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7.32 pm
The Minister for Crime Reduction, Policing and Community Safety (Ms Hazel Blears): I genuinely thank my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Redcar (Vera Baird) for securing the debate. Although attendance is sparse, the topic is probably the top issue in the surgeries and postbags of most Members and
councillors throughout the country. When I visit local communities, antisocial behaviour and quality of life issues are at the heart of people's concerns.Dealing with antisocial behaviour is hugely important. In our recent assessment, under the British crime survey, one in three people nationally—a huge number—said that antisocial behaviour affected their quality of life. It is wholly unacceptable that people have to tolerate the kind of behaviour that my hon. and learned Friend has detailed. Disgusting and despicable acts are committed against very vulnerable people, some of whom have to live with such behaviour day in, day out, week in, week out. That incessant pressure on people's lives really has to be experienced to be understood.
The problems that many communities face cannot be tackled in isolation; they cannot simply be dealt with either by the police or the local authority and certainly not by communities on their own. It is vital that all the agencies work together—the police, local authority workers, neighbourhood wardens and social workers. Our schools are a vital element in tackling antisocial behaviour. Other officers, such as environmental health officers, are much undervalued in terms of the powers and analysis that they can bring to bear on some of the problems, especially in relation to housing.
I have heard of some devastating experiences over the past few weeks and months as I have visited areas to talk to local people. Recently, I visited the Little London area of Leeds where 66 antisocial behaviour orders were obtained by the local authority at the end of the summer in a period of only a few weeks. In that community, all control had been lost. Children as young as nine or 10 were running amok; many of them were acting as runners for drug dealers and the whole community was at a complete loss about what to do.
The fact that the authorities have now obtained the antisocial behaviour orders—35 of them are full orders and 30 are, at present, interim orders—has sent out a huge message to that local community. People have told me that for the first time in years they have been able to use the local play area and their children have been able to play out in peace and quiet. They have not been able to do something as simple as that, which most of us would take for granted, because of the behaviour of the minority who have made their lives an absolute misery.
Yesterday, I was in Nottingham, visiting a local community in the Stonebridge and St. Ann's area of the city. It suffers the problems of antisocial behaviour, vandalism and young people gathering in intimidating groups, much of it fuelled by drug addiction. The authorities in the area are beginning to get a grip on the antisocial behaviour, but they have some way to go before local communities will feel fully safe and protected.
For those reasons, my right hon. Friends the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary and I launched the antisocial behaviour action plan and campaign in November last year. We have backed the plan with £75 million of new money, to be distributed across the country with funding for every area. There will be an antisocial behaviour co-ordinator for every crime and disorder reduction partnership. Crucially, help and support will be provided for front-line practitioners.
My hon. and learned Friend is right: although the powers are on the statute book, tackling antisocial behaviour is a fairly new discipline and people have yet to come to terms with which powers they can use, how they can use the courts and how they can drive forward action at a local level. That is why we have set up the "Together" academy, which brings together a range of practitioners from the police, local government and the court system, and provides free training, delivered by expert practitioners who have already pushed forward the boundaries in the use of such powers. They have come across the problems before and solved them for themselves, and they are ready to share their expertise and good practice with others. The academy has now organised an event for every region of the country and, in the next six to eight weeks, it will train 3,000 people. There will be an academy event in my hon. and learned Friend's region and I urge her to get local people to take advantage of that training, so that they can be skilled up to use the new powers that the Government have put on the statute book.
Along with the "Together" academy will go the "Together" action line. Again, that is a practical way to try to help local communities. The action line will be staffed by expert practitioners, who will be at the end of a telephone line so that people can get in touch with them and say, "I've got a problem. I do not know how to get the evidence to obtain an order. The witnesses feel intimidated—what should I do to help them?" The expert practitioners stand ready to help at every opportunity. The action line, the website and the academy are practical ways to help people deal with these issues.
My hon. and learned Friend is right to say that antisocial behaviour spans a range of issues, including graffiti and fly-tipping, but the impact of nuisance neighbours can be enormous. We have examples from across the country of ordinary people's lives being ripped apart by the intimidation, harassment and criminal damage carried out by a small minority of families, who make life a misery for the majority. Such behaviour, as evidenced by my hon. and learned Friend, cannot go unchecked. It needs to be challenged and put under pressure, to the point where people want to change their behaviour. If they do want to change, we will be there to support them in doing so.
My hon. and learned Friend makes the important point that obtaining orders and moving the problem around does not resolve the underlying issues for some nuisance neighbours. It is key to our strategy to develop ways in which we can prevent the antisocial behaviour in the first place, rather than transferring it when we disperse those subject to an order.
We have set up 10 trailblazers across the country to deal with a range of antisocial behaviour, including nuisance families, but we have also set up a nuisance neighbour expert panel, which brings together people from social services, education, the police and various other agencies, to look at the hard cases with multiple problems. Those could include substance misuse, mental health problems and children with problems. The panel analyses the cases and determines exactly what support needs to be provided, alongside enforcement, to change the situation around. The first meeting of the nuisance neighbour expert panel was
extremely interesting and if my hon. and learned Friend's local practitioners wish to key in to that panel, we would be delighted to provide that support.My hon. and learned Friend cited some examples of good practice—the shelter inclusion project and the Dundee families project—where support is offered in various parts of the country to families who have been threatened with repossession, threatened with eviction, or against whom there are ASBOs. The projects are long term. The Dundee project has a residential element, with support offered 24 hours a day. Clearly, that is very intensive help for the families concerned. The projects are being evaluated, and so far the news is very encouraging, in that behaviour can be turned around.
It is vital that we have twin tracks to our strategy: support for those who are prepared to take it, but also very tough and swift enforcement, because the majority of people in this country have to know that we are on their side in dealing with the kind of horrific behaviour that my hon. and learned Friend has identified.
My hon. and learned Friend also raised the very important issue of witness intimidation, one of the most difficult and intractable matters with which we have to deal. As she rightly says, very often the victims of nuisance neighbours and antisocial behaviour will live in the same street, in the same community, and will have to face those who are perpetrating this behaviour day after day.
We are doing a great deal of work around witness support. It is vital that we support people, not just from when the matters get to court, but from when they first occur, and that we take them right through the process, supporting them at every point. My hon. and learned Friend is right that the ASBOs are civil orders, and therefore we can use hearsay evidence and professional witnesses. In many cases, police forces have been prepared to do surveillance and to put in different kinds of evidence. Where authorities have got used to using the powers, they have also adopted new ways of gathering evidence. We can share that best practice, concerning ways in which evidence can be gathered, through the academy.
At the end of the day the very best evidence is from the victims—those who have witnessed the behaviour themselves. Therefore, a key part of our strategy is to try to encourage them to come forward and to support them at every step. One of the key things that we have done is to launch "Taking a Stand" awards. Here in Parliament just a couple of months ago, we had people from all around the country who had been nominated by their local communities for their courage in taking a stand against antisocial behaviour. They were prepared to stand up and give evidence, with support. The message that that has sent to the rest of their communities is that if one stands up and is prepared to give evidence and get the ASBO, one really can transform the community in which one lives.
The overall winners of the awards were some extremely brave women from Failsworth who had suffered antisocial behaviour for three years. They had petrol poured through their letterboxes. Their children were bullied and harassed on the way to school. Their lives were an absolute misery. They finally decided that
enough was enough. They came together, co-operated with the police, and obtained ASBOs. Now their community is a much better place to live in. They have recently obtained an empty house on their estate and turned it into a community drop-in centre. They have done something extremely positive with the anger, distress and hurt that they were feeling, and have been able to make a tremendous contribution to the local community.It can be done. I do not underestimate the difficulties that people experience in tackling antisocial behaviour, but there are examples now, beacons up and down the country, of people having been able to make a difference by standing up in this way.
I commend to my hon. and learned Friend the "Together" campaign pack, produced to go with the academy and the action line. It contains details of all the powers available, when they come in and how they can be used. There is also a guide to running a local "Together" campaign. Perhaps we could have "Together Redcar", which would be a very good way of bringing people together.
There is thought of running local "Taking a Stand" awards. Again, my hon. and learned Friend might like to think about organising, perhaps with her local authority, nominations of local people who have made this kind of contribution, giving them a small reward for a community project and publicising the fact that people can come forward and make a difference in their communities.
My hon. and learned Friend has mentioned using housing powers, as well as the powers under the Anti-social Behaviour Act 2003, and I also remind her that a series of powers is being introduced in respect of housing. Demoted tenancies will be introduced from June this year. Where nuisance and antisocial behaviour occurs, demotion will remove the tenant's right to buy and security of tenure for a year, so it is a powerful weapon.
The Housing Bill, currently before Parliament, includes the prospect of introducing selective licensing and interim management orders for houses in the private sector. A big problem has been to try to ensure that unscrupulous private landlords do not simply let their properties to people without any vetting or supervision, allowing them to indulge in antisocial behaviour without any remedy. The prospect of being able to license private sector landlords will come as an enormous relief to those in many areas of the country that have been blighted by irresponsible private landlords. Of course, many good landlords are part of voluntary accreditation and licensing schemes and manage their properties properly, but far too often irresponsible landlords allow their tenants to make other people's lives an absolutely misery.
We will also introduce new powers in relation to noise nuisance, which, I understand, is a particular problem in my hon. and learned Friend's constituency. From 31 March, all local authorities will have the power to investigate complaints of excessive noise at night, to give warning notices in respect of that noise and, where it remains excessive after the issue of the notice, either prosecute or issue a fixed-penalty notice for £100, which is far more likely and should bring some people up pretty sharp, making them realise what their
irresponsible behaviour is doing to their neighbours. Noise pollution and noise nuisance are some of the most difficult things to deal with, and they cause people a huge amount of anguish in their own homes. So we now have a range of powers—from housing and managing noise to dealing with ASBOs—that are beginning to come on stream.I also want to highlight to my hon. and learned Friend the fact that we will also introduce powers to deal with the some of the underlying causes of antisocial behaviour. That is as important as enforcement. We will introduce individual support orders to juveniles with ASBOs. When an ASBO is made on a young person, an individual support order will be directed to the causes of the antisocial behaviour, such as substance misuse, mental health problems and anger management, so that we can try to change that person's behaviour for the future. The real success—the real prize—for us is to try to ensure that we prevent the antisocial behaviour from getting any worse and causing more concern in the community.
Antisocial behaviour powers have been on the statute book for some years now, and we have recently tried to streamline them, to make them easier for people to use and to give them the tools to make a difference. I am delighted that there are now more than 1,600 ASBOs throughout the country. There are many more
acceptable behaviour contracts, and they are now being used with adults, as well as juveniles. There are nearly 4,000 parenting orders. Again, they are a key part of our strategy to try to involve the whole family in dealing with such issues. There are about 18,000 drug treatment and testing orders. Many of these problems are driven by drug abuse and addiction.On enforcement, we now have record numbers of police officers and community support officers, who are out there in communities, giving people some visible reassurance. For far too long, people have been crying out for that reassurance. My hon. and learned Friend will know that record numbers of police officers and community support officers are helping the community in her constituency.
I am delighted that my hon. and learned Friend has raised this extremely important issue. I hope that she is reassured that the Government have an intense focus on the issue and that we are absolutely determined to tackle antisocial behaviour wherever it may be and to support the decent majority against the actions of the loutish minority who have made some people's lives far too difficult for far too long.
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