6 Empowering communities

There is a community centre that is located in a 1970s-style shopping area that contains a small set of shops, including a GP practice, pharmacy and a mini-supermarket. There is a much larger supermarket a mile further down the road.

For years now the local community centre has been a hub of the community. The centre regularly hosts all sorts of meetings and events, from parent and toddler groups to active retirees. It has also recently been used by members of new communities in the area to gather and host cultural events. These events are always well attended and underline the Community Centre’s place as an open and welcoming environment at the heart of the community.

Of late, however, the community centre has been attracting the wrong kind of attention. Anti-social behaviour has been spilling over from the nearby shops, particularly late at night. On a number of occasions the alarm has been activated by people trying to break into the centre, though thankfully these attempts have not been successful. It has also become more and more common for used syringes to be found in the doorway to the centre when people arrive in the mornings.

Figure 7 Drug use

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A close up of a man in a public place smoking drugs. His face is partially concealed by the cap he’s wearing.

Figure 7 Drug use

Leading members of the community are keen to take some appropriate action, but they are really at a loss as to what to do in order to make a positive, lasting impact on the situation. In simple terms, they are unsure what they can do and also unsure whether they have authority to do anything to help improve the situation.

They have now turned to you as a trusted member of the community for support and guidance.

Activity 7 Residents’ association meeting

You have been asked to address the next meeting of the residents’ association which is due to take place at the community centre. The chair of the residents’ association has asked if you might draw upon your own experience working in the community to provide some insights into how the community can be empowered to more effectively deal with crime and anti-social behaviour.

In preparing this you should refer back to the Empowering communities [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] course to inform your thinking. You should also spend some time reviewing and considering the comments made in the following clip by Jane Roberts, previously Leader of Camden Borough Council in London.

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Transcript: Video: Jane Roberts

QUESTION

Could you start by telling us your name and background?

JANE ROBERTS

My name is Jane Roberts. My background is a bit hybrid, so my professional background, I’m a medical doctor I specialised in child psychiatry, and I was a hospital consultant for many years. In parallel, I also pursued a career in elected local politics, so I was a councillor for many years from 1990 until 2006 in Camden in London.

And for nearly six years at that time, latterly I was leader of the council, and that was a period in which we actually thought quite a lot about anti-social behaviour at the time, but then more recently, I’ve gone more into academia.

I pursued some research with Professor Jean Hartley first at Warwick and then at the Open University. And so in the last few years, I’ve been doing more in terms of academia and social sciences, as well as taking up a range of non-executive roles.

QUESTION

How would you define or understand anti-social behaviour?

JANE ROBERTS

When people talk about anti-social behaviour they automatically pivot to a young teenager who’s causing mayhem in the neighbourhood, and that is an issue, don’t get me wrong. But actually I think anti-social behaviour should be thought over much more broadly, and I can give you some specific examples.

But actually, the time at which I was most involved was around the early 2000s, and there was an act, there was legislation at that time with regard to anti-social behaviour in 2003, and that talked about anti-social behaviour as being anything that was committed by a person that caused alarm, distress, or harassment to a person who is not of the same household.

And I was interested to see that understanding of the meaning of anti-social behaviour was repeated in the Police Reform and Social Responsibility Act of 2011. It seems to me pretty good. So why I say that is because certainly from my experience in Camden, two experiences really, I mean, we took out anti-social behaviour order, ASBOs, as they were called.

And I’ve got quite a lot of reflections on ASBOs. The first we took out was against a barista, and another we took out was against the multinational corporation Sony. So we did take out some anti-social behaviour orders on young men, young lads, really, but I do think it’s important to frame it much more widely than that.

QUESTION

How can local communities best address issues they face?

JANE ROBERTS

Well, I think these issues are often easy to describe, and I think – but I do think it requires a range of people to come together and to work collaboratively in order to really make a difference on the ground. And I’m thinking about local communities that’s individuals say in a street, on a housing estate that come together either within formal structures, whether it's an association, tenants association, whether it’s just a group of like-minded people who are fed up with whatever’s going on.

I think the local authority is absolutely key in all of this, and health organisations are really important as well. Policing, and I’ve been more involved in research and policing in later years, ideally, should be further downstream.

And I suppose that’s the other thing I’d say is I think you’ve got to look really very widely at the sort of spectrum of interventions very far upstream, which I think includes things like really good provision for early years where you look at the quality of the provision that you have, sure staff for example, I think was a fantastic way of bringing communities together actually as well as providing both child care and assistance and thinking, reflection about parenting.

And actually all the studies that have been done by people like the Institute of Fiscal Studies, the IFS, subsequently in the long term have shown their impact over the longer term. So lots of upstream things that local authorities working with others are in a position to do from a preventative point of view, youth clubs are the easy bit, and actually it’s not just youth clubs, it's a range of activities that you can do, which is very much tailored to local communities.

And then way back downstream, there are all sorts of things that you can do with regard to tackling it in the immediate. So I think I think it’s both a very wide spectrum of where you tackle anti-social behaviour, and I think it’s a wide group of people and stakeholders who need to be involved.

But I think the key ones are individuals and local communities together with their local councillors within a broader policy framework that the council should have, and then from a policing point of view, I think it’s the PCSOs and the neighbourhood police that are really, really important in all of this.

And with everything, it’s about how well do you know local people, individuals, and groups. What’s the extent to which there's proper interchange? You get to understand each other, you get to understand where you're coming from, you develop relationships such that you cooperate, that you've got some trust, and that all takes a period of time. You need continuity.

So nothing is worse actually than having, I don't know, so for example, in some parts of the country, the private rented sector is quite significant, and therefore you often get a faster turnover of people. You can often get quite a fast turnover and policing people in a local counsel, and actually as with anything, you really need to develop trusting relationships in a local patch over a period of time.

Now that’s not very specific, but actually you’re not going to get anywhere unless you've really got that sort of series of local communities and communities in place.

QUESTION

How important are considerations of justice and fairness for communities when addressing local issues?

JANE ROBERTS

Oh, I think fairness is deeply ingrained, actually. I think it’s deeply ingrained. I mean, it goes from noisy neighbours, and I would not underestimate, and I’m very persuaded of this, actually from my own personal experience, but also as a local councillor. I’m very persuaded of the distress, the immense distress that is brought about by noisy neighbours.

It’s miserable for people, and I think actually the most important thing is that people take all of this seriously. It’s very easy, particularly when resources are constrained as you go for the big ticket, easy items to crack, and at times, anti-social behaviour and the distress it causes people. It’s regarded by some, certainly not me, as it can be low level, lower importance, and yet the distress it causes to people is profound.

Noisy neighbours, noise in the street, next to a pub which just has lots of brawls at closing time, really people causing real disruption to the local realm. As hard as people try to look after where they live, it gets trashed. It causes real distress to people.

QUESTION

What role should local councils and authorities play in supporting communities to address their challenges?

JANE ROBERTS

Not least because of my local government background, I think local government is absolutely crucial here in two ways. One at a sort of a larger policy framework, having proper policy framework in place across the council, in terms of understanding what we mean by anti-social behaviour, taking it seriously, and having dedicated resources in place in order to tackle it. That's the overall policy framework.

But then I think ward councillors are really, really important here, and actually that can be replicated. I’ve never worked in parish councils or town councils, but we are talking hyperlocal here, and some of these issues, you do need the hyperlocal, albeit within a wider strategic framework.

And then as we found in Camden in the early 2000s, having that national legislation to back it up, so you’ve got – and working very closely with the police. We had good relationships with the police at a more strategic level in the borough, but also down in neighbourhood teams at all those different levels.

So you’re working together in order to tackle it effectively, and it’s tricky because even though I’m not involved at a local government elected level now, I know that my local council Camden as many others has had its budgets essentially cut by around 50%. Now that’s tricky.

When most of your budget will go on understandably safeguarding child protection and older people’s social care, then it is tricky. And I'm sympathetic. I’m sympathetic, but I really hate it. I think anti-social behaviour is a real bane of some people's life, and it's really important that it’s taken seriously with proper thinking and resources in place to tackle it effectively.

QUESTION

How can policing bodies better support local communities?

JANE ROBERTS

So I think you have got to have police really connected at a local level. Sometimes I worry that I think there’s quite an interchange of police personnel at a neighbourhood level, and we know that neighbourhood policing in many places has been cut back. I know there’s been a contention, neighbourhood policing doesn’t cut crime, but actually it does cut the fear of crime.

There is something about going back to me saying building capital with your local police, neighbourhood police. So they know who you are. You know who they are. That actually is really, really important, and you need some continuity there. So I think personally, I think neighbourhood policing is important. Clearly, it’s got to be balanced against all the many other activities that the police have to be involved in.

They get to know their patch, essentially. They get to know the local councillors because otherwise you just go around in circles, doing the same thing, and everybody passes the buck to somebody else, and nothing actually happens. So I think at a hyper local level, they’re very important. I think at a borough commander or chief constable level working with a local authority.

Again, you’ve got to have the policy frameworks in place, and the resources. So you have a team. You have a team, the local authority working closely in conjunction with perhaps even under dual management. It doesn’t matter what the management arrangements are, but you have a structure in place that you work collaboratively and you’re working to the same agenda, and people get to know one another, and they get to know people on the ground.

End transcript: Video: Jane Roberts

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Video: Jane Roberts

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Discussion

Jane Roberts shares her insights into some of the challenges and opportunities of empowering communities. Jane particularly highlights the importance of communities being given the opportunity to take ownership of their local challenges, though with the support and engagement of relevant authorities. In her discussion of ASBOs, Jane also highlights the important role that local authorities can play in putting in place structured responses to issues that might emerge locally, in a way that individual residents or even groups of residents might not be able to do.