Clause 13 - Injunctions against anti-social behaviour on application of certain social landlords
Anti-social Behaviour Bill
3:45 pm
Mr Tony McNulty (Parliamentary Under-Secretary, Office of the Deputy Prime Minister; Harrow East, Labour)
Without pre-empting what I shall say subsequently on amendment No. 232, I admit that I shall probably disappoint the hon. Gentleman. The essence of clause 13 and, I accept, the thrust of many of the amendments is that people's behaviour has consequences. That is the key. If there is a theme to the Liberal Democrat amendments, it is to narrow our ability and limit the powers of HATs, RSLs and local housing authorities to secure injunctions and correct antisocial behaviour. I am sure that that is not the purpose of the amendments, but it would be the outcome.
Amendments Nos. 138 and 142 would limit the use of injunctions to circumstances in which behaviour had caused nuisance or annoyance to a relevant person, rather than circumstances in which behaviour was capable of causing nuisance or annoyance. That would require a victim to be identified before the landlord could take action and would severely limit what landlords could do in the broader proactive and preventive sense to try to arrest the early stage of antisocial behaviour before it turned into something that ultimately had real consequences.
The amendment would prevent third parties from acting as witnesses where a victim was too scared or intimidated to come to court, which is a real concern. For example, some landlords use professional witnesses on estates where a fear of reprisals has prevented tenants from coming forward to give evidence, not least because their experience of raising their head above the parapet in the past has been sorely disappointing and found wanting.
Some of the most successful schemes that are in place to arrest the early stage of antisocial behaviour and restore greater confidence in local communities
are the various street neighbourhood and community warden schemes in which the professional witness model or duty is part and parcel of the role. That works terribly well. If the Bill referred only to circumstances in which nuisance or annoyance had been caused, that would severely limit the proactive nature of what authorities could do.
The hon. Member for South-East Cambridgeshire was right: amendment No. 232 refers back to the language of the Housing Act 1996. However, it would narrow the ability of social landlords to obtain an injunction to occasions on which the behaviour was causing nuisance or annoyance or on which it was likely to do so. We chose the language of clause 13 very carefully to make the test easier, in the context of being proactive and preventive as well as simply reactive.
I am afraid that I have to pretend to be a lawyer now, at least in some regard, and go through the notion of nuisance and annoyance, which underpins at least some of the amendments. That phrase has been readily understood by the courts. The same wording is used in existing housing injunctions under the powers in the 1996 Act and in the nuisance grounds for possession applicable to secure and assured tenants. The courts have said that those words should be given their usual meaning: nuisance and annoyance are given their ordinary everyday meanings.
Behaviour must be such as to annoy an ordinary person, not an ultra-sensitive person. That relates not least to some of the matters that the Committee discussed under previous provisions and will probably discuss again. The Bill is about antisocial behaviour that deviates from the norm, not about putting everything in the context of how someone ultra-sensitive—probably like me—would react to the circumstances. For example, in one case a possession order was made because a tenant kept cats in the back garden that caused nuisance and annoyance to several adjoining occupiers. Were there only one or two cats? No, there were 38. Such a number can be a nuisance and an annoyance in the wider sense.
Legal argument has tended to focus not on the meaning of nuisance and annoyance, but on whether it is reasonable to grant an injunction or possession order on the basis of the nuisance and annoyance. The phraseology is broadly interpreted in a normal sense and, as ever, the test is of the reasonableness of granting an injunction or possession order on that basis. That is why the words ''nuisance'' and ''annoyance'' are included in the clause.