Before the July general election, the two main political parties agreed; antisocial behaviour (ASB) was a blight on high streets and communities. Mark Rowe reviews first progress against ASB, and then the use made of private security.
Naturally, Labour and the Tories did not see eye to eye on ASB. In 2023 while prime minister, Rishi Sunak announced an antisocial behaviour action plan; ‘we will work tirelessly to crack down on anti-social behaviour. For too long, people have put up with it ruining their neighbourhoods’, Sunak said in January 2023. In the election campaign, Sir Keir Starmer for Labour agreed that ASB was a blight; but differed from the Tories in that he blamed them for failing to deliver. Both parties were correct in making much of ASB, as what’s routinely called a low-level crime (or not even ranking as crime, but a nuisance that police can fob off on local government, such as excessive noise) bothers people of all ages, colours and backgrounds. And more than bothers, but repels and makes lives misery. As Dame Diana Johnson, junior minister at the Home Office, put it in an October 22 speech, echoing Sir Keir and other Labour figures, the Starmer government has a ‘mission to crack down on anti-social behaviour and to take back our streets’.
What’s striking is that for 25 years, since the Crime and Disorder Act of the early Tony Blair years, methods of tackling ASB have been set: a place for local government (under the rubric of community safety), which implies public and private sectors working together (including businesses, crime reduction partnerships and the police); and using new tools short of prison or probation, first called antisocial behaviour orders (ASBOs) and now rebranded as ‘Respect orders’ by the incoming Labour government in late 2024. Whatever the name, the ASB issues remain drearily the same: on-street drug use and dealing, on-street drinking and accompanying public urination, bad language and plain hanging around on public benches, church walls, fire doors and such ‘grey space’. A tool added by the Coalition Government under the Anti-Social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act 2014 are Public Spaces Protection Orders (PSPOs), most typically against dog mess, and against nuisances by humans.
Enforcement
Whatever the orders or laws, someone has to enforce them. While Sunak’s plan gave money for police forces to carry out patrols of ‘hot spots’, the cuts since 2010 have left police as mainly a blue-light, emergency response service; or, no matter how willing officers are, unable to do more than dash from one equally pressing issue to the next, on ‘operations’ – metal theft one month, theft from shops the next, then car cruising, burglary and so it goes on – rather than applying themselves consistently to lower-level crimes. Everyday problems at highly specific yet ubiquitous places such as aggressive begging outside convenience stores with cashpoint machines? Police lack the numbers, and the whole point of ASBOs and criminal behaviour orders (CBOs, still given by courts to shoplifters and the like) is to give the authorities tools short of prisons (which, politicians admitted in a 2024 watershed – are full).
Despite Sunak talking up his plan, for example ‘immediate justice’, albeit only in trial areas, the reality is that the courts are chronically backlogged. The dismal reality is that if youths want to be malicious and aggressive – to bus drivers, convenience store owners and library assistants – there’s not much to stop them. If those assaulted verbally or physically were to ring 999 – for a youth mockingly mimicking a shop assistant’s foreign accent is hurtful and in context frightening, for what might it lead to? – a police officer, typically young-looking and inexperienced, may attend, but invariably after the event. The officer can do no more than take details; without an identification of the offender, what will happen? If the victim dials the non-emergency number 101, and has to wait on the line for some minutes, an ‘outcome’, to use the criminal justice jargon, is even less likely.
What percentage of ASB, we may ask, leads to any outcome? Here lies part of the suffering from ASB; the sense that those assaulted have, that they’re powerless because the state will do nothing, whether because of ‘low prosecution rates’ or ‘resource limitations’, which (to quote from the latest survey by the Victims’ Commissioner, Baroness Newlove) ‘discourages, or even silences, victims from coming forward’. When the Commissioner’s report for example asks that ‘the police develop training to better …. identify when offending has reached the criminal threshold’ – what’s been holding the police back all these years? Is ASB so unknown to them? One can only conclude a profound lack of will in the police to truly go after ASB, which would be far too voluminous for them.
To truly tackle ASB, would require not only a galvanised (and incentivised?) and more resourced police and courts system (because what’s the point in more police capturing more data and offenders, if it only clogs up courts and prisons further?). As the roots of ASB and violence may lie in problems at home, or lack of employment and opportunities, a determined approach to tackling ASB would have to bring in schools, local social care and healthcare services, housing associations and other services that can shed light on the relatively few delinquents who do much of the ASB and other crime. However, that would not only require more state spending than tax-payers would stomach, it would mean a stronger state than many would like, particularly if it started prying into their lives.
Part two – Essex example.
