Justice Committee Report: Youth Justice

Philip Hollobone Excerpts

Thursday 14th March 2013 Commons Chamber

[Sir Alan Beith]

In fact, we have been closing young offender institutions over the years because the number in custody is now much smaller. The Committee will continue to press its view that most of the work that can be done successfully with young offenders has to be done in small environments, where it is possible to devote sufficient attention to their problems.

There are a number of key things that I do not want to miss out. One is that the Government produced their own, “Transforming Youth Custody” document just as we were concluding our inquiry, so we did not have the chance to work on it in detail, although I have to say that there is not a lot of detail in it. One thing that puzzles us is the Secretary of State’s idea of creating youth colleges to deal with young offenders, because they are actually there, on average, for only 79 days. We fully support and applaud his interest in, and commitment to, sorting out the education of young offenders in custody, but the concept of the colleges does not fit well with the rapid churn of young offenders. In many cases it is important that we get them back into the education system. We have therefore recommended that schools and colleges could be incentivised to take young people back into education after they have completed their sentence, whether it is a custodial or community one.

The Committee had something to say about deaths in custody. It is unacceptable that so many vulnerable young people continue to die in the custody of the state. We await the Minister’s view on whether to set up an independent inquiry and will return to the issue when we have heard what conclusion the Government have reached.

We have many other detailed recommendations that I do not have time to cover today, but the message I want to leave with the House is that we must be prepared to make radical changes in the way we deal with young offenders if we are to stop them becoming the prolific criminal offenders of the future, which is often what they have the potential to become.

[Mr Philip Hollobone (Kettering) (Con)]

I congratulate the Chair of the Committee on the report. Does he agree that one of the most powerful pieces of evidence in support of his emphasis on getting the transition from custody to the community right is that which was given by the chief inspector of prisons, who said that

“the thing that unlocks everything else is accommodation. It does not mean that if you have settled accommodation everything else will turn out fine. It means that if you do not have that, nothing else will work”?

[Sir Alan Beith]

Absolutely. Accommodation in that context often requires support as well; it is not merely bed and breakfast and goodbye. There has to be some way of ensuring that an offender reintegrates into society, or indeed integrates into society for the first time, because they might have had an institutionalised existence prior to that, which is true of many looked-after children.

The second part of the message I want to leave with the House is that we need to ensure that new generations of children do not embark on crime. In order to achieve that, as was mentioned earlier, we must develop early intervention. As with adult prisoners, so much of the Ministry of Justice budget is necessarily committed to custody and to prison by policies that have been pursued over many years, yet the most important work of preventing people from getting into crime in the first place is deprived of money.

The Committee’s broad longer-term view is that we want to see resources not being needed to put people into custody or expensive sentencing processes because money has been spent dealing with troubled families and very young children beginning to show signs of later criminal behaviour—addressing that could prevent them from getting involved in crime in future. I am grateful to my Committee colleagues for the work they have done. We will continue to keep a close eye on Government policy in this area. We are glad to have had a good response to a number of our proposals, but a lot more needs to be done.

Question put and agreed to.