Housing Benefit (Withholding of Payment) Bill
11:15 am
Mr Frank Field (Birkenhead, Labour)
I accept my hon. Friend's point. The Bill does not deal with everything. When an irate Labour voter from Fulham wrote to me and said that the Bill did not deal with the unacceptable behaviour of yuppies, I had to write back to say that, sadly, we do not have many yuppies in Birkenhead—or if we do, they are very well behaved. If I represented a seat where yuppies were causing a great deal of trouble, my duty as the local MP would have been to consider what legislative changes would be required to deal with them. I sent the correspondent to talk to his local MP and I await a Bill about yuppies.
However, we have to deal with the charge that what the Bill deals with is an attack on the poor. It represents a demand from the poor to control the
unacceptable behaviour of people whom they do not want in their midst—not because they are uncharitable or unforgiving, but because any scrap of reasonable life has become impossible for them. As somebody with a bank balance, if I am up against it, I can move. Many of my constituents do not have bank balances: they are trapped by their circumstances. The Bill is a plea from the poorer areas of Birkenhead.
I am ashamed to be an MP when at public meeting after public meeting, I do not have answers for my constituents. When the role of the MP was different and people asked questions about housing, employment and social security, I could always give my constituents an answer, even if they did not like the one I gave. Now there are public meetings at which 200 or 300 people turn out at the drop of a hat to say how intolerable life has become because of the behaviour of perhaps only one family in the area, and I have to say that there is nothing much that we can do. Not one antisocial behaviour order has been issued in Birkenhead.
Before the 1997 election, I put to the Labour party the idea that, as parental authority collapsed, the local authority of the police should be reinforced and they should be allowed to impose penalty points. After that stage, the courts could automatically place restrictions on individuals. We did not go down that path; instead we went down the path of ASBOs. That is the one thing about we can get a public march in Birkenhead—there are people asking for antisocial behaviour orders to be issued, so they must believe that they work. Perhaps some groups can get their act together so that the problem can come before the courts. They do not believe that the orders are a panacea, but they might offer some respite.