Justice Committee Report: Youth Justice

Lord Beith Excerpts

Thursday 14th March 2013 Commons Chamber

[Sir Alan Beith (Berwick-upon-Tweed) (LD)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the matter of the publication of the Seventh Report of the Justice Committee, on Youth Justice, HC 339.

The Committee is having a busy week. We are publishing another report this week about the Government’s plan to abolish the Administrative Justice and Tribunals Council, but it is on the youth justice report that I shall concentrate today. As hon. Members know, I try to make a few points, then I take interventions. That is the only way in which hon. Members can take part in an exchange about the report, and we have 20 minutes in which to do it.

We conducted a wide-ranging inquiry to explore the targeting of resources, the use and effectiveness of available disposals, and the role of the youth justice system in diverting at-risk young people from offending. We took evidence from many witnesses. We made visits to Belfast and to young offenders institutions in Feltham and Wigan and in Denmark and Norway. I am very grateful to Committee colleagues and to the Committee staff for all their work on the report.

We found quite a lot to commend. The Youth Justice Board, youth offending teams and their partners have made great strides towards a more proportionate and effective response to youth offending that prioritises prevention. We welcome the fact that fewer young people are entering the criminal justice system. The numbers have been halved. We welcome the fact that, similarly, the numbers going into custody have been halved, although we are still high among the countries of Europe in the number of young people we have in custody.

That is not to say that we believe that minor offending is being or should be ignored; rather, we believe it should be dealt with differently. When diversion is done well, young people are less likely to go on to more serious and prolonged offending. We are particularly encouraged that agencies in many areas are using a restorative justice approach to resolve very minor offending. Bradford youth offending team, for example, established restorative justice clinics as an arrest diversion, and only 10% of young people attending the clinics were re-arrested.

[Nick de Bois (Enfield North) (Con)]

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for his work in leading our Select Committee on this subject. Is he concerned, as I am, that we found the practice of restorative justice to be a postcode lottery around the country? Although we recommended that Ofsted may have a role to play when looking at care homes, we need a sense of urgency from the Government to advise on strategy in areas that are not delivering restorative justice. Does my right hon. Friend think we will have the impetus to achieve that?

[Sir Alan Beith]

I agree with that comment. The phrase “postcode lottery” is one I do not like in areas where there is innovation because what happens is that some places show what good work can be done, and we want to spread best practice as quickly as possible, but I agree with my hon. Friend’s conclusion that the Government and we as a Committee should put as much weight as we can behind spreading the knowledge, experience and skills involved in restorative justice.

On our visit to Denmark and Norway we saw the benefit of intensive multi-systemic therapy, with a concentrated range of skills dealing with young people who are on the fringes of the criminal justice system and likely to become involved in it.

[Rehman Chishti (Gillingham and Rainham) (Con)]

I congratulate my right hon. Friend on his leadership of the Committee. He talks about different strategies for dealing with youth. Does he agree that we should welcome the strategy proposed by the Government to deal with troubled families? There are about 200 such families in the country and, by giving them access to education, skills and accommodation, we will get them out of the criminal justice system and give them a long-term future away from that as good citizens.

[Sir Alan Beith]

That is an extremely valuable initiative, and it relates to the point I will make later about early intervention, but as a Committee we think a lot more will need to be done in this area.

[Steve Brine (Winchester) (Con)]

I thank the Chairman, the Committee and the staff for the work they have done in producing what is a weighty tome. Further to that point, we say in the report, based on the evidence that the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists gave us, that 10% of children in the general population have speech, communication and language difficulties, but the proportion of young offenders with such difficulties is 65% or just over. I am sure he remembers that we heard in evidence how this over-representation is part of a compounding risk model that begins at an early age. Does he therefore agree that, as well as ensuring that our youth justice system has access to speech and language therapists to help young people when they get into trouble and are in the system, we would be smart as a country to widen access—

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)]

Order. Sir Alan was very generous and I allowed you to intervene, Mr Brine, but you cannot make a speech. You are meant to be making an intervention on Sir Alan, because he wants to reply and we need to get on to other business.

[Sir Alan Beith]

I think I get my hon. Friend’s point. He is absolutely right, and he and the Committee have regularly reminded us of that problem. There are so many young people in the criminal justice system who might not be there if they had not been so lacking in communication and language skills. We have to put significant effort into dealing with that part of the problem.

There will always be a need to detain a small number of young people who pose a risk of serious harm to the public, but youth custody is expensive. The Youth Justice Board spends £246 million on the secure estate, which is 65% of its total spending. Three quarters of those who leave youth custody reoffend, as opposed to a much smaller, but still too large, proportion of young offenders generally. That indicates that a lot of resource is going into a problem that we could better have prevented at an earlier stage.

[Simon Hughes (Bermondsey and Old Southwark) (LD)]

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for a very good report. Does he agree that two strong messages arising from his Committee’s conclusions are, first, that we still send too many young people into custody as opposed to dealing with them outside and, secondly, that we are still hopeless at providing for those who come out, particularly in accommodation, which would give them the security to prevent reoffending?

[Sir Alan Beith]

Indeed, that is a point we make quite firmly: that the accommodation needs of people leaving custody are often not met adequately. If they are dumped in bed and breakfast without adequate support, that is no help to them.

That applies particularly to looked-after children—that is, children who have been in care. Frankly, we were shocked by the evidence we received showing that vulnerable children are effectively being abandoned by children’s and social services. Public authorities have a duty to ensure that looked-after children are not at greater risk of being drawn into the criminal justice system than other children simply because they lack normal family homes. Poor behaviour that would be dealt with in the family should not be an express route into the criminal justice system. We heard one example of police being called to a children’s home to investigate broken crockery. The relevant authorities must also continue to provide support to looked-after children when they get into the criminal justice system and, even more, when they leave it. We were concerned that the relevant authorities often seem to end their relationship of providing support once looked-after children enter the criminal justice system, particularly if they go into custody, and we are talking about a group of very vulnerable children.

[Andy McDonald (Middlesbrough) (Lab)]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his excellent chairmanship of the Committee. Does he agree that one of the key messages to come out of our work is about encouraging local authorities and prosecutors to deal with trivial offences involving looked-after children not in a way that causes them to enter the criminal justice system, but in the same way as ordinary families would? While I have his attention, may I also commend the report for its identification of the issue of brain injury among those in custody? The report sets out that although 10% of the population may sustain a brain injury, the incidence among those in custody is much higher, at 50% to 60%. Neuropsychological assessments of those in custody would be an excellent measure, and I congratulate him on flagging it up.

[Sir Alan Beith]

What a telling statistic the hon. Gentleman has brought out—indeed, he brought it to the attention of the Committee, too. Although we are glad that a new system of assessment, ASSET-plus—assessing semantic skills through everyday themes—has been approved for use by the Government, we think it will take more than that to identify children who are vulnerable to that and a number of other health-related reasons. As for his point about treating looked-after children more as they would be treated in a family, if restorative justice skills are available and can be deployed and if training is provided, that can help to deal with difficult situations without putting looked-after children into the criminal justice system.

[Mr Elfyn Llwyd (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)]

I, too, commend the right hon. Gentleman for his chairmanship of the Committee. I am pleased with our recommendation that we should have legislation to ensure that the judiciary in criminal courts can refer under-18s to a single family court. That is important, bearing in mind his point about people entering the criminal justice system. Does he agree that we can learn a great deal in this context from the Scottish experience?

[Sir Alan Beith]

The right hon. Gentleman makes an important point. The Scottish system of children’s reporters and children’s panels has been proven over many years. We still have some lessons to learn from it in England and Wales.

Looking more widely at sentencing, we recommend a threshold to enshrine in legislation the principle that only the most serious and prolific young offenders should be placed in custody. We recommend that the custody budget should be devolved to a more local level, so that a local decision can be made about investing in effective alternatives to custody. We want to build confidence in community sentences by giving magistrates and judges more feedback on the outcomes of their sentencing decisions. We also want to take more action to reduce the number of people who breach the terms of their community sentences and address the problem that there is a large number of young black men in custody, far beyond their proportion in the population.

[Mr Peter Bone (Wellingborough) (Con)]

What was the Committee’s view on the fact that if we send only prolific offenders to prison, they will clearly have done a lot of crime before they get there? What consideration was given to the short, sharp shock treatment as a way of dealing with people right at the beginning?

[Sir Alan Beith]

The idea that we can sort out the problems of a young person who is committing serial, prolific crimes through a process that does not take much time is just a mistake. It takes time to address these problems. We have looked, for example, at the Willow unit at Hindley and a whole series of ways of trying to turn round the lives of young people. I am afraid that the short, sharp shock is an illusion. There is no proven way to deal with prolific young offenders other than by giving them a lot of attention over a significant period.

[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Lab)]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for chairing the Committee through the fascinating experience of undertaking this youth justice inquiry. Will he comment on the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974 and say at what point a young person who has committed a fairly minor offence or a more major one would have it written off? We do not want a society in which misdemeanours undertaken by young people, for all kinds of reasons of poverty, naivety or whatever else, follow them for the rest of their lives, damaging their career prospects and us as a society.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir Alan Beith]

The hon. Gentleman makes an important point, which he has made in the Committee. The Committee recommended that, for example, minor offences that were the subject of cautions should disappear from the register at the age of 18, to give youngsters a chance to get a job and get started in life. I also commend employers who, in the knowledge that people have past criminal convictions, take them on and give them a fresh start, often with success.

[Robert Flello (Stoke-on-Trent South) (Lab)]

The Opposition very much welcome the right hon. Gentleman’s report. I hope we can have an early debate on it, because, certainly judging from the interventions we have heard, there is a need for one. How does he square his Committee’s view that we need to move away from young offender institutions to smaller, more specialised units with what seems to be the Secretary of State’s view—that we should go the other way and roll the smaller units into bigger YOIs?

[Sir Alan Beith]

In fact, we have been closing young offender institutions over the years because the number in custody is now much smaller. The Committee will continue to press its view that most of the work that can be done successfully with young offenders has to be done in small environments, where it is possible to devote sufficient attention to their problems.

There are a number of key things that I do not want to miss out. One is that the Government produced their own, “Transforming Youth Custody” document just as we were concluding our inquiry, so we did not have the chance to work on it in detail, although I have to say that there is not a lot of detail in it. One thing that puzzles us is the Secretary of State’s idea of creating youth colleges to deal with young offenders, because they are actually there, on average, for only 79 days. We fully support and applaud his interest in, and commitment to, sorting out the education of young offenders in custody, but the concept of the colleges does not fit well with the rapid churn of young offenders. In many cases it is important that we get them back into the education system. We have therefore recommended that schools and colleges could be incentivised to take young people back into education after they have completed their sentence, whether it is a custodial or community one.

The Committee had something to say about deaths in custody. It is unacceptable that so many vulnerable young people continue to die in the custody of the state. We await the Minister’s view on whether to set up an independent inquiry and will return to the issue when we have heard what conclusion the Government have reached.

We have many other detailed recommendations that I do not have time to cover today, but the message I want to leave with the House is that we must be prepared to make radical changes in the way we deal with young offenders if we are to stop them becoming the prolific criminal offenders of the future, which is often what they have the potential to become.

[Mr Philip Hollobone (Kettering) (Con)]

I congratulate the Chair of the Committee on the report. Does he agree that one of the most powerful pieces of evidence in support of his emphasis on getting the transition from custody to the community right is that which was given by the chief inspector of prisons, who said that

“the thing that unlocks everything else is accommodation. It does not mean that if you have settled accommodation everything else will turn out fine. It means that if you do not have that, nothing else will work”?

[Sir Alan Beith]

Absolutely. Accommodation in that context often requires support as well; it is not merely bed and breakfast and goodbye. There has to be some way of ensuring that an offender reintegrates into society, or indeed integrates into society for the first time, because they might have had an institutionalised existence prior to that, which is true of many looked-after children.

The second part of the message I want to leave with the House is that we need to ensure that new generations of children do not embark on crime. In order to achieve that, as was mentioned earlier, we must develop early intervention. As with adult prisoners, so much of the Ministry of Justice budget is necessarily committed to custody and to prison by policies that have been pursued over many years, yet the most important work of preventing people from getting into crime in the first place is deprived of money.

The Committee’s broad longer-term view is that we want to see resources not being needed to put people into custody or expensive sentencing processes because money has been spent dealing with troubled families and very young children beginning to show signs of later criminal behaviour—addressing that could prevent them from getting involved in crime in future. I am grateful to my Committee colleagues for the work they have done. We will continue to keep a close eye on Government policy in this area. We are glad to have had a good response to a number of our proposals, but a lot more needs to be done.

Question put and agreed to.