Youth Crime and Anti-social Behaviour

Lord Ramsbotham Excerpts

Wednesday 30th March 2011 Grand Committee

[Lord Ramsbotham]

My Lords, I yield to no one in my admiration for all that the noble Lord, Lord Dholakia, has done in this field—even to the noble Lord, Lord Judd. I thank him very much for giving us the chance to talk about this important report, to which I had the great pleasure of giving evidence. Whenever we see such reports, we tend to look back, and two phrases in it immediately set my mind racing backwards. The first was:

“The young people directed our attention towards areas of need for reform that we might otherwise have underplayed or neglected”.

The second was:

“Despite seeing pockets of promising practice, the Commission shares the strongly voiced concerns of Ofsted and the Prisons Inspectorate over the way that education and training provision in custody varies between institutions; and that help given to children and young people to prepare for their release is inconsistent and often inadequate”.

How often have we heard that said? I look back to a report that I published in October 1997 as Chief Inspector of Prisons, Young Prisoners, and found, first:

“I believe that if young prisoners are to be engaged by regimes, they must be convinced that the challenges and demands that are made are relevant not only to their needs, rectifying deficiencies in their previous upbringing, but offer them genuine hope of better things resulting from their training”.

Secondly, I found:

“Much inconsistency seems to be due to the fact that no one is responsible or accountable for the consistent delivery of regimes in every establishment in which young people are held”.

That latter is a gramophone record that I have been playing over and over again since 1996: namely, that until and unless you have people who are responsible and accountable for making things happen, nothing happens.

This excellent report comes 13 years after Young Prisoners, which was sent to the Secretary of State containing many of the things that were said, including, in particular, on custody, but on other things, too. My concluding recommendations to the Secretary of State were numbered, the first one being:

“In order to reduce the harmful effects of custody on children, the energies and resources of Local Authorities, community and Criminal Justice agencies should be used collaboratively and managed through shared performance indicators to … identify potential problem situations for children and provide families and schools with support and guidance to prevent children growing up as offenders … reduce offending and divert children whenever possible from custody”.

Thirteen years after those questions were posed, they have been largely answered by the way that the commission has looked at its work. In posing them in 1997, I knew perfectly well that I was by no means the first to be doing so. I believe that the Ministry of Justice now has an opportunity, which it has given itself if it will seize it, to do something about it.

In making my recommendation, I want to mention two organisations with which I am associated. One was mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Dholakia, which is also included in the commission’s report. It is involved with the young offender academies, which are alternatives to the way that has failed for so long. They are based on real proof of things that work. Right at the heart of what needs to be done is to provide long-term contact with a responsible adult. That is what is missing. If you keep people in a site and they come to it by day, it does not matter where they live at night—they can live in a custody centre, in a foyer for the homeless or they can go home. However, they all come back by day to the same place where the same work is done. If you localise all that—and the pilot study shows that an hour on public transport is a good radius and gives you a viable place to work—you encourage all the forces in that area to assist in the rehabilitation of their own. Chambers of commerce will be interested in training people who can fill jobs—they can train them for the future—all the activities-related projects in the area will come in and education, job training and so on can happen. This transition was strongly commended in the report because the independent commission saw the things that it wished to be done encapsulated in that kind of idea. We have been banging on about this for ages and I hope this opportunity will be seized.

The second matter I wish to speak about has nothing to do with custody. Earlier today I was with a remarkable organisation called SkillForce. It consists of members of the Armed Forces, including people who have been injured and are being medically discharged, who go into schools and tackle the worst elements of failing schools—the troublemakers, the excludees, the potential excludees, the evictees and, of course, tragically, those in receipt of school meals. It is difficult to quantify what they do but, for example, 60 per cent of the people on school meals with whom they are working go on to further education, as opposed to 9 per cent who go through the normal system. They are working very hard and turning schools round. Mr Gove, the Education Secretary, has given them grants to increase the work they are doing, particularly on a zero-exclusion pilot in schools.

I mention this because they are doing positive work in challenging the worst. I do not see why these people, who are used to giving their service to the country, should not be employed in the community and provide a service for those in danger, in custody and under probation. I am sure that ex-members of the Armed Forces would be only too happy to do it.

I add that point as an addition to the debate, but my plea to the Minister is that the report is not taken in isolation and treated separately but is included in the work being carried out on breaking the cycle. This would ensure that it is not neglected but becomes a part of what is already in progress.