Are you prepared to have neighbours from hell living next door? This is the question that has to be asked now that the Government’s proposal to dock housing benefit from persistent offenders is out for consultation. These proposals are a welcomed step in the right direction, but they do not go nearly far enough.

Over the past few decades, there has been an increase in the number of families and individuals that behave in a totally unacceptable way. The root causes of this collapse in common decencies run deep and centre, I believe, in the failure of a small but growing number of families to teach their offspring how to behave properly to other people.

Reversing this decline will require a step change in British politics. Just how significant a change this will need to be is detailed in my new book, Neighbours from Hell: the politics of behaviour, which will be published by Politicos in late July.

This book sets out a coordinated programme stretching across the police, welfare and education. Part of that programme is to use housing benefit sanctions against families who persistently run amok with the lives of their neighbours.

Increasingly, local authorities are spending taxpayers’ money counselling such families, cautioning them, and trying to teach them proper behaviour.

A huge amount of additional money is going into building-up conciliation services and setting up projects, such as the one in Dundee. Here, anti-social behaviour families facing eviction got a stay of execution if they worked intensively with the project, which tried to instil better behaviour. But, despite this huge outlay of taxpayers’ money, the behaviour of some families is not abated.

I have seen in my constituency how these families destroy other people’s lives. A mother, writing to me from a neighbouring constituency, details how her daughter now lives in hiding from the neighbours from hell who persecuted her. Despite court orders that the neighbours should behave, her daughter is unable ever to visit her mother for fear of being followed and traced by those self-same neighbours.

I have also witnessed the desolation these neighbours from hell leave in their wake. Two neighbours from hell type families moved into a small respectable working class terraced area in Birkenhead. Within no time, their behaviour had reduced the area to what might be described as a suburb of Beirut.

Those families who were renting off the local authority or housing associations were quickly moved. It was not easy for the owner-occupiers. These respectable working class families suffered significant drops in the value of their homes and finally quit the area, which was in a state of total despair.

The cost of these two neighbours from hell to taxpayers has been in excess of £4m. Worse still the neighbours, with their housing benefit intact, have now moved on to other parts of the borough to begin the process of total destruction once again.

As part of the armoury of civilised society the Government must move to a position where, on their second offence, families lose their housing benefit in its entirety. Children growing up in such families are in danger and should be taken into care until the families learn how to behave.

Moreover, the worst offenders need to be housed on their own, away from decent people. In Birkenhead, I would have them housed under the motorway, out of harm’s way where they can torment each other while learning how to behave.

I am not talking about many families of course. But it is crucial that these neighbours from hell know that the final sanction may be taken against them. Of course, every effort should be made to ensure that families are weaned away from their bad behaviour. But experience is already teaching us that such strategies are not always successful with everyone.

This is the crux. I am not prepared to have these people living next door to me. Nor should any of my constituents. If readers of Inside Housing Magazine disagree, I would be very pleased to hear from them so that I can suggest to their local authorities that such hoodlums are, wherever possible, placed in their road and, better still, in an adjacent house.