Young Offenders: Employment and Training

Lord Warner Excerpts

Wednesday 17th October 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Warner]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend on securing this important debate. I agree very much with what she said. I want to speak in more systems terms from my experience in designing Labour’s reforms of the youth justice system after 1997 and my six years as a director of social services in Kent, helping youth people in care and young offenders.

It is a sad fact that so many young people who have been in care end up in our prisons, often from a young age. Many of these young people have been failed by society and the state, in whose care they have been. Their educational attainments are often modest, with literacy and numeracy skills among the lowest in our society. Too many have addiction and mental health problems inadequately addressed by public services. They have too often experienced a pattern of being let down by adults, rejected by their families and not helped to cope with family losses. They can too easily drift into offending after homelessness, exclusion from school and a lack of the skills to compete in today’s job market. By the time they end up in custody, they often have complex needs that cannot easily be addressed by any single agency.

Labour’s youth justice reforms tried to address those needs through radical changes to the structures for handling and supporting young people under 18 at both the local and national levels. At the local level, these provided for multi-agency—that is important—youth offending teams with a single budget and easier access by team members to the services of their own agencies. At the national level was a Youth Justice Board for England and Wales, supporting and performance managing youth offending teams, purchasing custodial places and carrying out research, with a budget for driving change, including bidding for money from government departments for new schemes such as preventive measures.

I do not want to claim that everything we at the board did was wonderful. We certainly had many critics—the board still does. We would not engage in a popularity contest and we could be critical of both local and national bodies. But over a decade or so, and with the wonderful work of the YOTs, the board halved the number of young people committing their first offence and cut by a quarter the number of young people locked up. This record produced the support in this House for the Government stopping the abolition of the Youth Justice Board in the Public Bodies Act. All other groups of offenders have seen their prison populations rise over the same period, so maybe there is something in this systemic approach that we need to learn from.

I do not tell this story for vainglorious reasons but to emphasise the merits of targeting a specific group of offenders and tailoring a set of services and approaches to that group’s very specific circumstances and needs. You also have to put in place local and national mechanisms, processes and organisations, properly funded, that can deliver a complex set of service responses over time. You have to stick with the agenda, irrespective of who is in government. It takes time and effort to change offending behaviour. Short-term programmes and quick fixes do not work. They only let down young offenders and the many splendid staff who try to work with them.

Our failure has been not to apply the same logic to young offenders aged 18 to 21—preferably up to 25—that we applied to the under-18s. That does not mean the same services but the same systemic approach. Older young offenders often have similar needs to the 15-17 year-olds in the reformed youth justice system. They do not just need employment and training but levels of personal support and development to stay away from drugs, stay away from other addictions, stay away from bad company—as the noble Lord, Lord Bates, mentioned—and secure and retain the jobs and training that they need. Above all, they must have access to accommodation. Homelessness is not a basis for reforming young people who are offending.

I do not have time to map out my programme for young offenders over 18 but this Government—or any future Labour Government—need to learn from the experience of the youth justice reforms and develop the same targeted approach to young offenders over 18, dealing with their specific needs, if we are to keep more of them out of prison and help them become productive and participative members of our society. Can the Minister say what will be done specifically to meet the needs of 18-21 year-old young offenders to cut significantly the numbers of them ending up in prison?