When Rishi Sunak presented the latest attempt by a prime minister to get tough on anti-social behaviour, it wasn’t the graffiti-cleaning or the ‘gotcha’ fly-tip cameras or the labelled jumpsuits that caught my eye. It was the inclusion of begging.

Admittedly, you had to go pretty far down his pledge list before you found it. Perhaps someone with a longer institutional memory than the current Cabinet Secretary, Simon Case, had warned him of the drubbing John Major received from the great and the good – and many well-meaning liberals – when he launched his drive against ‘aggressive’ begging in 1994.

It will be made an offence for criminal gangs to organise begging networks for extra cash, which is often used to facilitate illegal activities. To ensure police and local councils can address activity which is intimidating or causes the public distress, they will have the tools to direct people causing nuisance on the street – including by obstructing shop doorways and begging by cash points – towards the support they need, such as accommodation or mental health and substance misuse services. Any debris and paraphernalia will then be cleared away.

But there it was. A new offence could be introduced to deal with gangs who run networks of beggars, and the police would be given new powers to move people if they are causing a ‘public nuisance’ by blocking shop doorways or – wait for it – ‘begging by cashpoints’. This last, I admit, is a particular bugbear of mine. When I returned from a decade working abroad, I could not believe that what seemed like every cash machine, at least in big cities, had acquired its own guardian-beggar, how the police turned a blind eye, and how people almost took it for granted.

I am sorry, but I never have. To find someone sitting by a cashpoint with a cap in front of them, less often with an outstretched hand, has always seemed to me to be highly intimidating. Now it is not just beside cash machines, but outside the small neighbourhood supermarkets that have proliferated in cities in recent years. A boon in most respects, they soon acquired relays of people begging for all the hours they were open.

One difficulty in taking action against begging is that it is almost always associated with rough-sleeping and homelessness

The team ‘staffing’ the pavement space outside my local mini-market includes someone in an (expensive) wheelchair who clearly needs it; someone who gets up out of his wheelchair and pushes it away when his shift is done, someone who – local rumour has it – goes home to a council flat just around the corner and several individuals who seem to be taxi-ed in and out. At times there have been whole encampments. On occasion there has been a couple who set up an ‘art’ exhibition on the pavement opposite. Most come with a range of unhygienic accoutrements from blankets and quilts to bowls and beakers, which they sometimes take with them when they go, unlike the piles of litter that remain.

I have to admire their persistence ­– and their time-keeping. Rain or shine, heat or cold, someone will be there. But I still don’t like it. Nor, it seems, do many local residents. But they feel embarrassed to object – partly because they know that if they did, it would not make a ha’porth of difference. Like me, they may have tried to prod the local constabulary into some sort of action (on the rare occasion an officer passes by, only to be told that it is nothing to do with them). Contact the local authority and it is nothing to do with them, either. Contact the charities, they say, sometimes offering a phone number.

This black hole in responsibility is also, praise be, reflected in Sunak’s announcement, in which he said a new ‘one-stop’ digital shop will be developed to ‘help address problems people have faced when trying to report these sorts of crimes because of a lack of clarity around how to raise an issue or who to speak to, or a lack of confidence that these crimes will be dealt with seriously’ . Well, yes. Let’s see.

One difficulty in taking action against begging is that it is almost always associated with rough-sleeping and homelessness. And the logic from this – as many of those objecting to the proposed measures pointed out – is that being homeless should not be considered a crime, except perhaps on the part of local governments and the social order that leaves some without a roof over their head. Therefore, so the argument goes, begging – except when attended by assault or menaces – should not be regarded as an offence either.

But the two things are not the same. While there may indeed be some overlap between begging and homelessness, not everyone who begs is homeless, and vice versa. One of those who distinguishes clearly between the two is Baroness Casey – she of the recent excoriating report on the Metropolitan Police.  She masterminded the ‘Everyone In’ operation during the pandemic and spent much of her earlier career involved one way or another in homelessness, including in the civil service and via charities such as St Mungo’s and Shelter. Few know the field, and the dilemmas, better than she does.

Having always regarded her as socially liberal – she was recruited to government first by Tony Blair, then taken on again by David ‘Big Society’ Cameron – I was surprised by some of what she said in a discussion on rough sleeping in the wake of the pandemic. On the complexities of reducing rough sleeping, she spoke with great engagement and empathy. But her tone changed completely when she turned to begging. She said, as I recall, that she detested it and that far more should be done to stop it.

Hooray, I thought. Maybe something will finally be done. But with the whole anti-social behaviour discussion it has, once again, taken a very long time for the powers-that-be to recognise the importance of this in the eyes of ‘ordinary’ voters. My local (Conservative) MP, for instance, seemed amazed to find that anti-social behaviour loomed so large in her constituents’ concerns when she took the trouble to ask. The point is, I suspect, that many people simply gave up complaining because their worries were dismissed as intolerance or over-reaction – or were simply ignored.

Many people may not like rough-sleeping and believe more could be done, but many more, I would venture, detest begging. We find it – to return to John Major – ‘offensive’. Like him, we ask why a country with a social safety net tolerates begging to the extent that it does (or at least why its law enforcement does).  And I doubt I am alone in finding the cashpoint-watchers especially intimidating.

The 1824 Vagrancy Act – which criminalised both rough-sleeping and begging – was repealed in April last year on the reasonable grounds that homelessness should not be a crime. But it had long gone unenforced. The new measures against anti-social behaviour are intended, in part, to replace that law. But enforcement will be key. Major said the law should be ‘rigorous’ as regards begging, although it never happened. We will see whether Sunak has correctly judged public frustration – and if has the determination to see his crackdown through.