Yes, but I am dealing with Amendment 96 and in speaking to that amendment, the noble Baroness made no mention of criminal behaviour orders. She sought—perhaps accurately, in her eyes—to make a comparison between the IPNA and the ASBO. The two are not meant to be the same or to deal with the same problem in the same way. There is a suite of six provisions in the Bill, which are all meant to deal with situations which the Anti-social Behaviour Act has not managed to address. ASBOs are not an effective power. I say from this Dispatch Box that they are becoming increasingly less effective. Let us look at the published statistics: up to the end of 2012, 58% of anti-social behaviour orders were breached at least once and just over 43% were breached more than once. A staggering 68% of ASBOs issued against under-18s have been breached. By any objective measure, if an order has been around for more than 10 years and had plenty of time to bed down but has such a high breach rate, that is not evidence of success. I am surprised that the noble Baroness is so wedded to the idea of maintaining it.
If one wants to seek the root cause of the failure, it is that ASBOs can take months to obtain. They fail because they leave victims exposed while being obtained and because they do so little to address the offending behaviour, so are we surprised that the number of ASBOs has declined year on year since 2005? That is why we are abolishing the ASBO and the failure that goes with it, and replacing it with more effective powers in the IPNA and the CBO. By replacing the hotchpotch of 19 ineffective and under-used anti-social behaviour powers with six new, flexible and more effective ones, we will give front-line professionals that toolkit which the noble Baroness sought in her speech. The new injunction will replace anti-social behaviour orders on application, anti-social behaviour injunctions, individual support orders and intervention orders. As I said in earlier debates, the injunction under Part 1 is modelled on anti-social behaviour injunctions which have been used successfully by social landlords for over a decade. For more serious cases, where a perpetrator has a criminal conviction, the criminal behaviour order will be available. Like the injunction, it can be used to impose prohibitions and requirements, but breach is a criminal offence with accordingly tough sanctions.
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A key part of both the injunction and the criminal behaviour order is the ability to include positive requirements to address the underlying causes of anti-social behaviour. Amendment 96 also seeks to keep individual support orders but I am afraid that this is another story of failure. Individual support orders have had little or no effect and have hardly been used since their introduction in 2004. Only 9.2% of ASBOs on application have had an individual support order attached to them. I do not understand why the noble Baroness is so wedded to ASBOs and their structure when she shares with me, I am sure, a desire to reduce anti-social behaviour, provide effective methods of protecting the public and, indeed, help perpetrators mend their ways.
Where ASBOs have focused on enforcement they fail to address the underlying causes of the anti-social
behaviour. We want to change that, to help young people to break out of the cycle of anti-social behaviour that can often lead to more serious crime. We do not want our new injunctions and orders to be seen as a badge of honour like the ASBO. The new injunction will not criminalise young people, but it will carry serious yet proportionate penalties if it is breached. By moving away from focusing solely on enforcement and getting agencies to work with young people, we can get these young people’s lives back on track. Positive requirements, which are absent at the moment, are integral to this move and to the Bill. Front-line professionals not only know about them, they welcome them. When applying for an injunction agencies will consider whether positive requirements can help address the underlying drivers of the anti-social behaviour. They will be better than individual support orders because positive requirements will be more flexible and can last for more than six months.
Amendment 20HA, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Harris, relates to the court’s consideration of these requirements. Clause 2 provides that before including a requirement, the court must receive evidence about its suitability and enforceability. With the utmost respect to the noble Lord, Lord Harris of Haringey, I believe that his amendment is unnecessary. The court must not only receive the evidence, it must also consider that evidence to satisfy itself that any proposed positive requirements are suitable and enforceable before including them in the injunction. In the case of adults it may be the local authority which is named in the IPNA. There could be a range of persons: local youth offending teams in the case of under-18s, or a voluntary organisation providing counselling to deal with drug or alcohol dependency. There is no penalty, I must reassure the noble Lord—I do not suppose that he really thought for a moment that there would be—for failure to deliver success if the respondent fails to comply with the positive requirements; it is for the respondent to comply with the terms of the injunction. The injunction is taken out against the person. It is also up to the person who applied for the injunction to apply to the court to vary the injunction, so there is a provision that if the injunction turns out to be ineffective, or circumstances change, it is possible for the nominated person to change its provisions.
Amendment 20J seeks in effect to delay implementation of the provisions in Part 1 until the Secretary of State has published details of the funding arrangements underpinning the supervision of any positive requirements. Amendment 22F would require the Secretary of State to publish guidance on the scope of positive requirements that could be included in the criminal behaviour order.
It is essential that front-line professionals can tailor positive requirements to the individual needs of respondents. Practitioners have welcomed the addition of positive requirements, recognising the need to work on the reasons for behaviour to break the cycle of offending, rather than focusing purely on enforcement. That is why the injunction is a key plank in our reforms and why I welcome its introduction. The police, local councils, social landlords and others will be able to use it as a preventive tool to deal with emerging problems quickly and nip them in the bud before they escalate. This is crucial because we know that anti-social behaviour,
left unchecked, blights communities and causes untold misery to victims, particularly those who are vulnerable or who suffer from the cumulative effect of repeated anti-social behaviour.
Injunctions can also be used to help perpetrators; the positive requirements allow agencies to help those who commit anti-social behaviour to change their behaviour and turn their lives around. Amendments 20HA, 20J and 22F relate to the details of these positive requirements. As such, arrangements for positive requirements will need to be made and funded locally. It is therefore not appropriate or indeed possible for the Secretary of State to set out in guidance how the positive requirements will be funded. This will depend on the type of requirements identified as necessary and where the provision of such requirements can come from. That will be decided at local level, and I make no apology for decisions being made locally. In a tough financial climate we would expect councils and others to use their resources more effectively but, as we set out in the published impact assessment, we would expect that the majority of positive requirements would typically be a service that was provided in any case. That being the case, the additional costs of providing the actual requirement should not be significant. We would also expect use to be made locally of the voluntary sector, which is often best equipped to deal with specific and tailored information. Hard-to-reach groups such as young people, who are likely to be engaging in such anti-social behaviour, may also respond better to a non-statutory organisation.