Antisocial Behaviour

: The hon. Gentleman makes an interesting point. I was going to come to it later, but I shall come to it now. ASBOs in Manchester and other areas have been successful in dealing with antisocial behaviour, but one of the reasons why ASBOs and the 1998 legislation were necessary was that in some cases, the agencies that should have been dealing with antisocial behaviour, including the police, had walked away from some of those problems. They had re-prioritised their work. I shall come back to that point when I get to licensing. I agree that more police and other agencies should be dealing directly with the problem before the need arises for an antisocial behaviour order. In the present situation, however, those antisocial behaviour orders have protected many thousands of the people whom I represent in north Manchester. I mean thousands; I am not exaggerating. ASBOs have made those people's lives a lot easier, because although some of the antisocial behaviour described is trivial, though annoying—kicking a ball against the wall or playing loud music can make people's lives miserable—some of it is much more intense, frightening and awful than that. I should have thought that there would be all-party consensus on such issues, but there is not, although there seems to be in this Chamber. There is an alliance between The Economist—I suppose that I understand where it is coming from, given its history—and some lawyers' groups from both the extreme right and the extreme left, characterised by ASBOwatch and others, I would think. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Southampton, Itchen (Mr. Denham) said, parts of some of the professions believe that their role is to stop ASBOs and to be on the side of the perpetrators rather than the victims. Politically—this is particularly important in Manchester and elsewhere—the Liberal Democrats do not support ASBOs overall.