Moira Macfarlane is a director at ACA Law in north London, with an extensive experience of defending clients who have received Community Protection Notices. In this interview, she says how CPNs are being issued as a ‘tick-box exercise’, and gives advice on legal aid for CPN appeals. What is your experience defending clients with CPNs? I regularly deal with CPNs at both the police station and court. It tends to be that I see the same people repeatedly. For example, one of my clients was recently dealt with for breach of a Criminal Behaviour Order (CBO), he had been found with a…

Jim Nixon was a police officer for 20 years and has since worked as an ASB manager and consultant for councils. He discusses his experience of Community Protection Notices (CPNs) – why they are a problem, and how they might be improved. What is your experience of CPNs? I have seen CPNs being given out without a lot of thought to the evidence. I found that housing officers and ASB officers were giving them out like confetti, and police officers were doing the same. Officers have been given very little training around ASB in general, and there is a wide range of…

John Pointing is a barrister and David Horrocks is a chartered Environmental Health Practitioner; together they run Statutory Nuisance Solutions. They have decades of experience in the environmental health field, and co-authored the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health guidance on Community Protection Notices. What follows is an edited transcript of an interview with John and David, in which the discuss the trouble with CPNs, the reasons for the falling standards in local authority enforcement, and what needs to be done. What is the background to the changes in environmental health enforcement? The shift in Environmental Health enforcement started to occur around 2003,…

Have you received an unjust CPN? Do you need help? We are partnering with the Freedom Law Clinic to provide legal support for people who have received a Community Protection Notice. Qualifying solicitors will work with CPN recipients to provide legal support, such as advice on appeal process, writing court testimonies, or submitting informal appeals to the council. Their work will be overseen by solicitor and Freedom Law Clinic director Luke Gittos. Qualifying solicitors will also prepare case reports of historic CPNs, documenting events and the legal process, and providing support where necessary. At the same time, the Manifesto Club will work…

The Statutory Guidance for Community Protection Notices (CPNs) says that ‘Particular care should be taken to consider how use of the power might impact on more vulnerable members of society’. This would include groups such as the homeless, young people, or those with mental illnesses. We are currently in touch with a woman with bipolar disorder, who was issued with a Community Protection Warning (CPW) on the basis of unfounded allegations made against her by her neighbour. The stress of the CPW led the woman to have a bipolar relapse, after which the council issued her with a CPN and then a…

For the past year, we have been in touch with an elderly lady in north London who has received a series of council CPNs for Japanese knotweed. Her case is tragic and perverse – and shows perhaps better than any the counterproductive nature of Community Protection Notices, and why they badly need to be reformed. The justification for CPNs was that these provide quick and easy redress for ‘victims’ of anti-social behaviour. However, the extremely low standards of evidence and procedure (requiring no production of evidence, and no formal process or proof of guilt) have yielded instead a system that is arbitrary,…

One council has issued a legal order to a family ordering them not to ‘slam doors’. The family has two autistic children, and so leaving the house can be something of a challenging business. Yet the council issued them with a Community Protection Notice ordering them to ‘make sure that when you close the door you do in a way that does not disturb others’. When the family pressed a council officer for specification, he suggested that they close the door with both hands. When the father said that he needed one hand to hold a child, the council was unsympathetic. The…