Antisocial Behaviour in Town Centres

Robbie Moore Excerpts

Wednesday 26th April 2023 Westminster Hall

[Robbie Moore (Keighley) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the matter of antisocial behaviour in town centres.

It is a privilege to serve under your chairmanship, Ms McVey, in a debate on an important issue. Antisocial behaviour is a plague that haunts many of our town and city centres, our villages and our countryside. We all feel passionately about the issue, and I am sure we all receive much correspondence about it. Therefore, we all need to get on top of it. If we are to deliver real, positive change for our constituencies, it is important that we tackle antisocial behaviour in all its forms.

As Members of Parliament, we like to sing from the rooftops about the positives in our communities—how well our businesses are doing, how safe it feels to go around our town centres—but we need to tackle darker issues such as antisocial behaviour, fly-tipping and physical assaults taking place on our streets. I want to use the debate to outline some of the challenges that I unfortunately face in Keighley and in Ilkley, as well as some of the positive work that the Government are doing and further work that I would like them to do.

According to the Office for National Statistics, the police recorded 1.2 million incidents of antisocial behaviour in the year ending June 2022, which is a 16% decrease compared with the year ending March 2020. Antisocial behaviour, while decreasing, remains a problem for us all to face, and I want to describe some examples of antisocial behaviour in Keighley. There is a huge problem around the bus station. Young people are being approached and mobile phones taken off them. Assaults are taking place in the centre of Keighley where people are coming and going, and wanting to access businesses. Sometimes, the environment is intimidating and unsafe. I receive a lot of correspondence about that particular hotspot.

There are various hotspot streets, particularly around the Lund Park area of Keighley, and I have received correspondence about Westburn Avenue. The incidents that take place are localised micro-incidents. Nevertheless, they build the fear factor that we all associate with antisocial behaviour.

We have had some darker incidents as well, such as vehicles being targeted, and petrol being poured on vehicles and set alight. That happened only a couple of weeks ago outside a location in Keighley that I know well. We have also had speeding and the antisocial behaviour associated with it, extreme speeding and cars with loud exhausts going up and down particular streets in Keighley, such as North Street, Cavendish Street, Oakworth Road and Fell Lane. I have received a lot of correspondence about drivers purposely accelerating way beyond the speed limits that have been put in place. The police have been doing their level best to try to tackle those incidents.

Another issue in Keighley is cars being driven without insurance and parked cars that are way beyond having passed their MOT test. Some of those cars are parked at the roadside, particularly where drug drops and distribution take place.

[Anthony Mangnall (Totnes) (Con)]

My hon. Friend is making a good speech and giving us an A to Z of road names in his constituency. Does he agree that tackling the list of problems he faces in Keighley, which I also see in south Devon, is about enforcement, police visibility and ensuring that young people have things to do—options and opportunities to go out and achieve?

[Robbie Moore]

My hon. Friend makes a good point. I want to paint a picture of the challenges that we all face as MPs and describe the nature of the correspondence that is arriving in our inboxes, whether it is about speeding, antisocial behaviour or physical assault. We have to get to grips with why such incidents take place. It is predominantly those of a younger age who are participating in them, whether because of boredom or a lack of activities on offer to them.

One of the things that I have been doing—I believe that my hon. Friend has been doing this as well—is engaging in dialogue in community meetings. I hold large constituency surgeries and invite the police along, so that the issues can be raised. It is always fed back to me that police prioritisation relies on data collection. How many meetings do MPs go to and hear that, while residents know that these issues are happening on their streets, they have not necessarily been reported via the 101 system or email, or to the community police station so that data is collected and police enforcement targeted in specific areas?

On the outskirts of Keighley, the Utley safer streets group holds regular meetings. It is organised at community level by local residents and provides me as the MP, district councillors and the local police with the opportunity to go along, receive information and provide feedback on what the local police forces do, while also serving as a means to hold them to account.

[Margaret Ferrier (Rutherglen and Hamilton West) (Ind)]

I congratulate the hon. Member on securing today’s debate. A pub in Rutherglen in my constituency has faced awful harassment from teenagers who loiter and drink on the street outside, spoiling for a fight, and they have actually physically assaulted customers coming out of the pub. The pub has spent tens of thousands on preventive security measures, but the presence of a bouncer actually exacerbated the problem. The police have done a lot in this case, but a cross-agency approach is needed. Does the hon. Member share my concern about the lack of funding for these teams?

[Robbie Moore]

The hon. Member makes a valid point: street drinking is a big problem. It is one that we have in Keighley, particularly around the Church Green area, where groups hang around, causing issues for local businesses that want to grow, thrive and improve their customer base. However, street drinkers are putting people off going to those businesses. In my constituency, the police are doing a lot to try to alleviate the issues, including engaging in dialogue and correspondence. Sometimes it is up to the pubs and venues themselves to address the drink-related issues that spill out from them and the issues caused by some wishing to access their facilities. It is very much about having a joined-up approach, which I will come on to later in my speech.

[Anthony Mangnall]

My hon. Friend is being gracious in giving way again. I have set up a police hub initiative in my constituency where the police use local spaces to enhance visibility. That ensures that they can get out into the community more readily, rather than having to go back to HQ each time. It has been very effective in driving down crime and antisocial behaviour in local areas, at no extra cost to the state. Does my hon. Friend approve of that model?

[Robbie Moore]

It is an exceptionally good idea. Before I became an MP, the police station was in the centre of Keighley, but, frustratingly, our previous Labour police and crime commissioner decided to move it to an industrial estate just outside Keighley, which is not a good location. Everyone in Keighley knows that the police station is now out of the town centre as a result of that bad decision by the previous Labour PCC. I want that police station to be moved back to the centre of town.

[Sarah Jones (Croydon Central) (Lab)]

We all suffer from the closure of police stations. Will the hon. Member also condemn his own Government, who have overseen the closure of nearly 800 police stations across the country?

[Robbie Moore]

Our police station was not closed. The Labour PCC decided to move it out of the town centre to an industrial estate outside Keighley, making it less accessible to many of my constituents.

In addition, in the run-up to the 2019 general election, the then Labour PCC, the then Labour MP for Keighley and the Labour leader of Bradford Council gave false hope and false promise that the police station would be moved back to the centre of town. That false hope just happened to be announced in the run-up to the general election, but what happened? All those plans are now off the table as a result of our new West Yorkshire Mayor deciding that we cannot facilitate that move. I hope we will get an instruction, or as much help from the Government as possible, to move the police station back into the centre of Keighley, from which it should have never been moved in the first place.

On the point that my hon. Friend the Member for Totnes (Anthony Mangnall) made, police hubs are an excellent idea. In many rural parts of my constituency, facilities such as village halls have been used for community-wide engagement. A police officer, a sergeant or the neighbourhood policing team can go along and have dialogue with residents, and communicate and provide reassurance at a micro-local level. We can use such facilities across our constituencies to enable dialogue and better reporting of issues and concerns.

On drug taking, I am very pleased that the Government have taken a stance on nitrous oxide—laughing gas—cannisters, which I have been campaigning to ban since being elected. In the summer months, and particularly on bank holiday weekends, a lot of people get the train from Bradford and Leeds to Ilkley to sit at the riverside and enjoy the sunshine, but sometimes the area is used for antisocial behaviour, and that is not fair for Ilkley residents.

We all face many, many issues with antisocial behaviour. I will quickly touch on fly-tipping. I represent an urban fringe-type constituency, and we have a lot of fly-tipping, particularly in the Worth Valley ward, where Councillor Rebecca Poulsen has been fighting incredibly hard, working with the police, to deal with fly-tipping-related incidents. We must not forget that dumping used construction material, or whatever else it might be, in our beautiful environment is a form of antisocial behaviour in its own right. It was horrifying that, at the back end of last year, our Labour-run Bradford Council decided to close the Keighley tip—a ridiculous decision that would have resulted in more fly-tipping across the constituency. I am pleased to say that after I brought a petition to this House, signed by more than 7,000 people, which Laura Kelly and Martin Crangle heavily campaigned for, Labour-run Bradford Council finally listened and overturned that ridiculous decision. It has now decided to keep the Keighley tip open.

I very much welcome the Government’s plan to put more police officers on our streets. As a Conservative MP, at the last election I campaigned to get 20,000 police officers back on to our streets, and West Yorkshire police has recruited more than 1,000 since I was elected. I want to ensure that they are prioritised in dealing with the many concerns that my constituents across Keighley raise. I urge the Mayor of West Yorkshire, Tracy Brabin, to ensure that as many as possible of those police officers are on the streets of Keighley, Ilkley, Silsden and Worth Valley to tackle antisocial behaviour and give our neighbourhood policing teams the means that they need.

It is a complete myth that Labour is the party of law and order, and that it actually cares about clamping down and being tough on those who commit offences that cause harm to others and try to rule the streets through fear. I can categorically say that that is not the case at all. Labour will not pull the wool over the eyes of residents across Keighley and Ilkley. It was so determined to secure power in Keighley a couple of years ago that it actively selected as a candidate for Labour-run Bradford council Mohsin Hussain, who only seven years earlier had been given a 12-month sentence, suspended for two years with 250 hours of unpaid community work, after being convicted of an armed street assault in Keighley with a pickaxe handle, causing bodily harm. Another of his gang used a baseball bat. When that individual was released on bail, he was caught accelerating to 77 mph in a 30 mph zone in Keighley, driving through a series of traffic lights at speed and going around the wrong side of a roundabout. Those are the types of antisocial behaviour issues that I get contacted about time and time again. These are unfortunately the very issues that are still happening in Keighley today—physical assaults and extreme speeding. Yet Labour’s answer to all of that is to select and actively campaign for a candidate who a few years previously had been handed a two-year suspended sentence. What is worse is that our West Yorkshire Mayor, Tracy Brabin, who is in charge of implementing our local police and crime strategy, John Grogan, who wants to be the next MP for Keighley, and the current Labour leader of Bradford Council all came to Keighley to campaign, knock on doors and deliver leaflets to get that individual into power. And now, unfortunately, he is a district councillor on the Labour-controlled authority.

What does that say to the victims of antisocial behaviour, the victims of street crime, those who have to put up with physical abuse and those who live near the streets where extreme speeding regularly takes place? My view is that Labour does not care about implementing a strong and robust police and crime strategy. Labour will use any means possible to secure the votes to secure power, taking the votes of people in Keighley and Ilkley for granted.

I say to the Minister that I appreciate the work of the Home Secretary and her predecessors in taking a robust approach to antisocial behaviour. It is an issue that impacts all our constituencies time and again. It is probably one of the biggest issues to fill my inbox. We cannot sing from the rooftops about the good things in our constituencies and promote our businesses without tackling the plague that continues to haunt our town centres. On that, I will hand over to other speakers, as I know that many want to take part in this debate.

[Esther McVey (in the Chair)]

I remind Members that they need to bob if they wish to be called in this debate. I will not put a time limit on speeches, but be mindful that we will go to Front Benchers at 10.28 am, and that Robbie Moore will have a couple of minutes at the end to wind up.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sarah Jones (Croydon Central) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms McVey, and I am delighted that the hon. Member for Keighley (Robbie Moore) was able to secure this debate on an incredibly important topic. Perhaps we can forgive him for some of his colourful attacks on his Labour party colleagues because sometimes there is a direct correlation between an MP’s majority and the scale of their exaggerations against their opponents. However, the hon. Gentleman made some good points, and I agree 100% that antisocial behaviour is a plague that haunts many of our communities.

It is a shame that the Government have only recently woken up to the challenges of antisocial behaviour. I have attended debates at which Ministers have described antisocial behaviour as low level and not something they had chosen to prioritise in the past, and if Members look at the strategies that the Government have published in recent years, they will see that antisocial behaviour barely got a mention. The Labour party takes antisocial behaviour seriously. It is not low level; it is ruining lives.

[Robbie Moore]

I note that the shadow Minister says the Labour party takes antisocial behaviour extremely seriously. I am interested in her views on the selection of Labour party candidates for local elections. Does the Labour party think it appropriate to select candidates with previous convictions, such as a two-year suspended sentence, to stand for election to positions of responsibility?

[Sarah Jones]

I do not know about that particular case, but I do not think it acceptable that over the past 13 years the Government have not taken antisocial behaviour seriously and that the lives of people across the country have been ruined as a result. The hon. Gentleman is perhaps sad that he did not become a police and crime commissioner when he stood for election—I am sure he would have done an excellent job—but he cannot deny, and did not deny in his speech, the damage that has been done to our town centres and our communities over the past 13 years.

People across the country know exactly what antisocial behaviour feels like. They know what changes in their neighbourhood when community respect is worn down, and they know what broken Britain feels like. Parents worry about their children playing in the park or being targeted online. Pensioners worry about scams. Small businesses worry they will be targeted by thieves or vandals. Knife crime plagues communities, women feel less safe on the streets and antisocial behaviour ruins lives without consequence.

Labour’s driving mission is to deliver safer streets. If a family does not have a big house with a garden, the kids play on the streets, or hang out in the parks or the town centre, and it is vital that people feel they are safe enough to enjoy their local area. Criminal damage to shops, schools, leisure centres and businesses has increased by more than 30% in the past year alone. That is an extraordinary figure. There are 150 incidents of criminal damage to non-residential buildings a day. Antisocial arson went up 25% last year. Knife possession is up 15% on pre-pandemic levels. More than 6 million Brits are witnessing drug deals on their streets. That is 6 million people seeing drug dealing and drug taking on our streets.

Some town centres have been particularly hard hit by vandalism, harassment and abuse. Do not be fooled by the Government’s announcement today that they have met their arbitrary police recruitment target of 20,000. The Tories should hang their heads in shame that they decimated policing. Replacing some of the officers cut by the Government is not a victory. A press release will not suddenly make the public see police officers on the streets who are not there. Nobody will be fooled.

My hon. Friend the Member for Wansbeck (Ian Lavery) made a powerful speech about how people just want to see action; they want something done when a crime is committed. He rightly paid tribute to the police in his area. They are trying to do the right thing, but they do not have the resources. How insulted will they be when they hear the Home Secretary say in her speech today that the police need to stop concerning themselves with political correctness and get on with basic policing? It is nonsense that the police are not doing the things we want them to because of the way they approach their job. They are trying but they are massively overstretched. We have seen such cuts that it is very difficult for them to do the things that we all demand of them. They will not praise the Home Secretary for what she says today.

In her shocking 300-page report on the Met, Louise Casey made it really clear that visible neighbourhood policing is crucial to restoring confidence in police. Neighbourhood policing has been slashed. There are 10,000 fewer neighbourhood police and PCSOs on our streets today than there were eight years ago. The population has also increased, so we have fewer officers per person in this country by some margin than when the Tories came to power.

Charge rates are plummeting, victims are dropping out of the process in record numbers, the Conservative Government scrapped the major drug intervention programme that the last Labour Government had in place, and support services for kids have been decimated. YMCA says that £1 billion has been taken out of youth work across the country. As my hon. Friend the Member for Wansbeck mentioned, the police spend hours, if not days, dealing with mental health cases, simply because there is no one else to pick up the pieces. Community penalties have halved and there is a backlog of millions of hours of community payback schemes, not completed because the Government cannot even run the existing scheme properly.

Far from punishing perpetrators of antisocial behaviour, the Government are letting more and more of them off. The Conservatives weakened Labour’s antisocial behaviour powers 10 years ago, and brought in new ones that are barely used. They got rid of powers of arrest, despite being warned not to, and they introduced the community trigger, which is sadly something most people have not heard of. When polled, the public say there is no point in investing in improving the community if it is just going to be vandalised by criminals. It is impossible to level up without tackling crime.

Labour announced months ago our action plan to crack down on antisocial behaviour that blights communities. Respect orders will create a new criminal offence for adults who have repeatedly committed antisocial behaviour and are ignoring warnings by the courts and police. Labour will introduce new town centre patrols, and a mandatory antisocial behaviour police lead for every local neighbourhood, as part of our neighbourhood police guarantee, with 13,000 extra neighbourhood police and PCSOs.

We should, of course, pay tribute to the Welsh Government, as my hon. Friend the Member for Pontypridd (Alex Davies-Jones) did, for committing more PCSOs, because they are the eyes and ears on antisocial behaviour and can stop things escalating. They can find out the problems, they know people’s parents, they know where people live, and they can go round communities to stop antisocial behaviour escalating. The hon. Member for Keighley’s force, West Yorkshire police, has the second highest proportion of PCSOs by population in England, which I am sure he is pleased about.

We will bring tough action against town centre drug dealing, with tough powers for the police to shut down crack houses, and local neighbourhood drug teams to patrol town centres and lead data-driven hotspot policing targeted at common drug-dealing sites. We will introduce a national register of private landlords, and a duty for local partners to tackle antisocial behaviour, with mandatory antisocial behaviour officers in each area.

Under a Labour Government, if somebody wants to commit vandalism or dump rubbish on our streets, they had better be prepared to clean up the mess. We will bring in fixed-penalty cleaning notices and tough penalties for fly-tippers, and establish clean-up squads, where offenders will clear up litter, fly-tipping and vandalism that they have caused. The next Labour Government will not let another generation of lost boys and girls grow up without hope. That is why Labour will introduce full prevention and diversion programmes, with new youth mentors for the children and young people most vulnerable to crime, and access to mental health professionals in every school.

What are the Government proposing to do about the 13 years of neglect? Recently they called for hotspot policing, faster community payback, and stronger powers of arrest. That sounds familiar—because it is exactly what Labour has been calling for, and is already in Labour’s plans. However, the Government have left out the most important part, which is putting our neighbourhood police and PCSOs back on the streets. They are not investing in that. Labour’s plans to support victims have also been neglected. On the community trigger that is not working, the Government have decided to rename it, and they have re-announced plans on youth support that the Levelling Up Secretary announced more than a year ago.

The Government have said that 500 young people will get one-to-one support. There were 1.1 million incidents of antisocial behaviour last year. Supporting 500 people just will not cut it. The Government are still not changing their weakened enforcement powers on antisocial behaviour, and neighbourhood policing is not even mentioned in their action plan. The Minister knows that hotspot policing cannot be a replacement for neighbourhood policing. Neighbourhood teams made up of officers, PCSOs and specials are the eyes and ears of our communities. They are the Catherine Cawoods of policing. They know what is going on in their communities, and are trusted to understand and fix problems.

I hope that the Minister can answer a few questions. What is the plan for the police workforce now that the uplift programme has finished? Will she back Labour’s plan to put 13,000 more police officers, PCSOs and specials back in our neighbourhoods? Will she support Labour’s respect orders, so that the police can have the powers that they need to arrest and deal with persistent antisocial behaviour, and can she confirm whether cutting the number of PCSOs by half was a deliberate policy measure or just an accident of no planning?

Where the Conservatives have dismantled neighbourhood policing, Labour will bring it back. Where the Conservatives have weakened antisocial behaviour powers, Labour has a tough new plan to tackle it. Where the Conservatives forgot about our young people, Labour will prioritise them. Labour will revive the reassurance that if you are a victim of a crime, something will be done.

--- Later in debate ---

[Robbie Moore]

I thank all hon. Members who have participated in this important debate. Like them, I thank my local neighbourhood policing team. We all know how hard those teams work on the ground and that they face many challenges across our town centres, cities and villages.

It is very good to hear from the Minister that today we can announce that 20,951 extra police officers have been recruited since 2019—an uplift of 3,542 since 2010. I also thank the Minister for recognising the challenges that I have faced in Keighley bus station. I know that she will follow that through with interaction with West Yorkshire police in working out how to get to grips with some of those examples and other challenges that we all face. Without a doubt, it is important that the Government are being strong by introducing increased penalties, tougher sentences and swifter interaction between arrest, conviction and sentences coming to fruition.

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Totnes (Anthony Mangnall) and the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) for mentioning policing hubs, the importance of engaging police officers with constituency meetings, and a community buy-in and community partnership approach that works with our local authorities. Some antisocial behaviour issues are related to challenges that partnership-led approaches can deal with. I thank them for mentioning that, and I also thank the hon. Member for Rutherglen and Hamilton West (Margaret Ferrier) for mentioning the specific issue of street drinking.

Of course, the hon. Members for Wansbeck (Ian Lavery), for Pontypridd (Alex Davies-Jones) and for Birmingham, Erdington (Mrs Hamilton) all have Labour police and crime commissioners. It is disappointing to hear that the Labour PCC for the West Midlands is spending £33 million on refurbishing the office at Lloyd House rather than protecting 20 police stations. I see that in my constituency as well: a lack of prioritisation of what police officers should be focusing on because of a lack of direction and approach from our West Yorkshire Mayor, who does not have the right strategy.

It was disappointing that the Labour spokesman, the hon. Member for Croydon Central (Sarah Jones), could not answer my question about whether political party candidates’ previous convictions should be properly referenced. It is disappointing that the Labour party is putting up candidates who have previously had suspended prison sentences. On that note, I thank the Minister very much for her time in this debate on an important issue that we all want to raise.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House has considered the matter of antisocial behaviour in town centres.