Nadine Dorries (Mid Bedfordshire, Conservative)

It is about 8.30 pm and seven Members still wish to speak, so I shall keep my comments as brief as possible.

I had wanted to talk about the importance of the role of the family. I have looked at the situation in some European countries where there is a stronger family ethos and where antisocial behaviour differs very much from ours both in type of antisocial behaviour and in the amount and frequency of it. That will have to wait for another day, however.

Instead, I shall discuss a situation that arose in my constituency over the weekend. Mrs. Moon said she was out in her constituency on Friday night, observing how the street pastors operate. I was out in my constituency in the very early hours of Sunday morning, after having received a telephone call to let me know that 800 cars, each containing between two and five young people, had arrived between two villages. They proceeded to leave the cars, walk into the woods to a disused warehouse and have an illegal rave. We might ask, so they left their cars and went into the woods; where is the harm in that? Well, there are a number of ways in which that behaviour was antisocial, and there are a number of issues to do with how it was dealt with and how I would like it to be dealt with in future.

First, the warehouse was unsafe; there was steep rock and it was surrounded by water. It is also no exaggeration to say that everybody in there was high on drugs. The organisers were making their money by selling the drugs, not by charging an entrance fee. The cars had been left all over the road, too, and the local people were kept awake from about 1 am, when the cars started to arrive; they screeched up and down between the two villages. There was also the noise from the sound system. Three thousand people descended on to this small rural area, and it was completely overwhelming.

The debris caused were an antisocial feature, as was the fact that there were no toilets—people just went to the toilet where they could. My biggest concern, however, was the fact that there was no water supply and also that there were no medical facilities, no emergency services and no back-up. These kids had no water. I was there for seven hours, along with others. The kids were taking pills, inhaling from canisters and yet they had no water. They were not in a position to be in control of what happened to them or their own safety.

Another big concern is the fact that these people came to our constituency in the first place. They did so because the place they came to was seen as an easy target. Two policewomen were sent at the height of this rave. I am not sure what they were sent to do; I imagine the phone call went to the emergency services and they came. They wandered into the middle of this illegal rave, but they should not have done so because their safety was compromised. We needed a strong response from the local police to protect the safety of these young people, getting them out of this area and this danger.

What did the police do? When it became daylight these two policewomen, having been up, left their shift and two policemen came to take over—they were great people, but what could two of them do in the face of this? The police superintendent told us that they were going to send a helicopter up to assess the danger, despite the fact that we had been there for hours and had already been up there. They sent the helicopter up, although we had actually been told that the weather was too bad; we knew that it was raining, because we were soaked to the skin. Thank goodness it does not rain in Afghanistan, Iraq and such places, because I have no idea how helicopters are used there when it rains. The helicopter eventually went up when the rain stopped, and a couple of hours later the police did come out. The action chosen was to stand and to serve an order on the organisers—but there were no organisers as such.

People slowly began to disperse peacefully. All credit to the kids, because they did, in their incapable state, try to clean up some of the mess as they left. People who should not have been driving were getting into cars. Drugs are as dangerous as alcohol when one is driving, and these people should not have been getting into their cars on leaving—this was 13 hours after they had arrived. If we had had an elected police commissioner who was accountable to the people of the two small towns where this rave took place, the police would have been more rapid in their response and more effective in how they dealt with the situation. As it was, this rave continued and people had their day disturbed, as their night had been. Can one can imagine this going on all through the night? I was there at 7 am and I got home at 2.30 pm —we were just in the position where we could leave around then. The mess on the roads and at the site was disgraceful.

We have spoken about antisocial behaviour today, and people have cited their cases and what has happened to their constituencies. Antisocial behaviour can be anything from a child misbehaving, or somebody on the tube or train with their iPod on too loud so that it disturbs everybody else's peace and environment, to something like the 3,000 people who arrived in my constituency. At the bottom of all this is the authorities' ability to deal with antisocial behaviour as it arises. I know that a number of cases have been made for the myriad of agencies and tools that both the police and the authorities have to deal with antisocial behaviour, but the fact is that in many cases they do not deal with it. As I witnessed with my own eyes on Sunday, it is not a case of not wanting to deal with it; it is almost a case of there being too many instruments for the police to use. It is not as though any one event is dealt with by saying, "This is how we deal with this; this is the tool we use." There are so many tools that the police are confused as to what they use and when.

We know that 15,000 antisocial behaviour orders have been served, that 50 per cent. of them are breached and that 65 per cent. of ASBOs given to young people are breached. That constitutes a fail; it means that ASBOs are not working. Rather than serving ASBOs on young people who behave in a way deemed to be antisocial, perhaps we should be reinforcing our police, so that they can act in a way that makes these young people think twice about what they are about to do before they commit any instance of antisocial behaviour; those 3,000 young people who wanted to arrive in my constituency for an illegal rave should have known that it was not worth their while, because the police would descend on them and move them on. It should not have been worth their while coming from Wisbech, Suffolk and all the other places that they told me they had arrived from, because the police should have had the powers and the ability to deal with the situation straight away and move them on. Apparently some police forces do take that approach, which is why the kids were in my constituency; they were there because the police forces in their area have a zero-tolerance attitude towards these raves.

It has been very interesting to listen to some of the speeches made by Labour Members—in fact, it has been amazing, because this Government have been in power for 12 years, but some of the speeches have almost suggested that antisocial behaviour is a new phenomenon that has suddenly arisen. If we speak to anybody, anywhere and ask them what is of huge concern to them, the answer will be the rise in antisocial behaviour in all areas of life and in all places. Whether it is on the train or in schools, or whether it involves people descending on the streets in my constituency, antisocial behaviour is on the increase and it is getting worse.

Whatever we are doing with the myriad tools and instruments that the police have, it is not working. As soon as the Government accept that, the better. As soon as they understand that the way to deal with antisocial behaviour is to give the police powers, to make them more accountable and to give them the ability to deal with such behaviour as and when it arises, the better it will be for all of us. One way of doing that and of ensuring that it happens is to consider having elected police commissioners.

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