Antisocial Behaviour

: The hon. and learned Gentleman has correctly picked up on a slight contradiction between two things I said. I congratulate him on listening; that is very nice, as one never knows on these occasions whether anyone will be listening at all. He has captured exactly the broad thrust of what I was saying: the main issues are managerial, not legislative. The major powers that are needed for agencies to tackle antisocial behaviour are in place, and the challenge is now largely managerial. A few legislative issues are worth looking at. One is that, in practice, there is great confusion between the data protection legislation and the various bits of data-sharing legislation. We found a lot of evidence that, when in doubt, agencies at local level decide not to share information, because that seems to be safer than sharing information. That is an area where some change would be useful. These comments are about the broad approach. It follows from what I have said that we are disappointed that the witnesses and the evidence we received tended to polarise between the enforcers and the preventers. We received large bodies of evidence from people who talked about effective enforcement action against antisocial behaviour, and from organisations that talked about the need for early intervention and prevention. In respect of that, we have made what I hope is the most obvious comment, which is reflected in the respect action plan: successful antisocial strategies will involve prevention and enforcement. If a Committee such as mine were to look into this issue in three years' time, it would be good if more witnesses presented balanced evidence, because we received evidence that tended to be one sided, one way or the other. Let me make a few points about the overall approach. We could not find any evidence that there is excessive use throughout the country of punitive powers such as antisocial behaviour orders. On the contrary, measured against the incidence of antisocial behaviour, there appears to us to be too little use of them, rather than too much. There is a popular impression that people can hardly step outside their front door these days without having an ASBO slapped on them, but that is completely wrong. [Interruption.] Even in Manchester. I will say a little more about Manchester shortly, because we were very impressed by the evidence its council gave to the Committee. It is important to get this message about such powers across. If anything, we feel that some measures are used too late in the cycle of offending. It was interesting to discover how many young people who had received ASBOs had quite serious offending histories before the ASBO was issued. Given the purpose of ASBOs, that suggests to us that the ASBO had been left too long and that turning to it earlier might have been better. We were impressed by the evidence we received from Manchester city council, which made a perfectly reasonable point: housing injunctions and many types of ASBO require the individual to do no more than what a decent, ordinary person would do anyway. Used early enough, ASBOs are preventive rather than prescriptive. It is clear that if things are left too long, the ASBO might have to go further and, for example, ban somebody from a certain area. Our view is that there are cases for using these powers earlier. That ought to make it possible to use some less severe measures, such as housing injunctions and demoted tenancies, before reaching the point of talking about evicting a family and all that goes with it in terms of rehousing them and making further provision.