Lord Oates (LD)

My Lords, in moving that the Bill be now read a second time, I thank the Minister and his Commons ministerial colleague Jake Richards for the constructive and proactive manner in which they have engaged with me and colleagues on this Bill. I also pay tribute to my noble friend Lord McNally, a former chair of and tireless advocate for the Youth Justice Board, who had hoped to speak in today’s debate but is, sadly, unwell. We wish him a rapid recovery. Nearly 30 years ago, the new Labour Government revolutionised the youth justice system and laid the foundations for one of the great public policy successes of our time. The Crime and Disorder Act 1998 established a youth justice system with a clear principal aim: preventing offending by children and young people. It created the Youth Justice Board to monitor the system, advise Ministers, promote effective practice and assess whether that aim was being achieved. It provided for youth custody services and commissioning places in the juvenile secure estate to be transferred to the board, which subsequently took place via the Youth Justice Board for England and Wales Order 2000. At the local level, it brought together police, probation, health, education and social services in statutory youth offending teams, creating a co-ordinated response to youth offending on the ground for the first time. The results have been remarkable. The number of under-18s detained in the secure estate, which peaked at 3,052 in 2003, has fallen to fewer than 400 today. Over the same period, proven offences by young people have fallen by nearly 90%, from more than 268,000 to fewer than 36,000. That is an extraordinary achievement. Yet instead of learning from that success and asking how its lessons might be applied more widely throughout the justice system, we have seen three successive attempts over the past 15 years to abolish, diminish or strip responsibilities from the Youth Justice Board. The first came in 2011, during the coalition Government, as part of the Treasury’s bonfire of the quangos. At the time, I was chief of staff to the Deputy Prime Minister. I had previously had the privilege of working at the Youth Justice Board under the inspirational leadership of our former colleague, Lord Warner, and I knew how important the board was to the success of the system. Thanks to efforts in government and in Parliament, led by Lord Warner, my noble friend Lord McNally and many others, those proposals were happily defeated. The second attempt came in 2017, when Liz Truss was Secretary of State for Justice, when responsibility for youth custody operations was transferred to the Youth Custody Service and commissioning functions to the MoJ. Responsibilities explicitly assigned to the YJB in the 2000 order were removed under ministerial instruction, without an amending order being laid then or since. Now comes the third attempt—and, remarkably, it comes from a Labour Government. Under the Government’s proposals, the board will lose responsibility for national oversight, performance monitoring and the administration of the youth justice core grant. Its future role will largely be confined to identifying good practice and supporting local services in continuous improvement. It will have lost the principal levers through which it has been able to drive improvement across the system. Ministers will lose something equally important: robust, independent advice from a board containing experts with practical experience of youth justice and the levers to drive change. My Bill takes a different approach: it would restore the powers and responsibilities of the board as broadly envisaged by the Labour Government in the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 and the Youth Justice Board for England and Wales Order 2000. It also recognises the development of devolution since the board was created. It would require the Secretary of State, the board and the Welsh Government to agree a memorandum of understanding setting out their respective responsibilities for youth justice. It would require consultation with the Welsh Government on board appointments, extend the board’s advisory role to the Welsh Government, and provide for Welsh Government approval of specified grants in Wales. I do not pretend that the youth justice system is perfect or that there is no room for improvement. The much smaller cohort of children now entering custody often have extraordinarily complex needs, and reoffending remains far too high. There is still plenty that needs to improve, but I am adamant that the changes the Government are proposing would be a major step backwards. What makes their approach particularly difficult to understand is that it runs directly counter to the review of the Youth Justice Board that the Government themselves commissioned from Steve Crocker, a former director of children’s services. His conclusion was clear: changing the board’s current status would be risky, costly and disruptive, with no certainty that its functions would be better delivered inside the MoJ. He warned that splitting these functions across the department would create a system that was “less agile, more complex, and less transparent”. He specifically highlighted the importance of technical expertise and an independent voice within youth justice. What did the Government do with the review they had commissioned? They published it, and, on the very same day, announced a strategy that rejected its central conclusion. Their explanation was that the scale of change required more significant reform than the review recommended, but that is not really an explanation. The scale of change required was precisely what Steve Crocker had been asked to review. John Drew, the former chief executive of the YJB, has identified the danger in the Government’s proposals very clearly, warning that moving youth justice policy and performance monitoring exclusively into the Civil Service will create a greater separation between practical experience and policy-making, increase the likelihood of advice being given by people without experience of the system on which they are advising, and reduce the chance that Ministers will hear dissenting voices. Surely that last point matters. Independent advice is not an inconvenience to good government; it is part of good government. The other argument advanced for these changes is that democratic accountability somehow requires these functions to be exercised directly by MoJ officials, but that simply does not make sense. The Youth Justice Board is already accountable to Ministers, and, through them, to Parliament. The Secretary of State appoints its chair and board members, and Ministers set the policy and performance framework within which it operates. They approve its strategy and annual business plan, and the board is required to comply with ministerial directions and guidance. The question is not whether the Youth Justice Board is democratically accountable—it plainly is—but whether Ministers use that accountability effectively and set clear objectives, engage with the board and use its expertise to drive improvement across the system. When I worked at the Youth Justice Board, there was regular engagement between its chair, Norman Warner, and the Home Secretary, first Jack Straw, then David Blunkett, as well as with the Prime Minister. Indeed, the first time I ever stepped over the threshold of No. 10 was to represent the Youth Justice Board in discussions on youth crime. This level of engagement was key to the success of the youth justice reforms. Government understood that the board had an important role in driving systemic change, engaged with it proactively and resourced it properly. I am interested to know from the Minister how many meetings recent Secretaries of State for Justice have held with the chair of the Youth Justice Board specifically to set objectives for youth justice and agree strategies for delivering them. There is a final question the Government need to answer: why would we take important functions away from an expert board with a proven track record and transfer them into a department already overwhelmed by the crisis in the adult justice system? The reason why the Youth Justice Board was established in the first place is that in the 1990s, when oversight of youth justice was run from the Home Office, it had received little attention. Inevitably, the focus was on adults, as they represent a vastly larger contingent in the criminal justice system. The consequence was an explosion of youth offending and anti-social behaviour, and a collapse in public confidence in the system. If the Government proceed with their transfer of oversight functions of the youth justice system to the MoJ, the same process will inevitably play out. Youth justice will be relegated to a backwater as the ministry naturally focuses on the adult criminal justice system. In five years’ time, we will be back where we were before the 1998 reforms. In contrast to the success of the youth justice system in reducing the number of young people in custody and the number of youth offences by nearly 90% over the past 23 years, the adult prison population has risen by around a fifth over the same period, despite crime rates falling. Our prisons are now so overcrowded that people convicted of serious violent offences are being released early. Recalls to prison are at an all-time high—up 28% last year. This is overseen by the department to which Ministers now propose adding responsibility for functions currently exercised by a specialist and highly successful organisation whose very purpose is youth justice. Why? What evidence is there that this will improve outcomes? How will separating policy-making from practical expertise make the system better? Why have the Government rejected the conclusions of the independent review they themselves commissioned? Those questions deserve answers. If the Government persist with these changes, the Youth Justice Board may survive in name, but in practice it will become little more than a statutory think tank—a pale shadow of the organisation that has played such an important role in one of the great public policy successes of the past 30 years. With all the challenges in our criminal justice system, we cannot afford to dismantle the one part of it which has been an overwhelming success. We cannot and must not go back to the past, when an overwhelmed department neglected youth justice and youth offending spiralled out of control, bringing misery to the lives of so many law-abiding citizens. It is not too late for Ministers to think again. I beg to move.