Caution urged on Tory plans to localise youth justice

Their concerns have been echoed by Paul Tidball, president of the Prison Governors' Association, who told CYP Now that placing management in the hands of councils would lead to the loss of a professional national prison service.

He said binding prisons closer to their communities was welcome in principle but warned that creating smaller prisons would mean accepting that the activities available to inmates would be far more restricted than in larger establishments.

Frances Crook, director of the Howard League for Penal Reform, welcomed plans to enhance the role of local authorities in youth justice and agreed that it was vital for them to be "incentivised to care for their children properly and to intervene to prevent crime".

But she emphaised that local flexibility and local budgets should be placed in a "national framework of excellence". She suggested this could be a role for a "revamped Youth Justice Board, similar to the role of the National Institute for Clinical Excellence in the health sector".

Proposals for localising youth justice were aired at a Conservative conference fringe meeting held by the think-tank the Centre for Social Justice, which was addressed by former leader Iain Duncan-Smith and disgraced former minister Jonathan Aitken. However, another review is being undertaken by MP David Burrowes, which is expected to take a more traditionally hard line approach to the issue.

The Youth Justice Trust said that if local authorities were handed a wider role in the youth justice system they should tackle poverty, deprivation and exclusion from education to reduce and prevent offending. Referring to Aitken's call for the voluntary sector to be more involved in rehabilitation, Mags Casey, communications manager at the charity, said there was "a worrying trend for the third sector to be seen as the answer to every issue, without an examination of the necessary funding for infrastructure and delivery of these services".

In his written response to the Conservative Party's Prisons with a Purpose proposals, Tidball indicated that making prison governors responsible for post-release supervision was not feasible because of the way the prison estate is configured. "Very few and possibly no prisons discharge 100 per cent of their prisoners into neighbouring communities," he said.