A hard copy can be obtained by writing to the Home Office, Direct Communications Unit, 2 Marsham Street, London, SW1P 4DF, United Kingdom.

Footnotes

[^f00001]: 2023 c. 15.

Reading this document does not replace reading the official text published on legislation.gov.uk. Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. We assume no responsibility for any inaccuracies arising from the conversion of the original CLML XML to this format.

This text is published under legislation.gov.uk's own terms of reuse, not a Legalize or public-domain licence. legislation.gov.uk
Open Government Licence v3.0 (attribution required)
© Crown and database right. Derived from content available under the Open Government Licence v3.0 from legislation.gov.uk.