Public Bodies Bill [Lords] (Programme) (No. 2)

I am grateful for my right hon. Friend's advice. It is a fair point and one that was laboured, quite properly, by the Justice Committee. The advisory group would not achieve the purpose that I have for it if it was not sufficiently independent. Rather than give my right hon. Friend the guarantee that I will come back here, I point out that my right hon. Friend the Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Sir Alan Beith) and his Select Committee are ideally placed to ensure, in the detailed scrutiny that they will properly give these matters, that the advisers have credibility in the youth justice field and that a range of views is presented to me. The group will serve me no use if it consists of people who entirely agree with what the Ministry of Justice is doing. They will not be there to act as a cheer group for the execution of policy. This is an important area in which we need to be continually challenged so that we get it right. I expect the advisory group to challenge us continually to help us to get it right. We will never be perfect, because we are operating in a financially very constrained time due to the simply dreadful economic inheritance that we received. [Interruption.] Well, Opposition Members may get bored of this, but as the Minister responsible for youth justice, prisons and probation, I would much rather have inherited merely a flat budget. Sadly I have not, and we have to deal with that. We have to be innovative and clever about how we respond to those circumstances to deliver the rehabilitation of offenders in this much more challenging environment. As the responsible Minister, I want to make it clear to all hon. Members that youth justice is critical to the Ministry of Justice and a visible part of the Department's business plan. We already have three key youth justice indicators, which are the number of young people coming into the youth justice system, the number of young people reoffending and the number of young people being sentenced to custody. The Ministry, and I, as the youth justice Minister, will continue to be held to account by the public and Parliament for our performance against those measures. I should add that from my own day-to-day experience and information drawn from youth offending teams, I fully understand just how difficult it will be simply to hold performance at current levels in this economic environment and the associated social environment in the short to medium term, before our wider social justice agenda begins to make itself felt in the long term. To some extent, keeping the Youth Justice Board would provide me with a helpful sandbag from the direct parliamentary fire of ministerial accountability for performance measures. Difficult though it may be to improve on the current performance that we inherit from the YJB, those measures will be used to inform our youth pathfinder and payment-by-results initiatives. That work is vital to the Ministry of Justice. There is no question that the focus on youth justice will be lost or that it will become a junior partner to the work of the National Offender Management Service. In addition, we have put in place mechanisms to ensure a proper policy focus on youth justice. Senior officials have established the cross-departmental youth crime and justice board, which supports the strategic agenda. Regular inter-ministerial meetings ensure ministerial representation from the Ministry of Justice, the Department for Education, the Home Office and the Department of Health, to support cross-Government work on the matter. I turn briefly to the amendments on Wales tabled by the right hon. Member for Cardiff South and Penarth. The criminal justice system, of which the youth justice system is an element, is not a transferred matter. It is the Secretary of State for Justice who is ultimately responsible for youth justice in England and Wales, and the Ministry of Justice that is responsible for the secure estate and courts. The Government have no plans to change that. It would be unfair to imply to Welsh Ministers that they have a liability for outcomes when they do not have statutory responsibility for the administration of youth justice. The proposal to establish a joint committee between the YJB or the Ministry of Justice and Ministers in the National Assembly for Wales is also likely to create further confusion throughout the youth justice system about who is ultimately accountable. Unless the wider statutory environment were to change, making that piecemeal statutory change would not be helpful. It would further complicate what is already a complex picture. The Government recognise the differences between England and Wales in areas such as education, health and social care, which are essential to improving the life chances of children who have offended, and we will always take into account the views of Welsh colleagues. The need to reduce reoffending and offending among children and young people is shared. Current arrangements offer the advantages of scale that come with an England and Wales resource, as well as the opportunity to learn from each other and share effective practice while retaining the ability to tailor the delivery of youth justice to Wales. That is why we will ensure that there remains significant join-up between England and Wales in our youth justice priorities.