Rebecca Bryant and Charlotte Hamilton-Kay gave evidence.

We will now hear oral evidence from Resolve and ASB Help. We have until 10.55 for this session. Will the witnesses please introduce themselves for the record?

Rebecca Bryant:

Good morning. My name is Rebecca Bryant and I am the chief executive of Resolve.

Charlotte Hamilton-Kay:

Good morning. I am Charlotte Hamilton-Kay and I am the deputy chief executive of ASB Help.

Q Good morning. I am Dr Kieran Mullan, a Shadow Justice Minister.

The antisocial behaviour that your work focuses on is often resolved, at least initially, through non-custodial sentences, so the other measures available to the court are particularly important. I would like to ask you about court fines and compensation. I have spoken to victims who feel it is unfair that if someone is responsible for, let us say, the criminal damage of property, the victim will not necessarily be awarded compensation for the value of that property, as they would if they took someone to the small claims court. To reassure people in the community that the measures available are effective, would there be benefit in ensuring that when someone is responsible for property damage, the victim is awarded compensation that matches the value of the damaged property?

Rebecca Bryant:

Compensation in relation to antisocial behaviour cases is currently quite vague. Often, if you are looking at cases that are resolved through an early Intervention and prevention approach, you would be looking at more of a restorative justice element, and perhaps mediation, where there is no compensation and it is more about recognising the impact of the behaviour the person has perpetrated. Once you move into the legal action arena, we have to recognise that a lot of the people who are perpetrators of antisocial behaviour may not be in a position to pay any compensation—although I recognise that, from a victim’s perspective, some sort of restorative approach would be welcome.

Charlotte Hamilton-Kay:

I agree with that. Part of the problem with antisocial behaviour is that when we record it, and when certain agencies take reports, there is a real grey area in how it is classified. We struggle with the classification of crime versus antisocial behaviour. It is often dismissed as a misdemeanour or, as Baroness Helen said, it is low level, so we are not necessarily going to reach the threshold at which we can look at compensation. That is impactive for victims of antisocial behaviour, because it immediately makes them feel that what they have experienced and suffered is not as important or serious as other cases that might meet the criteria. We would really need to look at that before we could go that way.

Additionally, victims of antisocial behaviour often do not report what they are experiencing because they feel they are not going to be listened to or taken seriously. Introducing a compensation element would just complicate that at this stage.

Q Is it ever an element of the community resolution process that a perpetrator might agree to make some kind of financial compensation voluntarily?

Rebecca Bryant:

That is not something that I have come across at all. Restorative justice and community remedy can be either between the two individuals or group of individuals who are involved in the antisocial behaviour—bringing them together and doing a piece of work to recognise the impact of that behaviour—or something in the community itself, perhaps with higher visibility. There was a pilot last year around immediate justice and the impact on the community of seeing the behaviour paid back, if you like.

Restorative justice is often only one of the tools that we use to respond to antisocial behaviour. When we are talking about early Intervention and prevention, we also use mediation and warnings, highlighting to the individual perpetrator the impact that the behaviour is having on the victim and the community.

Q Related to that is the issue of fines, which are separate from compensation. I accept your point about people’s ability to pay, and that there is always a process that ensures that fines are collected only in a way that is proportionate to someone’s means, but you can time out of fines: if you have not paid them in a certain amount of time, you do not have to pay them. Would you support that time limit being taken away, so that if someone comes into financial means later on in life, they will still be held accountable for stuff they did in the community for which they were given a fine as part of community resolution?

Rebecca Bryant:

Yes, I think I would, but how long is that time? I think a victim of antisocial behaviour, community safety issues or even crime wants to see some closure, move forward and move past the incident that has happened. Having something like that hanging over them for an indefinite amount of time might not enable them to have that closure.

Charlotte Hamilton-Kay:

The bonus of fines or penalty notices for antisocial behaviour is that we hope they act as a deterrent. If they are not working as a deterrent, it does not matter what amount of time we put on them: they are not going to have the effect on the perpetrator of stopping the behaviour. Yes, there needs to be culpability —we should not just have a “get out of jail free” card if we can wait out the clock—but we need to be realistic about what they are going to achieve.

Q I appreciate that some of what you deal with would not end up involving a magistrate passing a sentence, but sometimes that will be the case. Would it benefit transparency for victims, even at a magistrates level, to have a record of the remarks that were made in relation to why the sentence was passed?

Rebecca Bryant:

Absolutely, yes, I do. What is taken into account around sentencing is often rather opaque, as is whether someone actually has to attend the sentencing. Victims need to be able to see justice done, because they have had a traumatic experience and have perhaps gone through the process of giving evidence live and having to face the person who has perpetrated the antisocial behaviour, crime or community safety issue. Having access to the sentencing report and the sentencing itself, and understanding that their victim impact statement is being read out and taken into account, would be significantly beneficial.

Charlotte Hamilton-Kay:

I agree. We have to look at everything on a case-by-case basis, and in some situations it would not be appropriate—a victim would not feel comfortable with it. The problem with antisocial behaviour is, again, that grey area between ASB and crime. Impact is the biggest factor, and a victim needs to have that voice and explain how they have been impacted, but we certainly do not want the secondary traumatisation of coming face to face with someone who potentially does not acknowledge what they have done. You would have to look at the complexities of each case.

Q What are the benefits of the Bill having the first ever duty to co-operate among housing providers, the Victims’ Commissioner and other relevant authorities? What will that do for victims of ASB?

Charlotte Hamilton-Kay:

It is a really great step. We need more accountability, and oversight of all agencies involved in managing antisocial behaviour, and the duty to co-operate with the Victims’ Commissioner, is a really great start to that. There is a huge postcode lottery and disparity across England and Wales in the way that victims of antisocial behaviour are supported, the way their cases are managed and what action is taken on different behaviours. Anything we can do to bring a nationalised approach would be really beneficial to victims.

Rebecca Bryant:

I think there is a balance. We welcome the Victims’ Commissioner having the authority, and the co-operation element, but the arena of social housing, local authorities and antisocial behaviour is very crowded at the moment. You have the social housing regulator, which is currently looking at housing providers in relation to the consumer standard, which includes antisocial behaviour—their approach to it, the number of cases per 1,000 and the respondents’ satisfaction with how they respond to it. That is not just for housing providers; it includes local authorities with housing stock. That is one side.

You also have the local government ombudsman and the housing ombudsman, which both deal with individual people who are not satisfied with the response they have received from the agency we are talking about. We are very supportive of antisocial behaviour victims and approaches being at the forefront of the Victims’ Commissioner’s mind, and her or him being able to pull together responses, require people to respond and perhaps look at themes and areas where we can strengthen our support and guidance for agencies that work in this arena, but what will that actually look like? We are currently working on that with the current Victims’ Commissioner. At the moment it is quite vague. There would have to be a tightening up of what element she is going to look at, bearing in mind that the ASB case review, the housing ombudsman, the local authority ombudsman and the social housing regulator are all looking at the same thing.

Q What measures to improve the situation around antisocial behaviour would you have liked to see in the Bill that are not in it?

Rebecca Bryant:

Funded universal support for victims of antisocial behaviour. It has been made clear by not only us but the previous panel that antisocial behaviour is a very broad church and often includes criminal activity, but it is not recorded as a crime. We use antisocial behaviour legislation, as it is under the current regime and as it will be in future with the Crime and Policing Bill, as that stands, for the use or threat of violence, for example. We all know that using or threatening violence is a crime, yet we use antisocial behaviour legislation to respond to it. It can involve drug dealing, cuckooing properties, criminal damage—all those things are crimes.

If you are a victim of crime and you report it as a crime to the police, you will get an automatic offer of victim support. When you are dealing with an antisocial behaviour case, you might report it to the local authority or to a housing provider, and you do not get immediate access to victim support. We know from our own research and research from the Victims’ Commissioner, various different reports and colleagues like ASB Help that what supports a victim is having a named person who can support them through the process. That person can guide them through often very complex and difficult situations in relation to taking legal action, or if the perpetrator is vulnerable and has multiple issues around mental health, drugs and alcohol, and the significant delays in the civil justice system mean that the case may go on for a long time.

We need specialist victim support that is universal and independent. I should stress the independence because, often, when a complainant makes a complaint to a housing provider and a local authority, they will be part of a caseload of many. They will be given some support and guidance, and some people have specialist training to do that, but we would seriously support having an independent specialist to provide that kind of support—for example, Victim Support, which is commissioned and funded. It is very much a postcode lottery at the moment. There are some police and crime commissioners in the country who fund specialist ASB victim support, but they are few and far between. It really is a postcode lottery as to what you get where you live. That is what I think is missing.

Charlotte Hamilton-Kay:

I absolutely agree with that. We can talk about victims of a single instance of minor crime, which I do not say easily; it is the criminal version of “low level”. If, for example, someone smashed your plant pots on your front doorstep, that is a crime and you are entitled to support for it. But if you have been suffering sleepless nights for 12 months because a neighbour has kept you awake constantly, you are losing your job because you are falling asleep at work, and you have experienced a constant campaign, there is no one there. If there was a statutory agency to provide support, that could be life-altering for some people. It is a very important thing that we continue to campaign for.

With the best will in the world, a lot of the measures are a great step forward for victims of antisocial behaviour, but if we do not allocate the resources and ensure that the training and experience is there for frontline practitioners, then we are only as good as our weakest link. We need to ensure that we support our frontline practitioners who work in the field of antisocial behaviour to get the job right. If they do not have the resources to do the job properly, they are not going to be able to. If they have not got the training and the knowledge to understand the vulnerabilities and the different caveats of antisocial behaviour, they are not going to be able to do the job properly. That is immediately where we fall down. Unfortunately, the buck will stop with them, so we are dutybound to make sure they have adequate support to do it right.

Q Rebecca, you talked about situations in which there is a complex mixture of housing and mental health issues, and possibly drugs and alcohol, and the housing association or local authority struggles to move the person on because it is not clear where they would go. Do you think the agencies involved have the tools and resources they need to comply with the Bill in respect of the Victims’ Commissioner?

Rebecca Bryant:

I would say that the vast Majority of local authorities and housing providers up and down the country resource their response to antisocial behaviour, but there has been a significant impact on that since 2008, with austerity and the cuts that have happened across local authorities. I believe that the toolkit itself is strong. There is a mixture of early Intervention and prevention, which we absolutely know work. Around 75% of complaints around antisocial behaviour are resolved first time. When we are talking about taking cases to court, we are only talking about a small minority of all the complaints.

There is something there about us understanding the real picture of antisocial behaviour in the country. A million incidents of antisocial behaviour were reported to the police last year, but our YouGov survey suggests that over 50% of people do not report antisocial behaviour, so imagine doubling that number to 2 million, and then adding on top the incidents recorded by housing providers and local authorities: we are probably looking at more like 4 million or 5 million incidents of antisocial behaviour. It is a really significant problem; it is pernicious and causes great damage to communities and individuals alike.

There are certain things that we strongly feel should happen. We did some work with the all-party parliamentary group a couple of years ago, looking into the complexity of antisocial behaviour. We made a recommendation that there should be a pilot for a specialist housing court that could look at the complexity around antisocial behaviour. You are asking an ASB officer to be an enforcement person, a mediator, a victim support person, a mental health expert and a social worker.

We recognise that people who perpetrate antisocial behaviour can often be victims themselves and have had traumatic experiences—adverse childhood experiences—in their lives, which might be the root cause of their antisocial behaviour. We need to have something like a specialist court, and we need the judiciary who look at antisocial behaviour to be trained to understand the complexity, because we often find that judges are not necessarily trained in antisocial behaviour when they look at complex cases.

The resources required are wide. It is about not just local authorities and housing providers but the community safety partnership, because we know that a partnership response is what resolves antisocial behaviour. It is not about one single agency, and it is certainly not just within the auspices of the police.

Q In my experience, housing is often at the heart of antisocial behaviour and the related problems and, of course, at the heart of that is usually the tenant. What are your views about how the provisions in the Bill can be effectively communicated to tenants so that they have knowledge of what their rights are and how to access them, in relation to local authorities and social landlords?

Rebecca Bryant:

We have long called for a campaign on antisocial behaviour to explain rights. That is one of the reasons why we have Antisocial Behaviour Awareness Week, when we talk about how to report and what people should expect when they report antisocial behaviour. I liked the idea from Victim Support that perhaps we should have a charter that explains people’s rights: you can ask for an ASB case review, you can make a complaint to the ombudsman if you are dissatisfied, and you can—if this element of the Bill passes—make a complaint to or request support from the Victims’ Commissioner.

Equally, we must remember that this is about stopping antisocial behaviour. Often when members of the public report antisocial behaviour, they are looking for a specific outcome. That outcome might be to evict the person who is the perpetrator, when actually, that is not our role. Our role is to stop the antisocial behaviour from happening. So there is always something, on behalf of housing providers and local authorities, about managing the expectations of the individual who is making the complaint and being really clear on what antisocial behaviour is, what you can resolve as an individual, and what we can do to support you as an organisation. We need to be much clearer about what people can expect from us as the agencies and our response.

Charlotte Hamilton-Kay:

Absolutely. I will make a couple of points. Rebecca has mentioned the ASB case review. The disparity in its administration across England and Wales is a real issue for victims. We released a report last year that showed there are some areas in England and Wales that, in four years, have still not held one ASB case review, and this legislation has been around for over 11 years. That is purely because victims are not aware of the case review’s existence. They are not able to make an application because it is not publicised. We have to ask why it is not publicised. Practitioners feel that it is a complaint process and will involve them being questioned on why they have made the decisions they have made in case management, and victims are really missing out on the opportunity to explain the impact of what they are experiencing.

As Baroness Newlove mentioned, we really need to standardise the threshold for an ASB case review application, so there are no additional caveats—it is three instances in six months and that is it. We also need to standardise how it is publicised and how victims are made aware of it, because a lot of people are still unaware. A report that you at Resolve issued in the last couple of years said that 87% of people were still unaware of this tool’s existence, so in 11 years we have not done a very good job of making people aware of it.

Finally, on the concept of a victim being able to express what they are experiencing, when we are talking about tenants, everybody experiences things differently. What might be really impactful to me could just go straight over your head. It is all about your personal circumstances and what your experience is, what your triggers are and what you happen to have been experiencing that day. We need to be very clear about what is antisocial behaviour, what is unreasonable behaviour and what is inconsiderate behaviour, and manage the expectations of what people can and cannot demand change to. Managing the expectations of victims is part of the support network. When they know what to expect and what can and cannot happen, and when they are not dealing with that unknown, it makes it a lot easier for them to cope.

Q Good morning both and thank you for coming to give evidence. We have rightly discussed antisocial behaviour in depth. I know from my own email inbox that it is a huge scourge on my constituents’ lives in Erewash. Broadly, what is your general assessment of how the Bill’s measures on antisocial behaviour will help us to tackle it as a whole?

Rebecca Bryant:

It is very difficult to see this Bill in isolation, considering we have the Crime and Policing Bill going through Parliament at the same time. We want to be in lockstep and to recognise that we need not only to support victims and communities, but to consider the drivers for antisocial behaviour—where it is happening and how we can better respond, whether that is through a legal toolkit or by putting checks and balances in place. For example, I gave evidence to the Joint Committee on Human Rights last week around checks and balances on ensuring that we recognise the human rights of individuals versus the community, and how we do that.

Having a spotlight on antisocial behaviour can only be a good thing if it is what the Majority of people in the country say is a high priority. Having spoken to lots of Ministers, Governments and civil servants over the last 25 years that I have been working on antisocial behaviour, that priority has not gone away. When you look at our survey results on the impact of antisocial behaviour, one in seven people say that their mental health is impacted, and one in 10 actually move home because they are a victim of antisocial behaviour. Over 50% of people do not report it to us. Why not? Is it because they do not trust us to respond? Is it because we do not advertise how to report it to us? There is something there that we need to be think about, and we need to do more research into that.

With the Crime and Policing Bill, there will be mandating of data collection. For the first time since the crime and policing Act that is there at the moment, we will be gathering information on use of early Intervention and prevention tools, and we will be able to evaluate what works, what we want to invest in and how we train our staff. We will look at legal action and whether the new respect order—as it will be once it has been piloted—works. What is the impact of positive requirements and what is the impact of sentencing? What is the impact of increasing fines as a deterrent?

At the centre of that, we will have the Victims’ Commissioner, advocating for individual victims of antisocial behaviour—in a different way, perhaps, from the way the ombudsman will be looking at complaints, the ASB case review looks at a response or the social housing regulator looks at things. The Victims’ Commissioner is actually advocating for the individual victim or the communities that are being impacted, and that can only be a good thing.

I thank colleagues for the timeliness and focused nature of their questions. I thank the witnesses for sparing their valuable time this morning to come and give evidence to us.