Imprisoned for feeding the pigeons: The use and abuse of ASB injunctions

Introduction by Josie Appleton, director of the Manifesto Club

Respect Orders (contained in the Crime and Policing Bill) have been enthusiastically trailed as a new policy mechanism that will tackle the ‘virus that is anti-social behaviour’. However, Respect Orders are not new, but are an almost exact replica of existing ASB Civil Injunctions (see our Briefing on Respect Orders).

Both orders can be issued on application by various state bodies to the High Court or county court, and can impose prohibitions as well as positive requirements. The test for issuing an order is if the court is satisfied (on the balance of probabilities) that a person has engaged in, or threatens to engage in, anti-social behaviour (with anti-social behaviour defined as ‘behaviour that has caused, or is likely to cause, harassment, alarm or distress to any person’).

In this urgent policy context, the Manifesto Club is delighted to publish this series of three ground-breaking reports by academics at the University of York, examining cases where people have been imprisoned for breach of injunction.

These reports show how the Civil Injunction power has led to hundreds of people being imprisoned, in many cases for actions that were not in themselves harmful or criminal. Those imprisoned were often homeless, from a traveller background, or had problems of addiction or mental health.

Case studies cited in these reports include a man imprisoned for over a year, for breaching an injunction that prevented him from moving his caravan on to a disputed site. Two men were imprisoned for feeding the birds, a woman was imprisoned for 18 months for calling 999, while another woman was imprisoned for 18 months for entering and attempting to sleep in the YMCA. Several people were imprisoned for begging or for sleeping rough, including a woman for asking for 50p.

The basis for these reports is work by Rona Epstein to document the 405 cases of people given custodial sentences for breach of injunction, between July 2019 and the present, from the Courts and Tribunals Judiciary website. This data was worked on and analysed by Caroline Hunter and other academics at the University of York.

The government doesn’t publish data on the numbers of Civil Injunctions issued by the courts, but a Manifesto Club FOI request to the Ministry of Justice returned the figure of 1473 ASB injunctions issued in county courts between 2015 and 2023. If this figure is correct, it suggests that 30-50% of injunction recipients are imprisoned for breach.

Here are summaries of the three reports:

In the first report, Caroline Hunter, Rona Epstein and Jed Meers examined 263 cases of imprisonment for breach of injunction between 2020-2.

They found that:

The majority of cases of imprisonment for injunction breach concerned anti-social behaviour injunctions (76% of all cases). There were a total of 196 sentences of imprisonment for breach of an ASB injunction (ASBI), spread over three years.
The longest sentence for injunction breach was 730 days; the average was 95 days and the median was 60 days.
The most active claimants were local authorities, with 40.9% of breach prosecutions that resulted in imprisonment. Social landlords made up 29.7%, and the police 6.2%.
Around half (46.7%) of these sentences were suspended, while 49.8% resulted in immediate imprisonment. Gypsy and traveller cases were far more likely to receive immediate rather than suspended sentences, with 80% of these cases subject to immediate imprisonment.
Where data was known, the majority of defendants were not represented in the breach hearing that led to their prison sentence. Overall, 57% were not represented at the breach hearing, as opposed to 43% who were.
The report concludes that for injunction breach the courts lack adequate sentencing guidance, as well as the usual range of sentencing options (including community sentences) and the usual protections for the defendant in criminal courts.

In the second report, Caroline Hunter, Sümeyye Ünal, and Rona Epstein focus on 242 committals for breach of ASB Injunctions between 2020-4.

They note that the definition of ASB is ‘elastic’, with the capacity to be ‘stretched’ to encompass a wide variety of situations and behaviours, ‘which provides an ill-defined and unrestricted power to state institutions’. This is particularly the case with housing-related ASBIs, which can be issued in cases of ‘conduct capable of causing nuisance or annoyance to a person’. The report found that:

Several cases of imprisonment for ASBI breaches concerned ‘behaviours that are not generally criminal’, such as entering a banned area or making noise. In 73 breach cases, the defendant had entered an area from which they had been barred. In 72 cases the person caused ‘general nuisance’. There were 61 cases of committal for ‘abusive language’ breaches, and 51 cases for noise.
People can also be imprisoned for failing to comply with positive requirements in the injunction. The report highlights the case of a woman with a history of overdosing and self-harm, who was imprisoned for 6 months for breaches that included ‘being discharged from the community health team…due to non-engagement’ and ‘failing to respond to an opt-in letter for the “complex needs service”.’
The majority (45%) of ASB injunction breach cases had been initiated by a housing association. 41% had been initiated by the local authority, and 7% by the police.
In one case identified, imprisonment led to the death of the ASBI recipient. Floyd Carruthers had been diagnosed with schizophrenia for which he took medication. His landlord successfully applied for an interim ASBI, which prohibited conduct capable of causing nuisance and annoyance to any person in his housing facility. He breached the order by twice banging on his neighbour’s door; the landlord applied to commit for the breach. Mr Carruthers was sentenced to 66 days in prison. He stopped eating for 4 days; when a prison officer entered his cell they found he had collapsed, and he later died in hospital of sepsis. The coroner’s court found that Mr Carruthers’ death was contributed to by neglect in prison.

In the third report, Rona Epstein analysed court records of the 405 cases of imprisonment for breach of an injunction, between July 2019 and the present.

The report argues that imprisonment was a disproportionate penalty in the majority of cases included in the database. Additionally, many of the cases involved punishing people for underlying issues of destitution, homelessness, mental illness, and bereavement. The report concludes that imprisonment should not be an option available to the courts in cases of behaviour order breach, and that there should be strengthened protection for those accused of breach.

Case studies cited included:

In 2021, a group of travellers breached injunctions forbidding them from moving their caravans on to land that they own but that Essex County Council believes they should not occupy. On 14 December 2021, the High Court imposed a sentence of 14 months immediate imprisonment on Thomas Cleary who breached his injunction by moving his caravan to a proscribed site. Bridget McDonagh was committed to 11 months immediate imprisonment for the same breach. A mother with 6 dependent children was sentenced to 14 weeks immediate imprisonment for moving her caravan.
On 18 December 2024 Peterborough County Court found that Jacqueline Reilly, who is homeless, had for the second time breached an injunction not to enter the YMCA and not to sleep there. The Court committed her to an immediate term of imprisonment of 18 months.
On 21 February 2021, Mr Batty came before Leicester County Court, which found that he had breached an injunction against begging. It ordered 52 weeks immediate imprisonment.
In 46 cases in the database, the judge made mention of ‘mental health issues’ or ‘mental illness’ or ‘drug or alcohol addiction’. Nonetheless, sentences of imprisonment were imposed.
A woman whose baby had died was subject to four months suspended imprisonment for making a noise outside her flat. She was described by the judge as being in a ‘distressed state’, and he observed that no mental health help was available due to the covid pandemic.
There are multiple cases of imprisonment were no harm or inconvenience was caused by the breach. Annie Harley was subject to four weeks immediate imprisonment for being in a prohibited area; she did not appear in court and was not represented. The judge commented ‘On no occasion was there evidence of a resident or person lawfully present in the exclusion zone suffering any adverse consequences as a result of the defendant being present’.

These reports reinforce concerns raised by a 2020 Civil Justice Council working party report, which found ‘a number of serious problems’ with the Civil Injunction power, including a lack of representation of defendants at breach hearings, a lack of data collection (it described the situation as a ‘data desert’), and a failure to address underlying causative problems such as mental health or substance misuse.

The Civil Justice Council concluded that Civil Injunctions were ‘not working’, and made a number of suggestions, including an ‘urgent request’ to collect data on the use of the power, widening legal aid to ensure that no one faces the possibility of imprisonment without representation, and improving sentencing guidelines.

Over four years later, these problems persist. Rather than resolve the significant problems with the ASB Civil Injunction, the current government has introduced a near-replica order, the main result will be to catalyse existing problems and make imprisonment for breach significantly more likely.

These powers have a devastating effect on people’s lives, as emerged from our interview with Nick, a man imprisoned for breaching an injunction banning him from feeding birds. He told the Manifesto Club:

I’m nearly 70, and I am a vegan bird lover, and feeder of the less-liked birds such as pigeons and seagulls. I started feeding birds with my mum in the 60s. In recent years feeding the birds has helped with my grief, depression, and ongoing sobriety. I owe them. I lost my partner, mother, brother, and best friend in the space of a few years. I haven’t drank since 1990.

I had one injunction in 2016 and another one in 2019. In 2020 I was arrested for breaches and held for one day.

At my breach trial, the council had four members present, all saying things that were exaggerated, including lies from the next-door neighbour who hated birds (and poured disinfectant on my balcony). The judge was horrible. I tried to tell him about how feeding the birds saved me from drinking again, and helped my grief. I had a solicitor, who said that it was a mental health issue, but the judge disagreed. He offered no compassion for my severe grief and very fragile mental state, and told me that I was sentenced to 15 months prison for several breaches.

I was taken away in a prison van, in solitary because of covid, and held with nothing in a cell for 10 days. In prison I nearly died – I had a doctor and nurse check my blood pressure every day because they said it was the highest they had ever seen and it was critical they bring it down. In reality, the sentence was only 15 weeks – I received a letter saying it was 15 weeks – and I was released after 11 weeks. I was very ill, and I didn’t return to the flat because I had lost that, so I stayed with a friend.

We urge the Home Office to halt the launch of Respect Orders, and instead carry out an urgent review of the operation of existing powers, in order that any future legal orders can be based on sound policy and the principles of justice. Announcing new orders with great fanfare appears to be cheap, but unchecked powers carry a very heavy human cost that needs to be recognised.

Acknowledgements: We would like to thank the Oakdale Trust for supporting the research by Rona Epstein and these reports.