My Lords, I have tabled this amendment in support in particular of Westminster Council—my wife is a councillor there—but it has been supported on a cross-party basis by the other main city councils of Birmingham, Manchester, Nottingham and Southampton. I suggest that they cannot all be wrong in believing that there is an issue here. These major city councils have the quite demanding job of keeping public places free of nuisance for both residents and tourists, particularly in their city centres. Westminster has self-evidently the particular issue of a huge tourist presence in, effectively, most of the key places in London’s city centre.
This is not my natural territory. It has taken quite a lot of effort to get my mind round fairly obscure, and certainly complicated, legal issues. If I make the odd technical error, please accept my apology. This amendment is largely about the problem of persistent and aggressive begging in city centres. This has been an area where the ASBO has worked reasonably well. Local authorities can address the problem by applying for ASBOs; they can be obtained without the individuals involved having a criminal record, but when the ASBO is breached a criminal offence is committed and the local authority can have offenders arrested and prosecuted. Certainly, not only the politicians at Westminster but Westminster City Council staff believe that the present arrangements have worked pretty well in dealing with the problem of inner-city aggressive begging.
The first argument is, to put it simply, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. It is a difficult area. Under this Bill, as we know, ASBOs are to be replaced by IPNAs,
but a breach of an IPNA is no longer an automatically arrestable offence. Local authorities can apply for an IPNA, but they would have to take evidence of a breach to court and apply separately for an arrest warrant relative to cases of persistent begging. This is not only hugely bureaucratic and cumbersome but simply would not work, because the offenders invariably have no fixed address; by the time the subsequent power of arrest were granted, it would be useless, because they would not be able to find the offenders. Concerns have been raised about the provisions in the Bill for this problem by Westminster council with Jeremy Browne, who was the Minister, and now with Norman Baker, but there have not been any meetings or no direct response has been received. Concerns have also been raised in the other place by Westminster’s MP, Mark Field.
My amendment in essence seeks to enable an IPNA to be used on a similar basis to ASBOs to deal with the aggressive begging problem. It adds a wider but not universal set of circumstances of,
“intentional or deliberate anti-social behaviour of a potentially persistent nature”,
to enable a court to be able to grant an IPNA with an automatic power of arrest if the IPNA is breached.
The Government’s response so far has been that IPNAs are designed to deal with lower threshold offences and to operate as a pre-emptive tool, so they do not want them to have beefed-up powers attaching to them across the board. My two comments are that IPNAs already are to have powers of automatic arrest for violent or a threat of violent behaviour, so the principle has already been breached. Secondly, my amendment does not give beefed-up powers across the board but only under special conditions of intentional or persistent and deliberate anti-social behaviour, which is what persistent and aggressive begging constitutes. Norman Baker’s stated objection to the stance of the main city councils was that what is proposed is a power of arrest to every injunction, but that is not correct; it is a quite specific power.
The Government’s main argument and objection to this amendment is that it is not needed as the Bill contains new powers that can deal with the problem of aggressive begging and, in particular, the two powers of the CPN and the public spaces protection order—and, I might add, in extremis the dispersal power under which police can clear an area of undesirable people. If a community protection notice’s warning is first issued and then breached, a CPN can then be issued whereby, if it is breached, police can have an automatic power of arrest. But the key is the additional stage prior to issuing a CPN, when the relevant offending individual or group has to be issued with a written warning notice.
Westminster, in particular, argues that warning notices would increase the time and costs of addressing the problems of persistent begging, and would be likely to decrease the ability of local authorities to respond promptly to these problems. If the requirement for the written prior notice of offending behaviour were removed, my understanding is that local authorities would be perfectly happy to use CPNs to address this issue. There is also the financial point that, under the present
ASBO arrangements, the Crown Prosecution Service handles the prosecutions but, with CPNs, the local authorities would have to pay the prosecution costs.
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The Government argue that it would be easy to give prior written notices and that a council such as Westminster could have a fleet of street officers who would have preordained notice chits, rather like parking tickets. They could be given out as and when appropriate, according to the particular unacceptable conduct. If no notice were taken of such warning notices, the council could then issue the CPN. Even after that, if the CPN were breached, it could go straight for a police arrest warrant, as a criminal offence would have been committed. The Government think that this has an advantage over the present ASBO arrangements because you can go straight for the arrest warrant, whereas, under the ASBO arrangements, the local authority has to apply to the court for an arrest warrant. Both Westminster and other councils take that point to some extent, but they still argue that, with the problem of persistent beggars, adding this additional warning notice stage will undermine the ability to deal with them. Persistent beggars are transient by nature and you cannot envisage local authorities employing huge flocks of people to chase persistent beggars all over their city centre.
The second new instrument is the public spaces protection order which can be used as a preventive tool. This designates unacceptable activities, which include persistent begging, that are likely to have detrimental effects on citizens. It covers a particular site, and, if breached, a notice must inform offenders of their offence. Only thereafter can offending individuals be arrested—if they breach the public spaces protection order and their warning notice. My understanding is that, at that stage, an on-the-spot fine could also be applied, both as a deterrent and because the public spaces protection order had been breached. The Government argue that, in a city centre such as Westminster, the authority could designate all areas which are patronised by tourists as public spaces protection order areas. They could then employ street wardens to police the relevant areas, who would be equipped with notices to give out in cases of offending behaviour.
The main issue for local authorities such as Westminster, is that they would have to have substantial additional resources to police the relevant designated spaces and to monitor the offenders. As has already been stated, they, like every other local authority, are facing substantial cuts in their budget. It would cost councils a considerable additional amount to operate and to work this designation, and it would also need police to buy in. In London, anti-social behaviour is not considered by the police to have any priority, for fairly obvious reasons.
My point is that if the Government are not willing to agree to this amendment or to consider a similar amendment of their own, I think that they have the burden of convincing the main cities, and not just Westminster, that the CPN powers in particular, supported by public spaces protection orders, are as good as or better than the existing ASBO powers and the alternative of similar IPNA powers, as the amendment seeks to
provide. The Home Office has advised that it has taken up the issue with the Local Government Association safer communities board, which is fairly satisfied with the new provisions. However, my understanding is that that is not the case with the major cities, which have the inner-city aggressive begging problem to deal with. They are certainly not convinced and so are supporting my amendment.
I go back to where I started: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. While the two new powers may work, I really cannot see what the objection in principle is to the amendment, which would enable IPNAs to operate on effectively the same basis as ASBOs successfully operate.
I end by asking the Minister to meet representatives of the main cities and Westminster to go through the new arrangements and either satisfy them that they will be just as good as the existing arrangements or, if he finds that they too argue that in practice, particularly because of this “double doing” stage, they are unlikely to be very effective in dealing with the problem of persistent begging, undertake that the Government will come back with their own proposals to deal with this issue.