Communities Committee, 12 Nov 2003

Meeting date: Wednesday, November 12, 2003

Official Report 160KB pdf

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Antisocial Behaviour etc (Scotland) Bill

Agenda item 2 is on the Antisocial Behaviour etc (Scotland) Bill. Members have a paper on our pre-legislative scrutiny. As I said last week, we thank all those who organised the meetings, including the clerks and the people in local communities who welcomed us. The exercise was useful. My experience was that everyone who attended the meetings did so with a degree of seriousness. Whatever people had to say, it was generally said in tolerant and reasonable tones. The report presents the views of the people whom we met, which we will reflect on further. We are grateful to those people for meeting us and giving us a background to our stage 1 consideration of the bill.

I seek comments from members on themes that they identified in the meetings that they attended. I do not want to start discussing our position in the debate; I want to know whether general themes arose on which we might want to reflect and which might give a steer to the people who will prepare questions. We will then decide whether we want to publish the evidence.

Most people recognised the carrot-and-stick nature of the issue—that there is a need not only to have facilities and more police, but to deal with the underlying problems. The issue of private landlords was a big one at the meetings in which I was involved. I think that the report from Dumfries mentions the effect on people when a community feels demoralised and under siege. That broad issue struck a chord with me. In one of the meetings in Glasgow, people said that their community had changed over time from being a community in which people wanted to live to one that people wanted to move away from. That issue came out strongly.

I want to mention a theme that I am not sure we have captured totally. It is also mentioned on the front page of the edition of the Third Force News that I picked up today. I know that the points in the summary, under question 6—which is on page 45 of the document—are not in any particular order, but I think that there was more emphasis on using existing powers and regulations than on introducing stronger laws. I went on three visits only, but I think that the Glasgow visit was the only one in which the three-strikes-and-you're-out stance, as used in the United States, was supported and in which it was claimed that the law is too lenient on criminals. There was a strong cry for the existing powers to be utilised more fully.

People wanted that to happen as well as for new powers to be introduced.

Yes, but I do not think that the report makes the point strongly enough that not enough use is made of existing powers. That point certainly came through in the meetings that I attended.

Would it be fair to say that the point relates particularly to antisocial behaviour orders?

Yes. In the Third Force News, a representative of Barnardo's Scotland is quoted as saying that

"Rather than introducing new and costly legal processes, the Executive should be developing the existing children's hearing system and concentrating"

on what works. The point is that we should be more proactive and use existing powers, as we heard during the visits. As well as the legislation, there must be greater emphasis on supporting the children's hearings system and ASBOs. That was the strong message that I got.

I thank the clerks for putting together the report, which was no small task. If we are to publish it, however, I am keen that it should reflect the emphasis that I picked up on and that seems to be present in the reports of the visits that I did not go on.

What came through to me most strongly from the reports were issues about drugs and alcohol, facilities, resources and the use of existing powers, as Mary Scanlon said. The other issue that was important was the need to ensure that existing systems work, either ones that are under-resourced or at which resources are not being targeted properly. I agree that there is a balance between support and control, but the overwhelming message about control is that what happens at the moment does not work because social work and the children's hearings system, for example, are under-resourced. I have also heard that certain systems, such as the regeneration programmes, do not work and that money is being wrongly targeted. The views about new powers were mixed.

There was a strong feeling in the Glasgow meetings in particular that the agencies were doing the wrong things—phrases such as "goodies for baddies" were used. I am not agreeing with that, but the feeling was not that social work did not have enough resources; people said that things were not being dealt with appropriately and that the agencies were not giving strong enough messages.

Existing systems are not working.

The people at the meeting said that the system was wrong; whether it works is a different matter. They said that they did not think that the approach was the right one. The committee will have to make a judgment on that matter. We have the opportunity to emphasise certain things in the report and that might be the best way of dealing with the matter.

I just feel that if we are to publish the report—

You are right to say that one of the big themes is drugs and alcohol and the consequences for local communities. There is no doubt that that theme comes out of the report strongly.

From the visits that I made and from reading the evidence, I think that, whatever stand people took on the matter—whether they wanted to bring back corporal punishment or whether they thought that the problem was about a lack of funding and services—they all seemed to identify as a problem the lack of recreational provision for young people. That is important because, even when there are facilities in communities, they tend to be outwith the reach of young people, who often cannot afford to access them. Everybody felt that that was the case, no matter what their point of view.

I might have misled members with my enthusiasm—I call it "enthusiasm" rather than "obsession". We must reflect on the evidence further, but we do not want to come to conclusions now. There is certainly an issue about recreational facilities, the abuse of such facilities and the fact that young people cannot use them because of what is happening in local communities.

Although I want us to reflect on the report in committee now, we will have a chance to reflect on it further as we take more evidence. It will inform some of the questioning to the witnesses who will come before us.

The report contains many good points and reflects a wide range of views. However, the committee must clarify what antisocial behaviour is. For example, some people find groups of young people wandering about the streets intimidating, even though those young people are not doing anything wrong. If youth culture involves wandering about the streets in groups, is that antisocial behaviour? What is the perception of normal behaviour? Another example is noise. A lot of students and unemployed people turn night into day and blare out their music at night, but that is their normal way of life. Are we saying that that way of life is wrong?

If you live underneath them, yes.

I think that it is probably wrong, but another example that caused a great problem when I was a councillor concerned a law-abiding Chinese family who prepared a meal late at night after returning from their restaurant. Although they did not make an undue amount of noise, they disturbed the nine-to-five type of family who lived next door. What is social behaviour? We need to analyse exactly what it is that we are addressing.

I remember living underneath a group of doctors who worked in shifts and thought that it was quite reasonable to hoover in the middle of the night. Some behaviour just makes you grumpy and some is simply intolerable. My experience is that most people are desperate to be tolerant but that everyone has a limit. This would be a useful subject to ask the ministers about.

The three visits that I went on were fascinating and invaluable. I was particularly glad that I went on the Glasgow visit because, until then, I must confess that I did not really see the problem. The situation that I saw on that trip was different from the situations that I saw in Edinburgh and Lossiemouth and appears to be different from the ones described in the other visits, to judge by the report. There is little doubt that this is the right time for the Antisocial Behaviour etc (Scotland) Bill to be introduced. There are issues in our communities that need to be addressed.

It would be useful to publish the report so that people outwith the committee can read it; it might be as useful to them as it is to us. Like Mary Scanlon, I have a small concern with the list on page 45. I know that the report says that the list is in no particular order, but people will still read it as if the order in which it is written is significant.

The eight reports and the recommendations arising from them did not give a strong steer that new legislation is required—there was a suggestion that it might be necessary, but that was not a strong theme. However, I accept that people might not have said that there ought to be new legislation because they believed that the Antisocial Behaviour etc (Scotland) Bill would result in stronger laws in any case.

With the exception of the Glasgow situation, the use of the legal drug that is alcohol appeared to be much higher up the list of people's concerns than the use of illegal drugs. We must be careful not to change that emphasis.

I was surprised, in a way, that no one focused on the definition of antisocial behaviour in the bill. I recognise that the definition comes from the Criminal Procedure (Scotland) Act 1995 and is therefore not new, but I think that the three occurrences of the definition in the bill are all slightly different. I am not sure whether the provision in the bill to give a sheriff the opportunity to consider whether an action was reasonable in the circumstances is sufficient. We should explore that further. How do sheriffs interpret the definition in the 1995 act?

We must recognise the fact that hardly anybody—probably nobody—whom we visited had read the bill. Indeed, the bill was published at the end of the period in which we were out and about and not even members of the committee had read it. I suspect that, when we read the bill and relate it to what we have experienced, we will come up with further thoughts.

The report is excellent and my comments on it are purely matters of detail and are not suggestions that I would want to have a vote on.

There is a distinction between annex A and annex B. Annex A is a report on our visits. Annex B, where the list is, is a report on the questionnaires.

Thank you for that; I am afraid that I missed that.

In my experience, people ask for the police to do more about X. They do not know whether laws or powers exist for that; they just think that the police are not doing enough about it. We have to ask the people who police our communities whether they need extra powers or whether they have sufficient powers but are not using them. The problem is identified by communities, but those communities tend to accept others' judgment about whether new legislation is needed or whether existing legislation needs to be better enforced. I do not think that the distinction between using existing powers and getting new powers came out of the meetings that I attended; people just wanted action on the problem. We will have to explore with witnesses who appear before us the arguments on either side about whether the current powers do what people want them to do or whether further powers are required. That will be interesting.

This is just a technical point, convener, because I assume that you are winding up the discussion.

I am getting wound up—that is not quite the same.

The responses are available on the committee's web page. In the communities that we visited, we heard concerns about our just disappearing back to Edinburgh, with the people there hearing no more about the matter, so could the report be sent to them? Not everyone has access to the net and can trawl through it.

There is a proposal to send a copy of the report to the organisers of all the visits that we undertook.

Sorry, I missed that.

At a couple of points in annex A, it is said that sentencing is too light or too heavy, but there is no explanation of what that means. In at least two instances during the visits, phrases such as "light sentencing" or "get tough" were used, but once we explored what they meant, people thought that reparations and community disposals were the tough sentences and that simply locking people up or tagging them did not address the problem—they did not consider that to be tough. I wonder whether we could introduce—

We are not going to go back and amend the report. What you have said will be in the Official Report.

The report is about what we heard on the visits. It is not for us to try to change people's mind. We were there to listen. People were saying that we should get tough or that they accept that community reparation is a good way forward. The report does not reflect everything that was said, but it reflects the flavour of the visits and of what people were saying. It is not about our words; it is about the public's words and opinions.

Do we agree that the evidence be published along with our stage 1 report on the committee's web page and circulated, as Elaine Smith suggested, to the groups? Do we agree to say for the record that the views came from our visits and from the questionnaires and to give those views no more or less weight than that?

You are not proposing that we delay publishing the report until we produce the stage 1 report.

We would publish it along with the stage 1 report. It would be part of the body of evidence, but that does not mean that we will not put it in the public domain now.

That is fine.

I wanted to know that, too, because a lot of the people who were glad that we had taken the time to visit them were anxious to see how the visits would be written up. Perhaps we could send out the report as soon as possible.

Is that action agreed?

Members indicated agreement.

Meeting closed at 11:13.