Policy & Practice: Briefing - Antisocial behaviour measures fallshort

Now I heard about this - it was all about town centres being "turned into no-go areas by armies of yobs".

Well it's a bit more complicated than that. The use of that phrase in a headline in The Daily Telegraph was a textbook case of putting the key findings of a report down in paragraph five while grandstanding to your readers with an incendiary sound bite from a right-wing committee chair.

OK, so what did the committee find? The main thrust of its report is that the Home Office has been pretty hopeless at establishing the best way of tackling antisocial behaviour. In the 10 years since the first antisocial behaviour measures were introduced, no national evaluation has been undertaken of the effectiveness of the 10 different interventions available - antisocial behaviour orders (Asbos) and so on. For example, no Home Office information was available on warning letters, despite a National Audit Office study suggesting this was the least expensive and most effective piece of initial intervention.