Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill

That was an interesting introduction to this question. The noble Baroness raised some interesting points about breaches. Her amendments would alter the powers available to courts for dealing with young people who breached their youth rehabilitation order. I shall not talk about robustness again, because the point has already been made. I hope that the noble Baroness will accept that I do not use the term in some macho sense of wanting to be seen to wield a big stick. It is more about getting the balance right between ensuring that custody is truly the last resort and that the new approach to YROs and community sentencing hangs together, is integrated and does for young people the kind of things that noble Lords have talked about. Within that, public confidence is important. It is important that they understand that it is not a soft option to place young people on community sentences. I think that we all agree on that. The noble Baroness’s Amendments Nos. 36 and 41 would remove the provisions which allow courts, both magistrates’ and Crown, when re-sentencing for the original offence, to impose a youth rehabilitation order with intensive supervision and surveillance, or custody if the young offender is already on a youth rehabilitation order with intensive supervision and surveillance and has wilfully and persistently breached their order. The provisions apply even where the original offence would not have warranted such a sentence. The amendment would mean that if a young person wilfully and persistently breached the terms of the youth rehabilitation order, they could be re-sentenced only to a further youth rehabilitation order, even if there were multiple breaches. The Bill makes it clear that the measures that we are discussing come into play only for wilful and persistent breach. I assure the noble Baroness that they would not do so for a minor infringement. That is why courts need to be able to raise the bar and use the youth rehabilitation order with intensive supervision and surveillance, or, ultimately, custody. Of course, we want to look carefully at the powers that the court has to deal with those young people who have breached the order when they have not committed an imprisonable offence. When that is the case, custody is available in the following circumstances alone. There must have been a wilful and persistent breach of the first youth rehabilitation order. The court can then impose a youth rehabilitation order with intensive supervision and surveillance for that persistent and wilful breach. Custody is not available at that point, if the original offence was not imprisonable. The young offender then has to again wilfully and persistently breach the youth rehabilitation order with intensive supervision and surveillance imposed in the first place because of his wilful and persistent breach of the original order. Custody is then available to the court, which is then allowed to make a detention and training order for up to four months—the minimum period of such an order. I emphasise to the noble Baroness that this provision really is to deal with wilful and persistent breaches and is not a charter for locking young people up for spurious reasons. The Government have absolutely no interest in wishing to do that. We are talking about what I hope will be a very low number of the worst cases in which, for the sake of the integrity of the whole system, it is important that the courts have that discretion.