On-the-spot fines for yobs

Police are to issue on-the-spot fines for yobbish behaviour such as drinking in a public place, it was revealed today.

In a highly controversial scheme officers will hand out £40 and £80 tickets for offences ranging from anti-social behaviour to throwing stones at trains.

The plan is to be launched in five pilot areas throughout the country, including London.

The scheme is based on the Prime Minister's idea of issuing on-the-spot fines for public order offences and marching youths to cash dispensers.

The difference is that yobs will be issued with fixed penalty tickets and told to pay up within a certain time or face going to court.

The scheme is designed to tackle the lower end of public order offences and keep people out of the criminal justice system. For offences such as drinking in a place where alcohol has been banned the fine would be £40; for repeated yobbish behaviour the proposal is for an £80 fixed penalty fine.

The London scheme is expected to take place in Croydon and could start within weeks.

Other offences to be targeted include litter dropping, dog fouling, hoax phone calls to emergency services and minor cases of vandalism.

Also under consideration are fines for those caught in possession of cannabis in an extension of the Lambeth drugs policy which sees offenders warned instead of arrested for possession. Violent offences would be excluded from the plan.

Deputy Assistant Commissioner Steve House, who is in charge of the Met's pilot scheme, said it could apply to someone who was behaving in an unruly fashion and insulting people in the street after ignoring police warnings.

He said: "This is not going soft on thugs, it is designed to offer more options to police and keep people committing the lower end of public order offences out of court, so we can fill the criminal justice system with street robbers."

The scheme, which is being proposed by the Association of Chief Police Officers, will be launched in five pilot areas: West Midlands, North Wales, Essex, London and an area covered by the British Transport Police. It relies on existing legislation under the Criminal Justice and Police Act 2001.

The Met evaluated a similar scheme in Australia but discovered that 50 per cent of fines remained unpaid. It was revealed today, meanwhile, that street crime in London is still soaring and has reached nearly 170 muggings a day. New figures showed that robberies and snatches last month increased by 18.5 per cent compared with a year ago.

The figures come as an opinion poll suggests that fear of crime is sparking a Conservative revival. Law and order has become the public's top concern with 55 per cent saying it has deteriorated under Labour.

At the same time, the Tories' rating jumped from 30 per cent to 34 per cent in the ICM poll - the party's strongest showing since Iain Duncan Smith became leader - while Labour dipped from 47 per cent to 43 per cent.

The crime figures showed there were 5,246 muggings in London last month, compared with 4,426 in the same month last year. However, Scotland Yard points out that the 18.5 per cent rise increase in February was better than the 50 per cent increase in January and pledged that its Safer Streets initiative would reverse the trend.

Senior officers also admitted there was some evidence that the campaign against robbery in central London was displacing crime to outlying boroughs.