It is not in the interests of the children to be brought up by such violent, dangerous and neglectful parents

Frank Field

Prime Minister Tony Blair endorsed the Bill last week and it is being pushed through Parliament with government help.

The new law would target extreme behaviour involving violent or criminal acts by parents or their offspring.

Labour MP Mike O'Brien, former home office minister, applauded the move and called for eviction measures to be extended to embrace "neighbours from hell" who own their own homes.

Lost benefits

The proposed legislation would see guilty families evicted from their council homes and stripped of their housing benefits.

Children would be taken into care until their parents made a commitment to behave.

The proposal follows Mr Blair's controversial plan to take child benefits away from the parents of teenage troublemakers.

Frank Field MP, the new Bill's author, said eviction alone was ineffective because anti-social families can simply demand to be rehoused, transporting the problem to a different estate.

Mr Field, the former minister for welfare reform, said it was necessary to take children into care because existing measures do not work.

Frank Field says existing measures do not work

"Many of the violent, disruptive and aggressive neighbours have small children and up until now children have been used as a means to get another home," he wrote in a Sunday Telegraph article.

"Families have to be rehoused because they have children. So they get a new house or flat, and then proceed to terrify a new set of neighbours. That's the cycle we have to break.

"It is not in the interests of the children to be brought up by such violent, dangerous and neglectful parents.

"The government must therefore be willing in these extreme and exceptional circumstances to use the power the Bill will give it to take the children into care until the parents show some semblance of proper behaviour."

He said Mr Blair was willing to place children with social services.

"I believe the prime minister is prepared to accept that consequence of my Bill," Mr Field said.

"He knows the legislation won't work if this final sanction is never used."

Endorsed

The prime minister endorsed the Bill in the Commons last Wednesday.

Mr Blair told MPs: "We are also looking at the housing benefit and the persistent anti-social behaviour and offending by families in receipt of that benefit."

We have to restore social control of families from hell

Labour MP Mike O'Brien

Mr O'Brien, MP for North Warwickshire, said the proposals to evict nuisance neighbours should be extended to those in private accommodation.

"It would be wrong just to have powers for council tenants and to ignore completely the fact that some problem families are living in private rented accommodation or own their own homes," he told GMTV's Sunday Programme.

"We have to restore social control of families from hell."