Southampton City Council is consulting over plans to introduce Public Space Protection Orders, giving new powers in five locations including the city centre and Portswood Broadway, where it says begging and street drinking have caused problems.
Photo courtesy Nick James
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Public Space Protection Orders, or PSPOs, focus on “improving and protecting the local area for the people of the city and those who visit Southampton”, according to the council.
In Portswood the proposed area appears to extend from near Gordon Avenue to St Denys Road, and includes the section of Westridge Road behind the police station.
“Begging and street drinking are becoming increasingly prominent within the city, particularly around our shopping centres and parks, despite a network of support services for those who have alcohol dependency or who are homeless,” says the council in the preamble to its consultation.
The move has been welcomed by Highfield Residents' Association , as well as Portswood ward councillor Paul O'Neill (Con), who says it's “a growing issue for the public”.
Nuisance
“T here are undeniable nuisances being caused for residents by drinkers and drug addicts in those parts of the city in question and by no means are all the people who are begging homeless ...
“Whatever the outcome of the consultation, I hope that any action taken to reduce begging and antisocial behaviour should be backed up by measures to provide additional support including drug and alcohol rehabilitation for those involved.”
Swaythling councillor Bob Painton (Con), left, is another supporter of PSPOs, although there isn't one currently proposed for his ward.
“I would encourage the PSPO because obviously if a situation arrives in Swaythling, then we push for a PSPO in that area as well, so eventually there'll be nowhere for them to go and drink, apart from sitting in the middle of a park away from anywhere, or in the middle of the Common or something, and not actually pestering on the street corner or lounging, sitting down on the benches that are there for old age pensioners,” he said.
But not everyone agrees that PSPOs are the answer to what is clearly a complex problem.
Evidence
Rebecca Kinge, who lives in Shirley where another PSPO is proposed, said she'd like to see evidence spatial control orders are effective, and asked whether they'd “create greater tensions between authorities and the marginalised members of our community”.
“Cities have to accept that drinking and begging will happen, and work to reduce it through positive and preventative measures and not draconian controls,” she said.
“W here I live I have never noticed a problem with begging or street drinking. No doubt it does exist but I have never felt intimidated on Shirley High Street. Where these issues exist in the city, PSPOs could well just move the problem elsewhere beyond the boundary or into the back alleys... which would be a much greater concern in terms of perception of safety of the city.”
Sanctions
There are also wider concerns that PSPOs can offer a fast-track route to criminalise individuals – themselves either “local people” or “visitors” – for activities like drinking or asking for money that aren't in fact illegal, in a climate where benefit sanctions, especially in this area , are reportedly causing “severe financial hardship”.
“Homeless people in particular can struggle to meet the conditions of the [sanctions] regime,” said Matt Downie, Director of Policy and External Affairs at Crisis, the national charity for single homeless people, which has called for a “more common sense approach” to sanctioning and for guidance on protecting the most vulnerable.
“Many are trying to rebuild their lives, and losing the support of benefits can be disastrous. At the same time, sanctions can increase people’s risk of becoming homeless, leaving them without enough money for food, rent or heating.”
Homelessness
Crisis stresses “not all rough sleepers beg, and not everyone who begs is homeless”, and in Southampton the new powers are reportedly not designed to “'victimise' genuinely homeless people”. But in other areas civil liberties charity Liberty reports there have been attempts to use PSPOs to criminalise homeless people and other activities.
While Matt Downie from Crisis agrees that if people break the law they should be held to account, he stressed that “rough sleeping itself is not a crime”, and said that: “rough sleepers are far more likely to be victims of crime than perpetrators.”
“The real issue here is the substantial rise in homelessness in recent years, with rough sleeping in England up by 55% since 2010,” he said.
“Instead of PSPOs that penalise rough sleeping, we need a real safety net for anyone finding themselves in difficulty, including housing benefit that actually covers the cost of renting, a much stronger focus on preventing homelessness, and a change in the law so that no one is forced to sleep rough.”
Arbitrary regulation of everyday life
Others have broader concerns about the scope of PSPOs, and about the potential for 'mission creep'.
According to the Manifesto Club, which campaigns against what it calls the “hyperregulation of everyday life”, PSPOs bring with them “arbitrary, open-ended powers, with towns and cities planning bizarre new offences such as ‘loitering’, carrying out card tricks, or failing to be carrying a poop bag. In every case, these new laws target an activity that is not in itself problematic or criminal.”
Undemocratic regulation
And Bradley L Garrett, below, a lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Southampton, who wrote about PSPOs for Guardian Cities in September , said he thought the orders were, at their core, “an attempt to criminalise poverty”. He suggested that they could pave the way for the undemocratic regulation of public behaviour at the whim of the council.
Bradley L Garrett. Photo courtesy Winch
“What the Council does not make clear on the consultation website is that the implementation of a PSPO gives police or ‘authorised persons’ the ability to charge anyone violating the order with a criminal offence if they refuse to pay an on-the-spot fine. Obviously those begging are unlikely to be able to pay that fine and will therefore end up fast-tracked into the criminal justice system.
“PSPOs are dangerous because they unfairly target the weak, the poor and the vulnerable in our communities and because they are a way of criminalizing non-criminal behaviour without going through proper democratic channels to change the law. The PSPO, once in place, can also easily have its terms varied so that the council could criminalise other activities within the proposed areas, including the right to protest.
“The Southampton Public Space Protection Order is undemocratic, unethical and unnecessary and should be resisted,” said Dr Garrett.
Guy Phillips
The council's consultation is here and closes on December 11
Previously - Audio: Numbers using food bank up 50% - February 2014
Images of hat and sign being held cropped from an original photo under CC2 by SLR Jester
Links
PSPO discussion on Streetlife forum
PSPOs: the new control orders threatening our public spaces - Bradley L Garrett in The Guardian
Sanctions linked to drop in benefits but few return to work - University of Oxford
Report reveals benefit sanction ‘hotspots’ across Britain - Crisis
Begging and sleeping rough aren't anti-social behaviour - they're the result of poverty – Liberty
Benefits stopped through sanctions over 23,000 times in Hampshire - Daily Echo
Conmen make £200 a day begging on streets of Southampton and Winchester claims councillor - Daily Echo
Bogus beggars make life hard for the homeless on streets of Southampton - Daily Echo