Young Offenders: Employment and Training

Lord Aberdare Excerpts

Wednesday 17th October 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Aberdare]

My Lords, I start by declaring an interest as a director of Waltz Programmes, a small social enterprise which has worked with young offenders in partnership with the crime reduction charity Nacro, and with funding from the European Social Fund via the Greater London Assembly. Based on this experience, I would like to comment on three rather specific challenges relating to the issues raised in this debate, which I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Healy, on obtaining and introducing so well. I apologise if at this stage of the debate some of what I say may be a little repetitious.

First, what is needed is a seamless process of support, starting while young people are still in custody and continuing all the way into sustained education or employment. We have usually had one of two experiences in working with young offenders. We have worked with groups in custody, who have turned up reliably for every session—they are, after all, in the most literal sense a captive audience—and show great enthusiasm and determination to plan an appropriate path towards work or study and to get into a different peer group on their release. However, once they are released, many of them disappear without trace, despite the best efforts of Nacro’s resettlement brokers and the local youth offending teams to keep track of them and to keep them on track.

Alternatively, we have worked with young offenders who are not in custody. They may have community sentences or be out on licence or with tags. Their average attendance tends to be a depressingly small fraction of the numbers expected, but at least for those who attend regularly support can be offered that ultimately leads them into training or jobs. Lessons to be learnt from this are: support needs to start in custody, where possible; it needs to be on a close one-to-one basis with each individual and it needs to stay close to them all the way through from release to a successful placement.

One of the greatest challenges to this is the difficulty of building up a sufficiently close and trusting relationship in prison for it to continue outside, which in our experience has not been made any easier by the difficulties of agreeing and scheduling in-custody programmes with the Prison Service, particularly when those programmes involve bringing outsiders such as employers in to the prison. I very much support the idea, emphasised by the noble Baroness, Lady Linklater, for a link person in each prison to help make that happen. That has not always been our experience.

Secondly, the majority of young offenders are very far from being ready to go back into education, let alone being job-ready. More than 80% of under-18s in custody have been excluded from school, 25% have special educational needs, 46% are rated as underachieving, and 21% have difficulties with literacy and numeracy. Young people leaving custody face significant barriers, including experience of social exclusion, low self-confidence and self-esteem, problematic family situations, and previous negative educational experiences. They may need a wide range of intensive, one-to-one, specialist support. This may include housing and benefits support; help with literacy and numeracy; help with English language skills; drug and alcohol treatment, which is very important; mental health and other medical support; help with parenting skills in many cases; gang awareness and avoidance—I am not sure whether that has been mentioned in the debate so far, but certainly in a London context it is a crucial element of the process; help with communication and interview skills; mentoring, which has been mentioned; confidence building; life coaching; and I could go on. Above all they need access to a range of education and employment options so that they have some choice about the direction in which they wish to go.

An additional need, sometimes overlooked, is that of support for employers and training organisations, who may be willing to offer places to young offenders but may need considerable extra help to address the challenges that that employment can present. The noble Baroness, Lady Stedman-Scott, mentioned the example of the person who did not turn up on Fridays. The idea put forward by the noble Baroness, Lady Healy, of some sort of incentive for employers is well worth looking into.

Support programmes such as those run by Nacro are valuable for all those who take part in them, but the number who actually get as far as gaining, let alone keeping, training places or jobs within a specified period is likely to be only a low percentage of the total. That brings me to my third and final point, which is that the Government should be careful not to make it impossible for the sort of organisations that are best at delivering such programmes—often small, specialist, local bodies working in partnership or on a multi-agency basis, as the noble Lord, Lord Warner, mentioned—to be able to afford to do so. I am a believer in outcome-based payments, but not in payments by results alone. To illustrate what I mean, we worked last year on a programme that offered up to £5,700 for each young offender placed into sustained work or training. Of that amount, 20% was for pre-entry support, 28% for actually placing them into work or training, and 52%—over half the total—for supporting them to remain there for at least six months. I see that as a very reasonable balance.

A new funding programme that has recently been launched offers between £4,300 and £4,700 per head in total. That is over £1,000 less, of which only 9% is available pre-entry, about 24% on entry into a job or training place, 36% after staying for six months, and a further 31% after a full year. In other words, two-thirds of the total funding available is only payable after six to 12 months of sustained training or employment. Such a model risks acting as a real disincentive to many organisations that are otherwise capable of delivering effective work and training outcomes for young offenders but find it hard to manage cash flow when payment for much of their efforts comes only after six to 12 months.

Young offenders are among the most difficult to place of the very many young people seeking work or training today. I welcome the Government's commitment to providing appropriate support to help them, and hope that in doing so they will recognise and address the challenges that I have mentioned. I look forward to hearing the Minister’s response.