Youth Justice: Children's trusts to oversee crime prevention

Eagle told the Youth Justice Board's annual convention that youth offending teams would still be involved in preventive work, through children's trusts, but made it clear the Government is determined to introduce integrated preventive services. "We know from research that programmes that aim to address multiple risk factors are more likely to be effective than those that deal with factors individually," she said. "And integrated intervention is critical to dealing with those problems."

She added that pooling budgets will be an important part of the process.

"Youth Matters provides ways in which we can enable services for young people to build young people's resistance to the problems they face," she said. "Children's trusts will be key in taking forward prevention. It just makes sense to explore pooling of budgets."