Young Offenders: Employment and Training

Lord Bates Excerpts

Wednesday 17th October 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bates]

My Lords, it is a privilege to follow the noble Baroness. On behalf of all who will take part in this debate, I thank her for securing this time for this very important issue to be aired and discussed. I also thank her for the way in which she introduced the debate, which was very even-handed and fair, and reflected the fact that this is not a situation that developed in May 2010 but is something that all Governments have been wrestling with for many years, and needs to be approached as such.

There are a number of speakers who I am looking forward to hearing, particularly my noble friend Lady Stedman-Scott, who, through her wonderful organisation, Tomorrow’s People, has shown how even the most hard-to-reach young people can be picked up, have a future and a job, and work their way out of the problems they have found themselves in early in life. My own contribution comes through growing up on Tyneside, being involved in a church youth group and meeting lots of young people and seeing the problems that they encountered at that time; then through a long involvement in secondary education, and also having visited many young offender institutions, particularly in the north-east of England.

I want to put down one marker before moving on to some of the suggestions and analysis. There is nothing intrinsically different about the young people who enter the criminal justice system. They could be any child—and anyone’s child—but for the environment in which they spend their formative years and the choices that they make. I have no doubt that had a young offender had the good fortune to be born into a home where they were loved and affirmed by their mother and father, had attended one of our outstanding public schools, where expectations of life success were set at a very high level and where they mixed with similarly motivated and secure students, their life choices would have been different, their peer group very different and the outcomes profoundly different. In short, for better or worse, we are all the products of our environment but also of the personal choices that we make in responding to the circumstances in which we find ourselves.

We live in a very unforgiving world. That may seem like a strange thing to say at a time when we are supposed to all be very liberal, but in many ways it is a very dismissive world and culture, in which people are written off, whether they are young people or people in senior positions in public life or sport. It is far too easy for people to be caricatured and written off as problems, particularly in the media. Therefore, it is very important to see these young people as having the same potential and gifts of any young people and to approach the situation in that respect.

This subject is a statistician’s dream. There are statistics everywhere, including those in the excellent briefing pack prepared for this debate by the House of Lords Library. The noble Baroness has highlighted some of those statistics. If she will forgive me, I will repeat one or two because they so clearly point out where the problem lies.

Reference has been made to the fact that 54% of males and 71% of females have no qualifications, which reflects the fact that these young people do not just arrive in the criminal justice system. They arrive there having been excluded from school, having been sent to pupil referral units and having probably been in local authority care at some stage. It is difficult enough to get a job these days when you have a degree. When you have no qualifications and a criminal record, it is challenging to make your way into the jobs market. Again, that is where the work of Tomorrow’s People is so utterly inspirational for me.

We know that often people have mental health disorders. We know—I think this is a key element—that many are involved in drug or alcohol misuse. It is a common denominator throughout. Sometimes there is a tendency to take a soft approach to this and say that people need simply to control their habits. I have visited, an initiative called the Betel Trust. These Betel places say to young offenders who have come out, “What we will do is have a contract. We will offer you a bed, we will give you a job but there is absolutely no alcohol or drugs. It is zero tolerance”. Sometimes that can be a bit harsh because it means that if there is one transgression, the person has to leave the home. However, for those who remain the success rate is quite astonishing, showing drug or alcohol misuse to be a particular cause of offending.

We know that people get drawn into the criminal justice system and therefore it behoves us to do everything we can to keep them out of it. Some 70% highlighted the fact that the major driver for crime was that their peer group consisted of criminals. If you can stop them going into that environment that would seem to be eminently sensible. The costs of this, financially and socially, are dreadful for society but I would argue that they are worse for the young people themselves. The most important thing we can do is to battle for a culture in which we allow people to make a fresh start and tell them that their future is not determined by where they started in life but that their worth is determined by where they finish.

Examples such as the competitors at the Paralympic Games show how people can overcome all manner of difficulties in their early life to achieve incredible success. They are the kind of inspirations and role models that we need. We do not need self-pity. We need to inspire these young people to realise their full potential and full worth.