My Lords, I have listened to the quite detailed discussion that we have had so far in our attempt at line-by-line scrutiny of the Bill in relation to respect orders. Weighing up the pros and rather more cons, I am very aware that what I am going to say might seem glib about anti-social behaviour. People listening in might think, “This crowd who are raising problems of civil liberties are not aware of the real scourge of anti-social behaviour and the impact and the misery that it can cause on ordinary people’s lives”. The noble Lords, Lord Pannick and Lord Blencathra, gave us a taste of what that anti-social activity can feel like in local areas. I recognised the descriptions from the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, of young people potentially running amok in local areas. Where I live, that has been known to happen, so I recognise that.

However, it would not be appropriate for us to be emotionally blackmailed by the suggestion that, if we are opposed to some of these anti-social behaviour orders being brought in, it is because we do not care about ordinary people suffering anti-social behaviour. It is not that we should be told to shut up and put up. I am not satisfied that respect orders will help. They certainly will not help increase the amount of respect in society, particularly of young people respecting authority or what have you. There is a danger that the orders themselves could become a scourge. Using the civil level of proof, on the balance of probabilities, respect orders are too problematic to keep in the legislation without a real challenge.

I want to challenge the Minister: introducing respect orders was a manifesto commitment but, with respect, the electorate would not know what a respect order was. They want the Government and politicians to tackle anti-social behaviour. They do want more respect in society. They do not know what a respect order is. We can barely understand what a respect order is ourselves and the Bill has only just been put before us. One would not be betraying the manifesto commitment by saying, “This order that we dreamt up because it has a good sounding title isn’t fit for purpose”.

I want to remind noble Lords what we are being asked to sign up to. Respect orders are not just to be used to deal with an individual engaged in anti-social behaviour. You can also be issued with an order if it is concluded that someone threatens to engage in said behaviour. That is a preventive order that can be dangerously open-ended. What does “threatens to engage in” mean? It means that criminal sanctions based on speculation rather than actual behaviour can be applied. This is based on a definition of anti-social behaviour as not just conduct that has caused harassment, alarm or distress to any person but conduct that is

“likely to cause distress, alarm or harassment”.

I am emphasising that because these things matter. We end up arming the state with new tools which I am not completely convinced will tackle the problem.

The notion of young people shoplifting, engaging in anti-social behaviour and running amok is a noble Lord, Lord Blencathra-style caricature—no disrespect to him—and kind of like a Daily Mail image. When those activities are happening, there is no Intervention using the Laws that we already have. A lot of these things are already illegal. They are certainly anti-social and actually criminal activities, but nobody does anything. So I am worried about having too open-ended a criminalising Clause that can be doled out to people but will not necessarily tackle the problem.

On harassment, alarm and distress, I have been doing a lot of work with university students, and I can assure your Lordships that in universities there is a huge amount of harassment, alarm and distress being caused, particularly in relation to, for example, pro-Palestinian activists disrupting lectures and threatening lecturers, and where we have a kind of explicit Jew hatred on campus. Everybody says, “Well, what can we do?” Well, you could issue them a respect order, but even I do not think that that is the way that we should deal with it. The point is that we are using these things, it seems to me, as an abdication of responsibility for acting by basically creating another legislative tool.

Overall, the statutory test for imposing respect orders, in my opinion, is too broad and vague in its language to be a safe new legislative change. I am mindful that respect orders can also have significant impacts on our citizens’ rights and freedoms, and I do think that rights and freedoms are important. These measures are a form of behavioural control order that imposes limitations upon a person’s liberty and daily activities in an attempt to prevent unwanted behaviour that is actually quite subjectively defined. To do this, they provide the state with unfettered discretion to do anything described in the order, and that might include imposing curfews, electronic monitoring, and restrictions on who a person can communicate with and where they can travel to, and even can exclude people from their own home—things we have already heard about.

There are no limits to the type or number of prohibitions or requirements that can be imposed. Respect orders can be imposed without notice, as we have heard—without telling the person the order has been made against them—and for an indefinite period, with no provision to remove conditions imposed.

These are quite draconian challenges to our civil liberties regime and we do not even know whether they work. We are told by the Minister that the pilot scheme has been put off because it is urgent that we get on with using these orders. I would suggest that what is urgent is that we get on with enforcing the laws that we have and ensuring that those laws are used to punish wrongdoing, rather than creating a whole new legislative framework that also will probably not be enforced, but none the less gives the state a lot of powers that I would rather it did not have without much more scrutiny. I do not want this clause to stand part of the Bill, and I do want to get rid of respect orders altogether.