Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

My Lords, I shall speak also to Amendment 177C. These amendments are complementary to Amendment 177AA because they refer to the group called young adults. In this connection, I remind the House that on many occasions I have said in other debates that the trouble with the criminal justice system is that the Ministry of Justice simply does not know the cost of imprisonment or probation. That is not to say that it does not know how much money is given to it for prison and probation, but it does not know how much money is needed to do the things that it says it wants to do with and for offenders. Until it knows how much money it needs to do with and for, it cannot know how much it does not have and therefore what it cannot do, and therefore what it needs to ask for in order for it to be able to do more. This is something that always amazed me from the moment I went into the Home Office in 1995 because every year in the Ministry of Defence we used to go through what was called a basket-weaving exercise. We would be asked to cost the White Paper or whatever targets we had been given. We did that. Inevitably it came up that more money was needed to do what we had to do than we have been given, so the Ministers were asked to go and try to get more money out of the Treasury. They never did, so we then had to go through what we called a basket-weaving exercise, where you put what you had to do into ““desirable””, ““essential”” and ““nice to have”” baskets. Then you went to the Ministers and said, ““Look, here are the implications are of not having enough money. What are we not to do?””, and then it was up to the Ministers to make the decision. I thought, naively, when I went into the Home Office in 1995 and heard people saying there was not enough money, that this is what would have happened and the Ministers would therefore know what they could not do and what they needed to ask for. Nobody knew—nobody knows now. There is all this talk about not having enough resources—we do not actually know how many resources we have got to apply to which because we have not done the total sum. This is something that needs to be done in order to get discipline into the system. But that is by the way. I welcome the reforms in Clause 73 that give flexibility to the courts in their response to individual offences and encourage specific support needed to reform a child’s behaviour. But that is talking about children. The purpose of these amendments is to extend this approach to young adults by requiring the Probation Service to replicate the work of youth offending teams with children in what are called referral orders. The figures suggest that these referral orders for children, which encompass a restorative justice approach within a community setting and have been available to sentencers since 2002, have the lowest reoffending rates of all juvenile court-imposed sentences. One-half of those given a custodial sentence reoffend within one year, and two-thirds within two, but the rate for referral orders is 37 per cent—not great, but a great deal less than that for custodial sentences. The Powers of Criminal Courts (Sentencing) Act 2000 made provision for referral orders except for offences so serious that they merited custodial sentences or so minor that they merited only a fine or an absolute discharge. This ruling was amended by the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008, which laid down that referral orders must be imposed when children aged 10 to 17 plead guilty to an offence that is punishable with imprisonment but have not been previously been convicted of an offence. That refers to first-time offenders as children. Orders may also be imposed when an offender who is pleading guilty has already been convicted of another offence, or where a youth offender team recommends that a second referral order may be beneficial. That provided some flexibility in the system. Courts determine the length of orders, which may be between three and 12 months, extendable for a further three, and under them children are referred to a youth offending panel of two volunteers representing the local community and an experienced youth offender team worker. The panel reviews offences and their consequences with the offender and his or her parents. Following that, the offender signs a contract, which can be varied according to circumstances but which has two core elements: first, reparation or restoration to the victim or the wider community; secondly, a programme of interventions that are designed to address the risk of reoffending. The panel monitors the compliance of the offender and if at the end of the referral period the contract has been successfully completed, the conviction is declared spent. If, however, offenders are unwilling to agree a contract, or fail to comply with it, they are referred back to the court, which may revoke the order and impose an alternative sentence. Youth offender teams are required to provide regular reports on the operation of referral orders to judges, magistrates and their legal advisers. That process underlies some of the other things about which we have been talking because they provide flexibility and the ability to relate what is going on to the needs and problems of the particular offender. Along with many others, I believe that the time is now right to build on this proven success and to extend referral orders to 18 to 20 year-olds or possibly even 18 to 25 year-olds in line with what my noble friend Lord Adebowale has just proposed. If this is accepted, a decision will have to be made as to who is to lead the panels. At present, the remit of youth offender teams covers children only up to the age of 18. Speaking to the chairman of the Youth Justice Board, I know that she would not be happy for the remit to be extended to the older group because the youth offender teams have to look after children down to the age of 10. Therefore, it seems absolutely natural that this responsibility should be passed to the probation service, which takes on the responsibility at the age of 18, and probation trusts, which is what I favour because they are the people who have the financial responsibility for this age group. However, given the very high reoffending rates in this group, I believe that there are very strong grounds for requiring the probation service—I mean requiring it—to deliver more targeted interventions for young adult offenders and referral orders seem to be a very strong model to follow. Until now, the probation service has not had a strong portfolio of programmes suited to this group, which is one of the contributors to its very high reoffending rate. I beg to move.