My Lords, I have found the Government’s answer to these amendments a bit less satisfactory than their answer to the previous group. We will get on to community protection notices later but I think that the last example that the Minister put forward was a good one. It provided a good reason why CPNs may be a very important and useful new power compared with what currently exists: they will not relate specifically to one thing, such as litter, dogs or whatever, but will be a general power based on whether an anti-social nuisance is taking place.
If I may say so, the other examples that the Minister gave show that the people here who are preparing these things and explaining to us how they will work do not fully understand how things work on the ground, if they work well. Noble Lords seem to think that the police and social landlords operate in one little area and that the local authority is something quite different. Where these things work well, those different groups work together on these issues all the time. The first people to go and investigate the noise may or may not be the police and it may or may not be the social landlord. However, most people who experience anti-social behaviour do not live in social housing. In my experience and, I think, that of many people, most people who experience anti-social behaviour live in private tenanted accommodation, and therefore social landlords are not relevant. The people who turn up to deal with the noise nuisance may be local authority officers. In my part of the world, there is a scheme in
which the local authorities work together. They have an out-of-hours service whereby, even at three o’clock on a Sunday morning, somebody will answer the telephone and try to do something about it.
Therefore, if things work well, they work well because people on the ground from those three agencies, as well as from other agencies that may exist locally—some of them voluntary—work together in that way. That is why I think that saying that, on the one hand, there will be the council and the environmental health officers with their statutory nuisance abatement powers and, on the other hand, there will be everybody else with these powers is not quite how it is going to work. I hope that it will work but locally everything has to be much more flexible than the Minister seemed to suggest.
The guidance is going to be crucial but, as it stands, I do not think that it is adequate in this area. I am aware that work is taking place to improve it but, when it comes down to it, the idea that local authorities will stop the police or a social landlord going ahead and taking action because they may be investigating and they have other powers is just not how it works. In any case, even a local authority may have a statutory duty to serve an abatement notice if it is satisfied that a statutory nuisance is taking place, but in practice that is not how it works. In practice, a local authority will always go down the route of contacting the people involved, as well as the landlord, and attempting to resolve the matter without serving a notice. If it does serve a notice and the matter gets to court because people appeal against the notice, then, if the local authority has not gone out of its way to resolve the matter, the court will send it back and say, “You’re not having this. Go and do it properly”.
Having said all that, if they are willing, some further discussions on this matter with the Government in the mean time would be very helpful. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.