It's not what you would expect from a community sentence. There's no scrubland that needs clearing, fences that need painting or a gang of young people reluctantly serving out their punishment. Instead there is just one young man and two youth offending team (YOT) workers happily chatting away and restoring a bike.
While this might seem like a soft way of punishing criminal behaviour, Paul Howard, reparation co-ordinator and the brainchild behind Wandsworth YOT's bike project, believes it is a far better use of both the young people's and the workers' time. Here, hidden away in an undisclosed location in Wandsworth, southwest London, young people are learning about the human cost of their actions by repairing old and stolen bikes and giving them to the victims of one of the UK's fastest-growing crimes - cycle theft.
Chance to learn
The young people referred to the reparation programme have largely been involved in petty criminal acts and have all expressed an interest in learning about bikes. They attend the project for a minimum of 12 hours spanning at least four weeks.
"They work on every aspect of the bikes," says Howard. "They learn about the gears, how to change tyres, replace brakes and make adjustments. Most importantly, they meet the victims of theft when they hand over the cycles at the end."
This week, the YOT is working with just one young man - 15-year-old Josh. He was given a 16-hour community sentence for actual bodily harm after a young person was injured in an altercation. Josh claims it was a case of mistaken identity, but says he has appreciated his time working with the bike project over the past four weeks. "It's been good," he says. "I thought it might be boring but it hasn't been."
The project started three years ago as part of a joint initiative with Wandsworth Primary Care Trust. Initially, the focus was on encouraging young people reluctant to take part in sporting activities to develop an interest in cycling. But the funding only lasted a year and wasn't continued.
Reluctant to see the team's efforts go to waste, Howard changed the focus of the scheme to make it about reparation, and involved Victim Support and the police. The plan met with approval and was awarded 5,000 by the Home Office.
"Starting the project had the usual problems, such as finding the right people to run it," he says. "It seemed a shame to end the project after we'd spent time setting it up and 3,000 on tools and equipment."
Since the change in its focus, 31 young people have been through the programme and 32 bikes have been given to victims, 29 of whom came to meet the young people who had worked on their new bikes.
Jon Broad, reparation superviser at the project, believes its strengths lie in the fact that the young people and victims get to meet. He recalls how on one occasion a young woman who had only recently moved to London came down to the project to pick up a bike after hers was stolen. "You could tell the theft had really affected her," he says. "But she went away thinking London isn't such a bad place after all."
Local support
Local residents are also starting to show an interest in helping the project to develop. When it first launched, the YOT relied largely on the police supplying stolen bikes for the young people to restore, but as word about the scheme has got round, increasingly members of the community have offered their unwanted cycles. "I even get calls from people way outside London asking me to pick up bikes," says Howard. "Politely, I have to turn them down."
The achievements of the scheme were recognised nationally in May when it won a Youth Justice Board (YJB) Alliance Award. Brendan Finegan, director of strategy at the YJB, says the board was impressed by how the project involved a range of agencies including Victim Support in its work. "It's exactly the type of innovative way of working that we want to encourage," he says.
As for the future of the project, Howard would like to see it set up by other YOTs around the country and believes it could be easily replicated.
Josh agrees that more young people should have access to the project. He is planning to use his newfound skills to fix his own bike and says he will steer clear of crime in the future. "If I had committed the offence it would have made me think about what I'd done," he says.
