The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (Elizabeth Truss)
This Government are determined to improve standards in youth justice so that we not only punish crime but also intervene earlier to prevent crime and reform offenders to stop further crimes being committed — protecting victims and building better lives.
Youth offending has fallen sharply over the past decade, as has the number of children and young people in custody. However, once those children and young people are in custody, the outcomes are not good enough. Levels of violence and self-harm are too great and reoffending rates are unacceptably high, with 69% of those sentenced to custody going on to commit further offences within a year of their release.
When children and young people commit crime, it is right that they face the consequences of their actions and that the justice system delivers reparation for victims. But we must also do more to reform them. The 900 young offenders now in custody represent some of the most complex and damaged children and young people within society. Broken homes, drug and alcohol misuse, generational joblessness, abusive relationships, childhoods spent in care, mental illness, gang membership and educational failure are common in the backgrounds of many offenders. Youth custody needs to be more than just containment where children are exposed to yet more violence and given little hope that things may ever change. We must make sure it is a safe and secure environment that can equip young offenders with the skills they need to lead law-abiding lives. The system should provide discipline, purpose, supervision and someone who cares—elements that have all too often been missing from these young lives.
The Prison Safety and Reform White Paper published last month outlined how we will improve adult prisons by giving greater powers to governors and boosting the safety, transparency and accountability of regimes. We will apply the same principles to the way the justice system deals with children and young people who commit crimes.
Last year, the experienced school head and child behaviour expert Charlie Taylor was commissioned by the Government to look at how this country deals overall with children and young people who break the law. Today, I am publishing the report of Charlie Taylor’s Review of the Youth Justice System and the Government’s response. The Taylor Review makes a compelling case for change and we will be implementing his key recommendations.
The Government’s response sets out how, informed by Mr Taylor’s findings, we will put in place the right framework for improvement, tackle offending by children and young people and put education at the heart of youth custody to better address the factors that increase the risk of young people committing crimes.
We will start by bringing greater clarity and accountability to the youth justice system so that at each stage we are driving to reduce reoffending and turn lives around. We want to see an effective system — both in the community and in custody with high standards of performance. To tackle violence in custody we will clarify commissioning functions and create a single head of youth custodial operations, who can keep a firm grip on the performance of the estate and ensure that we reduce violence so that the estate becomes a place of safety and reform. We will strengthen inspection arrangements and create a new mechanism for the inspectorate to trigger intervention. Where there are failing institutions the Secretary of State will be obliged to act.
Youth custody must be a safe, secure environment where children and young people can learn and turn their lives around and to ensure this we will boost the number of frontline staff by 20%. We will also introduce a new professional Youth Justice Officer role to ensure that more staff are specifically trained to reform with young people. To ensure the right level of support each young person will now have a dedicated officer responsible for challenging and supporting them to reach agreed goals. Each officer will be responsible for four children or young people, so that each person gets the level of attention they need to turn their life around.
To ensure that more children and young people make progress in maths and English we will give governors the responsibility for education and hold them to account for the progress made in these crucial subjects while young people are in custody. We will also better prepare children and young people for a life after their sentence with a youth custody apprenticeship scheme being developed, ensuring that all young people are earning or learning on release.
Alongside these improvements to the existing estate, we will go further to more comprehensively transform youth custody by developing two new secure schools in line with the approach recommended by Mr Taylor in his ground-breaking report.
Of course we need to do more and we will. Intervening early is crucial in reducing youth crime, and we will be looking at how to improve services locally and improve the court system for young people. Together with the urgent action required to transform youth custody into places of discipline and purpose, these changes will improve the outcomes for young people who end up in the criminal justice system, helping them take a better path and improving outcomes for society as a whole by reducing crime.
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