Examination of Witnesses (Questions 100-119)
7 DECEMBER 2004
MR DAVID
COPELAND, SERGEANT
PAUL DUNN
MBE, MR MARTIN
LEE, MS
SALLIE BRIDGEN
AND MS
MICHELLE MONAGHAN
Q100 Chairman: Mr Copeland,
I think you raised that subject in the first place—over
to you. Mediation services I think have grown over the last ten
years.
Mr Copeland: Yes, they have.
Q101 Chairman: Is that
in response to a real growth in the problem?
Mr Copeland: If I may talk about
the problem locally, my experience is that recently it has grown.
I think there is a reason for that. The local authority and the
police have had other issues to concentrate on, whether it be
violent crime, burglary or the volume of crime. I think that has
been an issue. Anti-social behaviour, the low-level stuff, has
not been perhaps given the attention it should have been. As an
indication, in Peterborough we have just finished the crime audit,
and anti-social behaviour across all its variant areas came up
as a very clear problem being experienced by a large number of
people. So within the actual forthcoming strategy and accident
plan, one of the clear priorities will be anti-social behaviour,
including nuisance neighbours. I think now, with all the other
agencies, we are going to look to address the problems itself.
As you have said, mediation has grown throughout the last 10-15
years in this country. I think it has grown because it is seen
as an effective means of resolving disputes, differences, misunderstandings
and some areas of anti-social behaviour.
Q102 Chairman: Just to
pursue the point, because Mr Lee raised it: I think you were one
of the witnesses who said that a lot of people do not realise
that what they are doing is anti-social behaviour and Mr Lee is
saying, "Oh, yes, they do." are you talking about different
things, different issues? Why do you have different views?
Mr Copeland: I think we are talking
about slightly different issues. My core business is nuisance
neighbours. We are not dealing in the main with groups of young
people who in quite large numbers are going into ABCs (acceptable
behaviour contracts). My experience, in dealing with the vast
majority of nuisance neighbours that we deal with, is that they
do not understand exactly what they are doing. If they do understand,
they do not fully understand the implications of what they are
doing on their neighbours.
Q103 Chairman: You are
talking about things like noise, late night parties—
Mr Copeland: Late night noise,
parties, the way they are treating people. There is a small element,
as I said earlier, who are clearly doing it because they want
to do it. For whatever reason they actually want to disrupt other
people's lives.
Q104 Chairman: Michelle
Monaghan, you are dealing with the families who have been accused
of this. Is your workload increasing? Are the local authorities
referring more people to you?
Ms Monaghan: I think people are
identifying that behaviour can be tackled, that there are solutions
to that behaviour. So there may not be an increase in the behaviour
but may be an increase in the response to that behaviour and how
that behaviour can be improved. Certainly we do have full case
loads on our project and throughout the Rochdale borough we receive
referrals from a wide number of agencies who are identifying that
there are many different solutions to that.
Chairman: Thank you.
Q105 Mr Taylor: Could
I ask our appropriate witnesses this question: How easy is it
to establish whether particular behaviour requires a response?
Or is it something you recognise when you see it?
Sergeant Dunn: I think it depends
on the community you are working with. In some communities we
have to lower tolerance and in some communities we have to raise
tolerance. I think it really is about localising your approaches.
As David mentioned before, it is about looking at it not as a
strategic thing but as: What do people in that particular area
want us to tackle effectively? More importantly: How can we tackle
it over a long period of time and give it credibility and sustainability?
How can we keep those agencies working together so that we do
refer on to other people, so it is not seen purely as a statutory
requirement by just a small number of departments? We have to
see that everybody takes an equal share in the responsibility
and that people see that we are there to work with the communities,
to listen to the communities, to all members of those communities,
from different parts of those communities, to tackle their issues.
Q106 Mr Taylor: Chairman,
I would like to say that I accept the essence of that answer.
Variable tolerance I think is the practical reply and I do not
propose to pursue that question. May I then ask: What is your
approach when the complaint occurs in the context of a dispute
between neighbours? Is that where it is most likely to arise?
Sergeant Dunn: The difficulty
when we first started looking into this was that each agency dealt
with this in different ways: there was no uniformity. Especially
housing officers, who, in certain areas in which I worked, tended
to be the frontline in relation to receiving complaints: some
housing officers dealt with complaints in a comprehensive way,
a structured way, others did not, which did not give a true picture
of what was actually going on. When we started looking at the
way that people could first report things to the right people,
we tended to find that it was not just down to one agency to receive
those complaints initially. The housing officers actually welcomed
the structure, so that it was properly being managed and evaluated
and these cases were not running for year upon year and handed
to different individuals, but we also found that it was invaluable
to involve other agencies who could come in and deal with many
of these complaints at an early stage before they actually went
into a formal structure. Mediation is an excellent example of
that. The earlier you get these people involved, the quicker we
can deal with some of these complaints without actually having
to formalise them.
Q107 Chairman: Could we
bring in Mr Lee.
Mr Lee: My experience of thousands
of cases is that there are a lot of disenchanted witnesses out
there, complainants who have had their cases, where their lives
have been seriously disrupted, categorised into various coat-pegs,
such as dispute, tit-for-tat, counter-allegation and other such
phrases. When you scratch the surface of those cases—and
I have been round the country with the Neighbour Nuisance Panel—they
are in fact genuine and bona fide complaints. In the 4,500
successful legal actions we have done in Manchester, ASBOs and
injunctions, I can think of ten possibly in ten years that were
in some way malicious. The idea that we have an army of people
who get a real sense of satisfaction filling out diaries just
for the sake of it is the biggest fallacy that exists. We have
even had discussions about what some people have raised: "How
do we ASBO a persistent complainer who is 70 and their fence is
being damaged and they are demanding that something is being done
about it?" and when you read the diaries, the people who
come into your surgeries, I do not think make it up. Because the
idea that it gets better when you complain does not happen for
a lot of people; it actually gets worse when you complain about
your next-door neighbour, because somebody tells the perpetrator
who has complained, the warden turns up in uniform at the door—your
door—the police officer turns up in uniform. It is very
difficult to put your head above the parapet and complain about
neighbour nuisance and anti-social behaviour. I know you did not
say that in this question, but we need to be very, very wary of
labelling cases as a "clash of lifestyles". I have heard
that given to a lady who has lived in a ground-floor flat for
80 years—which is a palace—a council flat—and
a seventeen-year old moves in above her and starts playing loud
music from two until four in the morning and the response that
old lady gets from the housing landlord is, "Well, that's
his noisy party lifestyle and you'd better get used to it or move
into sheltered accommodation." Those are some of the very
poor responses that people have had to so-called disputes.
Mr Taylor: I think that rather anticipates
what might have been my next question, so I will move on, if I
may—and the Chairman can select who answers this—to
ask: In terms of assessing whether behaviour is anti-social, how
far should agencies be guided by community standard and how far
by their own professional judgments? I cannot help feeling that
Mr Dunn has already touched on this with his varying tolerance.
Chairman: It might be interesting to
explore that with all the witnesses, though.
Mr Taylor: Under your guidance, Mr Chairman.
Chairman: This perhaps goes to the heart
of establishing what is and is not anti-social or at least who
takes that judgment.
Q108 Mr Taylor: And: Is
there a structured way of assessing it? by the way.
Mr Copeland: It is different things
to different people, Chairman.
Q109 Chairman: But if
it is, who decides. In the case of the perhaps extreme, perhaps
difficult case that Mr Lee gives, somebody has to decide whether
you are coming down on the side of a lifestyle dispute or on the
side of the elderly tenant and in most of these issues somebody
has to decide. I think Mr Taylor's question is a key one for this
whole inquiry. Who takes the responsibility of deciding what standards
are going to be enforced in the community? Is it the local people
who live in the community? Is it professional agencies who are
trying to serve the community? Is it the landlord? Is it the police?
It would be very interesting to have a sense from each of the
witnesses as to who takes that decision, and, if you like, what
is the structure by which that decision is taken. If you could
concentrate on that.
Mr Copeland: Certainly at the
present time, in the circumstances you have just given, there
is no direct community input. It is effectively taken by a group
of professionals in a multi-agency panel. If the referral then
came to ourselves, we would clearly see both parties and then
the person who has lodged the complaint who has actually started
the process is really in control of it. As you have heard in the
examples that were given, these are people who are living different
lives. The impact is tremendous on the life of the other people,
but we find that when we actually bring those people together
either directly or indirectly then we can improve communication,
improve levels of understanding, which will bring about levels
of tolerance, because tolerance is variable. What is acceptable
in one street in Peterborough, if we moved within 200 metres would
not be acceptable. It can change during the hours of the day.
It is a variable. As I say, to answer the question directly, we
currently have a panel of professionals who will consider this.
There is not currently any direct community input. I am aware
that there has been a suggestion that there should be neighbourhood
nuisance panels set up to perhaps lay down some standards, but
the actual views of the complainant are paramount and they will
always be followed through.
Ms Bridgen: I would go back to
the earlier question about how we establish what type of behaviour
requires a response. I think the first point that most anti-social
behaviour becomes aware of is through the housing office. If housing
officers are well trained in identifying anti-social behaviour
and organise an appropriate response at that stage and good, sound
housing management, a lot of these problems can be prevented from
getting any worse. In the example that Martin gave, you perhaps
might say it was not a good choice of tenant, to put a 17-year
old above an 80-year old person. I know sometimes local authorities
do not have a lot of choice in that, so I am not criticising the
local authority, but you might say that that in itself is going
to cause difficulty, to put a 17-year old above an elderly lady.
So there are choices about where you place people, there are decisions
about how you manage a tenancy right from the beginning and let
people know what the rules are.
Q110 Chairman: Is it reasonable
in any block of flats anywhere in the country for a tenant to
play music so loudly that it interferes with the quiet life of
their neighbour? You are implying, I think, that there are appropriate
places to put people who want to play very loud music and I am
just challenging you on whether that is right or whether there
is a consistent standard that, unless you are living in an extremely
well sound-proofed flat, there is a limit to how loud you play
your music, full stop.
Ms Bridgen: Sound proofing is
another issue, but, yes, I think I would agree with David in that
tolerance is not a standard level thing. You are much more tolerant
of things you have control of. I have teenage children. My neighbours
know that if they are noisy they can come and tell us and it will
stop. That empowers the neighbours. I think it stops the noise
being as much of a nuisance as when if you feel completely out
of control, with somebody who is going to carry on willy-nilly.
It is about tackling things at an early stage, making sure the
people are aware of what the expectations are and that you get
the dialogue through mediation or whatever source so that the
person perpetrating the anti-social behaviour learns the consequences
of that action and learns how to control it, modify it, and change
their behaviour.
Mr Lee: I am interested in this
early stage bit because, in most complainants' cases that I read,
before they get to the housing office they have already been putting
up with the anti-social behaviour for far too long. Because they
are all reasonable people, in the case files I read they have
approached the perpetrator to try to ask them to turn it down.
In a lot of cases they have been met with abuse. They have closed
the curtains. They have hoped it will go away. They take the dog
on another route to the shops to avoid the anti-social behaviour.
The have probably fallen out with their partner, who says, "Don't
complain. It will make it worse. Our windows will go in. Let's
just leave it." The idea that we have a sequence for every
case of early intervention: ABCs and then, somewhere at the end
of this very long road, we might get some action, is not something
that I sign up to. Each case is different. Some cases demand urgent
action. Because, in the end—as you will have seen through
meetings that you attend in your locality—the biggest source
of complaint at public meetings is: "How many diaries do
I have to fill in"—well, it is said—"before
anybody on that top table does anything at all? Is it 61, Mr Lee?
Is it 62? Just let me know when I get to the magic number because
I will go to number 70 for you but I really want something done
now." Housing officers and police officers and wardens and
environmental health officers who allow diaries to pile up on
their desks when someone is writing: "I am in danger of losing
my job now because of the loud music—I cannot get up to
go to work and I have been disciplined this morning by the security
manager—because I have had no sleep this week." Those
are real examples of what people have to put up with, so I think
we need to make it so that early intervention means early legal
intervention as well as mediation.
Q111 Chairman: I will
just bring in Michelle Monaghan and then go back to Mr Taylor.
Ms Monaghan: First of all, when
we talk about early intervention, yes, we talk about through the
housing office, but we receive referrals from education welfare,
and so it may not be even through so many reports to the housing
office. Things are picked up through school nurses, education
welfare, maybe community police officers, so it is from a wide
range of professionals who are identifying this behaviour, and,
hopefully, it does not accelerate so that there is a huge amount
of complaints. Around the communities themselves, we now accept
self-referrals, with people in households identifying that they
need support and that they do have behavioural issues, so as well
as professionals identifying it, people themselves are identifying
that need.
Q112 Mr Taylor: Chairman,
I understand and I think the Committee does that the National
Federation of Arm's Length Management Organisations argues that
there is "an increasing lack of tolerance for less serious
instances" so that people are becoming more intolerant of
less serious anti-social behaviour. An example given is of young
residents playing football in common areas. Is it the experience
of our witnesses, Mr Chairman, that tolerance has decreased?
Sergeant Dunn: Absolutely. It
has towards certain generations and I have to say that young people
are being targeted in relation to this. I read somewhere that
the chief constable of West Midlands actually identified that
many of the calls now coming into his control room are about groups
of kids walking down streets. We have got to the point now where
we just do not want them there. A MORI poll in this country identified
that 75% of the adults asked wanted a lawfully enforced evening
curfew for all teenagers in this country. The interesting thing
about that was that 69% of that 75% came from the adult age group
20-30, so it is not a gap between elderly people and young people.
Actually, we very quickly come out of the age group and go into
adulthood, and we do blame them for an awful lot of the issues
that are going on—fairly, I think, in some cases. If I may
just say, the whole thing about the anti-social behaviour agenda
is that, when we first started looking at this, enforcement was
a very necessary tool. We did not have the right tools to tackle
it and I think recent legislation has given us that. But what
more importantly has come out of this, with working with various
different groups, with different agencies, is that there needs
to be an educational part of this, there needs to be a preventative
part of this, but there also needs to be a strong enforcement
part.
Q113 Chairman: We will
get on to other issues, but does anyone want to argue that tolerance
has not decreased.
Mr Lee: I would emphasise expectations
of what the authorities can do has rightfully increased and demands
that have been laid on them have rightfully increased.
Mr Copeland: Expectations have
increased but unrealistically. In the evening paper every week
people see "ASBO dispersal order" but the vast majority
of people in the street have no clear understanding of what this
means. They think that if the ball hits the window once in a blue
moon, somebody is going to get an ASBO. I am afraid that the normal
person in the street does not understand this legislation and
it has raised expectations unrealistically.
Chairman: We will come back to the particular
legislative measures in a moment.
Q114 Mr Green: I am fascinated
by this concept of community acceptability that some but not all
of you clearly recognise. It is not obvious to me that if you
are the victim, if you like, it is any consolation to be told
that the acceptable standard of behaviour on this estate or in
this block of flats means that it is just tough if you are kept
awake until one in the morning. This is surely an individual issue
rather than a community issue.
Mr Lee: Everybody is being remarkably
tolerant. If I were to bring a football into this room and kick
it against that wall for ten minutes—a garage door, and
you were sat in your garden opposite—you would not be so
tolerant. If you were sat out in your garden in the summer and
all you could listen to all day is scramble bikes churning up
the local green, that is anti-social behaviour, it is not intolerance.
And, I agree with you, a lot of time complainants are made to
suffer twice: they are made to suffer by the perpetrator and then
when they report their complaints they are told, "Actually,
it's you that's got a problem" and in the end those people
leave those areas. They give up. They ask to be re-housed. In
the worst situations in the private areas where you cannot get
any sleep, people give the keys back to the building society through
the door at night, hoping that nobody catches up with them, because
nobody takes the complaint seriously.
Q115 Chairman: Is that
fair?
Ms Bridgen: I think we agree that
there are certain things that are intolerable, and not being able
to sleep because of noise until one o'clock in the morning is
unacceptable, but there are also grey areas. In Scotland, I think,
they did some research a while ago and the majority of complaints
against neighbours were to do with elderly people who were hard
of hearing having their televisions on too loud. We have had cases
of that kind where somebody has fallen asleep with the television
on too loud. It is not denying that that is a huge problem with
the neighbour, and it needs to be addressed, but, going back to
your first question, this is one of the problems of calling everything
anti-social behaviour. It is fine as an umbrella title, but we
need some distinctions within that because there are lots of grey
areas, the things that we are talking about today.
Q116 Mr Prosser: I would
like to ask some questions about balance between prevention and
enforcement, but first of all I cannot resist coming back to Mr
Lee for a moment. A critic might say that you were giving a very
austere, authoritarian enforcement view of things but I have to
say that you probably reflect the stories and feelings which our
constituents tell us about at our weekend surgeries every week,
frankly. You might just find that local authorities who read this
evidence will be head-hunting you down to their local authority!
But there is a serious side to this in terms of mediation and
the lower degrees of enforcement. Before I come to that, however,
you talked about these so-called defences or excuses that perhaps
some housing officers in some authorities use to avoid going in
and doing the business—you know, that it is a sort of tit-for-tat:
"It is a neighbourly dispute, we will not get involved."
What do you think is going on there? Is that because perhaps their
main function should be the provision of housing and the planning
of housing provision and all that goes with that, a huge agenda,
and they look upon the anti-social bit and the nuisance neighbour
bit as an unwelcome add-on? Why has that been the effect? Because
it has been the effect.
Mr Lee: I will answer that but
I do not want Manchester to be construed as somewhere where all
we do is legal action. We do have a very good mediation service,
we have Foundations, which is the Dundee family's project, so
we do do rehabilitation, diversion, prevention, but one of the
things where we differ is we do not think ASBOs and injunction
are enforcement and we really need to be clear about that. The
dictionary definition of injunction, if you look it up after this
session, is "authoritative warning" and I only see injunctions
and ASBOs as orders which prevent—prevent—an escalation
in anti-social behaviour, and if people do not break them there
is no consequence for them. To come back to your very specific
point, because I do not want just to make points, I think there
is a twin reason why housing officers do what you say, when they
think, "I don't want to deal with this, it's all . . ."
Maybe they have other things to do, like rent and repairs, and
so they do not have the time that maybe they would want to dedicate
to it—and usually it depends what the manager thinks about
anti-social behaviour as to whether the staff feel confident to
tackle it. But I would say to you, as members of Parliament, that
in lots of local authorities—not in mine because we have
a specialist team in between housing officers and the solicitors,
but in lots of local authorities—it is the solicitors who
stop legal action and, unfortunately, a lot of those solicitors
are more interested in the human rights of the perpetrators than
they are the community who is crying out in the diaries for some
assistance.
Q117 Mr Prosser: These
are the in-house legal advisors.
Mr Lee: Yes.
Q118 Mr Prosser: And legal
officers in the authority.
Mr Lee: Yes. I have been across
the country: if I had £10 for every time the quote was "The
lawyer says we haven't got enough to go on"—
Q119 Mr Prosser: Has the
setting up of specific anti-social behaviour units solved that?
Mr Lee: Yes, because that means
that the housing officer can work with someone who is not a lawyer
to develop the case. Lawyers always ask for more evidence, so
the poor housing officer runs round getting statements. A lawyer
would say to a housing officer, "Can we have 50 witnesses."
How is the housing office going to get time for that? If you have
a specialist team to instruct the solicitors and work with the
local team and serve them and say, "Two witnesses will do."
"Yes, one witness will do." "Hey, we've got hearsay,
who says we need a witness?" But if you just have solicitors
dealing with frontline housing staff and going out to see witnesses,
believe me, you do not have any legal action because they scare
housing officers to death.
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