Child Curfew Orders (Hansard, 14 December 1999)

§ Lord Dholakia
asked Her Majesty's Government:
How many local authorities have applied to the Home Office to invoke the powers to impose curfews on children under 10 following the passage of the Crime and Disorder Act 1998.

§ The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Home Office (Lord Bassam of Brighton)
My Lords, none yet. It is for local authorities to decide whether or not to apply for confirmation of a local child curfew scheme in the light of their work on wider crime and disorder reduction strategies. Local child curfews are an additional measure to use in the fight against youth 125 crime. They are part of a wide range of new interventions such as reparation orders, parenting orders and action plan orders which will help to prevent crime and make young offenders and their parents face up to their actions and responsibilities.

§ Lord Dholakia
My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for that reply. However, does he accept that the reason the police and local authorities do not apply for curfew orders is because curfews do little to prevent crime? The present curfew orders apply to children under 10. Does the Minister accept that those who commit crime on our streets are likely to be much older than that and are therefore unaffected by the provision of curfew orders? Will the Minister also accept that the police have ample powers, if children are found running in the streets at night unsupervised, to use other measures to take them home without resorting to the cumbersome curfew orders?

§ Lord Bassam of Brighton
My Lords, the noble Lord makes a number of useful and valuable points. It is for that reason that my right honourable friend the Home Secretary wrote on 15th October to all local authorities and chief constables in England and Wales to solicit their views in relation to the potential effectiveness of child curfew orders. We are beginning to receive responses, and from their content I suspect that the issues raised by the noble Lord will be those that we have to take into further consideration. It is undoubtedly the case that a number of other effective powers we put in place can be made use of by local authorities and the police in dealing with youth disorder, youth offending and youth crime.

§ Lord Skelmersdale
My Lords, the Minister began his answer with the words, "none yet". How long before the Government remove this ridiculous provision from the statute book?

§ Lord Bassam of Brighton
My Lords, it is all very well for the noble Lord to call it ridiculous; but this provision was asked for by local authorities and the police service. Clearly we keep these matters under review. We try to evaluate the effectiveness of the measures we put in place. We shall continue to keep this under review and, as I said, my right honourable friend the Home Secretary has already written to local authorities and police services to find out their views on the matter.

§ Lord Ewing of Kirkford
My Lords, is my noble friend aware that the only experiment of this kind has been carried out in Scotland, in Hamilton in the Strathclyde police area? When my noble friend writes to chief constables in England and Wales, will he advise them to consult the Chief Constable of Strathclyde, Mr John Orr, on the outcome of the experiment? I can assure my noble friend that it has been an outstanding success.

§ Lord Bassam of Brighton
My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend for those comments. From my recent 126 contact with Strathclyde police I was most impressed by the way in which they conduct operations. Of course we will take on board the views that come back to us from our friends in the north and make sure we reflect on them in the way in which we develop practice in England and Wales.

§ Lord Cope of Berkeley
My Lords, the scheme may be a success in Hamilton, but it is certainly a flop in England and Wales. Indeed, it is well over a year since these orders became available and they have not been used at all by any local authority. However, in that letter of 15th October, did not the Home Secretary also suggest that he was proposing to change the law so as to permit these curfew orders to be made for children over the age of 10? I believe it has been suggested that that should be extended to cover children up to the age of 16. Will that not cause further trouble for anti-social behaviour orders, which apply to the slightly older age group and which have also been very little used so far, despite being part of what is supposed to be a flagship policy of the Government to tackle youth crime?

§ Lord Bassam of Brighton
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord for his very helpful questions. We shall have to see whether child curfew orders become part and parcel of the apparatus. Clearly they are available and can be used. I note the noble Lord's comments about anti-social behaviour orders. In response, I quote from an article in today's edition of the Daily Mail which refers to a case where someone was arrested 100 times, convicted 55 times and was a "walking crime wave" at the age of just 14. The local authority in question—Nottingham City Council—clearly thought that it was such a serious problem that it decided to make use of the anti-social behaviour order process. Indeed, a number of authorities have now followed that course.
Many of the orders to which I referred earlier are working and are effective in pilot areas only. In managing their crime reduction strategies, it is clearly open to local authorities and the police to make use of a wide range of powers in the fight against crime.