Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what steps her Department is taking to help tackle youth (a) offending and (b) re-offending.

The Government is committed to intervening early to stop young people being drawn into crime with an ambition to halve knife crime in a decade, accompanied by a new, increased focus on crime prevention. The ‘Safer Streets’ mission proposes a prevention-first approach to crime reduction and fundamental to this will be the delivery of the Youth Futures Programme. This will consist of the creation of prevention partnerships in each local authority to map existing youth provisions and at-risk individuals, as well as the implementation of early intervention strategies to stop young people being pulled into a life of crime, supported by a network of Young Futures Hubs.

This will build on the Ministry of Justice’s Turnaround programme, which is providing Youth Offending Teams across England and Wales with funding to intervene earlier with children on the cusp of entering the youth justice system, with the aim of preventing them from offending or reoffending.

We know that community options can be more effective at reducing reoffending and so we believe that, wherever appropriate, children should be diverted from custody. To this end, we are currently piloting changes to intensive youth community sentences that aim to give courts confidence in using them as robust alternatives to custody. We have also recently opened the first secure school which aims to reduce the reoffending rates of those children who have been sent to custody by placing education at the heart of the establishment.