Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Bill
(10 years, 11 months ago)
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Baroness Anelay of St Johns (Con)
My Lords, perhaps I may encourage colleagues who are seeking to leave the Chamber to do so without walking in front of the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, wherever possible. At the moment he is waiting very courteously to begin moving the first amendment. It is a courtesy of this House that we do not walk in front of the speaker, and noble Lords should leave by the other end of the Chamber.
Clause 1: Power to grant injunctions
Amendment 19A
Lord Greaves
Lord Greaves (LD)
My Lords, Amendment 19A stands on its own. I should first apologise to the House for not being present for Second Reading. As this is the first time that I have taken part in this Bill I should, in line with the Code of Conduct, declare various interests that I know are going to come up. I am a member of Pendle Borough Council and its executive and vice-president of the Local Government Association. I am also a member and vice-president of the Open Spaces Society and a member and patron of the British Mountaineering Council. I will declare any other interests as they crop up.
The amendment is unusual for a first amendment on a Bill because it deals with a specific point rather than a general one that might lead to some general discussions, but there are amendments that are coming up fairly quickly where those general discussions can take place on the principles behind this part of the Bill. We are talking about the proposal to abolish ASBOs and introduce injunctions for the prevention of nuisance and annoyance. The proposal is that injunctions of this nature can be taken out against people from the age of 10 upwards. There was some discussion at Second Reading, which I read with great interest, about whether the age of 10 was appropriate or whether it was too low. The amendment provides an opportunity for some probing and consideration of that at this stage of the Bill.
It occurred to me that it might be useful to look at my party's policy on this matter. That could be a fairly original thing for someone in your Lordships’ House to do, but in any case I thought that it might be helpful. I discovered that we had agreed a policy paper within the past two years, Taking Responsibility: Policies on Youth Justice. Under the heading “More appropriate treatment of Young People in the Justice System”, it talked about the age of criminal responsibility. These are civil injunctions so, unlike ASBOs, they are not part of the criminal system—although as noble Lords pointed out at Second Reading, any young people involved in the system might not recognise a great deal of difference between the two.
The policy states:
“Liberal Democrats recognise that children aged under 14 often know the difference between right and wrong and have personal responsibility for their actions but that courts are not the appropriate way to deal with them”.
We are not talking about the wider youth justice system: we are dealing with what is in front of us. The paper went on to suggest that it would be better if there were specially trained panels to deal with young people of this age, similar to those in Scotland,
“with the emphasis on measures including restorative justice”,
and community sentencing. It continues:
“Panels would be expected to provide consequences which were proportionate, sought to reduce reoffending and provide amends to the victim as well as addressing any welfare needs the child had”.
They would also mean that,
“immature acts of youth do not result in a lifelong criminal record”.
Some of the principles behind this are embodied in the idea that the injunctions for the prevention of nuisance and annoyance—IPNAs, as I suppose we will have to call them—will bring in. The document went on to talk about the age of criminal responsibility across Europe, which varies, although the UK currently has the lowest ages in western Europe—10 in England and Wales and, at that time, eight in Scotland, although there is now new legislation in Scotland.
Baroness Hamwee (LD)
My Lords, my noble friend has rightly referred to the series of actions that the Government are proposing in the new regime. Like him, I welcome the fact that the new injunctions will not be criminal. I think he said that this distinction in the eyes of young people may not be as great as it is to us. Does he agree that that is particularly the case with the widespread powers that the court has on breach of such an injunction?
On this amendment, may I make a point that may come up time and again? This is on the place of guidance, as used by all those who will be involved in the new regime. Guidance is one thing. It is important and has a significant place in the way any measure is applied. However, guidance is only guidance. If an issue is really important, it should not be left to guidance and therefore, while it may or may not happen, it should be a matter for the legislation itself. I am glad that my noble friend has raised this issue right at the start of today.
The Earl of Listowel (CB)
My Lords, I speak as vice-chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on children and young people in care and leaving care. Half of young people in custody have experience of care: they have been fostered or have been in residential care. Many of those unfortunate young people, who are in that position principally because they have been abused by their families, are also likely to get tangled up in the law and in the situations with which we are concerned here.
I begin by putting two questions to the Minister. First, there has been concern in the past that the assumption relating to media reporting when dealing with children is reversed in these circumstances. One of the tabloid newspapers published a string of photographs of children and their addresses some time ago. This was a few years ago and perhaps things have moved on, but I would be grateful to the Minister if he could write to me on where things stand with regard to publicising the names and photographs of such children.
My second question relates to youth services. We all know that the devil makes work for idle hands. With the cuts that have come about, youth services have taken a very heavy blow. Research has shown that where there have been summer activities for young people, the crime rate among young people reduces. We need to think about the positive things that we can do as well as the negative things—the stick and the carrot, if you like—when we discuss this issue. What guidance and advice on protecting youth services are being offered by central government to local authorities at this difficult time? In particular, what advice is being offered to the new PCCs, which have a lot of resources and which could perhaps funnel some of them towards supporting youth services? I was very gratified to hear recently how much support the Government are giving to mentoring young people in the criminal justice system and in schools. That information would be helpful.
I am sorry to speak for so long but I should like to make just one point. Many of these young men—boys, I should say—grow up without a father in the home. We know that two-thirds of black boys in the United States grow up without a father in the home. According to the OECD, the level of lone parents in this country is even higher than that, so many boys here are growing up without fathers in the home. The risk is, and my experience shows this time and again, that such young men feel a sense of guilt. They are not rational in trying to understand why their fathers are not interested in their lives. They think that it is something that they did that caused it. I can think of an occasion when I was with a group of looked-after children in Parliament. Somebody popped their head in to ask a question, suggesting that somebody might have done something wrong, and there was an immediate look of guilt among them—“What have we done wrong? What are we to blame for?”. You hear from adults who have had such an experience that they are ridden with guilt and feel negative about their lives, even about the good things in it. The risk is that, by having a low age of criminal responsibility or by introducing these measures for people of such a young age, the state is coming along and saying, “Yes, there isn’t anything good in you. We will put your photograph in the local newspaper. You will be described as a bad person”. In that, we are reinforcing what their parents have told them and what their experience has been.
I remember as a boarder at school becoming particularly attached to my housemaster, who was with me for several years. When he moved on to be the headmaster of a new school, for several weeks I would ask myself before going to bed at night, quite unreasonably, what I had done to him that was driving him away. I felt guilt for driving him away. I cannot stress enough that my experience points to such a sense of guilt in these young people. Yes, they must be made to feel responsible; no, they should not be allowed just to be called victims. There are sanctions available but I worry that there may be a perverse outcome if we keep the age as currently proposed in the Bill. I look forward to the Minister’s response.
Lord Ramsbotham (CB)
My Lords, 10 days ago, a number of us debated in this House the Second Reading of the Age of Criminal Responsibility Bill, introduced by the noble Lord, Lord Dholakia. I commend some of the things that were said then about the ability of children of the age of 10 to comprehend fully all the businesses of the criminal justice system when they were motivated against them. During the debate I cited the fact that the well known 10 year-olds Thompson and Venables, responsible for the murder of Jamie Bulger, were said by the psychiatrist involved in the case to have a developmental age of four.
You cannot expect a child with the developmental age of four to be able to comprehend exactly what is involved in the criminal justice system, whether it is an injunction, which does not carry a criminal record, or an anti-social behaviour order, which does. I am glad that the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, introduced age very early in this Bill, because all the way through we ought to have at the back of our minds that we are talking about anything to do with children of the age of 10.
We are way below the United Nations recommendation that the age of criminal responsibility should be nearer 15. We are way below what happens in Scotland and countries such as China. I am not sure that it is civilised to throw the criminal justice system at children of 10. Therefore, while I am glad that the intention is not that the injunction should carry a criminal record, we ought to take seriously the question of whether 10 is an appropriate age to start whatever process we have, because within society there should be other ways of doing it. I know that these are not very satisfactory at present, but let us not forget the conditions in which a lot of these children live their lives. I have always thought that it was unfortunate that Mr Blair, in his famous statement about being,
“tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime”,
rather lost sight of being tough on the causes. It seems to me that we have to get to grips with the causes, as much as anything else, when we propose the injunctions and so on that we are talking about.
The other thing that concerns me is that we have here a Home Office Bill that talks about children, while in the Moses Room we have the Children and Families Bill, which also talks about children. We learn there that the Department for Education is not actually the key organisation in the development of children initially, but the Department of Health. Then we find that the Department for Work and Pensions has a role to play in all this, as, of course, does the Department for Communities and Local Government. Therefore all sorts of initiatives are going on, all aiming at the same thing, which lack co-ordination. I feel that there ought to be a Minister of child development in the Cabinet Office, responsible for pulling all these threads together, otherwise we will go charging off in a lot of directions, which will be unco-ordinated, and the casualties will be the very people whom this Bill claims to protect.
Lord Hope of Craighead (CB)
My Lords, perhaps I might follow my noble friend Lord Ramsbotham on an issue which I raised at Second Reading: the position of the court granting an order. I raised the question of whether there was anything in the Bill that provided for rules to be made requiring the court to make sure that the individual understood the order that was being made, bearing in mind the consequences if the injunction was to be breached.
I think I am right in saying that nothing in the Bill requires rules to be made to deal with that matter, but will the Minister tell us whether the guidance deals with the position of the child in court? Obviously, the guidance deals with the steps preliminary to taking this action against the individual. However, if the age of 10 is to be adhered to, it is extremely important—for all the reasons that the noble Lord has given—that the individual fully understands the consequences of the order, as well as the need to obey it.
If there are no provisions in the Bill about rules to be made, it comes back to the guidance and the responsibility on those who are guiding the individual to ensure that the order is fully understood, and that there is a reasonable prospect of the child fulfilling what he or she is required to do.
Lord Harris of Haringey (Lab)
My Lords, is not part of the problem that the Government are trying to sweep away a whole range of different responses to anti-social behaviour and replace them with what is essentially a single measure, at least as far as the individual is concerned, and that therefore there is no gradation? There is no way to modulate what is done or provide a specific response to individual circumstances. That seems to be what is causing this problem. If there were some gradation, there might well be measures that it would be appropriate to take against children of the age of 10 or 11, who have an understanding of when they are behaving outside societal norms. However, there would not be the same level of sanction implicit in breaching an injunction.
Part of the difficulty with all of the amendments which your Lordships will be considering today is that we are left, essentially, with one type of measure to deal with a multiplicity of problems. That is why trying to find the right balance as to how best to be effective against those problems is one difficulty. Because the Government have decided simply to do away with all the existing arrangements and replace them with one simple measure, we will face that difficulty.
Baroness Smith of Basildon (Lab)
My Lords, first, I welcome the fact that we are having this debate, because the injunctions were clearly the major issue raised at Second Reading. I think that most noble Lords who contributed to that debate raised this issue.
However, I start by saying that the late scheduling of today’s Committee sitting is rather unfortunate. There will be noble Lords who would have wished to table amendments to today’s debate but who, given that the sitting was scheduled only on the last sitting day before Recess last week, may not have had the opportunity to do so. The noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, made the point that we now have a clash with the Children and Families Bill, which is also in Committee as we speak. I suspect that, given the nature of the subject before us today, many noble Lords who are in that Committee would also wish to contribute here. My final plea is that this time yesterday I was in Argentina, and I arrived in the UK only a few hours ago. I promise not to do my Eva Peron impression on this issue—although perhaps in passion if not in length. The scheduling is unfortunate, and I hope that the Minister will take that message back. I would not want noble Lords who have a contribution to make to this debate to be unable to do so.
The noble Lord, Lord Greaves, has done us a service with his amendment, and I am also eager to probe the Government’s thinking on this issue as well. I am certainly not against children and young people being held responsible for their actions; we defined that principle in anti-social behaviour orders. We have had some debate today about the criminal age of responsibility for young people, but the amendment and the Bill are not really about that. They are about whether a young person aged 10 is likely, on the balance of probabilities, to cause annoyance or nuisance to anyone. I am not a parent, but my experience of 10 and 11 year-old children is that they inevitably cause nuisance and annoyance to somebody at some point. I do not know whether the Bill is an appropriate vehicle to make that kind of behaviour subject, on the balance of probabilities, to such an injunction. I find that somewhat strange and I would like the Minister to develop his thinking and explain why the Government think that it is appropriate.
I can think of numerous examples where 10 and 11 year-olds would cause nuisance and annoyance: persistently kicking a ball at a fence, breaking that fence or causing disruption in the neighbourhood. That is the very point that my noble friend Lord Harris made: the Government are trying to squeeze a range of interventions into one which, inevitably, will not be appropriate in every case.
I wonder, if a complaint is made about a young person aged 10 or 11 causing nuisance or annoyance, how the police are going to investigate to see whether it is appropriate that such an injunction be placed on that young person. The JCHR made the point that there is no requirement whatsoever in the Bill to judge what is in the best interests of the child before such an injunction is imposed. It would be helpful if the Government would explain their thinking why it would be appropriate to issue an injunction when a 10 or 11 year-old may cause nuisance or annoyance.
Lord Faulks (Con)
Perhaps the noble Baroness can help the House. Section 1 of the Crime and Disorder Act 1998, passed by the previous Government, permitted local authorities to apply for ASBOs in respect of persons aged 10 or over, subject to conditions. Does the party opposite have a changed view now, in view of the amendment?
Baroness Smith of Basildon
We want the Government to justify their position. As I said at the beginning, I think it appropriate for young people to be held responsible for their actions, but I want to probe why the Government think that this kind of injunction is appropriate. The anti-social behaviour order, as we shall debate later, required a much higher level of proof of nuisance. In the injunctions contained in amendments made in 2003 to the Housing Act, there is a lower level, as we have heard from the housing associations which have contacted us. In this specific instance, I think that the Government need to justify why they consider this injunction appropriate as the only means of dealing with such behaviour.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Home Office (Lord Taylor of Holbeach) (Con)
My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Greaves for tabling this amendment, because it does seem to be a good place to start. The issue has certainly triggered a lot of arguments from colleagues, if I may say so. We have set this age of 10 because that is the age at which children are currently deemed capable of being responsible for their actions under the criminal law. My noble friend showed quite clearly that this is something that has been enshrined in legislation for some time, but I emphasise that the focus of the injunction is to nip issues and problems in the bud.
Many of us agree that the move away from automatic criminalisation of young people is a step in the right direction; noble Lords have backed the Government’s decision to move in that direction. Breach of an injunction does not result in a criminal conviction, giving the young person a chance of reform with a clean slate. This is not the case with anti-social behaviour orders, where breach is a criminal offence; this change has been widely welcomed by, among others, the Home Affairs Committee in another place. In addition to the injunction, positive requirements can be used to help address the causes of a young person’s anti-social behaviour, to help them to turn their life around before that behaviour escalates to something more serious.
We have also built in requirements for the local youth offending team to be involved at different stages in the process, to allow for the proper and thorough consideration of the needs of the young person. This goes far beyond what was required for the anti-social behaviour order. Furthermore, on the recommendation of the Home Affairs Committee, we have limited the maximum period of an injunction to 12 months where it is issued against someone under the age of 18, whereas the minimum duration of an ASBO is two years. Twelve months will provide agencies with sufficient time for them to work with other agencies to address any underlying issues driving anti-social behaviour. It strikes the right balance between providing victims with the respite they need and sending a strong message to young people that anti-social behaviour is not acceptable.
My noble friend Lady Hamwee emphasised the importance of the guidance. We have published draft guidance for front-line professionals and I hope that noble Lords will take time to have a look at it. I think they will find that it complements what the Bill seeks to do, and it is a very important document. It is available on the Home Office website, but if those who want a hard copy let me know, I will ensure that one is sent to them. It will be relevant to the youth offending teams and, in relation to Part 6 of the Bill, to police and crime commissioners; again, my noble friend mentioned how important the role of the PCCs could be. We are consulting on the draft guidance at the moment, and we would welcome comments from noble Lords on what it should include.
The noble Earl, Lord Listowel, asked about reporting restrictions. We are going to come to that issue; it is in this early part of the Bill and will be debated as we have amendments down to discuss it. Amendment 21A has been tabled by my noble friend Lady Hamwee. I hope that the noble Earl will be able to be involved in that debate.
The noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, mentioned that the House is of course considering the Age of Criminal Responsibility Bill, introduced by my noble friend Lord Dholakia. He also questioned the risk of a lack of co-ordination across government. I hope—indeed, I have had private conversations with the noble Lord about this—that all this legislation is of a piece. It is designed to address the failure of Government to get on a child-focused agenda. The IPNA in particular is part of our Home Office legislation to reinforce child focus, and victim focus, in the same legislation so that we successfully tackle anti-social behaviour.
The noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope of Craighead, mentioned the question of the guidance and whether courts could be included in it. In theory, court rules could cover this, provided that the relevant rule-making committees agreed. We will consider the utility of this, as well as whether guidance could play a useful role here. I look forward to hearing from the noble and learned Lord on this issue.
If I may say so to the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, the timing of this particular day’s business, which I think all noble Lords will have found themselves swotting up on a little more earnestly than they might otherwise have done, was agreed through the usual channels, and indeed I understand from my colleague that the proposal was welcomed by the opposition Chief Whip, although I was not in the Chamber at the time.
I emphasise to the noble Baroness that the IPNA is not the only means of addressing anti-social behaviour by children. We have made it clear in the draft guidance that the police, local authorities and others should consider a non-interventionist basis in the first instance if they can do so. The Bill also provides for more serious cases at the other end with the criminal behaviour order, so there is a flexible response to the phenomenon. As I said earlier, the youth offending teams—
Lord Harris of Haringey
I am grateful to the Minister for giving way. Will he give us some examples of when he thinks it will be appropriate to use the injunction route for a child of 10 or 11? What does he envisage as the penalties in the event of breach?
The Earl of Listowel
My Lords, perhaps I could save the Minister some time. Following on from those two questions, it is comforting to hear that this is not as strong a method as I had been concerned about. Much of what the Minister has said has been reassuring. However, if one draws children into the support of the youth offending teams, they might say, “I am with all those others who are involved with the criminal law now if the youth offending teams are with me”. Does the Minister understand that concern? I hope that that relates to what the noble Lord was asking
Lord Taylor of Holbeach
That follows on from where I was in my argument. The engagement of youth offender teams is key to this issue. They welcome the opportunity of intervening earlier—pre-offending, one might say—because one of the deficiencies of the current system is that the remedy lies in an anti-social behaviour order, which is a rather heavy hammer with which to deal with the problem. This is much more nuanced. I cannot answer the noble Lord in specifics because I am not thinking quickly enough on my feet. However, I hope I have reassured him that the early stages of anti-social behaviour are likely to be dealt with informally, as they would be at present. The injunction method gives a framework for remedial activity, particularly with a young offender, but we should remember that IPNAs apply to others as well as young people.
Lord Harris of Haringey
I am grateful to the noble Lord for attempting to answer the point. The amendment deals specifically with young people. Before we come to Report, could the noble Lord write to me and other noble Lords setting out, in more detail, his thinking on the circumstances which will lead to an IPNA for a young person when everything else has failed? What does he see as being the consequences of a breach? It sounded to me as though the consequence was a referral to a criminal behaviour order and the youth offending team process. I am not suggesting he try and answer now: he clearly wants to have the information in front of him. However, it would be helpful to the Committee to have that information.
Lord Taylor of Holbeach
The penalties, set out in Schedule 2, include up to two years’ detention for children of 14 or over, but only in exceptional cases. The noble Lord has invited me to write to him on this issue and I am very happy to do so. I hope he also has the opportunity to read the guidance because that will help in his understanding of how the IPNA is meant to operate on the ground, in particular cases, and will help inform him just as much as my letter will do.
Baroness Smith of Basildon
I am sorry to intervene on the noble Lord, but I asked a question about Article 3 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and the comment made by the Joint Committee on Human Rights that this Bill has no requirement to consider a child’s best interests, their specific needs or learning difficulties. Why does the Bill have no reference to that?
Lord Taylor of Holbeach
That will be the subject of a later amendment, but I can reassure the noble Baroness that, as a legal process is involved, the courts have to take into account the human rights of anybody who is before them. It is not for the Bill to make that explicit: it is a matter of practice within the courts.
The Earl of Listowel
My Lords, I am very grateful to the Minister for the care with which he is responding to these questions. I would be grateful if he would drop me a line about the advice the Government might offer the new police and crime commissioners on funding youth services. It is so important that children have something to do with themselves. At this very difficult time, youth services are being cut right to the bone. Therefore the new police and crime commissioners have a lot of resources that they can choose to focus wherever they please; if some of those went to youth services that would be very helpful.
Lord Taylor of Holbeach
To respond to the noble Earl, 38 of the 41 police and crime commissioners listed anti-social behaviour as one of their major priorities in their crime plans, so the subject is at the top of the list. Certainly one would hope that as well as dealing with the consequences of anti-social behaviour, that could be converted into preventive action. I beg to ask my noble friend to withdraw his amendment.
Lord Greaves
My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for trying to withdraw my amendment before I do, but he is a bit too enthusiastic. I am grateful to all noble Lords who have taken part in this discussion, which has been useful. It has shown that there is not quite as much clarity about how the youngest children in particular—10, 11 and 12 year-olds—will be dealt with in the new system. I hope that perhaps the Government might find ways to be clearer about that as the Bill proceeds. I am sorry that the noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Basildon, had to dash back from Argentina. Since she took up her responsibilities on the Opposition Front Bench I have admired her contributions to this House. I never quite thought of her as Eva Perón, but perhaps she can sing to us as well—that may be a thrill in store.
The Minister said that the Government are replacing ASBOs, which are a “heavy hammer”, with a more nuanced approach. The noble Lord, Lord Harris of Haringey, pointed out that they are doing this by sweeping away a whole range of means that perhaps on the face of it ought to provide a more nuanced approach and a greater choice of measures in each case, and replacing it with one. The crux of the matter—whether this injunction will work for young people and for people generally—depends on whether it is sufficiently flexible. The Minister referred to the draft guidance that has been published. For much of the anti-social behaviour parts of the Bill this draft guidance is still very skeletal. The part of this draft guidance that deals with the new injunctions and the way in which they might be the end of a series of actions is one of the better parts, although it can no doubt be further improved.
In particular, as far as these very young people—10 and 11 year-olds—are concerned, it is crucial that the measures and the intervention are there to prevent them ever getting to the juvenile court for an injunction. In my experience of kids in my area who have had ASBOs, once they are given one, for most of them the system has failed. There will be the same sort of thing with the IPNAs. Once kids are hauled up before a system of justice and have these things imposed on them, perhaps without sufficient support to make sure that they adhere to them and do not breach them, for most of them the system has failed at that stage. They are far from being rescued from a life of difficulties and crime—they are rather being set on the road towards it. That is my experience of people in our area. We all hope that this new system will be better for them.
Having said that, I am very grateful for the Minister’s careful comments, which set the Committee off to a good start as far as the anti-social behaviour parts of the Bill are concerned. I ask the Government to think again whether 10 is the right age for this. In the mean time, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Lord Greaves
Lord Greaves
My Lords, in moving Amendment 19B, I shall speak also to Amendments 20E and 22Q in the same group. The relationship between the new systems and statutory nuisances might appear a slightly obscure subject but I do not think it is obscure. It is fundamental to how it will work on the ground and to the workability of the measures in the Bill. Amendment 20E introduces a third condition for using IPNAs—injunctions for the prevention of nuisance and annoyance—which is that they do not cover the same ground as existing statutory nuisance powers.
Amendment 22Q leaps forward a little in the Bill to community protection notices, which are a parallel measure that the Bill introduces, again sweeping away quite a number of former powers into one power to prevent local nuisance such as litter, dog nuisances or whatever it may be. This states:
“A community protection notice may not be issued if the conduct constitutes a statutory nuisance under any other enactment”.
With these amendments I am trying to probe the relationship between the new measures and statutory nuisances, but also perhaps to probe the relationship between IPNAs and community protection notices. It is not entirely clear to me in what circumstances one might be appropriate and in what circumstances the other might be appropriate. It would help if the Minister could clarify that.
The Explanatory Notes to the Bill, I should say in passing, are of a considerably higher quality than some of the Explanatory Notes we get to Bills, which simply churn out the wording of the Bill in a slightly different way. The Explanatory Notes to this Bill make a real effort to explain what is behind the Bill, previous legislation, what it is replacing and the logic behind the proposals. Therefore, I should like to congratulate whoever in the Home Office wrote these. I do not usually congratulate the Home Office on anything, but on this occasion I do, very much.
It sets out some of the most common statutory nuisances:
“Noise … Artificial light … Odour … Insects … Smoke … Dust … Premises”.
We can all think of occasions when the troughings, or whatever they call them in the rest of the world, are leaking with water down the downspouts and covering everyone who goes past. The list goes on:
“Fumes or gases … Accumulation or deposit”—
which gives rise to all sorts of images—
“Animals kept in such a manner or place as to be prejudicial to health or a nuisance”,
and, indeed, any other matters in enactment.
These are clearly problems, or nuisances, which it is also intended that the new community protection notices should cover at least to a degree. The Explanatory Notes say that the community protection notice is intended to,
“deal with unreasonable, ongoing problems or nuisances which negatively affect the community’s quality of life by targeting the person responsible”.
Specifically they will replace litter notices, some dog legislation and so on.
Part 3 of the Environmental Act 1990 places a duty on a local authority to investigate complaints of statutory nuisance from people living within its area. There is clearly an overlap here. The question I ask is: will the use of an IPNA or a community protection notice preclude later prosecution for a statutory nuisance if the investigations reveal, or the officers concerned come to the view, that there is indeed a statutory nuisance involved? Will the community protection notice be overridden or withdrawn if it is found that there is a statutory nuisance, or is there a choice? Will it be a pragmatic decision on the ground at any given time, or can the two go hand in hand? Can a CPN or an injunction be proposed and be going through at the same time as a prosecution for statutory nuisance is taking place?
Baroness Hamwee
My Lords, I have amendments tabled later on community protection notices and how statutory nuisance is to be dealt with, but I use this opportunity to ask the Minister a couple of questions.
In the Commons, the Government took out the exclusion from community protection notices of statutory nuisance—it was in Clause 40(5)—saying that they had established a technical working group including representatives from the police, the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health and the Chartered Institute of Housing to draft clear guidance as to what to use when. I should declare an interest. I am a vice-president of the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health, which is why it has come to me on this issue. It has told me that it was asked for a comment at one point but that it is not aware of the technical working group. Can the Minister explain to the Committee what is happening in that area?
The institute’s concern is about confusion over who should do what, whose responsibility it should be and whether, in the case of some nuisances, those who might have powers to deal with them are likely to have the technical knowledge. The point was made to me that you can tell what litter is, but it is not always easy to tell when noise is a statutory nuisance, because so many conditions and criteria surround it. I would be grateful for some help and news, which might shorten our debate later—although, of course, it might not.
Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon (Con)
My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Greaves for his amendments and my noble friend Lady Hamwee for her comments. It is interesting that she talks about noise. In one’s own personal experience, what is music to some is noise to others. I think we shall be returning to this.
With regard to the amendments to the new injunction, it is our view that they could make the actual process much slower and more bureaucratic—akin to the orders that we seek to replace. It would not help professionals deal with anti-social people and, more importantly, would not help victims who have to endure the perpetrator’s behaviour.
The new injunction is designed to be used quickly and, in many cases, preventively, to stop problem behaviours before they escalate. These problem behaviours will not always relate to a statutory nuisance. Therefore, to include an additional condition which suggests that statutory nuisance should be considered every time would, in all likelihood, result in some social landlords or police forces being unable to act quickly to protect the victim. We expect social landlords and police forces to work in partnership with local councils to deal with shared problems, such as anti-social noise nuisance. If social landlords and police forces felt obliged to seek advice from the local council’s statutory nuisance team before every injunction, this could delay the process of the application unnecessarily, and lead to victims suffering even more. Moreover, this new third limb of the test could open up the process to prolonged and costly legal challenges, as respondents sought to argue that their conduct amounted to a statutory nuisance.
The same is true of my noble friend’s amendment to Clause 40. As he will be aware, we had originally excluded statutory nuisance from situations in which a community protection order could be issued. However, after discussing the matter at length with environmental health officers and other professionals, we discovered that this exemption could result in an undesirable scenario. Some perpetrators might use the appeal mechanism to go unpunished via either the statutory nuisance or the breach of the community protection notice.
My noble friend Lady Hamwee is correct that the Opposition Front Bench raised such concerns in Committee in the Commons. Having considered the matter further, the Commons was content to make this change on Report. So I ask my noble friend to accept my assurances that we continue to work closely with statutory nuisance experts, to ensure that the guidelines reflect the important rule that the regime plays in protecting communities from behaviour that is a nuisance or prejudicial to health. In addition, I assure my noble friend Lord Greaves that the issue of a community protection notice, or the granting of an injunction by the court—which was a specific question he asked—in no way discharges the local authority from its statutory duty to serve an abatement notice where behaviour meets the required threshold.
I say to my noble friend Lady Hamwee that our draft guidelines already deal with the interface between statutory nuisances and the new powers in the Bill. I can reassure her that we continue to engage with environmental health practitioners on how this guidance can be further developed in advance of the commencements.
My noble friend Lord Greaves also asked about the choices available. There is no choice as to whether a local authority serves an abatement notice for statutory nuisance. It must serve one if it is satisfied that a matter is a statutory nuisance. He referred to the Explanatory Notes. There is a good example in there that is illustrative of what may be a nuisance, but not a statutory nuisance. A dog bounding over a fence, or through a hole in a fence, can be a nuisance. Recently, I experienced that with my young son, aged 20 months. Suddenly, a dog scurried under a fence, and appeared next to him. It was certainly more than a nuisance to his father, who was far more startled, whereas the dog was just being playful. In those cases, the first and most sensible thing for anyone who is trying to be a good neighbour to do is to talk their neighbour and see if the matter can be resolved locally. Where such behaviour persists, a non-statutory injunction is not appropriate, and a sensible solution is required before putting it on to a more serious basis.
Let me reassure my noble friend Lady Hamwee once again that the Government continue to talk to experts in the field. Based on my explanation, I hope that my noble friend will withdraw his amendments.
Lord Greaves
My Lords, I have found the Government’s answer to these amendments a bit less satisfactory than their answer to the previous group. We will get on to community protection notices later but I think that the last example that the Minister put forward was a good one. It provided a good reason why CPNs may be a very important and useful new power compared with what currently exists: they will not relate specifically to one thing, such as litter, dogs or whatever, but will be a general power based on whether an anti-social nuisance is taking place.
If I may say so, the other examples that the Minister gave show that the people here who are preparing these things and explaining to us how they will work do not fully understand how things work on the ground, if they work well. Noble Lords seem to think that the police and social landlords operate in one little area and that the local authority is something quite different. Where these things work well, those different groups work together on these issues all the time. The first people to go and investigate the noise may or may not be the police and it may or may not be the social landlord. However, most people who experience anti-social behaviour do not live in social housing. In my experience and, I think, that of many people, most people who experience anti-social behaviour live in private tenanted accommodation, and therefore social landlords are not relevant. The people who turn up to deal with the noise nuisance may be local authority officers. In my part of the world, there is a scheme in which the local authorities work together. They have an out-of-hours service whereby, even at three o’clock on a Sunday morning, somebody will answer the telephone and try to do something about it.
Therefore, if things work well, they work well because people on the ground from those three agencies, as well as from other agencies that may exist locally—some of them voluntary—work together in that way. That is why I think that saying that, on the one hand, there will be the council and the environmental health officers with their statutory nuisance abatement powers and, on the other hand, there will be everybody else with these powers is not quite how it is going to work. I hope that it will work but locally everything has to be much more flexible than the Minister seemed to suggest.
The guidance is going to be crucial but, as it stands, I do not think that it is adequate in this area. I am aware that work is taking place to improve it but, when it comes down to it, the idea that local authorities will stop the police or a social landlord going ahead and taking action because they may be investigating and they have other powers is just not how it works. In any case, even a local authority may have a statutory duty to serve an abatement notice if it is satisfied that a statutory nuisance is taking place, but in practice that is not how it works. In practice, a local authority will always go down the route of contacting the people involved, as well as the landlord, and attempting to resolve the matter without serving a notice. If it does serve a notice and the matter gets to court because people appeal against the notice, then, if the local authority has not gone out of its way to resolve the matter, the court will send it back and say, “You’re not having this. Go and do it properly”.
Having said all that, if they are willing, some further discussions on this matter with the Government in the mean time would be very helpful. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Baroness Mallalieu
Baroness Mallalieu (Lab)
I shall also speak to Amendments 20A and 20D, which are grouped with Amendment 19C. I speak on behalf of the noble Lord, Lord Dear, who regrets that he is unable to be in his place today.
I think everybody agrees that anti-social behaviour is a very real problem and that the authorities have to be able to prevent innocent people having their lives made a misery by it. There can always be improvements to whatever system is in place. However, most of us—if not all of us—also agree that civil liberties are also precious, and freedom of expression is particularly so, as it is often through the expression of ideas that society is changed for the better. These three amendments are tabled with the aim of helping the Government to get the balance right between the two. Many of the people who spoke at Second Reading on this Bill—and many, many more who have written to and lobbied Peers on all sides of this House—feel that Clause 1, as presently drafted, has got the balance wrong.
A law to tackle anti-social behaviour must surely be precise, targeted and given proper safeguards. If not, it would be capable of undermining fundamental human freedoms; it would be likely to distract the authorities and swamp the courts, hampering the tackling of genuine social problems effectively. As it stands at the moment, Clause 1 creates what we are already calling here IPNAs: injunctions to prevent nuisance and annoyance. The very wording exposes the main problem in the present drafting, because you cannot actually outlaw nuisance or annoyance by all people and in all places. The concept of both of those things without a proper definition is vague and, above all, subjective.
We are talking here about a change of law that will apply to any person in any place, public or private. Clause 1(2) says that injunctions can be sought by a whole range of bodies and individuals in relation to conduct that is merely,
“capable of causing nuisance or annoyance to any person”.
That pretty much covers all human life: there is no human activity, I suggest, that does not annoy someone somewhere. This test has been borrowed from the context of housing, which involves neighbours and people living in close proximity who cannot simply move out or look the other way or pay no attention. The present test is very carefully restricted to conduct affecting the housing management functions of the relevant landlord. It is quite another thing, however, to apply it to the high street, the park, the sports stadium, the countryside at large or Parliament Square. It risks being used against every single one of us for something we do, have done or might do in the future—protestors; people with noisy children playing outside; people preaching in the street; people canvassing; people ringing church bells; pet owners; carol singers; clay-pigeon shooters; and even nudists, whom I have to say have written to me and a number of other noble Lords in very considerable numbers, concerned that they are likely to be targeted as people who are “capable of causing … annoyance”. However, it is not just those groups: it is all of us who are potential targets of this imprecise, all inclusive drafting.
We live in a crowded island; nuisance and annoyance are inevitable consequences of our lives which demand a degree of give-and-take and tolerance. Legislation must be targeted, or our courts will simply be clogged with the trivial and vexatious; real serious nuisance and actual serious annoyance will go unchecked. They will simply not get a look-in and the IPNA will become discredited.
The IPNA is intended to replace, among other things, the ASBO, which a magistrate, at present, can make if two conditions are met. The first is if somebody has acted in an anti-social manner, which is defined, very sensibly, as,
“conduct which caused or was likely to cause harm, harassment, alarm or distress to one or more persons not of the same household as him or herself”.
The second condition about which they have to be satisfied is,
“that such an order is necessary to protect relevant persons from further anti-social acts by him”.
The range of bodies which can apply for an ASBO is narrower than that for an IPNA, which obviously reduces the number of applications and the scope for abuse.
The IPNA is applicable to everyone but, most importantly, there is a vast difference between the thresholds of the two. Instead of targeting harassment, alarm or distress, Clause 1, as I have already said, catches any behaviour by any person that is capable of causing nuisance or annoyance. Each of us in this Chamber probably passes that threshold several times a day in the eyes of someone or another—in refusing to give way at Question Time or by talking for too long or too often. That is quite apart from outside this Chamber—snoring loudly in the Library or not putting newspapers back after reading them—or before we leave this House and venture into the outside world.
Clearly, there are other tests in Clause 1 but that it could at its base level encompass the most ordinary activities of human life is breath-taking. Further, instead of having to prove necessity, as under the ASBO, the courts for the IPNA application will operate the ordinary civil court test for injunctions; that is, deciding where the balance of probabilities lies. ASBOs currently are handled by the magistrates’ court, which must be convinced beyond reasonable doubt—in other words, the criminal standard of proof. But IPNAs are to be handled by the civil courts, which need to be convinced only on the balance of probabilities—the civil standard of proof—that a person has engaged in the alleged conduct.
Under Section 1(5) of the Crime and Disorder Act, where an ASBO is sought the individual has a defence if he can show that his conduct was “reasonable in the circumstances”. But, as yet, there is no reasonableness defence in Clause 1 of this Bill, although I see that the noble Lord, Lord Faulks, has a suggested amendment on the Marshalled List. Therefore, IPNAs have a far lower threshold with fewer safeguards, making them much easier to obtain than an ASBO. That is of course the Government’s intention. They want to reduce the present evidential burden, about which some have complained, and to speed up the court process.
There are strong arguments that most of the anti-social behaviour which the public worry about is caught by existing criminal law offences, such as criminal damage, public order and harassment laws. It is also said that it is not the lack of laws but the lack of political will and, I have no doubt, funding on the part of those responsible for enforcing those laws which renders them less effective than they should be. There are undoubtedly problems of court delays and not just with ASBO applications. However, the solution to that is surely not to remove civil liberty safeguards. Ironically, by making IPNAs easier to obtain than the old ASBOs, there is a real prospect that Clause 1 will slow courts down even further by clogging them with large numbers of IPNA applications. Some local authorities—notably Camden, which has a serious anti-social behaviour problem and has had considerable success with ASBOs—have expressed fear that this rebranding, as they call it, will not in the end prove an improvement.
In tabling these amendments, our concern is not with the Government’s attempts to make improvement to the present process for dealing with this sort of behaviour, which has broad support, but with proposing to do so effectively by placing injunctions on free speech and free movement without a court needing to be properly convinced of the need or the seriousness. If Clause 1 retained the definition of Section 1 in the Crime and Disorder Act, the current level of concern would simply not exist.
As it stands, a huge range of people and organisations from all parts of the political spectrum have already voiced serious disquiet. The Commons Home Affairs Committee said that Clause 1 is “far too broad”. The Joint Committee on Human Rights said that the nuisance and annoyance test,
“is not sufficiently precise to satisfy the requirement of legal certainty required by both human rights law and the common law”.
The noble Lord, Lord Macdonald, the former Director of Public Prosecutions, who unfortunately cannot be in his place today, has provided a most helpful legal opinion from the coalition Benches, in which he says of “nuisance and annoyance”:
“The phrase is apt to catch a vast range of everyday behaviours to an extent that may have serious implications for the rule of law … In my view, the combination of a low and vague threshold for the behavioural trigger, coupled with the civil standard of proof, creates an unacceptable risk that individuals will inappropriately be made subject of a highly intrusive measure that may greatly impact on their fundamental rights”.
He also criticises the lack of a necessity test and describes the safeguards as “shockingly low”.
Even the Association of Chief Police Officers, which broadly supports the IPNA thinks the threshold is unrealistically low and advocates a return to the harassment, alarm and distress test and the addition of a necessity test, both of which would be achieved by our amendments. Justice, Liberty, the Criminal Justice Alliance, the Standing Committee for Youth Justice, Big Brother Watch and countless other organisations and civil liberty groups, ranging right across the spectrum from the Christian Institute to the National Secular Society, have expressed their deep concerns about Clause 1. The three amendments tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Dear, and me seek to address their main concerns; there are other lesser ones. First is the standard of proof, which we say should be beyond reasonable doubt. Secondly, there is the absence of a necessity test, and, thirdly, the nuisance and annoyance threshold should be put back where it is at present with harassment, alarm and distress.
First, on Amendment 19A, the current ASBO legislation is applied by a magistrates’ court granting civil orders. When ASBOs were considered by the Judicial Committee of this House in 2002, it was held that the criminal standard of proof should determine whether anti-social behaviour had occurred. Given the huge impact such an order can have on an individual’s life and bearing in mind that an IPNA can make positive as well as negative requirements, we believe this standard must be retained. As the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Hale of Richmond, said, also in the Judicial Committee of this House, in 2008:
“There are some proceedings, though civil in form, whose nature is such that it is appropriate to apply the criminal standard of proof”.
We say this is one of them.
Secondly, the necessity test needs to be retained. The requirements of necessity and proportionality are enshrined in human rights law and it is important for them to appear in the Bill to reduce the risk of trivial applications and to help avoid unnecessary and disproportionate orders. Thirdly, in Amendment 20D the words “just and convenient” reflect the standard civil test and appear in the Bill. We believe that the higher test required by human rights law—“necessary and proportionate”—should be in Clause 1.
It is crucial that police, local authorities and the many other bodies which can apply for IPNAs can see for themselves in the statute the test that the court will be applying. This will focus minds and, we hope, reduce speculative, vexatious and inappropriate applications. Amendment 20A returns to the threshold test currently in use, “harassment, alarm and distress”. There is a real danger that if the currently proposed, worryingly low threshold is retained, we will create a situation every bit as bad as that under Section 5 of the Public Order Act, where the “insulting words” limb of the offence was used to silence unfashionable or politically incorrect speech. Noble Lords will remember that this House voted overwhelmingly and contrary to the direction of all party Whips to strike “insulting words” out of that legislation a year ago.
The present Clause 1 has united religious groups concerned with street preachers, children’s groups concerned about playground noise, and protest groups concerned that the temptation to seek IPNAs against inconvenient protesters, whether they be anti-frackers, anti-HS2ers, gay rights groups, Occupy or even the Countryside Alliance—in which I have an interest—will prove irresistible to people in authority. To take a test that works in one narrow set of circumstances, as the Government have done here, and try to apply it to the world at large is a recipe for unleashing a wave of unintended consequences. These three amendments are modest proposals that I hope will bring some real improvement and would not lead to the outrage that many have expressed about the current drafting. I beg to move.
Lord Lloyd of Berwick (CB)
My Lords, I had not intended to speak on this part of the Bill, so I am afraid that I have not done as much homework as I should. For many years, however, I have protested against using the civil law to do the work of the criminal law, because it leads to problems when you adopt that approach. For that reason I have always been uneasy about ASBOs. For example, it was years before it was decided—if it has now been decided—whether the standard of proof on ASBOs is the criminal standard or the civil standard but as near the criminal standard as makes no difference. So I shall not be sad to see the back of ASBOs.
Part 1 of the Bill deals with injunctions. Injunctions are a civil procedure. Therefore, on the face of it, one would expect to see the civil standard apply. When the question comes to whether the respondent is in breach of the injunction, the criminal standard applies under paragraph 1 of Schedule 2. That seems a sensible approach. With regret, therefore, I cannot support the noble Baroness’s Amendment 19C, but I am happy to support her other amendments.
Lord Faulks
My Lords, we are considering the powers to grant injunctions under Clause 1, but it is important to consider the other provisions in Part 1, particularly Clause 4, which specifies those who can apply for injunctions, including local authorities, housing providers, the local chief of police and various other agencies but excluding individuals.
The anxiety that has been generated by Clause 1 is understandable. This anxiety has been excellently analysed by the noble Baroness, Lady Mallalieu, but it needs to be closely examined to see whether it is justified. The Minister told the House at Second Reading that draft guidance had already been published for front-line professionals and referred to particular parts of that guidance. At page 24, it is specified that,
“in deciding what constitutes ‘nuisance or annoyance’, applicants must be mindful that this route should not be used to stop reasonable, trivial or benign behaviours that have not caused, and are not likely to cause, harm to victims or communities. For example, children simply playing in a park or outside, or young people lawfully gathering or socialising in a particular place may be ‘annoying’ to some, but are not in themselves anti-social. Agencies must make proportionate and reasonable judgements before applying for an injunction. Failure to do so will increase the likelihood that an application will not be successful”.
The jurisdiction to grant an injunction is given to the High Court or the county court, or the youth court in the case of a respondent aged under 18. The court has to be satisfied first that the respondent is engaged in anti-social behaviour and secondly that it is just and convenient to grant an injunction for the purpose of preventing him or her from engaging in anti-social behaviour in the future.
We should not underestimate the inherent safeguards that are present in that procedure. The expression “nuisance or annoyance” is well established in the context of landlord and tenant law and it has been statutorily incorporated into various housing Acts. The expression was introduced with little controversy by the Anti-Social Behaviour Act 2003. There is now a wealth of case law applying this test, which is applied by judges up and down the country. The words by themselves might be thought of as attracting remedies where actions complained of are relatively trivial, but in fact, for “nuisance and annoyance” to pass the threshold, it has to be to be something pretty substantial.
By the same token, judges are not easily persuaded that it is “just and convenient” to grant an injunction unless the court is satisfied that it is equitable to do so. The expression “just and convenient” is well established in law and will mean that the courts hesitate before granting injunctions, unless the behaviour complained of is such that the court considers it fair to do so. If a court were to be too draconian—as to which there has been little evidence in the past—then successful appeals would follow.
The provisions of Part 1 allow for a range of requirements to be included in injunctions, including if necessary a power of arrest. The terms of an injunction will of course depend on the particular facts of a case. Similarly, a power of arrest will be attached only if the seriousness of the allegations merits the exercise of such a power. A point made cogently by the Law Society in its briefing on this part of the Bill is that injunctions are used in the case of noise nuisance as an alternative to possession proceedings. They result in the person or their family staying in their homes, but with restrictions as to their conduct rather than their having to be evicted.
With respect, there seems to be a number of difficulties about the proposed amendments as explained by the noble Baroness, Lady Mallalieu. They would essentially create a criminal regime—there is a criminal offence later in the Bill—for low-level anti-social behaviour, in that before an injunction could be granted there would have to be proof beyond reasonable doubt. This would mean that hearsay evidence could not realistically be used. Witnesses are often afraid of the perpetrators of anti-social behaviour and give their complaints to a housing officer who can then present evidence. One should not underestimate the misery that can be experienced by residents of, let us say, a block of flats where one of the occupants is determined to make the rest of the occupants’ lives a misery. The amendment would probably necessitate seriously frightened residents having to give evidence and be cross-examined. It is much more likely that they would simply refuse to do so.
In our anxiety to ensure that civil liberties are preserved we should neither lose sight of the victims of anti-social behaviour nor underestimate quite what a scourge it can be. I understand entirely what lies behind this amendment and the concern expressed by a number of noble Lords that essential freedoms could be at risk if the powers under Part 1 were used too enthusiastically. However, I feel that the really substantial amendments here will emasculate the right to obtain an injunction under Part 1 and result in a failure to protect those who are the victims of anti-social behaviour. Nevertheless, by way of acknowledging the very real and sincere concerns that a number of people or groups have about Clause 1, I propose in my amendment, which I will outline shortly and is supported by the Joint Committee on Human Rights, that a degree of objectivity be imported into the definition of conduct capable of causing nuisance and annoyance. That amendment, which I will be submitting, would help, but I am afraid that I am against these amendments.
Lord Harris of Haringey
My Lords, I find myself in the difficult position of agreeing with much of the excellent speech by my noble friend Lady Mallalieu and much of the speech just made by the noble Lord, Lord Faulks. The reason for that is the mess that this Bill is. The reality is that the original concept of anti-social behaviour orders was introduced because of a real, prevalent problem in many parts of this country. The problem outlined by the noble Lord, Lord Faulks, is that of people whose lives were being made a misery by the actions of others, but because they were often frightened, or did not think that it was appropriate or possible, they would never bring those matters in a formal complaint and would be very reluctant to give evidence. That is why the test was lowered from the criminal standard of proof.
Those in this House who have been elected members, whether at local council level or who have been Members of Parliament, will have had brought to them cases of inter-neighbour disputes that have gone on for years. You tell them, “Keep a diary, keep a list” and so on, and they come back two, four or six weeks later with a completed list, none of which would be sufficient if we were still operating under the old system of a criminal standard of proof. That is why the previous Government introduced anti-social behaviour orders. I do not think that anyone suggests that anti-social behaviour orders have all worked perfectly, but they made a real difference to the lives of very many people. The reason was that we were changing the way in which those actions could be brought and lowering the standard of proof.
The problem with what the Government are doing is not that they are trying to simplify the system or make it better but that they have swept away what has over time developed and then moved to this system of applying for an injunction, or IPNA. By changing the test to one of nuisance and annoyance, they have opened up the prospect of a lower standard of proof being applied in far broader areas. We can all add to the list of things that cause nuisance and annoyance. While it is true that Clause 4 limits the list of organisations which might apply for an IPNA, it does not deal with the circumstances in which there will be very powerful local lobbying about much lower levels of nuisance and annoyance. The regime will be applied to local authorities; it will be applied to local housing providers—and an interesting question is what a local housing provider is. Is it somebody who happens to rent out one room? In which case, can they apply willy-nilly for IPNAs against all and sundry in the local neighbourhood? I am sure that this issue has been addressed in the guidance but that I have just not read it yet. There will be all sorts of cases where people raise matters which at the moment would not qualify for the ASBO procedure.
The reason why we are debating this amendment is that the Bill has created these anomalies. It would be clearly obnoxious for injunctions to be issued in respect of trivial matters on the basis of this lower level of proof. Equally, we are in danger, for those very legitimate reasons, of throwing away all the progress that has been made in the past few years by reverting to the criminal standard of proof. I think of my time as a local councillor and my time on the London Assembly, where much of my constituency work related to anti-social behaviour issues. The difference that it made for the local authority or for the housing association to be able to pursue these matters as they were able to under anti-social behaviour legislation, provided relief for many people. That is not to say that there were not problems or that some places were not more reluctant and so on. I shall propose an amendment later which states that there should be some coherent planning locally as to what the arrangements should be for pursuing IPNAs in a particular area and that there should be an anti-social behaviour strategy in local areas, but we will come to that later. However, the important point is that, because the Government have made such wholesale changes and have then tried to force them into the single IPNA process, we are in danger of sacrificing the civil liberties or well-being of many people who were protected by the regime of anti-social behaviour orders.
Lord Morris of Aberavon (Lab)
My Lords, we are all grateful to my noble friend Lady Mallalieu for raising these matters. She has spelled out her concerns and anxieties about what might be unintended consequences. We should always pause and think, particularly with regard to Amendment 19C, when a standard lower than the usual criminal standard is sought to be imported. I am always nervous of including any test other than the usual one in a criminal court. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Lloyd, has done a good service to us here in spelling out—and I am sure that he is right—the two parts of the procedures: civil, in order to obtain the injunction, then the usual criminal one, where there has been a breach or an allegation of a breach. This should reassure those of us who are anxious—and I was anxious when I first read it—of importing any lower standard.
I appreciate the remarks of my noble friend Lord Harris, who has dealt with this in part. I invite the House to stand back and try to deal with the mischief that we are concerned with of unacceptable behaviour in closely-knit communities. For more than 40 years, I represented an industrial constituency with large housing estates. People would come to my surgeries—as they did with my noble friend Lord Harris, who was in a slightly different capacity but with the same problem—and ask: “What can we do? We have been to see the housing manager, the police and everyone we can think of and nothing happens”. Time after time, we were impotent.
Far more frequently than would be admitted, the problem was that people were not prepared to come forward and give evidence, because they had to live in that community after the event. That is the crux of it. We are dealing with a real mischief. This is a small change to what we might expect of a standard of proof before any sanctions are imposed, but there are well-hallowed precedents for doing it in this way. Provided one maintains the usual criminal standard for a breach of it, then I for one am satisfied with Amendment 19C.
Lord Greaves
My Lords, do the Government expect more or fewer people to be arraigned before the courts for injunctions under this new system, compared with people given ASBOs? Have they made an assessment of that? This is important because, we hope, the number of people who are given the new injunctions or who at the moment are given ASBOs, are a minority—quite a small one—of people who cause some kind of low-level anti-social behaviour in the sort of communities that the noble and learned Lord has been talking about.
Do the Government have an assessment of how the new system will affect the numbers who get to the end of the road and have one of these badges—if that is what they are—put upon them? Secondly—I thought about this while listening to the noble Lord, Lord Harris of Haringey—the fundamental thing is: what level of resources are on the ground to deal with these problems and to prevent people getting either the new injunctions or ASBOs? The harsh reality is that in many parts of the country at the moment, that resource is going down.
In my area, what people might think of as a crime and disorder partnership—we call it a community safety partnership—has been extremely successful in the towns and wards of the borough. One meeting that I try to go to each month as a ward councillor is called a PACT meeting—police and communities together. It is a group of residents who meet police and councillors in the ward each month to talk about these problems: local crime and particularly disorder and anti-social behaviour. It works. Sometimes, a handful of people turn up. Then, when something erupts in some of the streets, a lot of people turn up and it provides a focus for dealing with these problems. However, it requires the local police to have the time and resources to take part in such activity. It also requires the local authority’s anti-social behaviour staff to be there and to be prepared to get involved at the case, area and street levels. If it is in an area of social housing, it involves the social housing providers as well. Other people get involved as well.
In our part of the world, that system is being slowly withdrawn for purely financial reasons, as the police cannot afford to devote the resources to it that they have done. If the police are given a choice between relatively high-level and low-level crime, they will put more resources into high-level crime. They might also be given a choice between low-level crime and local disorder or the preventative work where the local neighbourhood teams go round to talk to people, getting to know the patch and its lads and lasses who are hanging around on the streets and might get into bother. The police might find diversionary activities for them, if they have the resources. If that is going on, the system will work, but once that is withdrawn, then all the IPNAs, ASBOs and anything else in the world will not solve the problem. The numbers will increase, because the numbers who get to that level will increase, but the problems on the ground will get worse.
Lord Ponsonby of Shulbrede (Lab)
My Lords, I want to make one brief point which follows on from that made by the noble Lord, Lord Greaves. At Second Reading, the Minister made a lot of the breach rates for ASBOs; he said that they were about 60%. The point that I made in my Second Reading speech was that, in my experience as a sitting magistrate, breach rates have declined over the past few years as ASBOs have been more appropriately introduced. I have checked my recollection with my colleagues and I think that they would agree with my comments. Why does the Minister think that breach rates will decline when he is proposing through IPNAs to reduce the burden of proof to a balance of probabilities, and to address nuisance and annoyance rather than “harassment, alarm and distress”? Those two changes are very likely to lead to an increase in the number of breaches, which seemed to be a fundamental point in his seeking to replace ASBOs. I know that later in this Committee there will be a proposal to run the two systems in parallel, which seems a sensible way forward while the IPNA is bedded in.
Lord Ramsbotham
My Lords, in principle I am very keen on the idea that Governments should lay down what should happen and leave the how up to local areas to decide, because there will obviously be different local conditions. I remember that fairly soon after the ASBO was introduced, there was considerable concern about what great differences there were in how it was being introduced in different parts of the country. It was shown that there was something of a postcode lottery in it. I suspect that we have heard less and less of that over time because people have got used to the ASBO.
One reason for that is because the ASBO was quite tightly defined; the definition of what amounted to an ASBO was there. What concerns me about the injunction is that I agree with the Joint Committee on Human Rights that,
“conduct capable of causing nuisance or annoyance to any person”,
is insufficiently precise. I fear that if there is no more precision in this initially, we shall have exactly the same as we had with the introduction of the ASBO: there will be a postcode lottery. If the injunction is to be enforced properly—I support the idea of it not being a criminal activity—there is a need to sharpen up the precision to prevent that and to give better guidance to the local authorities who will have to enforce it.
Baroness Smith of Basildon
My Lords, this has been an interesting debate. All speakers have sought to be helpful to the Minister, perhaps seeking to protect the Government from themselves by this amendment—they were certainly not trying to be a nuisance or annoyance in identifying so many difficult issues that arise here. So I do not expect to have an IPNA taken out against us but, on the balance of the judgment that is in the legislation before us, I suppose we should wait and see. This debate strikes at the very heart of the issue, and the contributions that we have heard today reflect the balance of opinion at Second Reading.
The noble Baroness, Lady Mallalieu, made a very powerful case and addressed a number of the concerns that were raised, including the concerns of those who have argued against the amendment. Like the noble and learned Lord, Lord Morris of Aberavon, I spent a number of years as an MP, although not as many as he did. Anti-social behaviour was then and remains a very serious issue. I recall that many of those dealing with the problem welcomed ASBOs, despite some of the failings and problems we have heard about, and I think that ASBOs have improved with time and experience. The test of “harassment, alarm and distress” was rightly a higher bar than we see before us today, because it recognises the seriousness of the issue, but it also recognises the penalties for breaches of the order. That is an important point to make in the context of this debate.
I find it very interesting that, in the Second Reading debate and again today, the anti-social behaviour orders gained support from distinguished Members of your Lordships’ House with expertise in law, policing and the magistracy. There were criticisms, and I still have some criticisms about the implementation of anti-social behaviour orders and measures. There are those who do not understand how seriously and dreadfully victims of anti-social behaviour are affected. Unless you have suffered yourself or have spoken to people who have been through that totally debilitating experience, it can be hard to understand how that constant, unrelenting pressure of harassment, intimidating behaviour or excessive noise can leave people terrified of living in their own homes and very distressed. I remember one lady who I spoke to at great length on many occasions. She was so distressed by what some might regard as kids mucking around, but very seriously so, that she was terrified to live in her own home. We are now seeing ASBOs being more appropriately used and we have seen a reduction, as we have heard, in their breaches.
We have also heard that there can be injunctions for anti-social behaviour under housing legislation and that the test of causing nuisance and annoyance already exists, but that is in very limited and specific circumstances. The noble Baroness, Lady Mallalieu, made that very clear in her comments. Anti-social behaviour injunctions were brought in in 2003 and have been used sensibly and wisely since then. Today, we have all had correspondence from housing associations—in many cases, very similar letters—explaining why they want to retain the power they have and explaining the benefits they have been able to bring to their tenants, in many cases, very vulnerable tenants, because of those powers. Their letters highlight a problem referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Harris, a few moments ago, and by others; a problem which the Government have created by trying to rationalise the number of orders, procedures and interventions that can be taken against anti-social behaviour. Clearly, housing associations with very vulnerable tenants welcome the powers they have, but these are not appropriate for every single case of anti-social behaviour. We are not against all forms of injunctions but we are against making this test—on the balance of probability, for nuisance and annoyance—the test that should be applied in all cases where somebody complains about something that they consider to be anti-social behaviour.
In some cases there has been a misunderstanding that only small areas are covered; perhaps only social housing estates or council estates. In fact, anti-social behaviour, and certainly the test that the Government wish to apply, of nuisance or annoyance, is much wider spread than that. In many cases, injunctions to prevent nuisance and annoyance can involve similar and indeed wider matters than those raised in current ASBO applications. They can address relatively minor issues involving nuisance neighbours and minor disorder. Because as an order an ASBO can represent a serious slight upon the reputation of a respondent, as well as carrying serious consequences for breach, it is completely inappropriate for something of that seriousness to have a lower standard of proof to apply.
Lord Taylor of Holbeach
My Lords, I hope that I am never anything but positive. As I made clear at Second Reading, the provisions of the first six parts of the Bill, which deal with anti-social behaviour, are about protecting victims of anti-social behaviour. It was good to hear noble Lords across the House recognising that that is what lies at the heart of what we are trying to achieve here. It ensures that police, local authorities and all those other agencies that are listed in the Bill can, where necessary, take swift action to bring respite to both individual victims and communities. The noble Baroness, Lady Mallalieu, is right: the central purpose of the new injunction is to nip problems in the bud and intervene before anti-social behaviour escalates. It is essential for the threshold to be set at the right level for that to happen.
The amendments seek to retain the key features of the anti-social behaviour order that the Government are seeking to replace. I understand the arguments and the concerns that a number of noble Lords have expressed about the test of the new injunction and I have seen the legal opinion given by my noble friend Lord Macdonald of River Glaven, but I am sure it will not be a surprise that I am going to explain why we do not agree with these amendments and why I do not agree with my noble friend.
I fear that the effect of these amendments would be to weaken the effectiveness of the new injunction in providing relief to victims and communities. Amendment 19C seeks to replace the lower, civil standard of proof—on the balance of probabilities—with the higher, criminal standard of proof beyond reasonable doubt. Amendment 20A seeks to replace the “nuisance or annoyance” test for the IPNA with the anti-social behaviour test of “harassment, alarm or distress”. Finally, Amendment 20D seeks to revert from the requirement that it must be “just and convenient” to grant an IPNA to the test of “necessary and proportionate”.
As I have said, our reforms are about putting victims first. This means giving front-line professionals the right powers to protect victims and communities effectively from anti-social behaviour. The IPNA has been designed as a purely civil power which can be obtained quickly through the courts, to protect the public and stop an individual’s behaviour escalating.
It may interest noble Lords that the test of nuisance or annoyance was introduced in the Housing Act 1996 and subsequently amended by the Anti-Social Behaviour Act 2003 to extend to conduct capable of causing nuisance or annoyance. This test is used for the anti-social behaviour injunction. It is well recognised by the courts; they know it and are familiar with it. They apply it on a daily basis when deciding whether to grant injunctions to stop or prevent anti-social behaviour.
The term is also used in a number of other statutory contexts. For example, in Section 13 of the Criminal Justice and Police Act 2001 which relates to alcohol consumption in designated public places; in Section 9A of the Housing Act 1988 in respect of proceedings for possession; in Schedule 4 to the Local Government (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 1982 in respect of street trading consents; and in Section 142 of the Highways Act 1980 in respect of obstruction of highways. I could go on, but I have already demonstrated, with this list, that “nuisance or annoyance” is a widely used, statutory term that is understood by both front-line professionals and the courts.
It is therefore not surprising that the Law Society fully supports the use of the test in Part 1. Its recent briefing says:
“The Society strongly suggests that the test is retained and that judges are allowed to exercise their discretion and considerable experience in dealing with these matters. The test is already familiar to the courts and other partners working with families and offenders”.
That this is a well established test has been true for some time. When it was being considered in your Lordships’ House in 2003, the noble Lord, Lord Bassam—who was then Home Office Minister and is now Opposition Chief Whip, but who is unfortunately not in his place at the moment—made a similar point. He said:
“‘Nuisance or annoyance’ is a well-established legal test which the courts are perfectly comfortable to use”. [Official Report, 23/10/03; col. 1791]
That was true then and it is true now, which is why the Government believe—as the previous Government did—that this is the right test to use. To retain the test that applies for the ASBO, as these amendments seek to do, would increase the evidential burden on front-line professionals who are working hard to protect victims and deter perpetrators. It would hinder them in providing respite to victims and communities more quickly. That this will be the consequence of these amendments has been put clearly in the briefing submitted to your Lordships by the Social Landlords Crime and Nuisance Group, which says,
“we consider that these amendments are unnecessary and would, if carried, lead to unintended consequences and seriously disadvantage victims. They would also have significant adverse financial and other resource implications for agencies”.
In relation to the amendment in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Mallalieu, to apply the criminal standard of proof, their briefing note goes on to say:
“Raising the burden of proof to beyond reasonable doubt will effectively remove the ability to use professional evidence or hearsay, something which conflicts directly with the core purpose of the Bill, to deliver better outcomes for victims. To do so will make it extremely difficult to prove matters to the criminal standard without the victim giving evidence first-hand”.
These are telling points, which were reinforced by the noble and learned Lords, Lord Lloyd of Berwick and Lord Morris of Aberavon. They were also shared by the Chartered Institute of Housing, which also published a briefing note for your Lordships.
The central purpose of this new injunction is to nip problems in the bud and intervene before anti-social behaviour escalates to more serious levels or to criminality. That is in the interests of victims and perpetrators. To wait until these higher tests can be met would stop professionals from taking formal court action where it is necessary and from acting when there is more chance of the perpetrator addressing the underlying causes of their behaviour.
As to fears that injunctions will be handed out like confetti to stop children skateboarding or playing football in the street, or to silence street preachers giving public sermons, I can only quote again from the Law Society, which said:
“The Law Society supports retaining the legal test for the Injunction to Prevent Nuisance and Annoyance … as currently drafted in the Anti Social Behaviour Crime and Policing Bill. We do not agree with those who claim the test is too weak and should be strengthened by imposing conditions such as ‘seriousness’ or ‘malice’. Some are worried that the test is too weak and could result in preachers, buskers and even carol singers finding themselves subject to an injunction but the Law Society do not agree with this interpretation”.
Neither do I. The Law Society would not support these provisions if it had concerns that they would or could be used to stop children playing or people exercising their legitimate rights to freedom of assembly or freedom of expression.
I fully share the noble Baroness’s desire to ensure that these powers are used reasonably and proportionately. Significant safeguards are already provided for in the Bill, not least that an injunction must be authorised by a court. I am ready to consider further whether it would be appropriate to provide in the Bill that the court must consider, in the light of all the relevant circumstances, that it is reasonable to grant an injunction. I therefore urge noble Lords to listen to the Law Society and to the front-line professionals who are telling us, loud and clear, that these amendments are not necessary and would significantly weaken the provisions in the Bill.
If this amendment was made, it would make no difference at all to children doing the normal playful things that children do or to street preachers sermonising on the high street. However, it would make a real and detrimental difference to the victims of anti-social behaviour, who would not get the quick respite they need from those who make their lives a misery. The amendment loses sight of the victims of anti-social behaviour, who should be our first consideration. For that reason I urge the noble Baroness to withdraw it.
Lord Greaves
My Lords, before the noble Baroness does that, will the Minister answer the question that I asked? Do the Government believe that by significantly reducing both the level of the test and the level of proof required, there will be more IPNAs than there are ASBOs at the moment, and if not, why not?
Lord Taylor of Holbeach
I apologise to my noble friend for not answering his question. I was asked two questions—the noble Lord, Lord Ponsonby, also asked one. I was in a hurry because I am aware that we have a busy day. However, I can quote from the published impact assessment:
“The estimated volume of Crime Prevention Injunctions issued is assumed to follow the orders they replace with increase of 5 per cent in comparison with the baseline. It is not thought that there will be a large widening of availability due to the lowering of the threshold of proof, as this is only lower than the ASBO and not the ASBI which forms the majority of estimated applications for the Crime Prevention Injunction”.
I turn to the matter raised by the noble Lord, Lord Ponsonby. Positive requirements in the IPNA will help people to address the underlying causes of their anti-social behaviour. We believe that this will reduce breach rates in future.
Baroness Mallalieu
My Lords, I thank the positive Minister for his response, but I am bound to say that if that was positive, I would like to hear him in a negative mood. However, I thank him for the crumb of comfort in relation to a possible amendment on reasonableness. I also thank all those who have taken part in the debate.
A number of noble Lords referred to the Housing Act and the reasons for the much reduced requirements for an ASBI, the injunction allowed under that Act. The reason—as we all understand it, and as others have said—was the very great difficulty of persuading people in close-knit communities to give evidence against their neighbours and people they knew out of fear. That was the reason for the particular wording of that Act, which a number of noble Lords referred to and said worked perfectly well in that context. However, in each context where that lesser definition has been used there have been very clear statutory limits on the circumstances. What the Government are proposing to do now is to open that definition and apply it to everybody in all circumstances. They are apparently going to allow what must be an imprecise and subjective test to hold sway, and not in any way in the circumstances to which the noble and learned Lord, Lord Morris of Aberavon, and others referred, of close neighbours and fear.
The guidance, which was referred to not by the Minister in his winding-up speech but by others, also troubles me. Although there is already guidance in draft, and no doubt more is being prepared, there should be, whatever guidance comes later, clarity on the face of the Bill. While it is reassuring to hear that trivial matters are not going to be taken up and pursued, that is not something that anybody looking at the Bill itself can be confident about. The Bill should contain clear definitions. It should contain the important guidance—what has to be proved—but at the moment it does not.
There is no question of a Division in the House tonight but I say to the Minister that this is undoubtedly a matter to which we will return at a later stage. I very much hope that in addition to being positive he will be—as we know he is on other matters—fair and open-minded, that he will be prepared to hear further argument between now and Report and that, on reflection, he himself will table some amendments that reflect and go some way to meeting the anxieties raised tonight. With that in mind, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.