Alison Bennett
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Antisocial Behaviour
Alison Bennett Excerpts(1 day, 7 hours ago)
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Alison Bennett (Mid Sussex) (LD)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Butler. In his closing remarks, the hon. Member for Birmingham Perry Barr (Ayoub Khan) said that antisocial behaviour is not low-level crime, as it makes people feel unsafe and drains confidence from the community. That is certainly true in Mid Sussex, where we have our issues with car cruising and with e-bikes and e-scooters right across the constituency.
Jim Dickson (Dartford) (Lab)
On car cruising, which is being fuelled by TikTok and other social media platforms, we have cars running fast up and down main roads in my constituency, creating noise nuisance and huge danger for residents. The police are on to this issue, but they say they need preventive measures. I have asked Kent county council whether it will introduce speed cameras, but it has said no. Does the hon. Lady agree that councils need to step up?
Dawn Butler (in the Chair)
Order. Interventions need to be short and snappy.
Alison Bennett
I agree with the hon. Gentleman.
I want to focus my remarks on town centres, and the need to have civic pride and facilities that people want to visit and enjoy being in. The story of the Martlets shopping centre redevelopment in Burgess Hill is too long to cover in the next minute and a half. However, despite the best endeavours of successive councils over many years, there are derelict buildings there. On Saturday afternoon, when I walked across the town centre with one of my children, she pointed out that there were smashed windows. Then, when we walked back, she told me that one of the smashed windows was open. We looked up and could see masked youths in the shuttered building, which used to contain a little supermarket. That level of neglect for facilities is bad for communities, and it is bad for the people of Burgess Hill.
Burgess Hill has done everything it can to try to get its town centre redeveloped. However, the levelling-up bids failed under the last Government, and the town is not eligible for Pride in Place funding, as far as we can tell, so that money has not been forthcoming. We are hopeful that a joint venture bringing together public and private sector money may actually get the town centre redevelopment off the ground but, as it stands, the morale of people who live in Burgess Hill is low.
The town council has done what it can by bringing the Park Centre back into use, providing youth facilities. The Burgess Hill Creative Community has taken up an empty unit in the Martlets shopping centre, where people can come together and do a variety of good, creative projects. People want the town centre to be one that works. Obviously, the policing presence is really important, but if we do not get the skeleton right—the civic pride and buildings that work and that people love and want to go to—we will attract the wrong kind of people: a handful of people who want to make life a misery for the vast majority of law-abiding citizens, who are there for their town and to support their community.