My Lords, Amendment 4 is in my name and those of my noble friends Lord Marks, Lady Hamwee and Lord Dholakia. I will also speak to Amendments 6 and 15, which have been grouped with it.
The purpose of this amendment is to exclude anyone aged under 18 on the day of sentencing from the new supervision period of one year by a new provider of probation services, even after they have turned 18 and before the detention period has come to an end. Currently, sentencing for under-18s includes a detention and training order which requires the young offender to serve half their sentence in custody and half in the community. Only those sentenced to at least two years on a DTO are required to do 12 months on supervision. However, the Government’s new proposals are that all those young people will be required to do 12 months on supervision, even if they have had only a six-month DTO and if they are over 18 at the end of the custodial period. Thus, they would be transferred from the YJB and YOTs to an unknown private provider, with all the demands and expectation of adults. That would run directly counter to current practice.
I must declare an interest in and an admiration for the work of the Youth Justice Board, whose work I have followed for many years and which is responsible for the administration of services for young people in trouble with the law. I am sure that your Lordships will not need persuading of its levels of experience, professionalism and skill, which have been developed and honed in working with this challenging and vulnerable group, particularly in the past few years. Most of us have been parents of adolescents but we cannot even guess at the breadth and depth of the difficulties that characterise the lives and problems of this group. They are young adults who, because of the date when they turn 18, are required to be transformed into people of whom the expectations become quite different.
In fact, all the evidence is that this exceptionally vulnerable group of young people have many issues, which we have rehearsed on these Benches regularly, and which consist of multiple deficits in their difficult lives. They need highly skilled, professional help if they are not to get into even deeper trouble and increasingly make the lives of the rest of us more difficult through reoffending. I will give just one statistic to illustrate the counterintuitive vulnerability of this group, which
is that 18 to 20 year-olds account for about 9.8% of the custodial population but nearly 20% of all who self-harm. These are very vulnerable people. The YJB is the highly professional and specialist body whose expertise is widely acknowledged in dealing with this group, and for the range of collaborative work it does with other agencies where issues and needs overlap, including family and children’s services. It is impressive how these working partnerships have evolved over time to address the complexity of the difficulties of these young people.
As well as the range of offending, crucial to this age group in particular is the skill in dealing with issues of transition. This includes the process of moving from the youth justice system to the adult justice system at a stage in the life of these young people when they are particularly vulnerable. The YJB is quite clear when it says that this is a high-risk group with significant needs that requires skilled support from statutory agencies, in particular, from the probation service. The Government have clearly acknowledged that management of risk is where the probation service still has a clear role, and this group is characterised by high risk. Managing transition and managing risk go hand in hand, and I hope that the Minister can confirm that this area, which has not been properly clarified so far, will indeed continue to be choreographed jointly by the YJB, YOTs and probation, which would be in all our interests.
Evidence shows that where transitions are not appropriately managed, breach and reoffending follow. The converse is also true: when good, expert partnership working is in place, which is needs-led and flexible, especially at times of transition, the time of heightened risk, outcomes are better, breach is lessened and all of us are safer. The YJB is working towards transition before 18 is reached and then beyond. It plans, it works ahead and it knows what it is doing. It recently published an impressive youth-to-adult transitions framework, which I am sure would impress the Minister, and a youth-to-adult portal, which is used to transfer a young person’s information securely from a YOT to probation. Private providers are not legally able to work with under-18s, even if they had the skills and experience, and I reiterate that continuity and consistency are vital with this age group.
When we discussed this issue in Committee, the Minister undertook to take it away and consider the matter again. Given the enormous weight of evidence of the success of the current arrangements, which take account of all the evidence of the need for skill, experience and flexibility of partnership working which has now been established between professionals, I hope that he will feel able to give the House some reassurance that it will not be thrown away in favour of an untested and untried new idea.
Amendment 6 is a continuation of the argument I made earlier and relates to the arrangements to be made for the supervision of offenders who were under 18 when sentence was passed. It would mean that they would automatically be the responsibility of the local youth offending team until such time as they became 18, with the assumption hitherto that continuity is all-important and that the YOT’s work would be likely
to continue. This amendment specifies that the supervisor could be either an officer of a provider of probation services or, for people sentenced as juveniles, a member of the youth offending team. I hope that this amendment will endear itself to the Minister because it opens up the possibility that there could and, indeed, should be room for discretion in the supervision of young adults. It implies some form of mutual discussion and planning between the YOTs and the new probation service providers for the future supervision of a young offender who has passed his 18th birthday. He is already known to the YOT, which has done all the relevant work to realise positive transitions in various relevant aspects of his life and for whom his life is entering a potentially challenging and difficult stage. Relationships are therefore all-important. This is an area that has had very little examination, but the long-held assumption has been that there will be as much continuity as possible, that plans will already be in place to be carried through and that important relationships will be established. It is to be hoped and expected that these issues will be recognised and discussed and that planning will be taken forward with the agreement of all parties. To do otherwise would be to create damaging rather than helpful planning for the young person. I am not aware of any discussion on this period of transition involving these two agencies, yet it will be crucial that the continuity of work with the young person, which has always been pursued hitherto, is acknowledged and discussed and the vital discretion of the youth offending teams is taken into account.
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One of the problems in understanding the Government’s expectations of what the new providers of probation will look like is the absence of any kind of detail. It is extraordinary, given that they are to be given an enormous, hugely responsible role for a very large number of particularly challenging and vulnerable young people. I am aware of the updated impact statement issued by the Government last week, and I will discuss it on my next amendment. I would be grateful if the Minister could clarify the Government’s thinking on this transition. What is the view on continuity, planning, responsibility and relationships, and where will the appropriate discretion lie? It could make or break the future of a significant element of our next generation. I look forward to the Minister’s reply on that issue.
Finally, Amendment 15 relates to an offender who will be aged under 21 on the last day of the supervision period. I know this amendment looks as if I am whistling in the wind because I do not hold out much hope of a successful outcome, but none the less it represents an important ideal to me. It aims for continuing provision by the Youth Justice Board for all young offenders until the age of 21 and therefore continuity of provision, planning, support and all the skilled input by the range of professional agencies under the umbrella of the YJB. This what practitioners of all kinds active in this field believe is the ideal way forward because it holds out the most realistic chance of turning around the lives of this most challenging group of offenders.
As short-term, low-level offenders, part of the revolving door, this group has never had regular help or support from the probation service. It has not had responsibility for them, so this group has most significantly contributed to the reoffending figures. My fear is that the Government do not really understand or believe just what a challenge these young people represent, what a real, deep-seated mess they are in and how much time, care and persistence of support they need when they so readily offend. They find change and transition of any kind very difficult and many of them are immature and vulnerable. This is not a short-term issue, but a complex, multifaceted range of issues that takes real skill and persistence to turn around. Chris Grayling is right that long-term support is necessary, but of a skilled and multiagency kind, which I think is not what he has in mind.
Just last week, the Government published an updated impact assessment, which is still only partial and long overdue. It highlights the significant risks of breach and recall to custody that the new plans bring in their wake. It acknowledges that,
“offenders released after serving custodial sentences of less than 12 months are more likely to be petty offenders, more likely to have drug-related issues, more likely to be unemployed and in general more likely lead more chaotic lives. In absolute terms this difference is difficult to quantify, but our best estimate is that offenders released after serving custodial sentences of less than 12 months are, for behavioural reasons, 35% more likely to breach than offenders released after serving 12 months or more. Our lowest estimate is that they are 10% less likely to breach, and the highest estimate that they are 50% more likely to breach”.
Overall, it estimates,
“around 13,000 offenders recalled or committed to custody, giving a prison place increase of around 600 additional places, at a cost of £16m per year…This gives a best estimate of the cost of breach for offenders released after serving custodial sentences of less than 12 months of £24m per year”.
This is terrifying reading, but it shows the depth of the problem. We know that community-based penalties are more likely to have a better outcome than imprisonment. Nowhere is this more true than for this particular cohort of extremely vulnerable, dysfunctional young people. We also know that we face a crying need for properly qualified people to deal with the issues these people represent.
The YJB sent me some encouraging examples of what it is doing with this group, such as the enhanced transitions service, which is happening in Reading. This involves YOT staff and specialist officers in the probation trust working together, selecting young people based on need, family background, maturity and cognitive ability, and working together for six months before transferring the young person to probation. The result in this case is that the breach rates of the vulnerable young people decreased by 45%. It is a lot of work and it does not come cheap, but the best estimate of the cost of breach in terms of around 600 additional prison places is £16 million per year. We are told that commercial confidentiality prevents the Government publishing the costs of the proposed way forward in the Bill, but we know that the cost of these damaged young people’s lives is even greater and more challenging.
This amendment modestly suggests that these young offenders sentenced to a DTO should have continuity of their oversight by the specialist youth offending
services until they are 21, in the knowledge that this offers the best chance of reducing their reoffending in the future. I beg to move.