Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

My Lords, I thank the noble Lords for their amendment. Young adult offenders are a particularly difficult group and outcomes are not always as we would wish. I have a great deal of sympathy with the intentions here. The amendment proposes a new requirement of the adult community order called, "““an intensive community supervision requirement””," available for offenders aged 18 to 24. It is clearly intended to mirror the intensive rehabilitation order available for juveniles. I agree that we need to reduce the level of reoffending by young adult offenders and that more intensive engagement may very well have a role to play. However, we need to find ways of achieving this without further complicating the legislative framework and constraining how the needs of this age group will be addressed. Affordability is, of course, critical. If we were to create extra burdens through statute by delivering intensive interventions, supervision and surveillance to this age group, the Government would not have the resources to deliver what we prescribed. We want to see more effective and efficient use of resources, with payment by results and competition being used to secure improved outcomes for 18 to 24 year-olds and other offenders. A range of interventions may be used to achieve these outcomes, and we wish to avoid prescribing which approach must be used with different age groups. I heard about the problems at Isis, and the MoJ will be commenting in due course. I also note what noble Lords have said about intensive alternatives to custody. The Green Paper Breaking the Cycle said that the Government were looking at how the IAC principles could be extended nationally. The analysis of the reoffending rates of offenders who took part in the IAC pilots is under way at the moment. We will write to noble Lords as soon as the results are available. I hope that is useful to noble Lords. The spirit of the amendment ties in very well with work that we are already doing to improve community sentences generally. In addition to provisions in the Bill to strengthen community sentences, we want to deliver a step change in the way they operate. They must address the problems that have caused the offending behaviour in the first place: the drug abuse, alcoholism and mental health problems that noble Lords have referred to. They must also punish properly and send a clear message to society that wrongdoing will not be tolerated. We are hoping to provide sentences with a much improved community sentence offering a robust and credible punishment to deal with both young and old offenders. To this end, we are currently conducting a review of adult community sentences and hope to publish a consultation document shortly. I encourage noble Lords to feed into that. In the light of my comments, I hope the noble Lord will accept that this is not a necessary step to take at this stage and will accordingly withdraw his amendment.