Social Housing Tenants: Antisocial Behaviour

Gregory Campbell Excerpts

Wednesday 8th January 2025 Westminster Hall

[Lee Anderson (Ashfield) (Reform)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered social housing tenants and antisocial behaviour.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms McVey. Let us imagine a Government who believe that a council house should be a privilege, not a right, and that people have to be of good standing and in full-time employment to secure the keys. Let us imagine a Government who support the idea that a council house should be given on suitability rather than a need for social housing. Let us then imagine that same Government supporting the idea that people should keep their council house in good order: keep it decorated, keep it well maintained, do the garden, empty the bins, and make sure that their families do not cause trouble on the street. There was such a Government who believed in all that: the 1940s Clement Attlee Government.

Clement Attlee built over 1 million homes in our great country, and all the things I have just mentioned were beliefs of the Labour Government at the time. But if we fast forward 80 years I think Captain Clem would be turning in his grave after looking at some of the council estates up and down the country, such as Carsic estate, Leamington estate, Coxmoor estate in Ashfield, and estates over in Mansfield such as Bull Farm and Ladybrook, where we have families creating mayhem and misery. People call them “feral families” in my neck of the woods. There are people who cause problems on every single council estate throughout Mansfield and Ashfield, and it is a big problem. In this place we have the power to sort that out. I did try under the last Government, but it fell on deaf ears.

Before I came to this place, one of the main complaints that I got—I am sure many hon Members will agree—was about antisocial behaviour on council estates, which destroys and ruins lives. Most of us MPs, I imagine, live in nice houses; we have security, CCTV and panic alarms. Some of us live in nice big posh pads in gated communities—it is all right for us. We do not have to go home each night and put up with horrible, nuisance, criminal behaviour.

Let us imagine coming home after a hard day’s work at the factory, as many people in Ashfield do, and all we can hear is swearing, verbal threats, intimidation, shouting, screaming, outrageous noises—sounds a bit like a Labour Cabinet meeting. Joking aside, that is happening in every constituency throughout our great country. Let us imagine that we put up with that behaviour when we get home from a hard day’s graft. We go to bed and the noise continues. We can hear music playing and the idiots from across the road revving their motorbikes up and down the street. We open the bedroom window in the summer and the stench of weed comes wafting in. Then we manage to get a few hours’ sleep.

At 6 o’clock the alarm clock goes off and those idiots are just about going to bed, because they have been up all night creating mayhem, causing crime, and being complete nuisances. Yet when we get up in the morning to go to work—to do a shift; to do our seven days to pay our taxes—we are paying for those yobs, those idiots, to live in their social housing. We pay for their rent and benefits, and we wonder why: “Why are we doing this? Why can’t these people live by our rules? Why can’t they integrate? Why can’t they live our way of life?”

Many years ago—I am going back about 30 years—Ashfield district council had a brainwave. We had one particular street on the Carsic council estate that was notorious for antisocial behaviour, crime and poor behaviour. The council put all the nuisance tenants on one street. I am not saying that was a solution, but that is what it did. So when anything kicked off with any crime, the police went straight to one street and nine times out of 10 they knew where the culprits were.

Then the Labour council had a brainwave: it decided to take every single nuisance family off the street, spread them around the estate and put them on different streets. It thought that was a good idea. It thought that the good behaviour of the surrounding streets would encourage those nuisance tenants to be good tenants, to be good neighbours, to integrate and to respect their neighbours, but the opposite happened.

Just a few months after, we realised that every single street on that estate was having problems with antisocial behaviour, so the council had taken the problem from one street and spread it out to every single street on the estate. It was a complete failure, and our police and councillors could do very little about it because they are not backed up by the courts. When we get a nuisance tenant in Ashfield, for example, the courts sometimes carry out a lengthy investigation. They tell the complainants, “Keep a diary,” and give them diary sheets for about two years until they are fed up to the back teeth of filling them out, and eventually they just stop complaining.

In 2022, a Government survey showed that 26%—nearly one in three—of social housing tenants suffer from antisocial behaviour. That is a disgrace in this country. A 2018 report by Nottingham Trent University said that social housing tenants are 30% more likely to see antisocial behaviour, crime, drug dealing and so on.

[Mr Gregory Campbell (East Londonderry) (DUP)]

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on securing this debate on an issue that is exceptionally important in working-class areas. Does he agree that those who suffer most from the problem are those who live cheek by jowl with the very tenants he is talking about? It is working-class tenants in social housing, aspiring to a better life for them and their children, who suffer the most and are crying out for help and assistance to solve the problem.

[Lee Anderson]

I could not put it any better myself. The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right: it is the aspiring, decent, hard-working, working-class families who need a bit of a leg up. They get social housing—a council house—and they want to do the right thing; maybe at one stage they will actually buy the house. They put a shift in: mum and dad go to work, the kids behave themselves, but next door or across the road they have a nuisance family who are completely ruining their lives. That affects their mental health and it is absolutely shocking.