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Antisocial Behaviour

I thank the hon. Gentleman for that intervention. I know that he takes an interest in the police, because I bumped into him in the force training school in August last year. He and I were both spending time with West Yorkshire police force. I have heard anecdotal evidence from the police that things such as drinking banning orders are incredibly effective because they divide people from their drinking buddies and they know that they are banned from their own local clubs. I do not know what the rate of breach of ASBOs is in Wakefield. I know that the council has issued 155, but I do not know how many have been breached. It is obviously important to take into account the reasons for those breaches and their nature. We need to look much more creatively at how we use ASBOs and at making them more personalised to the individual. I will come to that later. I pay tribute to everyone who works tirelessly against antisocial behaviour in Wakefield by standing up for decency, running sports and youth clubs and standing up for the silent majority. They are a credit to our city. But the success of their work in tackling antisocial behaviour is also a credit to the measures that the Government have brought in. I am not going to rehearse the police numbers. Suffice it to say that West Yorkshire police have seen 600 more police officers in the last 10 years and the successful introduction of police community support officers, which Opposition peers voted against in the other place. This is about the police engaging with communities. The introduction of neighbourhood policing has been a step change in the way in which we deal with antisocial behaviour. Last summer, as I said, I spent three days attached to Wakefield police. I went out on the beat with the safer neighbourhoods team in the Agbrigg, Belle Vue and Portobello areas to see how their new working methods are helping to restore respect by providing reassurance, and tackling antisocial behaviour and low-level crime. I visited the Portobello estate with neighbourhood beat officer Eddie Davis. We spotted a mini-motorcyclist. The officer did not give chase, because it could have been dangerous, and potentially fatal, for that young person. Eddie Davis did not need to give chase to that young person. To my amazement, he already knew the child’s name and address. He had confiscated one mini-moto already from the boy and that child was about to lose his second mini-moto. Those new seizure powers were introduced by this Labour Government and they are helping the police to make life better on the Portobello estate. I also took the officer to visit people in a street where I had conducted a roving surgery and where they had complained to me about the activities of drug dealers. Those people’s lives are being ruined by people turning up late at night and people sleeping in cars outside the houses. One of the residents told me that a drug user had come knocking on his door at 1 o’clock in the morning, looking for the dealer’s house, accompanied by a three-year-old child. When we talk about the help that parents need, there can be no excuses for a civilised society to say that it is acceptable for any three-year-old to be out at 1 o’clock in the morning while his carer, father, uncle or babysitter—whoever that adult was—is out looking for drugs to get a fix. Anything that we can do to make the lives of those children better is to be welcomed. I would like publicly to thank the officers from the neighbourhood policing team who have started to accompany me on joint roving surgeries, both in our city centre tower blocks and on the Eastmoor estate. It is clear that Sergeant David Monaghan-Jones, PCSO Helen Pickles and PCSO Victoria Mann have established warm and productive relationships with the local communities and tenants’ organisations, particularly in the city centre. I went out and about with them last November. One lady who answered her door said to me, ““It’s just like the olden days. We know who our officers are. We know that they are around. We recognise the work that they are doing in the city centre.”” It was clear from listening to the interaction of the police with those tenants that they knew what the tenants could see—and how they could help the police to tackle crime in the city centre—from their tower block windows. They could see the drug dealers in the city centre car parks, where the dealers know that CCTV does not reach. There was a true spirit of co-operation. The men and women who serve as police officers or PCSOs in Wakefield do an incredibly tough and often harrowing job with professionalism, enthusiasm, dedication and good humour. The council also deserves praise for taking the problem of antisocial behaviour seriously. It uses the Government’s neighbourhood renewal fund to put teams of neighbourhood action patrollers on to the streets. In Wakefield, we are fortunate that people have one telephone number that they can call to report antisocial behaviour. There are joint patrols and there is a police inspector permanently based with those neighbourhood patrollers to ensure that information is shared effectively. Antisocial behaviour, whether it is fly-tipping, drug dealing or noise nuisance, can be reported. That enables problems to be tackled from both a council and a police perspective so that powers can be combined and information shared more effectively. Opposition Members may dismiss ASBOs as a gimmick, but they are not. They are a vital tool to tackle antisocial behaviour. They help to protect young people, individuals and the community from the harms caused by antisocial behaviour and they are effective. The Government have not only brought in measures to tackle antisocial behaviour, we have done a huge amount of work in tackling the underlying causes. We know that poor housing can blight whole areas and create a bad reputation. The Government’s commitment to make all council and social housing fit to live in and decent by 2010 is one of our least praised policies. However, it is transforming the lives of Wakefield’s residents by giving them warm, safe and modern homes in which to live. Such physical regeneration, together with the growing role for tenants in shaping their own environments, is transforming communities. Last week, I was delighted that regulations were laid before Parliament that will give tenant management organisations powers to apply for ASBOs. That is another step towards making social transformation a reality throughout the country. I called my local neighbourhood police yesterday to ask their opinion of what more is needed to help them in their fight against this scourge. Inspector Karen Bailes was keen to impress on me the importance of parents taking responsibility for their children’s actions. I have already mentioned the child who had one mini-motorbike confiscated, yet whose family seemed to think that it was acceptable to buy him another one and for him to continue to break the law. Many children’s first brush with the police is through low-level antisocial behaviour—a bit of graffiti here, some verbal abuse there; or perhaps throwing stones at a window. Neighbourhood police officers can identify problem children, but they are most successful when working with parents who take responsibility for their children’s actions and help their children to learn that such behaviour is unacceptable.