Exeter City Council has renewed its Public Spaces Protection Order (PSPO), extending the measure introduced to curb anti-social behaviour in 2017 to June 2028.
The order, which was made under the Anti-Social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act 2014, covers the city centre and extends to include Exeter St David’s, Cowick Street, Exeter Quay and Belmont Park.
While not imposing a ban on street drinking, the order grants powers to police officers and police community support officers to confiscate “intoxicating substances” and to disperse people who cause the public to “suffer harassment, alarm or distress” inside the area it covers.
It also prohibits public urination and “aggressive begging”, which includes using intimidating language or standing near a cash machine and requesting money, and grants powers to bar people from the area for up to 24 hours in certain circumstances.
First made in June 2017, the Exeter Public Spaces Protection Order was renewed for a further year in 2020 then again in 2021 before a three-year extension was agreed in 2022.
The order was renewed for a further three years to June 2028 at a meeting of Exeter City Council on Tuesday, nine days before the expiry of the current order.
Exeter Public Spaces Protection Order boundary map. Image: Exeter City Council.
The Public Spaces Protection Order is one of several initiatives aimed at addressing anti-social behaviour in Exeter city centre.
Local organisations delivering health, policing and justice services meet monthly as Safer Exeter, the city’s community safety partnership. Some of the matters it discusses are escalated to the police, which can issue warning letters and Criminal Behaviour Orders.
Exeter Business Improvement District, branded InExeter, launched a community safety team last summer to patrol areas identified as anti-social behaviour hotspots to deter what InExeter describes as “unwanted activity” and reassure residents and businesses.
Exeter Business Against Crime is a network of more than 120 organisations, many of which are retailers, which gathers and shares incident data between its members and the police, partly by using radio and CCTV cameras.
Its data and other data provided by Devon & Cornwall Police show that just over 3,500 anti-social behaviour incidents were logged in the Public Spaces Protection Order area last year, an increase of 800 from 2023 after the numbers had fallen over several years.
Altogether 1,280 individuals have been dispersed under the order to date.
Exeter PSPO anti-social behaviour incident logs. Data: Exeter City Council.
Exeter City Council originally proposed the introduction of a Public Spaces Protection Order in 2015.
It said the order was justified by intelligence provided by Devon & Cornwall Police, Exeter Community Safety Partnership, and the council itself, among other sources.
These included an InExeter survey of 35 city centre retailers, all of whom agreed that “being intoxicated openly in a public place is a problem in Exeter”.
However the results of a four-month public consultation which concluded in February 2016 showed that a majority of respondents did not support the proposals.
Consultations did not take place before either of the single-year renewals that took place in 2020 and 2021.
In 2022 its three-year renewal was accompanied only by a consultation about amending the order to increase the maximum time by which people may be barred from returning to the area covered by the order from six to 24 hours.
The consultation for this week’s three-year extension of the order was limited to selected “formal consultees” including Safer Exeter, InExeter, Exeter Chamber, Devon & Cornwall Police and the Office of the Devon & Cornwall Police and Crime Commissioner.
All strongly supported the order’s renewal.
Devon Public Health said only that it expected that intoxicated individuals should be offered a referral to Together Drug and Alcohol Services.
CoLab Exeter, a multi-agency hub which provides a single point of contact for support for people experiencing multiple disadvantages, said it appreciated that the police benefited from the powers the order confers and had seen many occasions on which they had been used positively.
However it said that it is not possible to police the current order area in “any consistent way” due to what it described as “resourcing” and the extent of the area.
It added: “We would also like to see consideration given to a tolerant space within the city, otherwise the problem is just being moved around, often just away from Cathedral Green, rather than addressed.
“A tolerant space would allow the consumption of alcohol within a particular area and would enable organisations to outreach to one location to engage with people who were street drinking and try and connect them in with services.”
