NEIGHBOURS have been urged to band together to fight back against yobs making life a misery for many communities in Britain.

Louise Casey, head of the Government’s antisocial behaviour unit, said yesterday that she feared people were becoming too tolerant and afraid to intervene because of traditional British reserve.

Critics will seize on her call as an admission of government failure to stem a rising tide of social disorder. But Ms Casey said that the answer to the yobs was not more legislation, but greater community spirit and co-operation.

Her rallying cry comes after a series of government measures to crack down on loutishness including antisocial behaviour orders, fixed penalty fines for parents of truants and greater powers for councils to evict nuisance neighbours.

More measures are planned, including restrictions on buying fireworks, and both main parties are determined to make crime the centrepiece of their election manifestos.

Research by the London School of Economics last September showed that 66,000 incidents of antisocial behaviour from graffiti to noisy neighbours were reported in a single day. This amounted to one every two seconds at a cost to the taxpayer of £3.4billion a year. Ms Casey said that she wanted the public to wake up to the powers that were already available and criticised the widespread attitude that abandoned cars, litter and noise were someone else’s problem.

Speaking in an interview with ePolitix.com, the politics website, she said: “To think that most people do not bother reporting abandoned cars, most people do not think there is any point in actually picking up the phone and speaking to the local authority about a neighbour from hell, it is astonishing that it is costing £3.4billion a year — and it could be frighteningly higher.”

Ms Casey’s call for action comes after her tough attitude on beggars while head of the Government’s rough sleepers unit. She urged people not to give them loose change but to donate to charity instead.

She said yesterday: “A lot of people are living in situations where they are very intimidated by some of their neighbours or they genuinely feel they cannot get to their shopping parade because someone is setting off a fire under a park bench, or their children are being bullied, or they cannot let their children out in the streets.”

She chastised a desire to turn a blind eye to behaviour which could escalate into serious community problems.

“It is not a case of poor kids, they have nowhere to knock the football about. If only it was that, my life would be a lot easier than it is. The truth is that a lot of this stuff is going unchecked, a lot of it is not dealt with. The way to deal with it from my point of view is to establish rules within every community and when those rules are broken there are consequences.

“The only way you deal with it is by families making sure that they get a greater sense of responsibility and that communities actually know when rules are broken.

“Not to challenge behaviour is a very British thing and we have at times felt sorry for the minority of perpetrators. We think the way to deal with them is feeling sorry for them and providing more and more services to them in the hope that maybe their bad behaviour becomes checked.

“What is missing is the community saying we have had enough, we have rights too and we have a right to a decent honest way of life.”

She urged communities to complain vociferously if reporting vandalism or nuisance did not bring results.

“There are hundreds of organisations out there like neighbourhood watch, street leaders schemes, city guardians schemes run by local authorities which people can get involved in,” she said.

“When people band together and say, no we are not happy about this, we want something done about it, on the whole a multiple voice is much louder than a single voice.”

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