Antisocial Behaviour

: I agree with my hon. Friend that this is a huge opportunity, but it will happen only if, at quite a low operational level of individual decision-making managers, individual members of staff have the confidence to say, ““We need to be doing the preventive work alongside the work that we do for the most serious cases.”” I would like to go a bit beyond the conclusion of our report, although what I have to say is in tune with it. To give another example of a problem, there has been quiet a lot of publicity in the past few weeks about whether the massive investment in dealing with truancy has worked. The logic of our report is that although a lot of money has gone into the education system for behavioural improvements and dealing with truancy, the bulk has probably been spent by schools in a short-term way—perhaps on extra classroom assistants, for example, to provide some separate provision for the most disruptive pupils. I suspect that little of that money has been invested jointly with social services money to target the dysfunctional families that those young people come from. The money has been used to buy short-term gain and peace and quiet, but has not contributed to the long-term tackling of fundamental problems. When I started to draft the report, my feeling was that we would end up calling for a large amount of extra money to go into the system to tackle the problems of dysfunctional families and some longer-term preventive problems. However, the more we went through the report as a Committee, the more we felt that a lot of money has gone to schools and social services through the regeneration budget, the new deal for communities and so on. A lot of money is out there in the places where most of the problem-causing families exist and the challenge is to focus it directly on the people who often give rise to a series of problems. Although I welcome the extra targeted money announced for social services last week, that broad conclusion drives home. I do not want to minimise the problems facing the Government in making these changes at local level. New institutional arrangements, such as children's trusts, will certainly help. We have highlighted yet again the extent to which fears about data sharing at local level provide a practical obstacle to different agencies working together. It is time for the Government to legislate so that there can be real confidence locally that individual agencies will not run into trouble if they share information from the police and from education and social services. When the problems are caused by the same young children or parents, it is crazy to have the same organisations running around and for nobody to be able to pool the information effectively. Measures are in the pipeline, but we need to go further.