Anti-social behaviour in the spotlight at the Battle of Ideas
FixASB's founder will join a panel at this year’s Battle of Ideas festival to discuss crime, anti-social behaviour and why disorder can have such a powerful effect on how safe we feel in our communities.
The session, “Anti-social Britain: why do we feel unsafe?”, takes place at 3.45pm on Sunday 18 October in the Convocation Hall at Church House, Westminster, as part of the 2026 Battle of Ideas festival.
It asks an important question: what makes a place and people feel unsafe?
Public debate about crime often focuses on headline statistics. But our everyday experience of safety is also shaped by what we encounter in the places around us: aggressive or intimidating behaviour, persistent disorder, littering, vandalism, public intoxication, shoplifting, people being harassed, or behaviour on public transport that makes others feel uncomfortable or unwelcome.
Some of these things are crimes. Some fall within legal definitions of anti-social behaviour. Others might not be illegal at all. Yet their cumulative impact can still change how people use and experience a place.
That distinction is central to the upcoming Battle of Ideas discussion. The session will explore whether public fears about crime reflect genuine changes in visible disorder and unpredictable offending, whether exceptional incidents are distorting perceptions of risk, and whether conventional crime statistics alone can adequately tell us how safe society feels.
The panel includes Lord Bailey of Paddington (Shaun Bailey), London Assembly member, youth worker and co-founder of My Generation; Laila Cunningham, Westminster City councillor and former senior Crown prosecutor; and Dr Stuart Waiton, senior lecturer in sociology and criminology at Abertay University and author of Scared of the Kids. The discussion will be chaired by Simon McKeon, founder member of Our Fight UK.
These are questions that matter directly to the work we are doing at FixASB.
Anti-social behaviour can be difficult to understand through traditional statistics not just because of huge under-reporting, but because it is often persistent, highly localised and experienced cumulatively. A single incident may appear minor when viewed in isolation. The same behaviour happening repeatedly in the same street, park, shopping parade or transport hub can have a very different effect on the people who live, work or travel there.
That is one reason FixASB exists: to make it easier for people to record persistent problems, demonstrate their scale and impact, find others affected by the same issue and build a clearer evidence base that can help those responsible for a place understand what is happening and take action to tackle it.
The Battle of Ideas brings together hundreds of speakers for more than 100 debates across the weekend of 17–18 October at Church House in London, covering politics, culture, economics, science and society.
We’re looking forward to a lively discussion about what safety means, why apparently “low-level” disorder matters, and how we can respond without either dismissing legitimate public concern or exaggerating the risks people face.
Book tickets for the Battle of Ideas 2026 via Eventbrite (opens external site)
