Youth Justice
The next item is a statement by Cathy Jamieson on creating safer communities and improving youth justice. The minister will take questions at the end of her statement and there should therefore be no interventions.
Youth crime tears the fabric of our communities. It erodes community strength and resolve, particularly in our most disadvantaged communities. It drags us all down—families, neighbours, streets and whole communities—but above all it drags down young people themselves.
We know that not all young people offend. The overwhelming majority of Scotland's young people are a credit to themselves, to their families and to their communities. Of course, we shall continue to support them with opportunities to reach their full potential. However, we cannot simply ignore those who do offend, especially those who offend time and again and those who are likely to go on to offend again as adults, and this statement is about how we prevent and reduce that offending. It is about how we intervene consistently, appropriately and quickly to help those young people back to a law-abiding lifestyle.
That means having first-class youth justice services across Scotland—services that make communities safer by preventing and reducing reoffending, and services that work together to give hard-pressed communities real hope that the future will be better, that youth crime is being driven down and that increasing numbers of young offenders are facing up to their offending and choosing law-abiding paths. That means intervening at the right time and in the right way to check and turn around offending behaviour.
I am on the side of the public and on the side of law-abiding young people, and I stand with the councils, agencies and professionals who are making a difference, but I cannot stand for continued persistent offending and I will not stand for ineffective services.
The youth crime action plan laid out clear aims. Every area has a youth justice team whose focus is to make those aims a reality. We now have a broadly sufficient number of services. Resources have increased at an unprecedented level, with £55 million this year, increasing to £63 million in 2005-06. I pay tribute to the hard-working local teams who have seized the opportunity to improve. However, our next task is to focus on the performance, quality and effectiveness of those services. Are they in the right place at the right time? Are we prioritising the right services? Do they work? We need to see the real impact and change in our communities on the ground.
National standards were developed to make that happen and they need to be met by 2006. In meeting those standards, youth justice teams will be helping to reduce the misery caused to communities by repeated offending from a minority. By meeting targets to improve planning, quality, effectiveness, the range of services, speed and services for victims, they will also be changing lives for the better.
I have always worked with councils on the issue. I met council leaders and chief executives twice in the past year to find out what was needed. They told me that they wanted support to enable their youth justice teams to develop creative responses to improving performance. They said that they wanted to engage meaningfully with their communities and that they needed time in which to deliver outcomes. In return, audit and performance measures needed to be developed to demonstrate success. We have responded tangibly to each and every one of those concerns.
So today, for the first time, I am reporting to the Parliament on how far youth justice teams have come. I also want clearly to identify and quantify the gaps between current performance and the point at which authorities and agencies need to be in March 2006. PA Consulting Group has worked with local youth justice strategy groups—with the local authorities, the police and the Scottish Children's Reporter Administration—to produce the comprehensive performance baseline information for 2003-04, which is set out in the document that I laid today in the Scottish Parliament information centre.
The information clearly outlines the extent of the youth crime problem in each area and shows which parts of the country have more persistent offenders. For example, more than 60 per cent of offenders are concentrated in only eight youth justice areas. The information will help service providers to get behind the figures and address why some areas are more effective than others at stopping reoffending.
Today, everyone can see where the challenges lie. For example, only three of the eight police forces have reported that they have achieved their national standard target and only 32 per cent of social work reports are submitted to the SCRA within the national standard. Overall, teams take an average of 74 days to deal with offenders through the hearings system when the target is 65 days.
We now have consistent data at local and national level that allow us to compare local progress with the national average. We can see where preventive action is making a difference. For example, the number of persistent offenders in the Fife Council and East Ayrshire Council areas is relatively low in comparison to the number of child offenders in those areas. The figures suggest that those councils are stopping young offenders from reoffending at an earlier stage.
Those councils seem to be getting that bit right. That is important when we consider that some 65 per cent of hearings decisions relate to persistent offenders. The baseline data now show that the realistic number for this category of offender is 1,200 and not 900 as was widely thought to be the case. The fact that the number is higher is not a sign of failure; it shows the true scale of the challenge and reflects more accurately the experiences of communities.
The fact that we now have the data means that those 1,200 individuals are in the sights of every part of the youth justice system and not just of one or another part of the system. Now that we have much more robust information on the number of persistent offenders, we must address their behaviour and prevent and reduce their offending.
To meet our targets, we are now talking about reducing the number of persistent offenders by 120 by 2006. That should be achievable and it should also set the pattern for further reductions in future years. Given that youth justice teams know who and where the young people are, they need to ensure that the young people are in programmes that tackle their problems.
Other information gathered relates to the speed of the process. It shows that only 17 youth justice areas achieved the timescale for hearings decisions. That performance must improve. Interventions with young people are much more effective if they are delivered as soon after the offence as possible.
Both North Ayrshire Council and Dundee City Council, which make the second and third-largest number of hearings decisions respectively, were able to achieve the target timescales. Both are fast-track hearings pilot sites. We need to learn from the areas that are meeting the targets.
I want to step up progress across the board and information and monitoring will help us to do that. It will also help members of the Scottish Parliament and locally elected politicians to track progress with us. The Scottish Children's Reporter Administration has led on the production and presentation of the data and it can now give regular updates to professionals and the wider community. A quarterly update will be made available on the SCRA's website. Monthly management reports, with even more current data, will be circulated in the system to allow managers and senior professionals to identify and address trends and issues as they emerge—it will be done almost in real time. It will ensure that youth justice teams have the relevant information for their area on which to act.
The figures disclose some stark lessons for us all. I said that no one agency meets all its standards nationwide, so much needs to happen before 2006. The information shows a large gap between current performance and what we need—and what communities rightly demand. Agencies have found that sobering. I have met the Association of Chief Police Officers in Scotland, the SCRA and the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities in recent weeks and shared the emerging findings. They have accepted the scale of the challenge and responded positively. They have made a number of commitments to me.
First, the police. All forces will share the lessons about an abbreviated police reporting process and ensure that all forces come up to speed in the coming year. ACPOS has also agreed to review how young people are formally referred to the children's hearings system. It will look at making the best use of options, such as police restorative cautions, and ways to tackle first-time offenders quickly. It will also examine how we deal effectively with young people who are already in the care of local authorities.
Secondly, the SCRA. Reporters have set new, challenging targets that will produce consistent, accurate and reliable performance management reports on a quarterly basis, so that teams can assess their progress. They will also set and meet targets for the speed of work by reporters, focusing on reducing the number of persistent offenders. They will also ensure that each local reporter team delivers on those commitments and identifies best practice.
Thirdly, the local authorities. COSLA has indicated that it supports our approach and the new national and local data. It understands that there is work to do in order to meet the targets, and that it will have a role in encouraging local authorities to do that. COSLA has stressed its commitment to reducing youth crime and, in particular, dealing with persistent offenders. It will be supportive of our work, and, with local authorities and other partners, will work to meet the national standards.
COSLA will host an event on the outcome of the work done by PA Consulting Group and will share good practice with elected members. It has also committed to working with elected members to raise the profile of youth justice and to ensuring that elected members are up to date with developments in the national agenda and aware of how they can best participate. For example, at the next meeting of the executive group on social work and health improvement COSLA will have a substantial item on youth justice and the implications of this announcement, and will seek the commitment of all councils to achieving the targets.
I welcome the acknowledgment that improving youth justice is a corporate responsibility for councils, not just a problem for social work. I welcome the responses from the professionals who lead in the field. However, we need to see the results of that leadership coming through in the next few months. The building blocks that people asked for are in place. They must now be used to best effect. Improvements have been promised. They must now happen on the ground. Quarterly performance monitoring will regularly show progress in each area, and I look for it to show regular improvement at the required rate. I also expect a clear improvement in annual performance at the end of this year.
In conclusion, when I launched the youth crime action plan I gave a commitment to update Parliament regularly. I am doing that today, sharing positive progress, as well as outlining where more work is needed. Much of what I have said is about systems, targets and numbers, but behind those systems are real young people, real lives, real families and real communities. Yes, there are success stories—young people's lives turned around, families supported and communities given a break from the onslaught of youth crime—but there are not enough and they have not happened quickly enough.
I am tired of hearing commentators talk of this Executive as anti-young person. It is quite the opposite. This Executive is ambitious for Scotland's young people. I want them to grow up in a Scotland that offers them opportunities and I want them in turn to help to grow our country into the great place that we all feel it can be. We must not allow any young person with that potential to fall into offending.
The scale of the challenge is great, but we must not be daunted by it. Every part of the system must do more. Every part of the system must see the work as a priority. Every part of the system must be ready to step up its activities to act quickly and decisively when young people offend.
The minister will take questions on the statement, for which I will allow 20 minutes.
I thank the minister for the courtesy copy of her statement and the full update that she gave to the chamber. I endorse the sentiment that the overwhelming majority of kids in our society are a credit to themselves, their parents and their communities. We need to praise the majority, as well as castigate the minority.
I also welcome the suggestion that she will be tough on the causes of crime as well as tough on crime itself. However, given that statistics show that 25 per cent of our prison population comes from 1.8 per cent of our local authority wards and that 50 per cent of our prison population comes from approximately 8 per cent of our local authority wards, we have a significant distance still to travel. On the small minority who cause mayhem and who are in many instances a danger to themselves as well as to others, given the announced closure of Kerelaw school, how and when will we see the creation of adequate numbers of residential secure units to secure the safety of the community and of those troubled young individuals? If the closure goes through now, as has been suggested, we will be left with fewer residential secure units than we had in 1999.
Members will have heard me give commitments in the chamber not only to increase the number of secure accommodation places, but to put in place a number of other options, including electronic monitoring, for some young people who might otherwise have found themselves in secure accommodation, and to provide close support to ensure that when young people make the transition from secure accommodation to the community they are monitored correctly.
The decision on Kerelaw school and secure unit was and is a matter for Glasgow City Council, which runs it. I have made it clear that the overall objective to ensure that we have additional places will not be blown off course or somehow forgotten or not dealt with as a result of the plans to close Kerelaw school. I have taken steps to ensure that of the 12 places that would have been made available in a redeveloped Kerelaw, the six places that would have been for girls and young women will be provided at the Good Shepherd centre in Bishopton, and the six that would have been for young men will be provided at St Philip's in Airdrie.
We have always had the best interests of children and young people at heart in all this—people would expect me to say that. I want us to continue to ensure not only that we provide secure accommodation for the most persistent offenders or those who need care and protection, but that we stop young people getting involved in offending behaviour in the first place. The youth justice teams must focus on that, as well as on having a range of provisions in place. They know who the persistent offenders are and they must ensure that those young people are prioritised in getting into programmes.
I, too, thank the minister for making available a copy of her statement in advance. The 11-page statement could, to be frank, be paraphrased in two sentences: things are worse than we thought and we, the Scottish Executive, admit defeat. How else can one view the fact that the number of persistent order referrals is 1,200 not 900 and how else can one interpret the Executive's feeble response to that of hoping to reduce the number by 10 per cent? That would not even take us back to the 900 that the Executive thought it was dealing with and accepted as an already bad position. It goes without saying that those data cannot take into account the practical implications and consequences of the Antisocial Behaviour etc (Scotland) Act 2004—a measure that the minister, by her own admission, would concede has specific provisions on young people.
Far from being reassuring and positive, the statement is deeply troubling. I want to ask the Executive something specific arising from the youth crime action plan, on secure accommodation places. I listened with interest to the minister's response to Mr MacAskill. For the avoidance of doubt, it is necessary for the minister to make one thing absolutely clear. As of 2002 we have proceeded on the assumption that we had 95 secure places for young people in Scotland. The ministerial commitment was to increase that number by 29. In 2003, the First Minister confirmed that no one seemed to have departed from that commitment. Is the Executive still committed to providing a total of 95 places plus another 29? As I understood it, of the 95 places, 24 were at Kerelaw. There are two issues to consider—the existing contingent and consignment of places and the additional quota. Everyone needs to know whether the existing 95 places are secure and the figure is stable. Do we know when and where the 29 proposed additional places will be available?
I will take those points in order. First of all, Annabel Goldie said that things are somehow worse and that the Executive is admitting defeat. Nothing could be further from the truth: I will never stop trying to ensure that young people are kept out of trouble and that when they are in trouble we try to turn their lives around. Indeed, it is vital that we do that. We have produced this report because, in the past, we have not received robust information. It is not good enough simply to take a stab in the dark and guesstimate how many young people are at risk of falling into offending behaviour. Local authorities, the police and the SCRA told us that they wanted us to take this particular approach and to establish this baseline as it would allow us to move forward on these targets.
I should point out that setting targets allows us to see whether there is a trend and whether things are moving in the right direction. We have a target for 2006; indeed, as our budget report makes clear, we also have a target that goes beyond 2006. I intend to ensure that progress is made.
I have already answered parliamentary questions on this matter but, for the avoidance of doubt, I will make it clear: the Executive has not moved from its commitment to provide the correct number of secure accommodation places. Annabel Goldie is correct to say that there were 24 secure places at Kerelaw. However, she might have misunderstood my previous answer; if she had listened, she would have heard me say that the 12 places that would have been developed at a new Kerelaw secure unit will now be developed elsewhere. I have already indicated in my answers to parliamentary questions that we can deliver those places faster by attaching them to other facilities than we can by rebuilding Kerelaw completely. We must also acknowledge that Glasgow City Council has accepted its responsibility for the transitional period as we move into the new situation.
I welcome the minister's statement. She will be aware that in the lead-up to the passing of the Antisocial Behaviour etc (Scotland) Bill there was much discussion about tagging and, in particular, tagging young people between 12 and 16. The committee and the Parliament finally accepted that as an alternative to secure accommodation. What progress has been made on tagging and electronic monitoring for under-16s?
I am pleased to be able to give the Parliament an up-to-date progress report on this very matter. Mary Mulligan has rightly reminded us that it was discussed during the consideration of the Antisocial Behaviour etc (Scotland) Bill. The seven local authorities that have confirmed their commitment to phase 1 are West Dunbartonshire Council; East Dunbartonshire Council; Glasgow City Council; the City of Edinburgh Council; Dundee City Council; Highland Council; and Moray Council.
As members will also recall, there was a clear expectation that support services would be in place to run alongside electronic monitoring. Some areas are setting up those services in advance of its introduction and are trialling some of the services that are currently available. All the areas that I mentioned will have support services in place by the end of 2004 and we will move on electronic monitoring when appropriate.
I welcome the minister's update this afternoon. After all, this issue is of great importance to all our communities. Moreover, I associate the Liberal Democrats with the comments that she and Kenny MacAskill made about the good work that the vast majority of young people do, and about the good work that the youth justice teams are carrying out. I have seen that work for myself in Edinburgh and it is important that it involves not only council social work departments but other council departments, the police and the voluntary sector.
The minister said that, broadly, there is a sufficient amount of services. What funding is in place to ensure that programmes are available across the country to those who need them? In her answer, will she let us know what funding is available for restorative justice schemes and for diversionary schemes to keep people away from offending in the first place? Will there be an update on whether the schemes that are already in place have been effective?
I will take that last point first. This particular report did not examine the effectiveness of some of the schemes on restorative justice that are already in place, because the report was about collecting baseline information on the numbers and locations of persistent young offenders and about establishing a benchmark from which the agencies could move on. That is not to say that we will not continue to look favourably on such schemes, because we know from other evidence that they tend to have a beneficial effect on young people. If young people have to make good the damage that they have done in communities, or face up to victims and witnesses of crime, they are much more likely to change their behaviour.
I remind the chamber that, when we launched the youth crime action plan, I made additional funding available. The intensive support fund was to deal with young persistent offenders in the most difficult of circumstances. There was also the youth crime prevention fund. Substantial amounts were injected into those funds. In our recent budget, we have been able to ensure that those funds will continue. I have also ensured that, during the summer holiday period, when more young people are out and about on the streets, we will put additional money into community safety partnerships to try to benefit all young people in particular areas as well as focusing on the persistent offenders.
I am sure that the minister will agree that the children who are the most disadvantaged are those who are being looked after by local authorities. I know that the minister has taken a great interest in how those children progress and develop.
It has been suggested that looked-after children feature regularly in fast-track hearings. I wonder whether the minister has looked into the reasons for that. Are the children being stereotyped; are we not supporting them enough in keeping them out of crime; or are they just being further disadvantaged by the process?
Maureen Macmillan highlights an area that has been of concern. In some initial reports from the fast-track hearings, we saw a disproportionate number of young people from a care background. Sometimes, those young people would have come into care while a number of offence-related referrals were still being dealt with in the hearings. Because of the definition of "persistent offender"—in which we talk about a number of offending episodes within a six-month period—many young people who were at crisis points in their lives would have appeared in that category.
It is important to ensure that, just because young people are in care for their own welfare, we do not then ignore offending behaviour. Too often, young people who have been through the care system and have shown a pattern of offending behaviour are the ones—as Kenny MacAskill suggested—who end up in our prison system. I do not want that to happen. We want to ensure that young people in care are not in any way further disadvantaged, but it would not be right for us not to continue to address offending behaviour when it occurs.
The minister will find support right across the chamber for her ambition that no young people in Scotland should fall into offending. Among the many parts of her statement that I welcomed was the part in which she welcomed COSLA's acknowledgement that this issue is a corporate responsibility for councils and not just a problem for social work.
Will that same approach apply to the Executive? Will the minister work with the Minister for Education and Young People to ensure that a revival of youth work—which is long overdue and which would represent prevention rather than cure—will be progressed at the earliest opportunity?
On this occasion, I probably agree with Patrick Harvie. I have not always agreed with him but, on this occasion, I do. It is music to my ears to hear that the Green party will support joined-up working and help to ensure that we have integrated services for dealing with offenders.
I will of course work with my colleagues—not just the Minister for Education and Young People but with colleagues across the Executive and in communities and the health professions—to ensure that we achieve the right services. A discussion has already taken place on how we can make progress with our youth work agenda. The Minister for Education and Young People takes that very seriously.
I was recently given sight of a children's hearing decision that showed that the teenager concerned had not been to secondary school for well over a year. That was shocking. Given that we know that young offenders in the young offenders institution at Polmont have high levels of illiteracy and difficulty in reading and writing, which are a barrier to their moving on with their lives—through rehabilitation or moving away from offending—does the minister agree that it is crucial for the Justice Department to work closely with the Minister for Education and Young People? There is a direct connection between young people missing out on school, for whatever reasons, and developing literacy problems, and their ending up in the criminal justice system. Does the minister agree that it is important that a joined-up approach is taken? I know that that is a strong theme in the minister's approach but, given the case that I have mentioned, urgent action is required.
Pauline McNeill makes an interesting point about the connection between young people falling into offending behaviour, which sometimes leads to truancy and to their not getting the benefits of education, and their ending up in our justice system in other ways later on. Although I do not want to step into the territory of the Minister for Education and Young People—the importance of joined-up working notwithstanding—members may recall that when I had responsibility for that portfolio, I made it clear that even though a looked-after young person has been excluded from a particular school, that person ought to have an education. I know that that policy, which is very important, has been continued. That is why we need to match the programmes that are available in local areas to the needs of individual young people. Of course offending behaviour must be tackled, but if an education input is also required, that should be addressed.
The minister might recall that, during the passage of the Antisocial Behaviour etc (Scotland) Act 2004, I and other members, most notably Elaine Smith, expressed concern about the possibility of people with developmental conditions, in particular autism and Asperger's syndrome, being disadvantaged by the failure of the criminal justice system—police on the beat and others—to recognise the existence of such conditions and illnesses when they come into contact with them. In the context of my question, I would include people who suffer from attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and mental health conditions of one sort or another. Given that, as far as I am aware, there are no measures that promote the diversion of such people by the police and others to appropriate sources of help, how can the minister guarantee that they will not be swept inadvertently into the criminal justice system when they need very different help?
The important point is to get the assessment right at an early enough stage to ensure that people are directed to the appropriate place. In the context of antisocial behaviour, mental health issues and the criminal justice system, different departments are doing various pieces of work and producing various pieces of guidance.
To return to the report that has been published today, part of the reason why I think that it is vital that the national standards on youth justice are met is that if we do that, we intervene early, the appropriate assessments are done and people are linked to the right services and if there is a problem with offending behaviour or a problem that requires some other form of care or service, that is tackled. The problem arises when such assessment is not done at an early enough stage, which means that people are likely to drift further into difficulty. That is the point at which some of the people to whom Stewart Stevenson refers are not picked up and that is why it is so important that we get behind the figures and understand that they relate to real young people and real communities.
I had hoped to get in another question, but the clock has beaten us. I express my regrets to the members whose names remain on my screen.