Public Bodies Bill [HL]

My Lords, the noble and learned Baroness sees an open goal when there is one before her, but she has approached it with charm and a great degree of kindness. Thinking of which quotes come to mind, I considered Sir Robert Peel who said during the Corn Law debates, ““You must answer them, for I cannot””, but I know that that is not my responsibility this afternoon. I shall settle for Denis Healey’s ““When you’re in a hole, stop digging””. I fully acknowledge the widespread feeling around the House about this matter and I am sure that feeling and indeed that passion will be noted by my colleagues. I have noted, as did the noble and learned Baroness, that we have had all the usual suspects on parade, plus one or two others. I am keeping a tab on the noble Lord, Lord Newton. Earlier today, he went 4-3 ahead in terms of interventions that are supportive of me when I am at the Dispatch Box, but that lasted for only an hour and now he is back to 4-4. I went to Braintree the other week to speak to the Braintree Liberal Democrats and had to spend a good part of the evening hearing what a wonderful Member of Parliament the noble Lord was, so his lack of support is even more hurtful. However, I understand where people are coming from on this. I understand also what the YJB set out to do and what it has achieved. A number of noble Lords have pointed out that it does not have a perfect record, but it is neither my job nor my wish to detract in any way from its achievements over these past 10 years. In 2000, there was a need for the YJB to provide coherent leadership and to establish a new youth justice system. However, the youth justice landscape has changed immeasurably since then. We fully intend to retain the youth offending teams and a dedicated secure estate, which are not being abolished with the Youth Justice Board. However, Ministers should be accountable for youth justice. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Warner, and others for their comments about the Green Paper. It was rather unkind of him to describe Ministers as a motley crew; I would prefer to acknowledge the fact that all Ministers are birds of passage. It was a little unfair to describe the idea of bringing the Youth Justice Board within the Ministry of Justice variously as vandalism, bureaucratic diktat, Whitehall-knows-best, reintroducing failure and care by people who do not care. Those are not fair descriptions of civil servants in large departments, who carry out considerable management functions without the advantage or otherwise of arm’s-length bodies. If those descriptions were true, everything would be opted out from our Civil Service. I note some of the views expressed about NOMS, although it already has responsibilities within the youth justice system. I shall try to say where the department is coming from at the moment but then perhaps address some of the specific points which rained down on me during the debate. In doing so, I immediately pay tribute to the record of the noble Lord, Lord Warner, with whom I had a very good discussion, as I did with the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, about the origins of the Youth Justice Board. They both gave a vivid description of the situation prior to the board coming into being. It is not true that the youth justice system is the poor relation, nor is there any danger of it being so under our proposals. The youth offending teams will remain in place. They are perhaps the greatest of the Youth Justice Board’s achievements. The holistic approach at local level of the youth offending teams has achieved real success and we want to build on that. Our reforms will build on the progress made by the YJB while restoring direct ministerial accountability for the delivery of youth justice. The Government believe that youth justice, which involves the incarceration of children, is an important issue for which Ministers, not unelected arm’s-length bodies, should be accountable. The principal aim of the youth justice system, as established by the Crime and Disorder Act 1998, is to prevent offending and reoffending by children and young people under the age of 18. It is a system in which local authority-led youth offending teams have the primary responsibility for delivering youth justice on the ground. These YOTs comprise representatives from local authorities, health, education and children’s services. The system also includes a dedicated national commissioned secure estate for young people. Both these crucial delivery elements will be retained and neither will be adversely affected by the reforms we are proposing. This is not because the YJB does not itself deliver front-line services. The YJB was established by the 1998 Act to provide leadership and coherence to the new system by exercising oversight functions. Its abolition is therefore a separate issue to the future of the youth justice system because its functions are to oversee local YOTs, disseminate effective practices, commission a distinct secure estate and place young people in custody. These functions are, of course, crucial in support of the effective delivery of youth justice and will, therefore, be transferred to the Ministry of Justice under our proposals, with an appropriate senior and visible level of leadership. Since its establishment, the YJB has undoubtedly helped to transform the youth justice system. It oversaw the establishment of local youth offending teams and has fulfilled an important role in reducing offending and reoffending by young people by spreading best practice and helping to make youth justice a priority for local authorities. It has also put the delivery of youth justice at the forefront of local authority partnership working and has driven up standards in a discrete secure estate for young people. As I have said before, the noble Lord, Lord Warner, as the first chair of the Youth Justice Board, must take credit for bringing a level of coherence to the system and for raising the profile of youth justice issues. There were good reasons why the YJB was initially established at arm’s length from government. This gave it the autonomy to make much needed changes and enabled staff with expertise in front-line delivery to lead the national rollout of youth offending teams. However, a decade on, the context in which youth justice is delivered has changed enormously, with youth offending teams now fully embedded at the local level and children’s services delivered through children’s trusts. The Government therefore believe that the oversight function of the YJB should be performed in a different way. Further, Ministers are ultimately accountable for youth justice and it is therefore right that they alone should be responsible for overseeing its delivery. Bringing the YJB function into the Ministry of Justice represents the most effective way to continue to secure the best outcomes for young people. In reaching this decision the Government have taken into account the recommendations of the review of the YJB by Dame Sue Street, to whom I have also spoken. It should be pointed out that whether or not the YJB should be abolished was not within the scope of her study. The issue was also covered by the Ministry of Justice’s own review of public bodies. We remain committed to maintaining a dedicated focus on the needs of children and young people in the youth justice system, while ensuring that there are appropriate and proper links to the wider criminal justice system, and that this system serves to protect the public. We also want to capture and replicate some of the best elements of the Youth Justice Board. The YJB successfully brought together staff from a number of different backgrounds, including staff with a direct experience of youth justice, social and health services, police and probation officers. This mix of skills and knowledge enables us to inform Government policy, both in Westminster and Cardiff, while also maintaining effective links with local delivery. We want to continue to harness this expertise and experience, and I take on board the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Elton, about how you renew that within a department. As such, and in terms of developing transitional arrangements, we are consulting on how best to maintain a specific focus on youth justice as part of the discussions on the Green Paper, Breaking the Cycle. We are committed to making sure that as few young people as possible end up in the youth justice system in the first place and that those who do so face consequences for their actions while getting the support that they need to get back on to the right path. We also recognise that a successful transition will be achieved only by working with the Youth Justice Board itself. I pay tribute again to the chair of the YJB, Frances Done, who has been mentioned by a number of noble Lords, for her contribution to a successful transition. As I have said, I am grateful to the chair, the chief executive and all the staff of the YJB for the constructive way that they are working on the transitional plan with the Ministry of Justice. Our proposed national governance arrangements aim to build on the recent success of a youth justice system which has seen a significant reduction, as a number of noble Lords mentioned, in the number of first-time entrants, the frequency of reoffending and the number of young people in custody. Our current proposal, subject to the outcome of the rehabilitation revolution consultation, is that the main functions of the Youth Justice Board should be delivered within the Ministry of Justice’s policy group. Bringing the functions of overseeing the youth offending teams and commissioning a secure youth estate together within the policy group ensures continuing leadership of the youth justice system. I went through all of that to get on the record where the Government are coming from on this issue. I note what a number of noble Lords have said about this and am smart enough to know that, if the noble Lord, Lord Warner, wanted a Pyrrhic victory this afternoon, he could probably get one—although I am not sure how good our Whips are. It would be absurd not to take back what has been said this afternoon by all parts of the House. However, it seems that an enormous amount of what has happened has been attributed to the Youth Justice Board. No credit is given to the possibility that it could be done in a different or better way, while retaining what is best within the YJB. I fully appreciate what has been said. I have argued, both in this House and outside, that it is not rocket science to notice that, time and time again, in youth offending four or five elements come up: a dysfunctional family life; illiteracy, innumeracy and truancy—as one of the guys showing me round a youth offender institution said, ““The trouble is that most of these kids have had only passing contact with education at any time in their life””—as well as drug addiction and alcoholism and, as I said before, broken homes. That is not an endless list, but those are issues on which intervention is possible. The House is not divided on that. Where the House and this debate may find itself slightly out of kilter is with the way our national media sometimes treat these problems. I have already been described as ““McWally”” by the Sun for suggesting that there might be a different approach to treating young criminals. That is clever because it only changes one letter of my name, which I had never noticed before. I also believe that if you are a Minister of Justice and you have not been attacked by the Sun, you must be getting something wrong. There has been a lot of emphasis on the Youth Justice Board, perhaps quite rightly so, but without enough attention to the success of the youth offender teams—another key, holistic, part of the reforms, which I would like to see carried into other parts of the youth justice system. A lot of the things that were said as part of the general debate were—