The reason why I told John Reid I had to quit

9th March 2007
By Rod Morgan

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The immediate reason for my resignation on 26 January as Chairman of the Youth Justice Board (YJB) was the decision of the Home Secretary to advertise my post rather than offer me an extension to my three-year contract. I reasonably inferred that the Home Secretary lacked confidence in me. I felt I had to go. But the lack of confidence was mutual. It arose out of my questioning, mostly behind the scenes but from time to time in public, aspects of the government’s youth justice policy

The YJB is a non-department public body (NDPB). Its statutory functions include offering ministers independent advice on the delivery of youth justice policy. The reality, however, is that Home Office ministers tend to deal with the YJB as if it were a division of the Home Office, expecting that it should conform to Home Office instructions with respect to the content and timing of announcements and not questioning government policy.

This is counter productive. The whole strength of NDPBs lies in their giving expert, independent advice and working at arms length operationally. Therein lies their credibility. An NDPB not given such room for manoueuvre and not exercising its independent judgement might as well be abolished and its functions taken over by its sponsor department.

I considered it a great privilege to chair the YJB, the creation of which I believe to have been one of the most enlightened of New Labour’s decisions since 1997. In my judgement the reformed youth justice structure generally works very well. This is one part of the criminal justice system that every informed commentator believes is ‘fit for purpose’ (see the Audit Commission’s 2004 assessment) though performance is uneven and there remains much to do.

Youth justice is largely a devolved local government service. Children and young people held responsible for their criminal actions (10-17 year olds) are assessed and supervised by multi-agency youth offending teams (YOTs), locally managed and accountable. The YJB is not a delivery agency. It oversees the system, part-funds the YOTs, encourages good practice and reports to ministers on performance. It also commissions custodial provision for those young offenders who the courts determine should be in custody.

It follows that the system is decentralised. There is only relatively light touch steerage from the centre by the YJB, whose overheads are small.

All the key operational decisions, including whether to provide services directly or contract them out, are taken by the local authorities in the light of local circumstances. A mixed economy of services has developed in which the voluntary sector is prominent. Volunteer members of the public are involved in large numbers in both support and decision-making capacities as appropriate adults, mentors and referral panel members. Victims are increasingly being engaged. More and more early preventive work is being done with parents and younger children at risk.

Morale among youth offending teams is generally high not least because there is a real sense of local ownership of programmes delivery of which much is highly innovative. Finally, significant improvements have been made in the custodial sector since the YJB took over responsibility for commissioning in 2000.

The key problems are closely related to the present prisons crisis which was both predictable and predicted. There are near record numbers of juveniles in custody. Despite all that has been said about increased custodial numbers surprising Home Office ministers, most informed analysts have for several years been warning that chickens entirely of the government’s making would be coming home to roost.

These include the new statutory sentencing provisions for so-called dangerous offenders, introducing more intensive community disposals more rigorously enforced, and failure to arrest the continued decline in the use of low tariff penalties, particularly fines. In the sphere of youth justice there have also been aspects of the anti-social strategy and the dramatic increase in the number of children and young people prosecuted.

It is likely that prisoners will in the near future have to be released early. This will involve a great irony.

A key Home Office objective is to increase public confidence in the criminal justice system. Nothing is more destructive of public and sentencer confidence than stop-go penal politics — sounding tough and insisting on the use of more punitive sanctions one minute, and restraining the use of custody because of prison overcrowding and releasing prisoners early the next minute.

My concerns, however, go beyond the various media stories that have led to the Home Office-related sound and fury of recent months. I am concerned by the general drift of policy which, to date, has not sufficiently been publicly debated.

The Times editorial commenting on my resignation (27 January) argued that I was no doubt ‘sincere’ but my case regarding the use of custody ‘would be more compelling were there evidence of other forms of sanctions that produce strikingly better results.’ This assertion was seriously flawed on several counts.

First, no well-informed person should be looking for strikingly better results. A wealth of research evidence suggests that the incidence of crime results from deep-rooted structural causes difficult to shift; the best we can hope for, certainly in the short term, are gains at the margin. Anyone who claims that the introduction of a particular measure, be it a sentence, a programme within a sentence, or a social intervention undertaken without invoking the criminal justice system, will reduce the incidence of offending or re-offending by more than a very tiny percentage is either ignorant or a rogue.

Secondly, comparisons of custody with cusp-case alternative sanctions — in the case of youth crime intensive supervision and surveillance programmes (ISSP), for example — do demonstrate relative effectiveness: the frequency and seriousness of re-offending is reduced and engagement with education and training enhanced.

Increased use of custody offers at the most very temporary, hugely expensive respite at the cost of an increased risk of re-offending. This has been well documented in independent, commissioned, research reports and in successive tranches of Home Office re-offending statistics.

Thirdly we need to look beyond comparisons of outcomes for adjacent strata of offences and offenders on the sentencing tariff. The overall shape of the system requires consideration. The government argues — one of the truly remarkable changes from Old to New Labour — that the fact that we are prosecuting and incarcerating more young people is an achievement.

The Home Secretary’s current plea is that the courts exercise restraint until even more prison places are brought on stream: that this will signify even more young offenders being brought to book and the ‘justice gap’ further closed. Close scrutiny of the evidence suggests otherwise.

The government has a target to increase the number of offences brought to justice (OBTJs) to 1.25 million by spring 2008. It is the government’s proud boast that current achievement is well ahead of target — that numbers are already running at 1.4 million OBTJs per annum.

But how is this figure being achieved? Not by prosecuting and convicting many more serious offenders, whose detection requires serious investment of police resources. On the contrary. The number of convictions in court has been flat-lining. The big increase in the number of OBTJs has almost entirely been achieved by handing out on-the-spot fines, and issuing these for relatively minor offences..

Does this mean that the sort of offences causing considerable public disquiet — assaults, criminal damage, drunken and threatening behaviour — are at last being dealt with? Does it not represent a shift in the direction for which the prime minister has called, namely ‘speedier, simpler, summary’ justice?

To some extent it reflects both those things. But close examination of the evidence indicates, once again, another trend. To meet their crime targets the police are picking a lot of low-hanging fruit, the lowest of which comprises juvenile group behaviour in schools, residential homes and public spaces. Much of this behaviour — if the juvenile, often on the advice of a solicitor’s clerk, fails to admit the offence at first interview, or has previously had a warning — is ending up in the youth court where magistrates complain many cases do not warrant their attention.

Over the past three years there has been a 26 per cent increase in the number of children and young persons criminalised at a time when both the British Crime Survey and police statistics indicate that crime, including that which is the responsibility of juveniles, has been falling.

Much of the increase in OBTJs is not made up of displaced, expensive court proceedings as the ‘speedier, simpler, summary’ justice tag suggests. It involves displacement of informal, non-criminal, control measures, which might involve police and community support officers and would involve them more if they were administratively rewarded for doing the work. which could more expeditiously, effectively and cheaply be employed, and in recent times were.

Criminalising children and young people who could be made to face up to the consequences of their behaviour by other means is criminogenic: it increases rather than reduces the likelihood of them desisting.

The research evidence demonstrates that it is not so much the punishment which deters but the fact of getting caught. And if the punishment brands the young person with the mark of Cain, if it increases rather than diminishes the resulting degree of social exclusion (principally from school and educational attainment) then the prognosis for future offending is not better, it’s worse.

Moreover, cluttering up our courts and YOT caseloads with minor offenders deflects the system from devoting more attention to persistent and serious offenders whose risk of re-offending and/or causing serious harm is medium to high. The public has a right to expect that they will be better protected from the latter than is currently the case.

Overburdening the criminal justice system with minor offenders who could, and should, be dealt with by other means is an unsustainable waste of scarce public resources. We should be spending more on early preventive work with children at risk and their parents and less on custody.

During my time with the YJB, despite a welcome allocation from the government of additional earmarked funds for preventive work, we spent seven times as much money on custody as we did on early prevention schemes the cost benefits of which are proven.

I am not, as The Times implied with their jibe of ‘sincere’, a woolly-minded liberal. My case for rebalancing the system is based on hard-headed economics as well as social justice.

Rod Morgan was formerly Chair of the Youth Justice Board.

Filed Under: Justice, Home Office, Youth
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