Public Bodies Bill [HL]

My Lords, as is clear, there is widespread concern around this House about the Government's plan for the abolition of the YJB, and indeed more widely among those organisations which work with children in trouble. I add my voice most wholeheartedly to theirs. This concern arises for a variety of reasons. Despite the consultations which have taken place with civil servants, the detail of the practicalities of how any change will actually work once it has been subsumed into the MoJ is a cause for concern, particularly if the quality and scope of what the YJB is doing and achieving are to be sustained. It has developed an extremely important role and expertise in this very specialised field. From my recent contact with the YJB and the many other agencies that work with children who offend, or are at risk of offending, I know how good and important the YJB’s work has become, particularly in the past few years. I pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Warner, for his vision in setting it up in the first place. However, there is considerable anxiety and distrust about what is likely to emerge beyond the immediate future if the YJB is abolished. There is particular concern, which has also been echoed around the Chamber, that elements of the YJB’s work will be taken over by NOMS, which is specifically an adults’, not a children’s, service. Indeed, it is not really a service at all, as the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, rightly said. NOMS inevitably lacks the expertise required for children and is therefore quite inappropriate. I hope that when my noble friend the Minister replies, he can assure us that NOMs will not take over YJB functions. This is because children who offend are not small adults to be taken over like a series of parcels. Indeed, they are the most vulnerable, disadvantaged, complicated and challenging individuals in our society. They are children who have experienced a ““disproportionate experience of loss””—indeed, one in eight has actually experienced the death of a parent or sibling—while 76 per cent have had an absent father and 33 per cent an absent mother. Thirty-nine per cent are on the child protection register, 75 per cent have lived with someone other than a parent at some time, and 40 per cent—I repeat, 40 per cent—have been homeless. The rate of children with special educational needs or who are underachieving is 46 per cent, while 90 per cent of boys who offend have been excluded from school. Finally, around 85 per cent of those in custody have mental health problems. This is a tragic picture. Those alarming children who we see on street corners, possibly collecting ASBOs, are quite likely to have no real loving home to go to that any of us might recognise. The gang members who carry knives may be doing so because they themselves are in a state of fear from what others may do to them, and the gang is their only family. This is why a specialist body for children in trouble should be maintained, just as in medicine and teaching there is a distinction in provision between children and adults. We have a duty of care to all our children, which is or should be a priority of government and all its agencies and sectors. This should never be more true than when things are going wrong. In my experience, while troubled children command considerable care and concern in the public mind, children who are in trouble do not. These children tend to have not our sympathy but our censure. I am not arguing for sympathy, but I am arguing for the knowledge, skill and understanding that are vital to how we manage and treat such needy children so that they do not offend or reoffend. Our society should be safer as a result. To do this, we need on the ground not only the multiplicity of agencies that are the bedrock of provision but a body that has the experience, knowledge and understanding to stand at the interface between all the elements of the justice system and give leadership and coherence to the very complex whole. The YJB does exactly that. It works with the complexity of the youth justice system that spreads across three government departments—the MoJ, the Home Office and the DfE—as well as the DH and DCLG, and the range of local agencies, to bring some coherence and leadership to a complex framework for youth justice services. A review of full searches in the secure estate—one of the YJB’s most recent bits of work—relating to children and young people has just been completed, so what is now a routine practice in many secure establishments but is both traumatic and distressing for many children, especially young adolescents, should be taken forward only on a risk-led basis. Another project on children’s views on safeguarding, carried out in conjunction with the Children’s Commissioner, covers complaints, full searches, helplines and separation, which in ““other speak”” means the segregation of children. It has just been published and will have implications for the way in which these issues are handled in the secure estate in future. Earlier, as we have heard, the YJB rolled out youth offending teams, which form the underpinning structure on the ground, and youth offender panels, which successfully involve the public in dealing with offenders and promoting restorative justice. It has also successfully developed ISSPs and intensive fostering as alternatives to custody, and much, much more. The YJB has in the process been on a steep learning curve and has come into its own over the past few years after a difficult start. The national leadership that its work demands cannot, and should not, just be lifted out and carried on by other less experienced bodies. I now quote, as others have done, something that I hope merits repetition. The Public Accounts Committee concluded: "““The abolition of the Board raises a question about how a national focus on reducing offending by young people and reducing the use of custody will be maintained””." This comment is gently put but needs strong endorsement, for, as we have already heard, our record of incarcerating children is one of the worst in western Europe and a source for condemnation by many. However, in the past two to three years the YJB has helped to make significant inroads into the numbers in custody. They are still far too high but the signs are that the downward curve is steady. Now, pressing issues wait to be addressed, such as the use of restraint in custody—which, shamefully, is now on the increase—and even children sustaining fractures. There is a lot of work to be done. We sacrifice the role that the YJB now plays at our peril, and the children it serves will suffer. I thank the Minister for his letter and for the attention he is now giving the subject. I sincerely hope that he will listen very carefully to the almost uniform expression of concern that we have heard today. He may also like to consider as a possible alternative, on which there could be some debate, that the YJB could be given the status of an executive agency in parallel to NOMS, which is also an executive agency. It would have its own identity and chief executive and, importantly, a degree of separateness. Of course, as we have heard, it would also ultimately always be answerable to the Minister. This, as its admirable chair Frances Done says, would then give the YJB the ability to get on with the job. That is what it needs and what the children whom it serves need too. I sincerely hope that, by the time this issue comes back at Report, my noble friend will have some words of comfort to give on this very serious suggestion. I quote, once again, Dame Sue Street’s review of the YJB carried out about 18 months ago. The report says that, "““the YJB earns its place as a crucial part of a system which aims to tackle one of the most serious social policy issues in this country””." It does not deserve to lose that place.