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

House of COMMONS

MINUTES OF EVIDENCE

TAKEN BEFORE

Home affairs committee

 

 

ANTI-social behaviour

 

Tuesday 7 December 2004

MR DAVID COPELAND, SERGEANT PAUL DUNN MBE, MR MARTIN LEE,
MS SALLIE BRIDGEN and MS MICHELLE MONAGHAN

Evidence heard in Public Questions 93 - 193

 

 

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 7 December 2004

Members present

Mr John Denham. in the Chair

Janet Anderson

Mr James Clappison

Mrs Janet Dean

Mr Damian Green

Mr Gwyn Prosser

Mr Marsha Singh

Mr John Taylor

________________

Memoranda submitted by Peterborough Mediation, Metropolitan Police Service, Manchester City Council and Shelter

 

Examination of Witnesses

 

Witnesses: Mr David Copeland, Service Manager, Peterborough Mediation, Sergeant Paul Dunn MBE, ASB Team, Metropolitan Police Service, Mr Martin Lee, Head of Operations, Nuisance Strategy Group, Manchester City Council, Ms Sallie Bridgen, Regional Manager, North West Regional Office, Shelter, and Ms Michelle Monaghan, Children and Young Persons' Worker, Shelter Inclusion Project, Rochdale, examined.

Q93 Chairman: Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you very much indeed for coming to give evidence to us today. This is the second evidence session we are having on anti-social behaviour. As you will have gathered, we have grouped the first set of evidence sessions broadly by type of problem, and we will be talking to some of the national organisations in the second part of the inquiry. Today has taken the tag, which we will come back to, of "Neighbours from hell". Perhaps each of you could introduce yourself and the organisation you come from and then we will go into the questions.

Mr Copeland: Good afternoon. I am David Copeland. I am the service manager of Peterborough Mediation. We are a voluntary organisation which delivers mediation services in and around Peterborough.

Mr Lee: Good afternoon. My name is Martin Lee. I am head of operations at Manchester City Council's Neighbour Nuisance Team.

Sergeant Dunn: Good afternoon. My name is Paul Dunn. I am a police sergeant. I work in the Safer Neighbourhoods Unit. I am an ASB advisor to the Metropolitan Police and local authorities and voluntary groups and other agencies within London. I am also used by the Scottish Executive in relation to their new legislation which is just coming in in relation to ASB, to promote its use across the country.

Ms Bridgen: My name is Sallie Bridgen. I am the regional manager for Shelter's Services Division and we have a range of services across the north-west.

Ms Monaghan: My name is Michelle Monaghan. I am the team leader at the Shelter Inclusion Project in Rochdale, a project that works with households in which there are problems of behaviour.

Q94 Chairman: Thank you. You will obviously understand that with five witnesses we are not going to be able to bring each of you in on every question, but everyone will get, I hope, a good chance to set their knowledge out in front of the Committee over the next hour or so. We have taken a tabloid tag and described this session "Neighbours from hell". Could you describe to the Committee what you think the issues are that we are generally dealing with when we talk about nuisance neighbours, neighbours from hell, dysfunctional families - a range of terms that we tend to use interchangeably. What are the sorts of problems that we are talking about?

Mr Copeland: We are talking about a wide range of issues really which are commonly known perhaps as anti-social behaviour. The sorts of things that we deal with on a daily basis are noise and various other forms of nuisance - anything where there can be any interaction really: competition for shared facilities: driveways, boundaries, hedges. It might seem quite a small issue on some occasions but the actual effect this has on people .... Because there is in fact no escape: if it is being caused by your neighbour or your flatmate it is going to be there all day every day and, albeit that most people interpret them as being quite minor issues, they do have a great effect. In my experience, the vast majority of nuisance that is caused is not intentional. At one end of the range clearly there are people who are doing it because they want to do it, because they want to harass people, but the vast majority is caused because people do not know any better, they do not know how to behave, and it is unintentional.

Mr Lee: Nuisance and anti-social behaviour covers everything from door slamming, arguing, playing loud music, doing illegal car repairs on the drive, cutting out your hedges at the front of the property without permission, right up to and including serious criminal behaviour, the large gangs of youths hanging around on estates, wearing balaclavas and hoods, refusing to let people pass to go the local stores. It covers a wide range and I think the definition of anti-social behaviour in the Anti-Social Behaviour Act 2003: "conduct capable of causing nuisance or annoyance" and the definition in the Crime and Disorder Act: "likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress" are a very good umbrella for covering all of those particular forms of anti-social behaviour.

Q95 Chairman: To pick up that point - and then I will carry on with the first question: as you have pointed out, there are two different definitions of anti-social behaviour in different pieces of legislation, one in the Crime and Disorder Act and the other in housing. Does the fact of the different definitions cause any practical problems?

Mr Lee: No. I think the definition to secure an Anti-social Behaviour Order, which is that someone has to be acting in a manner "likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress", will go before the magistrates who are familiar with that term from public order offences that come before them every day, and the "conduct capable of causing nuisance or annoyance" to get an injunction in the county court, where there is a lesser burden of proof, is one that county court judges are very familiar with. I think that umbrella, as I have said, covers everything. I do not think there is incompatibility.

Q96 Chairman: That is very helpful. Going back to the question, Mr Dunn, when you were invited to give evidence to the Committee what were the things you had in mind that you would need to tell us about?

Sergeant Dunn: I have been in the field of anti-social behaviour for about five years now, looking into all the different aspects of it. I think the legal definition helps if enforcement action is necessary, and it has to be looked at from that point of view. The definition of anti-social behaviour is getting wider every time we look into new areas and I think it is what really affects the rights and quality of life of other people, where consequences can actually be affected by continuance of that behaviour which has been deemed by an individual/by a family/by a community to be unacceptable. That is what we have to look at. Initially anti-social behaviour was looking at the whole concept of nuisance; we are now looking at environmental anti-social behaviour. As David said before, a lot of people do not understand or do not know they are doing this: no one has educated them. I do feel over the five years of experience that I have had in this particular field that anti-social behaviour in itself is a consequence of other issues. It is the underlying issues which are causing the problems in the first place. I have not yet found somebody who does anti-social behaviour just for a laugh. There is always an underlying issue which needs to be pinpointed and tackled, and that will be more successful than just dealing with the consequences, which is the behaviour itself.

Q97 Chairman: Could you illustrate with just one example of that.

Sergeant Dunn: I have done 400 acceptable behaviour contracts. Not one of those young people were actually doing anti-social behaviour because they wanted to do it. A lot of them did not know it was anti-social behaviour; we had to re-educate them. In the lives of those 400 people, 10% were known to the youth justice system and were going through the courts and getting the support that they would be offered, but 69% were known to child protection due to drugs, drink, mental health issues, tenancy issues, domestic issues in the family, lack of parental guidance or peer group pressure. All these issues were underlying the consequences of the bad behaviour.

Ms Bridgen: I would agree with what Paul has said. Obviously the definition of anti-social behaviour covers all the things that everybody has mentioned. I think I have slight concern about the fact that it does cover such a huge range of activity and is all called the same thing. Things such as slamming doors and mild noise nuisance are given the same title as perhaps violent harassment and abuse. We deal with many, many cases of anti-social behaviour where we are representing the victims of anti-social behaviour, so we do see every day the devastating effects that anti-social behaviour has. But, as Paul said, we also see the complexity of the situation. In our Rochdale project around 60% of the people we see suffer from depression and other mental illnesses, one-quarter of the people we see have drug and alcohol problems, and just under a quarter of the people we see have physical health problems as well. I would back up what Paul says, that there are always additional problems, but if we can address those we actually solve the problem of anti-social behaviour.

Ms Monaghan: I would add that at the project we work with households with alleged anti-social behaviour, and that does range greatly, as has been said before. We do accept and it is good to identify that behaviour, but we do look then at the root causes of what is happening. In order to tackle that anti-social behaviour, we look at how we can change that.

Q98 Chairman: Anti-social behaviour has shot up the political agenda. All the opinion polling suggests it has gone right up the public agenda as well and local authority surveys tend to say the same thing. You have all been working in this field for quite some time: Is the problem getting worse? It is perceived as getting worse; is it getting worse?

Sergeant Dunn: We now know what the problem is. It was perceived before to be a lot worse than it is in reality. It has really thrown up the need for multi-agency problem solving.

Q99 Chairman: I understand that, but out there .... I think you are from Islington, is it worse on the streets of Islington than it was ten years ago? Is the anti-social behaviour worse? Are more people having their lives made a misery in terms of the law?

Sergeant Dunn: I believe not. I believe it is perceived to be by the media but if you actually speak to people, yes, there is the generation who believe that 40 years ago things were a lot safer, but when you ask people what their concerns are and if they really do believe they are going to be a victim of anti-social behaviour or crime, many of them actually do not.

Mr Lee: I think it has got worse where authorities have not used their powers to act, and it has got better where the authorities with the powers that they have had at their disposal for several years have actually used them and brought cases before the courts. I think in Manchester we have started to reclaim some communities that we were on the verge of losing by taking action. I disagree with my colleagues who spoke before about how most people do not know that what they are doing is anti-social behaviour. I personally have done probably 300 ASBO warning interviews with juveniles over the last four years and I cannot think of one who did not say when I asked them, "Is it right or wrong to throw stones?" "Wrong." "Is it right or wrong to call someone a Paki?" "Wrong." Every young person knew that what they were doing was wrong. The idea that people are doing it unintentionally, I do not accept. They are doing it knowing that it is wrong and there is no excuse for that behaviour.

Q100 Chairman: Mr Copeland, I think you raised that subject in the first place - over to you. Mediation services I think have grown over the last ten years.

Mr Copeland: Yes, they have.

Q101 Chairman: Is that in response to a real growth in the problem?

Mr Copeland: If I may talk about the problem locally, my experience is that recently it has grown. I think there is a reason for that. The local authority and the police have had other issues to concentrate on, whether it be violent crime, burglary or the volume of crime. I think that has been an issue. Anti-social behaviour, the low-level stuff, has not been perhaps given the attention it should have been. As an indication, in Peterborough we have just finished the crime audit, and anti-social behaviour across all its variant areas came up as a very clear problem being experienced by a large number of people. So within the actual forthcoming strategy and accident plan, one of the clear priorities will be anti-social behaviour, including nuisance neighbours. I think now, with all the other agencies, we are going to look to address the problems itself. As you have said, mediation has grown throughout the last 10-15 years in this country. I think it has grown because it is seen as an effective means of resolving disputes, differences, misunderstandings and some areas of anti-social behaviour.

Q102 Chairman: Just to pursue the point, because Mr Lee raised it: I think you were one of the witnesses who said that a lot of people do not realise that what they are doing is anti-social behaviour and Mr Lee is saying, "Oh, yes, they do." are you talking about different things, different issues? Why do you have different views?

Mr Copeland: I think we are talking about slightly different issues. My core business is nuisance neighbours. We are not dealing in the main with groups of young people who in quite large numbers are going into ABCs (acceptable behaviour contracts). My experience, in dealing with the vast majority of nuisance neighbours that we deal with, is that they do not understand exactly what they are doing. If they do understand, they do not fully understand the implications of what they are doing on their neighbours.

Q103 Chairman: You are talking about things like noise, late night parties.-----

Mr Copeland: Late night noise, parties, the way they are treating people. There is a small element, as I said earlier, who are clearly doing it because they want to do it. For whatever reason they actually want to disrupt other people's lives.

Q104 Chairman: Michelle Monaghan, you are dealing with the families who have been accused of this. Is your workload increasing? Are the local authorities referring more people to you?

Ms Monaghan: I think people are identifying that behaviour can be tackled, that there are solutions to that behaviour. So there may not be an increase in the behaviour but maybe an increase in the response to that behaviour and how that behaviour can be improved. Certainly we do have full case loads on our project and throughout the Rochdale borough we receive referrals from a wide number of agencies who are identifying that there are many different solutions to that.

Chairman: Thank you.

Q105 Mr Taylor: Could I ask our appropriate witnesses this question: How easy is it to establish whether particular behaviour requires a response? Or is it something you recognise when you see it?

Sergeant Dunn: I think it depends on the community you are working with. In some communities we have to lower tolerance and in some communities we have to raise tolerance. I think it really is about localising your approaches. As David mentioned before, it is about looking at it not as a strategic thing but as: What do people in that particular area want us to tackle effectively? More importantly: How can we tackle it over a long period of time and give it credibility and sustainability? How can we keep those agencies working together so that we do refer on to other people, so it is not seen purely as a statutory requirement by just a small number of departments? We have to see that everybody takes an equal share in the responsibility and that people see that we are there to work with the communities, to listen to the communities, to all members of those communities, from different parts of those communities, to tackle their issues.

Q106 Mr Taylor: Chairman, I would like to say that I accept the essence of that answer. Variable tolerance I think is the practical reply and I do not propose to pursue that question. May I then ask: What is your approach when the complaint occurs in the context of a dispute between neighbours? Is that where it is most likely to arise?

Sergeant Dunn: The difficulty when we first started looking into this was that each agency dealt with this in different ways: there was no uniformity. Especially housing officers, who, in certain areas in which I worked, tended to be the frontline in relation to receiving complaints: some housing officers dealt with complaints in a comprehensive way, a structured way, others did not, which did not give a true picture of what was actually going on. When we started looking at the way that people could first report things to the right people, we tended to find that it was not just down to one agency to receive those complaints initially. The housing officers actually welcomed the structure, so that it was properly being managed and evaluated and these cases were not running for year upon year and handed to different individuals, but we also found that it was invaluable to involve other agencies who could come in and deal with many of these complaints at an early stage before they actually went into a formal structure. Mediation is an excellent example of that. The earlier you get these people involved, the quicker we can deal with some of these complaints without actually having to formalise them.

Q107 Chairman: Could we bring in Mr Lee.

Mr Lee: My experience of thousands of cases is that there are a lot of disenchanted witnesses out there, complainants who have had their cases, where their lives have been seriously disrupted, categorised into various coat-pegs, such as dispute, tit-for-tat, counter-allegation and other such phrases. When you scratch the surface of those cases - and I have been round the country with the Neighbour Nuisance Panel - they are in fact genuine and bona fide complaints. In the 4,500 successful legal actions we have done in Manchester, ASBOs and injunctions, I can think of ten possibly in ten years that were in some way malicious. The idea that we have an army of people who get a real sense of satisfaction filling out diaries just for the sake of it is the biggest fallacy that exists. We have even had discussions about what some people have raised: "How do we ASBO a persistent complainer who is 70 and their fence is being damaged and they are demanding that something is being done about it?" and when you read the diaries - the diaries - the people who come into your surgeries, I do not think make it up. Because the idea that it gets better when you complain does not happen for a lot of people; it actually gets worse when you complain about your next-door neighbour, because somebody tells the perpetrator who has complained, the warden turns up in uniform at the door - your door - the police officer turns up in uniform. It is very difficult to put your head above the parapet and complain about neighbour nuisance and anti-social behaviour. I know you did not say that in this question, but we need to be very, very wary of labelling cases as a "clash of lifestyles". I have heard that given to a lady who has lived in a ground-floor flat for 80 years - which is a palace - a council flat - and a seventeen-year old moves in above her and starts playing loud music from two until four in the morning and the response that old lady gets from the housing landlord is, "Well, that's his noisy party lifestyle and you'd better get used to it or move into sheltered accommodation." Those are some of the very poor responses that people have had to so-called disputes.

Mr Taylor: I think that rather anticipates what might have been my next question, so I will move on, if I may - and the Chairman can select who answers this - to ask: In terms of assessing whether behaviour is anti-social, how far should agencies be guided by community standard and how far by their own professional judgments? I cannot help feeling that Mr Dunn has already touched on this with his varying tolerance.

Chairman: It might be interesting to explore that with all the witnesses, though.

Mr Taylor: Under your guidance, Mr Chairman.

Chairman: This perhaps goes to the heart of establishing what is and is not anti-social or at least who takes that judgment.

Q108 Mr Taylor: And: Is there a structured way of assessing it? by the way.

Mr Copeland: It is different things to different people, Chairman.

Q109 Chairman: But if it is, who decides. In the case of the perhaps extreme, perhaps difficult case that Mr Lee gives, somebody has to decide whether you are coming down on the side of a lifestyle dispute or on the side of the elderly tenant and in most of these issues somebody has to decide. I think Mr Taylor's question is a key one for this whole inquiry. Who takes the responsibility of deciding what standards are going to be enforced in the community? Is it the local people who live in the community? Is it professional agencies who are trying to serve the community? Is it the landlord? Is it the police? It would be very interesting to have a sense from each of the witnesses as to who takes that decision, and, if you like, what is the structure by which that decision is taken. If you could concentrate on that.

Mr Copeland: Certainly at the present time, in the circumstances you have just given, there is no direct community input. It is effectively taken by a group of professionals in a multi-agency panel. If the referral then came to ourselves, we would clearly see both parties and then the person who has lodged the complaint who has actually started the process is really in control of it. As you have heard in the examples that were given, these are people who are living different lives. The impact is tremendous on the life of the other people, but we find that when we actually bring those people together either directly or indirectly then we can improve communication, improve levels of understanding, which will bring about levels of tolerance, because tolerance is variable. What is acceptable in one street in Peterborough, if we moved within 200 metres would not be acceptable. It can change during the hours of the day. It is a variable. As I say, to answer the question directly, we currently have a panel of professionals who will consider this. There is not currently any direct community input. I am aware that there has been a suggestion that there should be neighbourhood nuisance panels set up to perhaps lay down some standards, but the actual views of the complainant are paramount and they will always be followed through.

Ms Bridgen: I would go back to the earlier question about how we establish what type of behaviour requires a response. I think the first point that most anti-social behaviour becomes aware of is through the housing office. If housing officers are well trained in identifying anti-social behaviour and organise an appropriate response at that stage and good, sound housing management, a lot of these problems can be prevented from getting any worse. In the example that Martin gave, you perhaps might say it was not a good choice of tenant, to put a 17-year old above an 80-year old person. I know sometimes local authorities do not have a lot of choice in that, so I am not criticising the local authority, but you might say that that in itself is going to cause difficulty, to put a 17-year old above an elderly lady. So there are choices about where you place people, there are decisions about how you manage a tenancy right from the beginning and let people know what the rules are.

Q110 Chairman: Is it reasonable in any block of flats anywhere in the country for a tenant to play music so loudly that it interferes with the quiet life of their neighbour? You are implying, I think, that there are appropriate places to put people who want to play very loud music and I am just challenging you on whether that is right or whether there is a consistent standard that, unless you are living in an extremely well sound-proofed flat, there is a limit to how loud you play your music, full stop.

Ms Bridgen: Sound proofing is another issue, but, yes, I think I would agree with David in that tolerance is not a standard level thing. You are much more tolerant of things you have control of. I have teenage children. My neighbours know that if they are noisy they can come and tell us and it will stop. That empowers the neighbours. I think it stops the noise being as much of a nuisance as when if you feel completely out of control, with somebody who is going to carry on willy-nilly. It is about tackling things at an early stage, making sure the people are aware of what the expectations are and that you get the dialogue through mediation or whatever source so that the person perpetrating the anti-social behaviour learns the consequences of that action and learns how to control it, modify it, and change their behaviour.

Mr Lee: I am interested in this early stage bit because, in most complainants' cases that I read, before they get to the housing office they have already been putting up with the anti-social behaviour for far too long. Because they are all reasonable people, in the case files I read they have approached the perpetrator to try to ask them to turn it down. In a lot of cases they have been met with abuse. They have closed the curtains. They have hoped it will go away. They take the dog on another route to the shops to avoid the anti-social behaviour. The have probably fallen out with their partner, who says, "Don't complain. It will make it worse. Our windows will go in. Let's just leave it." The idea that we have a sequence for every case of early intervention: ABCs and then, somewhere at the end of this very long road, we might get some action, is not something that I sign up to. Each case is different. Some cases demand urgent action. Because, in the end - as you will have seen through meetings that you attend in your locality - the biggest source of complaint at public meetings is: "How many diaries do I have to fill in" - well, it is said - "before anybody on that top table does anything at all? Is it 61, Mr Lee? Is it 62? Just let me know when I get to the magic number because I will go to number 70 for you but I really want something done now." Housing officers and police officers and wardens and environmental health officers who allow diaries to pile up on their desks when someone is writing: "I am in danger of losing my job now because of the loud music - I cannot get up to go to work and I have been disciplined this morning by the security manager - because I have had no sleep this week." Those are real examples of what people have to put up with, so I think we need to make it so that early intervention means early legal intervention as well as mediation.

Q111 Chairman: I will just bring in Michelle Monaghan and then go back to Mr Taylor.

Ms Monaghan: First of all, when we talk about early intervention, yes, we talk about through the housing office, but we receive referrals from education welfare, and so it may not be even through so many reports to the housing office. Things are picked up through school nurses, education welfare, maybe community police officers, so it is from a wide range of professionals who are identifying this behaviour, and, hopefully, it does not accelerate so that there is a huge amount of complaints. Around the communities themselves, we now accept self-referrals, with people in households identifying that they need support and that they do have behavioural issues, so as well as professionals identifying it, people themselves are identifying that need.

Q112 Mr Taylor: Chairman, I understand and I think the Committee does that the National Federation of Arm's Length Management Organisations argues that there is "an increasing lack of tolerance for less serious instances" so that people are becoming more intolerant of less serious anti-social behaviour. An example given is of young residents playing football in common areas. Is it the experience of our witnesses, Mr Chairman, that tolerance has decreased?

Sergeant Dunn: Absolutely. It has towards certain generations and I have to say that young people are being targeted in relation to this. I read somewhere that the chief constable of West Midlands actually identified that many of the calls now coming into his control room are about groups of kids walking down streets. We have got to the point now where we just do not want them there. A MORI poll in this country identified that 75% of the adults asked wanted a lawfully enforced evening curfew for all teenagers in this country. The interesting thing about that was that 69% of that 75% came from the adult age group 20-30, so it is not a gap between elderly people and young people. Actually, we very quickly come out of the age group and go into adulthood, and we do blame them for an awful lot of the issues that are going on - fairly, I think, in some cases. If I may just say, the whole thing about the anti-social behaviour agenda is that, when we first started looking at this, enforcement was a very necessary tool. We did not have the right tools to tackle it and I think recent legislation has given us that. But what more importantly has come out of this, with working with various different groups, with different agencies, is that there needs to be an educational part of this, there needs to be a preventative part of this, but there also needs to be a strong enforcement part.

Q113 Chairman: We will get on to other issues, but does anyone want to argue that tolerance has not decreased.

Mr Lee: I would emphasise expectations of what the authorities can do has rightfully increased and demands that have been laid on them have rightfully increased.

Mr Copeland: Expectations have increased but unrealistically. In the evening paper every week people see "ASBO dispersal order" but the vast majority of people in the street have no clear understanding of what this means. They think that if the ball hits the window once in a blue moon, somebody is going to get an ASBO. I am afraid that the normal person in the street does not understand this legislation and it has raised expectations unrealistically.

Chairman: We will come back to the particular legislative measures in a moment.

Q114 Mr Green: I am fascinated by this concept of community acceptability that some but not all of you clearly recognise. It is not obvious to me that if you are the victim, if you like, it is any consolation to be told that the acceptable standard of behaviour on this estate or in this block of flats means that it is just tough if you are kept awake until one in the morning. This is surely an individual issue rather than a community issue.

Mr Lee: Everybody is being remarkably tolerant. If I were to bring a football into this room and kick it against that wall for ten minutes - a garage door, and you were sat in your garden opposite - you would not be so tolerant. If you were sat out in your garden in the summer and all you could listen to all day is scramble bikes churning up the local green, that is anti-social behaviour, it is not intolerance. And, I agree with you, a lot of time complainants are made to suffer twice: they are made to suffer by the perpetrator and then when they report their complaints they are told, "Actually, it's you that's got a problem" and in the end those people leave those areas. They give up. They ask to be re-housed. In the worst situations in the private areas where you cannot get any sleep, people give the keys back to the building society through the door at night, hoping that nobody catches up with them, because nobody takes the complaint seriously.

Q115 Chairman: Is that fair?

Ms Bridgen: I think we agree that there are certain things that are intolerable, and not being able to sleep because of noise until one o'clock in the morning is unacceptable, but there are also grey areas. In Scotland, I think, they did some research a while ago and the majority of complaints against neighbours were to do with elderly people who were hard of hearing having their televisions on too loud. We have had cases of that kind where somebody has fallen asleep with the television on too loud. It is not denying that that is a huge problem with the neighbour, and it needs to be addressed, but, going back to your first question, this is one of the problems of calling everything anti-social behaviour. It is fine as an umbrella title, but we need some distinctions within that because there are lots of grey areas, the things that we are talking about today.

Q116 Mr Prosser: I would like to ask some questions about balance between prevention and enforcement, but first of all I cannot resist coming back to Mr Lee for a moment. A critic might say that you were giving a very austere, authoritarian enforcement view of things but I have to say that you probably reflect the stories and feelings which our constituents tell us about at our weekend surgeries every week, frankly. You might just find that local authorities who read this evidence will be head-hunting you down to their local authority! But there is a serious side to this in terms of mediation and the lower degrees of enforcement. Before I come to that, however, you talked about these so-called defences or excuses that perhaps some housing officers in some authorities use to avoid going in and doing the business - you know, that it is a sort of tit-for-tat: "It is a neighbourly dispute, we will not get involved." What do you think is going on there? Is that because perhaps their main function should be the provision of housing and the planning of housing provision and all that goes with that, a huge agenda, and they look upon the anti-social bit and the nuisance neighbour bit as an unwelcome add-on? Why has that been the effect? Because it has been the effect.

Mr Lee: I will answer that but I do not want Manchester to be construed as somewhere where all we do is legal action. We do have a very good mediation service, we have Foundations, which is the Dundee family's project, so we do do rehabilitation, diversion, prevention, but one of the things where we differ is we do not think ASBOs and injunction are enforcement and we really need to be clear about that. The dictionary definition of injunction, if you look it up after this session, is "authoritative warning" and I only see injunctions and ASBOs as orders which prevent - prevent - an escalation in anti-social behaviour, and if people do not break them there is no consequence for them. To come back to your very specific point, because I do not want just to make points, I think there is a twin reason why housing officers do what you say, when they think, "I don't want to deal with this, it's all ...." Maybe they have other things to do, like rent and repairs, and so they do not have the time that maybe they would want to dedicate to it - and usually it depends what the manager thinks about anti-social behaviour as to whether the staff feel confidence to tackle it. But I would say to you, as members of Parliament, that in lots of local authorities - not in mine because we have a specialist team in between housing officers and the solicitors, but in lots of local authorities - it is the solicitors who stop legal action and, unfortunately, a lot of those solicitors are more interested in the human rights of the perpetrators than they are the community who is crying out in the diaries for some assistance.

Q117 Mr Prosser: These are the in-house legal advisors.

Mr Lee: Yes.

Q118 Mr Prosser: And legal officers in the authority.

Mr Lee: Yes. I have been across the country: if I had £10 for every time the quote was "The lawyer says we haven't got enough to go on" -----

Q119 Mr Prosser: Has the setting up of specific anti-social behaviour units solved that?

Mr Lee: Yes, because that means that the housing officer can work with someone who is not a lawyer to develop the case. Lawyers always ask for more evidence, so the poor housing officer runs round getting statements. A lawyer would say to a housing officer, "Can we have 50 witnesses." How is the housing office going to get time for that? If you have a specialist team to instruct the solicitors and work with the local team and serve them and say, "Two witnesses will do." "Yes, one witness will do." "Hey, we've got hearsay, who says we need a witness?" But if you just have solicitors dealing with frontline housing staff and going out to see witnesses, believe me, you do not have any legal action because they scare housing officers to death.

Q120 Mr Prosser: To what extent, David Copeland, do you agree with what you have heard from Martin?

Mr Copeland: I think Martin has just argued a very effective case for mediation, really. We are dealing not only with low-level incidents of anti-social behaviour or neighbour nuisance, but it is at a very early stage - and that is the key: before people get entrenched, to get people talking, communicating, understanding each other. We, as a service, resolve two cases out of three; 88% of cases do not go back to the referring agency. So there are two bonuses here. Two cases out of three are being sorted, are being resolved very quickly. I am very concerned about the credibility of mediation, and if something is not appropriate, if it is not going to work, it very swiftly goes back from whence it came, whether it be the police or the area housing office. The other big benefit is that we are actually freeing up a lot of time. This is what we were actually formed for. We were actually formed by the housing department, as it was then, of the local authority, and it was to free up time. We are freeing up time of the housing officers to deal with the more serious and the persistent offences, to be proactive in their other housing work. So there are two areas, if you like, of added value there.

Q121 Mr Prosser: I think you have answered my next couple of questions. I want to move on now to the case of a clearly dysfunctional family which is causing problems and this is another question of balance. To what degree do we give priority to the family in sorting out the difficulties and deficiencies within the family compared with protecting the community which is suffering because of their behaviour? Who wants to have a try at that?

Ms Monaghan: With our project we can deal with instances where it is fairly early on, or where we get involved and it is quite far on in the complaint and some of the families have huge, complex issues. We very much work on a multi-agency approach. Initially, when a family is referred to us and we have accepted them, we will speak with them and meet with all the other agencies that are involved with that family. In some instances where there have been huge issues, with some practical support issues have been resolved literally within a week. It is sometimes breaking down what is happening. If it is that there are young people in the family and things are happening at times when they actually should be in school, we need to look at why they are not in school at those times and we work with education around that. If it is getting them back into school, then immediately those issues are resolved. Certainly we would work with all the agencies and with the family and break down what is happening.

Q122 Mr Prosser: From a practical point of view, do you have case histories where by intervening and sorting out the dysfunctional nature within a particular family, so the anti-social behaviour dies away or ceases?

Ms Monaghan: Yes. Currently I am working with a family. When that family was referred to us there had been 51 complaints to the housing office regarding three of the young people in the family. We have been working with them now for six months and there has been one minor complaint. Literally, the complaints ceased immediately. I worked with the family. As a children and young persons' worker, I worked with the young people and I worked with the mother of the household, and also a support worker went in. In that household there were a number of different issues going on at the same time. There were debt issues; there was a huge amount of disrepair to the household - they could not use the front door, there were windows missing, several different things - the children did not have beds. There were four children in the household aged between 9 and 15. Three of them were sleeping in the living room, not going to sleep until very late and then not getting into school the next day. We initially provided beds and then we put the parent around developing routines so that the children went to school. There had been a lot of other agency involvement, and, because we all worked together, suddenly there were things happening, improvements happening and that family has relief.

Q123 Mr Prosser: Mr Dunn, did you want to add something?

Sergeant Dunn: I am a great believer that we have to look at the family as a whole. A number of agencies tend to work with some of these families and they look at the individuals and miss the big picture. If you have an anti-social child, you will have an anti-social teenager who will become an anti-social parent. There is no doubt about it. The difficulty with an anti-social parent is that it is difficult to change their ways unless you actually get them when they are young. The more we do this, the more we realise that if you get parental responsibility - through persuasion initially, but, if not, through enforcement (which we will talk about later) - you actually can get people to change their ways. You really can. It is all about consequences. They have to realise that and understand that there are consequences to their actions and that their behaviour affects other people. Many adults look at it in a defensive way, especially in relation to their children, and they will not see it from the point of view of the victim. I think it is about an education. It is about getting baselines, identifying what is acceptable and what is not acceptable in areas, and the only way we can do that is through the communities that we serve. But it is also about really getting the family to self-police itself to a certain extent and balancing it up with the need for public protection. If we can support a family and they can change their behaviour, that is absolutely fine. If we then find that that family will not take responsibility - they get the support and they will not take it; we offer other things and they do not take it - then we will have to go down the lines of enforcing that change of behaviour through the courts. I think we do that very effectively now and I think people realise that maybe in the past one or two agencies would go straight for the enforcement. We now have such a structured process in place that usually enforcement is a final resort, because we have tried other things: we have given them the opportunity to change and we can now go to court and say, "This person will not voluntarily change their behaviour or their family's behaviour, we are going to have to force it on them." If more people see that, more agencies are willing to be part of that process.

Q124 Mr Prosser: Just coming back to the issues which Ms Monaghan raised, in the evidence regarding the Shelter Inclusion Project you talk about lots of these problems being a symptom of unmet support needs. Ms Bridgen, at what stage do you find enough is enough and you have to give up, having just provided a new door and put a window in, and hand it over to the ... I was going to say: the tough guys.

Ms Bridgen: The project works with perpetrators at every level, so we can still have a role to play when the enforcement agencies are working. We work very closely with the enforcement team in Rochdale. We jointly work on the same cases. Quite often where the case has got more serious, it is helpful to have an element of enforcement there to help people understand what the issues are, so I do not think it is an either/or case. Even when you get to eviction, those people are still going to move on. If we are going to prevent them causing a nuisance to the next people that they are living alongside, who may well have less protection because they might be in private rented accommodation where there is not a good enforcement team to protect them, it is even more important that we address and tackle those underlying problems and change behaviour.

Q125 Mr Prosser: There is not a clear enough divide to enable you to say your approach works in x% of cases, or is there?

Ms Bridgen: So far our approach has worked in 100% of cases. With everybody we have dealt with, the anti-social behaviour has ceased. We have an independent evaluation through York University that is assessing that. We are into the second year. Obviously we will not maintain our 100% success forever, that is going to go, but at the moment we have 100% success.

Q126 Mr Prosser: I guess that means that you will only go in on specific cases.

Ms Bridgen: We work with every case -----

Q127 Mr Prosser: Otherwise you are going to put Mr Lee out of business.

Ms Bridgen: I am sorry, I did not catch that.

Q128 Mr Prosser: You are in danger of putting Mr Lee out of business if you get 100% success at this level of providing new windows and material support on unmet needs.

Ms Bridgen: I think it is going back to the multi-agency approach, working with enforcement, with mediation where appropriate, with the police, with education, with health.

Ms Monaghan: In Rochdale there is a case intervention group which has just been set up. It is a multi-agency group: referrals are made by people who are alleging anti-social behaviour and then that is passed on to the appropriate agencies. Within Rochdale there is a very strong multi-agency approach. Also our project is a voluntary service, so people do have choice over whether they take up our service or not. We are independent. We work very closely with enforcement but we are in no way connected. It is a voluntary service, so people who do take on our support have identified that they want to change their behaviour.

Mr Lee: We need to re-emphasise this bit about enforcement. In Manchester we do prevention - we have the area casework panels, we have tenancy support and we have tenancy compliance - but multi-agency meetings are too much dominated by the perpetrators' agenda. We cannot have multi-agency meetings that last for two hours that do not protect the community. So it is not either/or. It is not that we have to wait for this family to change in six or nine months - because somebody has to go back out and tell the witness that or the complainant. ASBOs and injunctions, for the record again, are not enforcement. Eviction and sending people to prison is enforcement. You raised the issue of displacing people into the private rented sector, that is why in Manchester we do not do that many evictions, because we know that they will just move into the private sector. This is about changing people's behaviour. If you are going to evict somebody now, you need to get an ASBO or an injunction at the same time, which the Government have facilitated, in the county court, so that they do not just turn up two streets away when they have been evicted from a council property and carry on the same behaviour. They are subject to an ASBO in England and Wales. It is not either enforcement or diversion and prevention. You can take preventative legal action which protects the community, but the witnesses and the community must have a say in these multi-agency meetings. Otherwise, the word "multi-agency" goes into disrepute when you go back out and talk to people who are suffering the anti-social behaviour. They want it stopped for them.

Q129 Mrs Dean: Mr Lee has just said that you would use an ASBO in conjunction with a possession order. Do other witnesses here agree with that?

Sergeant Dunn: Absolutely. I think the whole range of tools available to us now assists us enormously in getting the right option with the right individual. This is what I am trying to emphasise: it is an individually focused approach. What will work with one person may not work with another. It is the wrong way of looking at it if we say, "Right, ASBOs are the way for the future." They will be in many cases; they may not be in other cases. The same applies to injunctions, evictions, ABCs, whatever you want to mention. I think you have to have the ability to look at what is in front of you and come up with a plan of how you are going to get that person to take responsibility for their behaviour, which may result in taking somebody to county court or rent arrears but also putting an ASBO on them as well to show them that the public in that area need protecting. I totally agree with what Martin was saying, that an ASBO and an injunction is purely preventative. It is not an enforcement until it is actually breached. You are not asking them to do anything that you would not ask anybody else to do. It is just sitting back and seeing the picture, seeing what is actually going on. If you have an ability to support somebody through a change, there are a number of very highly successful preventative measures you can use, and you have to balance it up with the protection of the local public. If that is a question, you need to take some sort of action in relation to injunctions/ASBOs to protect the public, by restraining them from doing certain behaviour which has been deemed not only by that community but by the agencies involved as being unacceptable. I think we are getting this right. I think the balance is absolutely right. I would emphasise, because I do most of my work with young people, and that with young people it has to be a structured approach. You have to look at it from their point of view to a certain extent. You have to look at it from the point of view of their victims, I agree with that, but if you actually persuade people to change it is far more sustainable than if you actually enforce it on them. If I go to court to get somebody to change their way of behaviour and it does not work, it makes it very difficult for me to go back to that individual and say, "I now want to work with you." It is about responsibility; it is about ownership of the problem. I think there is a place for all types of action and I think the new legislation has given us a toolbox that we did not have before that gives us a number of options to look at this problem through an individual focused approach.

Q130 Mrs Dean: Mr Copeland and Ms Bridgen, do you both agree that if you were looking to issue a possession order, an ASBO should be issued at the same time?

Ms Bridgen: Yes, I would agree.

Mr Copeland: That is not really my area of expertise, but I certainly support the view that we need to use a variety of measures in individual cases.

Q131 Mrs Dean: Could I ask you all: How much bad behaviour should be tolerated before looking to evict?

Mr Copeland: Again, a very difficult question perhaps for me to answer. Eviction is the ultimate in terms of where you are going to move people on to. My experience is that all the other remedies, interventions would have been tried, and I suspect now that if you went to county court and applied for a possession order the judge would expect that the local authority had taken every reasonable step before they had gone to apply for that order. In terms of describing what behaviour would warrant that, I am not sure I can answer that really.

Mr Lee: I think of the 230-plus families we have evicted in Manchester in the last ten years: most of them were criminals and racists who needed to be evicted, full stop. People who are using our properties for illegal drugs and so on, they have to go or we do not have any credibility. We now have ASBOs, which we did not have before as part of the same proceedings, so witnesses do not have to go through two or three different sets of proceedings. Criminals and racists need to go from council properties to send out the message to other people that we will not have that sort of behaviour. In other cases, as I think we have said, we prefer injunctions and ASBOs because we recognise this: people are going to lodge somewhere eventually, they are going to live somewhere. It is about changing people's behaviour towards other people. Injunctions and ASBOs set a line. If you cross it, you go to prison, but that is your choice. Really, like my colleague said, an injunction says, "Could you possibly behave, please. Could you possibly respect your neighbour." That is all we are asking people to do, so if they then want to break that, that is their choice and they go to prison. That is unfortunate but some people will not learn from that. Evictions, we think we like to use them - not as frequently as injunctions and ASBOs, but for those categories of people we will do it, and we will put it on the front page of the Manchester Evening News - certainly as regards racism.

Sergeant Dunn: That is absolutely right. It is about sending a message with an eviction that certain things will be tolerated but other things certainly will not be tolerated. It is for the good of the community as a whole if that message is sent out. Evictions should not be done very often; they should be done in serious cases. When I started looking at some of the families who were evicted that I was now dealing with, I was amazed at the amount of money and the interventions that huge numbers of agencies had had with these particular families - all of which were lost if they were just moved to another area, because they would then have to be picked up by other agencies and the whole thing would start again. I am a great believer in socially including these particular families and, if they are dysfunctional, working with them, teaching them, re-educating them about what is required of them if they wish to live in certain areas. But, again, the emphasis and responsibilities are on their shoulders. They are the ones who make their minds up whether they want to stay in communities or if they do not. We can only do so much. We can support them through that process. If they decide that they do not want that support and their behaviour is that serious, we have to send a message and evict them.

Ms Bridgen: I agree there is a place for eviction. It should be a last resort after you have explored every other option. The two things I would add to what everybody else has said is that often you can have one perpetrator within the household and yet with eviction the whole household suffers. It is also a remedy that can only be applied to people in rented accommodation, not to owner-occupiers, and we do have owner-occupier perpetrators of anti-social behaviour. The final thing I would say, to go back to that statistic, is that huge numbers of perpetrators of anti-social behaviour have unmet support needs that need to be addressed if we are going to end the anti-social behaviour.

Q132 Mrs Dean: Do you have anything to add, Ms Monaghan?

Ms Monaghan: No.

Q133 Mrs Dean: Could I ask anyone who wants to comment: Should acceptable behaviour contracts or mediation always be tried first before other remedies?

Mr Copeland: My answer to that would be no. There are clearly instances where they are not appropriate, where there is danger to life or property and there is urgent response required, and we are not an emergency service, so my view is that there are serious incidents that do need a faster intervention than we would provide from a mediation point of view.

Mr Lee: I would like to reiterate we must get rid of this sequences bit. If someone is in serious trouble and has been threatened with violence or racist anti-social behaviour, we go to court and get interim injunctions and ASBOs to protect people, things that we have all agreed are only asking people to behave. I do not read The Guardian but there is a very interesting article on page 2 today about what works with an 11-year old boy in Bradford - and I do not know how many people have seen it - who signed an acceptable behaviour contract, even though he could not read or write. He broke it several times - we should read The Guardian afterwards - and the only thing that has changed his behaviour is the interim ASBO. His mum said, "We actually support it. We think the ASBO is great. We knew it was coming and we like it. So long as it is explained to him in simple terms what he can and can't do, it has been the best thing that has happened to him." That was from the mother.

Sergeant Dunn: In relation to Acceptable Behaviour Contracts, there are two areas here that we must not get confused with. Anti‑social behaviour is happening now outside this building. We need to tackle that. If it is necessary to protect people we have the means to do that, but we have a responsibility here. We have a responsibility to stop it happening in the future. Again, I emphasise the fact that if you can re‑educate people to change or educate them in the first place what effect their behaviour is having on other people, it works.  Acceptable Behaviour Contracts are used right across the country. At the moment they are used in Scotland and are going to be used in Northern Ireland shortly. All it is, and I cannot emphasise this more simply, is just an opportunity to communicate where people understand that they have a responsibility and consequences will follow if they fail to take that responsibility.  At the moment in London we have an 87% success rate with all our ABCs that we have done. Oldham has a 95% success rate with their ABCs. ABCs are now used in schools, businesses and youth clubs. What it does is it sets out an agreed list of prohibitions of behaviour which has been deemed to be unacceptable by everybody present; that includes the parents as well. I think that what you are doing is treating the parents of these particular individuals as partners in the process. They have not been treated like that before. When I first started doing Acceptable Behaviour Contracts I was the good guy, I really was for these families, because all I could do was lock up their children. They did not see me in any other way. I was the good guy, they wanted to talk to me. They did not like the housing officers because they could affect the whole family by taking away their building, so just using that as a deterrent those consequences were enough to get people to start taking responsibility. Most of the responsibility and most of the success of the scheme was taken by the parents themselves, being given an opportunity to realise what was going on, how it would affect them and what they needed to do about it. To quickly answer your question: Acceptable Behaviour Contracts are part of a big toolbox. They are not the panacea, but they are interestingly being used in areas that we have not used them before, but also they cannot always be part of the process. I will give you an example of that. If you have a persistent prolific offender going to court who is being found guilty, or pleading guilty, an Acceptable Behaviour Contract is not part of that process. We need to go straight to the courts for a conviction ASBO to restrain that individual from carrying on with that criminal behaviour that is being allowed to do so. It is part of the process but not in every case.

Q134 Mrs Dean: Mr Lee, in your submission you make it clear that Manchester City Council has relied primarily on legal interventions to combat anti‑social behaviour. Could you tell us a little bit more about perhaps other support measures that you have used, for instance to combat mental health, drug and alcohol‑related problems?

Mr Lee: Yes. As I said before, we have a range of services in Manchester. For people with drug or alcohol problems we have a tenancy support service which will support or attempt to support those perpetrators in their tenancy. It might have specific clauses written into that tenancy about who they need to see, when they need to see them, and other things such as attending alcohol counselling. They will be given a key worker who will go out and visit them and try and sustain them through that tenancy. In terms of mental health, the neighbour nuisance team, we have a protocol with mental health services which has come out of real cases. My view on protocols is the only worthwhile ones are a page long and that come out of three or four cases. We do not evict mentally ill people in Manchester. Lots of the ASBOs and injunctions we have are to protect mentally ill people who are called paedophiles, all sorts of vile names every day. I would like to say it is not a question of us seeing mentally ill people as perpetrators. We see them as complainants, witnesses who have a very hard time. A lot of our legal action is done protecting them. That is why mental health services do not have a problem with the name "nuisance team" because they see that we are not into eviction. We might want to change people's behaviour, but we are willing to work with them to try and modify people's behaviour. We do a lot of that. We have a foundations project, which is a residential scheme similar to the Dundee's Families Project where dysfunctional families can go in. It is a residential unit and they have things like anger management, diversion, drug and alcohol counselling. We do not just do one thing. I am glad you asked that question. We have a range, but the bit where we are different is not just diversion and rehabilitation and working with people. We also protect the community. We think services for perpetrators should be equal to, no more, no less, than services for the community and for witnesses. So long as that balance is the same and that is what witnesses ask for, all we are asking for is the same amount that they receive; we do not have a problem with that.

Q135 Mr Singh: Mr Lee, you mentioned injunctions a few times. Is this the injunction provided for by the Housing Act 1996?

Mr Lee: Yes, we have been using that.

Q136 Mr Singh: My briefing says that it provides for an injunction against unlawful use of premises. Is the scope wider than that? I think you referred that you could use injunctions to keep them away from an area. Is that the same injunction?

Mr Lee: Yes. There is recent case law; I cannot remember which it is and I wish I could. I would like to give credit to the housing association, because they ‑ it is not "us" - got an injunction ex parte, that means without notice, an Anti‑Social Behaviour Act injunction to exclude someone from their own home without notice. Where they lived next door to their neighbours and there was serious witness intimidation, in fact, the judge gave two.  One was appealed and they lost the appeal, but in the other case the perpetrator has been excluded from their own home whilst proceedings are taking place. Our view is we need to push the law back. We can get them and there is no reason why owner-occupiers who commit anti‑social behaviour cannot be excluded from their own home by an ASBO. Without that we do not have anything anyway to protect owner-occupiers, so, yes, with injunctions you have to stretch the law. You can use them for unlawful use of premises and let us exclude people from their own homes. People who are 17 or 18 do not need to live with their parents. People who are 18 can be subject to an injunction. If they are the one person causing problems in that family and you do not want to evict them the answer is to get an injunction or an ASBO to exclude them from that property, then you are not evicting the whole family.

Q137 Mr Singh: What happens in the case of, let us say you get an injunction against somebody to stop dealing in drugs. In fact, the tenant is not dealing in drugs, but they are under the influence of somebody else?

Mr Lee: If the tenant is not dealing drugs?

Q138 Mr Singh: But the premises are being used to deal drugs, but it is not the tenant doing it. The tenant is under the influence of somebody else, scared of somebody else.

Mr Lee: In that case we could go for a crack house closure if it was Class A drugs. What we did in Manchester in that case, in a couple of cases that we have done, we did provide suitable alternative accommodation for the vulnerable person, but we took action to close the house and move the vulnerable person because it is that balance again. We cannot have it going on for the community. We re‑house the person who was not the perpetrator to a more safe area, but we did not just do that. We obtained an ASBO against the person who was doing the business so that they cannot do the business in that area. That is the bit about the joined‑up thing. We have all these powers that we have, which are great, and the problem is people are picking the wrong one from the shelves. We need to pick the most appropriate form of action for the individual case. I think a lot of crack house closures should lead to possession and ASBOs as well afterwards. The crack house closure is immediate and it sends out a fantastic message to the community. The property is sealed up, yes, but we do not want them coming back doing their drugs business from that area, so let us get an ASBO leaflet which says they cannot come back to that area. Then you get carried around on the shoulders of the tenants and residents in that street.

Q139 Mr Singh: It appears to me that all these powers are available to social landlords. What do we do about nuisance neighbours who are private tenants or owner-occupiers?

Mr Lee: Thank God for the ASBO. That is Leslie Pulman, my witness, who was an owner-occupier in north Manchester who lived in a house for 30 years. What did we have before the Anti‑Social Behaviour Order to deal with anti‑social behaviour in private tenancies and owner-occupiers? We were relying entirely on private landlords to effectively evict people, but in parts that means they just move in two streets away to another private tenancy, so we have to be clear: that is why the ASBO is fantastic. Otherwise owner-occupiers would be handing in their keys to building societies in the dead of night hoping that they did not catch up with them to move to another address.

Q140 Mr Singh: Do you think that the licensing arrangements might be affected in the Housing Act 2004?

Sergeant Dunn: I think we are learning a lot from Scotland which brought it in with their Anti‑Social Behaviour Act. It is important to designate areas of private landlord accommodation, many whom (the landlords) do not live in the area but live in other parts of the country and really do not care what their tenants are up to as long as they get payment for those families being there or individuals. I think we will learn a lot from that. The housing legislation planned for the future will compensate for the private landlord issue. I think it is exactly what Martin was saying: it is looking at the issue you have in front of you and getting the right tool to deal with it. We have closed crack houses in large numbers across London. It is again looking at the vulnerability of the residents; are they the cause of the problem? Because of their vulnerability have people moved in and taken advantage of that? We can use injunctions and ASBOs to ban people from using that property, allowing that person to remain there or, as Martin said, we can move them to other places which we have done on a number of occasions. This is all brought about by good information sharing between the agencies involved and a problem solving approach. I just think that especially in relation to private landlords, there was a great danger when all the legislation first came out that we were only targeting a certain section of the community, as has been voiced by everybody present. We are all responsible for causing anti‑social behaviour at some time in our lives. I think it is important that everybody has a responsibility. The owner-occupier is certainly an area that we do need to look into as well. I am a great believer that they should have equal share of responsibility. Why should they be allowed to keep their mortgages if they are affecting the community they live in? I am surprised that mortgage providers would allow them to keep their mortgages if they knew that behaviour was actually possibly devaluing the price of the properties in that area.

Q141 Mr Singh: As you said earlier, you have been up and down the country on these issues. Do you think that every Local Authority is as assiduous as Manchester in using this new range of powers?

Mr Lee: No. I think it is improving. A lot of them are beginning to get to grips with it. I think it was you who said injunctions have been available since 1996 under The Housing Act. They are on the civil level of evidence. 51% is it more likely than not that someone is causing a nuisance to get an injunction. We do not understand why local authorities do not use it; it is cheap, it is fast, it is effective, it does not socially exclude people. If people do not break it, there is not a consequence. I think there are reasons for that. In some areas, to be fair to, say, rural areas do not have access to a solicitor sometimes. In some areas it is a solicitor who is the problem; I would have to say that. In a lot of Local Authorities, not so much Housing Associations but a lot of Local Authorities, solicitors are risk averse, do not want to take action. A lot of housing officers and housing managers, including senior ones, have difficulty, shall I say diplomatically, explaining that the clients listen to the advice, but the clients instructions are to run with the case. There needs to be more cases taken more quickly because this whole thing just to say: the longer it takes, we lose witnesses. That is why people do not like the criminal system.

Q142 Mr Singh: Is there a lack of guidance from the Government maybe?

Mr Lee: The Home Office has said five times ASBOs are not an order of last resort, so that means they can be an order of first resort. I think it is a case of accountability as well. I think people should be scrutinised in relation to using these new powers. I am not saying everybody should use these powers just for the sake that they are there, but it is about intervention. If these powers are being used as a successful approach through that intervention then they should be applauded for that. It is not about the number of ASBOs, it is not about the number of injunctions, it is about what successful interventions have you brought in that has come to a successful conclusion with that particular case. I think the Home Office is sympathetic to that approach. People realise people are trying new things, being innovative, looking at new agencies that come in with ideas. That is the excitement and the passion that people have in this field of work is that things are coming out of the blue which we never saw coming which are far more successful than traditional historic approaches.

Chairman: I would like to move on now, I know people want to come in, but the next questions will give opportunities to pursue this. The issue of co-ordination has come up quite a lot.

Q143 Mr Green: As Chairman says, I think we have moved on to process issues, if you like, and how to do it. The Home Office has argued that every Local Authority should have an anti‑social behaviour co-ordinator. Does each of you agree, and if so, should they be situated in the Local Authority or somewhere else?

Ms Monaghan: In my experience in Rochdale, the community safety team have anti‑social behaviour officers who currently, I spoke earlier on about the case intervention group, and they are chairing that group. Hopefully they will co-ordinate all cases put forward of anti‑social behaviour. We are hoping that that encompasses all of Rochdale so that they can have a handle on what cases are coming forward and more and more people will bring them at earlier stages, so it is about early intervention and that we work with all agencies within the borough. At the moment that is happening on the enforcement team, the police, education, welfare, youth services and we sit on that case group. There is a new multi‑agency of children, schools and families which look at all the services available for children and families. The YOT Team also sit on that and Social Services. Certainly, there is a co-ordinated response, so if a case is brought forward, all agencies then who have an involvement will say what involvement they have. It will be decided who will be the lead agency with that family. Certainly, in the cases I work with then that lead agency will be multi‑agency meetings and the family are very much involved in the support that is offered and provided. So that it is accomplished and individually based for that family.

Sergeant Dunn: Interesting; anti‑social co-ordinators. I think I was one of the first in London when I started in Islington and started my own team there which was a housing police team looking at co-ordinating multi‑agency problem solving with community issues. Each London borough has a dedicated anti‑social behaviour co-ordinator, all of whom employed within the Local Authority, but I think the difference now to when this role first evolved was that people really did not know what this role was going to do. They thought this person was responsible for all anti‑social behaviour. As you can imagine, lots of people changed in that role over a very quick period of time. It was seen much more as a strategic overview of anti‑social behaviour policies and strategies within the local areas, overseeing what groups and what agencies need to be involved in the process, making sure that they share information and dedicated people are identified within their agencies to make this multi‑agency work. The evolving role of the anti‑social co-ordinator is identifying a multi‑agency problem‑solving group: who should be on it, how are we going to take this forward, how are we going to educate the courts into the new legislation and make sure we can iron out some of the issues? How can we get some of the agencies who are less supportive of multi‑agency working and do not see it maybe from the point of view of other people? How can we build those relationships and get that trust? This is what is happening. We meet up with all the anti‑social behaviour co-ordinators regularly in London and we share good practice, we share national issues that are being addressed. We look at what is working, what is not working, what things are coming in legislation‑wise. Basically I think these people themselves are responsible for the approaches that their boroughs will actually take. If you get the right person in who is passionate about it, you will move mountains with these individuals. If not, it can be extremely damaging. Again, they are just part of the spearheading. It is very much involving other agencies taking that equal shared responsibility of work in this area.

Q144 Mr Green: David Copeland, do you think that these people should be Local Authority-led?

Mr Copeland: I think it is crucial that somebody takes that role. Peterborough is a Local Authority employer. The actual anti‑social co-ordinator sits on the community safety team. That is a joint team, but the actual anti‑social team is led by a Local Authority employer and they have case workers working for them. As has already been described, they oversee and drive the process forward.

Q145 Mr Green: If I can refer to Mr Lee, one of the things that the Home Office has told us, which raised the Committee's eyebrows, was that Local Authorities do not need extra resources to cope with this area of activity, that Local Authorities are not being asked to do anything new, just being asked to do different things. Do you accept that?

Mr Lee: Would you say that again, sorry?

Q146 Mr Green: The Local Authorities do not renew resources, that instead of chasing rent arrears, you are now chasing anti‑social behaviour, so you are basically doing different things but not more things, as it were, because of the whole anti‑social agenda. Therefore, you do not need any more resources.

Mr Lee: This is a bit difficult to give a quick answer to because I do not think you can separate rent arrears and empty properties from anti‑social behaviour. The reason why we have empty properties: if you look at the empty streets that are sealed up, that is because we have not tackled anti‑social behaviour. Who has costed up how much it costs, how much the demolition costs when an application for an ASBO is £23.50? I do not say that Local Authorities should not get some more resources, but I think we need to say that people do have the powers and they need to be creative in using them. The evidence is there in diaries, in people's in trays. In terms of co-ordinators, I am in favour of them so long as they co-ordinate action, not meetings.

Q147 Mr Green: On that note, and more generally, how useful are the CDRPs? Do they create action or do they create meetings?

Sergeant Dunn: That is a good one. Some do create meetings, some of them do create action. It depends very much on the local set up of the CDRP. It depends on the leads, on the vision that these CDRP have, whether they involve themselves in community issues, whether they see it more as a general type approach that they are going to take. I think it is about being innovative, identifying local champions, identifying good practice and being innovative with funding. We look at being quite courageous with putting money in areas that have not really been developed yet. A good example of that is in London at the moment there is one London borough that has a 90% success rate diverting young people away from crime. The only agency involved is the fire brigade. That is much better than any statutory agency that has the responsibility of doing that job. What we are saying here is that people are willing to get on board with this. People like the idea of partnership working, making this a better place to live in. Let us give them the opportunity and deal with it now and some of the issues that we have to address now, but let us look ahead as well. It is not a quick win thing this.  We are going to change cultures. It is going to be over the next 20, 30 years that we will be able to do that. Only by involving the right agencies now, getting them to buy into this, will we actually achieve that.

Q148 Mr Green: Do you have much exposure to the CDRP in your work?

Ms Monaghan: I have to say no.

Ms Brigden: I believe that we are involved, but I cannot say for sure, but, yes, we are involved at a strategic level.

Mr Lee: We have a very good relationship beginning to develop with police and the Local Authority in Manchester. It is effective. I am not saying it is perfect, but I think the important thing about partnership working is we cannot wait for somebody to lead action. In West Cumbria, it is the police who are doing it; in Harlow, it is the police; in Bristol, it is the Local Authority; in Leeds it is the police. So long as something is happening then that has a credibility with residents who can see that somebody is exercising their powers. I do not think the public is that concerned as to who is doing it, is something being done. Am I now able to walk my dog on a Saturday morning past the area I used to like but was vandalised but is now sorted and the graffiti is removed and the five-a-side pitch has not destroyed people's quality of life. That is what it is. If you see smashed bottles on the floor and the road sign full of graffiti and the five-a-side pitch smashed up you do not want to walk that way, but if it gets better those are quality of life issues that people are concerned with. That is true: is partnership working, whether it is getting better.

Q149 Mr Green: How much support, guidance have you had from the Home Office anti‑social behaviour unit? How useful are they?

Mr Copeland: Indirectly I sit on our community safety partnership and clearly we have had advice from them and we have just been successful, if that is the right word, in becoming an anti‑social behaviour action area. Certainly through the partnership there is information being fed out from the Home Office.

Mr Lee: I think they have been fantastic, seriously.

Sergeant Dunn: I totally agree with that. The reason why I think they have been fantastic is that they have listened to practitioners. They have come out and they have identified what the issues are, that communication is a huge problem. They have set up the Manchester helpline, which has a fantastic reputation of giving good quality information back, or having a network of individuals within the country who have answers.  I feel it is like we are on a train and I think we are really going at 150 miles an hour at the moment. I think this is a priority to everybody. I think it always should be a priority from now on. It should be an overarching priority that if we tackle this effectively, we will reduce crime for the future. We are going to reduce the fear of crime, to reassure people that people are working together. This is what the Home Office vision is to me in relation to the anti‑social behaviour team is that, yes, we have the tools now, let us get out there and actually deal with it, but let us look at it from a preventative as well as an enforcement thing. We want to get everybody we possibly can on board. That is exactly the message that they give at this moment in time.

Q150 Mr Clappison: Ms Brigden, earlier in your evidence you talked about the level of success which you enjoyed, but you put it at 100% success in dealing with people. Do I take it your definition of success is somebody who is referred to you as an anti‑social tenant who is behaving in an anti‑social way and the anti‑social behaviour is brought to an end?

Ms Brigden: That was research from York University. They carried out a three‑year evaluation of the project. We are into the second year of that and it looked at the closed cases that we have dealt with so far. In those closed cases, anti‑social behaviour has ceased in all cases.

Q151 Mr Clappison: Those are all the cases that came to you?

Ms Brigden: Yes. Also, people are maintaining their tenancies as well. We do not have people losing their homes.

Q152 Mr Clappison: In the light of that could I ask both of you in turn, perhaps starting with you, Sallie, what do you see as the key ingredient in that success?

Ms Brigden: Just to say a bit about the project. It works with the whole family and it works with all kinds of families: single people, childless people and families. A lot of the families we deal with are larger families with five or more children. We work with the whole family. We have support workers also working with the adults within the family. When we get involved with any household the first thing we do is sit down and look at what the anti‑social behaviour is but then look at what the underlying causes of that anti‑social behaviour are and what their support needs are and agree a package of support for the household. Do you want to say more about the work you do with children and young people?

Ms Monaghan: Yes.

Ms Brigden: What are the most valuable aspects?

Ms Monaghan: When you are faced with a family sometimes that can be quite a chaotic environment to work with. We try to find out exactly what is happening. First of all, we might look at the complaints that have been made and see what is happening there, what is building up to that and really trying to put interventions in place immediately to stop that. We are concerned about the whole issue, so we do not want to see this behaviour continue. We want to see a long‑term solution to it. A lot of my work is with the parents and I work with the children and young people. With the parents, it is about looking again at parenting skills. Over 60% of the households that we have worked with have identified a personal mental health illness. It is looking at the ability to cope with the household. I deal with starting sometimes with fairly basic parenting skills and setting boundaries and routines for the children and liaising then with schools or with housing as to support as well. When you get in it is quite supportive. Looking at the positive aspects, so we are dealing with encouraging whatever is good that is happening and encouraging that to continue. We also liaise quite closely with other agencies in Rochdale. Parents would attend separate parenting courses and things like that. Sometimes we need to develop their confidence in order to do that.

Q153 Mr Clappison: What you are telling us now in your answer, as you told us earlier, it seems to imply that there is quite an intensive level of intervention involved in this.

Ms Monaghan: Yes, absolutely.

Ms Brigden: It can vary from case to case.

Ms Monaghan: Yes. Sometimes we might just need three months' intervention or two months' intervention. If there is one specific problem we do not encourage dependency in any way. It is all about empowering those people to find those solutions themselves. Sometimes there is only one issue that needs resolving and that household is okay to continue.

Q154 Mr Clappison: Assuming that Rochdale is not a unique place, and the people in Rochdale are not unique - which is something some of them might contest, I suppose, making that assumption - what scope do you see for expanding this to the rest of the country?

Ms Monaghan: Personally I feel there is huge scope seeing the success rate and seeing the change in people's lives because obviously if complaints are ceasing and if behaviour is ceasing, it is a better place for people to live. It is linking people back into that community as well. I do a lot of work with ensuring that they access local services. Certainly, for this to be a countrywide spread that would be fantastic as a good way to tackle anti‑social behaviour.

Q155 Mr Clappison: Do you have any brief comments to add to that?

Ms Brigden: I suppose I would add that as part of the evaluation we spoke also to other organisations and agencies. In the final year of the evaluations we are going to assess the impact on the community, but they are leaving that to year three, but we do have evidence on what other agencies and other organisations think about the project. What they have said is that they value the fact that we are effective and successful and they also value the fact that we are able to engage young people which some of the organisations have failed to do. Sometimes where education is involved, Social Services cannot get that household to sit down and talk to them and face the issues. Because we are independent, we can go in and act as an intermediary, as a contact to bring in those other organisations.

Q156 Chairman: On cost, is it unfair to compare what looks like in figures an average £10,000 per family you deal with Mr Lee's £23.50 for an ASBO application?

Ms Brigden: I think the £23.50 is the cost of the application to the court. There are probably other costs involved.

Ms Monaghan: Enforcement.

Ms Brigden: Yes. I think when you look at cost you have to look at what the impact is. I think we are evaluating our project and we will be able to see in the longer term what the impact is. Part of that evaluation is a cost benefit analysis, looking at the cost of eviction which can cost thousands of pounds. As we have all said, the long term cost of children's well being in education, health, and their capacity to bring up their own children not as perpetrators of anti‑social behaviour. You do have to take a long term view when looking at cost. I would also say that because we are being evaluated we will be able to see which aspects of our work really work and which aspects of our work perhaps can be dropped and concentrate on things that are most effective in the future.

Q157 Janet Anderson: Mr Copeland, in its written submission to the Committee, Peterborough Mediation says that mediation should be an integral part of any strategy to combat anti‑social behaviour. Do you think mediation is explored sufficiently as an option for dealing with neighbour nuisance cases? How far do you think it is dependent on the attitude of the Local Authority? I can think of an example in my own constituency some years ago where the Local Authority was very reluctant to act. They do a lot better now. Generally, how does it work? How important is it and how much does the use of it vary between authorities?

Mr Copeland: I think it varies greatly between Local Authorities. Briefly on funding, funding is quite ad hoc really. It relies upon Local Authorities, registered social landlords, trusts or charities or the Lottery. Things are improving. Certainly, with the responsibility now on registered social landlords, the police and the Local Authorities have strategies to address anti‑social behaviour and neighbour nuisance. We are mentioned in there, we are part of that, we are one of the steps. We do not always have to take a step if other action is more appropriate, but it is there. It should be considered as an early form of intervention because it is very effective. Clearly mediation is still quite vulnerable in some parts of the country. Only 60% of the country has effective courage at the moment. If it was going to be seen to be almost, shall we say, statutory, for want of a better word, or a requirement that it will be part of the process then clearly that needs perhaps to be a lead from Government; there needs to be funding accessible via regional development agencies or the GOs or whatever. I think you are quite right. We are very fortunate perhaps and perhaps it is a reflection on how effective we are that we have a long standing arrangement with our Local Authority, and also we have just had a large scale voluntary transfer. So we have just entered into a contract with the new registered social landlords as well. Locally we are reasonably sustained in terms of money. As you say, some Local Authorities do not see that it is a priority for some reason.

Q158 Janet Anderson: There are clearly funding implications. You think that mediation can be very effective; is it effective in all cases or are there some cases when it would not be a good idea?

Mr Copeland: Clearly it is not affecting all cases. To actually mediate, we are talking about communication, negotiation. People have to want to do it and be capable of doing it and able to keep to an agreement. As I said before, if there are actual threats of violence to people or property then at that stage mediation would not be appropriate; it needs to be dealt with in some other way. It might well be when the heat has been taken out of the situation at some other stage the mediation can continue. We can operate alongside legal processes. I say to people: "We will try mediation, we are trying that route". It is successful in many cases, but that does not stop the legal process carrying on as well. There are other cases where it is more challenging, particularly if there is drugs and alcohol use. If it is habitual use then sometimes it is very difficult for people to negotiate and keep to an agreement, but as we have already talked about: support is very vital. We work closely with a variety of organisations, support workers supporting people. They will support people through the mediation process and beyond. That has also proved to be very effective. Interestingly, just going back to one thing I mentioned earlier, the money that we are getting as part of the anti‑social behaviour action area, that is going to fund and support a family support worker within the anti‑social behaviour unit. It has recognised that people do need support and help. We are looking then to improve, shall we say, the compliance, the changing in behaviour and reduce the number of breaches of ASBOs or breakdowns of ABCs.

Q159 Janet Anderson: Presumably it is more effective where the parties are receptive to mediation. If there is a case where you can see that that is just not going to happen and you are up against a brick wall, what is the next step then?

Mr Copeland: Clearly, as I said earlier, our credibility as mediation in an organisation is very important. People do have to take part. We encourage them to take part. It helps if the other agencies are all doing their job as well because it is about consequences. We are not looking to coerce people, to force people. The experience is if you do that, agreements do not hold, but it is important that we do encourage people. Clearly if people are not amenable and not going to take part, if their behaviour is not going to change, then we very quickly refer the case back to whence it came, so it would go back to the local housing office, the police, or wherever.

Q160 Janet Anderson: You do argue in your submission that in 2003/4 66% of cases were resolved and there was an 85% reduction in client contact with agencies. Again, that would be mainly where they were receptive from the outset, do you think?

Mr Copeland: Absolutely, but that is from the overall figure, that is from the total. As you say, two out of three cases are resolved or there is improved communication or understanding. I think the bottom, the 85% you talked about is very crucial. In many of those cases there is no further contact at all with the actual agencies. So the effect on their workload, reducing their workload, as I said earlier, it allows them to deal with the more serious, the more persistent offences of anti‑social behaviour and also be more proactive in terms of regeneration, cohesion work within their areas.

Q161 Janet Anderson: Mr Lee, do you use mediation in Manchester?

Mr Lee: We do indeed, we use everything. Manchester mediation has a 70% success rate and five full‑time officers and some volunteers and it is funded by Manchester Housing and housing associations. I think my caveat is it needs to have appropriate cases to be successful. Mediation is appropriate for parking, boundary disputes, kids falling out in the street, younger kids. It is not appropriate to ask you to go and mediate with a neighbour who has subjected you to racist abuse or violence or burgled your property. Those are inappropriate referrals. I think they take up scarce resources that mediation has. I think that they could get on a lot more with the boundary disputes, parking issues and get them resolved, but I think there is a small minority of cases that go to mediation that are not appropriate. They should be taking legal action there.

Q162 Janet Anderson: Presumably where you have children involved you would go to the parents and you would mediate between the parents?

Mr Lee: I think this whole area of work depends on the exercise of judgment of the person who is meeting the complainant for the first time. There is only so much you can do, if someone comes and says: "My neighbour said to me last night he is going to come round at 5 o'clock and burn me out". It is not appropriate for an officer to recommend that to mediation, although some have. How you get that exercise of judgment, is an emergency injunction possible? In fact, that is the big thing. You have to look at the evidence, but briefly, and make a judgment. What is the most appropriate and quickest way to resolve this?

Q163 Janet Anderson: Do you train your officers to make that judgment?

Mr Lee: We like to think we train the housing officers to make that judgment. It is in our neighbour nuisance file. It does say: "have you considered mediation", but, what you were saying, when I said before about most people have tried to resolve it with their neighbour first, people do not run to authority. They even go out and approach gangs of youths and you think: do not, please do not, but people do because they do try and resolve it without legal action. That is why there is not this whole lot of malicious complainers who get a kick out of it. It is a very traumatic thing to do. Unless it is bothering people, they do not usually report it to the authorities, but it is very important that inappropriate cases are not referred to mediation and that they get the right cases referred to them.

Mr Copeland: Can I make one point? I think our scope of cases is far wider than the examples Martin has given. They might not be appropriate when the initial incident occurs, but they might become appropriate later on in the process when the initial action has been taken. Certainly, in the case studies I gave, one was quite a serious case of racial harassment. It was referred by a County Court judge. That worked very well. When we talked about tolerance, there are different stages of being appropriate. There is the immediacy that needs to be dealt with quite properly and I accept that. You need action to make people safe and feel safe, but at the end of the day the victim - for want of a better word - his views are paramount. If they want to try and resolve this and want to try and build some form of a relationship with their neighbour, then mediation can be appropriate further down the line and just because it is very serious at the start point I do not think - in fact I know - that should not exclude mediation further down the line.

Sergeant Dunn: Very quickly, I think that we have to recognise as well the positive side of restorative approaches. There has been very much a lack of some areas that we can go into. We either go into the court system or we try and work it out or we don't do anything. What is really evolving now in this country is restorative processes tend to be very beneficial if you get in there early enough, the right individuals with the right cases. Mark Nesbitt, a registered social landlord manager in Manchester, does very effective community conferencing where he gets a community together, trains some of them up as mediators to identify what the issues are for that community. Again, it is empowering those people to deal with that. The safer schools partnerships are now using restorative processes. The Youth Offending Teams are now using restorative processes more than ever before. The safer neighbourhood reassurance teams we have in London are aware and will hopefully be trained in restorative processes as yet another arm to tackle some of these issues before we have to rely on more historical, traditional approaches.

Q164 Chairman: I would like to briefly resolve a tension which is clearly there in the evidence about the Acceptable Behaviour Contracts. Sergeant Dunn, I know you are somewhat the architect of Acceptable Behaviour Contracts. We have seen them getting under way in Islington and they have been praised by the Home Office. Mr Lee, you argue in your evidence that the Acceptable Behaviour Contract offers nothing but a potential prolongation of their distress. There is quite a difference of opinion between you on Acceptable Behaviour Contracts.  Can you give us an instance of the type of behaviour which you think is appropriate to an ABC and why. Perhaps, Mr Lee, I will invite you to come in and say why you think an alternative course is better. I am not suggesting you resolve this apparent disagreement between you, but it will be useful for the Committee to have the two points of view rehearsed.

Sergeant Dunn: My principle behind using Acceptable Behaviour Contracts is to stop behaviour: end of story, so I can fit an Acceptable Behaviour Contract round any type of behaviour which has been deemed to be unacceptable. I can do it in schools. I can get parents to take responsibility. As long as I do it in the right way, the supportive way and forward-looking rather than looking historically, if I sit down with a number of agencies and work with a family, I can persuade them to change their ways. I did that over 400 times in Islington alone. It is about communication, telling the people we are not just out there to lock them up or throw them out of their houses, about giving them an opportunity to take that responsibility on. Many of these families are confused and they do not understand where they sit in society. They have had interaction with a number of agencies in the past, all of which have come in and gone out of their lives at different times. I think what that has done is created a lack of credibility with agencies willing to work with these families. In relation to using ABCs as an evidence‑gathering tool, what that does is it proves that that person has identified themselves as a problem. They have done something which is deemed to be unacceptable. If they have failed to take the responsibility then we can use that as evidence. We can say to a court that this person will not change voluntarily, we need to enforce.

Q165 Chairman: In what percentage of the cases where you have ABCs that you say worked?

Sergeant Dunn: As far as serious breaches where we had to take further action, we had almost a 98% success rate with the first 400. Not one of those ABCs resulted in any enforcement action being taken. The 90% of the cases succeeded where the family themselves stepped in at the last minute and said: "Enough is enough, the consequences are such, we have to start taking responsibility."

Q166 Chairman: Mr Lee, that is a powerful case for ABCs. You say you looked across the country, you are fairly damning about ABCs. Why do you take a different view?

Mr Lee: I am not damning.

Q167 Chairman: You say they offer nothing to witnesses that have potential prolongation of their distress. That is fairly damning.

Mr Lee: My observations from going up and down the country at various events but looking at cases is that the feature of local authorities that use Acceptable Behaviour Contracts and just issue notices of seeking possession is that they do not do any injunctions or ASBOs.

Q168 Chairman: Your objection is not actually to ABCs per se. You think it is a symptom of Local Authorities that have no intention of taking any action anyway?

Mr Lee: I could go a little further, I do not want to. So long as there is a consequence. I was worried when he said serious breaches of a contract because how many opportunities do people get to amend their behaviour worries me. I have to be clear. Certainly in Manchester the reason why we love the ASBO is because it is the one order in the whole of the legislative process that is actually for the community. All the other orders, the Acceptable Behaviour Contracts, the Referral Order, the Action Plan Order, the Community Rehabilitation Order: those orders are for perpetrators. That is why we say to you that the ASBO is not for the perpetrator; it is for the community. We say it at our warning interviews so that they are absolutely clear: you have been involved in anti‑social behaviour and you are going to face consequences of that by being made subject to an ASBO. That interview makes it clear, there is no confusion. It is not another deal with the perpetrator. The perpetrator understands, for the first time in their lives for many of them, that they are in serious trouble if they carry on.

Q169 Chairman: Just to go back quickly to Sergeant Dunn, would you say that your ABC interviews have the same impact or not?

Sergeant Dunn: Absolutely. The reason for it is when I sit down with these families I ask them: "How can we stop you getting into trouble? How can we, I - as a police officer - a housing officer who you see as enforcement based officers, how can we stop you getting into trouble? If you continue what you are doing you will have to face the consequences." Many of these families have never been spoken to like that. Many of these families have only received a letter, many of the families have not received a letter or it has been given to them by somebody and placed in a bin. It does not explain what the underlying issues are. It is not face to face contact. They do not get to see what the other issues are in the locality, how they affect things. I will give you an example.

Chairman: I am going to move on, but I think rehearsing the issues in principle has been very useful.

Q170 Mr Prosser: Just briefly on this difference between ASBOs and ABCs. I can well understand that ABCs can be tested clearly in terms of the nuisance neighbour because you have the nuisance neighbour willing to relate whether the ABC is actually working. Outside of that sort of confinement how do you know whether the ABC has been complied with?

Sergeant Dunn: Because of partnership working. It is about monitoring it. I have officers who have difficulty going round to houses to say to little Jimmy that he has behaved himself. That is not in police culture; I go round when he has not behaved himself. It is about working in a locality. It is the whole essence of safer neighbourhoods. It is about small numbers of police officers, police community support officers working in partnership with local agencies to monitor the behaviour, to make sure that they deal with any breaches, so it is dealt with there and then; it is immediate. I am not here arguing that an ABC is better than an ASBO; there is a place for both. What I am arguing is if you do an ABC correctly and you do it in the right way with the right approach, you will find that you will not have to go for as many ASBOs as you did before.

Q171 Mr Prosser: That is very clear. Mr Lee, to look back to an earlier question, we were talking about the fact that eviction is the last resort; I think we would all agree with that. In practice, what happens to the family who go as far as that down the road and they have a family at home and they are evicted? The protection of a child, the Social Services, in practice what actually happens?

Mr Lee: I think the point to make is we would not evict a whole family. If there was just an 18 year old causing a problem in the family we would ASBO the 18 year old. If we did evict a whole family for anti‑social behaviour then the likelihood is, as we said before, that you would go into temporary council accommodation for 28 days and then we would discharge our responsibility. We would say they have made themselves intentionally homeless and, as we said, they would end up in the private rented sector displaying the same sort of behaviour which is why, as I said before, we need to have possession and ASBOs. Maybe we need to ASBO a few private landlords.

Q172 Mr Prosser: Where they could end up knocking on the door of Shelter?

Mr Lee: They could, yes, or they could end up in our foundations project. That is why we do not do that much eviction because it does not solve anything. Our worst families may go into our foundations project with people on site, residential people working with them. All this debate, there comes a time, does there not, in every case where the interests of the community are paramount. We have to take action and as long as it is a last resort we are all right with that.

Q173 Mr Singh: Mr Lee, what level of behaviour or anti‑social behaviour would I have to commit to come to an ASBO interview?

Mr Lee: You would have needed to come to the attention of the housing office or the police or, say, the wardens. Throwing stones, throwing eggs against asylum seekers windows, would get you an ASBO warning interview.

Q174 Mr Singh: Would it be a repetition of that behaviour which would then lead you on to get the ASBO?

Mr Lee: No. In some cases we say we are going for it. The warning is you had better stop because the terms of your order, if you carry on, will be far more serious than they already are. It is not an interview for the perpetrator. It is not a deal. It is not a "we are going to do yet another deal with you". It is: "you are in trouble". So we show them the leaflets and it is very powerful. You need to understand these so‑called bullies, when you get them in with their mother and you say: "Do you want this leaflet to go round your estate? Your sister is crying there in the corner, has come in the interview with you. She works at the bank. She really does not want your face plastered round this estate on that leaflet." It has an impact. You can use: "Do you want your Mum to be evicted for your behaviour? Is that what you are asking? If you are, carry on, we can deliver all that", because at the end of the day they are bullies. These people - not all young people - they are bullies and when you take them out of their group and you talk to them, some of them, for the first time about what consequences there will be for their behaviour because their parents have not told them about consequences in life, that is why there is this bit about ‑ I do not want to go back to the ABC thing ‑ we do not think those warning interviews are credible unless you have done legal action. If you have not done it in the past and you have not done leaflets, people will go: what are you going to do, get your Dad on to me? So unless you show people that you are serious you do not have an effect. You do not have any credibility whatsoever.

Q175 Mr Singh: You have a 65% compliance rate.

Mr Lee: It is higher with ASBO warning interviews. I think it is something like 22, 23% go on to have an ASBO against them who come to the warning interviews.

Q176 Mr Singh: Of the people who get ASBOs you have a 65% compliance rate?

Mr Lee: Yes.

Q177 Mr Singh: 35% breach?

Mr Lee: Yes.

Q178 Mr Singh: What do you do when it has been breached?

Mr Lee: Can I just make one quick point? I want to say the ASBO is not for the perpetrator. Our ASBOs are 100% successful for the community and the witnesses. They are only 65% effective for the perpetrator, but that is pretty high. I think other interventions that have been talked about today, if they are at that level, we are going on the right road. If they breach it I think we have said in our submission, and we probably want to ask about technical breaches, the order gets brought into disrepute if magistrates do not impose custodial sentences.

Q179 Mr Singh: Is that happening, in your experience?

Mr Lee: Yes. I think magistrates overall are great. If there are one or two things that do go awry we do not take our ball home and say we are not doing any ASBOs any more because somebody got £100 fine. We go and sit down with the magistrate and explain to all the clerks, why it is important that the order is not brought into disrepute. Getting ASBOs is a doddle. They should get 10, 15 a week; that is what we are doing. The actual problem is the breach. You have to send out a message because then the warning interviews are more effective: "Here was a 14 year old who did exactly what you are doing. Look where they ended up." You have credibility. It goes right from start to finish. Credibility: I am coming into the housing. It is not a little chat with a headmaster like at school where I can spin them around my finger; this is serious.

Q180 Mr Singh: If I breached my ASBO and am taken to court, I am given a fine. Does the ASBO still continue on me?

Mr Lee: Yes.

Q181 Mr Singh: It is still in force?

Mr Lee: Yes.

Q182 Mr Singh: I will be back in court until eventually I will be jailed, presumably?

Mr Lee: I hope you would not be back too many times before you were jailed because you have been to see the magistrates.

Q183 Mr Green: Just one question: is the naming and shaming element necessary to make it effective?

Mr Lee: We try and shy away from that level. We do not call it 'naming and shaming'. These orders are for the community and for them to police. It is not for the perpetrator. It is a community protection order. I cannot understand Parliament passing a law that said we will give you an order that stops somebody doing something, but we are not going to tell the public what the terms of the order are because they are the people who are supposed to police it.

Q184 Mr Green: So, yes basically.

Mr Lee: Yes. It is very effective. It is not naming and shaming. It is telling the community. In certain cases it stops vigilantism. In some cases it is in the interests of the perpetrator to have a leaflet because some people say if you do not deal with so and so at meetings, residents' meetings, somebody who has been running around on the estate, we will. So that reinforces you should report things to the authorities, the authorities will take action and then you, with the authorities, we will police the order.

Q185 Chairman: Michelle?

Ms Monaghan: I wanted to mention on that issue. I have worked with some people who have had ASBOs. That has been quite a difficult issue, one being that, yes, the community do police it and I know one incident where I was actually with the young person and he was reported to have been somewhere on a street he was not supposed to have been on. It is quite difficult sometimes in that case. Also regarding the same youngster the magistrate allowed five newspapers to report the ASBO and the conditions of that. His father, who had been violent in the past and with whom there had been no contact, saw that in the paper, found out where he lived and that was clear and there was a violent incident with the child. So certainly it is not the most supportive way or the best way to go about things.

Sergeant Dunn: I think there is no right and wrong with this. Again, it is an individually based thing. It is very important to tell communities if you are going to tackle their issues that they are identifying. You need to publish what you are doing if it is an individual affecting that specific community. I get a sour taste in my mouth sitting on the tube coming into London and I read the freebie newspaper. I have a young 13 year old who has no previous convictions banned from every restaurant in Leeds. Why do I need to know that? That person may change because she is growing up, maturing. In two or three years time she may be a completely different person. Why am I reading on a train in a newspaper about something that does not affect me at all? I know that we do not have any control over the national press. I think, again, if you look at the numbers of press reports in relation to ASBOs where publicity is thorough, it is mainly against young people. There are some fantastic uses of ASBOs at this moment in time across the country against specific individuals, adults, who are a real threat and a real risk to the community and the ASBO is successfully restraining them from carrying on what we want them to stop. Why have this issue? It is about a yob, a young person's-related issue and nothing else. I think it is distasteful. Agencies do not like it. I think we need to control it in a more effective way, certainly inform the local community of being affected by those individuals' problems. Let us control who gets to see and hear of these news stories.

Q186 Mr Clappison: On a specific point on the breaches of ASBOs. Nationally the numbers are not that high of people receiving prison sentences for breaches of ASBOs, so one assumes that quite a proportion are in Manchester. How common is it for people to receive a custodial sentence for breach of an ASBO when they are also up in court for something else associated within the same incident, or receiving a custodial sentence for another incident as well, for example they have done some burglary or assault under a breach of an ASBO?

Mr Lee: All I can say in answer to that is that the magistrates do take breach of ASBOs seriously. The most usual sentence to dispose of it is a detention and training order. If someone has done a criminal act as well then they will get a sentence for both. They will get a sentence for the breach of the Anti‑Social Behaviour Order and they will get, say, four months for that and they might get four months for whether breaking into a car or whatever or a burglary, like you said. They might be prosecuted for two things which will give them an eight-month sentence, for example.

Q187 Mr Clappison: Yes. When you see ASBOs, custodial sentences, is it just a breach of ASBO on its own?

Mr Lee: I think we need to talk about technical breach. It depends on the circumstances of the case. If somebody has put one toe in the wrong street and done nothing else, I might not agree that they should go to prison. However, if that toe is in front of the witness's house who was part of the ASBO proceedings, I would take a different view. It is in context. If they are standing outside the main witness's house and doing nothing else, they should go to prison for that. That is intimidating a witness who has been part of the ASBO proceedings, but you have to take each breach, and I think police officers are sensible about that. Most of our breaches, I have to say, you say 35% breach. The actual breaches are mainly for going in the exclusion area, associating with the wrong people and congregating in a group more than three or two. That, in comparison to what they were doing before they got the ASBO, is like unbelievable; they were going around burning cars, trashing the estate, vandalising it. Our experience: I would say only about 20% of breaches is for serious criminal witness intimidation.

Q188 Mr Clappison: Take that example, briefly on this. If somebody goes back and they burn a car, if they are committing arson or example, or trash the estate presumably, criminal damage, whatever else?

Mr Lee: Yes, they are.

Q189 Mr Clappison: Okay. Can I ask you on a different subject, demoted tenancies; what are your views on them?

Mr Lee: It is very early to say. The legislation has only been in since 30 June, I think. We have two or three cases trundling through court. We think they are a useful tool. I think we, in Manchester, to put it very succinctly, we think we are very good at stopping criminals buying their properties because you lose your security of tenure if you get a demotion order and you cannot exercise the right to buy. All those people who wish to buy council properties who are using them for drugs we have no excuse where we know someone has a conviction for supplying drugs and they live in a council property. Why do we not go for a demotion order? Because possession takes a little bit longer; we accept that anyway. We can complete on the right to buy, so I think they are a great tool for stopping criminals exercising buying council properties.

Q190 Mr Clappison: Resettlement; how far do you see resettlement as part of a solution for dealing with serious problems between neighbours?

Mr Lee: Of complainants?

Q191 Mr Clappison: No, resettlement of the person perpetrating.

Mr Lee: I am glad you said that. I do not think re-housing the complainant ‑‑

Q192 Mr Clappison: No, I understand that.

Mr Lee: I think we come back to the eviction bit, each case on its merit. If it is serious - we are not squeamish - we will evict people, but we will secure an ASBO against them, their visitors, their children at the same time, so if they do move somewhere else, we cannot have somebody moving from there, getting publicity, family evicted for the removal van to turn up and somebody else start having to fill out the same diaries over and over again. The ASBO has to travel with them. That is why it is great, the England and Wales things. If you think local authority solicitors are serving notices of seeking possession on perpetrators, they are no use unless they have ASBO proceedings with them. It is as simple as that. They are a waste of time.

Q193 Janet Anderson: If I could just ask one brief last point to all of you really. In terms of the school age, young people who are perpetrators, how many of the families are generally in work and how many are not in work? Of the adult perpetrators are they generally in work or not in work?

Mr Lee: I would say 90% of the ASBO warning interviews that I have done only the mother is there. That is a fact. I just need to share that with you. I can count on probably two hands the number of times there has been a male in those interviews.

Sergeant Dunn: Likewise, it has mainly been the mother present at many interviews that I have conducted. Fathers do turn up. They may be separated, living apart at that particular time, but I would say that the majority of adult perpetrators are out of work.

Ms Brigden: The vast majority of our clients have been unemployed. Around two-fifths are caring for children; a fifth is unemployed; a fifth cannot work for health reasons; a fifth has retired. We have had, during the course of the project, a few people return to employment, or return to volunteer roles. We see that as a real success.

Mr Copeland: On the question of the employability I am not really clear, but certainly we do see a lot of lone parents.

Chairman: Thank you very much indeed. You have left us with a lot to think about, particularly to sort out whether we are listening to compatible approaches that can be brought together or real choices of approach. We can pursue that with other witnesses in future sessions, but thank you very much indeed.