Perceptions of Anti-Social Behaviour in Lancashire

The Best Value Performance Indicator surveys are undertaken every three years by all councils in England, (most recently in 2006), and the survey asked several questions on the perceptions of the local area. This allows comparison across the country. One of the main sections on the survey is on perceptions of anti-social behaviour.

The survey is a postal questionnaire sent randomly to households throughout the local authority area. Each council was required to have at least 1100 completed surveys and the responses are weighted to reflect the population by age, gender and ethnicity. This means the accuracy on each statistic is approximately ±3%.

The perceptions of a variety of aspects of anti-social behaviour are shown below. The score for Lancashire is from Lancashire County Council's survey (covering the NUTS-3 area of 12 districts, not including Blackburn with Darwen and Blackpool). The England score is the mean of the 387 English local authorities, including all county, district, metropolitan and unitary councils, and all London Boroughs.

The questions asked about seven aspects:

• people using or dealing drugs;
• vandalism, graffiti and other deliberate damage;
• people being drunk or rowdy in public spaces;
• abandoned or burnt out cars;
• teenagers hanging around on the streets;
• noisy neighbours or loud parties; and
• rubbish and litter lying around.

It is important to remember that these figures are perceptions, rather than based upon police figures for example. However, for many of the above factors of anti-social behaviour, there are no objective measures. Also, anti-social behaviour inherently depends on people's perceptions to some extent: the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 defines it as acting in "a manner that caused or was likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress to one or more persons not of the same household as the complainant". Therefore the behaviour needs to cause some offence or inconvenience to others which depends on the perceptions of members of the public.

There is another main perception measure of anti-social behaviour, the national British Crime Survey (BCS), undertaken annually by the Home Office. This is more methodologically robust than the BVPI survey, as it is a face-to-face rather than a postal survey. However, with at least 1,100 returns in each local authority area, (around ten times the size of the BCS), the BVPI survey is able to give more reliable results at such a local level.

Figure 1 High Perceived Levels of Anti-Social Behaviour (Composite Measure)

Note All respondents expressing an opinion (excludes don't know answers)

Source Audit Commission, BVPI Survey 2006, Home Office

Fieldwork September to November 2006

The seven measures were combined together by the Home Office for their RESPECT Task Force into a single measure. Each of the seven factors is given equal weighting. Above a set score, a respondent is considered to have rated anti-social behaviour as high in their area. The same derived measure is used on the British Crime Survey. The scores for each local authority area in Lancashire from the BVPI survey are shown in Figure 1. The ranking is shown for each council area of the 387 English councils who undertook the survey (all county, district, metropolitan and unitary councils, and London boroughs). (Where rankings are joint, the place shown is the highest).

The responses to the residents survey in Pendle puts the area as having the third highest perceived level of anti-social behaviour in England (46%), after Newham in London (53%), and Blyth Valley in Northumberland (47%). The proportion for Pendle appears particularly high when compared with Preston, a district with very similar levels of deprivation, but 22% less respondents rating anti-social behaviour highly in their local area. The next highest Lancashire district is Burnley, also in the ten highest areas in England (41%).

The same questions were asked on the BVPI survey in 2003, and the combined measures of anti-social behaviour in 2006 have generally fallen from the previous survey. The mean figure for all English councils has dropped from 38% measured as rating anti-social behaviour highly in 2003, to 23% in 2006. (It is important to note here that the anti-social behaviour questions were asked at the end of the 2003 questionnaire, and the start of the 2006 survey. This could have an effect on the responses. However, the changes are by no means across all surveys or indeed all questions, which might be expected in the case of an order effect.) The change in Lancashire varied from a statistically insignificant increase of 1% in Ribble Valley, to the very large decrease of -24% in Blackpool. The high result for Pendle is explained by its low decrease on 2003 (-3%), while other areas have had much larger falls, (eg Blackburn with Darwen, -18%).

Pendle has the highest or joint highest rating in the county for each of the seven anti-social behaviour factors. Most notably it had the highest proportion of any English council area rating vandalism, graffiti and other deliberate damage as a very or fairly big problem (68%). Three-quarters of residents expressing an opinion thought that people using or dealing drugs was a problem in their area (75%), the fourth highest in England.

In Burnley, the highest ranking was for the proportion saying rubbish and litter lying around was a problem in the area (61%, the same proportion as for Pendle). This supports Burnley residents giving clean streets as the highest priority for the local area on the same survey (see the Perceptions of Lancashire research monitor).

As mentioned previously, these figures are based on the perceptions of local residents, rather than by recorded crime for example. A comparison with police crime records and the BCS for example shows that the order between areas for crime is very different to that for the perceptions of anti-social behaviour above.

Scores for each individual question for each local authority in England are available in the BVPI General Survey 2006/7 results from the Audit Commission.