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Antisocial Behaviour

My remarks are still at the introductory stage, but I think the substance of them has been precisely that. The problem is not the fault of the police or of councils, and prevention is as important as—if not more important than—intervention at the other end to deal with the consequences. That is what I have been saying for the past 10 minutes. Perhaps I have confused the hon. Gentleman, rather than the other way around. I certainly agree that the problem should be dealt with further back, as it were; that we should think about housing and the condition of some estates, and about education in discipline and citizenship and other awareness factors in schools. Families are also important in this context, which is why parenting is such a core part of our respect agenda. What I was trying to say was that it is a shame that, when antisocial behaviour issues reach the public domain, people tend to concentrate on behavioural excess and our responses to it. As was suggested by my hon. Friend the Member for Stockport (Ann Coffey), where ASBOs have proved effective their success has been largely due to individual support orders, and the work of police, councils and other agencies behind the scenes. I think that we agree on that. The December report of the National Audit Office broadly accepts that our approach to tackling antisocial behaviour is working. It builds on the findings of the 2005 Home Affairs Committee report on antisocial behaviour, which not only welcomed the fact that the Government had made tackling such behaviour a priority but concluded that our strategy was about right. It describes the range of far-reaching actions we have taken that have helped to make the policy a success. Most people in the NAO’s case review sample who had received an antisocial behaviour intervention—an ASBO or an acceptable behaviour contract, for instance—did not re-engage in antisocial behaviour, thus bringing continued respite to the community. I know that there is a debate about breach rates among young people and others, and we will come to that, but it is important to note that the NAO’s sample showed that 65 per cent. of people desisted from antisocial behaviour after one intervention and 93 per cent. did so after three. That is encouraging, and reinforces the point that earlier intervention is central to overwhelming success. The NAO report acknowledges that areas are making increasing use of the new interventions. More than 13,000 acceptable behaviour contracts were made between October 2003 and 2005, more than 800 areas were designated for dispersal between 2004 and 2005, and powers to close crack houses were used more than 500 times between January 2004 and 2005. When I paid a visit to Burnley and Preston, I saw—in Preston, I think—acceptable behaviour contracts working well. I spoke to young people on the wrong end of the contracts and to the police, who, after the serving of contracts, worked with the young people as well as the rest of the community to ensure that they did not ““descend”” from acceptable behaviour contracts to ASBOs. That is relevant to what was said by my hon. Friend the Member for Chorley (Mr. Hoyle). The local policing network was taking part in what are loftily called diversionary tactics, which helped keep those young people who were the focus of such contracts on the straight and narrow instead of ““descending”” into ASBOs.