Countering anti-social behaviour should top the police agenda. It is the big issue with voters. It is becoming clear that continual outbreaks of anti-social behaviour play a key role in the perception voters have of whether they feel safe and, as a consequence, whether they believe crime is rising or falling. Anti-social behaviour is also the recruiting sergeant for more serious disorder and crime.

But anti-social behaviour is not only the dominant issue on the police agenda. It is now reshaping national and local politics as well as impacting on the delivery of key public services.

New politics

I have described in Neighbours from Hell: The Politics of Behaviour the point at which politics changed fundamentally for me. Since I was elected in 1979 I have received complaints about behaviour in Birkenhead, but overwhelmingly constituents sought my help on a range of what I regarded as traditional issues. Were my benefits correct? Could I help in getting a housing transfer? Were these redundancy payments correct? These and similar issues came thick and fast.

What constituents taught me, as I helped them around the welfare benefit maze, formed the basis of much of the welfare reform programme I hoped a future Labour Government would implement. My help was also sought on industrial questions which ranged from helping to secure orders for the local shipyard to slowing down (for that is what it became) the exit of manufacturing jobs from the area.

Then, quite quickly all this changed. I still remember the point vividly at which I realised that, while these traditional requests would continue to be part of my work, they were essentially the politics of yesteryear. A group of highly respectable working class pensioners came into my surgery and described the near daily horror they had to endure from youths, who had totally broken free of a common decency culture which took into account of the needs and feelings of other people.

The youths run across their bungalow roofs, made surprise attacks on their windows when they were watching television at night, peed through their letter boxes and jumped out of the shadows should they come home after dark. The police confirmed to me afterwards that, as the pensioners had assured me, they unfortunately were powerless to act against this new form of barbarianism. What I had previously viewed as wretched but isolated acts of yobbish behaviour, I now saw as part of a trend.

The politics of behaviour had been born. These politics have already begun to reshape what voters expect from national and local government. The continual bombardment of elected representatives by constituents demanding ‘what do you intend to do?’ is reshaping the national and local political agenda.

Action on common decencies

No public service is immune from the new politics. Schools are a key part in the front line of the fight against the spread of yobbish behaviour. If the longer-term battle is to be won it will be won here. But yobbism respects no boundaries. Public workers in the health service, for example, are increasingly a butt for unacceptable behaviour.

Less than a year ago when I was writing Neighbours from Hell there were five households in the Wirral (which covers four parliamentary constituencies) to whom the ambulance service would not attend without police protection. Even though the ambulance service had been requested it was likely that the families would end up fighting the ambulance crew. Since the publication of Neighbours from Hell this number has already risen to nine.

From the time when the police admitted they had no powers to deal with the kind of anti-social behaviour reported to me by those respectable pensioners, national governments have begun to act. The first moves were made under the previous Tory Government, but it is under the present administration that anti-social behaviour has begun to attract the attention it deserves.

Root cause of yobbism

A main element of the armoury society now has against yobbism is the anti-social behaviour contract and order. While these are a welcome addition to this public armoury against anti-social behaviour, I do not believe they are adequate. The reason for this stems from the root cause of anti-social behaviour.

The genesis of anti-social behaviour is the dysfunctional family. Over a two hundred year period Britain marched towards respectability, characterised by families automatically teaching their offspring a set of common decencies centring on learning to respect the needs of other members of the family. This grounding then provided the social skills for members to live peaceably within the wider society.

Society needs to respond in two ways to the growth of dysfunctional families. In the first place we need to devise a means of more effectively holding the line against bad behaviour. Simultaneously we need to seek ways by which these common decencies can be taught to the offspring of failed families, and to achieve this in a way which reaffirms the total community’s commitment to a core of civilised values.

A rapid response

The only national agency which can act where families have failed is the police. When Labour, before the 1997 election, asked for views on how best to tackle anti-social behaviour I lobbied for a very simple system, which would give the police the powers of surrogate parents over those children of dysfunctional families.

Using the football referee as a model, I suggested that police have the power to show the yellow card, and that after say three yellow cards a red card would be produced which immediately triggered an anti-social behaviour order.

The real and effective authority of the police would be significantly increased. Very quickly young yobs would understand that the police meant what they said and had the power immediately to enforce their decision. And that any challenge to police authority had to be conducted by the young person themselves going into court to argue for an overrule of the powers of the surrogate parent.

I very much hope in the new session of parliament the Government will return to and enact this idea. It will run alongside existing measures, such as anti-social behaviour orders and anti-social behaviour contracts. But its advantages are obvious.

The authority and respect the police once had will be much restored. But simultaneously, by being able to act immediately, the police will be able to prevent disorder spreading. In Birkenhead it took literally years to get the first Anti-Social Behaviour Orders (although the procedure is now much simplified). While this was happening large numbers of other young people saw that it ‘paid’ to behave in a loutish manner.

This process is cumulative. Bad behaviour begets bad behaviour. More bad behaviour gives the impression rightly of a collapse in order. This collapse in order affects, as the Chief Constable of Surrey has agreed, people’s perception that crime is on the increase, even when that is not so.

March to respectability

Britain did not become a peaceable kingdom over night. It was a long march over a number of centuries. There were two great forces which changed the British character, and which gave us that peaceable kingdom, reaching its apex during the mid-point of the last century. What is called the evangelical revival quite simply put the fear of God into us, and much more besides. And the discipline of the Labour Movement’s mutually owned welfare state imposed a strict framework on people’s behaviour.

The power of these two forces has long since been spent. In their place I suggest, in Neighbours from Hell, the move from a rights based welfare strategy to one based on contract. Welfare would once again become a teacher.

Contracts are a two-sided affair. Each time an individual signs on for benefit they would be reminded of what society wishes to do for them. In return, society would make clear the kind of behaviour it believes is required from its fellow citizens.

School contracts

This contract-type approach links to a third raft of policy reform centring on schools. School contracts need to be made a reality and I was surprised by the support pupils in our toughest schools in Birkenhead gave to this proposal. I was equally surprised by the demands they made in wishing to shape these contracts.

While they did not put it in quite these terms, none of them believed good parenting results from a process of osmosis. They believed that knowing how to give their children the best start in life ought to occupy a crucial part in the national curriculum. Similarly they believed that a national scheme of refresher courses ought to be made part of their preparation once they had decided to start a family.

The next stage has now begun in taking these proposals forward in discussions with the police, government and with schools. There is no use hoping that somehow, miraculously, this new tide of yobbish behaviour will be reversed of its own accord. Determined action across many fronts is required. Such action forms the agenda of the new politics of behaviour with which politicians and public servants must now engage.