Member

One small step, I suggest, is in my amendment: lower the respect order intervention age to 14. “What difference would that make?”, noble Lords will say. Let us look at the Youth Justice Board’s latest statistics, for the year ending 2024, published in January this year. As might be expected, the rate of reoffending increases with the number of previous offences committed. For the year ending March 2023, those with no previous offences had a reoffending rate of 16.7%, compared with 72.8% for those who had committed 11 or more previous offences. Those who had committed no previous offences made up 51% of all children in the aggregated cohort—the highest proportion in the time series, and up one percentage point from the previous year. But they committed only 17% of all proven offences. Those with 11 or more previous offences made up only 9% of all children in the aggregated cohort, but they committed 29% of all proven reoffences.