Gangs’ families should lose council homes – Home Office minister

Families of gang members who are living in council housing should have those homes taken away from them in order to deter the criminals, a government minister has said.

Victoria Atkins, a Home Office minister, backed a scheme being trialled in north London that threatens whole families in council homes with eviction and offers leniency to gang members in some low-level cases, such as possession of cannabis.

In a newspaper interview published on Friday, she backed the scheme, saying the government had “changed the law to enable it to happen” and claiming it would force people involved in violent crimes to “understand the consequences” of their actions.

“In the most serious cases, with these people who are exploiting young people, making the lives of local residents a misery, putting fear into people’s hearts when they’re picking children up from the school gates, I think absolutely they should understand the consequences of their criminal behaviour,” Atkins told the Daily Telegraph.

Critics have previously attacked such powers as “discriminatory and unfair as well as illogical and ineffective”.

They are conferred by the Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act 2014. As the bill was passing through the parliamentary process, Liberty said: “Whole families could be turfed from their homes because of the actions of one person. This will pile pressure on innocent and vulnerable people at a particularly difficult time for them and their family.”

It said people who had passed through the criminal justice system would be doubly punished. “A basic principle of criminal law is that an individual should be subject to appropriate punishment for their crime just once. Our criminal law is designed to do exactly this.”

And the group said it believed the powers would contravene human rights laws because “only those who live in rented accommodation will ever be at the mercy of this power”.

The scheme is part of the Integrated Gangs strategy, under which the Metropolitan police work with council teams, including psychologists, probation workers and social workers, to try to stop people getting involved with gangs.

Supt Nick Davies, the police commander in an area of north London in which at least 14 gangs reportedly operate, has said the power to threaten whole families in which a single member is linked to gangs “seems to be a particularly effective strategy in changing the behaviour” of the gang members. In an interview with the Sunday Times earlier this month, he insisted the “threshold for eviction is high”.