MPs urge action on youth crime prevention

The House of Commons’ Public Accounts Committee said any savings made by forthcoming cuts to prevention spending will likely be outweighed by the cost of increasing crime in the future.

During evidence sessions the committee was told by the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) that prevention funding was "certain to be cut in future years", at both national and local level, due to general reductions in budgets and the non-statutory nature of prevention work.

"The board [Youth Justice Board] and the Ministry should encourage investment in prevention where reducing youth crime has been identified as a local priority," the committee’s report on the youth justice system states.

"They should consider offering match-funding, piloting the use of other incentives such as payment by results, and sharing the proceeds of reduced custody levels."

The committee also questioned the wisdom of plans to scrap the YJB, questioning how a focus on reducing youth crime can be maintained under the move.

However, despite receiving praise for reductions in offending levels and numbers of children in custody, the YJB did come in for some criticism.

The committee found that:

• Young offenders serving custodial sentences or more serious community sentences remain highly likely to re-offend
• The YJB has limited evidence of what interventions work, making it difficult to achieve better value for money from the £800m spent in the youth justice system
• The YJB lacks sufficient knowledge of what interventions are being used by youth offending teams and how well they are working, meaning it cannot disseminate best practice effectively

Responding to the report, Enver Solomon, policy director at the Children's Society, said the government needs to actively encourage local authorities to maintain a focus on effective crime prevention programmes.

He added: "In developing its future plans for delivering youth justice reform, the Ministry of Justice must ensure that a discrete and specific focus is maintained on children and young people in trouble with the law.  Future provisions for commissioning and delivering youth justice must be kept separate from adults."