Clause 1 - Crime and disorder reduction strategies
Clean Neighbourhoods and Environment Bill
9:25 am
Mr Alun Michael (Minister of State (Rural Affairs), Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs; Cardiff South and Penarth, Labour/Co-operative)
I am particularly pleased to commend the clause because it amends section 6 of the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 to make it clear that damage to the local environment is a part of the continuum of low-level offences, running through vandalism and damage to disorder and serious crime. It follows that the crime and disorder reduction partnerships established under the 1998 Act should consider the state of the local environment and the types of offences that are doing damage to neighbourhoods in their area in developing their strategy for reducing crime and disorder.
I have no intention of using the initials CRDP, which somebody seems to have invented to refer to these partnerships. It is for the Home Office and other Departments to decide on their use of initials, but I have said that they are banned in DEFRA. To use any set of initials less easily identified than AA, RAC or RAF excludes those who are not familiar with initials, and it is important that crime and disorder reduction partnerships engage the public rather than exclude them. That certainly applies to increasing the sense in the local community that their neighbourhood is clean, safe and green by reducing the damage done by litter, graffiti, fly-posting, vandalism and other so-called petty offences. They may be petty offences in themselves, but their cumulative effect creates a sense of ''Nobody cares around here'', and therefore the response ''Why should I care?'' The answer is that we should all care. There is an individual and a collective responsibility on the community and an institutional responsibility on the police, the local authority and others involved in the local crime and disorder reduction partnership to ensure that a balanced and proportionate response is made to offences that degrade the local environment.
We want to ensure that local crime and disorder reduction partnerships consider—I emphasise the word ''consider''—the quality of the local environment when conducting their audits and then developing their strategies. Once they have considered the local situation, it is for the partnership to decide whether offences of the sort covered by the Bill are relevant to their concerns. If they are not a problem, they should not receive attention in the strategy. However, I suspect that there will be few areas, whether rural or urban, where some aspects of environmental offending are not relevant. In one area, for instance, there may be a serious problem of fly-tipping or burnt-out vehicles, but little fly-posting or graffiti. The duty on the partnership is to address the problems that exist, not a theoretical construct that is not relevant to local circumstances. What is certain is that the broken window theory applies. If we do not tackle degradation of the local environment quickly and get the message across ''We care around here'', things will deteriorate. There is a link between damage to the local environment and people's sense of well-being and the levels of crime and disorder that can develop.
The first is that we always intended that damage to the local environment and vandalism in the local neighbourhood should be part of the continuum to be examined and addressed by crime and disorder reduction partnerships. Many partnerships addressed this problem from day one, but not all have done so. Some have taken the more old-fashioned view that these are petty offences and not worthy of specific attention. That is why we are taking this opportunity to make it clear that these issues, which are at the forefront of people's minds in most parts of the country, need to be sensibly addressed in the local crime and disorder reduction strategy.
The second reason why it is now timely to make the expectations explicit is that we can now measure the extent of environmental offending in an area and the comparative improvement or deterioration over time. That is important in the context of the old saying, ''What don't get measured don't get done''. These things have been measured, and the Government and local government have a done a great deal of work over recent years to make sure that they could be, but that was not the case in 1998. We inherited a situation in which a good deal of offending went unremarked, which is why changes in the collection of statistics were made shortly afterwards. So-called low-level violence, for instance, was brought into the equation for the reporting and recording of crime.
The issues dealt with in the Bill have taken a little longer to address, and to an extent we are still in the early stages. I shall shortly publish the third local environmental quality audit produced by ENCAMS, the environmental charity that we sponsor. When we published the second report last year, it was possible for the first time to compare the 2003 snapshot with the 2002 snapshot of local environmental quality. It was possible to note that littering had got worse—by about 12 per cent.—a point raised by the Opposition on Second Reading. As I said in my response, what is interesting now is not only the deterioration in some aspects but evidence from work done by ENCAMS and elsewhere that a local partnership can make a massive difference—perhaps an improvement of 20 per cent. in respect of fast-food litter, for instance. By examining progress over time, we can see where things are getting worse, where things are getting better and what we can do to make sure that we move in the right direction rather than the wrong one. The important thing then is to learn the lessons and make sure that they are spread across the country and that improvement becomes universal.
This process is considerably helped by other evidence now available to us. BVPI199—best value performance indicator 199—now gives a measure of each local authority's effectiveness in cleaning up its local environment. The comprehensive performance assessment programme places an emphasis on local environment quality, which is rightly part of determining whether a local authority is a high-performing authority or not. We share the view, with councillors generally and the Local Government Association in particular, that people are concerned about their local environment and that it is therefore crucial for the Government and local government to tackle these problems effectively and create what several Government Departments have identified as ''cleaner, safer, greener'' communities for everybody to live in.
Why is the clause so important? It is important because it sets the strategic framework within which local environmental quality can be improved and makes explicit the nature of the continuum that starts with petty environmental offences such as littering and dog fouling. Let me use the issue of dog fouling to underline a big difference between us and the Conservative party. Typically during the Second Reading debate the Conservative contributions pointed to one negative fact in the ENCAMS report, but the report demonstrated where things are getting better as well as worse. It demonstrated explicitly that dog fouling has reduced over recent years in most areas and in the country generally. Improvement is not the same as perfection, and we should not be complacent, but I can illustrate the point from experience in my constituency. As I discovered on Saturday, it is still possible to get oneself mired in an unpleasant substance left by somebody else's pooch. However, as a regular runner, I examine the pavements of Penarth with great diligence, and the situation has improved massively over the past few years. Dog owners have got the message.
To return to the strategic approach that needs to be taken, let us look at the operation of local crime and disorder reduction partnerships. The authorities that make up the local partnership, together with the wider group of partners that they have to engage, have a responsibility to carry out an audit to establish the nature and extent of crime and disorder, antisocial behaviour, and misuse of drugs in their local area. Collecting the evidence will involve looking at the crime figures, but other hard and soft evidence will also be involved.