| Previous Section | Index | Home Page |
Mr. Patrick McLoughlin (West Derbyshire) (Con): On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. Can you confirm that, if there were a Division, it would be deferred?
Mr. Deputy Speaker (Sir Michael Lord): There are no deferred Divisions at the moment.
PETITION
Respiratory Disease and Ambulatory Oxygen
7.17 pm
Hugh Bayley (City of York) (Lab): I rise to speak on behalf of those of my constituents who suffer from respiratory diseases that require them to breathe oxygen artificially. They are greatly concerned that, although oxygen for use at home is provided by the national health service, portable or ambulatory oxygen is not, and can only be provided privately.
Those constituents have asked me to present a petition, which is signed by Mr. Tony Wilson, of Clifton, York, and by hundreds of other constituents. It reads as follows:
- To the House of Commons
The Petition of members and supporters of Breathe Easy York declares that all people in Britain living with respiratory disease should get a comprehensive lung health service from the national health service.
The Petitioners therefore request that the House of Commons press for the NHS to provide ambulatory oxygen and pulmonary rehabilitation services for those who need them.
And your Petitioners remain, etc.
Nuisance Neighbours
Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—[Margaret Moran.]
7.19 pm
Vera Baird (Redcar) (Lab): It is a rare surgery in Redcar that does not bring to me people who are full of anxiety about nuisance neighbours. Last weekend, into the Saturday calm of Redcar library came a couple with a horror story about their community. About a year ago, my constituents' car was taken from outside their flat; they got a replacement and parked it in the only place they could—outside their flat. Two days later, the windows had been smashed with a brick.
Around that time, a couple of the flats on the estate started to be occupied by a pair or a group of 17 and 18-year-old lads, who seemed to congregate around them much larger groups of similar lads. A couple of them got into the habit of riding motorbikes—rather noisy and dilapidated ones—at night without lights and at speed, in and out of the alleys between the blocks of flats.
One day, the couple came home to find furniture from an unoccupied flat all over the green between the buildings. Since the new year, the female has clearly seen a knife in the hands of a young man in a gang, who were being followed around by a group of six or seven-year-old children. The next week, there was no knife, but there was an air rifle in similar hands and the female told me that if she looked at those people on the street, they poured abuse on her. She said that they all felt under threat and that she went home with her eyes cast down. One day in January a couple of them chewed a cake half up, spat it into their hands and threw the lumps at a middle-aged woman's windows, and when she came out to protest what must have sounded like an army of feet ran across the roof of the block of flats, pulling up the aerials like weeds as they went.
The police come. There are no complaints. The police talk to the lads and disperse them. "Yes, of course, officer, we will go", say the lads. The police go, the lads come back and the same happens again. No one in the community wants to be a witness for a prosecution, an antisocial behaviour order or an eviction. Not even the people who came to see me wanted that. They wanted to know how to move, but it is not easy to move.
Later that week, a 20-year-old with a baby girl who was housed on an estate at the other end of the constituency called me because she wanted to move. Next door to her lives a family that is noisy, rowdy and drinks a lot, often slamming doors late at night so that neither the woman nor the baby can sleep. She is worried about her baby's welfare. Across the road lives another family whose comings and goings, with streams of visitors at all times of the day and night, heavily suggest drug dealing. She is very scared.
The police came, as they should, about the noise. When she told them about the drugs, they asked her whether she was prepared to be a witness. Of course she was not prepared to be a witness: she is 20 and lives on her own. She has to be there when the police are not: she cannot be a witness.
Those are random examples of hundreds and I guess that every MP could list similar cases. Apart from the misery, fear and stress that people trapped in those
situations experience, it seems to me that both the police and the people are trapped in a nuisance neighbours conundrum: the police cannot take action without witnesses and the people are too afraid to be witnesses.There are some methods in force. Cleveland police have an acceptable behaviour contract campaign, which they now use for adults as well as children. They talk to people, keeping it as anonymous as possible. They take graded steps; they send graded letters, and it is pretty successful. There is a group of local authority wardens, and people can be seen talking to them, because they could be talking about grass cutting or a hole in the ground. Information can be given to the police on a reasonably anonymous basis.
I cannot praise the Government highly enough for their recent focus on antisocial behaviour. The Anti-social Behaviour Act 2003 allows the police to disperse gangs and provides for more parenting orders; and the Housing Bill will at last require landlords to co-operate in attempts to control antisocial tenants. There have also been witness protection measures since the Youth Justice and Criminal Evidence Act 1999 allowed people to give evidence from behind a screen without having their names revealed. I have even seen a piece of equipment designed to distort people's voices.
It is not easy, however, to have much faith in witness protection measures when the culprit lives only two doors away. The culprits will see someone going to court, check the time someone leaves home and recognise that the "plain clothes" police car outside is indeed a police car. They will recognise an incident when it is related in court, thereby recognising the person giving evidence. Someone might have a police alarm on the house, but how could the police get there in time when the neighbours live just up the street? I do not believe that the police could, in all conscience, guarantee to protect people who live so hugger-mugger with their tormentors.
Some of the methods work, and more ASBOs are being secured, but the conundrum continues to prevail. Policing methods must be upgraded to the levels of those used historically against serious crime. The police must take the primary responsibility for gathering evidence. They must launch antisocial behaviour surveillance operations, with cameras hidden in cars, empty houses and on the roofs of public buildings. They must be able to call on professional witnesses, such as other police officers, wardens, and community support officers. They must be able to move into empty houses, or wait outside in a series of different vehicles. In that way, they can make tape recordings and observations and notes of events, and recognise the people involved. In the end, officers can testify about what they have seen done and who they have seen doing it.
That sounds melodramatic, like cops and robbers. I am sure that the Government will think that it sounds very expensive for a response to what is antisocial behaviour and not armed robbery. However, it has become clear that antisocial neighbours can force ordinary families into real misery. The methods that I have outlined, and their costs, are justified.
I am aware that there are some green shoots by way of developments in this matter. A series of ASBOs was obtained in Leeds on the strength of professional evidence, and I know that Sunderland council, some 40
miles north of Redcar, is a trailblazer for the "Together" antisocial behaviour campaign. It has been tasked with looking at ways to collect evidence.I am also aware that ASBOs are issued under civil proceedings. Hearsay is acceptable, so it is possible for one officer to collect 10 accounts and deliver them to the court. Also, the Criminal Justice Act 2003 allows hearsay to be admitted in criminal proceedings. As long ago as 1988, a power was given to admit statements rather than oral evidence from people who were being kept away from court by fear. However, those tools are not being used. In addition to them, we need the other tools that I have described. We cannot leave people to act against antisocial behaviour on their own.
The methods that I have outlined may allow us to win some more prosecutions and ASBOs. More culprits will be evicted, and there will be great relief as people start again to want to live where they live, but what happens to the culprits then? They have to have somewhere to live. If they have children, they will need to be rehoused, often in an area of low housing demand that may not be far away from where they used to live. In such areas, there will be plenty of voids, and plenty of other people who, for similar reasons, will have been moved in from elsewhere. The neighbourhood will be in decline already.
It is well known that decent people can get trapped in such areas. For instance, owner-occupiers are unable to sell their properties because no one wants to buy them; even if they did sell them, they would not get enough money to buy another house. Other people to be affected would be the tenants of registered social landlords with no points to move or exchange. All that puts a new meaning on the much-used phrase, "Hello, I'm your new neighbour." Even in my surgery in Redcar—a very small microcosm of the area—we have dealt with a family that caused trouble at location A. It was moved away from there, to the relief of neighbours, and is now causing trouble again at location B.
It was not all that long ago—in 1996, in fact—that Dundee council realised that it was moving nuisance families and antisocial behaviour around the city at the same time. It set up the Dundee families project, with the aim of changing the behaviour of problem families so that they could live unobjectionably in mainstream housing.
An assessment by Glasgow university in 2001 said that the project was "a rare example" of an "intensive intervention" targeted at the sort of behaviour that I have described. Such projects remain rare even today, and that is the problem. The charity NCH joined the Dundee council project, because it understood how necessary it was. It knew that the children of problem families were likely to be the biggest casualties of eviction and of its aftermath—bed-and-breakfast accommodation, going into care, poor school attendance and the break-up of families.
The Dundee project had worked with 83 families by 2001, when the Glasgow university study stated that most of them had made real progress. Their decline had been stopped.
It is not my main point, but I want to tell the House that the project also saved money. The cost of even intensive rehabilitation is less than the cost of repeated
evictions and of taking children into care. In addition, it obviously makes a strong contribution to maintaining the stability of the community. The point is that behaviour can be changed.The Dundee project works in three ways. For the worst people, there are three flats in a block where there is 24-hour supervision and intervention; the average stay is nine months. Flats dispersed through town but owned by the project offer support at the next stage down, when people have moved on. An outreach arm tries to make early interventions before either of those two courses is required.
Behaviour is addressed by intensive work on a family group basis, with anger management, parenting and budgeting skills, alcohol and drug counselling or whatever is needed. The project is a success, although probably not with everybody; but for many families who realise that they are in the last chance saloon, it has been a success. Indeed, the project is so successful that it has been shortlisted for a national housing award. It must be good because it won a local government award for innovation in Scotland, presented by the Labour party.
Although such schemes are rare, there are similar projects in Manchester and Rochdale—the latter in partnership with Shelter. In its first year, the Rochdale scheme reported a high number of mental health issues among problem families and that, where children were part of the problem, 35 of the 50 heads of families were single mothers. Provisionally, Rochdale, like Dundee, reports that incidents of ASB among many of those households have been reduced or have stopped.
There is a scheme in Bolton, and Dundee has received inquiries from as far away as Devon and Middlesbrough—the next town to Redcar, where I started and where I briefly return, to finish my speech. Redcar is a little place, on the edge of the Teesside conurbation, and there are many extended families. That aggravates both elements of antisocial behaviour to which I have referred. It is doubly hard for a witness to have confidence when not only do they live in the same street as their adversary, but they know that his relations know where their relations live. Furthermore, moving problem families around a small place brings them more quickly back to where they started.
On behalf of the Redcar people who come to me so frequently with those problems, I ask the Government to consider the two policy developments that I have proposed. First, they need to understand more fully the burden of being an intimidated victim, and ease it by putting the primary responsibility for collecting and presenting evidence on to the public authorities. Secondly, there should be more local intervention schemes to change the behaviour of nuisance families, so that they are not evicted from next door to brother on one day only to move next door to sister on the next.
| Next Section
| Index | Home Page |