Yes
Paul McKeever
Chairman of the Police Federation in England and Wales

This idea should certainly be given serious consideration. Most people are convinced that where youngsters are committing antisocial acts there has to be an immediate response for them to take notice.

At the moment police dealing with antisocial teenagers have to go through the process of getting an ASBO imposed. This is granted in the magistrates courts and it can be days or weeks before the order is made. By this time it is often too late – the heat has gone from the offence.

This recognises that the sanctions that are being imposed are not working. It is trying to resolve the disconnect between the offence and the punishment by allowing police to say “we are going to do something immediately”. ASBOs don’t make an effective connection between the act and the penalty. With young people we need something more immediate.

Police curfews would deal with the sort of behaviour that upsets neighbours, the low level disorder that we see on our streets on a regular basis – minor damage, nuisance, excessive noise – the things ASBOs are set up to deal with.

I am sure that many communities would welcome the curfews. Many would support it as the modern day equivalent of the old-fashioned policeman’s “clip around the ear”. It would send out the message that we are serious that the criminal justice system has the power to impose immediate sanctions for bad behaviour and that “no” will mean “no”. At the moment no is negotiable.

There is work to be done on the idea: what happens if young people break the terms of their grounding. There have to be effective sanctions against breaching a curfew. It would require cooperation with parents.

At present reoffending rates stand at 70 per cent. The sanctions imposed are not effective. The police are doing their job of detecting offenders and crime – it’s what happens afterwards that fails the public. We need innovative ideas that make a difference.

It is the police’s right to intervene in these cases. If parents have abnegated responsibility and are not controlling their children, then police or social workers have to step in.

ASBOs have become almost a badge of honour among certain groups of young people. With simple curfews you wouldn’t get that same badge. I’d hope it would be a useful deterrent for young people to carry out antisocial behaviour.

At the moment this is just one idea in the pot. Curfews would not replace ASBOs and substantive offences would still be dealt with at a different level in the criminal justice system – if people’s property was being damaged, for example.

Police officers are there to keep the peace. At the moment their work is hampered by excessive bureaucracy and legislation needed to secure a penalty. When youngsters breach the peace, we should be able to address the incident straight away.

No
Martin Narey
Chief executive Barnado’s

I don’t have any difficulty with curfews in principle. In my former role as the head of the prison service I introduced detention-based curfews for offenders released early. If properly policed with electronic tagging it can be effective and reduce offending.

Similarly, in the ideal nuclear family, with two parents committed to their children, curfews can work. Grounding is what a lot of parents will do when a child’s behaviour is poor. But we are talking about children in families where parenting is often very poor and where supervision is lacking. These children won’t comply with a curfew unless it is enforced – almost certainly by some kind of tagging.

Many parents either won’t be able to enforce it or will not be interested in enforcing it. But, even where the child complies with the curfew it is difficult to believe that, on its own, it will change their behaviour.

It is fantasy to believe the police could impose an immediate sanction for somebody to stay in their home for four weeks without any kind of due process. There would have to be a court appearance. A child can be returned to their parents if out and unsupervised. That power exists under antisocial behaviour legislation. So there is nothing new there. Curfew orders exist now: but as a disposal of the court.

What I find disappointing is that this measure singularly fails to address the very real problem of poor behaviour by a minority of young people. Curfews have a role to play but, on their own, will not address the all too familiar underlying issues. The first of those is parenting. Illiberal as it might sound we need closely to examine the case for much more parenting training and the possibility of making it compulsory for some parents.

The second and perhaps more immediate issue is education. Chris Grayling, the Shadow Home Secretary, promises that curfews will not apply during school hours. But for a significant proportion of the young people we’re talking about there is no school. We all understand why schools want to exclude pupils. But the link between exclusion and offending and then incarceration is very clear. This Government is right to do all it can to restrain the number of school exclusions.

But Conservative policy proposals would mean exclusions will soar and so will the numbers of young people on the streets, disaffected, bored and dangerous. These children will recommence their education only when, eventually, they are sent to prison.

I would restore police discretion to deal with early offending and that would include allowing them, when they think it appropriate, to caution young people more frequently. A caution, swiftly delivered by a senior uniformed police officer and in the presence of parents is much more likely to be effective than a elongated judicial process. The research is very clear: cautions can be very effective. They are the replacement for the “metaphorical clip around the ear”, which Mr Grayling seeks.

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