Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill

Clause 175 takes us to that part of the Bill which deals with anti-social behaviour disorders in respect of children and young persons. The purpose of Clause 175 is to extend the jurisdiction for the making of individual support orders—ISOs—under the Crime and Disorder Act 1998. My opposition to Clause 175 concerns the extension of individual support orders to forms of ASBOs which are other than civil orders. Individual support orders were created in Sections 322 and 323 of the Criminal Justice Act 2003 to address the concern that anti-social behaviour orders which were made in civil proceedings failed to provide any support that could assist the young person not only to comply with the order but also to change his or her behaviour. Individual support orders can last for up to six months, but here again, critically, the breach of the conditions of an individual support order is a criminal offence and can result in a fine. Again behaviour that is not necessarily criminal is being criminalised. Clause 175 allows individual support orders to be made more than once and not at the same time as an ASBO is made. It also permits individual support orders to be attached to ASBOs obtained on conviction and in the county court, whereas at the moment, they can be made only in civil proceedings in the magistrates’ court. In January 2007 the Respect unit of the Home Office published a paper showing that in 2005, although 1,555 ASBOs had been given to people under 18, only 42 individual support orders had been issued. For some reason ASBOs are being granted by magistrates’ courts against young people without in the vast majority of cases individual support orders being made alongside them. My objection to Clause 175 has the support of the Standing Committee for Youth Justice, which has been very helpful throughout the consideration of the Bill’s provisions concerning young people. The committee agrees that support for young people who are given ASBOs is often inadequate and that ISOs can be used to provide structure and support to young persons to help them carry out the conditions of their ASBOs. The committee believes that allowing for multiple ISOs is not the way forward, and that imposing an ISO on conviction is superfluous because the court in a conviction case has the full power to consider measures to help the person to stop reoffending. In its report in 2006 the Youth Justice Board suggested that low take-up rates of individual support orders reflected a lack of knowledge about them, both among sentencers and YOT duty officers. I know that that matter very much concerns my noble friend Lady Linklater who has done so much to try to introduce to the judiciary the value and extent of these orders among other community orders. The board also found that in cases in which the young person had contacted the youth offending team through an existing court order, there was a general assumption that an ISO was unnecessary because it would add nothing to services already in place. Although the provisions in Clause 175 may increase the number of individual support orders that are made, it does not look as if they will assist after conviction how a young person is treated. The Standing Committee for Youth Justice is concerned, as I am, that these ISOs place breachable requirements on young people in addition to those that are already in place in the ASBO itself. If there are multiple ISOs there are innumerable conditions floating around with which the young person has to comply: the conditions of the ASBO; the condition of the first ISO, if he is given one; the conditions of a second ISO if he is given one; so he is set up to fail. Instead of a statutory change to ISOs the Government should guarantee to offer targeted youth support, and when an ASBO accompanies a conviction, support must be received through the youth justice system and not through the extended use of individual support orders, which involve the children’s and youth support services.