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Antisocial Behaviour

The hon. Gentleman has made a significant contribution to the debate through a number of the pamphlets and papers on the need for early intervention, on the focus that he has discussed and on the fact that if we take action when people are younger, we can make such a difference. I recognise what he has said, and I will discuss that preventive approach, focusing on those sorts of issues, before I conclude. He makes a powerful and important point, which I know is shared by my right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr. Duncan Smith), who has produced a number of papers on early intervention and on dealing with family breakdown issues and ensuring that those issues are focused on because of the significant difference that can be made. I return to the point about active citizens and people's apparent reluctance now to intervene to confront antisocial behaviour and crime. We believe that there is a need to support, rather than hinder, the active citizen. That is why we would amend the police guidelines so that officers back those who use reasonable force to maintain the Queen's peace, and why we believe the code for Crown prosecutors should be amended so that it is clear that it is not in the public interest to prosecute those who reasonably and legitimately perform a citizen's arrest in good faith. If people take appropriate action to protect their communities, they should be praised, not prosecuted. Let us move on to the wider issue. Enforcement, sanctions and policing are only one part of the solution. If we are to make a more sustained and substantial shift in community safety, we have to address the underlying causes behind that behaviour; aggression, abusiveness and violence are, in part, a symptom of much wider and deeper societal malaise. As Barnardo's rightly points out in its briefing for today's debate,""the underlying causes of anti-social behaviour are complex and multi-generational."" This is about addiction: the UK has the highest level of drug use and the second highest level of drug-related deaths in Europe. It is about the binge drinking culture, with more violence in the small hours of the night and hospital casualty departments having to deal with those who have committed alcohol-fuelled excess. We need to deal with truancy and exclusion from school, ensuring that underachievement and the lack of basic skills do not close off options to employment and lead inexorably down a criminal career path. We need to strengthen and support families and deal with a benefit system that has become so complex that it holds people down in poverty rather than lifting them out to fulfil their aspirations. That is why family policy is so essential in setting boundaries and instilling discipline as well as creating greater understanding and respect for people from a different generation from one's own. Parents are the key to the debate, as they can raise the aspirations and opportunities of their children and give them the best chance in life to fulfil their aspirations. However, they can also hold them back and discourage them from fulfilling their potential for fear that, as I heard in one deeply depressing case, their child's success will highlight their own weaknesses and failures and the inadequacies of their lives. Particular times in a family's life put extra pressure on relationships, and the early years of a child's life are a good example. Parents are more likely to split up in the first year after their child's birth than at any other time. Family breakdown is, of course, not the only cause of our present societal problems, but some figures stand out. A child whose parents have split up is twice as likely to live in poverty and more than 75 per cent. more likely to suffer educational failure. According to the Centre for Social Justice, more than 70 per cent of young offenders come from lone-parent families. Such deep-rooted problems require a sustained approach over the short term, medium term and long term. That is why we would end the couple penalty in the benefits system so that families are no longer incentivised to live apart and why we would provide more health visitors across the country, so that families have the support and advice they need to give their children a good start in life. We would ensure that there is greater discipline in schools, with head teachers having the right to exclude pupils, and we would enable schools to make behaviour contracts legally enforceable. We would also reform pupil referral units to ensure that they adopt the best practice of those graded by Ofsted as outstanding and of special schools that cater for children with behavioural difficulties to get troubled youngsters back into mainstream education as quickly as possible.