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Antisocial Behaviour

I was about to compliment the right hon. Member for Salford (Hazel Blears)—before she finished with that outrageous slur on my party—on a thoughtful and interesting speech. I very much agree with her central thrust, which, as I understand it, is that we need to deal with the problem by using a set of agencies across the Government and locally. I recently visited the Liverpool community justice experiment and was very impressed by it. I know that there has been a similar effort in Salford, too, but it depresses me that the Ministry of Justice has decided not to roll out the scheme, because it seems that there has not been a holistic appreciation of the cost savings to other Departments. The MOJ has looked at the costs that its own budget would incur, but it has not taken into account the savings elsewhere. Our inability to join up government in a way that makes the most effective contribution is an enormous problem. I welcome the debate, which is a valuable opportunity to discuss a serious issue, and I shall discuss two main aspects. First, I shall consider the scale of the problem and outline why the measures being used to tackle it are not working; and, secondly, I shall outline my party's position on antisocial behaviour and make it clear how we believe that it can be effectively challenged by considering the evidence of those policies that work and those that do not. Antisocial behaviour is one of the greatest challenges that our society faces, and I agree with the right hon. Lady not least on her point that it affects those who are most vulnerable in our society—not just young people, as many people think, but those living in low-income and deprived areas. In 2008-09, the police recorded more than 3.5 million incidents of antisocial behaviour—more than 10,000 a day; and, the Home Office estimates that responding to antisocial behaviour costs the taxpayer £3.4 billion a year. Some 17 per cent. of the population believe that there is a high level of antisocial behaviour. That is an improvement on previous recorded findings, but the figure is still far too high, particularly in low-income areas, where it rises to 32 per cent. when people in so-called "hard-pressed" areas are asked. They are typical of the area that the right hon. Lady represents. However, knee-jerk and punitive measures that are applied indiscriminately and in isolation do not work well. The most infamous of those is, of course, the antisocial behaviour order, and such orders are now routinely breached, as the hon. Member for Hornchurch (James Brokenshire) said. Almost 15,000 ASBOs were issued between 2000 and the end of 2007, according to the latest available figures, and more than half of all ASBOs were breached. Among children, the breach rate was 64 per cent., and, of the near-15,000 ASBOs issued in England and Wales, 40 per cent. were given to children. Penalty notices for disorder are scarcely better. Almost half those issued in 2007 were not even paid. As a result, almost 1,000 children were sent to prison for breaching an ASBO between 2000 and 2006. That represents 42 per cent. of all children who breached an ASBO in the period. By the end of 2007, more than 1,000 children had received a custodial sentence for breaching their ASBO. Half those sentences were for periods of more than five months, yet we know that there is no evidence that custodial sentences act as a deterrent to such offending. In fact, quite the opposite is true. The figures for 2007 show that 75 per cent. of 10 to 17-year-olds reoffended within one year of being released from custody, and the reoffending rate for a young man serving his first custodial sentence is 92 per cent. The result is that we have criminalised a generation of young people—particularly young men, and particularly those from ethnic minorities. That has become a matter of concern, even to the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child.