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Chamber and committees

Audit Committee, 10 Dec 2002

Meeting date: Tuesday, December 10, 2002


Contents


“Dealing with offending by young people”

The Convener:

Item 3 is a briefing by Audit Scotland on its report "Dealing with offending by young people". This joint report by the Auditor General and the Accounts Commission for Scotland examines offending by young people between the ages of eight and 21. It investigates how those young people are treated by the children's hearings system, which deals with young people who are 16 and under, and the criminal justice system, which deals with the over-16s.

I invite the Auditor General to brief us on this report.

Mr Black:

The report was undertaken jointly by the Accounts Commission and me, as the issue clearly involves local authority services as well as other public services, and follows up a commitment made in the baseline report "Youth justice in Scotland" that we produced a little while ago. Our intention was to carry out a comprehensive performance audit to review the full range of services for young offenders in Scotland and assess the extent to which good practice has been met.

Because of the size, complexity and ambition of the study, we have produced three documents: the main report, which runs to almost 100 pages; a summary report; and a four-page executive summary, which is reproduced at the beginning of the main report. There are two systems in Scotland for dealing with young people up to the age of 21 who offend: young people up to the age of 16 are dealt with mainly in the children's hearings system, while those who are over 16 are dealt with in the criminal justice system. The report indicates that £240 million is spent from 10 different budgets on those systems and that they deal with a total of more than 47,000 cases a year. As a result, we are talking about a large and complex system.

We have examined the processes for reaching decisions about offending and looked at the decisions themselves. Furthermore, we have commented on the effectiveness and efficiency with which resources are used. However, we did not consider activities that prevent crime from occurring or services for young people who have not yet offended but are at risk of doing so. The report concentrates only on services for young people who have offended.

In all, we have made 38 recommendations to the Scottish Executive and other national agencies. Some of the findings are quite interesting. For example, we found that it takes an excessively long time to deal with young people in the system. In the children's hearings system, it might take an average of more than five months to dispose of a young person's case; in the criminal justice system, it might take up to eight months. That means that a young person going through the system now might not have a decision on their case until next summer or later.

Moreover, there seems to be a variation in the treatment that young people receive in the system. For example, within the children's hearings system, a young person in south-west Glasgow has a one in six chance of having a full hearing whereas, in Inverclyde, a young person has a one in two chance. We must acknowledge that how a young person is treated in the system depends on the nature of the offence and their own family and personal circumstances. However, it surely must not be the case that their treatment depends on where they live.

The report identifies various other issues, one of which is the pressure on resources. That comes under two principal categories. First, there is evidence that special community support can be effective in treating young people if that support is well provided and provided early. We found that there is a shortage of that form of disposal, particularly for under-16s.

The second example of resourcing problems seems to be in social work departments, in which we ascertained that vacancy rates run at around 11 per cent. Evidence showed that that affects the timeliness with which reports have appeared for children's hearings in particular and the quality of the reports in some cases.

The report is long and detailed and there are many other issues in it. My colleagues are here to help me to answer any questions that members might have.

The Convener:

The report is indeed long and detailed. It is a major report with 38 recommendations to the Scottish Executive and various national and local agencies. As the report will be on-going, will you remind us of the timing of the two follow-up stages?

Mr Black:

We have discussed the main report. There was a baseline report several months ago, which laid out the issues. We intend to follow up the main analysis with local audit work that will consider key indicators of concern. We anticipate that that work will be completed in the summer, so there will be a further report later in the summer.

We will deal in detail with the matter under item 6. As members do not wish to ask any general questions, I thank the Auditor General for attending.