Justice Committee Report: Youth Justice

Elfyn Llwyd Excerpts

Thursday 14th March 2013 Commons Chamber

[Sir Alan Beith]

What a telling statistic the hon. Gentleman has brought out—indeed, he brought it to the attention of the Committee, too. Although we are glad that a new system of assessment, ASSET-plus—assessing semantic skills through everyday themes—has been approved for use by the Government, we think it will take more than that to identify children who are vulnerable to that and a number of other health-related reasons. As for his point about treating looked-after children more as they would be treated in a family, if restorative justice skills are available and can be deployed and if training is provided, that can help to deal with difficult situations without putting looked-after children into the criminal justice system.

[Mr Elfyn Llwyd (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)]

I, too, commend the right hon. Gentleman for his chairmanship of the Committee. I am pleased with our recommendation that we should have legislation to ensure that the judiciary in criminal courts can refer under-18s to a single family court. That is important, bearing in mind his point about people entering the criminal justice system. Does he agree that we can learn a great deal in this context from the Scottish experience?

[Sir Alan Beith]

The right hon. Gentleman makes an important point. The Scottish system of children’s reporters and children’s panels has been proven over many years. We still have some lessons to learn from it in England and Wales.

Looking more widely at sentencing, we recommend a threshold to enshrine in legislation the principle that only the most serious and prolific young offenders should be placed in custody. We recommend that the custody budget should be devolved to a more local level, so that a local decision can be made about investing in effective alternatives to custody. We want to build confidence in community sentences by giving magistrates and judges more feedback on the outcomes of their sentencing decisions. We also want to take more action to reduce the number of people who breach the terms of their community sentences and address the problem that there is a large number of young black men in custody, far beyond their proportion in the population.