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Antisocial Behaviour

We have heard from numerous speakers this evening that a wide range of strategies are in place to try to deal with antisocial behaviour. However, they are only as good as the sanctions that apply when they are breached, which happens are all too frequently—unsurprisingly, because they are issued to people who are non-conforming and have no natural empathy with others. The initiative that interests me most is the child safety order, which allows compulsory intervention when a child under 10 commits antisocial behaviour. To most right-minded people, the thought of a child under 10 out in public unsupervised and getting into trouble fills us with horror. A child safety order allows compulsory intervention and, if breached, can lead to a parenting contract, which is issued on a voluntary basis, but which, if breached, can lead to a parenting order. I hope that when the Minister sums up, he might elucidate what happens when a parenting order is breached. What happens then to the child who required the child safety order in the first place? We have also heard about the wholesale breaching of ASBOs. Breaching an ASBO is punishable by a fine or up to five years in prison. I am not sure how often the continuous breaching of an ASBO leads to a custodial sentence, but when it does, it is important that the person concerned leaves prison a better person than when they went in. One way to achieve that is by improving education and training courses in prison. However, one of the greatest impediments to that is that someone serving a custodial sentence who has to make a court appearance will thereby lose their place in the prison where they are serving their sentence. When they leave court, they are transferred to another prison, which means that any education or training that they might have been undertaking is lost, and they have to start all over again. To somebody who might not have a good educational grounding before they go into prison, that is extremely discouraging. I hope that it might be possible to do something about that, so that people in prison can at least complete the education and training courses that they take. Even more needs to be done with employers, particularly large organisations, so that people who have completed custodial sentences are given a chance of employment, so that they can become productive members of society. All the strategies that are in place need serious review, to see which are working and which are not, and how well they are working or otherwise. Barnardo's has had some interesting ideas about both education programmes for children and parents outside prison, and a range of specialist services, including remand fostering, which all need to be considered together in addressing how best to combat antisocial behaviour. There is great perplexity among people in my constituency who have been victims of antisocial behaviour. We have big problems on our buses. At one stage, two routes had to be withdrawn because the antisocial behaviour was so bad, with passengers and drivers being abused and bricks being thrown through the windows, but that has now been overcome. The routes had to be withdrawn for a period, so all the people who wanted to use them were disadvantaged because of the bad behaviour of a small number of people. I should pay tribute to Havering PCSOs, who are now doing an extremely good job of riding on the buses and giving confidence to elderly passengers in particular. Happily, for the time being at least, the bad behaviour on the buses seems to have been overcome. Two elderly ladies who were living on either side of a problem family have contacted me this week. There was a litany of antisocial behaviour over a very long period, culminating in the family's house being burned down and one of the adult members of the family ending up in prison. These elderly ladies now find that after the house is refurbished, one of the younger generation of the family will be allowed to assume the tenancy. They are extremely nervous that continued antisocial behaviour will lead to their having to start keeping diaries all over again. They cannot understand why a family who behaved so badly have been able to resume their tenancy in a new house that has been paid for by the taxpayer, with no guarantee of any peace of mind for their neighbours. I want to see more police powers and more flexible police powers, so that when young people cause trouble, particularly at night out in public, the police can return them not to their homes, as they do at the moment—to the great surprise of some parents, who cannot understand why their young children have been returned home—but to the police station, so that the parents will have to come and collect them. No doubt that will be of great inconvenience to some parents, who have no idea where their children are—and who care even less—because they do not supervise them. That will at least give the police an opportunity to discuss the children's behaviour with the parents in an attempt to modify that behaviour. There is also the opportunity for curfew orders and the confiscation of mobile phones. There is a whole flexible range of additional powers for the police to use to try to overcome this scourge in our neighbourhoods. For the few minutes that remain, I want to concentrate on what we would colloquially term families from hell—those in which every member behaves in a socially unacceptable way and makes it impossible for anyone living in the vicinity to enjoy their lives, because of aggressive, intimidating and threatening behaviour. Such families often damage their own and other properties and they are unable to live in harmony with others, treating everybody else as a potential enemy. Of course, the children learn this behaviour from the adults around them. Strangely, these problem families are in their own comfort zone because everyone else around is scared of them. They are in control of their area and they can make other people's lives a misery without hindrance. The younger members, in particular, often belong to a gang and run around at night causing mayhem. However, having to move somewhere strange where they are not known by others—this is particularly true of the teenagers, who may suddenly be separated from their gang—is the last thing that such people want. Without the local reputation that they have built up, they might become the victim of the sort of intimidation that they have enjoyed meting out to others. Although the situation is much more difficult in private property, the threat of eviction from public property much sooner in the proceedings—such proceedings can often take as long as a couple of years—could have a much more salutary effect than issuing ASBOs, which are often treated as a badge of honour and breached again and again with impunity. People should know that their antisocial behaviour could affect the security of their tenancy, in the same way that points affect a driving licence. Their victims might be encouraged to come forward with evidence if they thought that that would be effective, and that would enable the local authority and the police to build up sufficient evidence to take matters to court. In short, several improvements could be attempted to address this problem: strengthening tenancy agreements by accumulating sanctions, with earlier eviction as a tool for moderating behaviour; better education and training in prisons, so that people who serve a custodial sentence have an opportunity to be productive and to find employment when they come out; more discretion for police officers and more flexible working hours for PCSOs; and clear consequences for troublemakers to deter them from going on to commit more serious crimes. The decent, law-abiding majority should be protected, and these simple measures could help to act as a deterrent to those who blight our neighbourhoods with antisocial behaviour.