My Lords, I wish to speak on the statutory guidance sections. I have one little amendment, Amendment 57, in this group, and it is fairly clear what it means.
This is the first time that I have spoken at this stage of the Bill, apart from one intervention, so I should declare my interests again in relation to this group and some others that we will come to. They are my membership of a district council in Lancashire as a councillor, my membership of the British Mountaineering Council, of which I am a patron, and my vice-presidency of the Open Spaces Society, and they relate to things that will come up later.
I thank the Ministers—particularly the noble Lord, Lord Taylor of Holbeach, who is not yet in his place—for the way in which they have approached this Bill, for the way in which they have been open to discussion and to holding meetings with the Bill team, and for the large amount of material that they have sent out in letters and so on. Their readiness to look at a lot of the questions raised at Second Reading and in Committee, and to come forward with quite a lot of amendments today—most of the amendments that we are discussing at the moment are government amendments—shows that they have been willing to listen. I have absolutely no doubt that the parts of the Bill in which I am interested—those on anti-social behaviour—are a lot better for that process, so I will put on record my personal thanks to them.
These amendments are all about guidance. As the Minister said, they mean that the guidance that we were told would be issued—we have already seen the draft guidance—and that is now out for consultation with various bodies will become statutory. This is very welcome. A caveat to that is that I would much have preferred the guidance to be statutory instruments and regulations, as those would have had the benefit of having to come before the House of Commons and your Lordships’ House. Nevertheless, it is better that the guidance should be statutory rather than it being left open as to whether or not people will bother to produce guidance. The fact that it is statutory guidance means that there will have to be proper consultation on it, that it will have to be published and everybody will know that, and that the Ministers issuing the guidance will have some accountability to the Houses of Parliament if we want to raise questions as a result of what is in it. That is welcome and it is being welcomed by a number of organisations with which I am in touch.
The guidance referred to in this group of amendments covers a number of different parts of the Bill, including IPNAs—I am interested that we are still calling them IPNAs following the amendment that was agreed this afternoon; I was trying to work out whether they should now be called IPHADs but at the moment they are called IPNAs—criminal behaviour orders, the powers of police community support officers, community protection notices, public space protection orders and the question of the closure of premises, and there may be others. The point that I would have made if I had been able to get in during the debate this afternoon is that the Bill is not really about everything that was discussed this afternoon.
Most of the debate was about free speech, freedom of assembly and the right of people to protest, as by-products of Clause 1. In practice, this Bill is about anti-social behaviour—or at least the majority of it that refers to anti-social behaviour is—and about whether it is successful in tackling anti-social behaviour more effectively than the existing regime based on ASBOs. I am optimistic that it will be more successful, but the guidance that we are discussing is going to be crucial to how it works on the ground. At the moment if you have to make an ASBO, you have failed.
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If you have to make an IPNA, or criminal behaviour or public spaces protection orders, that is the end of the process. They are backstops to everything else that ought to be happening in the mean time. If the system is to work properly, the problems should be picked up early. A lot of work should go into what my noble friend Lady Hamwee this afternoon referred to as preventing escalation. That requires a lot of work and effort on the ground, and teams of people: perhaps the neighbourhood policing team, or the local council anti-social behaviour team, or people from schools and from the truancy, probation and environmental health services. These people need to work together as teams rather than individually. That is what tackling anti-social behaviour really means if it is to be successful on the ground.
I hope that the guidance will strongly point people in this direction: to take action as early as possible and to take preventive action to work with people rather
than at the beginning waving these new powers, orders and notices, and using them as last resorts but nevertheless as backstops if necessary. However, resources are a huge problem. Before Second Reading, I had a meeting with two people from the local anti-social behaviour team—a team of three altogether—from my council of Pendle to talk about this Bill and get their views on it. They were optimistic that it would help them.
Given the scale of the spending cuts on the local authorities and the fact that my own authority is having to lose about half its staff over six or seven years, the problem is whether that team will exist in a year’s time. The presence of services and teams like these, which are not statutory but voluntary as far as the council is concerned, is crucial if the statutory provisions in this Bill are to work. I think they would want me to make that point. Having said that, I support the amendments in this group and hope that the Minister will reply to my little amendment.