ASB Civil powers: A Frontline Guide to Warnings, Notices and Orders

A man I had arrested more times than I could remember was back on the same parade of shops by the weekend. A year or two ago he would have been remanded — too prolific, too quick to reoffend, too obviously going to do it again before his case was heard. This time he was bailed. The custody clock had not changed; the law around it had. And standing outside the Co-op on the Saturday, watching him watch the door, I had the uncomfortable thought that the thing now protecting that shop and its staff was not going to be a prison wall. It was going to be whatever order I was willing to do the paperwork for.

Civil orders are the most powerful tools most officers never reach for. We know they exist.

Civil orders are the most powerful tools most officers never reach for.

We have a vague sense that the council does them, or that they are a faff, or that they belong to someone else. So we leave them in the drawer and reach for an arrest that, increasingly, ends in release. This is a guide to taking them out of the drawer: what each order is, the test you have to meet, how they climb from a quiet word to a court order, the case law on drafting ones that survive contact with a defence solicitor, and templates you can adapt. They are, used well, the closest thing frontline policing has to a free safeguarding tool.

Why this matters more now

The reason to learn this now, rather than at some point in a career, is that the ground has shifted under remand. The Sentencing Act 2026, which received Royal Assent on 22 January 2026, grew out of the Independent Sentencing Review led by David Gauke. Its purpose was to relieve a prison estate that had been running at near-total capacity, and one of the levers it pulled was the threshold for holding people before trial. Courts must now weigh whether there is “no real prospect of immediate custody”, and a tightening of the Bail Act exemptions points the same way. The intended, and likely, effect is fewer people remanded into custody and more released on bail.

I want to be careful here, because this is not an argument that more people should be locked up. Remand is not a punishment and was never meant to be a safeguarding scheme. But it did, as a by-product, take some dangerous and prolific people out of circulation while a case ran its course, and that by-product is now smaller. When the prolific shoplifter, the persistent harasser or the man making a neighbour’s life unliveable is bailed rather than held, the question “what protects people tonight?” does not answer itself. A civil order can be part of the answer. It does not need a remand decision to go your way, it can attach conditions custody never would, and — handled properly — it follows the person rather than simply pausing them.

The ladder: warning, notice, order

Almost all of this sits inside one Act, the Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act 2014, which swept away nineteen overlapping powers — the old ASBO among them — and replaced them with a tidier set. The Home Office’s statutory guidance for frontline professionals describes them as a graduated set of tools, and that word — graduated — is the key to using them well. They are a ladder. You are expected to start low and climb only as far as the behaviour forces you to, recording why at each rung.

Two distinctions run through the whole ladder, and getting them straight saves a lot of confusion. The first is civil versus criminal. Some of these are civil orders, decided on the balance of probabilities, where breach is dealt with as contempt of court; others bite only after a criminal conviction, or turn a breach into a fresh criminal offence. The second is the standard of proof. A civil injunction needs only the balance of probabilities — more likely than not. A Criminal Behaviour Order’s trigger must be proved to the criminal standard, beyond reasonable doubt. That difference decides which tool fits the evidence you actually have, not the evidence you wish you had.

Community protection: the warning and the notice

This is the rung most officers can reach without anyone’s permission, and the one most often skipped. The Community Protection Notice (CPN) under section 43 tackles the persistent, unreasonable behaviour that grinds down a street: the address that is forever a tip, the dog that is never under control, the music, the intimidation that never quite reaches a chargeable threshold. The test is that the conduct is having a detrimental effect, of a persistent or continuing nature, on the quality of life of those in the locality, and that it is unreasonable.

Before a CPN, though, comes the Community Protection Warning (CPW) — the written warning the Act requires you to give first. It is the second rung on the ladder, and it does more work than it looks. Many problems stop at the warning, because for the first time the person has it in writing that the next step is a notice they can be prosecuted for ignoring.

A CPN can do two things, not one. It can require a person to stop doing something, and it can require them to do something — clear the yard, repair the fence, keep the dog muzzled, take reasonable steps to achieve a result. That positive limb is what makes it useful for the slow, grinding problems an arrest cannot fix.

A real example shows the range. Forces and councils use CPNs for the genuinely corrosive — the address terrorising a cul-de-sac — but the same power has produced a pensioner issued a warning over leaves drifting from his trees, and councils have used notices over feeding birds and untidy gardens. That breadth is the power’s strength and its danger, and I come back to it in the caveats. For now, the discipline is simple: name the behaviour, name its effect on identifiable people, and ask whether your requirement is reasonable and necessary — not merely whether it is available.

The civil injunction

When behaviour needs a court order but you do not have, and may never have, a criminal conviction to hang it on, the civil injunction under Part 1 of the Act is the tool. It is decided on the balance of probabilities, which makes it reachable where a prosecution is not, and it is genuinely flexible: it can prohibit and it can compel, and the court can attach a power of arrest where the behaviour involves violence or a significant risk of harm — so a breach can be dealt with there and then, rather than by a fresh application weeks later.

In one recent case the approach is visible end to end: a council, supported by police, secured an injunction at Mansfield County Court against a Worksop man for drinking, shouting and swearing in the street, running for two years with a power of arrest attached. The “anti-social behaviour” the Act covers splits two ways — conduct causing harassment, alarm or distress in the general context, and nuisance or annoyance in a housing context — and that second, housing limb is why social landlords lean on it so heavily.

One change is coming that frontline officers should have on their radar. The Crime and Policing Bill 2025 introduces a new Respect Order, intended to replace the civil injunction for persistent anti-social behaviour by adults. The headline difference is the consequence of breach: where breaching an injunction is contempt of court, breaching a Respect Order is set to be a criminal offence. If and when it lands, it raises the stakes of the order — and the importance of drafting it well.

The Criminal Behaviour Order

The Criminal Behaviour Order (CBO) under section 22 is the one that should be on every officer’s mind at the point of conviction — and the one the remand changes make most urgent. It is made by the convicting court, on the prosecution’s application, on top of the sentence. It needs two things: that the offender has behaved in a way that caused or was likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress, proved to the criminal standard; and that the order will help prevent a repeat.

Here is where the remand thread and retail crime meet. Retail crime is surging, and a small number of prolific offenders drive most of it. When that offender is convicted but not jailed — or is jailed briefly and released — the CBO is the protection that outlasts the sentence. Forces are using it exactly this way: a prolific Clacton shoplifter was given a five-year CBO barring her from named supermarket chains across England and Wales; Kent Police secured a CBO banning a prolific offender from every TK Maxx in the county. A well-built CBO can do what a short sentence cannot: keep a named, evidenced offender out of the shops, off the estate, or away from the victim for years, and make the next breach a straightforward arrest.

The CBO can also carry positive requirements — attendance at a drug or alcohol programme, engagement with a support service — which is where it stops being purely punitive and starts addressing why the person keeps offending. That is the difference between an order that manages a problem and one that has a chance of ending it.

Closure notices and closure orders

The other powers follow a person. Closure powers under Part 4, Chapter 3 follow a place. They let the police or council shut premises that have become a focus of nuisance, disorder or crime — and in practice they have become one of the sharpest tools against cuckooing, where county-lines dealers take over a vulnerable person’s home.

The pattern recurs across the country: in Northampton, police and the council secured closure orders on cuckooed addresses, keeping everyone but the resident and emergency services out for three months; in Wokingham, three properties were boarded up after investigations found them taken over for drug dealing. Used carelessly, a closure can make a vulnerable occupant homeless and hand the dealers a win. Used well — with a housing and safeguarding plan wrapped around it, treating the occupant as the victim they usually are — it breaks the dealing and protects the person at the same time. The order is the easy part; the safeguarding around it is the work.

Getting the terms right

An order is only as good as its wording, and this is where applications most often come apart. The courts have said, repeatedly, that the terms of a behaviour order must be reasonable, proportionate, realistic, practical, clear and enforceable — the principles set out in Boness [2005] EWCA Crim 2395 and applied to CBOs since. In R v Maguire [2019] EWCA Crim 1193 the Court of Appeal stressed that the terms must be “policeable” — capable of being understood and monitored by the offender, by the officer on the street, and by the public. The Court has also been clear that these orders are “not to be lightly imposed”.

In practice that means a few habits. Define any geography with a map, not a vague description, and attach it. Avoid terms that simply forbid “behaving in an anti-social manner” — unenforceable, because nobody can say on the night whether it has been breached. Watch exclusion zones that would cost a person their job or their home, because a term that makes a stable life impossible tends to be challenged, and tends to fail. And ask of every clause: if I stopped this person at 2am, could I tell — from the wording alone — whether they were breaching it? If the answer is no, the term is not ready.

Choosing the right power

The orders overlap, and the skill is matching the tool to the problem and to the evidence you can actually prove. The table below is the quick version.

The disciplined way to choose is the way the National Decision Model asks you to make any decision: gather the information, assess the threat and the evidence you can prove, consider the powers, and write down why this power and not another. A CPN where the conduct is low-level and persistent. An injunction where you need a court order now and have civil-standard evidence. A CBO where there is a conviction to build on. A closure where the problem is a place. The grade of tool, like the grade of risk, should be a documented judgement, not a reflex.

Where these powers go wrong

These powers are easy to admire and easy to misuse, and a guide that only sang their praises would be worthless. The Community Protection Notice in particular has drawn sustained criticism, and some of it is fair. The civil-liberties group the Manifesto Club has catalogued notices issued over leaves, birdsong, charity collections and front gardens, and argues that a power one officer can issue on the spot, on a test as elastic as “detrimental effect”, invites overreach. Liberty has published a guide precisely because so many people do not know they can appeal. Academics studying CPNs have called them a tool of a “preventive state” that operates with little scrutiny, and the low rate of appeals is not proof that the notices are sound — it may simply mean people do not know how, or cannot face it.

I take that seriously, and it cuts the same way as the rest of this guide. The answer to a power that can be misused is not to abandon it but to use it well: to climb the ladder rung by rung, to record the evidence and the reasoning, to draft terms that are necessary and clear, and to remember that the person on the other end of the order has a life the order will reshape. An order made carelessly is not just unfair — it tends not to survive, which helps no one.

Templates, and how to use them

The examples below are starting points, not finished documents. They are written to show the shape of a good warning, notice or application; they are not legal advice, and anything you actually serve should go through your force’s legal services and reflect the current statutory guidance and your local policy.

Download the editable example templates:

• Community Protection Warning — example letter
• Community Protection Notice — example notice
• Criminal Behaviour Order — example prohibitions wording
• Civil injunction — application checklist
• Closure notice & order — checklist

And the official sources to work from:

• Home Office, statutory guidance for frontline professionals
• College of Policing, anti-social behaviour powers
• Crown Prosecution Service, Criminal Behaviour Orders legal guidance
• Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act 2014 on legislation.gov.uk

The orders in this guide will not fix everything, and they were never meant to. But the next time someone walks out of court on bail and back onto the street you police, the question of what protects people that night should not be met with a shrug. Often enough, the answer is an order — and whether it gets made comes down to an officer who understood the power and was willing to do the work. Take them out of the drawer.

See more in safeguarding, county lines and violence against women and girls.

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Sources and further reading

• Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act 2014 — Part 1 (civil injunctions), Part 2 (CBOs, s.22), Part 4 (community protection, s.43; closure powers, ss.76–93).
• Home Office, Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act 2014: statutory guidance for frontline professionals (updated 2023 and 2025) — the graduated approach to the powers.
• College of Policing, anti-social behaviour powers; Crown Prosecution Service, Criminal Behaviour Orders.
• Boness [2005] EWCA Crim 2395 and R v Maguire [2019] EWCA Crim 1193 — terms must be clear, proportionate and “policeable”.
• House of Commons Library, Crime and Policing Bill 2024–26 (Respect Orders) and the Sentencing Act / Bill 2025 briefing; Independent Sentencing Review (Gauke).
• Examples: Essex Police on retail-crime CBOs; Kent CBO (TK Maxx); West Northamptonshire closure orders on cuckooed addresses.
• Critical perspective: the Manifesto Club on CPNs and PSPOs; Liberty on appealing a CPN.