Anti-social behaviour in Britain’s towns will take years to fix, experts warn

When Mark Craig first moved to the Merseyside town of New Ferry in north-west England 35 years ago it had a decent reputation.

But over the past decade, antisocial behaviour has come to blight the community. Gangs of 30 or 40 children hang around the boarded-up shopping precinct or the corner of the park, starting fires and throwing missiles at passers-by, terrorising locals.

“It’s a wonder nobody has been more seriously injured,” said Craig, who for the past 20 years has chaired the area’s residents’ association. New Ferry’s reputation had become “worse and worse as the state of the district centre has declined”, he added.

Similar stories are reported regularly in town centres across the UK, with 54 per cent of people telling pollsters More in Common in January that the police were not taking antisocial behaviour seriously enough. Self-reported experience of antisocial behaviour rose by nearly 30 per cent between 2015 and 2020, according to the Office for National Statistics.

Academics, think-tanks and local community leaders point to a combination of factors driving the pattern. Many local services that would once have kept a lid on such behaviour remain hollowed out in the wake of austerity, while some town centres have struggled with empty units and economic decline, making them magnets for disorder.

Addressing them will entail long-term efforts by multiple local and national agencies, say experts.

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Both main UK political parties have promised to focus on the issue. Labour have pledged to recruit 13,000 more neighbourhood police officers and police community support officers. The government launched a strategy in March, featuring a ban on the possession of laughing gas and “hotspot” policing to target problem areas.

In its report on levelling-up earlier this year, right-leaning think-tank Onward asked inhabitants in five towns — Oldham, Walsall, Clacton, Barry and South Shields — about their biggest concerns, which were similar to those of New Ferry.

Residents referred to “no-go zones” — places they avoided in town centres, parks and transport hubs. The number of recorded public order offences, such as drunk and disorderly behaviour in the towns outstripped national levels, which had themselves more than doubled since 2015.

Onward pointed out that feeling safe on the streets was “an essential foundation to other routes to regeneration” such as high street spending and commuting.

Levels of antisocial behaviour in the UK were not always so high, said Matthew Ashby, lecturer in security and crime science at University College London.

He said austerity policies imposed after the financial crisis had cut funding for local agencies that helped identify and solve problems. “Prior to 2010, we were really good at managing it in the UK. But as that capacity has been stripped away, not only within policing but in local authorities and youth work, the managing of it has fallen away.”

One solution recommended by Onward and taken up by the government is the rollout of “hotspot policing”, daily patrols targeting locations where antisocial behaviour is concentrated.

Jon Yates, executive director of the Youth Endowment Fund, a charitable body that researches evidence-based policy for young people, said the move was “sensible”.

“The evidence for hotspot policing is very good and shows reductions in violent crime, in property crime, in antisocial behaviour,” he said. “It’s not a difficult thing to do. You just identify the areas where antisocial behaviour is high and then make sure police patrol in those areas every day for 15 minutes.”

Ashby agreed, but cautioned that the strategy should be used to give temporary “breathing space” for local agencies to identify the root cause of the problem.

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He pointed out that many areas do not have the capacity to maintain the patrols on a permanent basis. While police officer numbers — which fell sharply under austerity — have steadily risen since 2019, “there’s not been a corresponding uplift in civilian staff” such as data analysts. “That means police are struggling to target what they’re doing effectively, because they don’t have the evidence,” he said.

He added that the police were also forced to stand in for other agencies — such as mental health teams and youth services — that had their capacity hollowed out under austerity.

For example, although the government pledged to spend £500mn to ensure that “every young person will have access to regular clubs and activities” by 2025, the YMCA charity estimated last year that more than £1bn in youth services funding had been withdrawn since 2010.

The government’s strategy referred to the role drugs played in antisocial behaviour and banned nitrous oxide, or laughing gas, for recreational use.

But Rick Muir, director of policing think-tank the Police Foundation, pointed out that the ban went against the advice of the government’s own drug advisory body.

“I think that’s just aimed at getting a big symbolic headline,” he said, arguing that adding the drug to a long list of already-proscribed drugs would not “make much difference”. “The issue people have with nitrous oxide is the paraphernalia that’s left behind afterwards, which is a litter problem,” he said.

Muir said that in the long term more work on prevention was needed to stop people falling into crime in the first place. He added that Community Safety Partnerships — joint initiatives between councils, police and local businesses, which he said had become ineffective as a result of cuts — needed to be revived to help tackle antisocial behaviour.

“There’s no doubt there’s an issue in town centres,” he said. “What I would do is revive Community Safety Partnerships and really focus them on low level crime, antisocial behaviour and specifically prevention.”

In the meantime, Muir added, there was a risk that people would not bother to report incidents. It its report Onward pointed out that “much antisocial behaviour is never officially reported at all, particularly where the public don’t have confidence anything will be done”. 

In New Ferry, Craig agreed that people were often either too scared of reprisals to report incidents, or felt there was no point.

“They think ‘why should I bother reporting it — because nobody cares’,” he said.