Youth Justice News

Abstract

In England and Wales, youth offending teams (YOTs), the statutory multi-agency partnerships with responsibility for providing services to children subject to youth justice interventions, are inspected by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Probation. The Inspectorate’s Annual Report, published in November 2020, summarises the outcome of those inspections and indicates that children in care are substantially over-represented among those subject to formal youth justice disposals. On 31 March 2019, 78,150 children were looked after by the local authority in England (Wales has devolved responsibility for children’s services and Welsh children are accordingly not included in the data), a rate of 65 per 10,000 children in the population, or 0.65 per cent. By contrast, according to the Probation inspectorate, in the 24,000 cases examined in 2018/2019 of children given a caution or subject to a court order, an estimated 4500 (approaching 19 per cent) were children in care. Although figures are not directly comparable, it would appear too that over-representation rises in line with the level of youth justice intervention. Thus, 26 per cent of cases inspected, over the past 2 years, of children subject to a court disposal (that is omitting those given a pre-court disposal), were ‘in the care of the local authority at some point during their sentence’. Surveys of children detained in young offender institutions (YOIs) and secure training centres (STCs) during 2018/2019 (children in secure children’s homes (SCHs), the third type of custodial establishment are not included in the data) found that more than half (52 per cent) reported having been in care at some point in their lives. The Probation Inspectorate also found that the quality of provision to children in care by YOTs was, on average, of a lower standard than that given to their non-care counterparts. Moreover, as shown in Table 1, where looked-after children were placed outside of their local authority area, the quality of services was further diminished. For that group of cases, planning, delivery and review of interventions were all assessed as requiring improvement on aggregate.