UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 242-iHouse of COMMONSMINUTES OF EVIDENCETAKEN BEFOREHOME AFFAIRS COMMITTEE
THE GOVERNMENT'S APPROACH TO CRIME PREVENTION
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This is an uncorrected transcript of evidence taken in public and reported to the House. The transcript has been placed on the internet on the authority of the Committee, and copies have been made available by the Vote Office for the use of Members and others.
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Transcribed by the Official Shorthand Writers to the Houses of Parliament: W B Gurney & Sons LLP, Hope House, Telephone Number: 020 7233 1935
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Oral Evidence
Taken before the Home Affairs Committee
on
Members present
Keith Vaz, in the Chair
Tom Brake
Mr James Clappison
Mrs Ann Cryer
David TC Davies
Mrs Janet Dean
Patrick Mercer
Gwyn Prosser
Bob Russell
Martin Salter
Mr Gary Streeter
Mr David Winnick
________________
Witness: Ms Louise Casey, Director-General, Neighbourhood, Crime and Justice Group, Home Office, gave evidence.
Q1 Chairman: Good morning. I would draw the attention of all those present to the Register of Members' Interests, where the interests of Members are noted. Welcome to this new inquiry on the Government's approach to crime prevention. This Committee will look at what the Government has done in preventing crime, in particular youth crime. We will be taking evidence from individuals and community groups, as well as the Opposition spokespersons on behalf of their parties. Our first witness is Louise Casey, Director-General of the Neighbourhood, Crime and Justice Group. Welcome, Ms Casey. Thank you for coming to give evidence to us at the start of this inquiry. I wonder whether you would start by telling us a little about the Respect agenda, which I understand was very much your invention. Do you think that it has achieved what you hoped it would achieve when you set out the vision behind this agenda?
Ms Casey: Yes. It is fair to say that over quite a long, sustained time period reductions in antisocial behaviour have been fairly well recorded and fairly well known. From the British Crime Survey to the local government place based survey, their very formidable research has shown that it has all moved in the right direction. One of the things I feel quite proud of is the implementation of the Respect strategy. What was amazingly powerful about the Respect strategy to me personally was not giving up on an unrelenting - and I use that word in quite a determined way - focus on enforcement of standards in communities. That was one of the things we drove forward as much as humanly possible but at the same time having a sense of wanting to prevent problems. There are two big things that are quite symbolic policies. One is Family Intervention Projects. If you were asked to cite a number of things in your life that you think are particularly powerful, I would say the Family Intervention Projects are one of them, and I would like to talk about those because I think they really, really make a powerful difference.
Q2 Chairman: Yes, we will be coming on to that.
Ms Casey: The other one is parenting. I think parenting is the Exocet missile to challenging and changing antisocial behaviour. Certainly when we published the Respect Action Plan, by then we had persuaded the then Prime Minister and others - and the public are already persuaded of it - that you have to tackle poor parenting and get parents back in charge of their households. The evidence of that is incredibly compelling. I would say the Respect strategy has worked, in so far as the statistics and the evidence show that antisocial behaviour has moved in the right direction for the public, and I would say the powerful mixture of enforcement and support was the way forward that has made that work.
Q3 Chairman: As part of our inquiry, the Committee staff are looking at all the initiatives that the Government has announced or launched in the last 13 years, trying to work out what has happened to all those initiatives. You mentioned the previous Prime Minister. One of his most famous quotes was "We need to be tough on crime and the causes of crime." Do you think the Government has been tough on the causes of crime? What are the causes of crime?
Ms Casey: I would say you have to be tough on crime, tough on criminals, and then do rehabilitation or reform, whatever word you want to use.
Q4 Chairman: If we could go to the causes of crime, what would you say the causes of crime are? Since you are an expert in this field - and you cannot have an initiative unless it addresses a problem - if you were to define, say, the top four causes of crime, what would they be?
Ms Casey: You have to crack down on the very small number of absolutely problematical families that cause the most havoc in communities, and that ranges from the lowest level of disorder that we call antisocial behaviour to the nastiest crimes. They are few in number but the problems that they cause in communities are phenomenal, and it would prevent a great deal of crime if we got to those people very effectively. Another cause of crime is poor parenting. It is a subject that quite often people in public life and politics are afraid to take on. It is not about having a view on every single parent, but it is having a view and a judgment to be made on people whose children are out of control. A significant proportion of the teenagers who are recidivist criminals - and I could look at my file and quote the statistic to you, but I think it is something like 90 per cent - had conduct disorder as children. That tells a committee that is looking at crime prevention that the first weapon in trying to prevent crime is looking at the family and looking at the families that are messing up and cannot cope or are deliberately choosing not to cope.
Q5 Mr Streeter: It is not rocket science.
Ms Casey: As the gentleman on the left has said, it is absolutely not rocket science.
Q6 Chairman: Mr Streeter.
Ms Casey: Mr Streeter. Forgive me, I do not have my glasses on.
Q7 Mr Streeter: I am agreeing with you.
Ms Casey: You are agreeing. What is really interesting about this is that the public get it. The public are not daft when it comes to how they think crime should be prevented or dealt with: 58% of the public think that parents are the most important weapon in tackling antisocial behaviour, and something like 80-plus% think that antisocial behaviour is the responsibility of poor parents.
Q8 Chairman: May I stop you there, because there are a number of other questions.
Ms Casey: I am sorry.
Q9 Chairman: All these aspects will be covered.
Ms Casey: I could talk for
Chairman: I am sure you can. Members of the Committee will come in and ask you questions, but perhaps we could have briefer answers.
Q10 Mrs Cryer: I want to ask you about working with parents and families. We are in a position now, quite possibly because of pressure from the press, et cetera, where we are losing a lot of social workers. When we are talking about working with parents and families, are we talking about social workers intervening with them? Who is going to do this intervention? Who is going to make a decision that this is a lifestyle choice and they are entitled to make that choice? Who is it who is going to do this?
Ms Casey: First, again, forgive me, it
is common sense to the public and anybody paid by the public that, for example,
a ten-year-old being on the streets at
Q11 Chairman: Do you think the Government has used excuses and some of these initiatives that they have launched in the last 13 years were really not necessary? This is plain speaking, is it not, what you are telling this Committee? As Mr Streeter says, it is not rocket science. Have we had too much spin over this area rather than some practical work that should have been done?
Ms Casey: That is a question you might want to put to politicians rather than me. My own view is that the evidence is that crime is down and, therefore, something has worked in order to bring crime down. I would imagine that quite a number of the things that have been in place are working. Obviously I am incredibly subjective, as is every other person who comes before this Committee: we all have our own views that we want you to hear, believe and understand. I think the relentless focus on tackling low level crime and disorder is incredibly important. The enforcement of standards relentlessly - no let-up in it - is really important in preventing crime, and parents and then cracking down on the worst families are the other two elements where I feel the evidence is absolutely compelling.
Q12 Tom Brake: You have talked a lot about clamping down on dysfunctional families and I do not think people would disagree with you on that point. Do you feel that it is your role to stop families becoming dysfunctional in the first place?
Ms Casey: That is one of the most
interesting things about the strategy on antisocial behaviour. Let me talk about something that is
incredibly current that I am not responsible for and did not set up, so I will
try to be objective about it. There is
something at the moment called Operation Staysafe. Where it works well, a parenting expert, the
police and the local authority antisocial behaviour team and others all go out
and essentially sweep the streets on a particular evening. They do not just then leave it at that and
tell the school or the parent: they do follow up interventions with those
people. I do not think that on the first
occasion you find a 12-year-old on the streets of
Q13 Chairman: I am sorry, I have to say it again, briefer answers, and then more questions can come from us.
Ms Casey: I am sorry.
Q14 Bob Russell: The perception of crime and the fear of crime is such, and that is why we are having an inquiry. We are not talking about a little rascal who jolly japes, are we? Does the Neighbourhood, Crime and Justice Group have any dialogue with the established youth organisations?
Ms Casey: I would be interested to know why you are asking that question. Yes, of course we do. It is our job to have dialogue with anybody who is involved in tackling crime. It is interesting - and I may as well get it on the record - that the most fundamental thing that came across during the course of the review was that the public do not believe that the criminal justice system is on their side, and that - in huge letters - would include the youth offending/youth justice industry. 15% of the public think youth courts do a good job. It is not a figure to be terribly proud of. The confidence in the system to stand up for what the public want in terms of tackling crime is not huge. That matters a great deal, because if the public are not confident in the fact that criminals face a consequence when they break the law whether they are 12, 22 or 52, it means that they do not pick up the phone when they want to report crime. I think that is important. We never hear about the punishment of criminals at all. We have no sense of what the service is of the police. That is fundamental. As a Committee, you want to prevent crime. Can anybody in this room, off the top of their head, tell me what the single non-emergency number is for their police? We are really bad at giving the public what they want and then getting them to help prevent or tackle crime.
Q15 Bob Russell: In summary, the answer to my question is yes.
Ms Casey: Yes. I work for the Home Office. You have to talk to endless people all the time about things that you want to do to improve things. The problem with all these things is that there is a sense that, if you believe in enforcement of standards, somehow that means that you are anti-youth. That is my take on quite a lot of the debate that goes on. That is a bad place to be.
Q16 Bob Russell: I will keep trying. Ms Casey, would you confirm that all the evidence suggests that the vast majority of young people who get caught up in troubles are not members of recognised youth organisations?
Ms Casey: Structured activities for young people are very powerful. I have been very, very clear right from the outset as part of the Respect Action Plan that there needed to be structured activities for young people. One of the things I am on record as saying, supported very much by the British public, is that they want activities for young people open on Friday and Saturday nights. We still have a way to go in getting a commonsense approach to youth activities open. One of the least reformed areas of public service has to be the Youth Service. In some areas of the country they are working to term times. It is very reminiscent of when I was responsible for the strategy on rough sleeping, when we had outreach workers who were supposed to be working with homeless people at night who were going out between nine and five and we had to get them to change their hours to go out in the evenings. I feel some of the issues around the youth industry are in that place and need reform.
Bob Russell: If I could come back to where I am with the question.
Chairman: Final question.
Q17 Bob Russell: Chairman, I have not even asked the question yet because the witness is going all around the houses. The point I was trying to get at is your survey by the Engaging Communities review showed that 15% of respondents said they would be interested in giving up time to help run activities for young people. Every youth organisation I know is desperately short of volunteers to run their organisations. Please, a very simple answer to a relatively simple question: what is the Neighbourhood, Crime and Justice Group at the Home Office doing to try to engage that 15% of the population to go out and help youth groups who are desperate for adult helpers?
Ms Casey: That is a very easy question to answer. Last year we trained over 4,000 members of the public who were tenants' leaders, Neighbourhood Watch leaders, and so on and so forth, key leadership members in their communities, to do a number of things, including setting up activities in community groups, knowing what their rights were by the police. The Community Crime Fighters programme is one of the things I am most proud of, and that answers your question quite directly.
Q18 Martin Salter: Ms Casey, you were talking about problem families. I know from my own constituency that the vast proportion of crime disorder, particularly low level semi-serious crime disorder, is perpetrated by a handful of people, a lot of whom were perpetrating it 20 years ago, and it becomes a generational thing. We do not appear to have broken the cycle. In respect of what we do with young offenders in youth custody, our youth re-offender rates are appalling. Over 70% of young people who go into first-time custodial sentences re-offend within two years. I totally agree with you on the inadequacy of the Youth Service, and it clearly needs to be brought up to speed. But is this not one of the missing pieces in the jigsaw - that we have to be serious about what we do with young people when they are in a custodial situation for the first time? Surely it is crazy to be moving them around the prison estate, sometimes for two weeks at a time, and not giving them proper detox or literacy programmes or the host of things you can do with somebody when you know you have them in a defined place for a specific period of time?
Ms Casey: It is fair to say that I have never been responsible for that area of policy. I think you are seeing the people who are and who have more expertise in that area. I can only say that I think we would prevent an awful lot more people ending up in that situation if we took a more robust approach, particularly in the youth criminal justice system, to involving parents in every single stage. I am so sorry to sound like a broken record on this, but it frustrates me that in the run-up to people going into custody and secure units and so on and so forth, it seems to me that sometimes we do not deploy the toughest methods we can to stop people ending up in the position you have just described - and then they end up in that position. I took a quick look yesterday. It was quite hard to find statistics, but when we eventually found the statistics I saw that in youth courts, in the disposals (that is the sentences handed out to individuals), in something like 60,000 individual offenders only about 1,000 or 1,500 were also getting a parenting intervention simultaneously. I just cannot urge the Committee enough to think about the ASBOs again. I was so frustrated over those years. It seemed to me that people did not grip that if you did an ASBO on a young person, you had to look at what was happening in their families. So many of those individuals in those institutions have siblings growing up in exactly the same situation, and parents who have been there before them. If we want to stop this, we have to take a really tough approach which involves support, but a tough approach to dealing with those families and those individuals.
Q19 Mr Streeter: Two questions from me, and I am very much enjoying your evidence. If you had an unlimited hand in this and the systems were working correctly, as they should, how good could things get? There have always been problem families, there has always been crime of course, but what is your vision for this? How much could we really do if things were working well?
Ms Casey: Again, I am on record as
saying that I have been frustrated at points. The Home Secretary used the expression
"coasting on antisocial behaviour". I
would agree with that. You cannot coast
on low level disorder. They are all crimes. Me spitting at an old lady in the street may
not end up in a court but it cannot be left unchecked. There is a sense that that is sometimes
difficult to do. The National Audit
Office took a long hard look, the previous Home Affairs Select Committee, the
Audit Commission, and what is interesting is that we cannot leave bad behaviour
and low level crime and antisocial behaviour unchecked. That is my first thing. I feel sometimes that we do, and I think
the evidence speaks for itself. Secondly,
on Family Intervention Projects my advice to the Government would be that I am
very, very clear that we need to have residential projects, core units that I
would almost equate to taking a family into care. Literally do not just deal with one
individual: take the lot. That is what
Dundee,
Q20 Mr Streeter: Things would get a lot better if you had a free hand.
Ms Casey: Indeed.
Q21 Mr Streeter: Going on to talk about preventing crime generally, although I entirely agree with why you said that, how effective are Neighbourhood Watch groups?
Ms Casey: The interesting thing about Neighbourhood Watch is that the evidence is it is mixed. I think that is fair. It comes back to the review that I did which shows really clearly that there is a fundamental mismatch between what the public want and what the public get. The public want to know that people are punished for breaking the law. They do not hear anything about that at all. They want to know how to get hold of people when they have a problem. Getting a policing pledge agreed and implemented across the country is happening, but I would not say it is a smooth process. They want to know that the issues that they are bothered about in their communities are being tackled. When you do all of that, you can rely on people coming forward. There is a real expectation that people volunteer when we do not have the basics right in terms of the public role. One small thing. I was in West Yorkshire and a great, fantastic Chief Superintendent said to me, "Louise, we're great here" - this is about 12/18 months ago, and they are a great force and they have changed - "In West Yorkshire we do alerts to Neighbourhood Watch: 'Could you keep an eye out for this person and let us know what is going on. If you see anything about him or her, let us know'." They never alerted Neighbourhood Watch to say, "We've caught them. This is what has happened to them." I wonder how much more powerful some of these community groups would be if they were armed with that information. I published this leaflet specifically to encourage the Community Crime Fighters and others to show what their rights were from the police and what they should expect.
Q22 Chairman: It would be very helpful to have a look at those leaflets. How many Neighbourhood Watch groups are there now in the country?
Ms Casey: I would have to look that up.
Q23 Chairman: Are they funded at all?
Ms Casey: I do not know whether it is
in the Home Office submission to you, but I think they get limited amounts of
money to run their networks. I have to
say I have a huge amount of time for things like residents' associations and
tenants' organisations. I would urge the
Committee not just to rely on Neighbourhood Watch. If I think of the people in many communities
in poor areas, there often is not a Neighbourhood Watch there. Neighbourhood Watch is the more
Q24 Gwyn Prosser: You have anticipated part of my question, because anecdotally it looks as if Neighbourhood Watch schemes are in the areas of least crime and least antisocial behaviour. Is that the case?
Ms Casey: There is a piece of research from 2004 that I looked at during the course of the review that said, yes, that was the case. In fairness to Neighbourhood Watch, which is a national organisation, they are at pains to extend their network. I just wonder sometimes if we did more to give the public what they wanted, we would empower (to use the word of last year) a lot of these organisations. Not giving them the information that then allows them to do their jobs as community leaders, I think they find very frustrating. I am not sure why, if we have not given the public a fair wind at crime, we are levelling any criticism at Neighbourhood Watch and others.
Q25 Gwyn Prosser: Coming back to the issue of involving the public in voluntary schemes, in a survey you did as part of your review, you found that 29% of people wanted more information on that. You have said something about that this morning. When they get that information and they find that they have to go through quite rigorous CRB checks, do you think that is a further barrier? Is there anything that can be done to alleviate that?
Ms Casey: The most fundamental thing is that the review found that the public are almost cut off from the criminal justice system; they do not hear about the consequences for criminals - hence I have been trying to push forward and get information out to the public about what happens in court. They have no idea what their service is from them. We all know how to get hold of our GP, but we have no idea how to get hold of the police in a non-emergency. Some of the things we take for granted in other areas, we do not get in crime. We have been trying, since I have been back in the Home Office, to push the police, the local authorities and the courts and others to give the public what they want, which is greater information.
Q26 Martin Salter: How are the public supposed to know how this jigsaw of involvement fits together? We have Neighbourhood Watch - which, you are absolutely right, tends to be in more affluent areas - residents' and tenants' groups; and then, over that, the Neighbourhood Action groups.
Ms Casey: What is fascinating about
what the review showed - sorry, I should have answered your question more
directly, and I think this is the same question - is that 3% of the public
would consider themselves active at the moment in helping tackle crime. Good luck to them if they are in
Neighbourhood Watch in
Martin Salter: Not a question but a follow-up memorandum on precisely those points would be incredibly helpful.
Q27 Chairman: Why has the Government failed to give this information? It has been in office for 13 years. You have been a senior civil servant for a great deal of time. Why are you telling the Home Affairs Select Committee now, after 13 years of this Government, that not enough information has been provided?
Ms Casey: What is interesting about it is that they asked me to do the review, which is now 18 months ago/two years ago, because they realised that crime was down very significantly. If you committed a crime as a child ten or 15 years ago, you would be an adult before you ended up in court. There was a real sense of how long the criminal justice system took to prosecute crimes. They have improved on those things. They were concerned to meet the public's desire for more police officers on the streets. But they found themselves in a situation which they asked me to look into, which is why then does the public not feel they are getting what they need on crime. What is interesting is that you cannot just level this at the Government; you have to level it at the police, the local authorities, youth organisations, the Youth Justice Board.
Chairman: We will be hearing from all of them.
Q28 David Davies: What percentage of the children that you deal with are living with their natural mothers and fathers?
Ms Casey: I do not deal with them personally.
Q29 David Davies: No.
Ms Casey: I would have to check. I would have to go back to our Respect Action Plan in 2006. We can get something like DCSF to let you have that.
Chairman: That would be very helpful, if you could let us have that information.
Q30 David Davies: Earlier on you were saying that we must not have a go at single parents. That is something I entirely agree with you on. Nobody wants to stigmatise them, but there is an issue with young women who are impregnated by young men - and we often forget about the men involved in this - who often are not really ready to deal with motherhood but who end up having two, three or four more children. They are going to find it very, very difficult, are they not, to bring them up in a responsible fashion if they are living in a deprived estate? Is that a reasonable assumption to make?
Ms Casey: One of the things which the public felt was common sense - and I think the evidence backs it up - is that in proposal 10 I suggested that if a child is excluded from school, if they are persistently truanting and they are found on their own late at night, if they are found behaving antisocially, or where a parent themselves are involved in drugs or crime and, I would say, other difficulties, it is common sense that there are at-risk groups. Some young parents will struggle. I would say somebody ought to be talking to them about whether they want to go on a parenting programme before the word "crime" is ever mentioned.
Q31 David Davies: I agree.
Ms Casey: That is really important.
Q32 David Davies: I almost feel that we are coming to a consensus on it, although I suspect we come from very different political viewpoints. I am just wondering whether you also think we might want to look at the benefits system, which appears to give financial encouragement to young women to have more than one child, and whether or not you think that is also something we should be looking at.
Ms Casey: In brief, I would say first of all that I am not from a political point. I am a civil servant and so I work for the ministers of the day. The second point to make is that I would say to you that over the years quite a number of ministers have asked to look at whether benefit incentivises or disincentivises people's behaviour. Each of the evidence each time has proved inconclusive.
Chairman: Thank you. And, indeed, you could end up working for Mr Davies after the election possibly.
David Davies: It is unlikely, but maybe for one of my colleagues.
Q33 Mr Winnick: Apart from working possibly with other people, Ms Casey, the job which you currently hold - Director-General of the Neighbourhood, Crime and Justice Group at the Home Office is your full title - was that advertised at the time, or did you apply on the off-chance, or what?
Ms Casey: No, it was not. I was already an existing civil servant. I had worked in the Home Office. I came in through open competition in 1999 - open and fair competition. Like many civil servants, you are then asked to do different things, so in 2003 I was asked to move to the Home Office, I was then asked to do Respect. You will find that civil servants move around and I have moved around.
Q34 Mr Winnick: You have given evidence before to this Committee either in your current position or previously. Ms Casey, as Director-General, how many staff do you have in your particular unit?
Ms Casey: This is also a very interesting thing: you can do a lot with a little. I have about 15 to 18 people in total.
Q35 Mr Winnick: Fifteen to 18 people under your support as Director-General.
Ms Casey: Yes.
Q36 Mr Winnick: And you are directly answerable to whom?
Ms Casey: The Permanent Secretary at the Home Office and I have a dotted line to Jerry Heywood in Number 10 and to Suma Chakrabarti, Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Justice. My team and the work we do, as you can see, spans the criminal justice system.
Q37 Mr Winnick: If you do not want to answer the question, I will not press you, but since everyone wants to be transparent these days, including Members of Parliament on their expenses, could you tell us how much your salary is?
Ms Casey: You can look up the rate of what a Director-General of the Civil Service is paid. I am happy for that to be in the public domain.
Q38 Mr Winnick: Would you like to give your salary?
Ms Casey: No. I am not going to give you my salary. I am here today to answer questions of policy.
Q39 Chairman: We can look it up on the website.
Ms Casey: You are more than welcome to look it up on the website. We have given that answer in parliamentary questions.
Chairman: I think we will leave it at that.
Mr Winnick: Yes, of course, Chairman. I said I would not press it. Ms Casey, let us say that your unit was not in existence, and the work undertaken by you, which I would not in any way want to denigrate - far from it, and I mean that - and your position did not exist and you did not have these 15 to 18 people working with you in the unit, how far would criminality be different, one way or the other?
Q40 Chairman: I think the question is, have you provided value for money?
Ms Casey: I think the answer to the question is yes. As we sit here, there are greater numbers of the general public who have a sense of what their rights are from the police. That is an Exocet missile: they will then have more confidence to contact the police. If you want to prevent crime, which I believe this Committee is looking at, you need to give the public the information they can contact, so that when they see a crime they can do something about it. Second, we have pushed very, very clearly forward and got policies such as not just leaving it to prison to be a punishment for people, but community payback. Having people in orange jackets cleaning the streets across the country would not have happened if there had not been a Neighbourhood, Crime and Justice Unit. That is a very clear, coherent policy to try to improve the sense that criminals do not get away with it but they are punished. Prison is one punishment; doing community payback is another. Giving the public what they want from the pledge; the 4,000 Community Crime Fighters was done directly by those 15 to 18 people during the course of last year; I have a relentless focus on visits. Obviously I think I am value for money.
Q41 Chairman: Thank you.
Ms Casey: But it is for you to decide.
Q42 Patrick Mercer: In your view, what will be the impact of the recession, Ms Casey, first of all on youth offending rates, and, secondly, on the funding for programmes?
Ms Casey: That is an interesting question, and in a way it follows on neatly from the other one. I would be upset and concerned if people used the recession as an excuse for not continuing to tackle youth crime or crime more generally. As I think I have made clear during the course of the evidence so far, a lot of what I have talked about does not cost money. For example, shifting from a Wednesday night to a Friday night, if it is, say, a youth activity, does not cost anything: it is just a change of approach. In the same way, public organisations like the police and local authorities give endless information to the public; they just do not give them what they want. Again, that is a change of approach. I would say that each of the things in which I have been involved over the last ten years as a civil servant - you might not want just to look at my salary, you might want to look at the budgets they have given me, tiny in comparison to some of the other things - you can do an awful lot to change culture if you have bold, relentless strategies that you follow through on. I do not think there is an excuse just to say, "Oh, there's a recession. Crime is going to go up." That would be a very disappointing position for anybody to take.
Q43 Patrick Mercer: I understand your aspiration, but do you think there will be an effect of the recession or have you seen evidence that there is already?
Ms Casey: The evidence is mixed at the moment. Without wanting to get into endless statistical debate, the British Crime Survey continues to show that crime has fallen and remains fallen. There are recorded crime statistics that show small rises in things. Burglary is certainly going in the wrong direction. I have to say that if you look at things they call "integrated offender management" - another very public, user-friendly expression, which essentially means zero tolerance of people who commit endless crime, particularly burglars, and we follow them from the minute they leave prison to keep them out of as much trouble as possible and to make their lives a misery if they are thinking about it - through to what they call "target hardening" - another extremely user-friendly expression, which is about making sure the public know to put a light outside their door - a lot has gone on. We are in a much better state of preparedness, but I would not like to see it used as an excuse.
Q44 Chairman: Are you telling this Committee that the fundamental answer to the question "What is the cause of crime?" is dysfunctional families?
Ms Casey: I would say dysfunctional families and families that are not coping that you could help very early on. You have extreme dysfunctional families that we should do much more with than we are. We started well: FIPs are great; Respect is great; all the evidence is right, you have to do that. You need an unrelenting focus on the enforcement of standards, I really believe that, and to let the public know that that is happening. Then you do parenting for people who are not at the level of dysfunctionality but are risk groups. You do not just leave it to taking them back to school and having a chat; you get their parents in and you put them on a parenting programme.
Q45 Chairman:
Since
you are before the Committee, there was a rather large article in the Evening
Standard yesterday indicating that you were to be running as Mayor for
Ms Casey: Yes. Again, I do not like answering personal questions at these things, but I suppose that is the nature of the beast. It is nonsense.
Chairman: Thank you very much. Ms Casey, thank you very much for the evidence. We have asked for a number of memoranda, if you could kindly let us have them, and, also, if you have any examples of good practice around the country, of projects that are involved in crime prevention, we would be very keen to see them. Thank you very much.
Witnesses: Ms Fiona Blacke, Chief Executive, Ms Peta Halls, Development Officer, National Youth Agency, and Mr Adnan Mohammed, User Voice, gave evidence.
Q46 Chairman: Good morning. Thank you very much for coming to give evidence. I am afraid I am going to be a little bit tougher on you than I was on the first witness, because you are the second witnesses, simply because time is marching on, and ask you for brief answers. Ms Blacke, is there evidence that you have that diverting young people to positive diversionary activities works in preventing offending in young people?
Ms Blacke: Absolutely, Chairman. We were involved on behalf of the Department Children, Schools and Families in working with 15 areas which were piloting positive activities for young people. Those areas put on diversionary activities. My colleague, Petra Halls, who is a specialist in this area, will say something about one project, if that would be helpful, just to give you an idea as to how that impacted directly.
Ms Halls: I want to talk a little bit
about
Q47 Chairman: If we are looking for key messages from youth workers about what particular kinds of activities work, as opposed to the practical examples you have given, what are the key messages?
Ms Blacke: There is a range of
activities, Chairman. It ranges from the
push that has come for Friday and Saturday night opening, which Louise Casey
talked about. I have to say I rather
take a different stance in relation to the number of local authorities
which are attempting to deliver that. I
think many of them are attempting to move services towards that. Open universal provision of high-adrenalin
activities that work as a real alternative to misbehaving on the streets, very
targeted provision, targeting groups of young people who are perceived as being
at risk or targeting young people already involved in offending behaviour. Perhaps really importantly detached and
outreach work, which picks up the point that
Mr Salter made about those young people who are not involved in any kind of
youth provision. Those are the kinds of
activities where people are engaging with young people who nobody is reaching.
Q48 Mr Winnick: Arising from what we heard from the previous witness, would you say that it is children from dysfunctional families who are causing first and foremost problems relating to criminality?
Ms Blacke: Yes, but I think it is broader than that. We are seeing an intergenerational effect. It picks up the issues around teenage pregnancy, for example, very young people with very low parenting skills then having children themselves and not having the ability, the skills or the support to parent those children effectively. I think it is about family support but I also think it is about community support. One of the issues is the extent to which communities believe they have a responsibility to grow their own young people into responsible adults.
Q49 Mr Winnick: I mentioned families in a different inquiry into black youth criminality. There is criminality from all kinds of users, as we all know, regardless of race or colour, but the point was made about the particular problems faced by a society as a result of criminality carried out by those where the father is absent, where in fact the father has hardly showed any interest, to say the least, in the children which he has been responsible for, in the sense of producing, being responsible biologically. Is that a particular aspect?
Ms Blacke: One of the things that we know from all the work that we have done as an agency over many years is that the most important thing for young people is long-term relationships with trusted adults. If you are a young man and you do not have an adult role model in your life, then there will definitely be issues for you, which is why we lobby very strongly for resources to go into individuals and communities so that people can take on their roles where fathers or, indeed, mothers are absent.
Q50 Mr Winnick: Perhaps in some respects this is historical, but is there any real difference in the pattern of youth criminality if you take a century ago and now, regardless of colour or race? It is basically from the same social grouping. You do not expect prosperous families, in the main, to have children engaged in criminality. It just would not make any sense. Am I right?
Ms Blacke: There has always been white collar crime of one form or another. It is a different sort of offending behaviour, I suspect, and perhaps you are less likely to be caught. I think you are right. If you had asked me the questions about what were the main causes of crime and disorder, I probably would have started with poverty, intergenerational poverty.
Q51 Chairman: As opposed to dysfunctional families.
Ms Blacke: I think dysfunctional families are a result of intergenerational poverty.
Q52 Mrs Cryer: Adnan, can I ask you to give us your views on the sort of provision for young people in your area - and I am not sure where you come from, so I do not know where the area is. Perhaps you could widen that to say whether any organised activity would have helped you in your earlier life before you got into trouble with the law.
Mr Mohammed: I live in South East
London. I grew up in Lambeth, the
Croydon Borough, around that area.
Basically, it is really non-existent.
I have recently come out of prison. I only got released on
Q53 Mrs Cryer: Your friends do not use the facilities that are available, whether it is with a pool table or table tennis or anything like that.
Mr Mohammed: No.
Q54 Mrs Cryer: In my constituency probably 30% of young people are Muslim, and I have a great deal of sympathy with them because they do not have anywhere to go and often finish up just chatting in cars. The people who live in the houses adjacent to those cars get a bit worried and ring the police, but they are not doing anything wrong. What do you think we should be doing to replace this sort of car mentality, where perhaps four young men are sitting in a car because they do not have anywhere to go, and all they want to do is chat without parents overhearing them?
Mr Mohammed: The scenario you just
explained now gets played out day in, day out in where I am from, and where I
grew up. I am from a Muslim background
as well. To answer your question
specifically, regardless of the person's background of whatever, when they find
that they do not feel that the laws that govern the society that we all live in
- as in working a nine-to-five job and being a responsible person in society - do
not apply to you, then you do not feel part of society, so you are governed by
your own rules and regulations. In my
society in
Q55 Chairman: Could you not make it too long. Briefly, please, Mr Mohammed.
Mr Mohammed: If there was inclusion and the young people were asked what they would like to do, I think that would help.
Chairman: Thank you. That is excellent.
Q56 Bob Russell: We just heard Adnan's account, and I was going to put a supplementary question to him: were you ever asked what activities you wanted to do? Perhaps I could put that question to you. Do you engage the disaffected, if I could use that term, to become engaged in purposeful activity?
Ms Blacke: Up and down the country there are great examples. Many of you will be involved in them, whether they be the Young Mayors, the Youth Parliament or even local committees of young people who are being engaged and invited to shape local provision, everything from the Youth Opportunity Fund to the Youth Capital Fund, where young people are making decisions about what is going to be spent. By 2018 the Government is determined under Aiming High that young people will have control of 25% of youth budgets. All of those seem to me really important opportunities. In the main, that is happening. Peta will know examples, and if you want them we can send them to you if that would be helpful. We do know that makes a difference.
Q57 Bob Russell: Both of you will have heard my question to the previous witness, and I am going to put it in similar terms to you. What is the role of the voluntary sector in crime prevention? How can we collectively encourage more volunteers to come forward?
Ms Blacke: The voluntary sector has an absolutely central role. You heard Adnan saying it is local people with local influence who are known and respected in the community who can make the biggest difference. There are barriers to people becoming involved as volunteers, or indeed to accessing funding, to establishing provision, so there are a number of things that need to happen. One is that there has to be really good commissioning by the local authority, really sensitive commissioning, which is not just about funding the obvious and the visible but recognises what the needs of young people are, engages young people in shaping that, and then commissions the right organisation, and sometimes builds the capacity. The smallest organisations are often the ones that do not have the systems and processes in place to secure government funding for these projects.
Q58 Tom Brake: Ms Blacke, you mentioned the Youth Parliament as being one of the ways in which you engage young people. Is not the problem with that that those young people would tend not to be disaffected, that they are very engaged young people who are involved? Can you give us some examples of successful projects that have engaged perhaps the sort of people that Adnan or Ann Cryer were talking about, who are sitting in a car somewhere, who are not going to join the Youth Parliament necessarily but it might be possible to engage them in another way?
Ms Halls: We do an awful lot of engagement and consultation work with young people who are traditionally deemed "hard to reach". We call them "easy to ignore" because that is what many people and organisations do. I have recently undertaken some work with some young people who are on the periphery of extremism, some Muslim young people who live in an area which is fairly volatile, and also some gang-involved young people, very hard to reach. To engage with those young people and to gain their trust, as somebody who is not from their community was extremely difficult. We found it incredibly interesting that they absolutely never would engage with the police. They have total distrust of authority. There is so much work to be done with these young people to make them feel a part of society, because at the moment they are living in another place.
Q59 Tom Brake: How do you do that?
Ms Halls: We engage with them. We have built the bridges, we have made the trust, but it is listening to them in terms of their views as to how to improve, and to open dialogue. For example, this piece of work was to open dialogue between them and the police as to how to make improvements, so those young people will feel they are being listened to and for the police then to come around with realistic actions to take forward, to start to improve not only relationships but to improve the situation for them so that they have trust and confidence in the police.
Ms Blacke: That ability to engage with young people, to listen to them and help young people represent their own views is a central skill set of youth work. One of the issues is about the under-resourcing of youth work. I am not talking about local authority statutory services, I am talking abut everything from supporting local people to developing those skills through to mainstream services.
Q60 Chairman: What happened to the Government's proposals that money in dormant bank accounts should be used to fund the Youth Service?
Ms Blacke: I think it was the Government's proposals that that money would be used to fund youth centres.
Q61 Chairman: Whatever it was supposed to be for, what happened to it?
Ms Blacke: They are not necessarily synonymous.
Q62 Chairman: No, but did they build a single centre?
Ms Blacke: Yes. There are a number of My Place Centres. Some of you will have those, with young people intimately involved in the design and shaping of those organisations, like the Sorrell Foundation working with young people.
Q63 Chairman: Would you have a list of these centres?
Ms Blacke: Absolutely.
Chairman: It would be very helpful if you could let us have them.
Q64 Gwyn
Prosser: Ms Blacke, you have mentioned some of the youth
funding schemes which the Government is putting in through local
authorities. In my
Ms Blacke: We are currently doing a
survey in
Q65 Gwyn Prosser: In particular, are you aware of any moves to cut the Youth Capital project, for instance?
Ms Blacke: No. In terms of the Capital projects, I am not aware of cuts, although we still do not know what is going to happen to the bulk of the unclaimed assets.
Q66 Gwyn Prosser: Have you heard anything about plans to cut the PAYP?
Ms Blacke: PAYP is not a discrete budget. It is not ring-fenced. In many local authorities, when they are talking about 10% or 20% cuts in service, PAYP falls into that, so I think we are already hearing about services being cut.
Q67 Martin Salter: There has been a lot of work done and a lot of talk about the value of engaging ex-offenders in working with young people at risk of getting involved in crime and antisocial behaviour, but it seems not to be that successful in achieving that. What barriers do you think there are to engaging ex-offenders in this process - obviously Adnan is doing valuable work - and what more could be done to encourage them?
Ms Blacke: I will let Adnan say
something in a minute, because I know he has a particular view about some of
the barriers. There are issues around
Mr Mohammed: Not just the
Q68 Martin Salter: For the clerk's benefit it would be very useful to note that recommendation about level I youthwork course in young offenders' institutions. Should we not be saying that there is a massive advantage in people having been involved in the criminal justice system in this type of work, so that far from being a barrier, it could almost be a qualification.
Mr Mohammed: 100%. Our life experience is our qualification.
Martin Salter: I agree entirely.
Q69 David Davies: There is a lot of talk here, I have heard it today and I hear it all the time, that the police must do more to engage with young people and must understand their point of view. Turning it around, as somebody who is a Special Constable myself, who has been abused on the street, may I say, by young people, do you not think there might be an argument for saying young people ought to understand what it is like to be a police officer, to work eight hours, 40 hours a week, to be abused, spat at, not treated with any respect whatsoever? It is not surprising that in some instances, unfortunately, police officers perhaps say things that they should not say when they are confronted yet again with somebody who is having a go at them for no good reason.
Mr Mohammed: Time and time again the police are seen as being the enemy when they are not. They are there doing their job and they should enforce the law at all times. At the same time, with the school system we have in this country, it detaches people from knowing what their nine-to-five is. The young people have no idea. When kids are young and they are in primary school, they like police officers. When they get to high school, that is when they start disliking the police. That is the crucial time that the work should be done between the police and young people.
Ms Blacke: Mr Davies, we can send you
examples of projects we have been involved in brokering relationships between
the police and young people, and older people actually, to have discussions
about how policing should take place and the relationships they should have. Peta has been very involved in work in
Q70 Mr Clappison: Adnan has touched on what I wanted to ask about. We do appreciate the work you are doing in this field. Could I draw on your personal experience a little bit more and talk about your experience of institutions. What sorts of programmes were available for you when you were serving your sentence for helping you to stay out of trouble?
Mr Mohammed: I think there were a lot of course that were meant for tick boxes, a lot of courses that were there just so that people could say that they had done something. I think we have missed the whole point of prison. It is there as a punishment, but it should be there to rehabilitate people as well. I think we just storage people: put them in storage and leave them to fester and then they come out with no skills. They do not understand. I was asked the question once: what would I change if I went back? If I had the power, what would be the one thing I could change? I said I would change the first month when you are in prison, because I think that is the most effective plan. If people were shown, "Look, you have done something wrong, this is your punishment, the judge has given you this and the jury of your case has found you guilty, but at the same time we want you to come back out and be a positive member of society," if that was enforced right from the start, that would help people and that would empower them to change their lives. While I was in prison, no courses. The first rule is that only the offender can stop offending, so if you do not choose to stop offending in the first place, prison does nothing for you. There is nothing. We should not kid ourselves to think that when you put someone in a cell, and it is a small cell, that is what changes them. It really does not. It is the person who changes himself.
Q71 Chairman: Did you learn any more criminal activities while you were in prison? Did you learn to do more than you knew before you went in?
Mr Mohammed: If I went in with that intention, I could have. I could have learned a lot more if I had wanted to, but that was not my intention. That was only because it was the choice that I made. It was nothing to do with the prison environment I was in.
Q72 Mr Clappison: On the positive side, was there any practical training offered to you; for example, to get another skill, to learn something?
Mr Mohammed: They emphasise basic skills, as in numeracy and literacy, and I think that is the target-driven side of it, where they try to help as many people that have low numeracy and English skills basically.
Q73 Mr Clappison: That is a good thing. What about if somebody wanted to do a course in, say, construction, mechanics or something like that, something practical which would help them to get a job when they came out?
Mr Mohammed: Unfortunately, if you were to go to a prison today, you would see that there are workshops where you go to where the prison makes money from the people who work, and it is not really geared to help people to learn new skills.
Q74 Mr Clappison: It is not training them.
Mr Mohammed: It is not at all.
Q75 Mr Clappison: It is not giving them skills.
Mr Mohammed: Not at all. When I was in the camp on the
Q76 Patrick Mercer: Are there any key recommendations which you would advocate in this area?
Ms Halls: I want to go back to the point about having a trusted person in young people's lives. That is really, really important. Whether the young person be involved with the youth offending service, whether they be out in the community on prevention programmes, or whether they be within a youth club, one of the overwhelming concerns and requests from young people is a constant responsible and trusted person in their lives.
Ms Blacke: There is going to be in the region of £360 million going from custodial budgets out to local authorities or sub-regional partnerships. If even a small percentage of those was focused on prevention, on ensuring that there were activities when young people needed them and that young people were involved in shaping those activities - and I am not talking about mainstream young people, I am talking about young people like Adnan - then I think that would make an absolutely enormous difference.
Mr Mohammed: The main thing we could do is include people within the system, because we always feel like we are being dictated to, we always feel like we are being talked at and not being talked to. Right now, I know so many of my friends and people I have grown up with that have no idea that there is a Home Office Select Committee that is going on that is trying to solve these problems. Why am I the only young person here? Should we not be involved in the solutions? We are part of the problem: should we not be included in the solution as well?
Q77 Chairman: How many members of your group User Voice are there?
Mr Mohammed: User Voice only started six months ago. It is really for ex-offenders. We say that only offenders can stop re-offending, so if you do not include us in the whole picture - and not as a token, because we have got some great ideas of ways to solve it ---
Q78 Chairman: Mr Mohammed, there is a way of doing this. Why do you not get together a group of people? We will either visit them wherever your community group is or we would like them to come here. If you feel this is too intimidating, we will come to you.
Mr Mohammed: It is not a community group. User Voice is a national charity.
Q79 Chairman: Yes, I understand that. I am saying that here is our challenge to you. You have made a very valid point: we need to include you and we need to include young offenders. We want to get to the bottom of this. Why do you not get together a suitable group of people, the kinds of people the Select Committee on Home Affairs should talk to, so that it is not just men and women in suits talking to you - at you, as you say - but involved in a dialogue, we would be delighted to give you that challenge and we would be delighted to work with you. Can you do that for us?
Mr Mohammed: 100%. I am delighted.
Q80 Chairman: Could I ask you one question of a personal nature. Why do you think people commit crimes? You may want to draw on your own experience. Why do they go out and commit crimes in the first place? Is it the dysfunctional family that we have heard about? Is it poverty?
Mr Mohammed: To be real honest, it is the socio-economic background and situation that you find yourself in. As a young person, I did not ask to be brought up in the environment I was brought up in, but that is where I found myself. When I walk out of my front door and I do not feel like I am being involved in anything, I feel everything is happening to me. You feel victimised to a certain extent, and from there there is a resentment that grows. If you then go back to your house and you live in a dysfunctional house, then that just exacerbates the situation. But if I tell you the truth, I did not come from a dysfunctional background. I have got a great mum. My mum is very law-abiding. She always taught us right from wrong. But that was not why I committed crime.
Q81 Chairman: Then why did you commit your crime?
Mr Mohammed: The reason why I committed crime was basically financially. That was the real reason for it. Because I did not want to do the nine-to-five. I saw people like you walking down the road. I have seen you on television ---
David Davies: We do not want to work nine to five either. It is the only way to make a living.
Q82 Chairman: Let us keep focused on this.
Mr Mohammed: Basically I did not want to do the nine-to-five and struggle when I looked out my front door and I saw other people that did not have to that, that were above the law to a certain extent. I did not have the motivation to be a part of society. I was not given that motivation. I was not empowered enough to think I could do it. I was very bright at school. I am at university. I have been at university.
Q83 Chairman: It is because of that you felt you had to go out and commit your crime. What was the crime that led to you going to prison?
Mr Mohammed: I was in prison for five counts of robbery.
Q84 Chairman: And you did it because you needed the money.
Mr Mohammed: It was not that I needed the money. It was not even that I needed the money; it was that someone owed me the money and I got my money back off them. But then they went to the police and said that I robbed them, and when we went to court I was not believed. That is just how it simply happened. But I was guilty for my crime. I really was. But the question you are asking, Chairman, what you are trying to get at is why did I commit the crimes in the first place, and the fact of the matter is that it is the socio-economic background that you find yourself in. That is first, and then, on top of that, you get hurt and you feel disenfranchised by this whole big machine that is British life. That is what it is. Because I walk around the streets and I see people like you in suits and we do not live in the same world. We do not live in the same world, we really do not. We could walk past you and we could be on the tube, we could walk past you on the streets, but we do not live in the same world. My problems at night are not the same problems you have. The pain and the problems I went through, where do I get help from? Who helps me? Is it my MP? Is it the police? Is it the social workers? Where does the buck stop at the end?
Chairman: Thank you. It would be very helpful if you would get together a group of people we can talk to and engage with, because these are very serious matters and we want to conduct a serious inquiry into dealing with the reasons why we prevent crime. That would be very helpful. I would like to thank our witnesses very much. Thank you.
Witnesses: Mr John Drew, Chief Executive and Mr Bob Ashford, Head of Youth Justice Strategy, Youth Justice Board, gave evidence.
Q85 Chairman: Mr Drew and Mr Ashford, thank you very much for coming to give evidence to this Committee. You have heard, as we have done, evidence from our witnesses this morning. The evidence seems to be a little depressing in the sense that what we have heard is that this is a cycle that starts virtually from birth, the environment in which young people live in. Can we predict from birth or from a very young age whether a child is going to be someone who is going to go on to commit offences in the future?
Mr Drew: You cannot predict from birth whether someone is going to commit offences or not. There are a whole series of factors that make it more likely or less likely that a child or a young person will offend, and they build as the child goes through their childhood. I think in our submission of evidence to you we highlighted the four main areas which certainly include the family background, parenting, but also include what is happening within the school environment, that include the wider community within which the child was being raised and will also include the really important influence of peers, of other children.
Q86 Chairman: The Youth Justice Board was the creation of this Government, was it not?
Mr Drew: It was.
Q87 Chairman: Just to remind this Committee, could you tell us what your budget is and how many people you employ?
Mr Drew: Yes, our budget is £511 million for this year.
Q88 Chairman: Half a billion pounds.
Mr Drew: Yes, that is correct. Directly employed, the Youth Justice Board has a headcount of 260 members of staff, not all of those are full-time. Obviously that £511 million does a lot more than just employ those people. Within that budget you will have all the money for youth custody, a number of establishments of different sorts throughout the country, and for the 22,000 paid and unpaid staff who work within the Youth Offending Teams for whom we provide 20% of their funding.
Q89 Mr Winnick: How much of the work and budget of your organisation is dedicated, Mr Drew, first and foremost to crime prevention?
Mr Drew: Specifically money that is labelled as prevention money is £36 million, Sir, although a number of our other budgets are spent on things that, depending on what you define as being prevention, are preventive activity in the sense that they are there to prevent reoffending. The money that is specifically targeted on preventing offending in the first place and, therefore, is for work with youngsters who have not as yet offended is £36 million.
Q90 Mr Winnick: I wonder if I can take you somewhat wider. There is a feeling, certainly amongst many of my own constituents, and I would be surprised if it was different for colleagues around the table and generally in the House, that for those who commit crime and where crime prevention has not worked and criminality takes place amongst young people, appropriate punishment - and I am not talking about what happened in the past or anything like that, the hanging or flogging brigade, - is not taking place which encourages criminality. Do you have a view on that?
Mr Drew: I do, Sir, and I believe it is very important that the first response is punitive. That is the purpose we are seeking to achieve. Beyond that, you have to move beyond pure punishment in order to try to prevent reoffending. You are, I know, only too aware that is the primary task of the criminal justice system so far as it concerns young people. Punishment is incredibly important and punishment exists in a number of different ways. Firstly, obviously, for the 2,600 young people in custody today, their loss of liberty is a punishment, and that figure taken through the year will be about 8,000 young people who are in custody at some stage or other during the year, but also a number of our community sentences, particularly the more intensive ones, intensive supervision and surveillance, are punitive, that is one part of the intention of the sentence, and indeed it would not be credible with the youth courts were it not so.
Q91 Mr Winnick: If I can take you up on community service, which certainly to me, I do not know about other colleagues, makes sense, where it is appropriate as an alternative to a custodial sentence. Again, does it really mean much? The general impression, it may be wrong, amongst the public is that you turn up and perhaps if you do not turn up nothing much is done, you do a bit of street cleaning or picking up leaves and the rest of it and it is not considered much of a punishment by those who have committed criminality of one kind or another. What is your response to that?
Mr Drew: I think two things. Firstly, we do need to remember here that what we are talking about are children and young people and so society would rightly set different types of punishment for children and young people than they would for adult offenders. Secondly, the direction, "You will be in such and such a place, you will take part in such and such an activity" is punitive and is experienced as such by the young people doing it. Then our sentences in the community are backed up by and enforced through breach procedures.
Q92 Mr Winnick: Are you satisfied community sentencing is tough enough? Have you gone round and seen for yourself what is actually happening?
Mr Drew: I have spent, in effect, all my working life in this area. I believe that we engage young people, we confront them with the consequences of their behaviour in a much more purposeful way than we did when I started which was in the mid-1970s. I believe we have got the balance broadly right. Of course there are always areas where programmes are better run and less well run but I do believe we have got the balance broadly right, yes, Sir.
Q93 Mrs Cryer: Mr Drew, can I ask you, because I have had the same experience as Mr Winnick in that I have a very good organisation in my constituency which does work with probation officers in giving work for persons doing community work, but when those persons do not turn up and they ring a probation officer to say, "Fred has not turned up today" - which is very discouraging for the people who are trying to organise the work - the probation officer frequently cannot do anything because they just do not have enough probation workers. Is this what you are finding? Do we have enough probation workers or have we got rid of too many and they are unable to make these community programmes work effectively?
Mr Drew: I think you are probably describing in that particular example the adult system, but the youth system is not fundamentally different.
Q94 Mrs Cryer: No, they were young people.
Mr Drew: Right. Apologies. Someone in my role is always going to say that there is more that could be done if you had higher levels of staffing. I referred earlier to the fact that centrally through the YJB only 20% of the funding for Youth Offending Teams is brought about, 80% comes from local authorities, local health care trusts and the like. There has been a very substantial expansion over the last ten years, and broadly I think we have got the resources to deliver the range of community sentences that are available.
Q95 David Davies: Mr Drew, I went on one of these community sentences once and amongst other highlights was one of the young people turning round to his social worker telling her, "Go and get me my f ... ing chips, I'm not going to queue" and even more surprisingly she obediently trotted off and bought them for him. I last saw her trying to stop six of them going off to the shops. I was going there as a Member of Parliament and they presumably roll the red carpet out to try and make these things look gone. I was frankly horrified by what I saw. Is my experience typical or did I just go on the only one which is hopelessly run?
Mr Drew: No, I am sure you did not go on the only one, but clearly you are also absolutely right in suggesting that is completely unacceptable. It makes a mockery of the idea of community sentences. I have to say if that was widespread then the youth courts would be aware of it. Magistrates have got pretty good antennae in that sense.
Q96 David Davies: Can I throw out a challenge to you. Since then, I have raised it before and everyone has said, "Oh, Mr Davies, come back and have a look at one of ours". What I would like to do is say, "Yes, that is fine, I will do that" but I am not going to tell you when I am going to turn up. I want you to give me one in the Gwent area with a whole load of dates, sometime over the next 12 months, and I will make a surprise visit. I would love it and if you, Mr Drew, could arrange that I will report back honestly what I find. I am not prepared to do it unless I can turn up by surprise. Can you help me?
Mr Drew: Chairman, I can most certainly discuss that with the local authority in Gwent.
Q97 David Davies: Excellent.
Mr Drew: I do not have the authority to direct them because of the way we are cast constitutionally. I completely take your point. I do not know whether or not my colleague, Mr Ashford, wants to say anything more about that.
Mr Ashford: I was just going to come in if I could, Chairman, to say we are concentrating rather a lot on the punishment and enforcement and of course a lot of the work we do and a lot of the work the Youth Offending Teams do is to try to offer support and to identify the needs of young people to try to change their behaviour because clearly that is somewhere that we do want to go. Of course enforcement and punishment is absolutely critical in the work we do.
Q98 David Davies: Let me forego my other questions and just ask you this then. As a victim of crime who dealt with the youth justice team in Gwent I wanted to know when that criminal was going to be in court, he was a young person, up for burglary, I wanted to know what his punishment was. I was not told when he was in court. The punishment was not explained to me at all even though I kept writing as a member of the public and eventually from that board I got a patronising letter referring to him by his first name and sort of implying that it was pretty wrong of me to be demanding that he be banged up and wanting to know what was going to happen to him saying, "This poor lad was going to be incarcerated", treating me in a patronising and disgraceful fashion and telling me more or less that I needed counselling, ie some social worker coming round to drink my tea when I was justifiably angry with both him and the way I was treated by these people who are supposed to be victim-focused. Gwent Youth Justice Team, or whatever they are called these days, are an absolute disgrace and are not interested in victims of crime at all, but only in protecting the perpetrators in my view.
Mr Ashford: It is difficult obviously to comment on a certain instance like that within a certain Youth Offending Team.
Q99 Chairman: Maybe you can comment on the principle involved.
Mr Ashford: In principle, the general principle is we try to do, and the Youth Offending Teams try to do, and have been increasing the work they are doing with victims over the past ten years. Indeed, in many Youth Offending Teams it is actually the police officer within the Youth Offending Team who makes that first initial contact with victims because of the experience that police have in dealing with victims. There are numerous other schemes we are involved with, for instance restorative justice, which has increased dramatically over the last ten years and of course restorative justice is about trying to put right the deed the young person has done but also to try to address victims needs as well. In many of the approaches we have, both in terms of community punishments and, indeed, in pre-court interventions, restorative justice is in fact a key strand of that work that Youth Offending Teams do. We can always do more and clearly there will always be instances when that does not work.
Q100 David Davies: Can I say I have first hand experience of it being a failure. Maybe everywhere else in the country is fine, I do not know
Mr Drew: I do not think we are saying that, no, but clearly it is a bad experience. I would just like to pick up, if I might, Chairman, the point that Louise Casey made about at times the invisibility of the criminal justice system and the public not knowing what happens.
Q101 Chairman: The issue of information.
Mr Drew: Absolutely. I think you are going where I am going in the
sense that there is a dilemma in relation to youth justice in respect of this
because it is enshrined in statute, the anonymity in most instances of the
young offender, and given that they are children and young people there are
reasons behind that. I think my Board
does recognise that actually we ought to and are doing more to make what
happens in the youth justice system more apparent, to make the nature of the
sentencing, whether it be community or custodial, more clear to the public so
that they can more assured. If I can
just give one instance of that. We
launched in November a new scheme called Making
Good whereby members of the public, in the first instance in the
Q102 Mr Streeter: Moving the conversation on a little, though I think it is quite relevant, there are no doubt a lot of young people who get tangled up in the criminal justice system because they commit crimes but then they grow out of it. Do we have any statistics about what number of people that happens to and, whether you do or do not have numbers it is obviously something that does happen, how does that help us to prioritise where we place resources? We do not want to criminalise young people if they will grow out of it, we do not want them to grow out of it with a huge problem in their history but can you talk to us about that for a moment?
Mr Drew: I can and then I will hand over to Bob as well. Firstly the phenomenon is right, broadly speaking. We will provide your Committee with a graph which shows the pattern of offending against age and you will see very clearly a peak somewhere around the 18/19 age range and a rapid fall away after that as well as a build up from 10 onwards. There are real dilemmas here. I do not think there is a case, as some critics of the current system would say there is, for saying, "They are going to grow out of it so we will leave them alone", not least because I think that would be unacceptable to the communities who are blighted by the offending behaviour. What we try to do is to strike a really delicate balance and it is based ultimately on looking at the individual and assessing the risk they represent to themselves, to their community, to the people who may be the victims of their crime, to strike a sensible balance between those cases where we do divert away from the criminal justice system and those cases where we are very actively involved. We elaborate a bit on that in our evidence to your Committee.
Mr Ashford: I think it is fair to say when the Youth Justice Board started just over ten years ago, and the Youth Offending Teams started just over ten years ago, the emphasis of both the YJB and Youth Offending Teams was really on preventing reoffending. What we have done over the last ten years is to shift that emphasis away not just from preventing reoffending, which we have done very successfully, but also to prevent offending in the first place. Again, the primary aim of the Crime and Disorder Act is to prevent offending by children and young people. We have developed over the last ten years a range of services through Youth Offending Teams, a range of programmes through Youth Offending Teams, and been happy in attracting additional funding over that ten years from Government to give to Youth Offending Teams to be able to identify those very young people that we believe and the Youth Offending Teams believe are going to go on to become offenders. It is not really rocket science either because where a young person's parents, for instance, or their father has been in prison or their elder brother or sister has been involved in offending it is fairly likely that young person is going to go on to start offending themselves. The trick is to identify within local communities who the most predictable young people are who are going to go on to commit crime and to try to bring about interventions designed to divert them from that possible offending behaviour. I think we have been fairly successful in the last ten years at doing that. Certainly within the last three or four years where we have seen the number of first-time entrants to the youth justice system fall very significantly. I think that has been a record of the programmes that we in Youth Offending Teams have managed to put in place during that time.
Q103 Bob Russell: In the spirit of joined-up government, a lovely phrase which probably dates back to a golden age that may never have existed but in the spirit that hopefully we can still have some of it, in 2004 the Audit Commission argued that preventative activity needs to be better co-ordinated and overseen from a single source. To what extent is this still the case five or six years on?
Mr Drew: I think there have been improvements in the last five years in relation to local co-ordination and we have yet got a long way to go. The key point here is that co-ordination, as your question implied, can only take place locally. As a central funder we can make, as a grant condition, all sorts of requirements, and indeed we do, about funding streams being joined-up locally. The key thing is that it has to be joined-up on the ground in local authorities. There are two key places for that: one, the Children's Trust and in the evolution of the Children's Trust increasingly it is a commissioning body, a place where people with funds come together to discuss the delivery of programmes, so that is one, and the other is the Crime and Disorder Partnership. Again, a number of funding streams now have to be spent and commission decisions have to be made within the Crime and Disorder Partnership.
Q104 Bob Russell: So I can get a better feel of these funding streams, so I can get a comparison, what is the annual cost of keeping a young person in a Young Offender's Institution?
Mr Drew: It does vary because there are three main categories.
Q105 Bob Russell: Let us have the three categories.
Mr Drew: The Young Offenders Institution, broadly, is about £51,000 to £52,000.
Q106 Bob Russell: £1,000 a week.
Mr Drew: Yes. The secure training centre is about £165,000 and a secure children's home is about £212,000. If I could try and illustrate that in terms of numbers. Secure children's homes today, 168 children are in secure children's homes out of the 2,600 who are in custody in total. There is capacity in the secure training centres for 301 children at any one time, although actually in terms of placements today the number is about 240/250, and the bulk is taken up by YOIs. From that you will deduce a number of things, the principal one of which is that most young people in custody are aged 16 and 17 and most of those are in YOIs.
Mr Ashford: Can I come in as well on that question, if I may? In terms of joined-up government, there have been other advances as well in the last few years, particularly around central Government joined-upness. It was around three or four years ago the Youth Justice Board had a single sponsor department in terms of the Home Office. Machinery of government changes now mean that both DCSF and the Ministry of Justice have become our joint sponsors, if you like. That has given us a better bridge between children and young people and justice elements in terms of central Government and better understanding there. We have also, of course, seen the Public Service Agreement developments and national indicator sets also developed over the last few years as well. What that has done is to shift away the onus of what was seen as the responsibility of the YJB and YOTs just by ourselves to reduce reoffending upon local authorities and their partners to also be seen to be responsible for preventing offending and reoffending as well because there are national indicators now which local authorities and their partners have to adhere to in terms of both the prevention of crime and the prevention of reoffending as well.
Q107 Bob Russell: Can I just ask one linked question to that. Local authorities are being screwed down now on their finances, is that not going to impact on their contribution for dealing with preventative crime measures and if that is not happening then it is going to push even more people into these very costly dealing with the consequences of criminal activity by young people?
Mr Ashford: There is a huge possibility there and, again, one of our challenges, if you like, to Government is to say, "We believe we have made some significant advances over the last ten years in both preventing offending, reoffending and indeed in the last 12 months in reducing the numbers of young people in custody". The challenge now is to sustain that and it would be very easy to say prevention funding particularly is something which is a sort of icing on the cake, if you like. It is not, it is the foundation of the youth justice system, both in terms of central Government funding and local government funding as well. The challenge is to maintain that.
Q108 Mrs Dean: Could you tell us what is the rationale behind the introduction of the Youth Rehabilitation Orders and what is your view about how this can contribute to reducing reoffending?
Mr Drew: The YRO was an attempt to rationalise the various sentencing options and I could link that back to this issue about public understanding, if I might. The public need to understand the shape of sentences. The more complex sentencing options are the less likely they are to understand it. It was principally an attempt to codify, to bring together, a range of separate sentences which existed. Secondly, and this is perhaps a more distinctive feature of the YRO, it has set an explicit test around the use of custody in the sense that now when youth courts are considering custody they have to set down expressly why it is that they have chosen not to take any of the stiffer community sentences prior to ordering a period in custody, so there is a change there. Then, lastly, I suppose what the YRO is doing is it is pushing certain sentencing options, so clauses within the YRO which are not at the moment universally available and it is trying to create pressure for that. The most obvious example of that is intensive fostering where a young person who would have otherwise gone into custody goes and lives with foster parents for a specific period of time. That is only available at the moment in pockets of the country. It is now a clause within the YRO and our hope is that we will be able to use a variety of mechanisms, which I could talk about if time allowed, in order to see funding spread out so that intensive fostering is available. We know from our work with the Magistrates' Association that broadly speaking magistrates across the country wish to have that as one of the ranges of sentences.
Q109 Mrs Dean: How many YROs have been issued, do you know?
Mr Drew: That I do not know. I am sure we could get that statistic but it is very early days because of the particular point about when you can make a YRO relates not just to the implementation of the act but also the commission of the offence. We are still in very early days.
Q110 Mrs Cryer: Can I ask you again about reoffending. If I was a young person today coming off a community sentence or I had been in prison and I just came home, what would be the difference in what would happen to me now than would have happened to me perhaps two years ago in order to persuade me not to reoffend?
Mr Drew: There are differences everywhere you look. I will not talk about the work that we are doing on resettlement simply because Bob Ashford leads on that and he ought to talk about it and take the credit for the work that we are doing. What I will talk about, therefore, is the offender behaviour work that we are doing within custody in particular. I was as disappointed as I suspect your Committee were hearing Adnan's evidence about the apparent lack of work done with him while he was in custody to affect his behaviour. Our take on custody is very simply this: it is a punishment and the punishment is the loss of liberty. Once thereafter you have a youngster under 18 in custody your task is to do everything you can to equip them to not reoffend when they come out of custody and, therefore, offender behaviour schemes within custody are very important. In the best institutions there are now well-developed programmes supported by psychological input which take each individual youngster through their offences and confronts them with the consequences of it and explores what can be done to make sure they do not reoffend. There is still much more that can be done, but I was reading in preparation for this session a review of the unit that the YJB opened at Wetherby YOI during the summer, the Keppel Unit, which is targeted specifically on a sub-set of young men who would be in YOIs where they were praising the offender behaviour management programmes within the YOI and from the point of view of inspectors saying it was the most purposeful thing that they had seen in a long period of time. That would be one example of how we are trying to roll out real improvements in how we engage with youngsters in custody. Bob will now talk about resettlement.
Mr Ashford: In July 2008 the Youth Crime Action Plan announced some new initiatives around the resettlement of young people from custody, because that was something we most definitely wanted to see in the Youth Crime Action Plan. Over the last couple of years we within the YJB have formed a programme board with several work streams. First of all, integrated resettlement support is a new scheme we are developing. It is based on the old resettlement and aftercare programme but is, if you like, an enhanced version of that programme. We have been lucky enough to drawdown some additional funding of £3 million last year and this year for that particular programme and we have issued new guidance to Youth Offending Teams but, importantly, what we have also done is to try to ensure that it is not just Youth Offending Teams that are working on the resettlement of those young people from custody but also local authorities, children's services, housing authorities especially because what we do know is that young people leaving custody in terms of trying to gain accommodation, trying to gain employment, trying to gain education, those are the three areas where they find it incredibly difficult. The reality is unless we can find something for young people to do when they leave custody they will very quickly go within that revolving door back into custody again. We also know that, happily, whilst the numbers of young people in custody are going down, those young people who leave custody very often do go on, as we have heard this morning, to reoffend and we know, in fact, that those young people can be some of the most prolific young offenders. It really is incumbent upon all of us, both Youth Offending Teams and local authority children's services, to actually do whatever we can to try to reduce that number of young people going back via that revolving door. We have another initiative, which is called Resettlement Consortia. We have developed both in the North West area and we are developing in the South West area, based around Ashfield YOI in the South West and Hindley YOI in the North West, the notion of trying to bring local authorities and Youth Offending Teams closer together to try to identify and work with the YOI within that particular area, to try to identify those young people who are going to be the most vulnerable, the most likely to commit offences again when they leave custody and to try to produce what we call an enhanced offer to those young people to try to ensure that local services are brought to bear to try to produce education opportunities, accommodation opportunities and employment opportunities. That is looking extremely promising as I speak.
Q111 David Davies: A quick question: have you met the targets that have been set for preventing people going into custody and for preventing them from reoffending?
Mr Ashford: There are two areas and I will talk about custody after that. The first target is in relation to numbers of first time entrants. We have met the target, in fact we have met the target for 2020 so we are there. The second target is in relation to the frequency of reoffending, that is the measure that the Government wished to measure, there are other ways of measuring reoffending. So frequency measures the number of times that someone having gone through a sentence will reoffend. On frequency we are ahead of trajectory for our end target, that is that we have reduced the rate greater than we would need to do through the period of the target but we are not at the end of the target period now and from memory it is 2011. I am confident we will make that target. Then in relation to custody - I can talk all day about this - there is a history in relation to target setting for custody. The Government has in the past set targets and then has moved away from targets.
Q112 David Davies: I think I asked for the maximum number of people going into custody?
Mr Ashford: Set targets for the total number of young people in custody at any one time in terms of seeking a reduction. At the moment there is no target but on 31 December last year there were 12% fewer young people in custody than there were the previous year. It is a difficult issue which I am sure you will rapidly get, what is the right level to be achieved.
Q113 David Davies: Can you give us a list of all the targets you are meant to achieve?
Mr Ashford: Of course I can, yes.
Q114 Mrs Dean: Overall, what is your view of the Government's approach to youth crime prevention and is there anything you think should be done differently?
Mr Drew: I think what has happened over the last ten years, and clearly the Government has led this but it is more than just the Government, is there has been a huge amount of focus on youth offending in a way that was not there beforehand. That is reflected in the legislation, it is reflected in the creation of Youth Offending Teams, the bringing together of a wide range of people from different backgrounds - police, social services, health and the like - to work together in a co-ordinated way which is the integrated Government question. I think that is why we are seeing the sorts of results we have just been talking about in terms of achievement of targets. That is very praiseworthy. In terms of areas where there is a need for another step, Bob has already talked about one which is especially in relation to resettlement, but there is actually a broader range of people, organisations and the like that need to be brought in to really make a step change in relation to resettlement. I will illustrate that, if I might, with just one statistic. I was looking at figures for one YOI the other day and of the 1,000 young people discharged, having completed their sentence there, over a third went into bed and breakfast in terms of their accommodation. Sometimes that will be the right thing, I am not saying it will not be always, but I think you and I both know that some of our bed and breakfasts are amongst the most unsatisfactory temporary types of accommodation, and it brings with it all the risks that custody does in terms of who else is there and what habits might be passed on. That highlights, for example, in that area in relation to housing but I am an ex local authority director of housing and I think housing services need much more to be linked into this field. Lastly, I think we are probably due a discussion around what is the proper length of a custodial sentence. There is a view within the secure estates that actually if they had young people in custody for longer they could do more with them and there is clearly a trade-off there because it is the taking away of a young person's liberty. The average period in custody as things stand is 73 days and if we see custody as being about changing young people's behaviour, that is a very short period of time. Having said which, as we have already highlighted, custody is an immensely expensive disposal. My broadest belief would be that if there was to be a serious debate about length of sentence that would have to be balanced by looking at some of the young people who are in custody at the moment and saying, "Actually the response to their offences can just as satisfactorily be dealt with within the community". The Canadian Government in recent times has achieved that balance. You might through that balance be able to come up with something that was more effective than what we have done today, even though I think the last ten years in terms of young offending has been a very impressive period.
Q115 Chairman: A final question from me, Mr Drew. Do you feel that you have met the Government's objectives as far as preventative work is concerned? You mentioned your budget was half a billion pounds a year. What kind of proportion of that do you think has gone to prevention as opposed to dealing with the crimes after they have been committed?
Mr Drew: The simplest way is to say that £36 million has specifically gone to prevention.
Q116 Chairman: Only £36 million out of £501 million?
Mr Drew: That is correct. The reason for that is because the custody bill is with us, so I do not make a decision as to what proportion of the YJB's budget is spent on custody, that decision is in effect made within the courts. The only decision that I make is what sort of level of capacity do I run at in order to guarantee to the courts there is always a place available and also to guarantee to the young people that intelligent decisions can be made with a very young child, for example, being sent to custody at 11 or 12, it can happen, that they are not with 17 year olds.
Q117 Chairman: It would, I know, be very helpful to the Committee, because this inquiry relates specifically to prevention, if you would let us have a note as to how this £36 million is spent?
Mr Drew: Of course.
Q118 Chairman: I do not know whether you were in for Miss Casey's evidence. How often would you meet someone like Louise Casey to discuss the issue of prevention?
Mr Drew: I seem to bump in to Louise Casey quite a lot.
Q119 Chairman: You do at seminars and giving evidence, but sitting round the table and talking about the nuts and bolts of prevention, how many times would you be able to sit down with her and her team and say, "Look, let us try and work together as part of the criminal justice system to prevent crime rather than deal with the aftermath of crime"?
Mr Drew: The Government has a very complex system of boards and officials ---
Q120 Chairman: Is it too complex? Are there too many boards? Are there too many structures?
Mr Drew: No, in this regard the board
that oversees our work in relation to prevention is the
Q121 Chairman:
That
is the central co-ordinating committee, if I can borrow something from the
Mr Drew: Within
Q122 Chairman: You referred to it as complex, is it too complex? Should it be simpler?
Mr Drew: Personally I think it works.
Q123 Chairman: Would you let us have a little map showing how it all works?
Mr Drew: I was going to say we will draw you up a note on that.
Chairman: Mr Drew, Mr Ashford, thank you very much for giving evidence today.