Examination of Witnesses (Questions 440-454)
22 FEBRUARY 2005
PROFESSOR ROD
MORGAN, MS
CECILIA HITCHEN
AND MS
PAM HIBBERT
Q440 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: Do you believe
the publication of details about individual ASBOs contravenes
human rights principles? Have you had experience of this practice
being counterproductive?
Professor Morgan: Yes.
Ms Hitchen: Yes.
Professor Morgan: This has been
fully discussed by the Youth Justice Board and we are extremely
worried about any proposition that there be a presumption in favour
of loss of anonymity and publication. There are circumstances
where exceptionally it can and should be used but generally speaking
we think it is inappropriate and it can be in some instances profoundly
counterproductive. I visited a YOT in Brighton recently where
a local psychiatrist informed me about a 16 year old girl with
very substantial mental health problems who had been made the
subject of an ASBO and breached it. She had received two page
coverage in the local newspaper and the psychiatrist informed
me that it was now virtually impossible to arrange housing and
mental health support for this girl who needed it because she
had the mark of Cain so indelibly stamped upon her public forehead.
You would say that in those circumstances no court would allow
it to happen. We think the presumption should absolutely be against
publicity.
Q441 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: You did say exceptional
circumstances. What are the exceptional circumstances that permit
the publication of names?
Professor Morgan: There have been
exceptional circumstances provided for, I believe, since 1998
in the criminal court. I am sorry, I do not have the details in
my head. They are very sparingly used when there is great public
concern about a notorious case or where a person is very close
to the boundary of adulthood and there is great public concern
that something be done. I can conceive that there are circumstances
where it might be desirable, but if the argument for having publicity
is to empower local communities that they should know that something
is being done, frankly, in communities the complainants can be
told that something is being done about the instance that they
have concerns over. They know in those communities who the kids
are that actions need to be taken about. They can be informed
without necessarily releasing names and photographs to the press
so that it is then extremely difficult to work positively with
either those children or their families or carers.
Ms Hibbert: There are two extremes
of the impact. One is you get children who regard the naming and
shaming as a badge of honour and something they have to live up
to with their peer group. If the way they have obtained their
status is by being seen as the bad boy of the neighbourhood, the
likelihood is they will continue to be the bad boy of the neighbourhood.
Conversely for those children who perhaps the making of the order
has had a deterrent effect on, still being labelled throughout
the community makes it difficult for them to live it down and
make changes. The guidance that the anti-social behaviour unit
issues to courts and local authorities about publicity does ask
them to make an assessment of any risk that there may be but again
there is no separate guidance that specifically talks about children.
We know from some of our research into children who are sexually
exploited that adults who are seeking children like that will
be attracted to children who are perceived as having no supervision
and out on the streets so we are concerned about that. If we look
at the proposal that this should be extended to the youth criminal
court in the case of a breach of an ASBO, if we look at the reason
for publicity, we are told that it is twofold. One, it is to inform
local residents. Rod Morgan has talked about different ways of
doing that. The second is to help with enforcement. If the order
is breached and the child then goes into the youth criminal court,
that becomes obsolete, so we are not quite sure what the purpose
would be of naming and shaming them once it became a breach matter
because they will be sentenced by the criminal court to a sentence
for a criminal matter. We are concerned that it reverses the presumption
of privacy.
Q442 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: Ms Hitchen, earlier
on you made some reference to individual support orders and how
important these were in terms of successful ASBOs. How systematically
are individual support and parenting orders considered upon applications
for an ASBO?
Ms Hitchen: What I said was that
the difficulty with them is that they are not resourced. Whereas
possibly they could have more potential, I could not say that
I think they have it at the moment because the resources are not
there.
Q443 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: If they were
adequately resourced, individual support orders would be a positive
thing?
Ms Hitchen: Yes. An individual
support order that was properly resourced and attached to activities
etc., gives a piece of work to do with a child to divert them
from that behaviour and is a positive thing. It is another potentially
positive diversionary measure. In relation to parenting orders,
I suppose the question is whether you need an order. Offering
parents parenting help is a positive thing and a lot of parents
would welcome that but I do not think you necessarily need an
order to do that. I think that can be done voluntarily.
Q444 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: It is being done
voluntarily, is it not?
Ms Hitchen: It is and I think
that is positive.
Q445 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: What if orders
are put in place though when there is a reluctance by parents
to undertake the voluntary contract? Are you saying the voluntary
contracts are there and parenting orders should be in place for
those parents who are not prepared to undertake a voluntary contract?
Ms Hitchen: Yes. The bit I am
not sure of is whether you are always going to get people complying
in the spirit and learning if they are compelled to attend. I
suspect the answer is that some will but some will not but I would
certainly like to see the voluntary route being taken and parenting
orders as a last resort.
Q446 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: With respect
to the individual support orders, are you in favour of seeing
mandatory attendance at drug addiction facilities and alcohol
addiction facilities made as part of those?
Professor Morgan: There is no
reason why they should not be. The number of ISOs has so far been
rather small and there is a funding problem. The original understanding
about funding here was that the number of ASBOs to which they
might be attached was going to be much lower than is now the case.
Q447 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: There is some
merit in expanding ISOs as a way of attacking the underlying problems
of anti-social behaviour?
Professor Morgan: Absolutely but
at the moment there is no funding for it.
Q448 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: To touch on acceptable
behavioural contracts, put in place frequently before an ASBO
comes onto the agenda, are these working and are they suitable
media to satisfy the individuals who are the recipients of the
difficulties, that some changes are sought to be put in place
to address those problems?
Professor Morgan: We have surveyed
YOTs and we find that the majority say that they are using ABCs
and very effectively so, to the extent that many areas say that
within a tiered approach whereby an ABC is resorted to if home
visits and working with parents and the children do not work they
usually do not need to go beyond that. There is a question as
to what should be the ratio between the number of ABCs and the
number of ASBOs. I do not think it is clear what the ratio should
be but nor is it clear at present as to precisely what it is for
children because although we know the number of ABCs and the number
of ASBOs we do not know, as I understand it, what proportion of
the ABCs are for children. I suspect the majority of them are.
If they are, the ratio is probably about three ABCs for every
ASBO, as far as we are counting them. I would have thought it
probably ought to be a higher ratio than that, but that is what
the pattern currently appears to look like in most of the country.
Q449 Chairman: On the question of resourcing
of ISOs, most social services money is not ring fenced. Priorities
are set within the social services budget. Does not the fact that
social services departments are not resourcing ISOs rather confirm
the impression that social services departments are not engaged
in dealing with young people whose main symptom to the outside
world is that they commit anti-social behaviour? The ISO surely
is the sort of measure which in principle you welcome. It is a
preventative measure. It is working with the family; yet the reality
is that Parliament has given that order and, according to your
evidence, social services departments are not backing it. Do we
not end up in a situation where we have these punitive enforcement
measures simply because the mainstream services are not engaging
with these issues and the communities are left with no other defence?
Ms Hitchen: Many YOTs are part
of social services and will be engaged with them but also they
have a number of other initiatives to deliver. There is a question
both for the YOTs and for the mainstream social services of how
you divide up your resources. Social services departments obviously
are also working with children and child protection issues and
delivering a front line service. They are also in the middle of
implementing the Change for Children agenda which is a huge agenda.
If you look at children's services funding and the surveys done
by the ADSS each year on that funding, you will see how much of
that is taken by placements and associated costs of children looked
after. There are real difficulties there about delivering what
you might call the core functions both of the social services
departments and of the YOTs that have already been set, a lot
of which have been funded particularly through the Youth Justice
Board with discrete streams of money for a particular preventative
programme. The ISOs have not. That is the difficulty.
Q450 Janet Anderson: Professor Morgan,
you say in your evidence that in assessing the cases of young
people entering custody as a result of breaching an ASBO your
research study found that 95% were already known to the YOT and,
in the cases where there was a history of previous offences, the
young people would be considered prolific offenders. These young
people have been the subject of various interventions prior to
a custodial sentence and it does not appear from this sample that
the use of ASBOs is bringing a whole new group of young people
into custody. If this is confirmed by your September research
study, will that be enough to prove that the concerns about net
widening are unfounded?
Professor Morgan: No. This is
one of my current preoccupations and it is a very complex issue.
This is a very small study and it is only of children who have
been the subject of an ASBO, have breached it and have then been
sentenced to custody. It is not of children who have been subject
to ASBOs. The characteristics of those that have breached ASBOs
and then been sentenced to custody may or may not be representative
of children who have breached ASBOs but not been sentenced to
custody or those who have been the subject of ASBOs and have not
been brought back before the court at all. This is why I am slightly
hedging my bets over some of the broader issues that you are interested
in about the degree to which ASBOs are generally being accompanied
by quite a lot of support interventions. The truth is we do not
know. What we can ask from this study, because it was one of my
key questions, is has the introduction of ASBOs as far as we can
tell drawn into custody a lot of children who, prior to the introduction
of ASBOs, would almost certainly not have got there? The best
evidence so far is that is not the case. The most that might be
the case is that they have been brought into custody rather quicker
than would otherwise be the case. That shines through, but we
need a much finer picture of how ASBOs are being applied in terms
of conditions. We do not even know which specific conditions are
being breached all the time here. We only know the broad outlines
of that narrow sector of population.
Q451 Janet Anderson: That brings me to
my next question about the conditions because in your written
submission you list some examples of ASBOs which set inappropriate
conditions. Is this a common problem?
Professor Morgan: Once again,
I cannot answer the question definitively. My suspicion is that
it is relatively uncommon. You will have noticed from our supplement
that in those entering custody the YOTs report that they were
not involved in a third of the cases in the ASBO breach proceedings.
They had not been fully consulted. I think that is diminishing.
Where YOTs are not consulted, there is self-evidently a heightened
risk that inappropriate conditions would be applied and we cite
some examples: not being allowed to go to the part of the town
where the Connexions office is or the YOT office. That manifestly
does not make sense and almost certainly would not happen if the
YOT had been fully consulted and was involved in the court proceedings.
Q452 Janet Anderson: The more YOTs are
consulted, the less this is going to happen?
Professor Morgan: The less likely
it is by definition, I think, that there will be inappropriate
conditions attached.
Q453 Janet Anderson: Can I ask all of
you briefly to say what is your assessment of the dispersal powers
under section 30 of the Anti-social Behaviour Act 2003 and have
they been widely used? I am aware of a situation in my own constituency
where it has been used very successfully and was then stopped,
but we are going to have to reintroduce it. It did work but as
soon as the dispersal order ceased we had problems again. How
widely are they used?
Professor Morgan: I am not going
to pretend to knowledge I do not have.
Ms Hitchen: I have not got experience
of that, other than things that I have read, but I would suspect
that if you look at evidence from other initiatives, for instance
in dealing with prostitution, that perhaps is just sending the
problem somewhere else. It would need to be looked into in more
detail.
Ms Hibbert: I just think it is
the same, in a way, as some of the other things we have been saying,
that merely an order that prohibits or bans on its own is unlikely
to work; you actually need to look at what can be done to address
that problem in the long term—what is needed to stop these
young children congregating in this area? That calls for more
than a dispersal order.
Q454 Janet Anderson: What they wanted
was somewhere warm and dry to meet together—a kind of shelter.
It is back to youth work.
Ms Hibbert: If we have consulted
about those things there is less need to use enforcement—be
it orders, ASBOs or dispersal orders. If you look at some of the
examples they are much more likely to result in success.
Chairman: Fine. Can I thank very much
indeed our first set of witnesses this afternoon. We have covered
a lot of ground; it has been very helpful indeed. Thank you very
much.
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