Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Bill

Debate between Lord Ponsonby of Shulbrede and Lord Greaves

Monday 18th November 2013 Lords Chamber

[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In our part of the world, that system is being slowly withdrawn for purely financial reasons, as the police cannot afford to devote the resources to it that they have done.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.