Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)

My Lords, I find myself in agreement with many of the genuine human rights concerns already expressed around the Committee. I find myself in a bit of a time warp because these concerns were evidenced by the use, abuse, disrepute and ultimately disuse that anti-social behaviour orders fell into all those years ago. The criminalisation of vulnerable people, people with addiction problems, people with mental health problems, homeless people and so on is not hypothesis; it was evidenced by the practice of the original anti-social behaviour orders. I therefore hope that, in his reply, my noble friend, who I know to be a very thoughtful Minister, will go some way to expressing how he thinks these new respect orders will improve on the very unhappy history of ASBOs. Other members of the Committee have already set out what happened in the interim. It would be useful if my noble friend the Minister could explain what will be different this time, why and how. In a nutshell, my concerns are, first, that the threshold of behaviour likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress is low and vague. To be blunt, some people are easily alarmed and distressed. Harassment is the more objective, higher part of that threshold. That is the entry point at which vulnerable people can first fall into this quasi-civil criminal order that can sweep them into the criminal justice system rather than diverting them from it. The second concern is that, once one is under the jurisdiction of such an order, it becomes a personal, bespoke criminal code for the individual. I remember the suicidal woman banned from bridges and the pig farmer who was given an ASBO because the pigs wandered on to the neighbours’ land. Is it really appropriate to have bespoke criminal codes for different people in different parts of the country? The postcode lottery point was made well, but there is also the issue of vulnerable people and minorities, who find themselves disproportionately affected. Once you breach your personalised criminal code—which could be to keep away from a part of town where your close relatives live—you are then swept into the system. That is my third concern about these quasi-civil criminal orders: the ease with which vulnerable people with chaotic lives who have been let down by social services and society in general are now swept into the criminal justice system rather than diverted from it. Finally, I share the concerns about making such orders available to even younger people, who really should not be anywhere near the criminal justice system. In a much later group—sometime next year, I think, when we will still be in this Committee and will be older, if not wiser—I have tabled an amendment, with the support of the noble and learned Baronesses, Lady Hale of Richmond and Lady Butler-Sloss, to tackle the shockingly low age of criminal responsibility, 10 years-old, that we still have in England and Wales.