Gathering in groups sometimes up to 30 strong, these troublemakers were usually perceived as threatening, although only a few were likely to have been involved in anything serious. Yet brave or foolish would be the person who took them on. A storm of contemptuous abuse would be pretty well guaranteed, and, depending who was around at the core of the group on that particular occasion, there may well have been at least the threat of something worse.
The odd hailstorm seems to work wonders, even if it doesn't make the summer of your dreams.
So what is the story? For most residents it is simple. The kids are invariably a problem – "if those kids were mine, I would have drowned them at birth" – and youth facilities make it worse, not better, because they are seen as attracting outsiders, and the police seem to have no powers.
The police themselves feel frustrated beyond belief. If no offence is being committed, what can they do? Even when the law has been broken, getting the evidence together, let alone the witnesses, can be a nightmare. Victims will not come forward, worried about reprisals. So it goes on.
And there are no magic solutions. The soaring number of evictions may solve the problem in one place, simply to move it elsewhere – I've seen the evidence of that with my own eyes. And although trust is slow to build up and relationships matter, the turnover of staff, among the police, housing managers and others is fast enough to make one's head spin.
So, what of the latest proposals to deduct benefits from errant tenants? I confess I am something of a sceptic. Not because of wringing-wet liberalism: I believe that if you have rules, you must be prepared to enforce them, and demonstrate your willingness to do so. No good at all is done by sending out the signal that rules are only there to be broken. And sometimes harsh penalties appear to do the trick, as was demonstrated by the recent jailing of a mother who failed to send her children to school.
I am concerned that we may be focusing on the wrong target by bringing in new penalties rather than examining how to enforce those we already have
Frank Field's proposal to cut housing benefit for families repeatedly convicted of antisocial behaviour could potentially cut evictions rather than increase them, by placing a new penalty before the ultimate one of losing your home, and I can see the sense in that. I am concerned, however, that we may be focusing on the wrong target by bringing in new penalties rather than examining how to enforce those we already have.
All too frequently, efforts to tackle these now well-acknowledged problems falter on the crucial issue of the lack of evidence. Witnesses are thin on the ground, because of actual or feared reprisals. CCTV cameras are not much use when people hide inside hooded jackets. Of course, some people are deterred by the threat of heavy sanctions but for most people, the real deterrent lies in the probability of being caught at all.
I believe we should be concentrating more of our energy and resources on:
- better information exchange between the key agencies, like youth offending teams, schools, police and landlords
- more use of professional witnesses
- more systematic truancy patrols (I suspect that this is a bigger problem in our fragmented cities than in areas where there is just one town centre to patrol).
In my own backyard, neighbourhood wardens have made a promising start and I am hopeful that good police/school relations may help with problems outside the school gates.
In other words, it is not so much a choice between being tough or being soft, as the debate is so often presented, but about being smarter in the way we work, drawing on considerable amounts of intelligence which is all too often pocketed away in numerous corners and not put to effective use.
Source
Housing Today
Postscript
Karen Buck is the MP for Regents Park & Kensington North
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