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Welsh Affairs

I absolutely agree with the hon. Gentleman, and I will come to that matter in my concluding remarks. I am worried about the position of children and young people who are in custody. As Rod Morgan, the recently resigned chair of the Youth Justice Board, said:"““We know that criminalising young children…is generally counter-productive””." In some circumstances where young people and children are guilty of grave crimes, they need to be put in a secure closed environment, but for most children and young people it is ““criminogenic””—it makes them more likely to commit crimes when they come out than if other interventions had been used. The particular problem of which we are all aware in Wales is that 84 per cent. of children and young people from Wales are imprisoned in England. This month, the Parc youth offender institution is, supposedly, expanding its number of beds from 34 to 64, but that increase has already been swallowed up by the increase in the number of young people and children in Wales in prison. According to evidence to the Welsh Affairs Committee, the number went up 25 per cent. in just six months last year. That is the pattern across England and Wales. The number of children in prison has doubled over the past decade. Most of the young people and children in Wales are in Ashfield, yet the Youth Justice Board has a target that 90 per cent. of all children should be within 50 miles of their home. It is scandalous—and I know that that view is widely shared across the spectrum. What should we do? I think that we should create a Welsh equivalent of the Youth Justice Agency of Northern Ireland—a Welsh youth justice board that could get to grips with the problem of a lack of places for children and young people. We should also adopt some of the innovative policies that that agency has been following for some years in Northern Ireland—for example, the use of youth conference orders, which bring the young offender, the victim and the community together to look at the appropriate way forward, based on the principle of restorative justice, which has a lot of support in other parties. That is similar to the reparation orders that were in the Children Act 2004 but are hardly ever used. Because of the nature of community life in Wales, those principles would be appropriate in our setting. We need to phase out prison, certainly for the under-16s, as recommended over 10 years ago by the former chief inspector of prisons. Other secure environments are more appropriate for young offenders at that age.