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Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

My Lords, I have added my name to one of these amendments and I have great sympathy for what is proposed in the other one as well, so I strongly support what has been said. I would like to believe that not only will this work in terms of this being set out in referral orders and the probation trusts taking on their new role, but also that we could somehow link this to the previous discussion introduced by my noble friends Lord Adebowale and Lord Ramsbotham about provision for 18 to 25 year-olds. The more we think about this age group, we can see how important it is to ensure the possibility of young people growing up with enough of the right support, education and training to have a real opportunity of leading more ordinary lives and not reoffending. I wish we had more figures on what the actual costs are, because I should have thought it would be worth working out the budgets and spending enough to make this work. I am quite certain that it would be much cheaper than the cost of someone continually going to prison. I hope that the Minister will give this serious consideration.