The new government promises an injection of resources into neighbourhood policing and preventive programmes to reduce anti-social behaviour. For RHE Global’s Jim Nixon, these measures can’t come quickly enough. But he believes that existing laws and systems are not being sufficiently used. He talks to Will Hatchett.

UK politics are cyclical. For example, traditionally, the Conservatives remove rent control and security of tenure; Labour brings them back. Shifts of government bring dramatic changes of emphasis on criminal justice, from ‘bang ’em up’ to ‘hug a hoodie’ and back again. Keir Starmer’s government, under the banner ‘take back our streets’, has promised to return to neighbourhood policing, delivered by 13,000 new neighbourhood police and police community support officers.

Young Futures programme hubs will be staffed by youth and mental health workers and careers advisers. In the frontline of tackling ASB, new ‘respect orders’ (a clever name) look like a re-tread of ASBOs. They will address issues including street drinking, noise, off-road biking and fly-tipping. Breaching them will potentially lead to fines or imprisonment.

These measures look familiar. Both the rhetoric and mechanics of the new government’s approach, combining preventive programmes with unabashed punishment, strongly recall those of New Labour.

Jim Nixon, RHE Global’s director of community safety, a well-known podcaster and influencer on anti-social behaviour, has seen many changes of government and dramatic shifts in emphasis over the years. He began his career as a policeman in the West Midlands in 1995, reaching the rank of sergeant.

His days on the beat coincided with the implementation of New Labour’s far-reaching Crime and Disorder Act of 1998, which promised ‘joined-up thinking‘ and brought the innovations of community safety partnerships and antisocial behaviour orders (ASBOs). Obliging councils and the police to work together, often for the first time, the act was designed to ‘tackle the causes of crime’, rather than to merely deal with the consequences.

Generous funding

In that era, historically generous funding reached street level. Nixon recalls working in a team of eight police officers on a single beat in Sandwell, dealing with issues from graffiti to burglary and armed robbery, generally without cars. By the end of New Labour’s second term, the funding that had brought shiny regeneration schemes to blighted council estates and inner cities had run out. But some valuable legacies remained, at least as good practice – evidence-based policy-making and partnership-working.

The next policy milestone came just prior to Nixon leaving the police to bring his skills and knowledge to a large social landlord. Building on some elements of New Labour’s legacy and assumptions, the 2014 Crime and Policing Act amalgamated multiple ASB powers into six, including public space protection orders (PSPOs), enforced through fixed penalties.

Civil injunctions were attached to ASB enforcement, reducing its evidential burden and criminal behaviour orders (CBOs) were introduced, replacing ASBOs, which had been fixated upon by the popular media and trivialised, so that they were perceived as ‘badges of honour’ by offenders.

It’s common, in this area of policy, for governments to copy the good ideas of predecessors but to call them something else. The legislation that this Labour government has promised, will build on the Conservatives’ Criminal Justice Bill, introduced in 2023. It came with similar mood music – unsafe public spaces needing to be ‘reclaimed’ by frightened communities.

Labour also inherits from the Conservatives elected police and crime commissioners (PCCs) which replaced police authorities in 2018. Most people would say that PCCs have failed to attract public support or interest. They have been largely invisible. Nor has the Independent Office for Police Conduct, set up in 2017 to improve public confidence in the police complaints system in England and Wales, demonstrated that it is genuinely autonomous and has teeth.

Police at low ebb

Battered by cuts, and by allegations of excessive violence and racism – now provable by camera footage – and of ‘two-tier policing’ by recent short-lived but opportunistic home secretaries, the 43 largely autonomous police forces of England and Wales are currently functioning at an extremely low ebb. Nixon admits: “Policing, from a reputational point of view, is the lowest I’ve ever known it.”

In addition, he notes, our courts and prisons are overloaded, the probation service is “on its knees” and mental health services, for people of all ages, are stretched to breaking point. It’s not a great place to start from. Labour may have a battle on its hands – whole tiers of social infrastructure that have been stripped away over the last two decades – but at least it is not starting entirely afresh.

Some of the good ideas initiated during progressive periods of policy have stuck. For example, the multi-agency partnership-working that was introduced in public services in the late 1990s is now accepted as the best way to get results, if not always observed. The problem is a lack of uniformity. In the case of the police, separate authorities largely ‘do their own thing’. The service is neither national nor local, and tossed around as a political football, it has lost a sense of identity. Getting it back will require policy consistency and continuity and for politicians to move beyond gimmicks and slogans. It will take longer than the five years of a political cycle.

For example, to get ‘neighbourhood policing’ right, Nixon says, we’ll need to listen genuinely to empower communities. It is a hard thing to do, he notes. Empowerment was the language of New Labour, but it wasn’t always the practice. The party adopted a top-down approach. It parachuted in well-paid consultants to interpret the wishes of the socially excluded or self-appointed ‘community leaders’.

Some new infrastructure that was built was never used. The government’s lavish final regeneration programme, Housing Market Renewal Pathfinder, delivered solutions that few people wanted across the north of England, including the demolition of popular housing. It ran out of steam and was abandoned.

Tackling the causes

Nixon believes that the best strategy to reduce ASB, including noise, is to tackle its human, social and physical causes, rather than serving notices as a first resort. He says: “It’s important not to rush into enforcement. You’ve got to understand the problem first and the people you are dealing with to find the right solutions. You may need to have professionals meeting and bring in other agencies to assess what is the best course of action.”

He adds: “In my view, short-term prison sentences don’t work. I would always look at other options to address what is causing the behaviour. Alternatives to prison are desperately needed. I’m a firm believer that people’s behaviour can change with the right approach.”

Nixon welcomes the prospect of new legislation. He says: “We’re all waiting on the Criminal Justice Bill that will bring in a review of the tools and powers around anti-social behaviour, including respect orders. It’s imminent but, at the moment, everyone’s in the dark – we don’t know exactly what will be in it.”

At the same time, he argues that existing legal mechanisms to reduce pressure on courts and prisons are not being sufficiently used. He notes that positive requirements that can be included in injunctions and criminal behaviour orders (CBOs), for example, to address drug or alcohol issues, are not being applied to their full effect. Community safety partnerships, a welcome innovation of 1998, have been patchily applied and there is no auditing of their effectiveness.

Victims let down

In addition, the victims of ASB, are being badly let down by statutory services, as argued by a recent report from Victims’ Commissioner, Baroness Newlove. Nixon says: “We’re now in the tenth year of the 2014 Crime and Policing Act, which introduced the community trigger, now called the ASB case review, but a lot of victims of ASB who contact me say they have never heard of case reviews. In my view, there are far too few of them and there needs to be a standardised, uniform template for how they are conducted.”

Technology, he says, can play a valuable role in reducing cost and officers’ time in dealing with ASB problems. RHE Global’s noise app, launched in 2015, is now in its second version. Replacing diary sheets, The Noise App allows residents to make audio and video recordings. By facilitating a triage approach, the app hugely increases the productivity of noise teams. Over 400 organisations use it, and it has made more than three million recordings. Evidence collected by the app is valued by courts and supports civil injunctions and noise abatement cases.

AI has recently been added so that the app can flag up signs of fragile mental health in those affected by noise, and a new feature can log multiple cases as one incident. This allows officers to locate noise hot spots.

RHE Global is now looking at international markets. Nixon is currently working with potential customers in the Netherlands and Denmark. The Noise App, which has been consistently improved and refined over the years, has many potential users. Why not builders and civil engineers logging noise issues around new developments?

Nixon notes that the app doesn’t replace the skills of humans – it just makes their work go further and allows them to help more people and to work more strategically. Now that the age of AI has begun, surely that’s what will be needed in every profession and in all public services.

William Hatchett. Journalist

The views in this article represent those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of RHE Global