This is the final week in a consultation by Oxford city council, proposing a ban on various ‘anti-social activities’ in the city centre (the council is using new ‘public spaces protection order’ powers, PSPOs, which allow them to ban any activity they judge to have a ‘detrimental effect’ on the ‘quality of life’). These banned activities include : sleeping in toilets, rough sleeping, public drinking, dogs off leads in the city centre, pigeon feeding, ‘non-compliant’ busking, and ‘persistent begging’. When the Manifesto Club debated the issue on BBC Radio Oxford on Sunday, Oxford councillor Dee Sinclair said that they were bringing in the…

A 22-year old has been evicted from her home in Plymouth, as police used the broad new powers of eviction contained within the Anti-Social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act. The Plymouth Herald reports enthusiastically that new ASB powers mean that somebody can be evicted from their home and asked to leave ‘within the hour’, if police ‘tell the court they reasonably believe that there is, or is likely soon to be, a public nuisance or there is disorder in the vicinity of the premises’. The old conditions for eviction were significantly stonger: the ‘police would have to prove that the property was…

Colchester Council is planning a ‘public spaces protection order’ banning car enthusiasts from gathering in a retail park after 6pm. This comes after gatherings of hundreds of cars, organised by the East Essex Cruisers. Yet significantly, when police visited previous gatherings, they found that people were ‘not doing anything much’; they were looking at each other’s cars, some revving their engines or playing music on the car radio. The only offence was the sale of burgers from vans without a licence. Yet under the new law it will become a crime to enter Turner Rise retail park after 6pm, except for the…

In a post on the New Observer, Justin Wyllie points out that new anti-social behaviour powers are often being used against the mentally ill or other marginalised groups. He says: ‘Many of the targets of these new ‘Anti-Social Behaviour’ powers are people with mental health problems. The isolated and damaged individuals who interfere with the process of shopping in town centres up and down the country. There has been a blending of 3 previously separate domains; care for the mentally ill, handling anti-social behaviour (until recently dealt with informally by the authorities, if at all) and crime. Now all receive “support”. All…

One of the big questions about the implementation of the new wide-ranging ‘public space protection orders’ (PSPOs) was how councils will decide to pass them. PSPOs allow for the council to ban anything which it judges has a ‘detrimental effect’ on the ‘quality of life’ of an area. But there are no proceedural requirements about how officials might go about this – so one council might require a PSPO to pass through full council, which would provide a democratic check; while other authority might delegate the law-making power to a single council officer. This latter possibility is obviously extremely worrying, but extremely…