Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill

Part of the debate – in a Public Bill Committee at 9:15 am on 18 October 2007.

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Bob Reitemeier: I should like to encourage the Committee to take a long-term view in addressing this question of finances. Reoffending rates hover between 75 and 80 per cent. for offenders who go to custody. It is not just, as Simon Hickson pointed out, £100,000 a year, because you multiply that every time the young person comes back into the system. So what some of the interventions, such as intensive fostering or intensive engagement with young people, are trying to combat is the reoffending rate. It is working in a way that prevents these young people from coming back into the system. So when you look at finances and the long term, it sounds crude, but it is pay now or pay later, or pay now or continue to pay. We need to take a long-term view of that.

On intensive fostering, you said that we need the right people with both the right approach and the right skills, and I completely agree. Our evidence, over many years of the Children’s Society, is that the most important factor that changes a young person’s behaviour is a relationship. Without that relationship, we have little chance of making headway. It is not just intensive fostering. Working with children’s services and working with the voluntary sector in other ways, we can establish those relationships.

But again, I would remind you of the point that you made at the very beginning: in custody you are looking at a very significant percentage of young people who have been in the care system, so the state had already made what is one of the most important decisions it could ever make, which is to separate that child from the family. Once they are in custody and once they leave the youth justice system, if they go back into an environment that brought them there in the first place, we have little chance of changing their behaviour. So we need to look at those relationships. The thing that young people tell us is that they when they finally come across someone who actually cares whether they succeed or fail it makes all the difference in the world. Unfortunately they do not get that until we engage with this intensive relationship building much later in their life.