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5.18 p.m.
Lord Thomas of Gresford: My Lords, I congratulate the noble Earl, Lord Enniskillen, on an outstanding maiden speech. The noble Lord, Lord Sempill, said a moment ago that young people have little confidence in the political system. Indeed, we worry from time to time that young people do not respond to many of the political issues that concern us. But if there is one thing that young people are enthused by, it is the problems of the environment and how to deal with them. I welcome the comments made by the noble Earl, Lord Enniskillen, and his emphasis on the production of environmentally sustainable policies which he has seen developed in Kenya.
I wish to develop the theme of the problems of juvenile crime, which were touched on by my noble friend Lord Holme of Cheltenham. I, too, am indebted to the recently published report by the Audit Commission entitled Misspent Youth. My noble friend Lord Holme reminded the House that, according to Home Office statistics, two out of every five known offenders in 1994 were under the age of 21 and a quarter of them were under 18.
The estimate made in that report means that a staggering 7 million crimes against individuals--such as theft, burglary, assault and theft against retailers and manufacturers--were committed during that year. The Audit Commission estimated that the cost of the criminal justice system in processing and dealing with young offenders, including all public service areas, amounted to £1 billion per year.
We have to ask ourselves: what value do we get for that money? The first startling figure is that only a small proportion of those 7 million offences are ever reported and recorded by the police, of which just 3 per cent. lead to arrest and action. Of that 3 per cent. 1.8 per cent. of the offenders are cautioned and 1.3 per cent. are charged or summonsed. So, in effect, of the order of 97 offenders out of 100 are not caught or dealt with for the crimes they commit.
Youth offending is not going to be dealt with by progressively harsher penalties calling for larger and more numerous penal institutions, boot camps, psuedo-militaristic training and so on. That is not the way to prevent crime because, as I have said, 97 out of 100 young people who offend are never caught. So the emphasis must move from deterrence through these penal measures to a strategy for tackling youth crime as a whole. We have heard from Mr. Blair about his wishing to be tough on the causes of crime. That is an excellent sound bite, but it solves nothing on its own. It raises two further questions: what are the causes of youth crime and, having identified those causes, how do we prevent offending behaviour in the first place?
In a recently published Joseph Rowntree report Understanding and Preventing Youth Crime, these risk factors as the child grows up through the various stages of its life were identified; these are the formative years referred to by the noble Baroness, Lady Macleod. They were identified as, first, inadequate parenting. Nobody is trained to be a parent and when that bundle arrives we look at it with surprise and joy and wonder what to do next. I recall Steve Martin in the film "Parenthood" who did precisely that. He looked at the little bundle and said, "Just look at her--and we haven't harmed her yet".
Erratic or harsh parental discipline shading into child abuse is not the answer. Those who advocate spanking and caning really do not have an answer to the problems of dealing with young children. Conflict between parents, parental rejection of the child, low parental involvement with the child--these are the matters of concern. The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Birmingham talked about exclusion. These young children are excluded from love. I, unfortunately, and much more than most of your Lordships, have had to deal with pathological killers--far too many of them. The common feature of people who do not feel pain themselves and who do not realise that they are inflicting it on others is that they have never learnt to love because affection was never shown to them when they were young.
The learning of parental skills must start in the schools and continue with professional help, which will help young parents to develop the self-awareness and
self-confidence to deal with children. Family centres in areas of high risk can bring together the social services, the health services and the voluntary organisations such as the organisation Homestart which aims to befriend young families at risk through volunteer networks of experienced parents. We all have experiences as parents--I hope good ones--which we can pass on to other young parents who do not know quite how to react.As the child grows up the next problem is aggressive and hyperactive behaviour in early childhood. What is the answer to that? It is investment in nursery schools so that the children who have been brought up in a home lacking love can at least learn to socialise, to get to know other children and to have imposed on them by the carers at nursery school standards of behaviour, or even to have identified for themselves medical problems so that they can be helped.
Again, as the child progresses we come to the school years, with the problems of truancy and exclusion, which were highlighted recently in the case of Philip Lawrence with which I had some connection. It was tragic indeed to see what can happen when young people truant and are excluded from school. The research paper by Graham and Bowling, Young People and Crime, published in 1995, found that 42 per cent. of offenders of school age who are sentenced in the youth court have been excluded from school and 23 per cent. truant significantly. Further, excluding children from school causes them to commit 50 per cent. more offences in the year following exclusion. So excluding children from school is not the answer. That is not the way to go because that merely pushes the problem from within the disciplines that can be enforced on the children in the school, into the wider community. It is a challenge to parents, schools, headmasters and school welfare officers that these problems of truanting and exclusion should be dealt with.
The next matter which the report highlighted was peer group pressure to offend. They are young people who used to get into "bad company", as they used to say, who are associating with others and imitate what they do. How is that to be dealt with? It is to be dealt with by resources for youth clubs; giving people access to sports facilities and to outdoor activities; encouraging young people to mix with others in constructive and challenging activities; finding new role models to promote a positive self-image for themselves at the youth stage. We must get away from the gangs hanging around with nothing to do and with boredom causing them to commit crime.
A further factor was unstable living conditions particularly for young people leaving care. My noble friend Lord Russell referred to the fact that of the children who have been in care, 90 per cent. are unemployed and 23 per cent. have no income at all. They live in terrible conditions which are conducive to crime. We must tackle that. It is no use later coming along, taking them to a boot camp and marching them up and down in some militaristic way, as I have previously said, believing that that will solve their
problems. It is a question of dealing with the way they live in their homes; giving them support for the way in which they live their lives.It would take too long for me to deal with training and employment. As I have already said, boredom and having nothing to do are the sort of things which are conducive to young people offending. Finally, there is drug and alcohol abuse, which are so much behind all the crime with which I come into contact. It is a wide subject and I do not have the time to deal with it all. The noble Lord, Lord Sempill, developed that theme. Apart from the need to fashion a dream for young people, his point was that we should try to stimulate young people to have interests which mean that they do not get their stimulation from drugs or alcohol but from positive activities.
I have tried to describe the cycle of deprivation at each stage of the development of a child. Once that cycle has begun, it is difficult to break it. When he replies, I hope that the Minister will be able to say that the Government will shift their emphasis from populist draconian penal policies that are bound to fail to a more imaginative approach of preventing crime at its roots.
5.30 p.m.
Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton: My Lords, with the leave of the House, perhaps I may speak in the gap. I do so with some trepidation because I have a fundamental concern about speaking of young people as a group. I wonder what we would say if the noble Earl had introduced a debate on the practical problems facing 56 year-olds such as myself. I make that as a serious point because I was concerned that following the International Youth Year the most commonly repeated comment among young people was, "Please will people stop describing us all as though we are the same?". Thousands of young people are involved in the Duke of Edinburgh Award Scheme, community activities, Young Farmers Clubs, the Scouts and drama societies. The list is endless. It is important to have on the record the fact that so many young people undertake such activities.
I join the congratulations that have been paid to the noble Earl, Lord Enniskillen, on his distinguished maiden speech. His contribution will strike a chord with many young people who recognise the interdependence of the world in which they are growing up. One of the noble Earl's points, which I hope will be taken up, was the need to extend young people's opportunities to participate in international activities.
I seek to speak about one particular group of young people within the general category. I refer to those young people who are very young parents themselves. Many noble Lords have referred to the circumstances of, and the problems facing, young people. It is fashionable in some political circles to treat the issue of providing adequate incomes, adequate housing, a safe and secure environment, and education and training opportunities as somehow rewarding feckless behaviour. If we take that view, the feckless behaviour is ours.
In most cases, young people who become parents face intolerable pressures which I, for one, know that I could not have overcome at the age of 16, 17 or 18. On the
other hand, there is dramatic evidence to show that where we provide resources to help such young parents with, for example, parental support projects, support through family centres and, particularly, with nursery and primary education, it is possible to intervene and to break a tragic cycle that so often is one of deprivation.
In order to do that, we must recognise the importance of human resources and time. A child needs a sufficient number of teachers to ensure that he can speak and be listened to. With a committed investment in human time from professionals, young parents can break that cycle of deprivation and increase not only their own opportunities, but those of their children. I hope that the Minister will recognise the importance of that work.
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