Examination of Witnesses (Questions 20-39)
LORD WARNER
AND MR
MARK PERFECT
TUESDAY 3 DECEMBER 2002
Chairman
20. One occasionally hears it alleged that there
is a link between poor diet and bad behaviour. Do you have any
evidence for that proposition?
(Lord Warner) There was a study. There is a voluntary
organisation called Natural Justice, of which I believe, from
memory, David Waddington (Lord Waddington now) was patron or president.
They have done a study in a couple of young offender institutions—but
I think it was the adult part, the 18-20 part of young offender
institutions, and Aylesbury Prison comes to mind for some reason.
They have shown some link between diet and changing the diet and
behaviour—particular things like attention deficits and
hyperactivity. We have been given this information. The difficulty
with it is in a way the experiment is easier to carry out if people
are actually locked up in custody. You have some degree of control;
you can have a controlled experiment, in a sense. Providing they
were prepared to try the diet, you could actually be fairly confident
that they stuck to the diet. It is much more difficult to show
that and ensure there is some consistent application of the diet—as
I am sure all of us have shown when we have tried to diet—if
they are in a community setting. That is the only study I am aware
of. The evidence from that study did suggest that there was a
dietary component and I certainly am aware that in the health
field there have been studies to suggest that particularly colouring
in children's drinks can have an adverse effect on attention.
(Mr Perfect) Larry Sherman, an American professor,
is trying to set up a randomised control experiment in this country
on rehabilitation, which we are helping him with, that will be
based on Feltham, and he is hoping to include some trial of nutrition
in that to see if we can actually get some evidence.
Bridget Prentice
21. Good morning, gentlemen. Persistent young
offenders, the bane of everyone's life. You actually describe
them quite colourfully in your review when you say that several
of them "strut about with a sense of `untouchability'."
What are you doing to target those people?
(Lord Warner) The first requirement is that they are
caught and that is actually down to the police. It is not down
to the Youth Offending Team. I think the street crime initiative
has focused a lot of police attention on catching them, which
is the first requirement. The reason I say that is because there
is, I think, evidence, particularly in London, that their influence
on a younger cohort of children is quite significant, particularly
in some of the estates. We saw some evidence of that in and around
some of the issues relating to the Damilola case where there was
some evidence of that. So catching them is the first requirement.
What we have tried to do is to construct a programme in the community
which has a high level of intensity, the ISSP, particularly in
the first three months, and it is using curtailment of liberty
in the home through curfews and tagging and pretty robust enforcement
of breaches. I mean, if they do breach, they are back in court,
they can be re-sentenced. I think the message we are trying to
deliver and that the research suggests we should deliver is that
we are not going to mess about. They are quite arrogant some of
them and there needs to be very clear signals given that if they
carry on behaving in that way, they will be given a chance to
change in the community but they will go to custody if they breach
the conditions. What we are also putting in place there—which
seems to be lacking in many of these young people's lives—is
some higher intensity of what I call "a responsible adult
face-to-face involvement". What these programmes typically
have is at least 25 hours' structured programmes and they virtually
all have, some call them an advocate, some call them a mentor,
but they have a person drawn from the community, trained, who
is actually guide, counsellor, friend, but a pretty critical friend
about their behaviour and forms a relationship with them. Indeed,
we have made a video of this to show to the courts. What we show
on that video is fairly typical: in the first three months this
mentor will go in and literally make sure this young person is
up, breakfasted and goes to their first appointment in their programme.
What we are trying to do is to introduce structure into what are
pretty chaotic lifestyles and try to get them back into a pattern
of living which is orderly, which has education and training as
a component and teaches them to use their leisure in a more constructive
manner. What we want to see is those programmes lengthened. I
think the early evidence is that we could do with this ISSP—a
programme which only goes on for six months at the moment because
that is the limits under the supervision order—extended.
I am only saying what I have told David Blunkett: we want to see
this extended into an Intensive Supervision and Surveillance Order
of up to 12 months so we can have six months of intensive work,
because many of these youngsters need a longer period of intensive
working to change their pattern of chaotic behaviour. That is
where we are at. The reason why this has credibility with the
courts is that we are actually being pretty rigorous in the breach
conditions.
22. That is all very well, but if only 11% are
being detected in London, then we are quite a long way off really
dealing with some of the worst offenders, are we not? Where is
the problem? Whose fault is it? Is it lazy policing in London
compared to elsewhere? Or is it that these offenders are more
sophisticated in London, cleverer at it than they are elsewhere?
Why are we only detecting 11%?
(Lord Warner) I have a good relationship, which I
wish to maintain, with the Metropolitan Police Commissioner. I
think London is a particular case. We all know that after 11 September
a significant amount of police resource in London was moved away
from the boroughs, particularly some of the inner London boroughs
into guarding the centre of London in some form or another and
that we can actually track the rise in street crime from back
to that period in London. I mean, the good news is outside of
London. Detection rates are quite a lot higher. You are unfortunate
in being a London MP but if you go to Northumbria you will find
much higher detection rates, and, much more to the point, again
from our MORI survey, the kids know that the detection rates are
much higher. We ask them the question: What do you think your
chance is of being caught? and there is very considerable regional
variation in that. They are surprisingly well informed—which
came as a slight consternation to the Metropolitan Police, when
the youngsters did show that they are pretty well informed about
what their chances were in London. There is no easy answer other
than treating many of these persistent young offenders as significant
criminals who have to be caught, and that is down to police intelligence
work and the way they work in those particular communities.
23. You have mentioned the Intensive Supervision
Programmes. You say in your report that it is too early yet to
fully assess. When do you think you will be in a position to do
that?
(Lord Warner) We have got to have a significant number
of cases where there has been 12 months from the end of the programme
to see if they have re-offended. I will give you a good case example.
The anecdotal evidence is that they are being successful. The
acid test is whether the courts will go on using them, and at
the moment, at the end of October, about 2,700 of these programmes
had been authorised by the courts. We talk to youth court magistrates
on a regular basis. They seem to be very popular in London and
elsewhere with magistrates and they are using them. I looked into
a particular case which is a good example, a Camden case where
a young man had pretty prolific offending—non-violent offending
but very prolific property offending and fraud. He has now been
off this programme for eight months and has not re-offended. I
looked at a young man, very early on in the programme from East
London, who had a terribly family background, a terrible history
of offending. Unfortunately his family circumstances deteriorated
at the end of the programme. He has re-offended but nothing like
at the level he was re-offending before and nothing like the gravity.
So we have a growing number of case studies of that kind with
some pretty difficult youngsters. The mean average of offences
in the previous 12 months of the youngsters on these programmes
is 10, so we are not talking about Sunday School truants, we are
talking about youngsters being dealt with on this programme who
have very considerable offending careers.
24. One of your successes has been in speeding
up time from arrest to sentence. How did that come about? How
much does it cost? Is it an expensive process fast-tracking these
offenders?
(Lord Warner) I think the short answer is that if
you get people to look at their processes and change them and
do their jobs more efficiently, it is not expensive, because you
are just asking them to work more efficiently. The reason why
we succeeded, I think, is that there were some pretty poor processes
in place, particularly in some of the big cities, and there was
no real cooperative working between the police, the Crown Prosecution
Service and the courts in many of these areas, so cases just used
to muddle their way through the system. I think the thing that
we introduced into this was some practical help to people at the
local level, particularly in the big urban areas about changing
those processes. None of this was rocket science. It was things
like the cases being identified. We organised for a particular
flag to be put up on the police national computer: it flagged
up that this was a persistent young offender, so that people knew
to deal with that case quickly. There were things like identification
parade problems, non follow-up of warrants, slow passing of the
papers from the police to the Crown Prosecution Service, unusually
long delays in setting hearings in the youth courts, for example.
None of these things was high-tech. It did not require big investments
of money to change those things; it really required someone to
sit down with the agencies and that is what we provided: someone
to sit down with the agencies and get them to change their working
practices. That is the simple secret of why this was done. It
was nothing very magical.
25. Is there scope for some more almost-magic?
(Lord Warner) There is still an issue, dare I say
it in London. It is still slower than the rest of the country
and there is still an issue, I think, about one or two aspects
in relation to crown court cases. But across the country one has
to recognise that magistrates courts have done stunningly well
in this. I mean, the magistrates courts have come down, on average,
to somewhere in the mid-fifties/50 days from arrest to sentence.
It is quite difficult for them to improve on that. Possibly a
bit: some magistrates courts are down to not much more than five
weeks. But it is hard to see how they could improve too much on
that without neglecting other cases which they have to deal with.
26. What about the non persistent offenders.
Are they taking longer now as a result of this?
(Lord Warner) No, not at all. What I think this has
done and what we have tried to ensure happens is that the process
improvements that we introduced had benefits for the non persistent
offenders. So what you are seeing across, particularly, the magistrates
courts, which deal with the overwhelming majority of non persistent
offenders, is the same improvements. It is not as though they
have actually put to one side non persistent offenders and just
concentrated on the persistent offenders. We can send you the
data. I do not have the data in my head. I do not know whether
Mark has some figures.
(Mr Perfect) It is about 55 days on average for all
cases in the youth courts, and that has come down from 61 days
a couple of years ago.
27. The Intensive Supervision Programmes, are
they expensive?
(Lord Warner) We are spending about £6,000. These
are 100% funded from the Youth Justice Board to the local areas.
It is £6,000 for a six-month programme. Compare that with
spending, from memory, about £43,000 a year for a YOI place
and about £150,000 a year for a Local Authority Secure Unit
place. So we could double that spend and it still be pretty good
value for money.
Mr Watson
28. What factors do you think underlie the increase
of young people in custody? Is it an increase you see continuing?
If you think it is going to continue, do you not see that as a
failure of the policy to encourage credible alternatives to custody?
(Lord Warner) We took over responsibility one day
before 1 April 2000, when we were nominally in charge. We had
one day's notice, so our ability to have impact in the first six
months was, should I say, limited. The picture that has emerged—and
we can send you the graph—is that up until about the autumn
of 2001 the numbers were flattening off and slowly tailing down.
As you got to the end of 2001, the number of youngsters in custody
(and I include all three groups of custody: the Prison Service,
Secure Training Centres and Local Authority Secure Units) was
dipping slowly—not dramatically, but it was dipping slowly.
With the street crime concerns and following a judgment on mobile
phones by the courts in February, if you look at the graph it
suddenly shoots up at the beginning of 2002. But when you unpick
that, what you see—and what we are still seeing—is
that alongside that we were starting to get youngsters on bail
ISSP and sentence ISSPs. What you actually see is that the courts
are not sending more youngsters to custody. What they have been
doing—and we think there is now another change in the last
month or so—is sending youngsters to custody for longer.
The ones they have been sending have been going there longer,
so the cumulative effect was to clog up the secure estate. To
give you in orders of magnitude: between about the beginning of
2002 and the autumn of this year the average sentence length went
up by about 20%. So you can see that you do not have to have that
increase going on for very long—it is a quite small juvenile
estate, only about 3,000 places—before you fill the places
up. It is not a trend but the evidence from last month or so is
that the sentence length is dropping again. During all this time
I hope we have been able to give a pretty consistent message and
the consistent message we have been giving out is: "Use ISSP,
don't use short Detention and Training Orders" and that seems
to be what the magistrates certainly have been doing.
29. Nevertheless, if you have seen a "clogging
of the system" as you have described it, have you any intentions
to increase the capacity of secure units in order to guard against
overcrowding or deal with some of the problems of overcrowding?
(Lord Warner) We are back to the earlier questions
about our budget for the following two or three years and this
is where we are back to where choices have to be made. Our view
is still, as a Board, that the short Detention and Training Orders,
the four and six month Detention and Training Orders, are a less
good option than a 12 month Intensive Supervision and Surveillance
Order. What we as a Board are going to continue to plug away at
is arguing the case for that community-based order, with the resources
to back it up, as an alternative to using short Detention and
Training Orders and we think we have the senior judiciary and
the magistrates on our side on this argument. It is down to how
we, in a sense, continue to move that agenda forward. I mean,
it will require parliamentarians to amend the legislation to introduce
the ISSO. That is the case we have put to the Home Secretary.
30. What was his response?
(Lord Warner) Pretty positive, but you know as well
as I do that there are people called business managers who have
views on how much you can put in legislation and how much time
you can devote to legislation. These are those sort of issues,
I think.
31. Could I take you on to a new piece of legislation:
the change in the law to allow younger people to be remanded.
Do you think that was a desirable change?
(Lord Warner) It was on the statute book. I think
there are some issues about whether the definition of persistence
which was on the statute book was necessarily the wisest definition,
because it made it easy for youngsters who had done a relatively
small number of crimes to be treated as meeting the threshold
for persistence for secure remands. Having said that, what we
did do, at the request of the Prime Minister, in the street crime
meetings was offer to expand, provided there were resources made
available, bail ISSP, which is, in effect, a form of more stringent
conditional bail as an alternative to secure remands. The evidence,
I think, of the last few months is that the courts are using bail
ISSPs as an alternative to secure remands with some success. It
is worth bearing in mind the reason why I think they can do that,
going back to a previous question about persistent young offenders
and halving the time from arrest to sentence. The result of that
has been that the average time on remand has been shortened dramatically.
That is one of the spin offs from that, so youngsters are on secure
remand on average for somewhere between 30 and 35 days, so courts
are much more prepared to use stringent conditional bail for that
short period rather than use secure remands. That is what seems
to be happening. I think the outcome has not been that significant
a problem. We have been going since June and since June there
has not been any unmet need: there have not been courts ordering
secure remands that we have not been able to place.
32. You say the figures from the courts seem
to have changed in the last month or two, in that sentence levels
have dropped. Is that because of your active engagement in that
or do you think there are other changes involved in these figures?
(Lord Warner) I do not want to be vainglorious about
this but I think we have established a reputation with the Magistrates
Association and the youth courts. We have regular meetings with
them. We have these things called business meetings and we meet
regularly, both out in the regions and nationally, with representative
chairs of youth courts and meet with the Magistrates Association's
officers. I think we have tried to be people who do what we say
and I think they have actually accepted that. I think they do
recognise that ISSP is a robust programme which it is worth giving
a good run from their point of view and that seems to be what
is happening. Since they got used to ISSP they were prepared to
use bail ISSP, particularly given the length of time. I think
all these things in the end come down to your credibility with
the courts. If the courts did not believe the kind of pre-sentence
reports that they were getting from the youth offending team,
no amount of rhetoric from me or the Youth Justice Board would
convince them. I think they are convinced by what is going on
locally and it is a tribute to the people at the local level who
are convincing their local courts to try these programmes.
Chairman
33. What is the minimum time you need to have
a person in your custody in order to engage their attention?
(Lord Warner) At the moment the minimum time is two
months under the shortest Detention and Training Order.
34. That is the minimum time you can have him
in your custody. In order to make an impression on him . . .?
(Lord Warner) All children are slightly different,
clearly. We think two months, particularly in a period when we
are just coming out of serious overcrowding, when many of these
youngsters were being moved from one establishment to another,
so they were not even in one place for the period of their custody,
two months is pretty short with most of these youngsters to have
a real impact. They are taken away from their community. Some
of them develop accommodation problems while they are in that
custody, so there is then a problem of re-settling them back into
the community. The evidence we have also is that even if you make
good progress in education terms, there is then a lag to try to
continue those programmes when they go back into the community,
so you could have had a lot of success, even in a two-month programme,
in education and training and then find you cannot get them into
an FE College or on to a programme or whatever when they transfer
back to the community. So that issue is a problem, but on the
whole we think two months is too short. If you look at the Intensive
Supervision Programme and the kind of attention these youngsters
are getting in the intensive part for three months, there are
virtually no youngsters on Detention and Training Orders who in
three months get that level of adult involvement and that level
of programme content on a consistent basis. Our starting point
is really: scrap the short Detention and Training Orders other
than for breaches of the ISSO and move to a longer period of time,
up to six months of intensive work. Certainly a minimum of three
months of intensive work is actually required with most of these
youngsters.
35. There are some youths whose attention you
cannot hope to gain until they are securely detained.
(Lord Warner) You have eight months to two years for
a Detention and Training Order and you have a maximum of up to
a year in custody on the two-year Detention and Training Order.
I do not want it to be thought that I am recommending all these
youngsters should be given two year Detention and Training Orders,
because I am not, but for the very serious cases—and they
have to be quite serious offences to get that length of detention
and training.
36. Or it could be cumulative.
(Lord Warner) Or cumulative.
37. If you are still giving people non custodial
sentences when they have been in court 30 or 40 times, there comes
a moment when you realise that only a lengthy period of custody
is going to be any use.
(Lord Warner) There will always be a proportion of
these young people who are going to require custody and nobody
on the Board is arguing against that. What we are saying is that
the short sentences do make it very difficult to engage in a consistent
way and have a sustained programme content which continues throughout
the sentence with them. That is what we are trying to change.
There will be a proportion of kids who are of the kind you are
describing, but it is also fair to say that until recently nobody
has tried Intensive Supervision and Surveillance Programmes with
these youngsters, so it is not surprising that some of them have
actually chalked up this huge prolific offending career because
no one has actually at an earlier stage tried to get a grip on
them in some kind of intensive programme in the community. We
think we are in new territory now and we have to allow this to
be taken further forward. It is conceivable that we will be proved
to be wrong. I think the early evidence is that we will not be
proved to be wrong, although we will have some of these youngsters
who will fail. They will fail in some cases because their family
backgrounds are so appalling that there is nothing you can do
short term actually to change some of the outcomes for them.
38. Why is there such a vast variation in cost
between the cost of detaining someone in a Youth Offender Institution
at £35,000 a year to £160,000 in the case of Local Authority
Secure Units and Secure Training Centres?
(Lord Warner) The basic issue is staff to young person
ratios, which is much higher in the Local Authority Secure Units.
Many of the Local Authority Secure Units are very small, eight
to 10 places, whereas most of the Young Offender Institution juvenile
sections are 200/300 places. This is the cause of continuing irritation
to the Director General of the Prison Service, their staffing
levels are far more modest. Also, in the Prison Service, in a
sense, what you might call guarding and the whole apparatus of
a prison takes up a fair chunk of the money that you are paying
to the Prison Service, so their spend on regimes is relatively
modest, but it is basically an issue of scale and staffing levels
as well.
Mr Clappison
39. Could I ask you a little further about what
happens to youngsters before the decision on sentencing is made?
Particularly, I would like to ask you about the position in respect
of the remand of 15 to 16 year olds. I think I am right in saying
that 15 to 16 year olds are children for these purposes. When
I refer to remand, I mean the decision to hold them in secure
conditions before conviction and before a decision on sentence
is made in the event of conviction. You have just answered a few
questions about Local Authority Secure Units and Young Offender
Institutions. The choice for somebody of 15 or 16 who is on remand
is between a Local Authority Secure Unit place and a Young Offender
Institution.
(Lord Warner) It could be also a Secure Training Centre.
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