Justice Committee Report: Youth Justice

Lindsay Hoyle Excerpts

Thursday 14th March 2013 Commons Chamber

[Steve Brine (Winchester) (Con)]

I thank the Chairman, the Committee and the staff for the work they have done in producing what is a weighty tome. Further to that point, we say in the report, based on the evidence that the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists gave us, that 10% of children in the general population have speech, communication and language difficulties, but the proportion of young offenders with such difficulties is 65% or just over. I am sure he remembers that we heard in evidence how this over-representation is part of a compounding risk model that begins at an early age. Does he therefore agree that, as well as ensuring that our youth justice system has access to speech and language therapists to help young people when they get into trouble and are in the system, we would be smart as a country to widen access—

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)]

Order. Sir Alan was very generous and I allowed you to intervene, Mr Brine, but you cannot make a speech. You are meant to be making an intervention on Sir Alan, because he wants to reply and we need to get on to other business.

[Sir Alan Beith]

I think I get my hon. Friend’s point. He is absolutely right, and he and the Committee have regularly reminded us of that problem. There are so many young people in the criminal justice system who might not be there if they had not been so lacking in communication and language skills. We have to put significant effort into dealing with that part of the problem.

There will always be a need to detain a small number of young people who pose a risk of serious harm to the public, but youth custody is expensive. The Youth Justice Board spends £246 million on the secure estate, which is 65% of its total spending. Three quarters of those who leave youth custody reoffend, as opposed to a much smaller, but still too large, proportion of young offenders generally. That indicates that a lot of resource is going into a problem that we could better have prevented at an earlier stage.