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Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill

My Lords, we return to the question of youth justice. I suppose there have been two overriding themes in our debates; first the question of the number of young people in custody and the support given to them and, secondly, the important question of the inter-relationship between the criminal justice system and local authorities. Noble Lords are absolutely right to bring us back to this point, because clearly if we are to have an effective criminal justice system and if we are to achieve the outcomes that we wish to achieve in the prevention of offending and reoffending—to come back to our previous debates on this—it is absolutely critical that there is a strong partnership relationship between local government and the criminal justice system, particularly the YOTs. That point is very well made indeed. I certainly accept the argument made by the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, that we have to secure consistency of approach. I very much agree with that and with the intention behind much of this amendment, which is to ensure that local authorities provide the right kind of support to children and young people in custody who they have looked after or who remain in their care. There are many aspects of the intention behind this amendment that the Government support. As noble Lords will be aware, the amendment duplicates much of the effect of Clause 16 of the Children and Young Persons Bill, which was recently debated in your Lordships’ House. The policy intent underlying the provision in the Children and Young Persons Bill in relation to children in custody is to make sure that services for that very vulnerable group of children are effectively co-ordinated, so that they have the necessary support to re-establish themselves in their home area. For some young people, this support will mean being provided with accommodation, foster care or a children’s home, for example, and this would mean that they would again become ““looked after”” in the formal sense. The Children and Young Persons Bill will ensure that there is a statutory framework in place so that local authorities maintain contact with children who they have looked after and who are involved with youth justice services. The purpose of that contact will be to maintain continuity with the child and to assess what support the child may need on release, including whether they should again be provided with accommodation by the local authority. As the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, implied, following the response of my noble friend Lord Adonis in the debate on the Children and Young Persons Bill, we will use the powers in that Bill to require the local authority to visit children who were provided with voluntary accommodation by the authority who are no longer looked after as their status is dependent on provision of accommodation. That will ensure that all the children within the scope of proposed new subsection (1)(b) of the amendment will receive visits. As my noble friend Lord Adonis has made clear, the intention is that these visits will ensure the continued involvement of local authority children’s services by maintaining regular contact between the child and the local authority. We are not at present able to make firm commitments as to the detailed content of the regulations and guidance about how the visiting duty towards looked-after children in custody will be discharged. We will, however, ensure that the arrangements for local authority representatives are compatible with the sentence planning, case conference and resettlement meetings while the child is in custody. I say to the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, that I very much warmed to her use of the word ““mentor”” in that regard. We have made it clear that as far as possible—one has to understand the practical challenges involved here—we would expect the local authority representative undertaking these visits to be a professional who is known to the child. We do not think that this function should be carried out be a member of a youth offending team, and we will make that clear in statutory guidance. The visiting role should, overall, mean that local authority representatives ensure that the child is properly safeguarded, that their welfare promoted, that staff in youth justice services have the relevant information about the child’s past experiences and that children’s services are fully participating in planning for supporting the child in the community on release. In developing the new regulations and the guidance we will consult widely, which will involve the Youth Justice Board, Her Majesty’s Prison Service, voluntary sector organisations and local government, so that the input from children’s services complements and adds value to the support already provided by the youth justice system. I appreciate that this issue has been raised in debates and that my noble friend Lord Adonis has corresponded with the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, with more detail about how we intend to ensure that children who are or who have been looked after in custody receive better support. I reiterate that the Government share similar concerns to the noble Lord and other noble Lords, and that we are taking action on that basis. Amendment No. 85A was spoken to by the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss. I congratulate her on the ingenuity of her drafting, since she has used the points that I made against her when we debated this in Committee. The amendment would extend the existing power to direct an investigation to require a local authority to include in its report to the court plans or proposals for working with the child or, if it had no such plans or proposals, why it made that decision. In addition, the amendment would require the local authority, where the child is looked after, to provide the court with a copy of the full care plan, as she so eloquently described in her speech, including additional steps to take if the child were to be convicted of the offence. I remain of the belief that there is little need for this power in view of the responsibility under the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 for youth offending teams to provide reports to the court on young offenders. The youth offending team is attached to the local authority, and its multi-agency status should mean that it is best placed to draw together all the relevant information when compiling a report on a young offender. That is probably why the courts do not use the Section 9 power to order a local authority to undertake an investigation of the young offender. I say to the noble and learned Baroness and to the noble Baroness, Lady Falkner, that I understand their points about what they described as local authority disengagement. I understand their concerns, and I accept that more needs to be done to ensure that youth justice bodies and children’s services work together more closely, but it is not a matter of legislative provision; it is a matter of practice. The question is how we ensure that we get better practice. I do not think there is any doubt about that. We are looking at the youth crime action plan, where we are looking at the relationship between youth offending teams and children’s services, which will inform the further development of plans for the youth justice system. I hope that will pick up many of the points that noble Lords have raised today. Since this debate very much turns on the performance of local government and its inter-relationship with the criminal justice system, I add that we think that the Children and Young Persons Bill is addressing a gap in the statutory provisions. The joint sponsorship of youth justice by my department and that of my noble friend Lord Adonis is a very strong step in the right direction in ensuring a much more complementary and integrated approach, and getting that right at national level has an influence on how YOTs and local authorities should work together in the future. I have already mentioned in our previous debates the impact of the YOTs inspection regime. As noble Lords will recall, that is a regular inspection, which identifies successes and weaknesses in the performance of YOTs. That enables us to pinpoint areas where performance needs to be improved. I mentioned again the youth crime action plan which will be informed by our debates. Finally, I shall mention the local authority performance framework in general. While I would not wish to bore the House with a detailed exposition of our new approach to performance management within local government, given the critical importance of youth justice in helping local authorities meet some of the pressures that they face, I am sure that focusing on a smaller number of statutory targets will help to ensure the consistency we all want to see. I do not accept that changes in statute are required. What is required is an improvement in performance and consistency. I hope that I have enabled noble Lords to be satisfied that the Government are far from complacent in this area. We are committed to doing all we can to improve performance and to ensure that there is an integrated approach between YOTs and local authorities so that these very vulnerable young people get the right kind of support.