Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Bill

Lord Hope of Craighead Excerpts

Monday 18th November 2013 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Berridge (Con)]

My Lords, Amendment 20 was recommended by the Joint Committee on Human Rights in its fourth report—a committee on which both my noble friend Lord Faulks and I serve. Amendment 20 is a modest compromise and adds an element of reasonableness or objectivity, giving the test more rigour, and will aid the authorities and other agencies. It will enable them to better explain their refusal to act on behalf of some people who just have different views on what they should have to tolerate from their neighbours and other people in the neighbourhood. I agree with my noble friend Lord Faulks that at this earlier stage, the test should have a reasonableness requirement, as it is at this stage that the officials of the authorities outlined in Clause 4 have to consider that behaviour.

As has already been outlined, reasonableness and proportionality are a requirement that the judiciary has to take into account when granting an injunction. This means that there will be reasonableness applied in the test by the officials and, of course, by the court rather than having a more subjective test by the officials and only later on encountering the reasonableness threshold. I spoke at Second Reading about the inordinate lengths to which witnesses have to go to collect the necessary evidence to get an ASBI or an ASBO. Merely adding after “conduct” the words “that might reasonably be regarded as” does not increase the evidence that has to be gathered and I therefore support this amendment.

[Lord Hope of Craighead (CB)]

My Lords, I will add a brief word to what has just been said in support of Amendment 20. The words “any person” at the end of Clause 1(2) are rather important; I would have thought that they make it all the more important that the words which the noble Lord, Lord Faulks, has suggested are put in. Without that, one would have the very difficult task as a judge of having to assess the evidence of one individual and deciding whether that individual is to be believed. If that individual says that he or she has been annoyed or suffered a nuisance, it would be quite difficult to say that the test was not satisfied. The reasonableness test is the one which would soften this and make it more realistic, and I would have thought that it was compatible with the general aim of the measure.

[Lord Greaves (LD)]

My Lords, if I sometimes tell my noble friend Lady Hamwee that she is being legalistic, that is a compliment since she is a lawyer and I am not, which means that she sees things that I do not. When it comes to the meaning of words, however, I take a straightforward, common-sense view. Words have meanings and we ought to try to stick to them, but sometimes words have different meanings. A word that may well have a respectable legal background in terms of its meaning may not necessarily mean what ordinary people in the street think it means. I think that that is why “annoyance” is causing a reasonable amount of difficulty in the Bill. It has caused many to ask, “Are we really going to have an injunction just because someone is being annoying?”. I take the view that it is a human right to be annoying to other people from time to time, because if it does not happen there will never be any progress. Perhaps that explains some things. The difficulty, however, is at what level annoyance becomes unacceptable. “Harassment, alarm and distress” are clearly degrees of annoyance but they go rather further than what people nowadays tend to think annoyance means.

In the representations that we have had on this there has been quite a concern among those who are used to ASBOs—civil liberties groups and so on—about the way in which the changes are being made, switching from ASBOs and apparently making it easier to obtain an injunction to prevent nuisance and annoyance, and about the possibility that the words “nuisance” and particularly “annoyance” are far too feeble. On the other hand, the housing associations which have been writing to us in the past two or three days are saying, “No, the existing ASBIs”—which are injunctions—“work very well and those are the words that they use”. They would be very concerned if the test was increased.

One reason for this is that you might live next door to somebody who says something foolish to you or wags their finger at you every time you go out in the morning. If it happens to you one time out in the street, and even if the person is going round doing it to lots of people, it really is no reason to serve an injunction on the person, however daft they may be behaving. But if it happens day after day or every time you go out of your house, it becomes a very serious matter. There is a considerable difference between repeated, annoying, low-level anti-social behaviour which irritates and harasses neighbours and is totally unacceptable in a residential context and the same behaviour out in the street. This is happening partly because, as the noble Lord, Lord Harris of Haringey, told us earlier, the Government are bringing lots of different things under the same umbrella.

However, what does “annoyance” mean? Being a fairly boring person and having it on the shelf, I looked in the Oxford English Dictionary, and I found four definitions. These are definitions of the verb “annoy”, but “annoyance” is clearly about annoying somebody. The first definition was “Be hateful to” or,

“Be a cause of trouble to”.

That is a fairly high level of unpleasant behaviour. The second was to,

“be troubled, irked or wearied by”,

which is a much lower level. The third was to:

“Cause slight anger or mental distress to or irritate”,

which seems a very low level. There was another, which was to harm or attack repeatedly, or harass, but it said that that was archaic and the illustration of it was, “A gallant Saxon who annoyed this coast”. Well, I am all in favour of gallant Saxons annoying the Yorkshire coast in the past, otherwise I might not be here, but that is clearly not relevant now.

To bring it up to date, the Merriam-Webster internet dictionary defines it as,

“to cause (someone) to feel slightly angry”,

which is clearly something that we ought not to be legislating about;

“to disturb or irritate especially by repeated acts”,

which might be; and,

“to harass especially by quick brief attacks”,

which probably is anti-social behaviour. That dictionary then said that “annoyance” may be,

“slight anger : the feeling of being annoyed”.

I thought “I’m giving up” but I looked further and it then said it was,

“a source of vexation or irritation”,

and then it defined it as a nuisance, so I thought, “We are going around in circles here”.

Annoyance actually has lots of different meanings, and for most people in this country today it is very low level. If we want it to be higher, the Government ought to make a real effort to define it in the legislation. It is assumed that the words “nuisance” and “annoyance” are in the law already and that everybody knows what they mean. I do not think that they do if the Government mean that they are a sufficiently high level to warrant injunctions against people.