Rebecca Bryant and Harvey Redgrave gave evidence.

We are now sitting in public and the proceedings are being broadcast. We will begin this afternoon’s session by hearing oral evidence from Harvey Redgrave and Rebecca Bryant OBE, who is with us virtually. We have until 2.45 pm for this panel, so please keep your eyes on the clock. Could the witnesses please introduce themselves for the record?

Harvey Redgrave:

Hi, and thanks for having me. I am Harvey Redgrave, chief executive of Crest Advisory, which is a specialist crime, policing and criminal justice organisation. I am also a senior fellow at the Tony Blair Institute, where I lead on home affairs policy.

Rebecca Bryant:

Good afternoon, everybody. My name is Rebecca Bryant. I am the chief executive of Resolve. Resolve is a membership organisation focused on community safety and antisocial behaviour. Our members are housing providers, local authorities, police forces and police and crime commissioners.

I begin this evidence session by calling Alex Norris for the Opposition.

Good afternoon to both our witnesses; thank you for your time. Rebecca Bryant, you mentioned Resolve’s long-running interest in antisocial behaviour. Could you give us your views on the clauses in the Bill that relate to antisocial behaviour and whether there is anything you would add to them?

Rebecca Bryant:

Thank you for the question. First of all, as a membership organisation, the views are of our members. We have spent time talking to them since the Bill was published. Quite a few different views have been put forward by our members and by Resolve ourselves as an organisation. Some of the clauses we agree with, and some of them we do not. I can take you through each particular one.

We absolutely agree with the clause on creating a duty for police and crime commissioners to promote awareness of the antisocial behaviour case review. I am quite happy to elaborate on that. On extending the power to implement dispersal orders to local authorities, our members generally agree that dispersal powers should remain with the police rather than being spread to local authorities, and there are very specific reasons for that. The police are required to enforce any breach of the dispersal order, and really these powers should be seen as a partnership response rather than a sole agency response.

When a dispersal order is being put in place, that needs to be considered by the local authority and with it as a partnership across the board through the community safety partnership. There should be an understanding as well that the police are on the ground and out on patrol 24/7, so are in a much better position to be able to use that power. They also have the skills and knowledge to use it.

That takes me on to extending the time frame for a dispersal order from 48 hours to 72 hours. All our members that we consulted are in favour of the extension of time. Our members are not in favour of extending the public spaces protection orders to the police because local authorities are very skilled in using them—that is where the knowledge lies. Significant expertise and a lot of consultation with the public are required before you put one in place. Rather than extending it, it should be used in partnership through the community safety partnership.

In relation to lowering the age for issuing a community protection notice from 16 to 10 and increasing the upper fine limit from £100 to £500 for breaches, members are mixed, particularly on the lowering of the age to 10. A lot of work goes into early intervention and prevention and how we deal with young people on the path to causing antisocial behaviour. Penalising young people at age 10 for antisocial behaviour by fining their parents if there was to be a breach is quite a significant step and flies in the face of our approach to early intervention and prevention, which uses positive mentoring and youth interventions for young people.

On extending the time frame for applying for closure orders from 48 hours to 72 hours after serving the notice, everybody was in favour, but they would like to see more explicit guidance and support around magistrates courts. On giving the closure power to housing providers, everybody who is a housing provider is absolutely in support of that; Resolve has been lobbying for that for some time now, particularly as it is a very good tool to use for more serious types of antisocial behaviour, such as cuckooing and exploiting vulnerable people.

In terms of the power of arrest for all breaches of civil injunctions, on the whole most of our members are not particularly swayed by that because the power of arrest is a very serious tool. It requires the police to conduct that power of arrest, and it will mean significant resource implications for the police. Not only that, but we would have to get past the courts on proportionality and reasonableness for the power of arrest to be attached to any clause. It would also significantly impact on the court system, particularly if someone was arrested. They would have to be presented to court the next day, so there would be issues around cells and also the management of community expectations once we had got an injunction with the power of arrest. For the CSOs who enforce breaches of community protection notices, it was felt that this would be positive because having more resources with which to be able to enforce those breaches would be welcome.

Q76 May I come back to the point on the minimum age for community protection notices? When responding to the Government’s antisocial behaviour action plan, you talked about how we need to think about children as victims of antisocial behaviour—I think your phrase was “silent victims”. Could you briefly talk us through that?

Rebecca Bryant:

Yes. I would like to bust a few myths, if that is possible while giving evidence. There is a perception in the media and the community that young people are the main perpetrators of antisocial behaviour when, in fact, they are not: the vast majority of antisocial behaviour is perpetrated by adults.

In focusing on young people, we should be thinking about how they are impacted by antisocial behaviour. They are often victims. You will have seen terrible films on TikTok and social media outlets of fights, violence and aggression. That means that those young people are victims rather than perpetrators as a whole. We certainly need to recognise that if we can get in early and use the early intervention and prevention tools available to us to stop the antisocial behaviour or stop those young people becoming antisocial, we will be able to reduce antisocial behaviour as a whole.

Antisocial behaviour is often a precursor to more serious crime, so if we can use our opportunity—I call it a “golden moment”—to intervene with a young person, perhaps with an alternative trusted adult from outside the home, and work with them to understand the impact of the behaviour that they may be perpetrating, that in itself does not fall into the idea that we should be reducing the CPN to the age of 10.

Q Mr Redgrave, may I ask you a bit about some of the section 16 provisions about drug testing? You may be familiar with the ambition to give greater powers to test for controlled substances—class B and class C drugs—with a view to directing the person into appropriate treatment at an earlier stage; the idea is that that will intercept more serious offending further down the line. You have written something about this, for the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, I think—or, at least, the Institute has done so. Can you comment on the provision, and what is your view of a wider form of testing in police stations?

Harvey Redgrave:

I am in favour of this measure. I think it was used relatively effectively under the last Labour Government in relation to prolific offenders. [Interruption.] Sorry, do I need to speak a bit louder?

Please try to speak up a bit.

Harvey Redgrave:

I am in favour of the measure. It is right to test more offenders, particularly prolific offenders, many of whom are driven by addiction. The more we can divert offenders into treatment to address their offending behaviour, the better. I think there needs to be a broader look at how we deal with prolific offenders who recycle around the system sometimes tens or hundreds of times before they stop their offending. There used to be something called the prolific and other priority offenders programme, which was disbanded along with the whole infrastructure around it.

There is a need to place this drug-testing measure within a broader set of interventions that look at how we grip prolific offenders, how judges are able to defer sentencing, and how offenders are able to be rehabilitated and dealt with much earlier on rather than them serving short sentences, coming out, reoffending and going back in at great expense to the taxpayer.

Q I think that some of that is in the Sentencing Bill, which is running in tandem with this legislation.

The other question I wanted to ask is about Crest Advisory’s role in Baroness Casey’s review—again, if you were not personally involved in that, you can correct me. I think Crest Advisory played some role in supporting her review into the misconduct issues in the Met police, and there are two provisions in this Bill that at least partially respond to that. I would like to look at clause 73, which is on ethical policing and the duty of candour. In the light of your work with Baroness Casey, do you think it is important, and if so why? What does it answer in relation to her findings about failings in the Metropolitan police?

Harvey Redgrave:

To clarify, some of my team at Crest Advisory were seconded in to support Baroness Casey on her review, but obviously she led the review and wrote it herself. It is really important that we look at the ethics and systems around misconduct within policing. There is a crisis of public confidence in policing at the moment, particularly among women. The Commissioner of the Met has spoken repeatedly about wanting to have more say and control over getting rid of officers when there are cases of misconduct, and I think the Government have acted on some of that.

I support the measure, but I would argue that there is a case for going even further and looking at the whole system around vetting and how that takes place within policing, and the system of who really upholds the professional standards within policing. Which body do we hold responsible—the College of Policing, the National Police Chiefs’ Council, or the Home Office? It feels to me like there is a slight lack of clarity at the moment about where the buck stops on some of this at a national level, with each force able to adopt slightly different practices.

Q Do you think it is helpful then that the duty of candour, and what is required underneath it, will be set by the College of Policing? Do you think that will help ensure consistency?

Harvey Redgrave:

I think that it is helpful and is a welcome step, but I am not sure that, in isolation, it will be enough to bring about the kind of culture change that Baroness Casey believes is necessary, within not just the Met but policing as a whole.

Q My final question on this topic is about the other highly irregular employment-law-type power in the Bill: the right conferred on a chief constable to appeal against a disciplinary outcome for one of their subordinates. I think we can put that in plain English: if they do not like an acquittal, essentially, they can submit an appeal. Do you think that is an appropriate power for a chief constable to hold? I think Baroness Casey dealt with that; I recall reading about senior officers who were unhappy about the fact that they suspected problematic people were still part of the team.

Harvey Redgrave:

It comes back to the question of whether the chief constable should have more discretion over being able to hire and fire people, and to be able to get rid of people they are unhappy with. We have created systems and processes over the last 20 or 30 years that have taken some of that discretion away. It is a balance, and we need proper professional standards to be upheld by the College of Policing. In general, I think it a good thing for there to be greater discretion for chief constables to be able to act when they believe there is misconduct within their force.

Q Okay, that is helpful. My final line of questioning is about one of the issues that has been debated in Parliament, not just in relation to this Bill but previously too. It was about having a stand-alone offence of assaulting a retail worker. I do not know whether you are familiar with the contours of that debate.

We heard from the Crown Prosecution Service this morning, and it said that it did not think such an offence was necessary because the mechanics of an assault charge apply anyway—obviously, with actual bodily harm and grievous bodily harm, if that should arise. There is also a statutory aggravating factor for assaulting a retail worker. Do you have a view on this? If you do, could you set out what it is and why?

Harvey Redgrave:

Shoplifting is a real concern and we need some deterrents in the system, but I am not sure that we get those deterrents through harsher sentencing. A bigger problem is whether we are catching offenders, charging them, and convicting them. All the evidence shows that for this type of offending, it is swiftness and certainty that deter rather than severity. Not many shoplifters are thinking about aggravating factors or how long they are going to spend in prison.

Q Just to be clear, is your view basically that the police response needs to be more uniform, rather than we need a distinct offence?

Harvey Redgrave:

In general, the Bill probably focuses too much on sentence lengths and not enough on what is happening at the front end, around the police’s ability to catch, detain and bring offenders to justice. That is where I think the real gap is.

Okay. That is all from me.

Q I would like to ask Rebecca Bryant some further questions about the antisocial behaviour and nuisance begging and rough sleeping measures.

Rebecca, thank you for joining us this afternoon. In response to the shadow Minister, you raised questions about reducing the minimum age for community protection notices from 16 to 10, which is enclosed within clause 67 of the Bill. Do you agree that bringing 10 to 15-year-olds into the scope of CPNs provides an opportunity to halt a path into criminality that might otherwise occur? Combined with that, there is an opportunity to make other interventions to try to prevent the young person from getting into crime.

Rebecca Bryant:

It is using a hammer to crack a nut. For 10 and 11-year-olds in particular who are on the cusp of causing antisocial behaviour, there are many other tools available to partners. I am not necessarily thinking about fining parents, because a lot of the young people who are involved in antisocial behaviour come from more deprived backgrounds, and breaching and fining is not going to enable change.

What we are looking for is a change of behaviour in the longer term. Yes, we are looking to prevent in the first instance, but then we look for change. Being able to engage with a young person and their parents by putting in positive mentoring and other youth interventions would surely have longer term success than a community protection notice would have. Also, there is a community protection warning before a notice; that kind of warning and discussion between a parent, a child and the authorities, which could be the housing provider, the local authority or the police, has much more impact when you are offering a positive intervention.

Q Those interventions are likely to be tried prior to the use of a CPN. Do you not agree that a CPN would be a welcome alternative to prosecution in the more extreme cases?

Rebecca Bryant:

More extreme antisocial behaviour is often a criminal offence, so potentially there would be criminality and therefore a charge. That may be welcome in some cases, but not a blanket reduction to say that anybody from the age of 10 could have a CPN, which could then lead to breach and fine. As I say, from our members’ perspective, that seems too young.

Q Thank you. I would like to move on to the nuisance begging and nuisance rough sleeping measures. First, do you support the plans to implement the repeal of the Vagrancy Act 1824, and do you agree that repealing that Act potentially leaves some gaps in the law? I would like your views on the nuisance begging and nuisance rough sleeping provisions in clauses 38 to 62, which are designed to replace the 1824 Act measures where nuisance is being caused, but not otherwise.

Rebecca Bryant:

First, our members absolutely welcome the repeal of the Vagrancy Act. It is outdated and clunky, and has not been fit for purpose for many years. The replacement powers suggested in the Bill are generally welcomed by our members. I think there is some movement around more community rehabilitation. The people we are talking about here are particularly vulnerable members of society who have been through significant trauma or who have significant mental health problems, drugs and alcohol addiction, and their behaviours and rough sleeping are due to those underlying facts. Thinking about community rehabilitation and support to change is as important as moving people on and creating the powers to do that.

Thank you, Rebecca. Those are all my questions.

Harvey, do you think that there is the capacity for police forces across the country to drug-test everybody who comes through their doorsQ ?

Harvey Redgrave:

No, it needs to be attached to more resourcing.

Q So if this law passes, it will not be able to be enacted?

Harvey Redgrave:

I am assuming there is an impact assessment and a cost that has been attached to the Bill.

Q Never assume, Harvey. So currently, across the policing estate in our country, this would not be able to happen.

Harvey Redgrave:

I do not think it would be able to happen if you took current resource levels as the baseline. Some piloting is already going on in some forces, I think. I do not know how much of that has been allocated in future years.

Q Okay. As the conversation was about Louise Casey’s review, I was remembering some of the highlighted things in that review—testing samples left in fridges with sandwiches and things. I cannot say I have noted that the police estate across the country could cope with anything like this law, so I just wanted to check. Going back to Louise Casey’s review and the issue of vetting and suspension, do you think that what is in the Bill is enough?

Harvey Redgrave:

No. It is a good step forward, but not sufficient.

Q Okay. Have you seen evidence that where police officers are suspected of violence against women and girls or child abuse they should be suspended from duty, not just put on paper-based activities?

Harvey Redgrave:

I would agree, yes.

Q You would agree that they should be suspended, as a teacher would be.

Harvey Redgrave:

Sorry—I would agree with the premise of your question.

Q Okay. But currently that is not in the Bill.

Harvey Redgrave:

If I could also add one further thing on violence against women and girls—

Please feel free.

Harvey Redgrave:

One of the good developments that has taken place in the last couple of years is Betsy Stanko’s work on rape and Operation Soteria, which is now being rolled out across the country. As you know, it takes a new approach to the way that rape is investigated. There is a very good case for widening that to look at all violence against women and girls, because some of the same principles apply. I would look very closely at whether that requires legislation, and if it does not, at what is required to broaden that approach.

Q So you think there might be a legislative solution by writing that into primary legislation or secondary legislation.

Harvey Redgrave:

Potentially.

I will crack on with that, then.

Rebecca, when you were talking about clause 67 and the CPNs, I think you suggested at the beginning of your comments that this was not a unanimous view from your members. Is that correctQ ?

Rebecca Bryant:

Yes, it is.

It is not a unanimous view from your members.

Rebecca Bryant:

No, it is not a unanimous view. There are some mixed views. Some people represented by some organisations suggested reducing the age to 14 rather than 10, particularly when we are talking about the 10 to 13 age group, who are particularly young. Yes, of course they have criminal responsibility in this country, but we are talking about antisocial behaviour here rather than—

Q I just asked a very simple question: were your members unanimously opposed to this measure? And you said no, it is not unanimous—correct?

Rebecca Bryant:

Yes, that is what I am saying.

Thank you.

I have a question for Harvey—a point of clarification, really. You mentioned that you did not think that there was any need to increase the sentence for shoplifting; you thought that it just needed to be applied more uniformly. Is that rightQ ?

Harvey Redgrave:

I suppose it is more about saying where I think the priority should be. I do not have a particular problem with increasing sentences for shoplifters; it is just that I do not think that that is where the biggest challenge is.

Q I think the Minister started by asking about the creation of a new stand-alone offence of assaulting a retail worker. By association with your previous answer, do you think that that is unnecessary, or do you think it would be a helpful deterrent?

Harvey Redgrave:

I think it is fine; I do not have a problem with it. I am broadly supportive of it, but I do not think it will act as a particular deterrent when we are not catching enough shoplifters to begin with. That would be my slightly—

Q Sorry to interrupt, but are you saying that all assaults on retail workers tend to be associated with shoplifting?

Harvey Redgrave:

Yes.

Q Thank you. Rebecca, can I follow up on Vicky Ford’s question? You made it clear that opposition to reducing the age to 10 was not unanimous. There were some people who thought that 14 might be more appropriate. Were there any who thought it should go up?

Rebecca Bryant:

No.

Q So it is really just a question of finding the right level. Is that correct?

Rebecca Bryant:

Yes, I think so. When I say it was not unanimous, I am saying that a few members said that they agreed with 10. The vast majority said that they did not.

Q Okay. The problem is that between the ages of 10 and 16 there is a vast range of maturity, shall we say. Presumably, if some discretion were exercised, it might well be an appropriate measure for some 10-year-olds but not for others. Would you agree?

Rebecca Bryant:

I would suggest that if the behaviour were serious enough to warrant a CPN at the age of 10, there would be other significant issues within the family environment. You would be looking at a huge range of interventions. Unless a particular scenario is presented, it is quite difficult to say what type of intervention you would try in order to reduce or stop the antisocial behaviour, but I do not want to get away from the point that early intervention and prevention work. If we invest in early intervention and prevention, you would expect antisocial behaviour cases involving young people to reduce. The enforcement side would therefore become less necessary.

Q Finally, with an understanding of everything that you have just said, do you think that the measure proposed will be detrimental, or is it just unnecessary?

Rebecca Bryant:

I think it is unnecessary, and I think you will find it is very rarely used. There are other enforcement tools and powers available for young people that are also rarely used, because the focus of the sector is very much on early intervention, prevention, restorative justice and community remedies. There are all sorts of other tools that are perhaps more appropriate, particularly for dealing with young people who are on the cusp of causing antisocial behaviour.

Thank you very much.

Rebecca, I am really interested in the stuff about 10-year-olds. You said that if there were a situation in which one of these orders would be applicable, there would be other issues in that child’s life that were affecting their behaviours and everything else. What would be better than imposing this sort of order on a child of 10?Q

Rebecca Bryant:

Look at how we respond to antisocial behaviour. It is a partnership response—things like Supporting Families, which used to be Troubled Families, and those types of interventions and support provided to the whole family, which are trauma-informed and understanding of adverse childhood experiences, and recognise that behaviour is often a symptom of something happening within the family environment. We should be taking a whole-family approach, rather than looking at a young person, a 10-year-old, as an individual on their own. There is something there about the drivers of why that young 10-year-old is behaving in the way that they are. It is much more complex than focusing on a specific incident perpetrated by a child at the age of 10.

Q Would you accept that a family that has a child with challenges in his or her life may not be the best equipped to ensure that the child adheres to any order placed on them, and the child may therefore end up in the criminal end of the business rather than the supported end of the business?

Rebecca Bryant:

That is a fair assessment. Civil enforcement powers do not enforce; all they really do is set out very clearly how society expects individuals to behave. There is an expectation when that order is given that the person is able to comply. If a young person aged 10 or 11 is perpetrating and demonstrating this type of behaviour, are you setting them up to fail if you are not thinking about different sorts of interventions and support? You could think of supporting the parent to become a better parent, able to set boundaries and support longer term change, or using other trusted adults and other types of intervention and remedy to support that young person to change.

That is very helpful. Thank you.

Thank you. It looks like there are no further questions from Members. I thank the witnesses for their evidence. We will move on to the next panel.