9 December 2004
The Prime Minister outlined a range of measures to tackle the problems of anti-social behaviour, alcohol-fuelled violence and under-age drinking on a visit to Sheffield with the Home Secretary David Blunkett today.
Read the Prime Minister’s speech in full below:
Prime Minister:
Good Afternoon. It is a great pleasure to be here in Sheffield, a particular pleasure to be here with David, and to say thank you to Phil for being able to use the premises in order to say these few words. I think this is the first time I have ever made a speech on a matter of policy in - you call this a night club? But it is a fantastic thing to come here and to see what is happening actually here in the city centre of Sheffield, and I would like to start also by thanking the police as well for the work that they are doing. They have a very tough job, the police, it’s a tough job to do in the best of times, but trying to organise law and order in a busy city centre late at night with a lot of people milling about is one of the toughest things you can ever do, and they do it, and they go out there and they often risk injury to themselves in doing so, and I think we can be very proud of the work that they are doing here.
And really what I wanted to do, as well as making the announcement I am going to come to in a moment, is just try and explain to you exactly what it is we are trying to achieve now in this whole area of law and order, respect on our streets, antisocial behaviour.
I think it is a right, sometimes almost a duty on young people to want to go out and have a good time, and they should be able to do that. And one of the things that is often forgotten is that some of those that are the victims of crime are young people who are those that actually suffer from violence and disorder, and the truth is people should be able to go out, enjoy themselves, but do so in a responsible way with some respect for other people. And we began a process two or three years ago of changing the law in relation to antisocial behaviour, which encompasses all sorts of different things, but it is basically about respect within and for your local community. You should show respect to other people and you are entitled to respect back, and that is what it is about. And what I found in the conversations I was having with frontline police officers, but also with residents in local communities, and it really didn’t matter incidentally whether it was in an inner city estate or actually out in a suburb or a shire village or town, but the same thing came back, which was that the law was too complicated to allow us to enforce those ordinary minimum rules of respect and decency on the street. If somebody was using abusive behaviour to people on their way down to the shops, yes maybe you could get a police officer to come along and talk to that individual, but if you wanted to prosecute them through the courts it was a very, very long and complicated process. Or if someone was drunk and disorderly in a city centre and causing trouble for other people, yes you could prosecute them, they would be taken down to the station, they have to charge them, they have to go to court, they have to amass the evidence, and so on.
And then again if there were problems with particular premises behaving in an irresponsible way, encouraging binge drinking, if people were getting far too drunk within the premises, simply chucking them out and leaving someone else to pick up the pieces of that, then if you actually wanted to take action against those premises, again you had a massively complicated procedure, very, very difficult to do. Or alternatively, David was just talking a moment or two ago about the dispersal orders, well those originated from gangs of young people, and there is nothing wrong with gangs of young people hanging around being law abiding, but often it wasn’t like that and they were becoming a menace and terrorising people in local neighbourhoods. But again if you wanted to take action you had to prove the case in respect of each individual person.
So really what we were seeing was a situation where we have changing patterns of behaviour in society, but a legal system that still treated us as if we were living 50, 60, maybe 100 years ago, and it wasn’t working and for the police it was massively complicated to administer. So really what we began was a process, which is not complete yet incidentally by any means, but a process of putting the powers in the hands of the police and the authorities to take action in a swift and if necessary summary manner, in other words without an over-complicated court proceeding. So for example the dispersal orders allowed us actually to disperse groups of people who were causing trouble for people. The Antisocial Behaviour Orders allowed us to take action against people who were making people’s lives hell, not necessarily through one offence in itself that would be of a terrible nature, but just a continual pattern of behaviour that would make life hell for everyone. We then introduced fixed penalty notices which were much mocked and ridiculed at the time when we took them through the House of Commons, but enabled us to say to the police look you can actually take someone down to the station and put a fixed penalty notice fine on them, without the complication of a court hearing. Now these people can go and challenge that in court, but the onus is on them, rather than the police taking the case all the way through the courts. So a whole series of things happened, the power to close down houses that were being used for drug dealing, the powers to close down premises where there was regular disorder happening, either inside them or just outside them.
Now the focus of all that was to enable us to take swift action, and actually through doing that to enable us to say to those people who were trying to run decent premises, were trying to behave responsibly, look we are going to change the system so that those people that play by the rules get some help, but those people that don’t, the law will come down on them and come down on them very heavily and very swiftly. And that is why the law has been changed in this way, and what we are trying to do, as well as obviously expanding numbers of police and community support officers, but is to say to the police, look here are the powers that you need to take this action quickly. And then the other change that needed to happen is for the police, the local authorities and others, people for example trying to run licensed premises like this, to come together and try and get the right spirit of cooperation so that the powers could be used in an effective way.
Anyway what we are looking at now is how we take that process further. We have already announced certain things in relation to drug addiction and crime and how we tighten the procedures there, so for example we want all the way through the criminal justice system, if someone has got a drug addiction problem and they are committing crime, you offer them a way out by offering them treatment, but if they don’t take the treatment, or they refuse the treatment, you have got to take into account the fact that if they are a drug addict they are more likely to commit crime. So you can’t simply forget that when you come to see the processes of the courts working.
In addition to those measures we have been looking again at antisocial behaviour and how you tighten up the court procedures there. And then there is the whole issue of under-age drinking. Now, under-age drinking goes on, we all know that, we have all experienced it throughout our lives. All of that is true. However, it is pernicious if it is happening on a regular basis, it can be very, very damaging for the young people, for their health, if they are continually engaged in often very heavy drinking at an early age, and it is against the law, as we know, to sell alcohol to people under age.
We have already given the police the power to close for 24 hours, swiftly without any unnecessary court procedure, premises where there is disorderly behaviour, or where there are regular fights going on inside or outside the licensed premises. What we want to do now is to extend that power to close licensed premises, to a situation where there is persistent under-age drinking that is continuing with the knowledge of the licensed premises. In other words to say to licensees in this situation, and their staff, you cannot do this, you cannot sell alcohol to young people under the age that the law stipulates and get away with it, because if we don’t make it clear that there is going to be a penalty on those licensed premises for doing that, then exactly the problems that used to happen here, but now don’t, will continue and we will get young people put in danger, but what is more you will get precisely the type of disorder and violence that the police here have been trying to stop. So we will go through obviously the necessary consultations with people in order to do that, we will look for the first legislative opportunity to make sure that the police have that power to close licensed premises for 24 hours and do that immediately if there is a problem with persistent under-age drinking in those premises.
Now I just wanted to say one final thing, and I know I am coming back later to have a talk and answer questions on some of these issues, to have a discussion about them. I think we are only at the beginning of this process, but it is a gradual process but it is important that we continue it as swiftly as we possibly can, because it is ultimately about getting the law abiding citizen to have the power in their own hands to take back control over their local communities. In other words, no matter how difficult the community is, if you go into it you will find the majority of people are decent law-abiding people. But what happens is that you can start with the graffiti and the abandoned vehicles, you can start with a bit of drunk and disorderly, perhaps a little bit of drug dealing, and then before you know where you are a few people who aren’t law abiding and aren’t behaving in a decent and proper way end up taking control of an entire community, and then all the people who just want to behave themselves, do well, have a good time, enjoy leisure, enjoy their family life in the way that they should, those people then find themselves on the defensive feeling that they are prisoners of that small minority within the community.
So this is what it is about, and it is about a very simple concept of respect for other people and it is high time we brought it back into our communities, and I think we can do that with the right combination of powers, with the right policing, and also with the right spirit amongst local people that they need to feel that we are actually on their side in doing this. For too long people have felt well maybe we would like to change things, but we couldn’t. For too long the police have felt it would be good to be able to enforce the law properly, but it is all too complicated, it is too bureaucratic, we are not able to do it, and what we are trying to do is to change that, and this is just one element of changing it. And I think it is probably, for many people in our country, about the most important thing that affects their lives in an immediate sense. So it is worth acting upon and we are going to do it.
And I would like to pay a particular tribute to David about it, because he has really handled this legislation over the past two or three years and he has done it with immense skill and dedication, and his instincts on this are exactly the same as mine.
It is true that you can have a society that is a society without discrimination, where we treat people equally, where we treat them respectfully, but at the same time you have a society of order and rules and decent behaviour towards other people. It is pretty simple stuff but it is necessary and perhaps long overdue.
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