YES - Rod Morgan, chair, Youth Justice Board for England and Wales
Intensive fostering schemes will provide specialised, highly intensive care for young offenders who might otherwise face custody. For these young people, fostering will provide safety and stability: they will be looked after away from other offenders, and supervised by a specially trained foster parent.
Meanwhile, the birth family will get the support they need, such as counselling, to help them build a better relationship with their child. Providing a supportive home and improving relationships between young people and their families will be key to steering these children off the path of crime.
Of course, fostering is not the right solution for every young offender: the most serious or violent offenders will not be eligible. But for some of the most vulnerable young people we know it may be the opportunity they need to turn their lives around.
YES - Ena Fry, young people's development worker, Fostering Network
We need to recognise that foster care has a track record of helping some very vulnerable teenagers. We also know incarceration can be extremely damaging, so intensive fostering as an alternative to custody must be considered. That is not to say that foster care should be viewed as a punishment: the aim is to keep young people in the community, while helping them to address offending behaviour.
The key is to balance care and control, with the stability and security of foster care working alongside a supervision order. Intensive fostering must provide a structured framework. Carers must be well supported and given clear responsibilities.
Young people must be offered "wraparound services" that meet their education and health, particularly mental health, needs. Within such a structure, experienced carers can work effectively with young offenders, and, by providing them with stability and security, begin to help turn their behaviour around.
NO - Felicity Collier, chief executive, British Association for Adoption and Fostering
I would not want to support removing young people from their families as part of a "community sentence", unless it was clear in the new legislation that the young person's welfare had to be the paramount consideration. Separation may create great unhappiness, and can lead to persistent absconding and self-harm.
Foster care is not a punishment. No child should be forcibly removed from their family if they are not considered to be at risk of significant harm. I recognise that imprisonment can cause significant harm and, where the court considers this is the only alternative, then foster care of course provides a preferable option, but only if the young person consents.
History shows us that new intrusive orders are quickly used by courts for less serious offences, and when children fail to comply they can be more quickly pushed into custody. Look at antisocial behaviour orders.
NO - Geoff Monaghan, chair, National Association for Youth Justice
In principle, the provision of intensive fostering in preference to custodial sentencing is welcome and could help to bridge the gap between youth justice and mainstream children's services if based around a common assessment of need with a focus on welfare. But a flawed statutory framework that pays insufficient attention to children's rights risks harmful outcomes.
Strong safeguards are needed to protect the right to be removed from home only as a last resort, after genuine efforts to support the family have been exhausted. And tougher criteria are required to define a high custody threshold. The lesson from intensive supervision and surveillance programmes suggests many will be put in compulsory foster care below the current low and variable threshold.
Children's services should be given greater discretion over placement, planning and enforcement issues, minimising the difficulties of family reintegration after perhaps a year of enforced separation and the risk of inappropriate resentencing to custody.
