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Antisocial Behaviour

I have been generous in giving way, so I will move on if I may, as I would like to return to my point on inspection. We now have the policing pledge. On the face of it, its purpose is to set and raise standards, but it will be inspected on. Therefore, we will have a further range of inspection of performance against the police pledge. It was introduced as a message to the public, not as another set of metrics by which to judge performance. If we keep on inspecting and inspecting, we will lose more and more police from the streets and spend more and more time on people in offices. In addition, there are the tools and sanctions available to those in authority to deal with unacceptable behaviour. The Government have emphasised one particular order above all others: the ASBO. In the "Respect action plan", Tony Blair claimed that the ASBO""is now a household expression—synonymous with tackling anti-social behaviour."" As with so many other statements of the former Prime Minister, if only it were true. It was claimed that these orders would help to prevent problems in neighbourhoods, but if prevention was the intention, the breach rate of the orders would not be as high as it is. In some parts of the country, more ASBOs are being breached than are being issued. In Humberside, Northumbria, Surrey, Gwent and Leicestershire, breaches of the orders outstrip the number of new ASBOs being issued. As Chief Superintendent Neil Wain notes in his insightful analysis, "The ASBO: wrong turning, dead end":""As a serving police officer I had considerable use of ASBOs and what struck me was not only did they get breached on a regular basis, they did not appear to be controlling the behaviour of those subject to them."" The Centre for Crime and Justice Studies notes that the Government's flagship ASBO policy""faced huge implementation problems at the start and is looking increasingly discredited as a mainstream response."" It is interesting to note those comments, because clearly the policy was not necessarily thought through. The Youth Justice Board's report on ASBOs indicated that many young people still do not have a clear understanding of the details of their orders; it was found to be not uncommon for them to "flout openly" the prohibitions that placed the greatest restrictions on their lifestyle. Most young people did not regard custody for breach as a real threat or deterrent. For a while, it seemed that the Government had fallen out of love with the ASBO, with Ministers keener to talk about broader antisocial behaviour "interventions" than ASBOs. The Children's Secretary even went as far as to claim:""It's a failure every time a young person gets an ASBO"." ASBOs are now back on the agenda—reheated, repackaged and re-spun—with the Prime Minister's latest contribution to YouTube calling for greater publicity for ASBOs, despite the fears of perhaps making them a badge of honour, and with the Home Secretary putting renewed emphasis on the orders with the creation of drinking banning orders or so-called "booze ASBOs", even though a year ago I was told in a written answer that the Home Office was questioning whether the orders were needed at all. As they have done this afternoon in the Minister's contribution, the Government have sought to pray in aid the National Audit Office in support of their approach. Yet, the NAO found that the most effective intervention to prevent further incidents of antisocial behaviour among young people was not an ASBO but a simple warning letter. Rather than support the Government's claims of effectiveness for ASBOs and other antisocial behaviour interventions, the National Audit Office observed that it was not possible to draw any conclusions as to whether other forms of intervention, or no intervention at all, would have achieved the same, or a better, outcome—the NAO and the Government just did not know. The Government's approach has betrayed a complete lack of proper analytical assessment of the various measures that they have introduced. That point was made by the Public Accounts Committee, which noted:""Comparable local areas use different approaches to dealing with anti-social behaviour and there has been no comparative evaluation of the success of these approaches. Nor has there been a comprehensive evaluation of the use and success of the different measures and powers, making it difficult for the Home Office, the Respect Task Force and those dealing with anti-social behaviour to assess what works best."" Despite the NAO specifically calling on the Home Office to evaluate formally the success of different interventions and the impact of combining enforcement interventions with support services to advise antisocial behaviour co-ordinators better at a local level, nothing has been published to date; the Home Office took the recommendation so seriously that it has only recently commissioned an independent evaluation of the comparative effectiveness of antisocial behaviour interventions, and it is expected to report next spring—that is more than three years after the NAO first highlighted the need for such an assessment.