Examination of Witnesses (Questions 220
- 233)
TUESDAY 1 JULY 2008
1 JULY 2008 MIKE
THOMAS, JOHN
COUGHLAN AND
BOB REITEMEIER
Q220 Chairman: Non-compliance with
earlier penalties?
John Coughlan: Quite possibly.
We need to look at the criteria for sentencing as a way into managing
the behaviour of sentencing practitioners. I do not want to accept
responsibility for the funding for custody if I am just behaving
as a post box and we are effectively shunting the huge pressures
I know the YJB have faced back onto local government. I do not
think that would be particularly effective. Finding some ways
where we do go from purchasing into commissioning for a range
of alternatives will be the way forward. We have to recognise
as well that these budgets relate to quite large institutional
provision. For us to effect a change in the use of this money
you are talking about quite large decommissioning activity. We
cannot recommission the services through the use of that money
without decommissioning what the money is being spent on at the
moment. That is fairly profound behaviour.
Q221 Chairman: What has happened
is as we have made transfers into non-custodial other people have
arrived to fill in the custodial places.
John Coughlan: Absolutely, and
some partners in the health sector would make exactly the same
argument about the acute sector in health.
Q222 Alun Michael: We are right at
the centre of the question of what the potential is for re-prioritising
money but your focus has been rather on the re-prioritising of
money from mainstream services to the customers of the Youth Offending
Teams. What about the other way? What is the potential for re-prioritising
the money currently spent on youth justice into more mainstream
services albeit targeted?
John Coughlan: There are lots
of opportunities there as well. We are seeing the establishment
of local children's trusts and I understand DCSF is thinking through
further how children's trusts can evolve. The best local children's
trusts are becoming effective commissioning arrangements to target
resources where they are most needed and they are doing so through
the use of the Common Assessment Framework. One of the dimensions
to some of the future changes would be to see how we can more
closely relate the ASSET framework to the Common Assessment Framework
so there is better interplay between the two. Again we are looking
at some twin tracking approaches which may not support more effective
joint working at a local level. Those local trusts are able to
work with the developing strategic needs analysis, and we have
talked about data and what the evidence is of where the needs
are greatest, and they are able to use work in the new resources—and
children's centres are part of this picture at a very young age
to support parents—to really target resources. We are doing
that now at a local level between schools, Children's Services
and other services. We are doing it also with youth justice services
locally but it is not systemetised.
Q223 Alun Michael: I am struggling
with the idea that an institutional change will bring that about.
I take your point about the children's trusts. Some of the mechanisms
we have heard about in earlier evidence, like using the capacity
for the local crime and disorder audit to inform the work by other
partners in the local Crime and Disorder Reduction Partnership
into preventing the development of youth crime, seems to argue
for systems that would provide very much the input and the support
for the work of the Youth Offending Team but the implication is
that has not happened. Why would another institutional change
change the behaviour of the people who spend the money?
John Coughlan: I think the decisions
that have been taken strategically recently about a better balance
of responsibilities for what my YJB colleagues call the co-sponsorship
of the youth justice agenda, alongside the changes that are happening
about the establishment of children's trusts, those two developments
will facilitate this improvement but we need some additional levers
to make it happen more quickly and more systematically.
Q224 Alun Michael: What should those
levers be?
John Coughlan: We do need some
reviews of the sentencing policies not just around custody but
around some of the more rigid approaches to new offenders coming
into the system and having to be dealt with in the same way. For
example, could we have suspensions apply to referral orders and
save some of bureaucratic approach that happens at the moment
for low level offenders who my line manager says will not come
back into the system anyway. Those would be two examples: sentencing
practices and approaches to referral orders.
Mike Thomas: Picking up on that
and the point Bob made earlier, if we adopted a "team around
the child" approach and actually said do we really need to
criminalise this young person, do we need to get them into the
criminal justice system to access resources and we did the assessment
and said what is needed then that would be a means of preventing
the situation we have at the moment with more and more youngsters
going into the criminal justice system. That would begin to unlock
some of the resources at a local level and people would be much
more aware of what the need was at a local level.
Q225 Alun Michael: I can see the
point of trying to avoid youngsters going into the custodial system
for the disbenefits and problems that arise from that but why
does it matter whether the service or support or intervention,
if it is the right one, is provided inside or outside the youth
justice system?
Mike Thomas: Because once they
are in the youth justice system they have a habit of sticking
in the youth justice system and the youth court becomes a revolving
door, which is one of the reasons why the custodial population
is increasing. Youngsters are coming into the system at an earlier
stage and are staying in the system and we should be able to divert
them away and say what are the needs of this young person.
Q226 Alun Michael: Could you explain
your language there? If you are talking about the court, and once
you are in the court system it is difficult to get out of it,
that is one thing but the point of the Youth Offending Teams was
to bring the resources of different departments that are working
with those young people in order to get the right intervention
for them at the right time.
Mike Thomas: Absolutely, but as
I have tried to explain we are working with more and more young
people so the resources we have within the teams is spread thinner
and thinner. I do think that once a young person gets into the
formal court system the chances are they are going to come back
into the court system because of the revolving door situation.
They are in the court system, they are labelled as an offender
and they live up to that label and will come back in. If we were
able to do an assessment at a pre-court stage and say we accept
that an offence has been committed but actually we can deal with
the underlying problem without the need to criminalise the young
person and that would mean the resources available within Youth
Offending Teams could be spent more effectively on those whose
behaviour is becoming more and more entrenched.
Q227 Chairman: When you say criminalise,
do you simply mean a young person has acquired a criminal record
or the status of a criminal because it is a criminal justice system
disposal or are you saying that the particular means into which
he or she is brought, whether it is custody or some other form
of sentencing, is increasing the likelihood of criminality? Which
of the two are you saying?
Mike Thomas: It is the latter.
It is the fact that once they are in the system the chances are
they will continue to be there because there is the criminalising
nature of the system itself.
Q228 Chairman: We know that about
custody but is it the case with other forms of disposal?
Mike Thomas: Yes, it is the case
with other forms of disposal.
Q229 Alun Michael: Are you saying
it is the case with the Youth Offending Teams?
Mike Thomas: No, I am saying the
Youth Offending Teams have had to deal with more and more young
people so therefore the resources have been spread and because
somebody becomes labelled as an offender they are seen at a local
level as the problem which the Youth Offending Team is expected
to resolve. In reality we need to pull in the support from the
partner agencies that are part of the Youth Offending Team. It
is wider than just saying we are going to second a health worker
into the Youth Offending Team or we are going to provide a mental
health specialist probation officer or whatever.
Q230 Mrs James: When you talk to
young offenders, and I worked in the service, they are very afraid
of going back to where they have originally come from. In many
cases they tell you they go back to the same street corner, to
the same gang, to the same people who behave in the same way they
behaved prior to sentencing. That must be a huge challenge for
the Youth Offending Teams because you cannot isolate them from
all those external factors and influences.
Mike Thomas: Absolutely and it
is at the crux of the whole issue. If you prevent youngsters going
into custody you can move some of the resources. You can put those
resources into the community and you deal with a whole load of
issues that are there within the community, whether it is to do
with housing, with the social condition or whatever. It is not
just about putting the resources into the Youth Offending Team
but actually putting the resources into the community and involving
the community in the process itself. One of the interesting things
since referral orders were introduced is that the numbers of volunteers
working with the Youth Offending Teams has increased so the community
has a greater understanding of how the Youth Offending Teams work
and also that the offender, at the end of the day, could be somebody
living next door to the volunteers.
Bob Reitemeier: To follow up on
a point made about incentives, I do think there is a lot more
that can be done about incentives. There is both the incentives
of how do you look at the pricing mechanism so that local authorities
may be incentivised to look more at prevention. It is not that
the will is not there but there are mechanisms that can be looked
at. There is also looking at the Youth Offending Teams, which
is what you are asking about now, and our staff on the ground
do indicate that when a young person goes into the YOT then other
services take a breathe and step back because that is sorted,
or at least it is not their issue any more. That is a generalisation
that others can argue with but that is what the staff are telling
us on the ground. The example that the Youth Justice Board gave
in the previous evidence, saying that everyone points to the importance
of resettlement and if would could get resettlement right it would
make a big difference to re-offending, if you just think about
resettlement in the context that the only reason it is called
resettlement is because they are coming from custody, if you got
the custody out of it and applied the principles of resettlement
you are answering the question.
Q231 Alun Michael: Would the new
Youth Justice Unit have an impact on that closer integration and
the question of how resources are deployed?
Bob Reitemeier: I am sorry for
going back to what you asked the Youth Justice Board but you asked
about policy and practice. When you look at policy, clearly the
two accountable departments have to think policy so both the Ministry
of Justice and the Department of Children, Schools and Families.
I also think the Youth Justice Board does and should continue
to think about policy. I see the interaction between the YJB and
the departments as being critical on the policy front. On the
practice front that is where you need to connect directly to the
YOTs, to the directors of Children's Services and all the services
on the ground. I would promote an active policy engagement between
the YJB and the departments directly.
John Coughlan: Can I just reinforce
that? The establishment of the joint unit and the dual key or
the MOG arrangements have been a very positive step forward. Certainly
from the ADCS perspective we made it clear from the off we were
not asking that YJB should come under the auspices directly of
the new DCSF. We very much recognise the need for a balanced relationship
into the justice system. We felt that balance was not right in
the old arrangements and I think having the new unit reporting
to both departments but also sitting within DCSF where there is
such energy and drive towards better integrated working at the
moment is going to be extremely positive. It will take time to
see how that moves forward and we will see from the forthcoming
plan. Can I make one more point about incentives just to clarify
some of these arrangements? The Every Child Matters agenda
I would argue anyway is not a visionary agenda necessarily, although
I hope it is, but is an agenda for efficiency along the lines
of the discussions you have been having today about youth justice
policy. It is about trying to re-engineer resources and services
further upstream so they can stop children and young people falling
into greater levels of need. Off the top of my head, the special
educational needs, for children in care, for child protection
services, for children with disabilities, exactly the same argument
applies to those services as the argument we have been having
about trying to prevent young people ending up in custody. It
is about trying to unlock resources at more intensive expensive
ends of the service in the system for children, so for children
in care getting them out of the more intensive systems and supporting
them back at home, for SEN keeping them within mainstream schools
and not getting them into special education and similarly for
those other areas of service. There are profound obstacles to
making that work around safeguarding, around addressing the needs
of parents and the wishes of parents and addressing the way the
system works at the moment. It is turning tankers around which
I know is a cliché. Finding the incentives that will actually
work will take time as well.
Q232 Alun Michael: Mr Reitemeier
made the comment about the distinction between policy and practice
at the more local level. You seem to be suggesting that the more
intractable issues are the practice and the identification of
resources at the local level. Do you think that the situation
of Youth Offending Teams is going to be strengthened or weakened
by the new arrangements, for instance the children's trusts and
things like that, or is it all going to become rather more diffused?
Mike Thomas: I would hope it will
improve a situation that we have at the moment. My view would
be that in perhaps two or three years' time Youth Offending Teams
will be concentrating on what I would consider to be their core
business which is about preventing re-offending, and through the
partnerships of the emerging children's trusts the prevention
element we work with those youngsters on the cusp of offending,
those dipping their toes in the criminal justice system, could
be dealt with outside of the Youth Offending Teams. It has always
been strange to me that we talk about Youth Offending Teams as
youths who are offending but a large chunk of the work we do is
prevention in the first place. Let us concentrate on the core
business. As the children's trusts emerge and through partnerships
we can work with the trusts to prevent those youngsters coming
into the system but also, as I said earlier, in terms of preventing
access to a whole range of statutory services of which the criminal
justice system is but one.
Bob Reitemeier: I would argue
that it will improve. We are still talking theory in the sense
that it is early days. There is a phasing point to be made. All
the benefits of having the YOTs in place these last several years,
where they have had a specialist concentrated effort working with
this group of children, if we do not have some sort of phasing
we will lose that expertise that has been gained. If we go too
quickly into a more devolved or generic approach, that would be
the risk. The direction of travel is right, that Children's Services
has the holistic picture. Youth Justice is an element of that
but it is not the whole. I would argue, following what John said
earlier about when Every Child Matters came out young offenders
were not as included as some other children, we would always add
that the refugee population is still in that category. I know
that is not the subject of this Committee but we still have some
work to do on that.
Q233 Chairman: Can you throw any
light on any discussions you might have been drawn into on the
Youth Crime Action Plan and whether it is likely to be a vehicle
for doing any of the good things we have talked about?
Bob Reitemeier: We certainly hope
so. We are waiting for the plan to come but the points that have
been made in the introduction of developing the plan which, when
it first came out, was looking both at youth crime in its title
but also resettlement—it originally started off as a Green
Paper but then was incorporated into the plan—you are looking
at the whole facet of a different approach. I think we have to
hope that it is as bold and progressive as we would expect. If
it follows the principles of understanding the causes of the behaviour
that leads to offending and working across the agencies to address
the needs that will help the children and young people change
their behaviour, then it is a step in the right direction.
Mike Thomas: I would agree. Now
is the absolute right time in terms of looking at the development
of youth justice. We have had 10 years of Youth Offending Teams,
10 years since the 1998 Crime and Disorder Act, and we have an
ideal opportunity now. We have the generic community sentence
being introduced next year and we have the Youth Crime Action
Plan. We are putting a lot of hope on the Youth Crime Action Plan
as a vehicle to take us into the next phase of developing an appropriate
criminal justice policy for children and young people.
John Coughlan: I would echo those
sentiments. I have been very encouraged by some of the conversations
I have been party to about where the plan appears to be seeking
to focus and about some of the consultation that has gone on.
It seems to me to be an attempt to redress a balance about whether
this is a system which is a joint strategy around the justice
system alongside the child welfare system, and that has to be
positive. I think we have to also be realistic about how easy
it will be to effect a change in the context of some very complex
structural mechanisms between the judiciary, local authorities
and some government departments and we have to work collectively
on that.
Chairman: Thank you very much indeed.
| 
