Oral evidence: The treatment of young adults in the criminal justice system, HC 397Tuesday 12 April 2016

Oral evidence, 12 April 2016.

Witnesses

Andrew Hillas, Head of 18-25 young offender cohort, London Community Rehabilitation Company, David Ripley, Director of Resources, Durham Tees Valley Community Rehabilitation Company, and Grace Strong, Strategic Partnership Manager, the YAP!, gave evidence.

Chair

Welcome, everybody. The deputy mayor did not need an introduction because there was just him. Since there are three of you, could you kindly say who you are and what your background is?

David Ripley

I am David Ripley from Durham Tees Valley Community Rehabilitation Company.

Grace Strong

I am Grace Strong from the Derbyshire, Leicestershire, Nottinghamshire and Rutland CRC. I was formerly the project manager of the young adult project, which was just in Leicestershire and Rutland.

Andrew Hillas

Good morning. I am Andrew Hillas. I am one of the two heads of the 18-25 cohort for the London CRC.

Alberto Costa

Can I turn to the treatment of young adults? The question that we have here concerns academic principles of cognitive behavioural and desistance theory. How are principles based on cognitive behavioural and desistance theory aiding your work with young adults?

David Ripley

We have embedded the approach to desistance theory totally in our model of delivery. We have taken rehabilitation back out into communities. We believe that the hook and the motivation for change is core to all spectrums of offending. We have looked at things such as the age-crime curve, which shows that people’s maturity levels develop later in life. Maturity is one of the key academic principles we are hooking on to now, especially for this cohort, to make sure that they are at the stage where they can recognise that they need to change. Then we can use desistance theory to help them to gain the hooks to make positive change in their lives.

Grace Strong

In a similar vein, we accept desistance theory. In terms of cognitive behavioural approaches, with young adults, in particular, there is quite a lot of evidence around the accredited programmes that take that approach, but many young adults struggle with the very formal and structured nature of those programmes. What we are finding on the ground, as we take a more specialist approach to young adults, is that thinking behaviour is such a significant need among that cohort—significantly higher than among older adults—that it has to be woven into all interventions. By way of a very practical example, just yesterday a practitioner’s car broke down with a service user in it. They talked about problem solving in relation to what happened with the car. We know from the emerging evidence that that kind of very practical approach works really well with young adults. In terms of what else we have drawn from desistance principles, a really strong element that we have woven into our young adult pathway, and a couple of the other projects I am responsible for, is the relationship-based approach. We came across the concept of the trusted adult and how important that is for the young adult cohort. That is someone who takes an interest in and builds trust with that young adult, but who also holds them responsible, holds them to account and assists them. Every single contact matters in terms of trying to develop that young adult’s sense of individual and social responsibility. Other areas that we find are working really well with young adults on the ground are to do with taking a family and networked approach. You look at where their strengths are, in terms of their friendships, peer groups, family and so on. That comes very much from what we have learned through desistance.

Andrew Hillas

I totally agree with what my colleagues have said so far. In London, there are specific issues about using desistance theory. You have already heard about the cultural divergences of different populations in London. Before we can even start using desistance, we need to get buy-in from the different young adults we are working with. That involves obtaining role models who are trusted and appreciated by the different cultural groups in London. Buy-in is absolutely critical. You cannot start working with a young adult on cognitive issues if that young adult has not agreed to participate. We have spent a lot of time trying to understand the young adults we are working with. A key issue for us in London is the emotional maturity agenda. We have discovered that you need to tailor your intervention to each young person, to find out where they are in terms of their emotional maturity. Then you can intervene in various different ways to implement the desistance agenda.

Alberto Costa

Ms Strong touched on the family in response to my question. Can I turn to family involvement and support? The Harris review said that families are integral to supporting young people in custody. What are you doing to involve families in your work with young adults?

Grace Strong

I also have the lead in the area for children and families, so it is something close to my heart. They play a crucial role. It is interesting that there are still quite stark contrasts between the youth justice system and how it involves family, and the adult system, where it is fair to say that, in recent years, probation practice has focused more on the individual and less on family and wider networks of support. I sense that that is changing. There are challenges, one being that someone has turned 18 and consent is therefore required. We are also acutely aware that, for some young adults, family can be quite problematic; there will be certain risks and so on. It is certainly a difficult area of work. However, I do not think that we should shy away from it. There was an inspection back in 2014 that said that in the majority of circumstances family is the most effective resettlement agency; it is quite compelling reading. We are missing a trick if we do not include family. With young adults themselves, it is such an opportunity. It may involve the family they were raised in, but of course they are forming families themselves as well. The opportunity is there for early intervention and putting in parenting resources. That not only strengthens desistance for the young adult but, potentially, gets better outcomes for the wider family. In terms of what we are doing locally, taking a family approach opens up different partnerships. We are doing a lot of work with early help, for example, and the troubled families programme—we have phase 2 of that now. We are doing things like cross-agency training between family workers and criminal justice practitioners. That goes beyond probation services and includes the police as well. The training has been on things like taking a whole-family approach or hidden sentence training, which is about the impact of imprisonment, for example, on children and the family back at home. We have just started to do a small pilot in the Leicestershire area linking up early help services with prisons. When a parent goes into prison, a small assessment is done and we refer to early help, so that they can work with the family while that prisoner is going through their custodial sentence. The idea is that we not only undertake the work that the family may need but we try to strengthen the family and keep contact with the prisoner, given how effective family are in terms of resettlement. It is far too early to know how effective that is, but it certainly feels like one of those pilots that will yield very positive outcomes for us.

Mr Hanson

One of the things we are looking at is how needs are assessed. We are starting from the baseline that the MOJ itself has said: “There is limited available evidence on what works to reduce reoffending,” particularly for young people, and on whether it differentiates young people and older groups. We have also had evidence that, particularly for young women in prison, there are potentially some very difficult background issues that may need to be addressed. We had evidence from Baroness Young on the lack of data for BME young offenders. Does any of you have a view on the adequacy of data currently available? Do you have any particular suggestions about the adequacy of those data for women and BME young offenders?

David Ripley

There are limited data available. Whenever it comes to dealing with data, one crucial thing is to open up the data across boundaries, which I think Stephen touched on. Individually, for example, in Durham Tees Valley we have collection of data around some of our BME groups, but we are very under-represented in some of our areas, so is that reflective of the general offending population? No, it is not. However, when you pool some of the data that are available through different areas, you start to get a more holistic picture. When it comes to dealing with young adult offenders, we would be keen on any move to see a big data project to support that, to help data transfer across boundaries. The work of the CRC with the Ministry of Justice has helped to unravel some of that, so data are a little more openly accessible, but, although we have moved to the privatised side, we still have difficulties with new data-sharing arrangements with statutory bodies, as a private company. In trying to find a holistic approach to services for young people, it is vital that more data are easily available across boundaries.

Grace Strong

I agree. There is a lack of data, particularly in relation to the groups that you mentioned.

Mr Hanson

Who is responsible for doing that, given that, effectively, you are now a locally based private sector company and the MOJ is facing budgetary challenges? There is a long-term data collection issue. As you said, you have data protection issues and all sorts of things. Who has the central responsibility now to manage the data requirements to look at what can be done for women and BME offenders, in particular, and for young people in transition?

Andrew Hillas

In London, we have very close links with Stephen Greenhalgh’s department. When you co-commission, you can sometimes get around this issue, because the PCC can obtain the data. In London, specifically, we have managed to get around the problem that has been described of a lack of data being shared. I would recommend that for privatised CRCs the way forward is to work alongside the local PCCs to get those data. Alternatively, we have to come up with our own quasi-measures, which look not just at reoffending rates but at other aspects of a young person’s life journey. Those include the achievements that they have made physically, but in London we are also very keen to look at attitudinal situations. If we can measure accurately what people are thinking and what their approach to their life is, we get a very good indicator of whether or not they will reoffend.

Mr Hanson

The centralist in me would say, is it not the role of the Ministry of Justice to pull that together? You said it is down to local PCCs. If local PCCs decide not to do it, it does not happen.

David Ripley

There is a role for the Ministry of Justice in this. As independent providers, we have to take responsibility for the work we do in the areas that we cover and we can collect data on that. One of the downfalls that potentially needs to be addressed is that, through outsourcing having created investments in IT systems that link more to demographic profiling, there is a richness of data that potentially gets lost. There is no central collection point. One of the things with the transition from youth to adult is that there is consistency in the Ministry of Justice, where you could hope to have some of the core data, which could then pass through quite easily with some of the investments that have been made.

Mr Hanson

What are you doing in terms of tools or programmes to assess maturity or neurological impairments among young adults? In particular, do you have any plans to adapt services related specifically to those challenges? I know that London, in particular, has been looking at this.

Andrew Hillas

In London, we piloted the T2A Alliance and Birmingham University maturity tool, which is a snapshot of where a young person is. We are very keen for our practitioners to use that on a regular basis with the young adults they are working with, to see the journey of change. We are currently looking at developing new interventions that can be used—in fact, we already have some—to work with young adults whose journey through the emotional maturation process has not got very far. It is a work in progress in London, but we see it as a vital piece of work that is quite a key priority.

Grace Strong

It is also work in progress for us. We accept totally the relevance of maturity to understanding offending, to understanding need and vulnerability and in the design of all our different interventions. We have just finished quite a prolonged period of co-design, which includes a young adult pathway that has interventions that very much take into account the evidence around maturity. In terms of staff development, the maturity guide has been around for a while, so I am confident that if you asked a practitioner about maturity they would be able to tell you the differences between emotional maturity, physical maturity and so on. We also have a learning and development programme, which will commence quite shortly, that goes into a lot more depth. There are practitioners who will specialise with young adults. Neurodisabilities are the gap for us and they are firmly on our radar. My view is that we do not understand enough at the moment to pick up on those needs. Where the needs are not high enough to need clinical services, we do not currently have the tools to know how to adapt our approach and interventions. That is definitely a gap. I know that under-18s have the CHAT, which I look at with envy. We could do with a similar screening tool for young adults, and adults generally, I would suggest. We need help with it. Locally, we are entering into a collaboration with Birmingham University and Exeter to look at neurodisabilities, trying to develop a very practical toolbox for our practitioners on the ground. It presents challenges to us from the partnership point of view, in strengthening our links with health at local level.

David Ripley

From Durham Tees Valley’s perspective, we have a partnership with Tees, Esk and Wear Valleys mental health trust. That has been one of the things we utilised to create a new pathway. I echo what my colleagues have said. The maturity side of it is a lot easier to get into a practitioner’s mind in practice. When you border on the neurological and clinical side, it gets more difficult. We have taken a partnership approach, to try to use the skills that are already there within communities.

Chair

Does the lack of accountability in the health service cause a problem around all this? I find it a totally centralised and Department-looking system, as opposed to those of you who are looking to your communities and those who are elected and accountable.

Andrew Hillas

It makes the process of forming effective working partnerships more difficult. It is not a straightforward process at all.

Chair

My experience in Bromley has been that the health area is the problem, frankly, in terms of willingness to engage or accountability.

Grace Strong

I agree. We have a responsibility as well, in terms of raising the profile of this gap for us and trying to influence health locally, to ensure that the health needs of offenders are properly analysed and we start to commission services around that. We play a role in that locally as well.

David Ripley

We have had some success. We have been very lucky, in that the mental health trust was on board with the outsourcing venture from the start. There is a very acute problem in our part of the world with the mental health trust, in that within its geographical coverage the offending cohort is quite high. It very much comes down to whether it is a priority for the local NHS trust, essentially.

Chair

Yes, and they always have to refer up to the Department. They are not able to take a decision based locally, in the way that you can. There is an interesting piece of work for us to do around the health service.

Dr Huq

I have some specific London questions. The new directions programme has echoes of the Harris review. Both say that custody should be a last resort. When will you have the data on the impact of that programme and on consequent reoffending?

Andrew Hillas

The research that has already been done by Cambridge University was very clear: we got substantial attitudinal change from people who successfully completed the programme. Harking back to an earlier point in the discussion, we found that it was a particularly helpful intervention for people who had family or friends who were a positive influence on them. People who did not have that—who were isolated or had families who were harmful to them—did very badly on it. We learned a lot from that evaluation. An issue for this Committee is how we help young adults who are vulnerable because they do not have those support systems. It is a great idea to move forward with family aiding us—the associations— where appropriate, but in my view there is a big gap for vulnerable young adults. We are tracking the reoffending rates. We think that they are between 5% and 10% better than with no intervention whatsoever. The way the Ministry of Justice looks at reoffending rates is to follow people for two years. We are still in that two-year period, but we have the cohort that went through the intervention 18 months ago. We are virtually at the end, so the answer to your question is, “Soon.”

Dr Huq

Is that in the next six months?

Andrew Hillas

Yes.

Dr Huq

Chair, the reason why I forgot you are a London MP is that I thought that Bromley was in Kent. It is the garden of England, surely.

Chair

The fact that it may occasionally have a Kent postal address is not the reason why it does not think that it is in London. Mr Hillas’s organisation does a lot of work in Bromley.

Andrew Hillas

Indeed it does.

Chair

We are very grateful for that. London expands always and constantly. Mr Howell is not yet in London.

John Howell

No.

Chair

Just down the corridor.

John Howell

I feel threatened now. You are almost on my borders, even though we are 50 miles away. Can I go back to the issue of bringing people together on this and look at the hub model that has been developed in Durham Tees and in London? What has been the impact of that?

David Ripley

We have found that it provides much better integrated pathways and a much better experience for young adult offenders, and adult offenders, for that matter. The chance to co-locate with other agencies and have support on tap has been vital. There is the ability for families to attend, although obviously we make assessments on whether they can. A point was made earlier about whether that is appropriate all the time; there are certain cases where it is not appropriate for families. It also gives offenders direct access to the services so that we do not have to take a referral route or go around the road to make another telephone call. It is a lot easier having those people there. We have seen increased satisfaction from offenders. We have a 91% satisfaction rate with the services that we are delivering now. We are seeing much better performance in terms of whether people are reporting, delivering their community order and meeting their requirements. As has just been touched on, the longer-term reduction in reoffending will come once we get some analysis over the two-year period out of the way.

John Howell

The change in atmosphere that is created by this must be quite effective in terms of the way young offenders are dealt with. Do you have any feedback on that?

David Ripley

Yes. It has been very powerful, both for the offenders and for colleagues who work for Durham Tees Valley. There has been a marked change in the behaviour of a lot of offenders. They are a lot calmer and more peaceful in their outlook, now that the environment is friendlier than in the old probation office. We get a lot of informal feedback by that route. From a staff perspective, we have seen a reduction in staff turnover rates. We now have a staff turnover of less than 2%, as well as high levels of staff retention and satisfaction. The hub model has given our colleagues more time to spend with participants in their community—in their setting—so that they can get to know them better and create more of a relationship, rather than the potential to have conflict, as in the old settings.

Andrew Hillas

I will make two very small points, which are both quite important. First, for a hub to be successful, its geographical location is quite critical. Sometimes we have found that it works really well if a partnership organisation has a hub in the middle of an estate, for example. That can work particularly well, rather than expecting a young person to travel 3 or 4 miles to the nearest probation office. The second thing is that we have found that the success of hubs depends very much on the quality of the partnership organisations that are present there. It goes back to my earlier point about cultural relevance. Those organisations need to be ones that have some sort of acceptance by the young adult group in the locality.

John Howell

Are those hubs just for young people or do they extend further?

Andrew Hillas

We run both. We find that it is useful to run a separate one for young adults.

Chair

That is helpful.

Marie Rimmer

Good morning. I will chip in for the north-west. We are looking at sentencing provisions and possible changes. Cheshire and Greater Manchester Community Rehabilitation Company is using the intensive community order. I do not know whether you have heard of that, but we have had evidence on it. In London—you will know about this—there is the new directions programme. In your experience, what types of sentences are most effective in encouraging young adults to desist from crime? I am interested in your experience.

Andrew Hillas

We have found that intensity is quite helpful. I must admit that I came into the intensive supervision debate thinking that young adults find it difficult to comply with community sentences, so they will not comply and will all have to be taken back to court. In fact, we found exactly the opposite. If you occupy a young adult with a set of activities that they find meaningful, they will comply. We took very few back to court—far fewer than people on less intensive orders. For us, what worked was having a mixture of interventions, some of them even punitive. We tried to ensure that, when young people were placed on our unpaid work community payback orders, they were all completed. Young people found that there should be some meaning, so that they were actually repaying something to the community. That was quite helpful in its own right. It goes back to the point my colleague made earlier. Ultimately, you need a trusted adult role model, whether that is the probation officer or someone else, to hang the intensive order around. That person is the mentoring, motivating individual who makes sure that the young person continues to comply, even when they are perhaps at their lowest motivational point.

Grace Strong

I agree. Sentences that are multimodal are particularly effective for young adults. They balance the need sometimes for restrictive measures with making sure that there are clear rehabilitative measures as well. There is a sentencing option that I believe is under-utilised across the country for young adults—the senior attendance centre. We have just finished a redesign of that, because we see it as potentially a very effective sentence for young adults. It is a bit like the one-stop-shop model, as it brings them together for a set amount of time and you are able to deliver all sorts of interventions, including reparative activities, at the same time for that particular group of young adults. Again, it is about developing psychosocial maturity—problem solving, teamwork and so on. Although we do not have the evidence at the moment—I do not think that there is much evidence about the effectiveness of attendance centres—in our CRC we intend to generate that from the new model and to share it.

David Ripley

I echo some of that. Specific activity requirements are vital for young people—things they can hook on to and see meaning in. Too often people are put on programmes where there is not really a wider meaning for them as individuals; they are just put through the system. We have tried to develop a set of programmes linked to our hub delivery model, where we can deliver specific things for people of a specific nature. For example, we run a women-only hub, with specific programmes around offending behaviour that really help to target it. The key is to get the activity to align to the cohort you are dealing with at the time and to have an approach that is flexible enough to allow you to adapt.

Marie Rimmer

Is there any thought of providing real choice to the individual—something that they are interested in doing?

Grace Strong

Yes, and involving young adults in the delivery of the service. For example, with the attendance centres, we have built in young adult involvement. Young adults who are halfway through the group will welcome the new young adults. They will directly influence the topics that are talked about. Often they know best what their needs are and how those change—it is quite difficult to keep up with that. Yes, that is absolutely the case. I would not mind adding something about the new rehabilitation activity requirement, which came in last year. It is very flexible and lends itself to designing those kinds of interventions—groups and so on—that are tailored to the needs of young adults. That is certainly something we have done locally. We have a rehabilitation activity requirement for young adult males, which we have been able to design in line with the evidence.

Chair

A lot of that is about sentencing powers.

Alex Chalk

London CRC has come up with the suggestion that you should have distinct young adult courts. I want to explore that briefly. The key headlines appear to be: avoid sending young people to custody, where possible; have intensive orders, including attendance orders, that keep them occupied, motivated and so on; and have positive role models. Those seem to be the watchwords of success. Aren’t those things more important than necessarily having a young adult court? In other words, isn’t it really about what the court imposes, rather than the type of court that does the imposition? Don’t we have to look at outcomes, not process?

Grace Strong

We do need to look at outcomes, but from the point of view of a young adult’s experience; the system as a whole needs to make sense to them. If you take a particular approach in probation services, it is really helpful if that approach is mirrored across the system. The challenge is significant with young adults, in terms of developing their maturity and supporting desistance. The feedback that we got from our young adults when we talked to them a while ago in the YAP! was that the system does not make sense to them. Wherever they go, whatever the organisation or service, there are different approaches. We seem to see the best results where we have consistency in approach.

Alex Chalk

Sure, but I am asking specifically about the proposal for a young adult court. Let us be clear. We have a youth court, up to the age of 18, and then we have an adult court. What I think is being proposed is a young adult court. Is it right to focus on the system that will end up imposing one of these orders? Shouldn’t we really just say to the adult court, “Take account of maturity and don’t send so many people inside. Instead, look at these intensive orders.”? Why do we care what the dispensing authority is?

Andrew Hillas

I totally agree with my colleague that, ultimately, the sentencing occasion can be an opportunity for positive change. I know that may sound counter-intuitive. Whether you have a separate court or whether you have specific sentencers who are specialists in the maturity agenda, it can be an opportunity to bring the interventions that are going to be delivered into the courtroom. You can improve the compliance likelihood even at that very early stage. I am not disagreeing with you. You do not necessarily have to have a young adult court, but I can see that it could bring significant benefits.

Alex Chalk

Sure, but the priority has to be what they dispense, rather than how they dispense it. Isn’t that right?

Andrew Hillas

In our new directions intervention, we made mentoring, using members of the community, a key part of the intervention, and we got those mentors into the courtroom at the point of sentence, to act as a spokesperson for the young adult. I would want to encourage that.

Marie Rimmer

Looking at through the gate services, is there a difference in how through the gate is working for young adults in dedicated institutions, as opposed to mixed establishments?

Andrew Hillas

In London, we are partnering with Catch22, from whom you will hear very shortly. That is certainly an advantage. We now know exactly who are our colleague organisations doing pre-release work with young adults in the three London young adult prisons, so we can do far more joined-up work. Mr Greenhalgh told you about the “Gripping the Offender” project that we are just about to launch in London, which will provide intensive through the gate. We are very much looking forward to researching that, to see what happens if we have other organisations, as well as Catch22, going into the prison just before someone is released, meeting them at the gate, taking them out and ensuring that they resettle—doing all the practicalities, in addition to the normal probation supervision. We think that is a very interesting and exciting opportunity.

David Ripley

In Durham Tees Valley, there is not a difference in the sense of where the through the gate services are delivered, but there is a gap with the young offenders institutions, where we do not deliver through the gate services. A through the gate service in YOIs would greatly improve outcomes, as people transition either into an adult prison or into the community setting. At the moment, we are limited to a 12-week relationship prior to release. A longer, more intense relationship would allow us to get in there and work more holistically, especially with troubled people who have been in the system for longer, to help assess their motivations for change and the issues they have with their offending behaviour. Potentially, that would allow us to create some of the pathways before the person comes out, rather than at the point when they have come out.

Marie Rimmer

Do you find that, without support, transfer to an adult prison can be regressive for a young person? Can it be very damaging?

David Ripley

Yes. We have had a number of cases within our establishments where, unfortunately, young adult offenders have either taken their life or completely regressed once they moved into the adult institution. The CRC vehicle gives us the chance to act to bridge the gap between the two institutions—to be the professional person they can associate with and who can help to make sense of the whole system for them, although there are different parts they need to interact with.

Grace Strong

We have a through the gate service in our local YOI, which we provide. It is slightly different, because, of course, the needs of the young adults in that YOI are different. For example, there is more support put in place, recognising that the transition between custody and community can be particularly risky and problematic for the young adult. The area that is particularly relevant, in terms of subgroups, is care leavers, who have high support needs and are over-represented in custody. Our through the gate services with care leavers are making links with care leaving services out in the community. That is a distinct difference, just because that age group falls within the YOIs.

John Howell

I want to pick up and follow on from Mr Chalk’s question, and look at this in terms of probation services. Do you think that there should be a separate legal duty for probation services to offer a distinct service for young adults? I see a lot of scratching of heads and smiles.

David Ripley

I will start. No, we do not think that there should be. We think that the system should create an ability to deliver tailored services that individuals need. We have a lot of those elements in the changes under the ORA, which have now come into effect and give us as organisations the ability to choose the activity that suits a particular person. I am not saying that it is perfect—there is more that can be done—but separating and segregating a specific element of criminal justice may create the problem further up, in a different age group or at a different point in the system. We think that it is better to leave the system as it is structured at the moment so that we can deliver the prescriptive services we feel would be better for an individual.

John Howell

But there is a separate duty for dealing with women offenders.

David Ripley

From the way the system and the services are going for ourselves, we think that we are best placed to look at those. I am not necessarily saying that that separate duty needs to be torn up at this stage, but we now have the flexibility to be able to model the way we want to do it.

Andrew Hillas

In my opinion, it would be a very foolish CRC that did not offer a discrete service, given that all the evidence is pointing out that, if you do not treat young adults differently, you will not achieve the reoffending rates that we are seeking. It may be helpful, but is it necessary?

John Howell

Would you support a separate Minister—one of the MOJ Ministers—with responsibility just for young offenders?

Andrew Hillas

Yes, I would.

Grace Strong

Yes, looking at the totality of the evidence and the degree to which a step change is needed in the way in which we work with young adults. It goes far beyond the criminal justice system, and there lies a challenge, really. In the early days of the young adult project, which is a multi-agency project, it was very difficult to convince other agencies that young adults should be a priority, because there are so many competing priorities and scant resources. I am not sure whether it needs to be a legal duty, because I do not fully understand the pros and cons of that.

Andrew Hillas

Having a Minister for young adult offenders would be a good idea, because it would ensure that this agenda did not ever slip again. Ten years ago, when I was in probation, the young adult agenda was not considered to be an important factor, but this morning, very positively, we are concentrating on nothing else.

Chair

The problem is that you can make a Minister for anything, but unless they have the tools, the powers and the budgets, they will be one of those tokenistic Ministers who do not add a lot. At one point in my life, I was the community pubs Minister. Fine, but what did it actually mean? We were there to promote the sector. If it concentrates minds—this is Mr Howell’s point—and some budget and some power flow with it, you think that it is valuable.

Grace Strong

Yes, absolutely.

Chair

It has to be that way around. Or should it be national? Should it be the metro mayor, or whoever, who has control over that? I will take nods as a sort of yes. While we are on the probation service, it is probably handy for Ms Rimmer to come in with her questions about probation. I will come back to the other points.

Marie Rimmer

Currently, maturity assessments are not mandatory in a pre-sentence report, unless the young person has drug and alcohol problems that are linked to the sentence. New guidance will be issued this year. What involvement do CRCs have with the National Probation Service in shaping advice to the court on how young adults should be sentenced—whether there should be a community sentence or detention? Do you have any influence or involvement?

Andrew Hillas

In London, we advise our National Probation Service colleagues on what interventions we have in the CRC, so that they can then advise the courts themselves. We have a lot of contact with the National Probation Service, particularly around the transition of young people from the 32 London YOSs to adult services. In fact, the one bugbear for us—I would be interested to hear whether my colleagues agree—is that TR has now created a very complicated process for young people to leave a YOS and come to the CRC. They cannot just come straight to us; they have to go through the National Probation Service. We have had to spend quite a lot of time and effort finding a way to get around that, to ensure that young adults are not left in limbo while that administrative process takes place. Of course, the National Probation Service will have young adults as 25% of its own case load. As CRCs are responsible for developing the interventions, we think that it is only morally right that we should encourage and tell our NPS colleagues what interventions we have and that they should pass that on to sentencers.

Grace Strong

Our role in the CRC is to make sure that they are fully informed of the different sentencing options. As we gain more evidence about the effectiveness of those, we must also make sure that we share it with the NPS and sentencers.

David Ripley

One of the potential barriers is the variance between various courts. Although it may all be the National Probation Service, particular courts react in different ways to different sorts of propositions. Colleagues have touched on the fact that we have the tools to promote services and what we believe to be effective with our cohort. I suppose that the decision-making point in the system as it is will always be the NPS. Particular courts will promote that and others will not. The transition point that my colleagues just raised is vital. One of the potential downsides of TR is that it has made that transition harder, in that we now have private businesses delivering an element of the service, which creates difficulties around data protection and barriers to entry that make the transition from the youth side to the adult side a little harder than it potentially used to be.

Marie Rimmer

What steps are being taken to address that problem? Are any steps being taken yet?

Andrew Hillas

In London, we are making sure, with varying degrees of success, that our operational managers meet the YOS managers regularly so that we can spot the individuals who are going to be transferred very early on, so that, even if the admin process is taking time, the young person is not lost in the transfer.

Grace Strong

In Leicestershire, we have a joint practitioner group and a managers group, which we intend to roll out. That is proving to be really effective. It involves the NPS and the CRC, as well as the two YOS teams in the area.

David Ripley

We have also trialled having staff representatives in court to help the NPS to make their decisions and to ensure that they have all the information to hand.

Marie Rimmer

That is good to hear.

Chair

That is the sort of cumbersomeness Mr Hillas refers to in the written evidence from the London CRC and which we need somehow to get around. I understand that point. Does the funding create any issues around that? You are funded by volume and results. Does that create any difficulty or not?

Andrew Hillas

Charlie Taylor is currently carrying out research into the future of YOSs, which have had an in-year reduction in their funding. We are beginning to see the effects of that, as they are transferring far more young people to adult services than they customarily used to do. Obviously it is for them to decide whether or not a young person gets transferred when they turn 18. Previously they did not transfer that many in London. Now we are getting significantly more, so there is a resource implication for us.

Chair

I understand that. Is there more that you can do at the moment to pool your budgets in devolved areas?

Andrew Hillas

There is certainly scope for us to work more closely with YOSs to deliver intervention. The age of 18 is not a magic changing date. We ought to be able to deliver interventions that work for 17-year-olds who are being supervised by the YOS and 18-year-olds who are being supervised by ourselves.

Chair

Sure. We understand that. That is very helpful. Thank you very much for your time and your evidence. It is very much appreciated. Both your written evidence and the oral evidence that you have given us today has been very helpful. Examination of Witnesses

Witnesses

Bernie Kastner, Community Services Manager, St Giles Trust, Mat Ilic, Justice Strategy Director, Catch22, and Bex Mullins, Young Women’s Keyworker, Advance Minerva, gave evidence.

Chair

Thank you very much for being very patient. Everything has to pause for the choreography to be rearranged, folks; I am sorry about that. Just for the record, it would be helpful if you introduced yourselves and the organisations that you represent.

Bernie Kastner

I am Bernie Kastner. I represent St Giles Trust, where I am the community services manager. As the name suggests, I manage all our services in the community in London. I would like to point out that I am a very last minute sub; I have just come off the bench. I knew about this only last night, so if it is okay with you, I will be referring to my notes.

Chair

Don’t worry at all. I am grateful to you for taking the time to come along. I know St Giles’s work from London, as Rupa and others do. It is very much appreciated, so thanks for coming.

Bernie Kastner

Thanks very much.

Bex Mullins

Hello. My name is Bex Mullins. I work at Advance Minerva. I am the young women’s key worker there. My role is funded by Barrow Cadbury, as part of its T2A agenda. My role is to work with young women on a one-to-one basis. I also deliver training to police about working with young women.

Chair

It is worth mentioning how much work Barrow Cadbury does around this, isn’t it? I think that it is unsung. Do you want to tell us a bit about how they help you?

Bex Mullins

They have been really helpful in terms of funding my role, which is a prevention role. I work with young women who at the point of arrest or at court, when it gets dismissed, would otherwise not get any support and might get picked up only much later, when they enter the probation service. No one else is coming into contact or working with them. Barrow Cadbury has given services a lot of information about young adults and understanding their particular needs. It has been very helpful.

Chair

It is a charitable trust that has done a huge amount, it seems to me, in the fields you were talking about.

Mat Ilic

Hi. I am Mat Ilic. I am a strategy director at Catch22. We are a forward-looking social business with over 200 years of public service delivery. I am also executive director at Only Connect, which is London’s creative criminal justice charity.

Chair

You have heard a lot of the evidence already. I would be interested to hear your comments on it and your specific thoughts from your perspective, as the voluntary and NGO sector. What would you add to what has been said? What do you think we are missing out on?

Mat Ilic

I suppose that we are here to represent the interests of the voluntary sector, to some extent. From our perspective, the voluntary sector has a critical role to play in the criminal justice agenda, particularly with young adults. I feel that the sector can deliver better outcomes for the same amount of money—or less. It is quite a vast sector. There are 2,500 criminal justice charities in England and Wales, most of which have under £1 million in income, but 98% of them bring philanthropic income from the likes of Barrow Cadbury and others into the space. It is a place where there is a lot of resource to bring into the discussion. The other benefit of our sector is that we can work with young people in a way that statutory agencies cannot, by focusing on a strengths-based approach, being incredibly personal, being completely separate from the statutory imperatives of criminal justice and trying—

Chair

It can seem a bit judgmental sometimes, can’t it—a bit enforcing, rather than taking pity?

Mat Ilic

Exactly.

Chair

I understand that. How does that work in terms of your experience of Transforming Rehabilitation and the whole programme there? Do you find that that is working well with young adults, against the background that Mat set out well? Any thoughts on that?

Bernie Kastner

My first point concerns the role of the voluntary sector. A lot of the earlier evidence was about how the voluntary sector works with the statutory sector. The advantage of the voluntary sector is that we are able to be more flexible, adaptable and creative. We respond quickly to emerging needs, especially when we are a small or mid-sized agency like St Giles. I see the voluntary sector as the R and D department of the social care world. We come up with lots of ideas. If we are very lucky, we get some funding and then we pilot them. Quite a lot of that has been followed up and is now being embraced by TR. If it were not for the voluntary sector raising ideas early on, and piloting things like gangs work and through the gate, which we have been doing for quite a number of years, TR could not have taken them on. The key to our success is credibility, because credibility equals engagement. As we all know, disadvantaged young people can be very difficult to engage and they can mistrust authority. Charities, especially those like St Giles, which deploy ex-service users to provide the services, are more likely to connect with them. We are seen as an honest broker. In a way, if young people do not trust or buy into the service, there really is no service. We need to provide professional, well-managed services, which, effectively, work in partnership with TR and the statutory sector. We are a buffer between the statutory services and the young person. That is appreciated from both sides, usually, as we understand both points of view.

Chair

Do you think that the T2A report on effective approaches to young adults made a difference in practice? Are you seeing any difference in service delivery there?

Mat Ilic

In light of the questions earlier about evidence and data, personally I feel that there is quite a lot of evidence in relation to the young adult cohort, both from T2A and, indeed, from Government sources. The MOJ has released three evidence reviews on this topic in the last quarter. There is a ton of stuff out there on what works. The underlying points are probably what we summarise as the three Ps: people, place and purpose. It is about having the right people around you, being in a safe place—a place you relate to and can gain strength from—and having a purpose, which is something meaningful to do. That is the consistency across all of this. For us, both as practitioners and in terms of how we interface with the sector, those are the key things.

Chair

In your experience, are the hubs, the one-stop shop that we are getting with transforming rehab, working in your sector and the work that you are doing?

Bernie Kastner

From a St Giles perspective, I would say that there are some challenges. We feel that the hub is a more expensive model. In gangs work, certainly, it can cause problems around territory and young people not being able to come to one hub. There are also some safeguarding concerns around, for example, a women’s service or a DV service being placed in the same location as a gangs service. Our preferred option would be an outreach team that embeds its youth, gangs or resettlement workers in other teams, such as a community safety team or a troubled families team, as we do in the integrated gangs units in various London boroughs.

Bex Mullins

It is really important for young women to have a safe place they can go to. We operate from a women’s centre. That is so important, because most of the abusive experience they have had has come from men. I have had texts saying, “I am coming to your building. I feel safe there.” That evidences how they feel. It also gives you means to do empowering things. On our walls we have images of women, their achievements and their quotes. Young women come in and take pictures of that. There are other benefits you can get from having a safe space, as has been said.

Chair

That must involve a lot of training. How do you deal with the training of your folk so that they can deal with these sorts of issues?

Bernie Kastner

As in specialised training for our staff?

Chair

Yes.

Bernie Kastner

Anyone who works with vulnerable young people needs to be carefully selected and trained. I do not think that there is a specific post-custody resettlement training course. You would be quite rash to take that on, because it is very niche and there are limited career prospects for that. We look more at a high quality, generic qualification. We stand by the level 3 information, advice and guidance qualification, which is much more generic and can be used across the social care sector. We rely on our specialist detail from within the organisation or from our partners.

Bex Mullins

There is a lot of trauma-informed practice. The training around that is really helpful for practitioners, as is specialist training around women and girls. That is what my role has been, in terms of going out to police and trying to train them about the specific needs of the 18 to 25-year-old young women who are offending. There is a lack of understanding in lots of parts of the sector—we also train social services or do briefings at antisocial behaviour meetings—about young women and their risk of going on to offend. You have to go right back to address the question of the difference between young women and young men, or older groups. If people do not get that, all the evidence and stats do not add up.

Mat Ilic

There are three key areas of training that we focus on in relation to this group. There are issues of maturity, neuroscience and brain development. There is the subject of children in social care and care leavers; we talked earlier about the preponderance of that group in this cohort. There is also the effect of gangs on young people, particularly young people in custody, and how we deal specifically with that. There are specialists in our custodial teams who focus on that particular issue.

Chair

I get the sense that the public do not understand at all the extent of the importance of gangs within young offending. It is a much bigger driver than the popular press or others like to pick up, isn’t it?

Mat Ilic

It depends on your perspective. It is a really challenging issue. It is a challenging issue in terms of the community hubs—who you can work with and where. It is an issue in terms of the movement of people in custody and what you can achieve within an establishment as a result of that. Of course, it is an issue subsequently, on release. There is everything from having gang tattoos that prohibit you from going to work through to dissociation—

Chair

If you have the wrong tattoo, you cannot work with the guys with a different tattoo.

Mat Ilic

Exactly.

Chair

In a sense, disrupting the gangs at the beginning is the key thing, before you can get into the environment you are dealing with.

Bernie Kastner

Early intervention is really crucial. St Giles has an SOS team. We have an SOS+ offer that goes into schools, pupil referral units and youth centres. We deliver tailored sessions on the issues around gang associations, knife crime and peer pressure.

Chair

Getting them out of the gang at the very beginning is the thing.

Bernie Kastner

Yes.

Marie Rimmer

It is very difficult to get out of a gang.

Bernie Kastner

Once you are in there, it is very difficult, isn’t it? We have found that once you move on and are in the secure estate, staff in prisons are not particularly aware of the issues around gangs.

Chair

Aren’t other people within the custodial environment aware of the issue?

Bernie Kastner

I don’t think they are. There is a training issue. They need to look at training on the dynamics of gangs and gang associations. Even in London prisons, we have had examples among the young people we have been working with. A young person from Lambeth who was remanded in a London prison was put on a wing with people in a known gang. He was in direct conflict with them. That young person was beaten, humiliated, tortured and filmed in his cell. That was then put on to YouTube—

Chair

Which prison was that?

Bernie Kastner

I think it was HMP Thameside. We managed to get in touch with Catch22, which alerted the prison, and the young person was moved, but it is about the sensitivity of his being shipped there in the first place.

Chair

We have visited Wandsworth and other prisons recently. It is about finding it out on the very first day, isn’t it?

Mat Ilic

May I refer to some evidence from Thameside? In spite of that particular case, there have been some successes. You are absolutely right. The induction period is key in understanding the balance of the regime, who can go where, who can associate with whom and so on. We have an intervention at that induction period in HMP Thameside. Evidence suggests that it has led to a 77% reduction in prison violence since November 2015. Suffice it to say that the prison had quite a lot of issues when it opened, for the reasons that Bernie outlined. A lot of it is to do with the regime and what it can cope with, particularly for young adults. In other places such as Wormwood Scrubs and Pentonville, we have seen that the introduction of young adults leads directly to an increase in peer-on-peer violence in custody. Young adults can complicate prison regimes.

Bernie Kastner

The difficulty with the risk assessment is that a lot of young adults in gangs will never say that they are in a gang. Unless they tell you, it is very difficult at the beginning.

Chair

Is that because it is almost seen as a bad thing to own up to when you go into prison, for example?

Mat Ilic

It varies. You might be scared of retaliation, or you might suggest that you are in a gang in order to get protection. We have peer workers at the induction phase who can relate, instead of just relying on police and Trident data and other official stats that tell you the answer.

Bex Mullins

There is sometimes a kind of blindness to young women who are on the periphery of gangs or who are involved in gangs, until it gets to the conviction stage. The young women I am working with, who are committing fraud because they feel frightened to say no to gang members—

Chair

It is a coercive relationship, mostly, isn’t it?

Bex Mullins

Yes. It may involve weapons or firearms possession for the person they love, who is gang involved. Often, young women are not mentioned in these conversations, until we hear about them in media headlines about gang involvement. There needs to be a lot more training about why young women are involved in gangs and the relationship aspect of that.

Bernie Kastner

Young women are much more likely to be victims and to be used just to hold weapons or drugs, or to be sexually exploited. It is very difficult to find those women and engage with them. We have a project in Lambeth called Expect Respect. It is a very small project, based in youth clubs around the borough. It is for young women aged between 12 and 16. The idea of that is that usually they are invisible on those estates, and they do not come to the youth club, because it is ruled by the boys. We have trained female workers, one of whom used to be in a gang herself, who run sessions there. It is early intervention stuff, but these are girls who are at risk. I was laughing the other day, because one of the sessions was a combination of baking and a discussion around sentencing—together. I thought that was very good; they managed to bake something while they were talking about the implications of sentencing for various offences.

Bex Mullins

I have worked with a young woman who was arrested for a drunk and disorderly offence. There was no way that the police would have known that she was gang involved, but when I started working with her and built a relationship with her, a lot of information came out about how she was escorting young girls in care to prison to see gang members and how she was cleaning money through her account. That only comes out when you have a relationship with someone.

Chair

That is almost grooming.

Bex Mullins

Yes.

John Howell

I want briefly to pick up one point to do with the difficulty of young people with a criminal record finding employment. Earlier in the year, the Prime Minister suggested that we should have a US-style ban the box system, where a person applying for a job does not need to disclose prior convictions until a later stage in the process. What do you think of that?

Bex Mullins

There is a real stigma around criminal records, as well as a real lack of understanding. Three young women I have worked with had offences related to firearm possession. While they were rebailed again and again—they did not even know whether they were going to get a record—they stopped all education, because they felt that there was no point in going forward. It was at a critical time, when they can access funding and their peers are doing that. It goes back even to before they apply for jobs; there is also the impact on accessing education. Women are especially affected if they get a conviction. A lot of the jobs they go for are jobs in the care sector—teaching or working with children—so the stigma of having a criminal record is massive.

Bernie Kastner

I will disclose right now. I am an ex-offender—an ex-drug user, an ex-service user and an ex-prisoner. Many years ago, I then became a statutory sector caseworker, a voluntary sector caseworker and a voluntary sector manager. I am a fairly niche Venn diagram. I do not think that there are many of us who have done all those things. Back when I started working, there was not even a CRB. Obviously there were huge risks involved, so that had to come along, but in those days there was not the same issue. Now we need to manage those risks, but St Giles would certainly support banning the box. We would take it much further than that. We feel that employers need to be actively incentivised to take on people with criminal records, possibly through reductions in national insurance or business rates. Cost savings from a reduction in offending would make economic sense. The other thing is that ex-offenders need to see examples of people like myself and a lot of people at St Giles Trust, who have managed to change their lives. They need to see that kind of living proof. That is something St Giles really believes in.

Chair

Yes. At the end of the day, lecturing to people does not work very well, does it?

Bernie Kastner

No.

Chair

You have to see the reality.

Bernie Kastner

You need to see the example of other people having done it.

Chair

That is right. I had a case—I do not know whether this rings a bell—where there was a domestic issue at home and the police turned up. They did not have the time, the resource or the inclination to work out where the real issue lay, so they said, “It is six of one and half a dozen of the other. Give them both a caution.” Further down the track, she wanted a job as a care worker, but the caution was a potential impediment. Is that a common experience?

Mat Ilic

Bernie’s points are absolutely spot on. Banning the box takes us in one direction and sets that tone, but incentives need to be in place. We have seen great success with apprenticeships, for example—employers being encouraged to take on apprentices. You could create a similar impetus. The point that Mr Greenhalgh made earlier about London getting younger is fascinating. While that is the case, the whole point about adolescence is interesting, because you have 30-year-olds who are living at home with their parents and are out of work. That is something to consider in this debate. Most of the young people I come across in our work want work. Most of them want meaningful jobs, rather than menial jobs. Lots of them are interested in entrepreneurialism, but there is quite an optimism bias with us, in that we see the handful of young entrepreneurs who make it, not the many who do not. There is a challenge around disclosure and DBS. You need some really progressive employers to step forward. A third of our employees have criminal records. I am delighted to call them my colleagues, but it takes really proactive work on behalf of employers for them to step up and be able to say that.

Chair

We need more Timpsons.

Mat Ilic

Yes.

Chair

It was quite inspirational to listen to him on “Desert Island Discs”. That is really interesting.

Marie Rimmer

From listening to the panel, it is clear that you have tremendous experience, particularly with young people. What do you consider should be the role of the voluntary and community sectors in liaising with sentencers to improve their knowledge of the needs and characteristics of young adults and of appropriate interventions available to the courts? Young adults are very vulnerable, particularly when they have been in YOIs and are going into a more adult setting. They may have suffered and been bullied.

Bernie Kastner

As a voluntary sector organisation, we are very cautious about being involved in any kind of sentencing discussions or influence, because we do not want to become part of enforcement. If we did, we would lose all the advantages we spoke about earlier, to do with our independence and not being seen as part of the statutory sector. I recognise that quite often we attend court with a client and say, “We are here to support this client,” and that will influence sentencing. Quite often judges are looking for the opportunity to give a non-custodial sentence, but there has to be a credible alternative. Our role is to try to come up with that credible alternative. It has to be something that is robust and effective and not seen as a soft option by the fluffy voluntary sector, but it must also deliver on outcomes and be a successful alternative. For that, we need funding. It is as simple as that, really. Statutory funding must be provided to us to enable us to offer things like the RARs, where we were able to go to court and say, “This is the alternative to custody.” We have to be mindful of not being too closely connected to sentencing.

Marie Rimmer

It is more of an advocacy role—to sell a young person’s strengths and the opportunities available for that young person.

Bex Mullins

Yes. It is helping them to understand what a sentencer will need to know. I went to court with a young woman who had told her solicitor that she had resisted arrest because she had panicked with the police. I encouraged her to explain that she also had post-traumatic stress disorder and that she had a medical letter in her bag that she could show them. That makes such a difference in court. We were able to influence her having an absolute discharge for that offence. What concerns me are the young people who do not have an advocate, or the magistrate who has had no training around 18 to 25-year-olds and sees them just as adults, or who sees a young woman and does not think about the multiple disadvantages and the trauma she has most likely gone through in her situation. I agree with you; that does need to be put in place.

Marie Rimmer

Do you all agree with that?

Mat Ilic

Yes. We have direct experience of that. Before Transforming Rehabilitation, we had community workers liaising outside HMP Doncaster and trying to get better sentences for under-25s. We saw a 5.7% reduction in reoffending because of those better outcomes. That advocacy role is absolutely key with regard to those alternatives, as well as the feedback loop of the effect those alternatives have had, as opposed to a custodial disposal.

Chair

Sometimes it is about the sentencer—the magistrate or the judge—knowing what is available in their area.

Mat Ilic

Yes.

Chair

Out of interest, Bernie, what statutory funding do you get for St Giles?

Bernie Kastner

For the gangs work, we still get quite a lot of funding through MOPAC. We have about 20 gangs workers, and probably about half of them are funded through MOPAC currently. The rest is a patchwork of various charitable trusts and rich individuals, sometimes, if we are very lucky.

Chair

A lot goes into it.

Marie Rimmer

What evidence is available for the effectiveness of Advance Minerva in diverting young women from the criminal justice system?

Bex Mullins

The role that I have at the moment is being evaluated by Sheffield Hallam University. It is a three-year pilot, looking at the impact of prevention work with young women. They are going to look at the data. They will also interview staff, service users and partner agencies. That report will come out next year and there will be a lot of evidence in it. I would like to explain a bit about why our approach works with young women. We focus a great deal on their experience of abuse and trauma, and on relationships and how to have better coping mechanisms. The young women I am working with have multiple experiences of abuse and trauma. They all have different reactions—there is no one size fits all—so my approach with them will be very individual as regards what support they need and what they want to work on. It is taken into account that as well as their support needs around homelessness, debt and lack of employment opportunity, they have specific needs because they are young women. They are often the primary care givers for family members who have mental or physical health needs. They are also the primary care givers for children—the sole primary care giver, if they have their children between the ages of 18 and 25. Their experience of abuse and exploitation means that we see a lot of behaviours around self-harm, eating disorders and addiction, so our work will really focus on how you can start to cope in a different way. As I said previously, a lot of their offending is because of the men in their life or for the men in their life, so we look at healthy relationships, having the confidence to say no, when it is safe to say no, and building expectations that are not around relationships—“What do you want to be when you are older that is not about that?”

Marie Rimmer

What examples are there around the country of programmes for young adult offenders in general that are working?

Bernie Kastner

St Giles Trust runs a programme called the SOS project. That is a gangs project set up by a guy called Junior Smart, who still works on it. It started as one guy, coming out of YOI Rochester and High Down to work with young people coming back to Southwark and Peckham. It has grown from there to 20 staff, working in 13 boroughs. We work in the major trauma centre in the Royal London hospital. Earlier, Stephen mentioned the teachable moment, when someone reflects on their life and thinks, “I’ve just been shot. My life plans aren’t really going very well at the moment.” That is a time when they may well change. We run the SOS+ programme around schools and are looking at new projects around county lines. We are really interested in that at the moment, because it is something that comes up again and again in all the London boroughs we work in. A lot of the clients we should be working with are actually missing children. Occasionally they come back. We know what they are doing and where they are. It is just a question of setting up some kind of process—

Chair

Because there is no home base, in effect, is there? There is no family and no structure.

Bernie Kastner

Exactly. The other thing we are looking at and developing at the moment is family-gangs work, because we recognise that they are very closely and inextricably linked. The family work is linked to the gangs work, so we are trying to develop a programme where we have the more traditional gangs caseworker, who will be an ex-offender—usually an ex-gang member—and a family worker, who will scrub up more in a social services meeting and be able to work more closely with the family. Those two workers work together with the gang member and the family.

Marie Rimmer

That is very interesting.

Chair

Dr Huq has some final questions on gangs.

Dr Huq

We have heard quite a bit about gangs—some very rich description, too. We have heard about the MOPAC gang exit scheme. Do you think that central Government are doing enough to combat criminal gang activity, particularly with reference to BME young men?

Mat Ilic

We know that BME young men are disproportionately represented, particularly in relation to young adults in the criminal justice system. Earlier, there was a debate about the role of central Government in this whole agenda, not limited to gangs. The Home Office has done a lot on ending gang and youth violence and putting that at the forefront of the policy agenda, in particular. The stance that MOPAC is taking with London gangs—we are part of that programme—is incredibly bold and is the first step for a pan-London programme of that type. It is multimodal, so it is thinking across all the different aspects of gang involvement—and thinking about the local as well. The shorthand for me is that central Government have done a lot to push the agenda forward. This is a brilliant opportunity to think about devolution, particularly in terms of accountability and the relevance of local territory to gangs.

Chair

What is your sense as to where devolution might go? What bits do you think need to be devolved?

Mat Ilic

My personal feeling is quite in agreement with it. I have to confess that I worked at City Hall at one point. There is massive potential for what city mayors can do on this kind of agenda. The power to draw agencies together—the convening power that Mr Greenhalgh described—as well as the relevance of the different types of solutions, be it housing, policing, criminal justice services or education, is a massive opportunity.

Chair

You know of the interest that I have. As a local government person, I agree that we underestimate massively the power of local action.

Dr Huq

Do you have any particular views on how to manage gangs within young offenders institutions, which are in a different category? We have heard that they do not come on their own.

Mat Ilic

Absolutely. One of the challenges is that there are official data telling you who may or may not be in what gang, but there is also the formal and informal stuff young people affiliate to—what they do and why they do it in custody. At the heart of what we feel might be the solution is restorative prison. That is a conversation between all the prison staff and young people about why they are acting in a particular way. It may be that they are just locked up for too long. They may have various impulsive behaviours, so there is a bit of mental health work that needs to be done—special outreach and so on. It is really about trying to get underneath, to find out what is the underlying cause of the aggression and violent behaviour, as opposed to the surface of it. Sometimes gangs are at the core of it, but sometimes they are just an excuse for a bun fight in the lunch hall.

Chair

I understand that. There are often mixed motives, aren’t there?

Bernie Kastner

To go back to the issue of central Government funding, at the moment, given the way that gangs work is funded in London, it makes sense to continue providing that funding to individual boroughs, who understand the local issues. The county lines work seems to be nobody’s particular problem. The borough the young people come from is not so interested, because they are not offending in that borough, and the regional town where the drugs are being sold is not so interested, because they are young people from London. That looks to me more like an initiative for central Government.

Chair

Yes. It involves, for example, PCCs talking to their neighbours in a way that I get the sense they very often don’t at the moment, because it does not get them a cheap headline.

Bernie Kastner

Exactly.

Chair

Thank you all very much. I am very grateful to you. It has been a long evidence session, but thank you for your time and your evidence to us. It is much appreciated. Thanks also for what you do. Oral evidence: The treatment of young adults in the criminal justice system, HC 397 32