Youth Custody

(asked on 29th February 2016) - View Source

Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what estimate he has made of the proportion of young offenders remanded to local authority accommodation that stayed in local authority accommodation for the whole remand period in each of the last three years; and if he will make a statement.


Answered by
Shailesh Vara Portrait
Shailesh Vara
This question was answered on 12th May 2016

The proportion of young people who stayed in local authority accommodation (LAA) for their whole remand period, ending in 2012/13, 2013/14 and 2014/15, after being initially remanded to LAA by the criminal courts is shown in the table below.

It should be noted that the data covers only those who were initially remanded to LAA, not those remanded on bail or, securely, to Youth Detention Accommodation (YDA). A young person will ordinarily be remanded on bail but may instead be remanded to LAA where bail is refused for welfare reasons, for example where they are already in care or there are concerns about the young person’s living arrangements. A young person refused bail may also instead be remanded to YDA where charged with a serious offence. The initial decision to remand a young person on bail, to LAA or YDA may later be changed by the court, for example, where the young person is subsequently charged with further and more serious offences, in light of new information about their circumstances or a change is made to the original charging decision.

The proportion of young people who stayed in local authority accommodation (LAA) for their whole remand period, ending in 2012/13, 2013/14 and 2014/15, after being initially remanded to LAA by the criminal courts

Year

Proportion (%)

2012/13

24.05%

2013/14

21.71%

2014/15

21.20%

Notes

1 The proportions presented in the table above are derived from a count of young people and not remand episodes

2 The data is broken down by the financial year in which the young person was eventually acquitted, sentenced or dealt with in some other way. The remand to LAA may therefore have begun in a year preceding that shown in the data.

3 The data will differ from other published figures on the number of young people remanded to LAA because different counting rules were used.

4 The data has been taken from the YJB’s Youth Justice Management Information System (YJMIS) database. Data from this database is submitted to the YJB by Youth Offending Teams.

5 These figures have been drawn from administrative IT systems, which, as with any large scale recording system, are subject to possible errors with data entry and processing and can be subject to change over time.

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