CORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 80-i

House of COMMONS

MINUTES OF EVIDENCE

TAKEN BEFORE

home affairs Committee

 

 

Anti-Social Behaviour

 

 

Tuesday 30 November 2004

MR REG DENLEY, MR NEIL PILKINGTON, MS HONOR RHODES

and MS DAWN ROBERTS

Evidence heard in Public Questions 1 - 92

 

 

USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT

 

1. This is a corrected transcript of evidence taken in public and reported to the House. The transcript has been placed on the internet on the authority of the Committee, and copies have been made available by the Vote Office for the use of Members and others.

 

2. The transcript is an approved formal record of these proceedings. It will be printed in due course.

Oral Evidence

Taken before the Home Affairs Committee

on Tuesday 30 November 2004

Members present

Mr John Denham, in the Chair

Janet Anderson

Mr James Clappison

Mrs Claire Curtis-Thomas

Mrs Janet Dean

Mr Damian Green

Mr Gwyn Prosser

Mr John Taylor

David Winnick

________________

Memoranda submitted by Youth Works Scheme, Salford City Council, Family Welfare Association and Birmingham Youth Offending Team

 

Examination of Witnesses

 

Witnesses: Mr Reg Denley, Programme Manager, Youth Works Scheme, Bridgend, South Wales, Mr Neil Pilkington, Principal Solicitor, Community Safety Unit, Salford City Council, Ms Honor Rhodes, Director of Family and Community Care, Family Welfare Association and Ms Dawn Roberts, Deputy Manager, Birmingham Youth Offending Team, examined.

Q1 Chairman: Good afternoon. Thank you very much indeed for responding to our invitation to come and give evidence. As you probably know, this is the first session of the Select Committee's inquiry into anti-social behaviour. For the benefit of the press as much as anybody else, we have organised our inquiry broadly around three or four of the major problems, as they are often described, and we have got generally front line practitioners as witnesses for those sections and then we will be having some sessions with national representative organisations, the police, local authorities, ministers and so on. As you will know, the main focus of today's sessions is on youth nuisance, although I think the Committee accepts drawing narrow boundaries between one type of issue and another is quite difficult. It would be very useful if I could ask each of the witnesses to introduce themselves briefly to the Committee. Mr Denley, would you like to start?

Mr Denley: My name is Reg Denley. I am from South Wales, Bridgend county borough. I am a programme manager for a Youth Works programme dealing with eight to 25 year olds.

Ms Roberts: I am Dawn Roberts. I am the deputy head of the Youth Offending Service in Birmingham.

Mr Pilkington: Neil Pilkington, principal solicitor with Salford City Council heading up their specialist Crime and Disorder legal team and dealing with ASBO applications and related matters.

Ms Rhodes: I am Honor Rhodes. I am the director of services for the Family Welfare Association.

Q2 Chairman: Good. Thank you very much indeed. It will not be possible for all witnesses to answer all questions, so do not seek to repeat what somebody else has just said. I will ask a general question for each of you to start with and that is this. In your practical day to day work do you have any problems with the concept of anti-social behaviour? Some of our written evidence has varied with some people claiming that anti-social behaviour is too badly defined to be useful and others saying they do not have any difficulty with it. It will be interesting to know if you think you have any practical problem in understanding the issue. Honor Rhodes, please?

Ms Rhodes: I think I do have a problem with it in that I do not think there is even a workable definition yet. I am equally interested in what pro-social behaviour might look like.

Mr Pilkington: I think as a lawyer I have found it difficult in some ways that within the various bits of legislation there are different definitions that would fall within anti-social behaviour. You can get nuisance or harassment or intimidation and there is not a consistency in terms of the statutes that are available. I think we have found and the professionals working with the groups that are causing anti-social behaviour from whatever age group, whatever background, there is a shared understanding, you know it if you see it. From a practical basis we have tended to pick up the practical examples from the sort of One Day Count and the British Crime Survey typologies on anti-social behaviour. It is similar sorts of things, everybody knows what it is when they see it but sometimes they struggle to define it. It has not caused practical difficulties in terms of the application of legislation.

Q3 Chairman: It has not caused difficulties?

Mr Pilkington: No.

Q4 Chairman: Ms Roberts?

Ms Roberts: Coming from a Youth Offending Service perspective, we see young people who are put on Anti-social Behaviour Orders and the term anti-social behaviour is used and it is defined differently in different cases so perhaps I would disagree. You do need the full range of behaviours to be incorporated in the legislation and that is right from youth nuisance, which might be intimidating groups of young people, but there is a wide continuum then, right through to offences of criminality. I think there are differences in practice for how the legislation is interpreted.

Mr Denley: I have come across practical difficulties, obviously, and it depends whether you are a perpetrator or the victim of. Dealing with young people, we have searched on many professional groups to come up with definitions obviously around harassment and intimidation being part of it but then the same behaviours can be used that are normal play or normal high jinks or just youngsters being youngsters on the street and it depends where it is and who witnesses it and what their interpretations are of it sometimes.

Q5 Mr Taylor: Chairman, could I have a supplementary to Mr Pilkington. Mr Pilkington, could I ask you as a lawyer whether you think that the concept of anti-social behaviour - and from your answer obviously this is a difficult concept - fits comfortably into the general body of English law? Is it comfortable alongside its neighbours or have we brought a brick into the system which does not fit naturally or comfortably? Somebody once said to me years ago when I was a student that the whole of English law really grows out of the concept of trespass, whether it is trespass to land, trespass to person or trespass to goods, that is the cultural origin. Have we produced a new and awkward cuckoo in the system or does it work quite well in the culture of English law? I am sorry to labour that question, I would like to know the answer.

Mr Pilkington: I suppose what we have introduced is a concept of trespass to community well-being, and that is the problem that is trying to be dealt with. To an extent it sits well in some ways but there is confusion as to how people interpret it in that people will talk about anti-social behaviour as sitting pre-criminal behaviour but other people will say "Well, criminal behaviour is anti-social behaviour itself". Indeed the legislation reflects that when you have the powers to close premises where class A drugs are dealt, you use the Anti-social Behaviour Act. I do not think there is a difficulty in acknowledging the continuum of behaviour is identifying where thresholds are met, where thresholds are crossed and what powers can be applied. I do feel that perhaps the original concept of anti-social behaviour for Anti-social Behaviour Orders where there was talk about the sub-criminal behaviour has perhaps become lost. Certainly from my experience most of the people who are perhaps being dealt with already have a great deal of involvement in the criminal system. I do not think it sits as a pre-criminal sphere of operation on its own, the edges are very much blurred. One of the greatest difficulties - I hope I do have a degree of consensus - is that the definition of anti-social behaviour has now been adopted by many communities so that if you are under 18 and with a group of friends with your hooded top on, you are anti-social. That is the biggest difficulty to get over. A concept of anti-social behaviour sits very well with the injunctive relief in housing legislation and with the need to try and tackle sub-criminal behaviour without criminalising people but it has moved on into a criminal realm and that is where the biggest difficulties arise in terms of understanding. You can go for an ASBO to tackle someone who is a prolific robber, a prolific burglar or a prolifically violent person and some people will still interpret that as tackling someone who is a bit of a nuisance and those definitions then cause all sorts of problems.

Q6 Chairman: Can I pursue that point a bit further. Earlier, there was the elephant definition, hard to describe, you know one when you see it. On the other hand, if you have got an issue where some communities are inclined to equate groups of young people with anti-social behaviour it is obviously not so easy to know. In those circumstances, where the community is saying "We regard this as anti-social behaviour", by implication you are saying "I do not think it is", how do you reach an agreed definition of what the acceptable standard of behaviour is?

Mr Pilkington: I think when I was talking about the acceptable standard and understanding, I was talking about it in terms of the professionals who are working on the multi-agency basis within our Crime and Disorder Partnership. We all know what we are talking about in terms of what we are dealing with. The typical example, playing football in the street, I remember as a child being told off for playing football in the street, that is a consistent problem that has beset many people who deal with anti-social behaviour. I think there is a great deal more work that has to be done by all agencies to improve an awareness of what we are trying to deal with, to improve a tolerance of young people in many ways.

Q7 Chairman: We will come on to that. In practice though, from the nodding of heads, the definition of anti-social behaviour that is used in practice is one that is shared by professional practitioners, not necessarily always by the communities or I suspect young people. Ms Rhodes, can I bring you in, from your answers, your organisation perhaps has a different perspective on this issue. Do you find yourself out on a limb when you are working with other professionals when they say "We all know what anti-social behaviour is, it is this" do you find yourself saying "I do not think it is" and "under what circumstances"?

Ms Rhodes: I think that probably I find myself saying "I wonder what causes it?" which is a different question altogether. I appreciate that because I think that is our job as a family focused voluntary agency. I think that we, in the voluntary sector, who are not youth justice orientated have got to do a huge piece of work in catching up. Suddenly there is a whole new lexicon that has been acquired by our colleagues and we are not up to speed with it, yet we are working with families which our colleagues in the statutory sector are, so we have to think about that. I think I am advantaged because I sit on the expert neighbour nuisance panel with Ms Casey and that has helped tremendously. It has just provided me with further opportunities to witness cases brought to that panel which are deemed anti-social, and I entirely agree I would not like to live next to them. I can see lots of reasons why they might be so and I suppose it is about how we interpret it. The families we work with would deny actively, vociferously, that they are anti-social, although I would suggest that they are. There are lots of opportunities for confusion.

Chairman: That is a helpful scene setting set of questions.

Q8 Mr Green: Can I pursue that for a minute. I was fascinated by Salford's evidence where you try and go into it to address that. You make the point that it is often said that discipline in society, and especially in schools, has broken down. That is quite a strong statement, is that the experience in Salford, that discipline in schools has broken down?

Mr Pilkington: I think it is generally acknowledged that the people who we are dealing with at the heavier end of intervention are often also problematic within education environments.

Q9 Mr Green: You see it as that way round, the fact that the environment that is meant to provide them with some discipline does not, so that spills over into society generally?

Mr Pilkington: The evidence that we submitted was based on an evaluation of the work that we are doing. I think it is generally accepted it needs to be a far greater and more in depth national evaluation of problems. It is difficult to say what is necessarily the first in time, chicken and egg wise. The professional perception of those who are dealing with them, the young people show a general disrespect for authority. Now did that break down in school at the age of seven, eight or nine and was not picked up.

Q10 Mr Taylor: No. Sorry!

Mr Pilkington: --- or have they become anti-social in the communities and then carried that through to school in many ways.

Q11 Mr Green: However we define it - clearly this is a difficulty I get bogged down with - is it getting worse? Is anti-social behaviour worse among young people now than it was ten or 15 years ago?

Mr Pilkington: I am not sure that information is available currently. Our figures for reports to the police of youths causing annoyance have declined, although there is a perception that it is becoming more of a problem. I do think there are issues about what maybe would have been tolerated ten or 15 years ago will not be tolerated now, issues about how far the publicity around anti-social behaviour have raised public awareness, how far maybe now communities which have put up in silence with anti-social behaviour are at last saying "Sorry, we need something to be done now". Talking to witnesses who have endured ten or 12 years of anti-social behaviour, small shopkeepers who have been targeted for racist abuse and the like who now, because there is something they can do, come forward and say "Please do something for me". We do not necessarily have the baseline figures. The problems of definition do not allow us to say exactly what those baselines are but there is a general perception that problems are increasing. I think some of the individuals who are perpetrating anti-social behaviour are becoming more and more intense in the way they behave. As a general statement, "it is increasing generally", I do not know.

Q12 Mr Green: Does anyone else have a view on this?

Ms Roberts: I think the legislation has heightened people's awareness that perhaps you should not tolerate certain behaviour in communities. At the same time the young people who are coming forward in the youth justice system and the research that has been undertaken about their backgrounds is highlighting some of the complex needs which some of them have in terms of coming from problem families with generations of issues, perhaps unemployment, poverty and also young people who have failed in school and are out of school. I have been in Birmingham for 20 years working and I think there are more young people who are out of school, either truanting or being excluded, failing in school, than perhaps previously. I do wonder whether young people's behaviour has worsened or maybe we are not as supportive. I think there is far more we can do as we get on to some solutions as to how we deal with individuals and provide support to them and their families. It may appear to be also increasing as people are encouraged to report what they view as anti-social behaviour. For example, a helpline was set up in Birmingham and there were a lot of calls about football in the street, so at that level you would not have had that previously, people would have stayed silent on it or been privately upset about it whereas now they can call somewhere. I do think we need to look more deeply at what the issues are with some of the young people who are involved in this behaviour.

Q13 Mr Green: Can I ask Mr Denley, do you think anti-social behaviour is particularly bad among young people or are they just less tolerated or indeed more likely to be doing anti-social things in public places than their elders?

Mr Denley: Yes, I think there is a lot of that in it. Having worked for 25 years in the youth service and grown up in what I now find is a deprived community, we never had that excuse. I think the labelling of communities has been a problem area and when you are talking about discipline, I think I would like to put it around "worth", there is no "worth" in communities apart from any negative value you pull out. If you cannot strive to be a better citizen or whatever, you tend to go for the negative bravado, your place is held up by what you can do to be a negative person. Although the pressures of living in those communities now are far more, we keep coming back to playing football in the street, there are less opportunities, there are more "No ball game" signs, you are more likely to be moved on. People phone up and say "There are five youngsters at the end of my street." "What are they doing?" "Laughing!" "Well we will come out and arrest them for being in possession of a sense of humour!" All those things have come up over the years but it is easier now to try and label a problem than look at a solution I feel and I do not feel, having worked for 25 years in a youth service, any of the young people I am working with now are any different from the scallywags we dealt with 25 years ago.

Q14 Mr Green: You think telling them "This is a deprived area so you have got problems" actually makes it worse?

Mr Denley: It is like telling them they have got ADHD and instead of having competitions as to whether "You have got a social worker, I have got a probation officer and a social worker" is your strength of worth or whether "I am on three Ritalin a day". "That is rubbish I am on five" is a measure of your worth. I think it is giving people negative aspirations, negative stereotypes to fit into to recognise their own status in society, instead of catching them young, giving them worthwhile opportunities and giving them something worthwhile to strive towards and turning their back on their older brother's negative persona.

Q15 Mr Green: That is very useful. One last thing: if we take a more tolerant approach, if we say "Young people have always been like this. We are just getting over-excited about it, labelling them too much", would it get worse?

Ms Rhodes: Positive ignoring is a very good tactic and I think we do not do enough of it actually. I think that for a lot of young people we are working with at the moment, the one thing that they asked me to say today was that they would like things to do, they would rather not hang around being deemed to be anti-social. It is absolutely right, a group of two or more becomes an anti-social group and particularly this issue about hoods. I do not know why we have become so fixated about it. These young people are anxious for useful, interesting things to do and when we look around a lot of the youth centres' interesting activities are not there for these young people or they are located in difficult places to get to. I suppose I am thinking particularly of youth in rural areas where buses are infrequent and it is hard for them to access interesting things to do. I think it is a great shame and I do wish we were better at ignoring. The other thing, one of the things that we have forgotten, is there was an age when parents spoke to parents and said "Your boy is driving me mad with that football". Now that we have got a telephone helpline we tend to criminalise things quite quickly and I think it is something about communities' great anxiety I suspect about tackling things themselves. I think that it is about fear, I think people are fearful of these young people and no longer feel they can go up to them and talk to them as they would another human being. I think it is a generation issue.

Q16 Chairman: Can I just follow that up. Some of the evidence we have had has suggested quite strongly that other young people are as likely to identify anti-social behaviour by young people as a problem. That suggestion is not just, as it were, an older generation that does not understand the young. If you do surveys of young people they would say "We have problems with gangs, we have problems with people who are being intimidated and harassed." There is an issue there, is there not, that there is real behaviour going on of which other young people are more often the victims than anybody else. Am I right to say that because that is what has been suggested in some of our written evidence?

Ms Roberts: I was seconded to Government Office for six months to look at best practice in the West Midlands on reducing anti-social behaviour. When we did the research with young people both in the criminal justice system and generally those in schools they were saying very similar issues to adults, that they wanted to feel safe, they did not like certain behaviours in the community, they wanted clean streets and they wanted somewhere to go. The feedback from adult's in the Crime and Disorder Audit research was very similar. What the secondment team came up with was that partnerships need to have a matrix that included a preventative, educative and enforcement approach for the first two approaches to be more effective. I do believe we need to define what anti-social behaviour is and then talk to young people about this so they know the rules. I am not saying that is a simple definition, we have struggled already about what youth nuisance is but I do think probably we need to unpick it a bit more. Then you have the enforcement end, young people do need boundaries around them when they do step out of line. You also have to take approaches that are universal. We need to do more citizenship work in schools around this and we need to clean the streets[1]. We also need to have places for parents whose children are not in trouble to get help before they get into trouble. Finally you need to target the at risk group who would engage in anti-social behaviour and crime if they are not engaged in constructive activities.

Q17 Chairman: We will get on to that later. I want to establish that this is not just a problem of misunderstanding between generations, it is an issue which is perceived as a problem by some young people about the behaviour of others.

Mr Pilkington: There are a significant number of young people who are the victims of anti-social behaviour, also from the limited amount of work we have been able to do with people who are subject to ASBOs or ASBO warnings. I suppose it comes back to the issue of talking about communities. There are established communities of young people who are perceived as being anti-social. Some of those people are in there because of peer pressure and fear of leaving and they have been happy to be involved in the system so they can take a step back and say "I no longer want this" and getting involved in those issues can be important as well.

Chairman: We will come on to that now.

Q18 David Winnick: Ms Rhodes, I was rather interested a little while back when you said some of the families would not consider themselves to be anti‑social. I read a very interesting case study that you enclosed; I will not name the person. Is it a genuine name?

Ms Rhodes: No. It is anonymised; I have invented it for you.

Q19 David Winnick: In which case I will quote the Annister-Belgrave family as you describe them. It is, indeed, a demonstration of anti-social behaviour ranging from noise nuisance, hostility, threats of violence to burglary and extortion from neighbours, local newsagents, off‑licences and some pubs. How far would you say, as it were, such families are around nowadays? Is this a rare example of extreme anti-social behaviour?

Ms Rhodes: I think there was a very brief skirmish with statistics about this and I think every local authority was asked to provide to the anti-social behaviour unit a sense of how many really deeply problematic families they were working with. It seems that 50 per authority was about the number. These are families where every agency is involved. Everybody is scared and nobody does anything, and they just revolve. It is intergenerational, it goes on and on. I think we are saying there are a tiny number of families who attract an enormous amount of attention and an enormous amount of resource goes into them.

Q20 David Winnick: The violence is very threatening according to your account. Would it be right, also, to say the person who heads the family, if not others, clearly is in need and currently is receiving psychiatric treatment?

Ms Rhodes: Treatment, indeed, on occasions, but not someone who sees his behaviour as anti‑social. He is proud in many ways of some of those behaviours that he and particularly his sons exhibit.

Q21 David Winnick: Can we do anything further or should they be moved? Do they live in their own property?

Ms Rhodes: They are an unusual family, I presented them to you because they present a problem because they live in privately rented accommodation so none of the usual social housing sanctions apply. The property, in fact they are allowed to live there rent free, it has been given to them by a member of their family. The other part of this family is a large criminal family that lives all over the authority. It is not just the one family who we deal with, it is all their friends and relations. They are deeply problematic.

Q22 Mrs Dean: Can I ask Dawn Roberts, how good are you at identifying the perpetrators of anti-social behaviour?

Ms Roberts: I do not think the system is as joined-up nationally, as perhaps my colleague, Neil, has talked to me about prior to this session. In terms of the definition of anti-social behaviour obviously if it is a crime then police are identifying that. I think where I would like to see much more local auditing of what is happening in local areas and where young people are excluded or truanting ensuring we have more joining up of provision and agency working.[2] I think agencies do tend to know the young people who are causing the problems. I am not sure the welfare agencies come together enough, and that is one area I would like us to look at, at some stage, around the Children's Trust where you might have a single assessment of young people, whereas at the moment a number of agencies have different assessments and do not always talk to each other. One agency might know someone and another might not, but should. The Youth Inclusion and Support Panels, which have been set up from Children's Fund monies, to identify eight to 13 year olds, is really encouraging agencies to come forward and talk to other agencies about young people, and I would encourage that. I think the police in an area do tend to know the young people especially if they are in a family where the older siblings are involved in crime. That is why some of the initiatives we have started are really good at getting in early and working with youngsters who I think we all know but we might not know them collectively.

Q23 Mrs Dean: Can I ask Mr Pilkington how much should we target resources on known trouble‑makers and how much on young people as a whole?

Mr Pilkington: I think it is a major issue in that we are targeting a lot of resources at the people who are on the radar at present and we have a whole system of identifying them. I would say within our area, where we do have good working on a neighbourhood management basis, we do identify a lot of individuals who are causing anti-social behaviour, over 600 at the moment. If you are constantly fire-fighting that heavy end enforcement intervention, we are never picking up the next generation so you are just waiting for the next wave to arrive and we really do need to push the resources further and further down into preventative work. We have a YISP team in Salford. We roll out that model beyond the age of 13 and I travelled down to London today with our preventative manager from the office who is coordinating the YISP workers. She is looking at trying to roll a lot of the work out into the latter end of primary school years to try to do far more preventative work there. Resources are a major issue, moving into the crime and disorder field, I seem to spend half of my time discussing how we are going to finance next year's work, how we are going to keep people in work beyond March 2005, and beyond March 2006. That is very difficult when we are being asked to produce three year strategies and the like. Early interventions seem to work far better.

Q24 Mrs Dean: Can I ask, Ms Rhodes, how should we strike the balance between diversion, non-formal, formal or family interventions? Are there any good examples of that?

Ms Rhodes: I think family based interventions work very well early on. I think one of the problems we have around the focus on youth is we tend to focus on the youth and we forget to focus on the family which is where that behaviour is sustained and supported. Some of the very best schemes seem to me at any point of the intervention cycle, whether early or late, work best when you are working with the young person and also the family of origin so you are changing everybody's perception of the problem and what the solution might be. Some of the more complex families that we work with where children are within Youth Offending Teams would be often where a parent has an enduring mental health problem or a learning difficulty. These people are already struggling with problems in the parenting domain. We can do something there about helping support their parenting which enables the change that the YOT team are hoping to make as well but it requires a great deal of collaboration and I think this is very patchy because none of this provision is universal. It depends if you have the possibility of bringing both ends of the circle together: the voluntary and the statutory. I am interested also that we tend forget these children often have emotional and mental health problems themselves. We have lots of young people going through youth offending processes and equally they could go through child and adolescent mental health service processes, they are very distressed young people. It just so happens they have emerged and their behaviour has become criminalised, in another place they might have had a different treatment regime. I am very interested that we ask a whole range of questions when a young person appears and the question is always "Where is your family and how can we engage them in working with YISP too.

Ms Roberts: We run a parenting programme through a voluntary organisation. We did that because we did want to encourage parents to come and not be labelled. At the same time the voluntary organisation runs our parenting orders and we have had a number of parenting orders. Our staff recommend them, sometimes the court make them and we do not think they are necessary. We also have a number of parents who go on a voluntary basis. After the first year I asked Birmingham University to do some research and I was surprised to find that those parents who were tending to benefit most and attended most were the ones on orders. Although initially they were quite angry to be on the orders, actually they got a lot out of it. I am not suggesting that all parents go on orders, I do think though there is a place where we assess the parental responsibility is lacking, that it is those parents who should go on. What they found was that 50% of the young people whose parents were on the programme did not re‑offend. Parents' self esteem was greater in the parenting order group.

Q25 Chairman: That is 50%?

Ms Roberts: Yes, 50%. Conflict was down in both sets, voluntary and the order group. The young people who were interviewed also noticed that their parents had less aggression, less conflict with them. I think you need to have a range, a continuum. I still believe parents should come on a voluntary basis, where they will come, but if the young people re‑offend, and they have not come, we should be looking at orders if we think that is where the issues are. I do accept also parents are struggling and sometimes they do have alcohol issues, issues where they cannot access services themselves and sometimes where they have tried to access services for their children for a while but because social services are so busy, the thresholds are too high to get that support. In the main the parents welcome trying to work with someone to look at how difficult it is to bring up a teenager.[3]

Q26 Mrs Dean: You view the parenting orders as a success?

Ms Roberts: In Birmingham - I think nationally they are not used as much - we have never used them for the anti-social behaviour civil legislation, we have used them in the Criminal Courts and we do monitor outcomes quite carefully. Just as a caveat, it does tend to be mothers who come on the orders. There is a need to shift some of that responsibility towards fathers as well.

Q27 Mrs Dean: What level of anti-social behaviour ought to trigger formal responses such as ASBOs?

Ms Roberts: Again, I think where there is persistence in behaviour and it is not being corrected through another route. If the young person is on a programme with us, and obviously they are lessening their criminal behaviour, I do not see the need for that to occur. It is a useful tool especially if a young person is going into custody and you worry when they come out their behaviour will continue, a Criminal Anti-social Behaviour Order can be applied for, then you do have something to hold over them on release to keep communities safe.

Q28 Mrs Dean: Can I ask you where does your particular organisation strike the balance between prevention and enforcement?

Ms Roberts: We have been involved in quite a number of preventative strategies. There is always a dilemma about whether we can take our eye off the core business of young people in the system, and that is about resources. I think we have got so much we can offer to work with this group to try to get in early, which is why we have engaged in the Youth Inclusion and Support Panels. Mainly that is about meeting with other agencies to pick up young people who have fallen out of the system, the eight to 13s who are at risk of exclusion or who are presently truanting or have mental health problems are engaging in nuisance behaviour getting their first reprimand or they are on an Acceptable Behaviour Contract. We have tried to encourage our anti-social behaviour unit, and police and housing to give us the names of young people who are in that category. Then we do go out to offer interventions. We have had some good successes with families in crisis and by putting in some support we have managed to turn young people around so they have not gone down the route of criminality. Also, we have been involved in the Youth Inclusion Programmes for the 14 pluses. It is not across the whole city, we have just four programmes. We have worked very well with West Midlands police and education colleagues to go into schools to put messages across about young people preventing themselves becoming victims as much as the consequences of crime. We have been involved, also, in a lot of diversionary activities which are very important in the school holidays and in the evenings, again any more resources for that would be welcomed, people want to see youngsters off the streets and occupied. Schools have asked us to work with young people who have got behavioural problems, but we do not have the capacity. We have had to draw some thresholds around those most at risk and hopefully as Children's Trusts come on board other welfare agencies will come on stream.

Q29 Mrs Dean: Mr Pilkington, do you want to tell us about your authority?

Mr Pilkington: I think Salford has something of a reputation for enforcement, although it is not necessarily a reputation that is founded on facts. We have done a lot of work on orders on conviction which is a totally separate beast. In terms of civil ASBOs this year, we have only obtained three. As I said, we have identified, through our multi-agency working on a neighbourhood basis, 600 people and civil ASBOs are less than 8%, I think, of those identified. We do have a threshold criterion that if there is something that could be tried, which is available, which has not yet been tried, we will not apply for an ASBO. We are always looking for the diversion and the prevention first. We do not do ABCs as such but we ask people to sign promises which we think probably with young people makes more sense to them an Acceptable Behaviour Contracts or Acceptable Behaviour Agreements, "Please promise not to do that". We are constantly looking at trying to put the diversion/prevention further back into the system. We have got the team of YOT officers who will go to the warning interviews and say to the young people "This is what you are doing. This is what we want you to stop. What you need is help?" We have in some areas - and again it is all dependent on the funding that is available and what we can find and scrape together in some circumstances - a juvenile nuisance scheme and they pick up calls from the police at peak times for youths causing annoyance. Sports development officers will go out and meet with the young people. In some circumstances they will try and mediate with the people who are complaining and say "They are not doing anything wrong but please bear with us" and try and direct them into more positive things, again all the school holidays based things and the YISP. We have just recruited a new set of staff who work for me as enforcement officers. We have found that they take the very first complaint of anti-social behaviour and they get in straight away to advise the parents and speak to the children and say "Look, this is what is going on. This is the wider picture. This is why we are concerned about your behaviour". Those very early interventions do work but we will not go for enforcement unless we have said "Well, we have tried everything we can think of". I think there are issues and there are issues nationally for most people involved in anti-social behaviour about trying to gain the involvement of social services and education and certainly social services thresholds for when a child is at risk are a lot higher than when I might say "This child is at risk because of their behaviour in the community. They are out on the street, they are out late at night, they are out drinking alcohol and they are only 13 years old". Social services will say "We know of them but we are not doing anything because they do not meet our significant harm threshold under the Children's Act".

Q30 Mrs Dean: Can I ask Mr Denley what is the relationship between your Youth Works schemes and more formal interventions? Is there a tension between the work you do and the more formal approaches?

Mr Denley: I do not think there is any tension between us at all. We sit nicely between the young people's and children's framework partnerships and the Bridgend Community Safety Partnership. The YOT team manager, the superintendent, local education officers, all sit on those panels and our Youth Works scheme is seen as the appropriate response in the absence of a YIP. Whereas the YIP may look at targeting the top 50 in large areas, we need quite a large estate to find the top 50, and you would be lucky to find 50 in the whole authority. Within the Youth Works scheme we target the 50 most at risk and it could be at risk of social exclusion, teenage pregnancy, susceptibility to drugs, involvement in crime or being a victim of crime. We have stretched our boundaries so we can go into much smaller estates. Going back about three questions, I suppose, if nothing is done then the problem will get worse because any intervention is better than nothing and young people will push the boundaries until somebody brings it to their attention and they are doing it. The bullying gangs will thrive in areas where no interventions are taking place so young people will then be living in quite a bad area if nothing is put in to intervene. Early intervention is better than anything else. Talking about families, I think from my 20 years in social services looking at treats for naughty kids and intermediate treatment and different programmes where we took people away for short sharp shocks ---

Q31 Chairman: We are going to have to keep everything quite short.

Mr Denley: I am trying to get my point across and I will as quickly as possible.

Q32 Chairman: If I can ask all the witnesses to answer specifically. I think you have answered the specific question.

Mr Denley: I am sure I have not got back to that point yet.

Q33 Mrs Dean: Can I turn to Ms Rhodes and ask whether your Family Welfare Association feel you complement the more formal interventions and, again, is there any tension between the two, yourself and the former?

Ms Rhodes: I think we do complement very well. What I have discovered, given that we work in the South East of England up to the Midlands area, is it is very different in every authority. There is no uniformity about these processes at all. What we learn in somewhere like Kent, we cannot readily apply to Derbyshire. That means we can be the conduits of information, which is always the role of the voluntary sector. I think there are tensions because we are often perceived to represent the families' interests. I am not sure that is true but, nevertheless, we are seen as advocates for the family and advocates for the young person. I suspect a bit of advocacy is needed somewhere along the way but most of the time, having worked on a couple of particularly difficult cases, we establish a modus vivendi which then becomes very useful. I think the voluntary sector works best where we are very clearly doing our job and other people are doing theirs. I am quite happy to bump up against somebody else's thresholds but I do not want to be asked to do their job. Because of the gaps and tensions that there are, it is very easy to get sucked in beyond skills and ability levels and, as an Agency, we try to resist it but I think there is a complementarity.

Q34 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: Mr Pilkington, did you say you have identified 600 people?

Mr Pilkington: Yes.

Q35 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: I would just like to know how long it took you to identify the 600?

Mr Pilkington: That is a cumulative figure starting in the year 2000, so within our whole processes since the year 2000 we have identified 600 people in total.

Q36 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: What is the age span of the individuals concerned?

Mr Pilkington: Ten, because that is as low as we go in terms of anti-social behaviour - although we did have one Child Safety Order for a nine year old sibling - through to late 60s/early 70s.

Q37 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: Clearly, the realisation of 600 people requires some sort of concerted effort and team approach to this. How many people are involved in anti-social behaviour and related activities as a core function within the authority and its agencies and its working partners?

Mr Pilkington: The way we work goes far beyond the core function. We have my team, which is the legal function, plus some anti-social behaviour officers and what we call nuisance link workers who will take additional reports. We total 13. Our housing Arms' Length Management Organisation has an anti‑social behaviour team of eight staff but we would say that the 40-something housing management officers deal with anti-social behaviour as part of their job. Each of our police areas, and we have managed to align all our boundaries with community beat officers, they do not just identify people who are committing crime they will identify individuals who are being anti-social. We have a YOT team, which is our YISP team, which is nine or ten staff, I think, and then, of course, we have the role of the DCSOs, neighbourhood wardens and a variety of other stuff. We operate on eight areas within Salford and they hold regular meetings on a multi-agency basis to look at who is currently causing anti-social behaviour, who is being tackled and, because of that intervention, even if it is just someone having a quiet word with them to ask them to stop, whether they have stopped. The 600 is not 600 current cases, it is 600 in total since 2000.

Q38 Mr Prosser: On the question of various agencies, their cooperation and their coordination or otherwise, what can you bring to us in terms of your experience of how effectively the various agencies do work together and coordinate together? We are talking about the local authority, we are talking about the Youth Offender Teams we employ, we have anti-social behaviour units and coordinators being set up. We have got a whole plethora of agencies and groups and unless they work together the outcomes will not be very successful. It is a wide subject and I have a number of questions. What experiences do you have? Who should be leading, for instance, in an area where you have got all of those agencies working together on anti-social behaviour?

Mr Pilkington: We have within each of our areas neighbourhood managers so they are responsible for crime and disorder, health, social services issues, in trying to develop multi-agency work. They will lead the multi-agency meetings for their area.

Q39 Mr Prosser: Where is he or she specifically, within the local authority or the district council?

Mr Pilkington: They are situated within the city council, so they lead. I believe, certainly in our council, in our Crime and Disorder Partnership we have had great success in bringing in most of the agencies. I think the problems that have arisen have arisen amongst those agencies - social services and health agencies - where issues about confidentiality and the sharing of information have led them to feel they cannot contribute to the debate which can be a great shame because we then have a group of people who are trying to discuss problems and look for solutions that have got a black hole as to whether there are mental health problems within the family or health problems for a particular individual. In general, my experience has been that most of the individuals that we have been able to bring around the table have worked very well together. I do think, going back to the previous point, young people who are being anti-social are also children at risk. The whole issue about how we develop the Children's Trusts, the information sharing and assessment framework which is being promoted at present, and linking that scheme of work with the scheme of work about information sharing for anti-social behaviour is going to be an interesting development to see how easily people sit together. Is a mental health social worker going to be happy talking to a police sergeant when one is looking at treatment and health issues and the other is talking about possible enforcement proceedings?

Q40 Mr Prosser: Does that reflect everyone's opinion?

Ms Roberts: The Youth Offending Service is unique as within that service you have got both enforcement and support agencies. I think it has been a fantastic success in breaking down barriers between professionals. In our Service we have CAMHS workers who are seconded to us for part of the week and part of the week are back in the CAMHS service. They are able to access psychiatric assistance where it is required. You also have your drugs worker, your police officer, your social worker, your probation officer, your parenting worker and your Connexions worker within the Service. I think that is the way forward. When young people are in the system I feel very confident we have learnt to share information and not to duplicate and to look for problem solving and solutions. Our police officers link back to local beat bobbies. We all have targets to meet and really we all try and meet those targets. As I have said before, our YISP people are coming together and sharing information. One of the issues we have is where Anti‑social Behaviour Orders are being taken out by housing and police, and these young people are not known to the YOS. Therefore no assessment is undertaken on any support or intervention needs they may have. We have still got work to do on consultation in these instances.

Q41 Chairman: Could I ask, just for my own clarification, you say your service is unique, what is the difference in the structure of your Youth Offending Service and the Youth Offending Teams that many Members will be familiar with?

Ms Roberts: It is the same. We are the largest Youth Offending Team in the country. We have got the equivalent of about five Youth Offending Teams within the service.

Q42 Chairman: The skills that you have involved are the same ones as identified by the YOT offending team?

Ms Roberts: They are.

Q43 Mr Prosser: On the question of YOTs, some critics say that the danger of having YOTs very active in these partnerships is that you involve non-offenders in the criminal justice scheme, label them and you stigmatise them.

Ms Roberts: I think that was one of my first concerns about labelling young people but, often, they were already labelled. For instance they are already out of school or are exhibiting behaviour that had brought them to the attention of agencies. I felt in the absence of another agency stepping forward it was better that we did to try to prevent them coming into the system in the first place. That is why I am hopeful that in the future more agencies joining up under the trust umbrella will provide this service, if you have got multi-agency teams who are welfare led, even better. I am not sure where YOTs will sit because we have an offender management community safety arm and we have got a welfare arm as well, so I am not sure if we will come into the trust fully but we will need to be some part of it. One of our main aims with the YISP was to get mainstream agencies and voluntary organisations involved which is why we have local community meetings to discuss the young people, often with parental consent. A police officer will say to the parent "Your child has got into trouble, do you need help? Can we share this information?" Sometimes the YISP worker will offer support, sometimes it is a voluntary group who can offer more local interventions that are more beneficial. At the moment we are in because if we are not in, I do not want young people falling through the net.[4]

Q44 Mr Prosser: What about the Crime and Disorder Reduction Partnership, how does that fit in? Is it helpful?

Ms Roberts: It is helpful. The chief executive of the local authority chairs our Youth Offending Service chief officers' group and does take real ownership of the issues. We found that, therefore, the other agencies come in force and really it is a problem solving arena. We do attend the Crime and Disorder Reduction Partnership meetings. The new anti-social behaviour unit, it is a combination of police and housing, is coming together. I think because it is quite new that is why we are seeing more enforcement at the moment, of perhaps some persistent issues. The aim is to pick up youngsters earlier and look for more Acceptable Behaviour Contracts, warnings, diversionary schemes before the behaviour worsens and requires Court action.

Q45 Mr Prosser: Finally, could you tell us in two or three words how useful and helpful the Home Office's anti-social behaviour unit scheme has been to the work in your area?

Ms Rhodes: I think it is very helpful because I think what it is going to produce are very sensible suggestions, like how everybody can think about this better. I suppose I am privileged because I see month after month a variety of different people bringing these very problematic families. I have been very aware that they preoccupy environmental health officers' time, they preoccupy lots of housing officers' time, but they also preoccupy registered social landlords' time and they really do not know where to go with this. They come to present a case and you realise it is a very thin, very poor, unconnected response because they have not been aware.

Q46 Chairman: You are talking about your role in the anti-social behaviour unit, could you explain a little about that?

Ms Rhodes: The anti-social behaviour unit decided it would try and work out what was going on with some very, very complex and difficult cases so it set up something rather grandly titled the expert panel on which I sit as a voluntary sector representative because the Family Welfare Association has been hard at work in this area for a long time. What happens is that a local authority will come and present seven or eight cases in a morning, each of those will have had a response from a variety of agencies. They are coming with a problem, they are coming with a question and a variety of people sit on that panel. It is chaired by Jo Tuke who is Louise Casey's deputy. There are a variety of other people there, including a YOT representative and an anti-social behaviour practitioner, and we have a good think about these things. They range from the elderly person in sheltered accommodation whose housing has been taken over by prostitutes and crack addicts, to families who are causing pandemonium in the streets, and we have to think about what has gone on. These cases can be brought by any agency in that authority. I have been very aware of how registered social landlords struggle with this problem with very, very little help. The minute they realise there are tools they can use and a tool kit they can go to, I think they are going to find better responses, earlier responses.

Mr Pilkington: I would like to comment about the role of the Youth Offending Teams from Mr Prosser's earlier comment. The Youth Offending Team in Salford has worked really well, we just have one concern that some parents are reluctant to get involved where the use of the word "offender" is used, where they are not offending. We are looking at setting up a sort of shadow unit that would mean you could refer people to that organisation. I am not saying we are criminalising them by bringing them in touch with the Youth Offending Team but they do not feel it is youth offending. I have to declare an interest, I suppose, at this point in that I am a specialist practitioner tutor for the Anti-social Behaviour Unit's academy. I lead workshops for the unit on a variety of days around the country on both information sharing - which is hard enough for a lawyer to deal with in some respects and is a complete nightmare for a non lawyer to pick through the rules and regulations there - and also on practical applications about applying for orders, civil orders and orders on conviction. I must admit it has been enlightening to see the variety of approaches across the country and I do hope by using the academy and the Anti-social Behaviour Unit and the action line that is available, we can try and establish at least a degree of consistency in terms of approach and a sharing of best practice. I think that is where the primary role that I have been involved in has hopefully been successful.

Ms Roberts: I have not had a lot to do with the unit. I have seen their useful guidance on the legislation. I did attend one of their day seminars and I raised the lack of discussion about prevention strategies. I was worried they were going too far down the enforcement track and there was not enough problem solving and other approaches

Mr Denley: Speaking from a Bridgend perspective, the Bridgend Community Safety Partnership and the YPP partnership are now coming together under the Home Office through the Welsh Assembly, the Welsh version, and prevent and deter is being looked at. There is an over-arching looking at Safer Bridgend on the offending side and the YPP on the preventative side. The way those two groups have worked together, coming from the voluntary sector, it has been an amazing two years to see the way the partnerships have worked out. The amount of input from others going into it has been encouraging and I agree with the comments of everybody else here. Everybody has worked together on these partnerships and, taking those streams into consideration, things can only get better.

Q47 Mr Prosser: The anti-social behaviour unit within the Home Office has been helpful in co-ordinating it?

Mr Denley: In co-ordinating it. The legislation and the booklets and things that have come out, although they have had to go through the Welsh Assembly to get to our partnerships, now we have the Welsh version in brackets underneath.

Mr Prosser: I am sure it is not superior! I declare an interest as well.

Q48 Mr Taylor: My first question is for Mr Denley. I wonder if you could tell us what is the Youth Work scheme in Bridgend doing to help prevent anti-social behaviour?

Mr Denley: The whole scheme is built around preventing anti-social behaviour. The schemes were a forerunner to the programmes set up ten years ago in England. It is the first project of its kind in Wales. It was brought through the Bridgend Community Safety Partnership, the Youth Annoyance Panels sought a project which would go into areas of deprivation and meet the criteria for such a project. I worked for the first 18 months on the estate. It works with the young people, it works with their peers, it works with their siblings, it works with the family and it works on the estate. It is in a building, either a disused shop or house where we set up the youth programme. It is universal in its outlook. We try and cater for every young person on the estate between the ages of eight and 25 to offer something. Whilst doing that we identify a target of at least up to 50 who need more intervention. We work doing preventative work, regeneration work and diversionary work.

Q49 Mr Taylor: You have had some significant success. In your submission - I remind you, you will not need reminding - you tell us as a result of the scheme youth nuisance fell by 29% in the first year and by 56% in the second year. Have I got that right?

Mr Denley: Yes, that came from police figures. An update on that: violence against a person dropped 17%, it dropped 39% in vehicle related crimes, 17% in criminal damage and 44% in juvenile youth nuisance. Those are all police figures. We are run by a steering group which involves the YOT team manager, the superintendent, as I said the education officer and, although we are a voluntary organisation, set up through Marks & Spencer, Crime Concern and Groundwork, it is a local steering group and that success has resulted in us now rolling out in two other areas in Bridgend, the Caurau Estate and the Marlas Estate are now being looked at as being a preventative measure.

Q50 Mr Taylor: That first estate where you worked on the spot, what was the name of that one?

Mr Denley: Wildmill.

Q51 Mr Taylor: How many residents would there be?

Mr Denley: That is a thousand dwellings, probably 3,000, 360 young people of the target age and probably we have met with all of those over the three years now and regularly meet with 60 in an evening. We work four evenings a week on a youth club basis with eights to 12s on two evenings and 13s to 18s on another two evenings and we work with the 18s to 25s trying to get them on vocational projects, drugs awareness courses, that kind of thing.

Q52 Mr Taylor: I have one final question for you, Mr Denley, if I may. It would be slightly negative for me to ask you what would be your idea of an unsuccessful diversionary scheme so I am going to turn it the other way round and ask if you could give me an example of a good diversionary scheme and why it is a good one?

Mr Denley: It would be one in which you had time to plan for the activity, one which was not related to throwing money at the problem specifically and would involve targeting not only the most prolific perpetrators but their peers as well. I think you can work on individuals for as long as you like but once they go back to their peer group the work you have done is lost straight away.

Q53 Mr Taylor: Just like that?

Mr Denley: More or less, I would have said, yes. If you do not work with their peers on their estates and on their own turf then it is pointless working with them I have found.

Q54 Mr Taylor: Thank you very much, Mr Denley. Could I turn to you, Ms Roberts, you and I have a frontier, I represent Solihull so I am quite close to the activities that you are running in Solihull. I will just claim to say that I think my own borough of Solihull has lifted its game on the matter of anti-social behaviour quite noticeably in the last 18 months, perhaps we have borrowed some good habits from you. In your submission you mentioned the Youth Inclusion Programmes, what do they consist of and how far would these programmes be combined with more formal responses if someone on a Youth Inclusion Programme then offends or behaves anti-socially?

Ms Roberts: There is a joining up of prevention and more formal approaches. The Youth Inclusion Programmes which are your 14-plus targeting the 50 most at risk, work with young people referred by the Youth Offending Team where young people are coming to the end of their orders, they need a bit more support and we feel they have done well and we need to sustain that success. There is a lot of joint working. We will now be managing two of the Youth Inclusion Programmes taking over from the youth service and we want to see a lot more joining up of referring siblings. I would like to see the Youth Inclusion Programmes doing some of the support work under Acceptable Behaviour Contracts. It does consist of your detached youth work model where you are getting to young people who would not necessarily go to your mainstream youth services, who need that extra bit of support within the family as well, because I do believe a number of the issues are family related. The staff are more skilled at working with groups of young people and bringing them together and getting them all to behave better. Equally I think it is just as important to look to the future, for these young people to be encouraged in their thinking about what skills they have not got, how we could get them to acquire them, how they can be supported to stay in school or get training for a skill because I think young people will not act anti-socially if they have more to lose than to gain. The whole project is about very intensive support. In Birmingham we have used it for young people who have already been in the system but also young people who could be in the system if we do not intervene. All agencies refer. I know at one of the projects they linked up with a local school where a group of young people were about to be excluded and they came to the project one afternoon a week. The different support and input they received assisted this group to work well with the staff and to stay in school. We do need more of them, it is a good model.

Q55 Mr Taylor: In general terms, how do you measure success?

Ms Roberts: I would say, firstly, stopping the behaviour because young people cannot be allowed to impose that on others. There should be no excuses. There are, however, often lots of complex welfare issues. That is why my second point would be these young people giving something back to communities, reaching their potential. That is why programmes are based on a strengths-led approach, you are looking for what young people can achieve and mostly you can identify something they are good at and put them in that direction. Often young people commit a crime and the whole of them is labelled whereas, in fact, they may have something positive to offer. That is what a lot of the programmes are about, trying to find what a young person's strengths are, and at the same time getting support where necessary if there are outstanding needs such as mental health, alcohol or drug issues.

Q56 Mr Taylor: I just wonder if I could ask you a local constituency question because my constituency of Solihull has quite a significant frontier with Birmingham. Indeed, I have got roads where one side of the road is in Birmingham and the other side of the road is in Solihull. Clearly anti-social behaviour knows no such bounds, they break windows on either side of the street or whatever activity it is. Do you have good liaison with your neighbour authorities and it is clear that it is partly in one and partly in another?

Ms Roberts: We do.

Q57 Mr Taylor: Does that work all right?

Ms Roberts: It does. Until very recently we provided Court officers to Solihull Court and we share our persistent young offender programme, it is under one management. We meet regularly at steering groups. Also, we have regular West Midlands YOT managers' meetings so that there is a sharing of ideas about projects and around 'what works'. Occasionally, we might argue about is the young person on your patch or ours if they have just moved and they have got an order but it is nothing major. In the main there are good relationships, it is not a problem.

Q58 Mr Taylor: It is not a problem?

Ms Roberts: No.

Q59 Mr Taylor: May I put my final question to Mr Pilkington. In your submission, Mr Pilkington, you question the funding arrangements for diversionary schemes. What funding arrangements would you like to see in place?

Mr Pilkington: A lot of the issues relate to the fact that most funding is short term, it is 12 months, maybe two years, three years if you are really lucky. We have had situations where we are informed funding is available, can we put forward a scheme within the next two weeks and we get the funding. Of course you have then got the issue of recruitment of staff, that is what you try to do and if it is a 12 month scheme you are losing your staff after six months because they are looking to move on. A lot of the initiatives around crime and disorder are seen as funded by short term, whatever pots are available and that organisations, CDRPs, need to look at mainstream funding resources. If sports development is a useful resource for early intervention you need those sports development officers as a permanent feature of a local authority.

Q60 Mr Taylor: Nobody has mentioned sport so far. I thought perhaps Mr Denley might, and still could. Is organised sport and games an important element in this work? I should have thought it was. If we can get football off the street and on to a proper pitch it might be a good idea.

Mr Pilkington: Our juvenile nuisance teams, our sports development officers, go out to meet with the groups that are identified. I think there is a general consensus that sport is important because most of the people they are dealing with are teenage young men. I am not sure the evidence base is necessarily as good as it should be, and certainly I have experience where someone tried to get sport in place to tackle anti-social behaviour with a group who were involved, also, in other people's cars and in fact that did not work because they were not interested. They were diverted towards a project that looked at banger racing and renovating old cars, and they took that on board fully. In terms of what is appropriate, you have to say to them what do you want to do instead? There seems to be a general consensus that the decline of organised sport, sport within schools, has had a detrimental effect. It is difficult not to make wild generalisations but when you are looking for people who have strengths, maybe those who have been disruptive in school, who are not academically inclined, are not going down those routes, maybe they do have sporting skills and abilities and if you can promote those then it is something positive. I think also I am aware that in things like boxing clubs, you cannot box as an amateur if you have a criminal record so that gives them an incentive to make sure that they stay out of crime and disorder if they want to progress in that way. It can be a very positive aspect.

Q61 Mr Taylor: Bridgend produced the finest fullback for English football of all time perhaps!

Mr Denley: Maybe, but not on the estates I have been working on! We do work alongside Positive Features, which is a modest scheme trying to encourage people back into schools through sport and sport is high on the programme as an anti-social behaviour on many occasions. Yes, with improved lighting on sports pitches we would have to employ less youth workers and social workers and less ASBO areas in Sainsbury's car parks because people congregate there because the light is there. Yes, lighting is a huge aspect and I think even though organised sport is great for young people on the estates that I have worked on we need more initiatives and innovative ways of working with young people. Our biggest success has been through encouraging young people to use media studies, using video films, editing equipment, making films about their lives, let them have a voice, put them on a youth forum where they might go along and express themselves in real means, making films in which they might address the problems of living on such an estate. They did a spoof Western on our estate with Pete the Paedophile and Doug the Druggie and after 15 minutes said "You might have laughed at the way we have looked at our lives but these people exist on our estates and we have to deal with it every day". Yes, media studies, computers, anything, as you say if they have got an interest in scrambler bikes and they are a nuisance, get them working on lawnmower engines and grass cutting and getting some pocket money in or whatever. It is around using what they do already rather than trying to introduce something new. It is just taking what they do to amuse themselves at the moment and putting it into a more creative use.

Q62 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: You made a very useful comment about lighting and particularly in parks. Now I share your view that if we had better lighting in our parks we would have substantially less problems and dispersal would be less of a problem as a well. It is sort of a collective endorsement that actually parks which are accessible to the public will also become accessible to young people at night and could become constructive venues for young people and healthy distractions for them. Is that a reflective view? Are parks a significant opportunity to improve behaviour, well lit parks?

Ms Roberts: I think so. It is also then what you do about adult supervision because I think some parents are worried about their young people being out in parks. It is striking that balance with perhaps some good sports development workers or youth detached workers who are around, adding that safety value. It is definitely welcome. On our diversionary schemes we have used sport and leisure and young people have really enjoyed engaging in these activities.

Q63 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: And exists now.

Ms Roberts: Not as much as it should.

Q64 Janet Anderson: If I could turn to dealing with parents, and Ms Roberts you spoke a bit earlier about parenting orders and how effective you thought they could be. I wonder if I could put this question to all of you. What are the resource implications of parenting orders and are the resource implications thought through properly before parenting orders are imposed?

Ms Roberts: For our parenting programme, we have had to use a variety of resources. This includes using some core funding from the Youth Justice Board, Social Services and education, because we also run parenting programmes for parents whose children are out of school. We have obtained drugs money from the Drug Action Team, recognising the importance of working with parents and raising their awareness around drug issues on a preventative level. It is not like I have had money to just say "Here is money for a parenting programme", I have had to go out and look for that money and some of it is short term. You build on results so you are reviewing is this effective and then you are trying to sell it. As education look to more enforcement from Court Orders and subsequently more parenting orders, this work will come to the education workers in the YOS. I am starting to worry about capacity, which means taking it back to the Crime and Disorder Reduction Partnership and to the welfare agencies to explain exactly why this funding is important. In Birmingham we are also working in partnership with the targeted family support service that social services have just set up, and this is creating a tiered approach. The aim is to build up a wealth of resources to meet demand. The Home Office are giving us money to work with families who are about to be evicted because of their children's behaviour and we are going to extend the contract with our present voluntary organisation rather than starting again. I would say it is not something I know is always there, you are always having to think "Have I got money for this and where can I get some more if I lose it?".

Q65 Janet Anderson: Generally you think parenting orders and parenting contracts are effective and can be effective?

Ms Roberts: I think so.

Q66 Janet Anderson: Can I ask the other witnesses do they agree with that?

Ms Rhodes: Some of the families we work with need that degree of compulsion to engage with change. It is quite clear they will evade changing their behaviour if nobody requires them to do it, that is not huge numbers but it is certainly true. The families we work with, with chronic mental health problems, generations of neglect and poor parenting, find it very hard to go to classes, they do not lead regular lives. We have negotiated with some authorities to deliver parenting programmes at home because in order to get to a point where they can engage with parenting classes outside the home we have had to do a great deal of work with them within the home. These are families who do not have clean clothes to stand up in and do not have any food in their fridge and do not know what tomorrow will bring them, life is just a lottery for them. Our job is to help them acquire and impose order on chaos and it is a hard and laborious task, particularly for parents with learning difficulties who find it hard sometimes to both acquire and to sustain information. I think there is a step before the parenting rule, we have to look at whether people are ready for it. The one thing that parents with profound learning difficulties who are caring for children tell us, and sometimes parents with mental health problems tell us, is they cannot keep up with general parenting programme classes, they find it very hard. A lot of the parents we work with are functionally illiterate and so anything that relies on the written word becomes very problematic and stigmatic. People continue to send them letters, and I think that is a problem. We have a reliance on the written word and lots of the parents we work with just do not read or pretend that they do - because who wishes to show that they are illiterate - but do not. There is another line of inquiry, I suppose, and that is what the voluntary sector will always be doing, we will be working with the ungainly, complicated and difficult to get them to a point where they can use formal parenting programmes even if we are not necessarily delivering those ourselves.

Q67 Janet Anderson: How well do you think parenting orders are enforced in the event of a breach? You spoke about families who find it difficult to go outside their homes and then you go into the home but where a parenting order is breached, what happens then?

Ms Rhodes: Certainly we have worked with several authorities where we have worked with families who breach parenting orders and we are their last chance. They are the families who are profoundly chaotic and disordered rather than flouting authority has been our experience. The very, very few where it has been a deliberate flout of authority, it has been abundantly clear all the way along that they are just keeping within compliance. It is no surprise to anybody that they fail to come and they are families who need to see the consequences of breach, and you will have something to say about that. I think the families we work with divide quite neatly between the ones who are prepared to change, adapt and grow and use the regulatory mechanisms and the ones who are beyond it, who need to understand the consequences.

Q68 Janet Anderson: How effective are less formal interventions, such as family group conferences and so on?

Ms Rhodes: They can be remarkably effective, again it depends on the family. If you think about a family group conference, it is the strength model that my colleagues were talking about earlier. You say to a family "Let us get you all into one room so that everybody can bring to bear their ideas about the problem" and it is the professionals who are sitting outside waiting anxiously to hear what they will be summoned in to offer. Suddenly they will say "We want to see the social worker" and the social worker will come into the room and the family will say "What we want is respite care, one day a month, could you organise that? We have got a package we think will work if this child can have respite care say over a weekend or if we could all have a holiday together". It is a negotiated contract process. It can be very effective for a group of families who are able to negotiate. It is not particularly useful for families who thrive on conflict, high expressed emotion, and where it is hard to regulate behaviour. There is another piece of work you have got to do there for them.

Q69 Janet Anderson: In your evidence, the Family Welfare Association points to a range of informal techniques such as the use of videos to highlight parenting issues. In what kind of situation would that be more effective?

Ms Rhodes: We will use videos with parents who absolutely deny they have got a problem parenting their children and we get their consent to video them. We will arrive and over the course of a week, several visits, we will be filming at breakfast time, supper time, bath time, bed time, just watching parents give instructions which their children will cheerfully ignore. We will play it back to them and we will say "Look, you were asking your child to go upstairs to do something, did your child comply?" and the parent will say "no". They do not even notice. What we are able to do then is for the second week of videoing we will video just a tiny shot of behaviour and we will make everybody watch it on the enormous television that most families have. It means everyone can suddenly look, they can see the behaviour and they can see the consequences and we get everybody to buy in to change it. It is a very dramatic way. At the beginning everybody is terribly self-conscious and I am sure that children behave awfully just to show us how badly they can behave but that is useful in a way because it shows you how challenging they can be. The parents are genuinely then in a different place when it comes to saying "Shall we think with you about what you would like to change about this behaviour?" The parents will say "Yes, I will be deeply relieved if I can make him go to bed" and we will work with everybody on what reward they want out of the changed behaviour, at the same time reminding them that they live in a social world and their neighbours, for example, would prefer a great deal of quiet after 11 o'clock at night. Those are the things you can build into a family timetable, but we have discovered you need to be very immediate, you need to be feeding back to people instantly. "Did you see him, he has just dropped that. Did you want him to drop it or did you want him to put it in the bin?", that sort of stuff, that constant reportage. Families get very weary of it and in the end they are so keen for us to go away and leave them alone, they do it.

David Winnick: Success!

Q70 Janet Anderson: If I can just put the next question to Ms Roberts and Mr Pilkington in particular. How often do you use Acceptable Behaviour Contracts and how useful are they and do you think they should always be tried prior to ASBOs?

Ms Roberts: We do use Acceptable Behaviour Contracts but not across Birmingham. We are still in the early stages of working with police and housing to refer young people to us and to use Acceptable Behaviour Contracts. Where they are used and supported we are finding they are very successful. Parents want us to work with them. In the West Midlands study, one of the areas in the West Midlands, ABCs worked much better where you had funds for a support person running alongside them. Instead of just having the contract that said "You will not do A, B or C" it also said "and we will help you with any issues you have". It is not just about the stick, it is also trying to put those interventions in that are required to change behaviour. I would like to see ABCs used with young people before an Anti-social Behaviour Order, it does not always happen. What we have done is drawn up a threshold document between the Youth Offending Service, the police and the anti-social behaviour unit which is due to be implemented and in the future unless the behaviour is very serious and needs to go straight to an ASBO, the first time young person coming to notice should be getting a warning letter with support or an Acceptable Behaviour Contract with support. I do think the best way is to say to a family "If you change we will not take court action, if you do not then we will" and at least people have the opportunity to engage.

Q71 Janet Anderson: Is that your experience in Salford, Mr Pilkington?

Mr Pilkington: Yes. As I say, we refer to them as promises, which is the same thing. They did start off as linked to the invitation to come in to discuss and the warning interview and then "Do you agree with this? Sign the promise?" We have developed that model because of the staffing in the YOTs team that are working with people causing anti-social behaviour to now progress to "We want you to stop this but we can make this available to you or your parents to try and assist."

Q72 Janet Anderson: What happens if the ABC is breached? Is the next step an ASBO?

Ms Roberts: Yes.

Q73 Janet Anderson: Almost inevitably?

Ms Roberts: It becomes part of the evidence for an Anti-social Behaviour Order. It could be the young person commits a crime and obviously then they would go to the criminal court. I would add there is an issue about resources because our Acceptable Behaviour Contracts are either carried out by our police officers in the YOT or through our YISP team, which is a separate team to the YOT, which just deals with the under 14s. If we have lots of ABCs for the over 14s then that is where we will start to hit resourcing issues.

Q74 Janet Anderson: I was going to ask you about individual support orders and the resource implications for those as well. Again, before you make these, do you have to think about "have I got the resources to do this" and how much is that a consideration?

Ms Roberts: In my submission I did highlight the individual support order as an order that has not been enacted. I do not know of any nationally. I know in the West Midlands there have not been any made. I do not think there has been enough guidance. I know at one stage I was told maybe the Secretary of State has to designate an area and then someone said "No, they did not". In terms of the legislation the responsible agencies are education, youth offending service or social services. As it is we have not set up any resources or any structures for that order. There is not any new funding; initially the Youth Justice Board said there was probably going to be funding. The Home Office Anti-social Behaviour Unit said the Youth Justice Board had the money and then we were told to go to our Crime and Disorder Reduction Partnerships. I have acquired some funding and with the Home Office money for this pilot, we will be able to offer a very limited service in the future. I do think it is a really important order that provides support to people on Anti-social Behaviour Orders. We know some young people will not deal with ASBOs and this will make communities less safe unless someone is in there helping them or saying "You will have drug treatment, you will go to anger management programmes" et cetera. It is a real gap.

Chairman: Thank you very much indeed.

Q75 David Winnick: You all seem very enthusiastic about these Anti-social Behaviour Orders, and understandably so, but there has been criticism. I will take you through some of the criticism which has been made. One is are such orders really proportionate to the harm done? You do not all have to answer this by the way. Who would consider themselves the most enthusiastic advocate?

Mr Denley: From my point of view in the Bridgend area we have got a four stage ASBO process which consists of a letter pointing out the behaviour first, of which I believe over 3,000 have gone out. The second part is a visit plus a letter from either the police officer or the new ASBO support worker on the YOT team, of which I believe there are 400 so far. The ABC contracts I think are around 30 and we may have two ASBOs in the Bridgend area at the moment, and we are looking as a panel as to how we are going to put those in place. I think the whole thing which comes out from the partnerships that I have been on is that although ASBOs are welcomed as a tool, they are an admission of a failure in the fact that everything else has failed to address those things. I am not a big advocate of them, I think it is another tool in the box.

Q76 David Winnick: You are not the most enthusiastic after all. Would any of the other three like to comment?

Mr Pilkington: You asked the question, Mr Winnick, are they proportionate? I think you have to accept, my view generally from talking to most people around the country from CDRPs is that most agencies and most people will look at something before ASBO and therefore to go for an ASBO is a failure. You do get to the stage where regardless of what you have tried, regardless of all the resources that YOT have put in - the youth service, youth work, the voluntary agencies have put in - the behaviour does not change and therefore something has to be done and that is when the ASBO happens. Our threshold test is is there anti-social behaviour, is it continuing, what have we done, is there anything else we can do? If the answer is yes to the first two, everything to the third and nothing to the fourth, then we go for an ASBO. It is at that stage where you say we have tried everything, we now have to protect the communities. We do not say that is the end of the line because maybe now three months in, six months in, 12 months in to an ASBO someone's attitude has changed and we will always look at trying then to provide the support. The question of proportionality, of course, applies to the prohibitions you are applying. If your ASBO simply says "Please do not threaten people with violence, please do not damage others people's property, please do not intimidate people", you are only saying to them "Please do what everybody expects everybody else to do". It becomes different if the prohibitions go down - and we do have them - the "do not go into this area", "do not associate with that person". One of the big conditions that people talk about is not to congregate in groups of three or more or four or more. We do not say that in Salford we say "not to congregate in a group which is causing or is likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress". We do not want to stop people mixing with their social group, we do not want that social group to be anti-social and for the person who has the ASBO to have to think and have the responsibility to say "If this is now becoming anti-social, I have to step away from it", that is the tool we try and use there and that is where the proportionality lies.

Q77 Mr Prosser: Again, on the point of ASBOs being an admission of failure almost, is it not the case though that because you have got that as the backstop there is all the more encouragement and all the more pressure on families of individuals to comply with the lesser penalties or the lesser orders, is that not the case?

Mr Denley: I would have said to describe it as a backstop is probably quite right, yes, to have it that it is not a continuation of services after services after services. If there is no recognition of the behaviour reducing then it will be taken up a step.

Q78 Mr Prosser: Although you do not want to progress that far if possible ---

Mr Denley: --- the recognition is there if you need it.

Q79 Mr Prosser: --- that is putting pressure on acceptance of a lesser order?

Mr Denley: I could not argue with that.

Q80 David Winnick: Another lot of critics say "Well, you know, what is it all really about?" and of course over a third of ASBOs are subsequently breached. What would be the response to that? You have this emphasis on Anti-social Behaviour Orders, you tell people who are adversely affected by violence or certain anti-social behaviour - which none of us would wish to put up with - there is no reason why they, as our constituents, should have to put up with it. At the end of it all over 33% of such orders are breached so they are not that effective the critics argue. Who is going to answer that?

Mr Pilkington: If you are saying - I do not know the current percentage - 33% are breached 67% are not breached, the majority there is that people comply with it.

David Winnick: That is one way of putting it.

Q81 Chairman: If I build on Mr Winnick's question, the real critics would say that a third are breached because they are taken to court as breaches, therefore it is reasonable to assume there are a number of breaches that are never taken to court. So perhaps you cannot even claim 67%?

Mr Pilkington: The difficulty is I do not think we have clear statistics. We know how many breaches there are and if we drill down into the figures we could find out what disposals take place. Certainly within our CDRP I have not got the figures for what those breaches are because I know that some of our breaches are "You breached your ASBO because you robbed someone of their mobile phone" and they are charged with both offences to reflect that they are on an order not to threaten violence and also the robbery. The question there is these are the people who are at the heavy end of offending and are probably so far into the system that the deterrent of an ASBO is not something that plays on their mind, there are others who will say "I am glad now I have the ASBO because it has made me realise that". We have reduced the occasional teenager to tears when he has realised suddenly he has got to change his ways, and it has happened, but you do get to the stage of the court door before they realise. The friendly warning at the outset, they brush aside because everyone is told they have got to change their ways but they never do.

Q82 David Winnick: What does a court do normally in your experience when an order has been clearly breached?

Mr Pilkington: There are a significant number of young people who go into custody with breaches of ASBOs but that can often be linked to other significant and serious offending. I have found the courts have been willing to look at sentences more serious than those that you would get if it was behaviour that was an offence. Someone who is committing an offence of basic public order, causing harassment, alarm and distress but is in breach of an ASBO instead of receiving a small financial penalty or a conditional discharge, I can think of at least one case where they were made subject to a curfew and an intensive support supervision package. I do not see custody as being necessarily the outcome that we are looking for but it is saying, "You have reached the stage of having the ASBO because of serious and persistent conduct over a period of time" and the breach, even minor, now enables the court to put in far more significant resources from the YOT team to try and tackle that behaviour. People have been receiving custodial sentences for crossing the red line on the map and going into another area, and I know that causes concern, but the red line on the map can be outside the corner shop where they wreaked havoc for many years. Again, it is why was the order made and what is the impact on the victim of the anti-social behaviour who has been victimised for years seeing that person in the area they have been excluded from. I never quite buy the definition technical breach that many people talk about, it is a breach of the order just as driving a car whilst disqualified is a breach of an order whether you do 70 miles an hour on the M6 or 100 yards along the road to pop to the chip shop.

Q83 David Winnick: Your local authority monitors the position or do you have to be chased up by the residents who say to you or through the councillors "The same trouble is occurring and nothing is happening as a result of an Anti-social Behaviour Order"?

Mr Pilkington: When an order is made obviously one of the first things every organisation that is involved should do is to inform the people who have been coming forward to complain as to what has happened. Obviously we use publicity as and when appropriate including leaflets, and on one occasion posters, to inform communities and say to communities "If you are aware of breaches please come forward and tell us".

Q84 David Winnick: What about this naming and shaming? There was this case, was there not, which Liberty took up in Neasden ---

Mr Pilkington: London Borough of Brent.

Q85 David Winnick: ---- Neasden/Brent, not far from where I live but, be that as it may the photographs were shown, the case was taken to the High Court as an infringement by Liberty, fortunately the court through it out. Do you have such leaflets naming and shaming?

Mr Pilkington: We have leaflets. As I say, on one occasion we put posters up on an estate with particular problems of anti-social behaviour by a gang to inform the communities of the making of the orders, the nature of the prohibitions and where they could report breaches to but we do not see it as naming and shaming, we see it as providing information to communities. I must admit when we put the posters up, having discussed it and thought about it, I was not quite prepared for the media interest that occurred. I would say that 99% of the media interest was very positive and certainly anecdotally within those communities, the community was pleased they were aware of what was in place and they told us also that they knew that the youths knew that the community knew and the youths had changed their behaviour and were now not as intimidating because they knew that people could say, "If you carry on like that, I can report you to the police and you will be arrested and you will go to prison." Obviously, once the information is out, it is difficult for a local authority or the police to control how it is used. I know that the press will use it as naming and shaming in some of the headlines, that is not why my CDRP or any CDRP does it, we do it to inform communities and that has been a vital factor in trying to tackle the problem.

Q86 David Winnick: Mr Denley, would you be happy with that, whether you call it naming and shaming or some other expression, the photographs of the people concerned being shown?

Mr Denley: It has not happened in our area but I would say that, yes, if the information is not known then how well can it be enforced? We would try and make young people aware because part of anti-social behaviour to me is the intent to create harassment. If those young people gathering in groups have not realised that their behaviour is intimidating then we point it out to them and sometimes it changes. That is why the successes with everything we do are linked to how they are perceived by others. If the intent is there to intimidate others, and that is what they are getting their thrills out of, then if an order is made and the public are not made aware of the order being in place, how is it ever going to be sanctioned? Yes, I would be in favour of it.

Ms Roberts: I do not have as much of a problem if you have come to the end of the line and young people have had a number of opportunities, they have gone on an ASBO as a last resort. In Birmingham it is not always as a last resort, sometimes they are not even in the criminal justice system and they are coming into the system for the first or second time and we know they are going through the civil courts for an Anti-social Behaviour Order. Some of the conditions on those orders sometimes seem harsher than if the young person has gone into the criminal court. We had one where a young person was on a curfew and could not leave the house from eight onwards until he was 18, and he was only 14, unless his parents went with him. They wanted a lot of publicity around the area, the Partnership said "No" because they did not feel it was proportionate. I do think there needs to be a handle on what comes out because I do think sometimes there can be a flipside to this for the public, that it creates more fear and you think all young people could be in this category. I would like to see more positive stories, maybe about how witnesses or victims can get, or have got more support in addressing anti-social behaviour, and that angle. As I say, I am not as concerned where young people are at the end of the line or their behaviour is persistent, I just worry sometimes where perhaps they are not and you are attracting an individual to be labelled. Sometimes you want to get them out of that behaviour into more positive behaviour, not to have other youths who might think "this is quite exciting" hang around them because they want to be associated with them.

Q87 Chairman: Can I challenge you slightly on that. Are you absolutely certain that what you are describing is not just a slightly professional resentment that some RSL has gone and got an ASBO without going through the whole structure of the Youth Offending Team and, in fact, in fairness to you, they may have been dealing with the problems in their estate or their block of housing which were so extreme they had to go straight for an ASBO?

Ms Roberts: Yes, I suppose I am looking at it from an individual who may not have come into the criminal justice system. Their behaviour, if that bad, the police would have been looking at other methods of engaging with them. You could have a naming and shaming for an Anti-social Behaviour Order whereas someone in the youth court who has got a string of persistent crimes might not get named and shamed. I think it is making sure there are checks and balances to individual cases.

Q88 David Winnick: You will be pleased to know, Ms Roberts, that in my constituency, not very far from Birmingham, I will take this opportunity to point out that a large majority of young people are not offenders and they should not be demonised in that way. What is the feeling of the witnesses of the Government's intention to extend the penalty notices for disorder to ten or 15 year olds? Is that a good idea, Ms Roberts? From your facial reaction it does not look as though you consider it a good idea.

Ms Roberts: There was one thing I liked and another I was concerned about. What I liked was the idea that young people would not get a criminal record if they had a penalty notice. What I do not like so much is that parents who can afford it can therefore pay for it and parents who cannot, because the fines are quite high, may decide not to take it up or may take it up and then it causes more family conflict, because we know some of our young people come with child protection issues. We have to be considering what that might mean for parents faced with paying that fine. There is no means test on this penalty notice and I do not know if you could have the choice of something else instead, some reparation which does not get a criminal record. If some parents are given the choice, that is good, and it could be okay. I am just a bit concerned it will hit those who cannot afford it harder than those who can.

Q89 David Winnick: Some ten year olds can cause quite a problem, is that your experience, Mr Pilkington?

Mr Pilkington: There are some ten year olds who are a significant problem. We had an Anti-social Behaviour Order against a ten year old, who is now 11, and was subject to a supervision order for his breaches. If there had been a fixed penalty notice for him, his mother would have ignored it, would not have paid it and he would have been into the system. I think we need to wait to see the five or six areas that are evaluating them as an option, to see what comes out of that. I think it is certainly a useful process if it takes people out of the criminal justice system and deals with a lot of the issues. I think potentially a lot of the parents who will respond to the fixed penalty notice might be those parents who would respond to a knock on the door from an anti-social behaviour officer saying, "Your son has been seen doing this, can you control him" and will try to control their children in any event, regardless of the payment of £30 or £40, whatever figure is set.

Q90 David Winnick: You just said "sons", do we take it that it is, in fact, only a very small minority who are females involved in this business?

Mr Pilkington: I will plead the Interpretation Act, Mr Winnick, "he" means "she" in all legal proceedings. I think that whilst the behaviour we are talking about is traditionally seen as the behaviour of young males, there are a significant number of young girls who are now getting involved and perhaps are harder to control because we have not got the skills and experience of dealing with them. There are issues around congregations of groups and the use of alcohol and the impact of that. You get into the whole realm about the protection of young girls for a variety of reasons, issues around under age sex, sexual health and those issues which seem to flow from groups congregating, alcohol, drugs and the like.

Q91 David Winnick: The Family Welfare Association is with us: penalty notices for ten to 15 year olds?

Ms Rhodes: I have a completely different anxiety about this in that we give away nearly a million pounds a year in grants to families who cannot afford the essentials and I can see the penalty notices being one of those things that families come to us for because they cannot afford to pay for them.

Q92 Chairman: Just one last question, do any of you have direct experience in your areas of the Section 30 Dispersal Order?

Mr Pilkington: I have experience of a Section 30 Dispersal Order in my home town. We have not had any Section 30 Dispersal Order in our area, although we have highlighted a number of areas, we have tried other interventions and they have solved the problems to an extent.

Chairman: I will raise that at another session. Can I thank you very much indeed. It has been an extremely informative and valuable session.

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[1] In Birmingham there has recently been a sustained campaign that prioritised cleaning up all areas of the City and this is helping in driving up standards in areas.

[2] In Birmingham we have set up education, training and employment panels to identify those young people who are out of the system and there is good partnership working here.

[3] The programmes are run in groups but are mostly run with individual parent/s. We also offer family interventions including family mediation.

[4] The early findings of the Youth Inclusion and Support Programme are that mainstream agencies are taking ownership of 30% of the cases discussed which is really promising as prior to the programme these young people had become disengaged.