Labour’s ‘respect orders’ are a boon for curtain-twitchers

On Friday, UK home secretary Yvette Cooper announced tough new ‘respect orders’. She said these will allow police to ‘crack down on repeated anti-social behaviour’ and ‘keep communities safe’. Breaching these orders will be a criminal offence, carrying a prison sentence of up to two years. Courts will also be able to issue unlimited fines or force offenders to carry out unpaid work.

At this stage, it’s not quite clear how councils and police will use these new powers. However, the way in which they have been using the most recent set of anti-social-behaviour powers, launched with such fanfare a decade ago, gives us a good idea.

Take one of these powers, the community-protection notice (CPN), which replaced the anti-social behavioural order (ASBO) in 2014. In a new Manifesto Club report, we analysed the CPN data from 2023. We found that the authorities used their powers to tackle such sources of ‘public disorder’ as people camping in Folkestone, a loud TV in Islington, and beehives in Thanet. Officials also issued orders targeted at swearing in Brighton, a noisy pub-quiz night in East Cambridgeshire, messy gardens in Durham, crowing cockerels in East Devon and rough sleeping in Southend.

The CPN makes the ASBO look like a paragon of due process. To impose an ASBO on an individual, the authorities had to go through a court, and the defendant was provided with legal aid and time to plead his or her case. A CPN, however, can just be filled out by a police officer or a council warden on your doorstep.

The ease with which the CPN can be issued helps explain why they are currently being imposed at around 10 times the rate of the ASBO. In 2023 alone, there were 6,161 CPNs and 19,414 community-protection warnings (CPWs) issued. (The CPW is a preliminary warning, urging someone to modify a certain behaviour.)

These orders are subject to so little scrutiny and oversight that they are often littered with spelling mistakes, or are otherwise incomprehensible. One homeless woman was ordered by the Metropolitan Police not to be anywhere on a particular street ‘with a medial [sic] appointment or pre-arranged appointment’. I was recently sent a CPW that ordered a woman not to ‘play songs that mimic the actions of your neighbours’. The recipient understandably had no idea what this means.

The CPN has become a blank cheque for officialdom. It allows councils or the police to issue you with instructions, telling you where you can and can’t go and how you can and can’t behave in your own home. To hit someone with a CPN, the official only has to judge that an individual’s actions are having ‘a detrimental effect on the quality of life of those in the locality’. This could capture some aspect of just about anyone’s behaviour.

The use of CPNs seems to reflect the arbitrary pre-occupations of local authorities. Durham County Council issued 914 CPNs for messy gardens, which it seems to have a thing about. Medway issued 608 CPWs for people putting their rubbish out early. And Nottingham issued 1,400 CPWs for noise.

Nottingham is no noisier than other places in the UK, just as Durham’s gardens are no messier. It’s just that officials in these places have decided to crack down on particular minor annoyances and issue legal orders to people who, if they lived somewhere else in the UK, would otherwise be left alone.

Some local authorities sent us the precise texts of their CPNs. These reveal the quite extraordinary extent of the authorities’ intrusion into people’s everyday lives. North Devon Council ordered someone to ‘cut down the overgrown front garden to ground level and maintain at ground level thereafter’. Eight councils banned people from swearing or using abusive language, including in their own home.

While the state struggles to mend roads or maintain rubbish collections, it seems to have an insatiable appetite for dealing with people’s complaints about one another. Indeed, most councils and police forces now have reporting tools encouraging people to report ‘anti-social behaviour’, however small. This encourages people to feel they have the right not to be annoyed or inconvenienced by others. And it turns the state into an ever-present intermediary between people who can’t settle or negotiate their own differences.

Anti-social-behaviour measures heighten people’s mutual intolerance and fuel their negative fixations on one another. I have come across CPNs issued because someone has complained about the way in which several family members had been closing their front door, or because someone complained about the ‘noise’ from a ‘quiz night’.

In some cases, the procedure for gaining a CPW or CPN only fuels complainants’ sense of unease. East Devon District Council justified its legal order restricting cockerel crowing by explaining that ‘we require people who are affected by cockerel crowing to record their experiences using diary sheets and “The Noise App”’. I live about 80 metres from a noisy cockerel, and 100 metres from a much noisier church clock, and have noted that the mind tends to screen out routine and emotionally neutral noises. However, once you start perceiving these sounds as a threat, and have to leap up at 4.30am to take recordings on a ‘noise app’, then you really will believe that cockerels crowing are ruining your day.

The UK government has not yet announced the legal process required for a so-called respect order to be passed. However, given that Yvette Cooper says it will involve giving powers to the police to seize vehicles ‘immediately’, if they are used ‘in an anti-social manner’, it is unlikely to be a very arduous one.

Since breaching a respect order can carry two years in prison, perhaps we’ll soon be seeing our jail cells fill up with cockerel owners and pub-quiz hosts.

Josie Appleton is director of the Manifesto Club and author of its report on CPNs.