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8 Apr 2003 : Column 173—continued
ROYAL ASSENT
Madam Deputy Speaker: Order. I have to notify the House, in accordance with the Royal Assent Act 1967, that Her Majesty has signified her Royal Assent to the following Acts:
Community Care (Delayed Discharges Etc.) Act 2003
Police (Northern Ireland) Act 2003.
Question again proposed, That the Bill be now read a Second time.
Anti-social Behaviour Bill.
Mr. Peter Atkinson (Hexham): It is always a great pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr. Field). I cannot understand why, instead of struggling with writing these Bills themselves, the Government do not ask him to write them. He would have produced a far better Bill than the Home Office has done. I understand the right hon. Gentleman's views.
It is right that the Government should be forgiven for getting something wrong the first time and trying a second or third time, but, as my hon. Friends have said, they have tried 15 times since 1997 and three times since the Crime and Disorder Act 1998, so Opposition Members' patience is rightly wearing thin. The Government have had many shots at this and it is about time they got it right. The Home Secretary and other Labour Members will forgive Conservative Members if we appear to be cynical about the Bill. One of the things about Bills that crop up for the second, third, fourth or fifth time is that they always seem to do so when an election is approaching. Is it not curious that this Bill has come up just before the local government elections?
The Bill has been introduced with indecent haste. The fact that the ink has hardly dried on the White Paper "Respect and Responsibility" and that hardly anyone has read the White Paper when out of the woodwork has come the Bill makes us smell an election gimmick. As my hon. Friends have said, we doubt whether the measures will work. Similar measures have not worked in the past and I doubt whether they will work in future.
One of the reasons why the provisions will not work is that the people whose job it is to implement them have no confidence or faith in them. It is interesting to look at the briefing material produced by organisations that work in the sector. Here is the Children's Society's view on giving police powers to disperse groups of two or more young children any time of the day or night—I emphasise day or night:
- "We believe that these measures represent a potential breach of children's civil liberties and rights and we are concerned about the impact that this will have on children living in their communities."
I have a similar quote from Barnardo's, once a well respected organisation called Dr. Barnardo's Homes, which now takes on the completely different aura of a campaigning group. Again, it is against the
- "power for police to move on two or more young people from a locality or to return under 16's home after 9 pm".
- "Again we are concerned about the accountability of the 'relevant officer' and the omission of any requirement to consult with local people including the children and young people themselves."
Mr. Brazier: I congratulate my hon. Friend on his courage in making the points that he has just made, which highlight the wider point that, as Government money becomes a larger feature of voluntary organisations, more and more of them are turning from being providers of excellent services to being noisy campaign groups.
Mr. Atkinson: I agree. That is one of the reasons why the Bill cannot be effective. If the publicity is correct, teachers in the north-east of England have made it clear that they will not dish out fixed penalty tickets to parents. They say they do not want to take on that role and it is wrong that they should.
That is not to say that Conservative Members are not concerned about antisocial behaviour. I entirely agree with the right hon. Member for Birkenhead that it is an evil in our society and destroys communities. It is a problem even in the constituency I represent, which is a country constituency with market towns. On council estates in my constituency, there are in most cases just two or three families who with their children and various offspring cause complete mayhem. They threaten people who complain about their behaviour and slowly instil a spiral of decay on the estate: only people who have no option but to move there do so and the whole place slowly goes down hill. We could take firm action with those people. Evict two or three families and we would very quickly bring back up the quality of the estate. In the old days, we had sin bins. When people were evicted from nice estates, they were put into a poor estate, but given a chance, if they behaved themselves, to come back. Although I have no doubt that that was extremely unpopular with Labour Members, it used to work.
As my right hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset (Mr. Letwin) said, we believe that the real answer is to have a proper police force. In my constituency, we have had regular problems with gangs of youths gathering together in one particular location, curiously one of the most affluent parts of the north-east. Some of those gathering together were from some of the more affluent families in the area. It was the police who dispersed them. They went away and peace was restored to that area. Such an approach will work if one has enough police officers and if the police are given the right powers.
For goodness' sake, one of the ways to make policing more effective is to remove the ghastly aura of political correctness with which the police daily have to deal. They have too much bureaucracy to contend with, and more attention is paid to their being politically correct than to their getting on with the job of policing.
Laura Moffatt (Crawley): Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr. Atkinson: I do not have much time. Forgive me.
A police officer told me the other day that a new recruit had arrived in the police force who had been known as Paddy all his life. That was his Christian
name. He was told by senior officers that he had to be called Patrick and that calling him Paddy was an offence. That story came directly from police officers themselves. If we want to outlaw antisocial behaviour, we need a properly motivated police force. That is what Conservative Members will campaign for.I mention two further points. The first has already been mentioned and here I declare an interest: I refer hon. Members to the Register of Members' Interests. It is to do with the new firearms provisions in the Bill. The hon. Member for Vauxhall (Kate Hoey) made the point earlier. The proposals to restrict the use of air weapons by those aged between 14 and 17 will have a serious and unnecessary effect on law-abiding young people who wish to use air rifles properly. Many people who take part in shooting sports during their lives start with air weapons. The younger they start using an air weapon and are taught proper safety and responsibility—perhaps at the age of 14—the safer and more responsible they will be later in life. I hope that in Committee the Minister will consider amendments to allow responsible use of air weapons by those under the age of 17 and above the age of 14.
My final point concerns the issue of litter, which is dealt with in what is in effect a compendium Bill. The Bill gives local authorities additional powers to enter land and to remove litter, but the problem is that it is local authorities that are responsible for the state of our streets and roads. If one drives down the A1, say, between Newcastle and London, or along the A1 western bypass near Newcastle, one sees that the main culprits for the littering of such roads, which are the worst in Europe, are the highways authorities and the local authorities. Giving them greater powers to enter private land is an absolute waste of time, because it is they who should be doing more to keep the countryside clean.
3.10 pm
Liz Blackman (Erewash): I contacted my local police and the housing director of the registered social landlord and ran the Bill's provisions past them. By and large, their response was extremely positive, although they did flag up one or two concerns.
Because this is such a broad Bill, I want to concentrate on just a few issues that I am particularly concerned about as an MP and a former teacher, such as the provisions on truancy and poor behaviour, and particularly those resulting in exclusion. Such behaviour constitutes one of the first opportunities that children have to flaunt conventions, the needs of their peers, the law and wider society. We know that there are well-established links between under-achievement and crime when children behave badly, truant or both. If such behaviour goes unchecked, it is difficult to prevent it from becoming entrenched and being displayed in adult life.
There are some reasons for truanting that I can understand, such as bullying and family trauma—things that require a slightly different approach—but much truancy and bad behaviour in schools is condoned by parents, or, as the chief inspector of schools has identified, responsibility for it is ignored. In many cases, that was my experience as a teacher in dealing with truants and their parents. The underlying problem was
that the parents themselves had lost control at home by failing to set the boundaries. They were condoning or ignoring such behaviour by implementing what I can only call an appeasement policy, or, at the very least, by taking the line of least resistance at home.However, another recurring theme was that later on, those parents would return to seek support because their children were running amok at home, ruling the roost, affecting younger siblings and sometimes using violence. The parenting contracts with which clause 18 deals have the potential to get such parents to recognise their responsibilities and, above all, to seek support.
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