Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1-19)
11 MARCH 2004
MS LOUISE
CASEY AND
MR WILL
NIBLETT
Memorandum submitted by Department for Environment,
Food and Rural Affairs[1]
Q1 Chairman: Good morning and welcome
to our sub-committee on the world of graffiti, litter, dog faeces,
fly-posting and the general crapness of modern life. I want to
put to you initially something that was said to us by Mr Kier
Hopley, the Head of Sentencing Policy at the Home Office, at the
end of the oral evidence session we had with him. He said: "To
be absolutely honest, in terms of my day-to-day job and life,
environmental crime is not at the forefront of my agenda."
Does that not make your life a lot harder?
Ms Casey: Not really, no. He said
environmental crime is not at the forefront because actually he
is trying to sort out fixed penalty notices and how they work
right across the entire country and deal with sentencing overall,
and this is one part of it. There are other people, such as myself
and colleagues in Defra, who worry about this a lot. These are
not discordant, I do not think.
Q2 Chairman: They seem fairly discordant
to me, given the salience which this issue has in local communities
and the increasing prominence it is getting in the political debate
at local level, and of course here as well. It is rather disappointing
that the Home Office seems not to be taking this as seriously
as many people in the community are.
Ms Casey: That is a different
question. If the question was "Is the Home Office taking
this issue seriously?", the answer is: absolutely, and across
the Home Office they clearly are. Hence, Kier Hopley is responsible
for sentencing policy to Ministers and on sentencing policy he
has priorities, such as fixed penalty notices, community service
orders, et cetera. That is his job; he is an official working
for Ministers in a government department. The government department,
the Home Office, does take this incredibly seriously. That is
why I am here, I hope. It is also why many other people in the
Home Office worry about this so much. Environmental crime is absolutely
integral to the Government's agenda, not only on tacking anti-social
behaviour but dealing with crime and grime: clean and safe, crime
and grime are two halves of the same equation. If you had spoken
to Ellie Roy, who is the Director responsible for crime reduction
in the Home Office, she would have said to you quite a lot about
how much it matters to her that crime reduction partnerships do
prioritise what they are doing on environmental crime. Certainly
in my work, which takes me out of Whitehall a great deal, it is
absolutely evident to us that we are working very closely with
local authorities and police authorities to get them to prioritise
this issue. That is why the whole "Together" thrust
of the campaign is about clean and safe, the crime and the grime.
It is about trying to get communities to be able to have a bit
more control, and the way they see control is often through the
crime agenda. It is a huge issue for the Government and a huge
issue therefore for the Home Office. If we gave you the wrong
impression, then we can talk about that back at base camp!
Q3 Chairman: I think you gave the impression
that you wanted to give. It was a frank answer to a straight question.
Coming back to the Defra memorandum, which emphasises quite a
lot the "broken window" theory, do you think that current
levels of anti-social behaviour are related to the overall standards
of our local environment?
Ms Casey: There is no research
or evidence that makes that link as clearly as I think people
would like it to be, if I am honest. I am a signed-up member,
as a member of the public, to the "broken window" theory
because it seems logical to me personally. In terms of research
and evidence, that link is not really made quite so clearly. The
"broken window" theory is now 1970s; it is a good few
decades ago. That does not mean to say, however, that it is not
quite obvious to us that people, particularly in deprived areas,
perceive anti-social behaviour to be a problem. They are six times
more likely to see anti-social behaviour as a problem. The flip
side of that is that people in more affluent areas complain much
more about the sorts of issues that you are looking at today.
I think there is something in that. This is not straightforward
stuff. What is completely obvious is that the public care about
this issue hugely, and therefore we need to make sure that we
respond to it.
Q4 Chairman: When you say that the research
bears out the "broken window" theory, are you saying
that research has been done and no link has been established,
or that there has not been a great deal of research?
Ms Casey: I am not an academic,
a social scientist or a researcher. That is not what the Government
is employing me to do, so you would have to get in whoever runs
research to test all this out. What I do know is that I have read
people saying that they do not agree with the "broken window"
theory. I have read other people saying that they do.
Q5 Chairman: What is your view?
Ms Casey: My view is there is
a connection, definitely.
Q6 Chairman: That is as a member of the
public?
Ms Casey: Yes. In my job I go
out to communities all the time. I spend a lot of my life listening
to people who say that they are not only tired of these issues
but they are tired of the issues because they see them on a continuum
towards crime. You can look at this in two ways. Ten years ago
MORI polling was showing that people worried about unemployment,
whether they were going to be able to pay their mortgage and economic
type issues. Now, if you talk to anybody, they will say that they
worry about litter, graffiti and vandalism. We have to respond
on that basis. I can only say, from all the visits and community
meetings that I have attended, a huge number of people in the
public say, "If you could only get on to of this, we would
feel safer". When people feel safer, they are more likely
not to commit crime, and they are also more likely, in my view,
to report crime. I live in an area where some people gave up reporting
abandoned cars because they did not think anybody was going to
come and take the cars away. We are saying in government right
now, and the "Together" campaign is all about this,
working with colleagues in Defra and elsewhere, ENCAMS and others:
come forward, and let us make more complaints about this and more
noise about it. I think it is important. I think there is a link.
Q7 Chairman: Do you think that one of
the quickest gains that could be made in tackling anti-social
behaviour generally is by focusing on low-level crime?
Ms Casey: Yes. Anti-social behaviour
quite often is low-level crime per se. Things like harassment,
intimidation and those sorts of things are going to have a huge
and detrimental effect on people. It makes people very miserable,
it makes them ill and it does other things. I also think that
living in an environment of litter, graffiti and glass all over
the floor because somebody has done a bus shelter in is not exactly
motivational. The sooner we can crack those sorts of things, the
happier people will be and the less likely to commit crime and
other things.
Q8 Chairman: I am surprised that you
say that it is a low level crime in one sense. Anti-social behaviour
clearly it not the same as murder but it has a very high level
impact on communities, does it not?
Ms Casey: Absolutely, yes.
Q9 Chairman: In that sense, it is not
really a low level crime at all.
Ms Casey: If you go to court with
a criminal damage on one occasion, then that is not the same as
going to court with GBH. That was the point I was attempting to
make. If you go to court with one offence of intimidation or harassment,
that is not the same as going to court with GBH. I am entirely
in agreement with you 110% that anti-social behaviour has an enormously
corrosive effect, not only on individuals but on society overall.
I think there is corrosion in some of the areas that I have seen
and we are taking action and trying to tackle those areas. When
you cover litter, graffiti, abandoned cars, that starts to restore
confidence; when you start to restore confidence on those fronts,
people start to come forward and give evidence about some of the
more difficult things. Let us take the neighbour from hell, the
neighbour with challenging problems, whichever label you wish
to use for that family, and most people in the room, as you are
MPs, know who I am talking about—
Q10 Chairman: And we know where they
live.
Ms Casey: And you know where they
live. People sometimes find giving evidence against those people
very difficult; they feel very intimidated by those people; they
feel that they cannot come out and say anything. If people are
living in an area such as some I can think of which we are working
in at the moment where people celebrate an abandoned car being
removed but the glass from it and the tyres are left behind, or
they get up in the morning and have to take their kids through
an area that has litter and graffiti and stuff written all over
the walls, where people do not use the playground because it has
syringes in it or they feel intimidated because the lighting is
not good enough—you all know what I am talking about—then
coming forward against that family feels like a much bigger gulf
to them. I think we need to do both; we need to get members of
the public empowered so that they are able to give evidence and
come forward and complain. We need to make local authorities and
other authorities more effective in how they tackle the neighbour
from hell, but we need to do the cleaning and do that quickly
land effectively because, in my opinion, there is a link between
all those three things.
Q11 Mr Thomas: I wondered, on the broken
window hypothesis, and I think we all see that ourselves as constituency
MPs, how important you see design as having an effect on that.
When I think of the worst parts of my constituency, those are
the areas with the most cramped housing, the worst construction,
and the most difficult streets to access, where public transport
no longer goes because a bus cannot turn round at the top of the
estate. How much does that impact on the way people deal with
their communities?
Ms Casey: I think it does. I can
think of areas such as the ones you are describing where there
is no doubt that more effective design would be helpful. If you
look at all the stuff that obviously the Deputy Prime Minister's
Office is doing on the sustainable communities programme, they
put design and environment very high up their agenda in terms
of then creating clean, safe areas, places that are easy to keep
clean and easy to make safe. It has been going on for generations
but all the programmes—SRB and City Challenge—did
put those higher up the agenda. I think the sustainable communities
programme will do the same. Do I think that that is an excuse
for litter, graffiti, abandoned cars, intimidation, harassment,
spitting at old ladies? No, I do not. Yes, of course we can make
design better. I think there are ways we can do that and programmes
that are happening. People prioritise these much more than they
used to. Do I think that is an excuse for fly-posting, litter,
noise, graffiti, harassment and intimidation? No, I do not. You
cannot excuse one by the other. It is an element and it is like
saying—and this is a bit more controversial—that it
is all right for young people between the ages of 15 and 25 when
they are at a shopping parade not allowing anybody to feel able
to go to and from their shops at night because there is not a
youth club. That makes no sense to me at all. It does not make
any sense at all to any members of the general public because
they think bad behaviour is bad behaviour, and you call it bad
behaviour and you sort it. Coming to the fly-posting agenda of
this Audit Committee today, that that is bad behaviour too. We
need a much higher discussion and debate. I was really pleased
that you asked me to come and I will be pleased to see the results
of this because I think we need to raise the fact that this is
a social justice issue, too. This is a welfare issue, too. This
is not just about crime but about people feeling that they have
some control over their own environment. Bad behaviour, whether
it is spitting in the sidewalk, to use an American expression,
or throwing litter or putting your fish and chips stuff down at
the end, is environmental crime, and that is about environmental
justice.
Q12 Mr Thomas: There is another end to
that as well. I accept that but it does not help to solve the
issue. Just saying that people are badly behaved is not going
to help us to address that. On the design point, how does that
impact on authorities themselves which are tasked with cleaning
that graffiti and litter? There is a two-way process. In order
to build confidence in their communities, to get people to interact
with authorities once again, so that they feel it is worth giving
rein to litter lying about or the abandoned car, or whatever it
may be, then you have to see authorities themselves, wherever
they are, and we have already identified there is a myriad of
them, responding in a way that is adequate. I certainly come across
design being used as an excuse for example not to clean up the
streets because you have a narrow council estate and therefore
all the cars are parked on the kerb and all over the pavement
and they say, "We cannot possibly clean up there because
it is just too difficult". That in itself has a corrosive
effect, does it not?
Ms Casey: It has a very corrosive
effect. I have worked in the public sector for 20 years of my
life. I am a signed-up member of it and I believe in it, but I
also know its faults. One of its faults sometimes is that if you
can find a million reasons not to do something, then you will.
That is something that we are challenging over and over with the
Together campaign. I am tired of hearing people say they have
got an excuse not to do it. We are in agreement. You are saying:
do not use design as a reason not to get a smaller vehicle up
to clean the area; do not use design as a reason not to get a
minibus rather than a big bus; do not use design as an excuse.
I am absolutely a signed-up member of wanting to remove the excuses
for inaction on these sorts of issues right across the country.
That is very much what the Together campaign, the help line, all
of those things, are saying: we need to remove the excuses for
inaction. If I am charitable about it, I would say that we need
to empower people to know what they can do to make sure that they
are challenging those sorts of issues. I want to come back to
addressing that and confrontation. There is a culture in this
country, which I think is a very laudable and lovely culture,
about being British, which is that people—clearly you lot
do not—on the whole find confrontation very difficult. It
is one of our nicer traits that we do not find it easy to say,
"Listen, your son the other week . . ." unless we know
that person really well. I heard a true story very recently of
a brand new London bus and somebody "graffitied" in
front of everybody, the entire bus. That person wrote on the inside
top deck of the bus, and nobody challenged them. That is appalling,
in my view, in that what we have to do is get a bit more of the
"I am not getting off the tube until it runs on time"
attitude. All it needed was for somebody to go down and say to
the driver very quietly, "Seal the doors, call the police,
drive back to base and get this person". That is what I am
trying to say here. I do think when you name something as not
being OK, that is a good start, and not a lot of that happens
here. It is not all right to throw chewing gum on the floor. We
do not hear the politicians say that. We are hearing it now. It
is not OK. We need to hear community leaders and local authorities
say it. We need people to be saying that it is not acceptable—
Q13 Chairman: Ms Casey, this is a fascinating
answer but it is breaking a record for length! I want to ask you
one final thing. You are bringing a huge passion to this, and
that is clear and very welcome. I wondered to what extent you
are concerned that the Government's new high profile involvement
in all this area is going to let local authorities off the hook.
Ms Casey: The message that certainly
we are pushing through in the Anti-Social Behaviour Unit, for
which I am responsible, is: at the end of the day, we can put
an Act through Parliament. We have new powers coming in this area
on 31 March. We have a fantastic Together campaign, which gives
people all the tools they need to remove all the excuses, no matter
what they are, but it will stand and fall on whether local people
feel their local authorities and the local police authorities
are listening to them. At the end of the day, it does come down
to all sorts of things we have in place; we are empowering people
to do all sorts of things. I think, though, and this is quite
heartening, that if every local authority looks at the polling
that they do—and we all do it—and at their focus groups
or their consultation meetings, they will see that the issues
you are looking at here today will dominate. They must start to
listen to those issues. It is not just about getting elected but
about keeping their good services running all year round. That
is the other part of what we are pushing. We are saying: listen
to local people and take action. What I do not want is action
to be waiting on "we need a five-year regeneration programme"
or "we need a 20-year social justice programme". I want
that action to be about getting the litter picked up tomorrow
and prosecuting the hell out of anybody they find breaking the
law on that front.
Q14 Mr Challen: I do not want to incriminate
myself but I seem to recall that when I was a teenager there was
a lot of bad behaviour. I am wondering if it is any worse now
or are we in the middle of the latest moral hysteria or moral
panic and we have given it a new name and we are expecting the
Government to sort it all out because we ourselves, as you have
said, the man on the Clapham omnibus, are not prepared to tackle
it?
Ms Casey: Part of tackling it
is getting, as you say, the man on the Clapham omnibus to play
a role. All the time I meet with local communities and individuals
and I am saying that we need them to stand up and take a stand
and say, "The authorities can come behind you but we need
you to take a stand". That is the starting point of the Government's
strategy on anti-social behaviour. It needs the public to take
a stand and come out and come forward. The more that people are
able to do for themselves, the better. On the first part of your
question about kids hanging around, youth nuisance is a dominating
issue for the public. The British crime survey shows that. We
will respond to that. What communities are saying is that they
have had enough of some of this. It is not all about just providing
youth clubs and future positives and positive future funding and
youth service funding. A lot of money has gone into that area
and that has been great but there is a flip side, which is around
the enforcement agenda. That enforcement agenda needs to be heard
here. We need our local authorities and police authorities to
be enforcing—and I do not necessarily mean by court action
at all. There was a place where they were about to use the new
dispersal powers, and by a process of going and talking to the
people at the area saying, "We are going to use these dispersal
powers", they dispersed the problem without having to use
the power. That was a great result. I was delighted by that. The
less court action we have on this stuff, the better.
Q15 Mr Challen: Is it any worse now than
it was 20 years ago. Twenty years is a key period. When people
talk about things in the past, they always say, "Twenty years
ago, it was not as bad as this". If we go right back, tracing
the history of vandalism, in the nineteenth century they were
saying, at the turn of the century, "Twenty years ago it
was not as bad as this". Is it any worse?
Ms Casey: I do not know if it
is any worse. I know the public believe it to be significantly
worse.
Q16 Mr Challen: Are we keeping figures
on anti-social behaviour now?
Ms Casey: Yes, we use the British
crime survey as a way of dictating what we do. The British crime
survey shows very clearly that people are very concerned about
youth nuisance. I would, however, say that if you look at what
we are doing on anti-social behaviour, we are not particularly
zeroing in on youth who are intimidating and hanging around. It
is about any group of any kind. If you are asking for my personal
opinion, I think that the behaviour of some people is slightly
more out of control now. People do think it is all right to throw
rubbish on the floor and they do think it is all right to harangue
people as they go in and out of convenience stores in some of
the estates. It is all right for us to say, "Actually, we
are not happy". Whether it was a problem 50 years ago is
not really relevant to me. What is relevant to me is that everywhere
we have gone in the last year people have said that they want
this issue tackled. The taxpayer is paying me to tackle it and
I report to Ministers on tackling it.
Q17 Mr Challen: Do you think that the
more common availability of certain technologies has made the
matter worse? Joy riding now does seem to be a lot worse. We do
have a lot more cars around and a lot more older vehicles, which
seem to be the target. People have louder hi-fi's. Noise nuisance
is now considerably worse that it was 20 years ago. I think you
can demonstrate that by the sheer power of these things. Spray
paints are perhaps more available and cheaper comparatively. Do
these things contribute?
Ms Casey: We are bringing in quite
significant restrictions on spray paints because we are concerned
at how they are used in relation to graffiti. You have to start
from where you are. This is not a nanny state. You start from
where the people are. If people have hi-fi's, they should use
them responsibly. I have a hi-fi and I am sure I could make my
neighbour's life a complete misery if I decided to play a CD at
top volume day in and day out.
Q18 Mr Challen: If you look at what is
on offer and how these things are marketed, with hi-fi's you will
see that they are designed to be powerful, to be loud.
Ms Casey: It is OK if on a Friday
night or a Saturday night once every few months you have a party
and you tell your neighbours about it. What we are missing here
is that you can do design and limit noise but you are abdicating
personal responsibility. The reason I am delighted to be part
of this is that I have spent my life trying to work on things
to do with social justice and I see this thing about personal
responsibility; people have to take personal responsibility. We
need to push the boundaries back about them taking personal responsibility.
There is a line. You can support and help people and all of those
sorts of things, but if they then cross over that line, there
have to be consequences. I do not think it is realistic for the
Director of the Anti-Social Behaviour Unit to say to Ministers,
"We need to get videos of evidence of a particular area".
It is much more appropriate, in my view, for a government to say:
"There is personal responsibility and there is government
responsibility and there is a meeting of minds." That is
what this is about. You can find a million excuses to put your
noise up; you have to find a million reasons to keep it down.
That applies to the people next door with kids.
Q19 Mr Challen: It is often said that
in schools children can learn about the environment, they can
learn about respect for others, they can learn about citizenship
and so on, but when they leave school, they are then subject to
all these pressures that society puts on them. If they go and
see a film or watch TV, they learn a lot from that. What they
will learn to a certain extent is that it is all right to be aggressive
and it is all right to be loud, or whatever, because a lot of
that happens certainly in recent films with violence. That can
be part of their conditioning, if you like?
Ms Casey: I do not agree with
that. I think the vast majority of young people behave in a perfectly
decent and law-abiding way. We keep perpetuating this "it
is all about youth, it is all about kids, it is all about
them being conditioned". I just fundamentally disagree with
that. It is fascinating to me that the vast majority of teenagers
and young people completely understand what morals are, completely
get this stuff. In some of the meetings I have been at the youngsters
are significantly upset and they are often upset because they
feel people are getting at them. They do not feel that they are
the perpetrators of a lot of this stuff. They feel that they are
put upon. The Anti-Social Behaviour Strategy, the Together campaign,
is very much not targeted at any particular age group. A pensioner
recently received an anti-social behaviour order. He behaved in
the most appalling fashion day in and day out. Let us not forget
that this is not a youth issue, genuinely it is not. For every
film that is released with violence, there is a romantic comedy
coming out which the youngsters also go and see. Maybe I am being
anecdotal here, but that is my view. I do not think we should
see this as a youth issue. A lot of them are very proud of their
country. They deserve to live in an environment that is clean
and safe. They have an equal role and responsibility in that.
The more we model that behaviour as adults, the more effective
that is. I do not think going to see The Matrix Revolutions
means that tomorrow they are going to go out and knock down an
old lady. I just do not see that connection.
1 See appendix 8, Ev 70 Back
|
