Examination of Witnesses (Questions 300-319)
18 JANUARY 2005
MR ROGER
HOWARD, MR
CHRIS DYER,
MR RICHARD
GARSIDE, MR
WILL MCMAHON,
MR ROGER
SMITH AND
MR JIM
SKELSEY
Q300 David Winnick: That
is very interesting. I was interested in your comments, Mr Dyer,
when you disagreed with Mr Garside's view about those affected
by anti-social behaviour orders, but Mr Garside will give us some
documentation.
Mr Garside: We would be happy
to provide the Committee with those.[3]
Q301 David Winnick: It
is a very serious point, which I am not aware has been raised
with this Committee before. I could be wrong, but I do not believe
that it has been raised.
Mr Garside: We would be very happy
to do that.
Q302 David Winnick: If
you feel that there has been such a blatant abuse—because
there would be no other way to describe it—I think that
it would be useful if you gave us any chapter and verse that you
have.
Mr Garside: Would you also be
interested in a quick comment about the disparities? If you want
to move this session on, I quite understand.
David Winnick: Yes.
Mrs Dean: Could I ask you first, Mr Smith,
in your view what are the main causes of anti-social behaviour?
Q303 David Winnick: That
is a leading question!
Mr Smith: You have picked the
lawyer to answer it! The problem is that I think it is an unanswerable
question, because it ranges from householders who will not keep
their Leylandii hedges properly trimmed—so that is inconsiderate
householders wanting too much privacy at the expense of their
neighbours—to prostitutes, to young people drinking, to
errant pig farmers. My only answer to your question illustrates
the problem I have with the concept. If one talks about anti-social
behaviour, the political construct, we are talking about young
people hanging round on estates and in town centres; but I think
that is not the experience of how anti-social behaviour is being
defined. It is being defined very widely; very differently in
different localities. I therefore think that there is a real problem.
If you want me to say what I think the problem is for young people,
I can answer that—or hedge-growers.
Q304 Mrs Dean: That would
be helpful.
Mr Smith: If we concentrate on
the problem of young people—and Mr Skelsey acts for them,
so he can chip in if he thinks that I am getting it wrong—you
have some loutish behaviour, some straight-out unlawful behaviour,
drug dealing, intimidation, people on the edge of robbery, people
looking out, and you have a lot of bored behaviour, and you have
behaviour which is none of the above but which middle-aged and
older members of the community find threatening when young people
are standing round at bus stops. In terms of response to it, it
does shock me how much youth services—even in inner London
areas, which I am most familiar with—have been wound down
since I was much nearer the field than I am now. So I am not surprised
to hear reports, if you go and talk to young people and listen
to what they say, that they are bored. I therefore think that
there is a whole range of things, ranging from deliberate delinquency
to boredom.
Mr Skelsey: Speaking as a criminal
practitioner working with people who are before the courts, there
are definitely themes of poverty; there is also lack of opportunities,
lack of engagement and, as Mr Smith mentions, lack of youth centres
and funding in that area. Often there is also not a lot of parental
guidance. Certainly a major factor at that age is boredom. There
is not a lot of gain to be established from their criminal activity;
they are just not usefully and constructively engaged, and that
is predominant. If I were to mention one thing which contributes
towards anti-social behaviour amongst youngsters, it would definitely
be boredom.
Mrs Dean: Mr Garside, do you have anything
to add to what has been said?
Q305 David Winnick: Perhaps
you could be relatively brief, because we have another set of
witnesses and there are a number of important questions left which
we want to ask you.
Mr Garside: I will be brief. The
problem is that we get into tangles when we ask what are the causes
of anti-social behaviour, because it covers so much. Kids hanging
round may be bored, and boredom might be behind some teenage-related
anti-social behaviour—though, in some ways, what is wrong
with kids just hanging round? Speeding drivers in neighbourhoods?
That is nothing to do with boredom. It could be to do with a whole
range of issues. Kids cycling on pavements? Maybe they are cycling
on the pavements because they are frightened of cycling on the
roads, because of the speeding drivers. This comes back to my
earlier point: that if we want to understand what is going on
here, we need to start talking about bored teenagers, or about
speeding drivers, or about crack houses, or about graffiti, or
fly-tipping—rather than anti-social behaviour. Anti-social
behaviour as a construct gets in the way of any clear thinking
about the causes.
Q306 Mrs Dean: Mr Howard?
Mr Howard: Could I ask my colleague
Chris Dyer to give you an example of how Birmingham have approached
this?
Mr Dyer: For the past several
years I have been involved in overseeing a programme called the
Safer Neighbourhood Project across the whole of the City of Birmingham—which
has just won the European Crime Prevention Award. One of the results
of lots of work by lots of people, particularly the community
which has been the main driving force within the project has been
a reduction in youth crime of 29%. A big chunk of that is ASB,
and we also have separate statistics which would suggest—because
it is one of those things which is very hard to measure, accepting
the points that have been made—that it would be about the
25% mark on average across all areas. I would suggest to the panel
that the reason we have been successful is because we have used
a variety of measures. A partnership approach has been taken.
We have responded to the community's identified needs and their
priorities. Rather than us saying, "We know what the issues
are and we will tell you how to resolve them", we work in
partnership. Another example of work we are doing which reveals
the causes of ASB is the work we have been doing as an organisation
with the Home Office on the Taking a Stand Awards, which we have
been doing for several years. A large piece of research has been
done with all the entries to the award this year, and the response
has resoundingly been that young people need something to do,
but also that communities need to be engaged in the process of
tackling anti-social behaviour. These are therefore some very
strong messages which we feel should be noted.
Q307 Mrs Dean: Could I
ask you, Mr Dyer, how far would sub-criminal anti-social behaviour—especially
that perpetrated by young people—lead to crime if left unchecked?
Mr Dyer: Not surprisingly, there
are several answers. First, research would suggest that most young
people grow out of criminality, albeit findings on the back of
the recent British Crime Survey would suggest that the age is
getting higher—slightly, but higher all the same. My own
experience as a practitioner in the field would suggest that early
intervention and prevention are by far better ways of tackling
such matters. We have already heard about issues such as, for
example, ABCs, and the Youth Service, and there is a myriad of
other things that you can put on the table. I go back to the point
of working at a local level; working in partnership effectively
to apply legislation where appropriate, and also, where appropriate,
not to apply it.
Mr Howard: At the root of your
question is that if we can understand the causes we can prevent.
We would wholly endorse that. If one is looking at youth in particular—and
this is only one aspect of anti-social behaviour—if you
look at the evidence of the work of the Youth Justice Board and
at their youth inclusion programmes, at the one we run in Margaret
Hodges's constituency, the YJB recently found an 81% reduction
in arrests of young people. In other areas, it is quite common
that there is a 40 to 60% reduction in arrests. There are also
the Youth Inclusion Support Panels. These are incredibly effective
early intervention measures. The problem is that, in the last
spending review, I do not think that it is a State secret that
the Youth Justice Board argued for at least 200 of these programmes
to be in place around the country. There are currently around
70. To a great fanfare, an announcement was made that there was
a 50% increase; but a 50% increase of 70 is 30—and there
are 100. So there is a huge need out there, and more can be done—without
necessarily the need for more legislation or enforcement. Early
intervention and prevention can mean great savings in police time,
court time, and the community's well-being.
Q308 Mrs Dean: Could I
ask Mr Garside this? If anti-social behaviour is tolerated, what
implications do you think that has for youth offending?
Mr Garside: You mean is there
a link?
Q309 Mrs Dean: Yes.
Mr Garside: If you look at the
British Crime Survey, the researchers there look at this point
and they say that there is no evidence of a link. One of the problems
here is that we look backwards from the present and try to make
the links. So it may well be that a 17 year-old who is caught
joyriding round his neighbourhood was, at the age of 15, playing
football in the local square and causing a bit of a nuisance and,
at the age of 13, may be jumping up and down on garages and irritating
householders. That does not mean that, because he was jumping
up and down on garages at the age of 13, he was on some kind of
linear path to being a joy rider by the age of 17 and a burglar
by the age of 20. To say that some people who are doing things
which are deemed anti-social may also commit crime is not to say
that there is a transmission belt from anti-social behaviour to
crime.
Q310 Mrs Dean: Do you
have any comments to add to that, Mr Smith?
Mr Smith: I would agree. I think
that the question, "What do we do about disaffected youth?"
is a better one to ask than to ask, "What do we do about
anti-social behaviour?". One of the problems about using
anti-social behaviour as a category is that it all gets very imprecise.
I have been struck, talking to Mr Skelsey about his cases, by
how many of the cases are about behaviour which is criminal under
other provisions. This is something that has been said earlier.
There are other ways of getting at much of this behaviour.
Q311 Bob Russell: Mr Smith,
continuing with disaffected youth, we have been told about the
lack of youth facilities, the closure of centres and so on, from
the time when you and I were lads. If we are to tackle the causes
of crime, would you like to see that sort of establishment reinstated?
Mr Smith: Yes.
Q312 Bob Russell: Alongside
that, do you feel that inadequate housing is playing a part in
the rise of what has been termed anti-social behaviour? The disaffected,
the people who are perhaps not academically gifted, who may well
feel that society does not want them?
Mr Smith: There is a range of
problems. Assuming that we are roughly of the same age, the nature
of local authority social housing has changed dramatically in
my lifetime as a lawyer.
Q313 Bob Russell: For
better or worse?
Mr Smith: The crude answer is
for worse, but I will probably resist the question. A different
type of person is now being housed. Public housing, social housing,
is picking up tenants who are much less likely to work now; much
more likely to have a range of other problems; they are not in
trade unions; they do not have experience of organisation; they
do not have the strong tenants' unions of the past. So they are
much more ghettoes of people who are, or feel they are, at the
bottom.
Q314 Bob Russell: Is that
a way of partially identifying the perpetrators of anti-social
behaviour—that society has ghettoised them? That if they
were not in ghettoes, perhaps that would be one way of identifying
the perpetrators—if we take them out of that ghetto and
disperse them in the community at large, which used to be the
case, so that they will not fester in the same barrel?
Mr Smith: As a lawyer, I am the
wrong person to ask this. It is a social policy question. I think
that you will find there are certain characteristics to those
who come before the courts. Often, they will tend to come, and
Mr Skelsey said it, from households with bad parenting; I am sure
that they will disproportionately come from the estates that you
would predict—you will know this from your own constituency;
and they will have other criteria, all bundled up into social
exclusion. The current overall policy of driving against social
exclusion is right. Anti-social behaviour is interesting because
it is a sort of backwash against the drive for social inclusion,
because it is promoting the notion that some people have excluded
themselves and we should exclude them further.
Q315 Bob Russell: Do we
yet know what is the most effective response to the situation
where I have put the question and the answer? How shall we strike
the balance between diversion, the non-formal, formal, or indeed
family interventions, where you have this festering sore in a
community? What is the best way of tackling it?
Mr Howard: I think there is quite
significant evidence now that early intervention and prevention
are cost-effective. We are finding this across a whole range of
domains. It is not exactly the same with ASB. I do not think that
we yet have enough evidence round ASB interventions and their
cost-effectiveness; but if one looks at crime reduction and crime
interventions, the usual paradigm is that £1 spent will save
£3, £4 or £5 for the taxpayer. If I may say so,
it is about the political will to redirect resources into the
areas of early intervention and prevention, as opposed to the
traditional "Let's go for enforcement". We have a lot
of evidence to support such a shift of resources. The Youth Justice
Board has this evidence, and I am sure that there is a lot of
evidence in their submissions on the arrest rates on youth inclusion
programmes. If you are looking at the support programmes and mental
health, as Richard Garside has mentioned, again, there is a great
deal of evidence now about early intervention in many of those
domains bringing rich rewards for the taxpayer. As I said it is
partly about political will and the difficulty that you as policymakers
face in shifting that. I will let my colleague answer regarding
housing management and housing allocations.
Q316 Bob Russell: Can
I stick on this one though? Following on what Mr Smith said about
disaffected youth and the lack of youth centres, and bearing in
mind that your organisation, Crime Concern, is to create safe
and prosperous communities, is there a role not only for the youth
centres but also for the recognised youth organisations—who,
in my experience, do not tend to go into difficult areas?
Mr Howard: I think that is absolutely
right. There is an impending Green Paper on youth, is there not?
I think that it will be for you as parliamentarians to face this
issue. A lot of people have ducked the issue about whether the
youth service and youth provision should be put on a statutory
footing. Many people in local authorities will argue that it has
been one of the great tragedies for youth that there has not been
a statutory requirement on local authorities. Many people would
argue that that is the mechanism and device with which to deliver
that enhanced provision. All I would say is that the Youth Justice
Board has some excellent examples of early interventions and preventive
work, and indeed its work with offenders. There are a lot of lessons
there. I think that the whole area has been significantly under-resourced.
Q317 Bob Russell: Manchester
City Council have argued that ASBOs and housing injunctions should
be seen not as enforcement tools but as preventive tools, and
that they should be used extensively so as to provide a remedy
for victims. I do not know if that is where you come in, Mr Dyer.
Mr Dyer: I am familiar with Manchester's
stance on the matter. Where do we start on this one? Therein lies
the debate about how do you use an ASBO. Is it a preventive tool?
In certain cases it probably is. That is the best answer I could
give. Going back to the point you raised before about the concept
of housing management and "ghettoisation", which was
referred to earlier by Mr Smith, and the idea that these are potentially
full of less-educated, downtrodden individuals, I must say that
I have some difficulty with the idea that it is a separate part.
It suggests that different aspects of society are at work, which
I do not believe is so. My own experience is that it is a minority
in such communities who cause the majority of problems. When we
talk about engaging people—and I am probably beginning to
sound a little repetitive—it is about working at a level
which is appropriate to that local neighbourhood and using the
tools that one has. I therefore have some difficulty with the
perception that has been put across.
Q318 Bob Russell: Turning
to Mr Garside, we are told that in the last year there were 2,633
ASBOs, just over 5,000 acceptable behaviour contracts, ABCs, yet
the Government's estimate is that there are 13 ½ million
reports every year of anti-social behaviour. In your written evidence
you have concentrated on ASBOs. In that context, would you accept
that in practice the vast majority of instances of anti-social
behaviour are not dealt with through ASBOs?
Mr Garside: That is clearly the
case, bearing in mind the points about the difficulties with defining
what anti-social behaviour actually is. It clearly must be the
case. We have some questions about the way the Government currently
counts anti-social behaviour. However, I think that it illustrates
a slight tension and a problem in the current policy. Last November,
Louise Casey told the Welsh Affairs Committee, "I think the
growth in the number of ASBOs is incredibly heartening".
You will remember from some earlier sessions in this inquiry,
however, that you had some people working with and in the practice
field who said that they considered the implementation of ASBOs
to be a failure, not a success. I therefore think that there is
a confusion at various levels about the role of ASBOs, which is
partly a function of the fact that we have seen significant mission
creep with their implementation. It clearly is the case that at
one level they are a relatively small part of a bigger picture;
but at another level they play a very important rhetorical role.
There are a lot of the messages from the Home Office. A couple
of Octobers ago, in a speech to police, housing officers and local
authorities, the Prime Minister said, "We have listened.
We have given you the powers. It's time to use them". The
Anti-social Behaviour Unit often talks about a "campaign"
and how they are campaigning for people, amongst other things,
to implement ASBOs. So there is a bit of a tension there. ASBOs
are, if you like, at the hard end of quite a wide wedge. At the
other end you have some quite tough-talking rhetoric from politicians,
which is not necessarily replicated on the ground.
Q319 Bob Russell: Is that
rhetoric which is helping communities to feel safer and to feel
that there is action, or is it purely rhetoric?
Mr Garside: That is a very good
question. I do not think that there is an easy answer, and I am
not trying to fluff it. If politicians and other opinion-formers
talk up the nature of the problem, it is a difficult question
to know the degree to which people on the ground think, "That's
really good. They're dealing with it", and the degree to
which people think, "Oh, my goodness! I never realised that
this was such a problem". The anti-social behaviour rhetoric
has given almost everybody an easily usable term to describe behaviours
which they may not in the past have thought of in those terms—and
that is not always helpful.
3 See Ev 124, HC80-III. Back
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