Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what steps he is taking to help reduce the rate of reoffences per reoffender among children.

In the last year, both the overall reoffending rate and the rate at which reoffending children offended (frequency rate) fell. The overall proven reoffending rate for children has fallen by 9.7 percentage points from 40.9% in 2010/11 to 31.2% in 2020/21.

The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 included measures to strengthen sentencing options. These include piloting of changes to the YRO with ISS which we will commence later this year. These pilots seek to give courts the confidence that children can be effectively supervised through a community sentence, which can be more effective in reducing reoffending than custody. The Act also removed the previously fixed lengths of the DTO, giving courts more flexibility to address persistent offending.