Staying Afloat - 20 years of Youth Offending Teams

Despite well aired complaints about the volume of change faced by the criminal justice system in recent years, deep seated institutional innovations remain relatively rare. Last night’s anniversary event for the Association of Youth Offending Team (YOT) Managers at the House of Lords, provided the chance to reflect on the 20 years since New Labour’s creation of local multi- disciplinary teams to provide youth justice services, and the Youth Justice Board (YJB) to coordinate their efforts.

   

The YJB’s founding chair Lord Warner told us that the inspiration for YOTs came from Kent where he had been Director of Social Services in the 1980’s. His predecessor there, the Reverend Nick Stacey had persuaded police, probation and education staff to work alongside social workers on out-of-court disposals, the provision of court reports and the supervision of children serving community-based orders and after release from custody. 

Following the Audit Commission’s scathing 1996 youth justice report Misspent Youth, the incoming Labour government used the 1998 Crime and Disorder Act to alter fundamentally  the landscape in what Home Secretary Jack Straw called at the time the 'secret garden of youth justice'. Rejecting overtures from the Probation Service to take it over, Straw and Warner opted for a local authority led approach, adding health into the new YOT mix which was rolled out nationally by 2000.   

What’s the verdict after two decades of the new youth justice?

In 2007, I described it as the good, the bad and the ugly. Then, the creation of multidisciplinary teams to address the personal, social and educational deficits which underlie so much offending looked undoubtedly positive; and aspects of the way we locked up children including the gross over-representation of racial minorities in custody was shameful.  

What’s changed since then is the dramatic fall in both the numbers of young people being processed in the formal youth system and the population in the secure estate. YOTs deserve great credit for keeping so many children out of court and out of custody by carefully managing the unintended consequences of their interventions. While there is surely further to go, the 724 under 18s behind bars in December 2019 is a major improvement on the annual average of between 2,500 and 3,000 in the years 2000 to 2008. On custody, it's been a game of two halves.

What of the future?

While acknowledging the strengths of YOTs, Charlie Taylor’s 2016 Review of Youth Justice called for the removal of the duty on local authorities to establish them. He was concerned that some YOTs were alienated from other local authority services, operating within a silo and unable to secure the essential contributions of other services that their multi-agency make-up was intended to guarantee.

His findings echoed academic concerns from 2004 that “ the paradox of an imaginative multi-agency YOT structure that has, in general, weak links with child protection colleagues and a weak commitment to child welfare issues is one of the strangest features of the new English system.’ In similar vein, a survey conducted by the AYM this year identified a reduced sense of ownership of the YOT by the local authorities’ partners.

But Taylor’s recommendation that local authorities be given more flexibility in how they deliver youth justice services surely runs the risk of a return to Straw’s 'secret garden'. At the risk of stretching the metaphor, the government’s pledge merely  “to look at" Taylor's idea puts the proposal to remove the requirement for YOTs into the long grass where it probably belongs.

What does deserve serious consideration is how to enhance the work of YOTs through increased professionalisation of their staff and greater powers and  financial accountability. 

There is a growing case for recognising youth justice as a defined occupation, drawing on, but distinct from the disciplines represented in YOTs -as indeed there is in the secure estate. This is an area the Youth Justice Institute established last year is looking to explore further.

As for powers, the Youth Justice Task Force, that worked up the YOT concept after the 1997 election, argued that young people sentenced to custody should be placed by the YOT on behalf of the YJB; and that the latter should look at recharging some or all the costs of secure facilities to the responsible local agencies, so that custodial provision would no longer be a free good. 

Some steps have been taken in this direction, but a Justice Reinvestment approach could drive further reductions in the use of custody and the development more effective local measures to prevent and respond to youth crime. 

The YJB has been relieved of its duties to commission secure places and there were some mutterings last night about its long-term future. Taylor steps down as Chair in a few days and as far as I know  no successor has been announced. Whatever happens there, YOTs need to be kept afloat.