Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, with reference to Barnardo's report entitled Double discrimination: Black care-experienced young adults navigating the criminal justice system, published on 21 September 2023, whether he has made an assessment of discrimination affecting Black care-experienced young adults who have involvement with the criminal justice system.

We are grateful for the work Barnardo's have done to highlight the challenges faced by young black care-experienced people in our criminal justice system, and I was delighted to meet with them on 30 January to discuss the Double Discrimination report. We look forward to working with them further to ensure we are tackling these issues.

Across the criminal justice system, we are taking forward an extensive programme of work to tackle unexplained disparities where they are identified. The Inclusive Britain strategy is central to the development of this work and contains some of our flagship efforts.

We are also updating our strategy for people with care experience in the criminal justice system, to ensure we are using care-experienced people’s time in the criminal justice system to support them to lead crime-free lives. In this work, we will be building on the work done by Barnardo’s to focus on race and its role in shaping the experiences and outcomes of those with care experience in the criminal justice system, and developing proposals to address this.

We are aiming to publish this strategy later this year.