Innovations - A deal to cut street drinking and crime

Shafik Meghji, Regeneration & Renewal, 22 August 2008

Q: How did the council persuade shops to take part?

A: The initiative came out of CivicWatch, a scheme set up to tackle crime and antisocial behaviour in Westminster, which reported an increase in problems involving street drinking in particular areas. Last year, CivicWatch teams contacted shops and off-licences in these areas and asked them to voluntarily stop selling super-strength lager. Nearly all agreed to do so. In these areas, street drinking and crime declined.

From next month, we will be expanding the scheme to cover the whole of south Westminster. This time it won't be purely voluntary: if shops don't agree to stop selling strong lager, we will alter their alcohol licence to prevent them from doing so. Ultimately, we may have to take away some shops' licences if they won't take part.

Q: How will you monitor whether the shops are keeping to the deal?

A: The police, community support officers and council staff will have details of all the shops covered by the deal and will keep an eye on them. They will also act on any reports from local people and the police about street drinkers, and use this data to monitor nearby shops.

Q: How can the council be sure it has identified the right "hotspots"?

A: Analysts at the council looked through the police records of any incident involving street drinking in Westminster and used this to locate the problem areas. From this, we discovered that most of the worst affected areas were in the south of the borough.

Q: What is the target group: vagrants or underage drinkers?

A: Generally speaking, we don't have an underage street drinking problem in the borough. Vagrants - or vagrant-looking people, because not all are homeless - are a problem, particularly when they congregate in large groups. These people are not likely to be drinking too far from their source of alcohol. Street drinkers increase local people's and tourists' perception of danger in the area, whether or not they are actually dangerous.

Q: What's to stop an "offender" just buying a different kind of alcohol?

A: The legislation doesn't allow us to introduce a blanket ban on alcohol - and we wouldn't want to. The data on street drinking shows a link with high-strength lagers. Street drinkers may move to wine or spirits, but we can only do one thing at a time. We're optimistic the initiative will succeed.

Q: Is there a danger that this will simply shift the problem elsewhere?

A: It's possible, yes. We will monitor areas outside the "hotspots" to see if there is any displacement of the problem. If there is, we will have to act upon it.

THE PANEL

Questions were compiled with help from Rob Woods, town centre manager for Hastings in East Sussex, and Hannah Mummery, policy and research manager at civic society umbrella body the Civic Trust.

- Contact us If you know of an innovative scheme that merits closer scrutiny, email Adam Branson at adam.branson@haymarket.com.