Napping in public, feeding the birds and climbing trees may sound like perfectly normal activities. In fact, most people have probably done all of these things. And yet, these are just some of the activities people have been fined for as part of an ever more punitive government clampdown on “antisocial behaviour”.
According to new research, these types of fines – issued under public spaces protection orders (PSPOs) legislation – increased to 13,433 in 2022, up from 10,412 in 2019. It’s not just the record number, but the absurd nature of the fines that has raised alarm. PSPOs can be issued if a council official believes activities carried out in a public place have had a “detrimental effect” on quality of life. This is a vague threshold that has given local councils a blank cheque to ban normal, or at most slightly annoying, behaviour in a specified area.
These wide-ranging measures have so far been used to criminalise everyone from rough sleepers to buskers and cyclists. Southend-on-Sea, for example, has banned people from “using bikes in a way that has a negative effect for others”.
As if these measures weren’t draconian enough, they now look set to get worse under the government’s new antisocial behaviour (ASB) action plan. The plan proposes increasing the upper limit of on-the-spot penalties from £150 to £500 for those who litter or graffiti and giving PSPOs powers to the police. This would effectively allow police to write their own laws and to organise public spaces how they see fit. It would make them not just law enforcers, but de facto legislators, unleashing a terrifying new phase of policing.
Though this may represent uncharted territory, the plan is unmistakably rooted in policies cooked up under New Labour. In the decade after 1997, the perceived scourge of antisocial behaviour was a staple of political discourse and regularly made headlines. Tony Blair’s government broadly defined antisocial behaviour as that which causes nuisance, harassment, annoyance, alarm or distress and introduced several measures to manage it. These included evictions from social housing and antisocial behaviour orders (asbos) – a core policy of New Labour’s crackdown on crime.
When Blair left No 10, antisocial behaviour faded from the political agenda (it was barely given more than a passing mention in the 2015 general election manifestos of the Conservatives, Labour or Liberal Democrats). In her role as home secretary, Theresa May resolved to scrap asbos, introducing the Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act 2014 to replace New Labour’s failed policy.
But what may have seemed like a rollback actually created enhanced powers to tackle perceived nuisance, such as PSPOs, while maintaining a similarly broad definition as to what conduct can be considered “antisocial behaviour”. In proposing to extend these powers even further, the Tories’ ASB action plan is best characterised as Blairism on steroids.
Not wanting to be outflanked, the current Labour party has announced its own plans to crack down further on antisocial behaviour by increasing neighbourhood policing and introducing “respect orders”. These orders would create a new criminal offence for repeat adult antisocial behaviour offenders. Keir Starmer has made clear time and again that he is far more committed to showing Labour is the party that is “tough on crime” than investing in the kind of public services that would meaningfully change people’s lives.
In attempting to “out-punitive” one another, Labour and the Conservatives are using law and order rhetoric as a convenient distraction from the actual problems people are facing. Instead of stamping out “greedflation” – which has seen corporations use the cost of living crisis to push up their profits – the government is seemingly more concerned with, for example, banning the use of nitrous oxide, or laughing gas.
Through its antisocial behaviour clampdown, the government is also encouraging the public to direct its ire towards some of the most marginalised people in society. Overwhelmingly, the people targeted by PSPOs are homeless, with research from civil liberties group the Manifesto Club showing that in 2022, 53 councils banned begging, while seven banned rough sleeping and sleeping in a vehicle.
It is interesting to note that while statutory guidance on PSPOs previously stated that they should not be used to criminalise homeless people, this stipulation has recently been removed. It has led to homeless people being continually displaced from communities, perpetuating the problem the government claims to want to address. In fact, 2022 research carried out in 10 towns in England and Wales showed that PSPOs “did not stop or deter the behaviours of people experiencing street homelessness”.
And now, the ASB action plan intends to go further by giving police and council officers more dispersal powers to move on homeless people, and to ban anyone from public spaces for up to 72 hours. Much like the Vagrancy Act – a 200-year-old law making rough sleeping or begging an offence, which the government has pledged to scrap – these measures are simply a way of criminalising poverty. The idea that beggars can be fined hundreds of pounds for begging, potentially trapping people in a cycle of homelessness and destitution, is emblematic of how senseless and cruel these measures really are.
This punitive approach is doomed to fail. If the government wanted to prevent rough sleeping, it wouldn’t hand landlords more powers to evict tenants for antisocial behaviour. If it wanted to address perceived ills such as “loitering”, it would give cash-strapped councils the money to invest in youth clubs, leisure centres, public libraries and homeless hostels, which have all been gutted as a result of austerity.
And crucially, if it wanted to prevent more unnecessary suffering during a cost of living crisis, it would scrap the callous antisocial behaviour laws which have only made people’s lives more miserable.
Daisy Schofield is a freelance journalist
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