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(3) The caseworker appointed under subsection (2) must, so far as is reasonably practicable, be a person who is acting as a caseworker for the relevant person prior to that person being taken into custody.
(5) The duty contained in subsection (4) shall, so far as is reasonably practicable, continue after the young person has left custody.
(6) The duty contained in subsection (2)(b) only applies to a young person over 18 years of age if that person seeks the relevant advice, support or assistance.
(8) Regulations under this section for the purposes of subsection (7)(a) may, in particular, make provision about the frequency of visits by the caseworker to the young person in custody and upon his release from custody.
(9) In choosing a caseworker the local authority must satisfy themselves that the person chosen has the necessary skills and experience to perform the functions of a caseworker under this section.
“held in custody” means held in detention by the police, prison service or other court authority and “taken into custody” and “released from custody” shall be construed accordingly;
The noble Lord said: My Lords, I shall be brief. The amendment has been tabled to this Bill and to the Children and Young Persons Bill for very deliberate reasons. It seeks to add a requirement that social workers who are responsible for young people in the community stay as caseworkers with them for any period of custody to which they may be ordered. Currently, under the detention and training order regime, the consistency of supervision maintained throughout is critical at the vital stage when a person leaves custody and returns to the community. Therefore, it must make sense for the person who was previously responsible for the young person in the community to carry on with that responsibility when custody is over.
Many noble Lords may wonder why it is necessary to put the requirement in the Bill because it ought to be happening already. Tragically, it is not—the
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The statistics show that the children who are ordered into care are the most vulnerable within the young offender estate. Tragically, their reoffending rate is not helped because there is so little consistency in their treatment after release. They lack the parental support which others have. Therefore, I strongly feel that the requirement should be put into the Bill. It links with so much other legislation now being taken through your Lordships’ House—particularly the Children and Young Persons Bill—and therefore I beg to move.
Baroness Falkner of Margravine: My Lords, my name is attached to the amendment. The noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, clearly set out why it is so fundamentally important, so I will cover only a few of the main issues. We know that children in care are overrepresented in the secure estate population. Approximately 40 to 49 per cent of children and young people in custody have been in local authority care, and about 18 per cent are still subject to statutory care orders. This is a particularly vulnerable group of children who are most likely to experience resettlement problems on release.
We on these Benches believe that any child removed from their ordinary care arrangements by the state should be understood to be looked after by the state, both in the spirit of the term and by statute. Even those children who are sent to custody directly from their parental home, without being subject to any current or former care arrangements with the local authority, are, to all intents and purposes, being removed from any effective parental supervision and responsibility. In other words, it should be recognised that they move into the care of the state. The Government will argue that, under current arrangements, the youth offending team will have case responsibility. We would say that the main function of youth offending teams is to prevent reoffending, and that while they are required to take account of the holistic needs of the child, they do not have a primary welfare function. While they were originally established as multi-agency teams, with staff from a number of sectors, over time these links have become extremely tenuous and youth offending teams now often consist of generic youth justice workers. For this reason, we feel that children who are looked after, whatever their status and whether or not they are eligible care-leavers, should continue to have involvement from their own child and family social worker throughout their period in custody. That would be the holistic way to manage them, and it is not currently the case.
Lord Elystan-Morgan: My Lords, I, too, support this amendment completely. I am sure that it will be the Minister’s case, when he replies in a moment, that to a large extent this already represents the pattern of
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Baroness Howe of Idlicote: My Lords, I have seldom been happier to see my noble friend Lord Judd—and he certainly is a friend, even if he is on a different Bench—appear suddenly on the Labour Benches. We have been missing him all day and he has arrived for just the right clause.
I very much support this clause. As my noble friend Lord Ramsbotham said, our debates on the Children and Young Persons Act went through it, too. We are dealing with the most vulnerable group of people that you can think of. They have almost certainly suffered from the many problems that we have heard read out during these debates. Having a supportive worker in touch with them could make all the difference to whether they reoffend. I stress one thing—emphasis is laid on the particular worker chosen having the necessary skills, and I do think that that is frightfully important. But as well as that, there should be some degree of choice for the young person concerned. I hope that that will be borne in mind. Above all, they need a mentor who will take them through the more difficult periods of coming out of some form of custody and back into the real world—giving them advice on education, skills training and other things. I very much support this amendment.
Baroness Butler-Sloss: My Lords, I, too, support this amendment and also speak to Amendment No. 85A, which is linked. Actually, it is a stage before Amendment No. 85—it is a new amendment that comes through the Standing Committee for Youth Justice. The committee has asked me to put this forward, which I am very happy to do. It bears a certain resemblance to my earlier amendment, to make Section 37 of the Children Act 1989 part of the youth justice system. This is intended to amend the Children and Young Persons Act 1969, Section 9, in a similar way. We are back, on both amendments, to the welfare of the child appearing in the youth court.
The local authority has an obligation, where a child is looked after or in need, to provide proper proposals for that child and, where appropriate, a care plan. Lying behind Amendment No. 85A is the need for careful communication and working together between the social workers of the home local authority and the YOTs. Often, there is a lack of that working together, and a lack of communication. In too many cases, there appears to be a feeling by home social services departments that, when the child is coming up before
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The excellent White Paper, Care Matters: Time for Change, summarises clearly the indisputable evidence of the poor outcomes for children who are in care, particularly the children who get into trouble and end up in the youth court. That admirable document is a reflection of a series of system failures. It is those system failures that this amendment is intended to address. We need to put pressure on local authorities—overworked, understaffed, under-resourced—that all too often say, “That person is now the subject of the YOT and the criminal court. We can sit back and deal with the child who has not yet got there”. It absolutely is not good enough for the local authority to take a back seat.
The Howard League for Penal Reform has taken up a number of serious cases of children who have not been identified by the agencies—children who have slipped through the net. There is a need for effective structures that are at present lacking. The purpose of giving the criminal court power to seek help from the home local authority, which is not here at present, is to give the YOT and the court proper help from the home local authority. It is to plug the gap and provide real pressure—a kick up that which I would not mention in this august Chamber. We do need home local authorities to play a proper part and they are not doing so in too many cases. These are children for whom the local authority is responsible and if, as I sincerely hope, Amendment No. 85 is agreed to by the Government, they would have help from the home local authority at the point where they go before the youth court, and before and after they go into custody. We must remember that these children who offend are children in need, children who have welfare concerns, and they are not getting the help that they need.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath: My Lords, we return to the question of youth justice. I suppose there have been two overriding themes in our debates; first the question of the number of young people in custody and the support given to them and, secondly, the important question of the inter-relationship between the criminal justice system and local authorities.
Noble Lords are absolutely right to bring us back to this point, because clearly if we are to have an effective criminal justice system and if we are to
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The policy intent underlying the provision in the Children and Young Persons Bill in relation to children in custody is to make sure that services for that very vulnerable group of children are effectively co-ordinated, so that they have the necessary support to re-establish themselves in their home area. For some young people, this support will mean being provided with accommodation, foster care or a children’s home, for example, and this would mean that they would again become “looked after” in the formal sense.
The Children and Young Persons Bill will ensure that there is a statutory framework in place so that local authorities maintain contact with children who they have looked after and who are involved with youth justice services. The purpose of that contact will be to maintain continuity with the child and to assess what support the child may need on release, including whether they should again be provided with accommodation by the local authority.
As the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, implied, following the response of my noble friend Lord Adonis in the debate on the Children and Young Persons Bill, we will use the powers in that Bill to require the local authority to visit children who were provided with voluntary accommodation by the authority who are no longer looked after as their status is dependent on provision of accommodation. That will ensure that all the children within the scope of proposed new subsection (1)(b) of the amendment will receive visits. As my noble friend Lord Adonis has made clear, the intention is that these visits will ensure the continued involvement of local authority children’s services by maintaining regular contact between the child and the local authority.
We are not at present able to make firm commitments as to the detailed content of the regulations and guidance about how the visiting duty towards looked-after children in custody will be discharged. We will, however, ensure that the arrangements for local authority representatives are compatible with the sentence planning, case conference and resettlement meetings while the child is in custody. I say to the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, that I very much warmed to her use of the word “mentor” in that regard. We have made it clear that as
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The visiting role should, overall, mean that local authority representatives ensure that the child is properly safeguarded, that their welfare is promoted, that staff in youth justice services have the relevant information about the child’s past experiences and that children’s services are fully participating in planning for supporting the child in the community on release. In developing the new regulations and the guidance we will consult widely, which will involve the Youth Justice Board, Her Majesty’s Prison Service, voluntary sector organisations and local government, so that the input from children’s services complements and adds value to the support already provided by the youth justice system.
I appreciate that this issue has been raised in debates and that my noble friend Lord Adonis has corresponded with the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, with more detail about how we intend to ensure that children who are or who have been looked after in custody receive better support. I reiterate that the Government share similar concerns to the noble Lord and other noble Lords, and that we are taking action on that basis.
Amendment No. 85A was spoken to by the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss. I congratulate her on the ingenuity of her drafting, since she has used the points that I made against her when we debated this in Committee. The amendment would extend the existing power to direct an investigation to require a local authority to include in its report to the court plans or proposals for working with the child or, if it had no such plans or proposals, why it made that decision. In addition, the amendment would require the local authority, where the child is looked after, to provide the court with a copy of the full care plan, as she so eloquently described in her speech, including additional steps to take if the child were to be convicted of the offence.
I remain of the belief that there is little need for this power in view of the responsibility under the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 for youth offending teams to provide reports to the court on young offenders. The youth offending team is attached to the local authority, and its multi-agency status should mean that it is best placed to draw together all the relevant information when compiling a report on a young offender. That is probably why the courts do not use the Section 9 power to order a local authority to undertake an investigation of the young offender.
I say to the noble and learned Baroness and to the noble Baroness, Lady Falkner, that I understand their points about what they described as local authority disengagement. I understand their concerns, and I accept that more needs to be done to ensure that youth justice bodies and children’s services work together more closely, but it is not a matter of legislative provision; it is a matter of practice. The question is how we ensure that we get better practice. I do not
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Since this debate very much turns on the performance of local government and its inter-relationship with the criminal justice system, I add that we think that the Children and Young Persons Bill is addressing a gap in the statutory provisions. The joint sponsorship of youth justice by my department and that of my noble friend Lord Adonis is a very strong step in the right direction in ensuring a much more complementary and integrated approach, and getting that right at national level has an influence on how YOTs and local authorities should work together in the future.
I have already mentioned in our previous debates the impact of the YOTs inspection regime. As noble Lords will recall, that is a regular inspection, which identifies successes and weaknesses in the performance of YOTs. That enables us to pinpoint areas where performance needs to be improved. I mentioned again the youth crime action plan which will be informed by our debates.
Finally, I shall mention the local authority performance framework in general. While I would not wish to bore the House with a detailed exposition of our new approach to performance management within local government, given the critical importance of youth justice in helping local authorities meet some of the pressures that they face, I am sure that focusing on a smaller number of statutory targets will help to ensure the consistency we all want to see.
I do not accept that changes in statute are required. What is required is an improvement in performance and consistency. I hope that I have enabled noble Lords to be satisfied that the Government are far from complacent in this area. We are committed to doing all we can to improve performance and to ensure that there is an integrated approach between YOTs and local authorities so that these very vulnerable young people get the right kind of support.
Lord Ramsbotham: My Lords, I thank the Minister for replying in his customary full and courteous way. I listened in particular to the last mention he made of the importance of the YOT inspection regime because that is crucial if there is to be any reassurance about oversight and improvement in performance. I have been greatly reassured by correspondence with the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, in which he stated that it is intended that the instructions should be in the guidance. However, the oversight has always concerned me. Up until now, the oversight that should have been there has not achieved its aim. I hope that the guidance will include direction to YOT inspection teams that they should check to see that every young person in care has a case worker with him. If there was full assurance that that was the case, the performance would be overseen.
However, as the Minister will be aware, I still remain unhappy that that is not in statute. I have been
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On Question, Whether the said amendment (No. 85) shall be agreed to?
Their Lordships divided: Contents, 66; Not-Contents, 99.
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