Listening to you

Anti-social Behaviour harms people and communities. It causes misery and fear. People who experience it feel unsafe and unhappy in their own home. Victims often describe it as ‘like living in a nightmare.’

We take reports of anti-social behaviour very seriously. Each case is investigated thoroughly. Evidence is gathered from both the complainant and the alleged perpetrator. We work hard to prevent anti-social behaviour continuing, we intervene when necessary and, as a last resort, we take legal action.

Currently, we are reviewing how we deal with anti-social behaviour and hate crime. Residents’ views are at the heart of how we develop our service. We’re listening to what residents are telling us. We’re acting on residents’ views and experiences. 

Residents’ experiences

We’ve done 3 surveys to gather information we can use to develop our service. Our Perceptions Survey aimed to:

• Find out whether incidents are due to hate, prejudice, and targeted hostility.
• Understand the physical and emotional harms suffered by victims and their
• Find out whether anti-social behaviour or hate crime/incidents experienced by our residents are going under-reported.
• Find ways of improving our services to victims.

We sent the survey with our e-newsletter and received 883 responses. The top 3 issues listed as a ‘big problem’ were:

• Littering and fly tipping.
• People using or selling drugs.
• Noisy neighbours/loud parties.

Residents’ views on our service

We wanted to know what our residents who reported anti-social behaviour thought about the service they received. We spoke to 31 residents whose cases were closed in May 2021. To compare the results with the previous year, we also did an e-mail and phone survey of residents who reported anti-social behaviour between April 2020 and March 2021. We received 151 completed responses.  

It’s great to see an increase in residents’ rating of our staff’s performance.

We’re now considering all the findings of our research. We’re particularly interested in the issues residents have raised. There’ll be some issues we can do something about, and we expect there’ll be others that we can’t fix as they’re not in our control.

We will report back on all the results and our plans for developing our service soon.