Justice Committee

Oral evidence: The treatment of young adults in the criminal justice system, HC 397
Tuesday 12 April 2016

Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 12 April 2016.

Written evidence from witnesses:

–       Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime

–       Durham Tees Valley Community Rehabilitation Company

–       St Giles Trust

–       Derbyshire, Leicestershire, Nottinghamshire and Rutland CRC/The Yap!

–       Catch 22

–       London Community Rehabilitation Company

Watch the meeting

Members present: Robert Neill MP (Chair); Alex Chalk MP; Alberto Costa MP; Philip Davies MP; David Hanson MP; John Howell MP, Dr Rupa Huq MP; and Marie Rimmer MP.

Questions 315 - 415

Witnesses: Stephen Greenhalgh, Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime, Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime, gave evidence. 

Q315   Chair: Mr Greenhalgh, welcome. Thanks very much for coming to see us in, I suppose, the days of purdah at City Hall.

Stephen Greenhalgh: Yes—so I can say nothing.

Chair: It is probably the best of all times to come to give evidence. We ought first to make our usual declarations of interest. I am a non-practising barrister. You and I have also known each other for a long time, through London politics.

Alex Chalk: I am a practising barrister. I know Stephen Greenhalgh from when he was the leader of the Conservative group and I was a councillor in Hammersmith and Fulham.

Alberto Costa: I am a practising Scottish and English solicitor.

Q316   Chair: That is about it. Stephen, I hope that this is not a valedictory, in a sense, after your time as deputy mayor for policing; I do not know what your plans are for the future. Anyway, we are grateful to you for coming to give evidence to us. You and I can remember when MOPAC was created, as opposed to the old MPA, of which I was a member in the past. What do you think has been the fundamental difference in that structural change? We are thinking now about rolling out that devolution to other parts of the country as well.

Stephen Greenhalgh: London has an advantage, in a sense. The Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime was called MOPC when I first took over. I thought that that was not quite the right image, as it suggested a sort of Beatrix Potter character. We changed it to MOPAC, which is fundamentally very important. It sounds like a division of the US army.

We were lucky. With the mayoralty, you are able to bring together the Metropolitan Police Authority and the community safety experts within the Greater London Authority, so there is already a critical mass of over 100 people. Police and crime commissioners did not have that luxury, so there is the benefit of that coming together under the auspices of the Mayor.

The first thing that I would say is that the strength of MOPAC is the convening power of the Mayor. The Mayor can bring together people who are responsible for the wider criminal justice system, hold them to account and look at their performance. The second area is that performance oversight can be widened beyond policing, to look at the wider criminal justice system. That is certainly what Boris and I aimed to do in the first police and crime plan.

The last thing that is a change from the old MPA is that we are not just running around having committee meetings—although I am sure they were very fruitful. We can commission services. That started with the devolution of victim services. Part of it is a specific focus on young people, within the resettlement consortia areas in the first instance, but often the whole of victim services touch young people disproportionately. We also have two specific projects that I know practitioners will talk you through after me: the gang exit scheme, which we are co-commissioning with London’s community rehabilitation company, and the “Gripping the Offender” pilot, which we have financed through the police innovation fund. Again, that is co-commissioned with the CRC, MTCnovo. Those are the three areas that differentiate MOPAC from the old police authority.

Q317   Chair: What would you say that the Government should do in future in terms of devolution? What else do you think might be devolved?

Stephen Greenhalgh: One reason why I was very keen to appear before the Committee, despite the fact that we have purdah, is that I think wider devolution offers the opportunity for systems reform. If you just devolve budgets and say, “Can you run this a bit better?” you miss the point. With devolution of the youth justice system, there is an opportunity to improve reoffending rates and then to reinvest in prevention. That is the opportunity of system devolution. It gives you the opportunity to focus on young adults as a cohort. If we think about it, the number of those who are transitioning is very small. Clearly, with devolution of budgets, rather than holding those budgets at the centre, we would quite probably see better performance—getting that focus on young people between 18 and 24.

I am all for a New York approach, where you see whole-systems devolution of the entire criminal justice system, but I would start with youth justice and, probably, young adults. The third area would probably be female offending. It is clearly wrong to lock up women for short periods. There should be alternatives to custody. Obviously they have to pay their dues, but we need to improve the provision of that in London, which is considerably worse than it is somewhere like Manchester.

Q318   Chair: Why do you think it is worse in London? You make a fair point, which chimes with my own experience.

Stephen Greenhalgh: From what I know, London has eight holistic centres that provide alternatives to custody for women—the women’s centres. In London we have Advance Minerva, and you will hear from them later. They are based in the glorious borough of Hammersmith and Fulham; I visited them not too long ago, in fact.

I just do not know. I think that it will take a Mayor, working with Government, to improve the provision. We should have at least four, so that they can provide a hub-and-spoke model, not one and a half. The other one is Beth, in Lambeth. It is an historical anomaly. I suppose that we have had a women’s prison for a long time. You are right. It is wrong that we are in this position. Maybe it is because we have continually focused on this with centralised budgets. We have not had transfer of the block grant from NOMS.

Q319   Chair: Yes. There would have to be a transfer of some of the block grant, but it must follow that there would also be a transfer of the responsibility and accountability.

Stephen Greenhalgh: Perhaps I could take you through the case for devolution and what that would entail. There are three points. The case for devolution is that crime is falling, but the reoffending rate, particularly for young people, is increasing; it is above the England and Wales average. The reoffending rate is not improving, or it is rising, but crime is falling. Secondly, the number of offenders is reducing, but timeliness through the courts is slowing. You will probably recognise that, with the interests that many of you have as lawyers. That is odd, if the number of defendants is reducing. Lastly, it takes twice as long for the prolific and repeat offenders—the ones who go off the rails if you delay the period between arrest and charge—to go through the criminal justice system. That is a case for thinking about things differently and, potentially, for devolution.

If we think that it would be sensible to think about better management of budgets, how would we devolve? The first thing is that the formula for youth justice is based, effectively, on population and deprivation, not the cohort size you are dealing with. That leads to anomalies. We need to find a formula that thinks about managing a cohort—getting an amount of money where, frankly, the incentive is to reduce reoffending. There would then be opportunities to pool budgets. The Mayor’s Office spends about £8 million on youth justice matters in the community. The YJB spends around £12 million. Broadly speaking, we should pool that money in a single pot. Then we should co-commission that with London boroughs, because they have a big interest in providing housing and support around these offenders. It is not impossible to do that. It just requires a will.

Q320   Chair: I agree. Interestingly, I suspect that the way the formula works—on deprivation, as opposed to demand, indices—may be different from the way local authority social services are done, using the classic local government metrics of needs versus resource.

Stephen Greenhalgh: Yes. As you know from your background in local government, for safeguarding and children at risk it is entirely tiered towards trying to stop people rising up the pyramid to being in care. To be fair, the youth justice system seems to be working to try to steer young people away from criminal justice, and people are getting sentenced later and later, but there is not a formal structure that funds in that way.

Q321   Chair: No; neither can it drive decisions or give accountability.

Stephen Greenhalgh: Correct. And there is not a focus on young adults. Your evidence collection around young adults is very timely, in the sense that we have a youth justice system and an adult system, but we do not have something for the cohort of young adults. In London, we are talking about a very small number of young people who fall into that category. For the prolific offenders, we are talking about 1,900, out of a cohort size of 6,500. We are talking about central control of a relatively small number. If we divide that by 32, to take the borough level, it is even smaller, so clearly a local approach has some merit.

Q322   Chair: I see that. Talking about the local approach, you gave us some specific evidence on that in relation to Transforming Rehabilitation and so on, which was very helpful. Are we seeing that? Is that flexibility beginning to work in London? Are there lessons elsewhere?

Stephen Greenhalgh: It is early days. We supported the market engagement process and did a lot of joint events with London councils. We also hosted a specific event for young adults towards the end of April last year. They are taking a cohort approach, which I think is sensible. Having a platform that looks at particular cohorts seems like a solid idea to enable and facilitate commissioning. That came into force only at the end of last year, so it is too soon to comment on its efficacy. It is too early to tell.

Q323   Chair: That is fair enough. You made a specific point about information sharing and some of the challenges there.

Stephen Greenhalgh: In my submission to you, I said that if you Balkanise agencies you need to ensure that there is a flow of information. Where there was one organisation—the London Probation Trust—you now have two groups. You need to facilitate sharing between the two, which presents its challenges. It is too early to tell on that as well.

Q324   Chair: The logic of what you say can apply just as well to metro mayors or any other sort of devolution package, as I see it.

Stephen Greenhalgh: If you have a mayor who has responsibility not just for policing—remember that policing has a £3 billion budget; the rest of the criminal justice system is tiny compared with that—the whole system depends on efficacy between all those different agencies, so that they do not play pass the parcel. If the budgetary and performance oversight rests in one place, as it does in New York, you will see a slicker system. We should be working towards that.

Q325   Chair: On policing, are you satisfied with the degree of oversight that you have over the commissioner and his senior management?

Stephen Greenhalgh: Am I satisfied, as I end my four years? Certainly the levers that we have over the Met are stronger than those we had under the Metropolitan Police Authority. First and foremost, you will understand the relevance of key decision making, which is effectively a lever by which the Met has to show a business case to spend money. We reduced that from £5 million to £500,000. Effectively, we have been able to increase financial oversight and discipline for the cops to think about how they plan and spend money. That has meant that we have taken £400 million of cash out of the budget over four years and kept police officer numbers at 32,000.

The performance oversight—if you have a single metric, with a police and crime plan—is working as well. Crime is falling. Volume-based crime is down by around 19% over the last four years. The Met is a huge organisation. In some ways, it looks to its principal funder—the Home Office, the Home Secretary and Government. There are national security roles that the Met plays. We are in a far stronger place with effective oversight than we were under the old police authority, although obviously I was not around then.

Q326   Chair: I understand. One thing you cannot be responsible for is their judgment on some issues.

Stephen Greenhalgh: That is right. One of the risks in this role is to try to step into the operational rhythm of the police.

Chair: Exactly.

Stephen Greenhalgh: Then you lose sight of what you are trying to do for the people of London. You are trying to ensure that crime comes down and that the police focus on the things that matter most to the London public, but there is always something breaking with the Met—virtually every day. It is a mistake to get into that.

Chair: That is perhaps a lesson for future devolution packages as well. That is very helpful.

Q327   Alex Chalk: Stephen, can I bring you back to the young adult cohort, which you alluded to in your remarks? I was interested to hear what you said about reoffending rates, because I understood that the written evidence said, “The Mayor’s Police and Crime Plan target to” reduce “reoffending by young people leaving custody by 20% is on track,” with a current reoffending rate of 60.5%. In light of your earlier remarks, could you clarify that?

Stephen Greenhalgh: I will clarify it. This is why police and crime plans need to be revised, Alex. We are on track to meet our target in the police and crime plan to reduce the number of young people who reoffend once they exit custody. That was at around 70%. It is now 56%, so there is a 56% reoffending rate for those leaving custody. However, the reoffending rate for those in the community—those who get youth rehabilitation orders—has been increasing. Essentially, the number of people leaving custody is very small. There are only 350-odd offenders in places like Feltham and Thamesmead. We are hitting the target, but the problem is the wider reoffending rate. That is what I was referring to in my opening remarks. Any future plan needs to look at both custody and community, as well as first-tier disposals.

Q328   Chair: Are we talking about under-18s?

Stephen Greenhalgh: That is under-18s. The reoffending rate for young adults is slightly above the adult reoffending rate. The figure I have is 26%, but I will check that. The reoffending rate for adults in London is slightly under the England and Wales average.

Q329   Alex Chalk: Just so that we are clear about the terminology, when you talk about young adults, what age group are you referring to?

Stephen Greenhalgh: Eighteen to 24.

Q330   Alex Chalk: You are talking about those aged 18 to 24. By adults, you mean those aged 24-plus.

Stephen Greenhalgh: Adults are those aged 18-plus.

Alex Chalk: Of course.

Stephen Greenhalgh: Youth offending refers to anyone below the age of 18.

Q331   Alex Chalk: I follow that. I just wanted to understand the terminology. Your written evidence said that you would welcome a review of the impact that specific interventions with the young adult cohort in London have had. Is such a review planned?

Stephen Greenhalgh: At the moment we have the Charlie Taylor review, which is looking at youth justice. Apart from this evidence gathering, I am not sure that there is a specific focus on young adults and transition. Certainly we do not have that. As you end the time, you do not start a review, typically.

Alex Chalk: That is fine. Thank you.

Q332   Mr Hanson: Are you measuring seriousness of reoffending or frequency of reoffending by those who reoffend?

Stephen Greenhalgh: It is fair to say that those who are in custody, as the Harris review shows—I am happy to leave my copy, as it is pretty heavy to carry around—

Chair: We’ve all got one.

Stephen Greenhalgh: If anyone wants something to keep their door open, there is the Harris review.

Mr Hanson: We have the 21st-century version.

Stephen Greenhalgh: Oh, you have the 21st-century version of the Harris review. That is impressive.

Q333   Chair: I will not carry it with me when I canvass next in Fulham.

Stephen Greenhalgh: It is purdah, Chair. You should not mention that you are canvassing.

Chair: That is purdah.

Stephen Greenhalgh: You asked me about the challenges. This is the problem with having two separate systems. When I looked at reoffending, I was shocked to see that the Youth Justice Board does not have central data on the high-harm offenders—the seriousness. We do not have data on the prolific offenders and we do not have data collected in youth specifically on those who are transitioning into adulthood. The data are not there. Within the adult system—which is another, separate system—there are data on young adults. Clearly, not having a policy focus on transition means that there is an absence of data.

In answer to your specific question, obviously those leaving custody are extremely troubled. That is why in the first instance we wanted to reduce the reoffending rate of those exiting. By definition, if they have gone through first-tier disposals and are not getting a community sentence, they are particularly troubled, so we had a policy focus on those leaving custody.

Dr Huq: As the only London MP on the Committee, I was wondering—

Chair: Hang about. Bromley is not exactly outside London.

Dr Huq: I am sorry. I had forgotten our esteemed Chair.

Stephen Greenhalgh: The Chair has been here a lot longer than you, actually. He has a massive majority as well.

Chair: He may think it is, but it is not.

Q334   Dr Huq: I am a mere mortal. He is the Chair so he is above me. What is your analysis of the needs and characteristics of young people in London specifically? Is London a different case? We have people from the north-east. Yesterday I was on a panel discussion with David Lammy. Both of our constituencies had riots five years ago. Are there specifically London things?

Stephen Greenhalgh: One of the things I focused on was the issue of young people in London. Let us be clear. There are about 1.6 million Londoners under the age of 18 and about 750,000 within the area we are talking about. The vast majority have nothing to do with the criminal justice system. We forget that when we focus on the few thousand or few hundred who are in custody.

London is getting younger. That is a sign of the success of London as a metropolis. It is getting younger in some parts of the capital far faster than in other parts. There is no one here from Kensington and Chelsea, is there? Dare I say that Kensington and Chelsea is not particularly getting younger, but Barking and Dagenham is. Croydon is getting younger. We need to reflect the fact that we are getting younger and that there are more black, Asian and minority ethnic Londoners; the number is increasing and we see that in every census. We see that there are increasing issues to do with the people who touch the criminal justice system, in small numbers. We need to get smarter about our policy interventions and our grip around people who continually reoffend as they are on the edge of the system or going through it.

Q335   Dr Huq:  Would you say that those London characteristics extend to places nearby? You mentioned Feltham and Thamesmead. I do not know what the nearest place to Thamesmead is outside London, but Staines is down the road from west London.

Chair: If you went to Slough or Dartford, maybe.

Q336   Dr Huq: Take Staines or Dartford. Would you say that they are Londonifying as well? Maybe they are not outside your area.

Stephen Greenhalgh: Probably. I know that the police and crime commissioner for Thames valley is very keen for us to take on Slough. In all seriousness, we see urban problems in areas outside London. The specific change with regard to gangs is that gangs tended to be extremely localised and they used to form territories in parts of a borough. Your risk was if you moved from one gang’s territory to another’s. What we are seeing is that gangs are getting smarter and getting better at committing crimes beyond county lines. We are therefore seeing links between London gangs and places like Brighton, Slough or Dartford. That is the issue. We need to be able to have a system that responds to the fact that groups of young people are organising and committing crimes beyond London’s borders. That is a new challenge.

Q337   Dr Huq: It is often a Brexit argument—

Stephen Greenhalgh: We are not bringing up Brexit, are we? It is the Justice Select Committee.

Dr Huq: People say that these things do not respect borders. [Laughter.] Climate change—

Stephen Greenhalgh: Climate change, Brexit—

Q338   Dr Huq: You have already answered a bit on your women’s strategy.

Stephen Greenhalgh: I have written to the Justice Secretary, because I strongly believe that, as Manchester is getting the nod to look at custody budgets, there is an opportunity to have a better approach to looking at alternatives to custody for women in London. You would save a lot of money if you did that.

Q339   Dr Huq: You mentioned the Harris review. There is also the Young review. We have had Baroness Lola Young give evidence to this Committee. What account has MOPAC taken of her concerns about criminal activity, gangs and BAME issues, which you mentioned?

Stephen Greenhalgh: I have appeared on a platform with Baroness Young. Clearly our focus on victim services and victims’ needs is important, because young people can be both perpetrators and victims. We picked the two resettlement consortia areas, in both the north and the south, to enable us to have that focus. All our policy has been geared towards recognising that, if we co-commission with other bodies, we can get a better result.

I draw attention to three areas. We have something called the London crime prevention fund. We have spent some £30 million on reoffending and gang initiatives. All that is co-commissioned with boroughs. I am a former borough leader. If you are in City Hall, it would be quite easy to dis-intermediate local government, but we felt that it was important to commission alongside local government, to get a better result. That goes with the grain of what Baroness Young was talking about, as well as the focus on victimhood. The last area is looking at the opportunities to make a difference. We are commissioning services in the four major trauma centres—getting youth workers into areas where young people have been the victims of violence. When they have been a victim, they have a teachable moment that can take them away from that lifestyle.

One thing Baroness Young always talks about is the vulnerability of these people. I recognise that as well. We are doing a whole bunch of measures around vulnerability. I was on a platform where we heard about the victims of sexual abuse—they speak very movingly about that—or domestic abuse. We have a whole set of strategies around girls and gangs. We are funding some of the projects on that as well.

Q340   Dr Huq: There is a balance to be struck between managing risk—

Stephen Greenhalgh: And dealing with vulnerability. Absolutely.

Q341   Dr Huq: Do you also have links with Prevent?

Stephen Greenhalgh: We are now moving into security. There was not an architecture in London that was appropriate to the level of risk; 50% of the known threats are in London. One of the things that we have been able to do is to create a London Contest strategy—I always argue with Boris about whether it is pronounced “Cón-test” or “Contést”. We have a London Contest board, and now we have a London Prevent board. That provides a vehicle for Government to organise themselves, given that it is now a statutory duty. That is making some headway.

Q342   Alberto Costa: Can I come to the issue of the academic principles of cognitive behavioural and desistance theory? I think that just considering that would wipe the smile off most people’s faces. It may be a question for panel 2.

Stephen Greenhalgh: It is probably for the practitioners.

Q343   Chair: Do you have any comments from the Mayor’s point of view?

Stephen Greenhalgh: What strikes you is the fact that so many of these people are extremely damaged. If you go into the Heron unit in Feltham, broadly speaking you say, “Why is there an absence of mental health provision on the wings?” It is also about how we can replicate that in their communities, because they are not going to walk through the door saying that they have an issue.

First and foremost, we need to do far more to get those services and to recognise the emotional trauma and damage that a lot of people in custody, particularly young adults, have suffered. That is picked up by Transition to Adulthood and in the Harris review. I absolutely stand by and support all that. The way to do that and to have an effective policy response is to begin to co-commission some of those services, as we are doing with NHS London, to get some of the provision out there. We are paying for mental health professionals to go out alongside police officers as they patrol, and to do some pilot work on that. There is also diversion in custody and within the secure estate.

Q344   Chair: That is helpful. We will now move on to the practitioners, but I was interested in your last point. It is really the last opportunity to make the devolution plug. I get the sense that it can work in London because there are some structures and accountability. What lessons can we learn for the rest of the country? How do you do it in shire counties and districts, for example, where it may not be so easy to do that co-commissioning? Is there an argument for a much bigger piece of work around how we change things?

Stephen Greenhalgh: I would make this final point. We have to move away from opening the deal and talking about devolution as though it has happened. There needs to be far more on closing the deal. One of the things we all talk about is that Manchester has devolution of criminal justice. Well, no budgets have been devolved. Whatever happens, it is really hard to get to the thorny point at which someone in the centre—normally it is not a politician, but a central quango—transfers responsibility to someone else, so that we can effect change. That is what we need to focus on. Let us close the deals, as opposed to just talking about it.

Q345   Chair: Yes. Ultimately, unless you devolve the budget, you cannot do the co-commissioning.

Stephen Greenhalgh: Exactly right.

Q346   Chair: I will not be any more partisan than I am allowed to be, but I think that you have done a huge amount of work as deputy mayor for policing and crime in London, on any view. As a London MP, I am grateful to you for what you have done, and to all your officials on the team, who will serve whoever is the next Mayor hereafter. At the end of it, I believe that the devolution is very important. Thank you for your time.

Stephen Greenhalgh: Thank you.

Examination of Witnesses

Witnesses: Andrew Hillas, Head of 18-25 young offender cohort, London Community Rehabilitation Company, David Ripley, Director of Resources, Durham Tees Valley Community Rehabilitation Company, and Grace Strong, Strategic Partnership Manager, the YAP!, gave evidence.

Q347   Chair: Welcome, everybody. The deputy mayor did not need an introduction because there was just him. Since there are three of you, could you kindly say who you are and what your background is?

David Ripley: I am David Ripley from Durham Tees Valley Community Rehabilitation Company.

Grace Strong: I am Grace Strong from the Derbyshire, Leicestershire, Nottinghamshire and Rutland CRC. I was formerly the project manager of the young adult project, which was just in Leicestershire and Rutland.

Andrew Hillas: Good morning. I am Andrew Hillas. I am one of the two heads of the 18-25 cohort for the London CRC.

Q348   Alberto Costa: Can I turn to the treatment of young adults? The question that we have here concerns academic principles of cognitive behavioural and desistance theory. How are principles based on cognitive behavioural and desistance theory aiding your work with young adults?

David Ripley: We have embedded the approach to desistance theory totally in our model of delivery. We have taken rehabilitation back out into communities. We believe that the hook and the motivation for change is core to all spectrums of offending. We have looked at things such as the age-crime curve, which shows that people’s maturity levels develop later in life. Maturity is one of the key academic principles we are hooking on to now, especially for this cohort, to make sure that they are at the stage where they can recognise that they need to change. Then we can use desistance theory to help them to gain the hooks to make positive change in their lives.

Grace Strong: In a similar vein, we accept desistance theory. In terms of cognitive behavioural approaches, with young adults, in particular, there is quite a lot of evidence around the accredited programmes that take that approach, but many young adults struggle with the very formal and structured nature of those programmes. What we are finding on the ground, as we take a more specialist approach to young adults, is that thinking behaviour is such a significant need among that cohort—significantly higher than among older adults—that it has to be woven into all interventions. By way of a very practical example, just yesterday a practitioner’s car broke down with a service user in it. They talked about problem solving in relation to what happened with the car. We know from the emerging evidence that that kind of very practical approach works really well with young adults.

In terms of what else we have drawn from desistance principles, a really strong element that we have woven into our young adult pathway, and a couple of the other projects I am responsible for, is the relationship-based approach. We came across the concept of the trusted adult and how important that is for the young adult cohort. That is someone who takes an interest in and builds trust with that young adult, but who also holds them responsible, holds them to account and assists them. Every single contact matters in terms of trying to develop that young adult’s sense of individual and social responsibility.

Other areas that we find are working really well with young adults on the ground are to do with taking a family and networked approach. You look at where their strengths are, in terms of their friendships, peer groups, family and so on. That comes very much from what we have learned through desistance.

Andrew Hillas: I totally agree with what my colleagues have said so far. In London, there are specific issues about using desistance theory. You have already heard about the cultural divergences of different populations in London. Before we can even start using desistance, we need to get buy-in from the different young adults we are working with. That involves obtaining role models who are trusted and appreciated by the different cultural groups in London. Buy-in is absolutely critical. You cannot start working with a young adult on cognitive issues if that young adult has not agreed to participate.

We have spent a lot of time trying to understand the young adults we are working with. A key issue for us in London is the emotional maturity agenda. We have discovered that you need to tailor your intervention to each young person, to find out where they are in terms of their emotional maturity. Then you can intervene in various different ways to implement the desistance agenda.

Q349   Alberto Costa: Ms Strong touched on the family in response to my question. Can I turn to family involvement and support? The Harris review said that families are integral to supporting young people in custody. What are you doing to involve families in your work with young adults?

Grace Strong: I also have the lead in the area for children and families, so it is something close to my heart. They play a crucial role. It is interesting that there are still quite stark contrasts between the youth justice system and how it involves family, and the adult system, where it is fair to say that, in recent years, probation practice has focused more on the individual and less on family and wider networks of support. I sense that that is changing.

There are challenges, one being that someone has turned 18 and consent is therefore required. We are also acutely aware that, for some young adults, family can be quite problematic; there will be certain risks and so on. It is certainly a difficult area of work. However, I do not think that we should shy away from it. There was an inspection back in 2014 that said that in the majority of circumstances family is the most effective resettlement agency; it is quite compelling reading. We are missing a trick if we do not include family. With young adults themselves, it is such an opportunity. It may involve the family they were raised in, but of course they are forming families themselves as well. The opportunity is there for early intervention and putting in parenting resources. That not only strengthens desistance for the young adult but, potentially, gets better outcomes for the wider family.

In terms of what we are doing locally, taking a family approach opens up different partnerships. We are doing a lot of work with early help, for example, and the troubled families programme—we have phase 2 of that now. We are doing things like cross-agency training between family workers and criminal justice practitioners. That goes beyond probation services and includes the police as well. The training has been on things like taking a whole-family approach or hidden sentence training, which is about the impact of imprisonment, for example, on children and the family back at home.

We have just started to do a small pilot in the Leicestershire area linking up early help services with prisons. When a parent goes into prison, a small assessment is done and we refer to early help, so that they can work with the family while that prisoner is going through their custodial sentence. The idea is that we not only undertake the work that the family may need but we try to strengthen the family and keep contact with the prisoner, given how effective family are in terms of resettlement. It is far too early to know how effective that is, but it certainly feels like one of those pilots that will yield very positive outcomes for us.

Q350   Mr Hanson: One of the things we are looking at is how needs are assessed. We are starting from the baseline that the MOJ itself has said: “There is limited available evidence on what works to reduce reoffending,” particularly for young people, and on whether it differentiates young people and older groups. We have also had evidence that, particularly for young women in prison, there are potentially some very difficult background issues that may need to be addressed. We had evidence from Baroness Young on the lack of data for BME young offenders. Does any of you have a view on the adequacy of data currently available? Do you have any particular suggestions about the adequacy of those data for women and BME young offenders?

David Ripley: There are limited data available. Whenever it comes to dealing with data, one crucial thing is to open up the data across boundaries, which I think Stephen touched on. Individually, for example, in Durham Tees Valley we have collection of data around some of our BME groups, but we are very under-represented in some of our areas, so is that reflective of the general offending population? No, it is not. However, when you pool some of the data that are available through different areas, you start to get a more holistic picture.

When it comes to dealing with young adult offenders, we would be keen on any move to see a big data project to support that, to help data transfer across boundaries. The work of the CRC with the Ministry of Justice has helped to unravel some of that, so data are a little more openly accessible, but, although we have moved to the privatised side, we still have difficulties with new data-sharing arrangements with statutory bodies, as a private company. In trying to find a holistic approach to services for young people, it is vital that more data are easily available across boundaries.

Grace Strong: I agree. There is a lack of data, particularly in relation to the groups that you mentioned.

Q351   Mr Hanson: Who is responsible for doing that, given that, effectively, you are now a locally based private sector company and the MOJ is facing budgetary challenges? There is a long-term data collection issue. As you said, you have data protection issues and all sorts of things. Who has the central responsibility now to manage the data requirements to look at what can be done for women and BME offenders, in particular, and for young people in transition?

Andrew Hillas: In London, we have very close links with Stephen Greenhalgh’s department. When you co-commission, you can sometimes get around this issue, because the PCC can obtain the data. In London, specifically, we have managed to get around the problem that has been described of a lack of data being shared. I would recommend that for privatised CRCs the way forward is to work alongside the local PCCs to get those data.

Alternatively, we have to come up with our own quasi-measures, which look not just at reoffending rates but at other aspects of a young person’s life journey. Those include the achievements that they have made physically, but in London we are also very keen to look at attitudinal situations. If we can measure accurately what people are thinking and what their approach to their life is, we get a very good indicator of whether or not they will reoffend.

Q352   Mr Hanson: The centralist in me would say, is it not the role of the Ministry of Justice to pull that together? You said it is down to local PCCs. If local PCCs decide not to do it, it does not happen.

David Ripley: There is a role for the Ministry of Justice in this. As independent providers, we have to take responsibility for the work we do in the areas that we cover and we can collect data on that. One of the downfalls that potentially needs to be addressed is that, through outsourcing having created investments in IT systems that link more to demographic profiling, there is a richness of data that potentially gets lost. There is no central collection point. One of the things with the transition from youth to adult is that there is consistency in the Ministry of Justice, where you could hope to have some of the core data, which could then pass through quite easily with some of the investments that have been made.

Q353   Mr Hanson: What are you doing in terms of tools or programmes to assess maturity or neurological impairments among young adults? In particular, do you have any plans to adapt services related specifically to those challenges? I know that London, in particular, has been looking at this.

Andrew Hillas: In London, we piloted the T2A Alliance and Birmingham University maturity tool, which is a snapshot of where a young person is. We are very keen for our practitioners to use that on a regular basis with the young adults they are working with, to see the journey of change. We are currently looking at developing new interventions that can be used—in fact, we already have some—to work with young adults whose journey through the emotional maturation process has not got very far. It is a work in progress in London, but we see it as a vital piece of work that is quite a key priority.

Grace Strong: It is also work in progress for us. We accept totally the relevance of maturity to understanding offending, to understanding need and vulnerability and in the design of all our different interventions. We have just finished quite a prolonged period of co-design, which includes a young adult pathway that has interventions that very much take into account the evidence around maturity.

In terms of staff development, the maturity guide has been around for a while, so I am confident that if you asked a practitioner about maturity they would be able to tell you the differences between emotional maturity, physical maturity and so on. We also have a learning and development programme, which will commence quite shortly, that goes into a lot more depth. There are practitioners who will specialise with young adults.

Neurodisabilities are the gap for us and they are firmly on our radar. My view is that we do not understand enough at the moment to pick up on those needs. Where the needs are not high enough to need clinical services, we do not currently have the tools to know how to adapt our approach and interventions. That is definitely a gap. I know that under-18s have the CHAT, which I look at with envy. We could do with a similar screening tool for young adults, and adults generally, I would suggest. We need help with it. Locally, we are entering into a collaboration with Birmingham University and Exeter to look at neurodisabilities, trying to develop a very practical toolbox for our practitioners on the ground. It presents challenges to us from the partnership point of view, in strengthening our links with health at local level.

David Ripley: From Durham Tees Valley’s perspective, we have a partnership with Tees, Esk and Wear Valleys mental health trust. That has been one of the things we utilised to create a new pathway. I echo what my colleagues have said. The maturity side of it is a lot easier to get into a practitioner’s mind in practice. When you border on the neurological and clinical side, it gets more difficult. We have taken a partnership approach, to try to use the skills that are already there within communities.

Q354   Chair: Does the lack of accountability in the health service cause a problem around all this? I find it a totally centralised and Department-looking system, as opposed to those of you who are looking to your communities and those who are elected and accountable.

Andrew Hillas: It makes the process of forming effective working partnerships more difficult. It is not a straightforward process at all.

Q355   Chair: My experience in Bromley has been that the health area is the problem, frankly, in terms of willingness to engage or accountability.

Grace Strong: I agree. We have a responsibility as well, in terms of raising the profile of this gap for us and trying to influence health locally, to ensure that the health needs of offenders are properly analysed and we start to commission services around that. We play a role in that locally as well.

David Ripley: We have had some success. We have been very lucky, in that the mental health trust was on board with the outsourcing venture from the start. There is a very acute problem in our part of the world with the mental health trust, in that within its geographical coverage the offending cohort is quite high. It very much comes down to whether it is a priority for the local NHS trust, essentially.

Chair: Yes, and they always have to refer up to the Department. They are not able to take a decision based locally, in the way that you can. There is an interesting piece of work for us to do around the health service.

Q356   Dr Huq: I have some specific London questions. The new directions programme has echoes of the Harris review. Both say that custody should be a last resort. When will you have the data on the impact of that programme and on consequent reoffending?

Andrew Hillas: The research that has already been done by Cambridge University was very clear: we got substantial attitudinal change from people who successfully completed the programme. Harking back to an earlier point in the discussion, we found that it was a particularly helpful intervention for people who had family or friends who were a positive influence on them. People who did not have that—who were isolated or had families who were harmful to them—did very badly on it. We learned a lot from that evaluation. An issue for this Committee is how we help young adults who are vulnerable because they do not have those support systems. It is a great idea to move forward with family aiding us—the associations— where appropriate, but in my view there is a big gap for vulnerable young adults.

We are tracking the reoffending rates. We think that they are between 5% and 10% better than with no intervention whatsoever. The way the Ministry of Justice looks at reoffending rates is to follow people for two years. We are still in that two-year period, but we have the cohort that went through the intervention 18 months ago. We are virtually at the end, so the answer to your question is, “Soon.”

Q357   Dr Huq: Is that in the next six months?

Andrew Hillas: Yes.

Dr Huq: Chair, the reason why I forgot you are a London MP is that I thought that Bromley was in Kent. It is the garden of England, surely.

Q358   Chair: The fact that it may occasionally have a Kent postal address is not the reason why it does not think that it is in London. Mr Hillas’s organisation does a lot of work in Bromley.

Andrew Hillas: Indeed it does.

Chair: We are very grateful for that. London expands always and constantly. Mr Howell is not yet in London.

John Howell: No.

Chair: Just down the corridor.

Q359   John Howell: I feel threatened now. You are almost on my borders, even though we are 50 miles away.

Can I go back to the issue of bringing people together on this and look at the hub model that has been developed in Durham Tees and in London? What has been the impact of that?

David Ripley: We have found that it provides much better integrated pathways and a much better experience for young adult offenders, and adult offenders, for that matter. The chance to co-locate with other agencies and have support on tap has been vital. There is the ability for families to attend, although obviously we make assessments on whether they can. A point was made earlier about whether that is appropriate all the time; there are certain cases where it is not appropriate for families. It also gives offenders direct access to the services so that we do not have to take a referral route or go around the road to make another telephone call. It is a lot easier having those people there.

We have seen increased satisfaction from offenders. We have a 91% satisfaction rate with the services that we are delivering now. We are seeing much better performance in terms of whether people are reporting, delivering their community order and meeting their requirements. As has just been touched on, the longer-term reduction in reoffending will come once we get some analysis over the two-year period out of the way.

Q360   John Howell: The change in atmosphere that is created by this must be quite effective in terms of the way young offenders are dealt with. Do you have any feedback on that?

David Ripley: Yes. It has been very powerful, both for the offenders and for colleagues who work for Durham Tees Valley. There has been a marked change in the behaviour of a lot of offenders. They are a lot calmer and more peaceful in their outlook, now that the environment is friendlier than in the old probation office. We get a lot of informal feedback by that route. From a staff perspective, we have seen a reduction in staff turnover rates. We now have a staff turnover of less than 2%, as well as high levels of staff retention and satisfaction. The hub model has given our colleagues more time to spend with participants in their community—in their setting—so that they can get to know them better and create more of a relationship, rather than the potential to have conflict, as in the old settings.

Andrew Hillas: I will make two very small points, which are both quite important. First, for a hub to be successful, its geographical location is quite critical. Sometimes we have found that it works really well if a partnership organisation has a hub in the middle of an estate, for example. That can work particularly well, rather than expecting a young person to travel 3 or 4 miles to the nearest probation office. The second thing is that we have found that the success of hubs depends very much on the quality of the partnership organisations that are present there. It goes back to my earlier point about cultural relevance. Those organisations need to be ones that have some sort of acceptance by the young adult group in the locality.

Q361   John Howell: Are those hubs just for young people or do they extend further?

Andrew Hillas: We run both. We find that it is useful to run a separate one for young adults.

Chair: That is helpful.

Q362   Marie Rimmer: Good morning. I will chip in for the north-west. We are looking at sentencing provisions and possible changes. Cheshire and Greater Manchester Community Rehabilitation Company is using the intensive community order. I do not know whether you have heard of that, but we have had evidence on it. In London—you will know about this—there is the new directions programme. In your experience, what types of sentences are most effective in encouraging young adults to desist from crime? I am interested in your experience.

Andrew Hillas: We have found that intensity is quite helpful. I must admit that I came into the intensive supervision debate thinking that young adults find it difficult to comply with community sentences, so they will not comply and will all have to be taken back to court. In fact, we found exactly the opposite. If you occupy a young adult with a set of activities that they find meaningful, they will comply. We took very few back to court—far fewer than people on less intensive orders. For us, what worked was having a mixture of interventions, some of them even punitive. We tried to ensure that, when young people were placed on our unpaid work community payback orders, they were all completed. Young people found that there should be some meaning, so that they were actually repaying something to the community. That was quite helpful in its own right.

It goes back to the point my colleague made earlier. Ultimately, you need a trusted adult role model, whether that is the probation officer or someone else, to hang the intensive order around. That person is the mentoring, motivating individual who makes sure that the young person continues to comply, even when they are perhaps at their lowest motivational point.

Grace Strong: I agree. Sentences that are multimodal are particularly effective for young adults. They balance the need sometimes for restrictive measures with making sure that there are clear rehabilitative measures as well. There is a sentencing option that I believe is under-utilised across the country for young adults—the senior attendance centre. We have just finished a redesign of that, because we see it as potentially a very effective sentence for young adults. It is a bit like the one-stop-shop model, as it brings them together for a set amount of time and you are able to deliver all sorts of interventions, including reparative activities, at the same time for that particular group of young adults. Again, it is about developing psychosocial maturity—problem solving, teamwork and so on. Although we do not have the evidence at the moment—I do not think that there is much evidence about the effectiveness of attendance centres—in our CRC we intend to generate that from the new model and to share it.

David Ripley: I echo some of that. Specific activity requirements are vital for young people—things they can hook on to and see meaning in. Too often people are put on programmes where there is not really a wider meaning for them as individuals; they are just put through the system. We have tried to develop a set of programmes linked to our hub delivery model, where we can deliver specific things for people of a specific nature. For example, we run a women-only hub, with specific programmes around offending behaviour that really help to target it. The key is to get the activity to align to the cohort you are dealing with at the time and to have an approach that is flexible enough to allow you to adapt.

Q363   Marie Rimmer: Is there any thought of providing real choice to the individual—something that they are interested in doing?

Grace Strong: Yes, and involving young adults in the delivery of the service. For example, with the attendance centres, we have built in young adult involvement. Young adults who are halfway through the group will welcome the new young adults. They will directly influence the topics that are talked about. Often they know best what their needs are and how those change—it is quite difficult to keep up with that. Yes, that is absolutely the case.

I would not mind adding something about the new rehabilitation activity requirement, which came in last year. It is very flexible and lends itself to designing those kinds of interventions—groups and so on—that are tailored to the needs of young adults. That is certainly something we have done locally. We have a rehabilitation activity requirement for young adult males, which we have been able to design in line with the evidence.

Chair: A lot of that is about sentencing powers.

Q364   Alex Chalk: London CRC has come up with the suggestion that you should have distinct young adult courts. I want to explore that briefly. The key headlines appear to be: avoid sending young people to custody, where possible; have intensive orders, including attendance orders, that keep them occupied, motivated and so on; and have positive role models. Those seem to be the watchwords of success. Aren’t those things more important than necessarily having a young adult court? In other words, isn’t it really about what the court imposes, rather than the type of court that does the imposition? Don’t we have to look at outcomes, not process?

Grace Strong: We do need to look at outcomes, but from the point of view of a young adult’s experience; the system as a whole needs to make sense to them. If you take a particular approach in probation services, it is really helpful if that approach is mirrored across the system. The challenge is significant with young adults, in terms of developing their maturity and supporting desistance. The feedback that we got from our young adults when we talked to them a while ago in the YAP! was that the system does not make sense to them. Wherever they go, whatever the organisation or service, there are different approaches. We seem to see the best results where we have consistency in approach.

Q365   Alex Chalk: Sure, but I am asking specifically about the proposal for a young adult court. Let us be clear. We have a youth court, up to the age of 18, and then we have an adult court. What I think is being proposed is a young adult court. Is it right to focus on the system that will end up imposing one of these orders? Shouldn’t we really just say to the adult court, “Take account of maturity and don’t send so many people inside. Instead, look at these intensive orders.”? Why do we care what the dispensing authority is?

Andrew Hillas: I totally agree with my colleague that, ultimately, the sentencing occasion can be an opportunity for positive change. I know that may sound counter-intuitive. Whether you have a separate court or whether you have specific sentencers who are specialists in the maturity agenda, it can be an opportunity to bring the interventions that are going to be delivered into the courtroom. You can improve the compliance likelihood even at that very early stage. I am not disagreeing with you. You do not necessarily have to have a young adult court, but I can see that it could bring significant benefits.

Q366   Alex Chalk: Sure, but the priority has to be what they dispense, rather than how they dispense it. Isn’t that right?

Andrew Hillas: In our new directions intervention, we made mentoring, using members of the community, a key part of the intervention, and we got those mentors into the courtroom at the point of sentence, to act as a spokesperson for the young adult. I would want to encourage that.

Q367   Marie Rimmer: Looking at through the gate services, is there a difference in how through the gate is working for young adults in dedicated institutions, as opposed to mixed establishments?

Andrew Hillas: In London, we are partnering with Catch22, from whom you will hear very shortly. That is certainly an advantage. We now know exactly who are our colleague organisations doing pre-release work with young adults in the three London young adult prisons, so we can do far more joined-up work. Mr Greenhalgh told you about the “Gripping the Offender” project that we are just about to launch in London, which will provide intensive through the gate. We are very much looking forward to researching that, to see what happens if we have other organisations, as well as Catch22, going into the prison just before someone is released, meeting them at the gate, taking them out and ensuring that they resettle—doing all the practicalities, in addition to the normal probation supervision. We think that is a very interesting and exciting opportunity.

David Ripley: In Durham Tees Valley, there is not a difference in the sense of where the through the gate services are delivered, but there is a gap with the young offenders institutions, where we do not deliver through the gate services. A through the gate service in YOIs would greatly improve outcomes, as people transition either into an adult prison or into the community setting. At the moment, we are limited to a 12-week relationship prior to release. A longer, more intense relationship would allow us to get in there and work more holistically, especially with troubled people who have been in the system for longer, to help assess their motivations for change and the issues they have with their offending behaviour. Potentially, that would allow us to create some of the pathways before the person comes out, rather than at the point when they have come out.

Q368   Marie Rimmer: Do you find that, without support, transfer to an adult prison can be regressive for a young person? Can it be very damaging?

David Ripley: Yes. We have had a number of cases within our establishments where, unfortunately, young adult offenders have either taken their life or completely regressed once they moved into the adult institution. The CRC vehicle gives us the chance to act to bridge the gap between the two institutions—to be the professional person they can associate with and who can help to make sense of the whole system for them, although there are different parts they need to interact with.

Grace Strong: We have a through the gate service in our local YOI, which we provide. It is slightly different, because, of course, the needs of the young adults in that YOI are different. For example, there is more support put in place, recognising that the transition between custody and community can be particularly risky and problematic for the young adult. The area that is particularly relevant, in terms of subgroups, is care leavers, who have high support needs and are over-represented in custody. Our through the gate services with care leavers are making links with care leaving services out in the community. That is a distinct difference, just because that age group falls within the YOIs.

Q369   John Howell: I want to pick up and follow on from Mr Chalk’s question, and look at this in terms of probation services. Do you think that there should be a separate legal duty for probation services to offer a distinct service for young adults? I see a lot of scratching of heads and smiles.

David Ripley: I will start. No, we do not think that there should be. We think that the system should create an ability to deliver tailored services that individuals need. We have a lot of those elements in the changes under the ORA, which have now come into effect and give us as organisations the ability to choose the activity that suits a particular person. I am not saying that it is perfect—there is more that can be done—but separating and segregating a specific element of criminal justice may create the problem further up, in a different age group or at a different point in the system. We think that it is better to leave the system as it is structured at the moment so that we can deliver the prescriptive services we feel would be better for an individual.

Q370   John Howell: But there is a separate duty for dealing with women offenders.

David Ripley: From the way the system and the services are going for ourselves, we think that we are best placed to look at those. I am not necessarily saying that that separate duty needs to be torn up at this stage, but we now have the flexibility to be able to model the way we want to do it.

Andrew Hillas: In my opinion, it would be a very foolish CRC that did not offer a discrete service, given that all the evidence is pointing out that, if you do not treat young adults differently, you will not achieve the reoffending rates that we are seeking. It may be helpful, but is it necessary?

Q371   John Howell: Would you support a separate Minister—one of the MOJ Ministers—with responsibility just for young offenders?

Andrew Hillas: Yes, I would.

Grace Strong: Yes, looking at the totality of the evidence and the degree to which a step change is needed in the way in which we work with young adults. It goes far beyond the criminal justice system, and there lies a challenge, really. In the early days of the young adult project, which is a multi-agency project, it was very difficult to convince other agencies that young adults should be a priority, because there are so many competing priorities and scant resources. I am not sure whether it needs to be a legal duty, because I do not fully understand the pros and cons of that.

Andrew Hillas: Having a Minister for young adult offenders would be a good idea, because it would ensure that this agenda did not ever slip again. Ten years ago, when I was in probation, the young adult agenda was not considered to be an important factor, but this morning, very positively, we are concentrating on nothing else.

Q372   Chair: The problem is that you can make a Minister for anything, but unless they have the tools, the powers and the budgets, they will be one of those tokenistic Ministers who do not add a lot. At one point in my life, I was the community pubs Minister. Fine, but what did it actually mean? We were there to promote the sector. If it concentrates minds—this is Mr Howell’s point—and some budget and some power flow with it, you think that it is valuable.

Grace Strong: Yes, absolutely.

Chair: It has to be that way around. Or should it be national? Should it be the metro mayor, or whoever, who has control over that? I will take nods as a sort of yes. While we are on the probation service, it is probably handy for Ms Rimmer to come in with her questions about probation. I will come back to the other points.

Q373   Marie Rimmer: Currently, maturity assessments are not mandatory in a pre-sentence report, unless the young person has drug and alcohol problems that are linked to the sentence. New guidance will be issued this year. What involvement do CRCs have with the National Probation Service in shaping advice to the court on how young adults should be sentenced—whether there should be a community sentence or detention? Do you have any influence or involvement?

Andrew Hillas: In London, we advise our National Probation Service colleagues on what interventions we have in the CRC, so that they can then advise the courts themselves. We have a lot of contact with the National Probation Service, particularly around the transition of young people from the 32 London YOSs to adult services. In fact, the one bugbear for us—I would be interested to hear whether my colleagues agree—is that TR has now created a very complicated process for young people to leave a YOS and come to the CRC. They cannot just come straight to us; they have to go through the National Probation Service. We have had to spend quite a lot of time and effort finding a way to get around that, to ensure that young adults are not left in limbo while that administrative process takes place.

Of course, the National Probation Service will have young adults as 25% of its own case load. As CRCs are responsible for developing the interventions, we think that it is only morally right that we should encourage and tell our NPS colleagues what interventions we have and that they should pass that on to sentencers.

Grace Strong: Our role in the CRC is to make sure that they are fully informed of the different sentencing options. As we gain more evidence about the effectiveness of those, we must also make sure that we share it with the NPS and sentencers.

David Ripley: One of the potential barriers is the variance between various courts. Although it may all be the National Probation Service, particular courts react in different ways to different sorts of propositions. Colleagues have touched on the fact that we have the tools to promote services and what we believe to be effective with our cohort. I suppose that the decision-making point in the system as it is will always be the NPS. Particular courts will promote that and others will not.

The transition point that my colleagues just raised is vital. One of the potential downsides of TR is that it has made that transition harder, in that we now have private businesses delivering an element of the service, which creates difficulties around data protection and barriers to entry that make the transition from the youth side to the adult side a little harder than it potentially used to be.

Q374   Marie Rimmer: What steps are being taken to address that problem? Are any steps being taken yet?

Andrew Hillas: In London, we are making sure, with varying degrees of success, that our operational managers meet the YOS managers regularly so that we can spot the individuals who are going to be transferred very early on, so that, even if the admin process is taking time, the young person is not lost in the transfer.

Grace Strong: In Leicestershire, we have a joint practitioner group and a managers group, which we intend to roll out. That is proving to be really effective. It involves the NPS and the CRC, as well as the two YOS teams in the area.

David Ripley: We have also trialled having staff representatives in court to help the NPS to make their decisions and to ensure that they have all the information to hand.

Marie Rimmer: That is good to hear.

Q375   Chair: That is the sort of cumbersomeness Mr Hillas refers to in the written evidence from the London CRC and which we need somehow to get around. I understand that point. Does the funding create any issues around that? You are funded by volume and results. Does that create any difficulty or not?

Andrew Hillas: Charlie Taylor is currently carrying out research into the future of YOSs, which have had an in-year reduction in their funding. We are beginning to see the effects of that, as they are transferring far more young people to adult services than they customarily used to do. Obviously it is for them to decide whether or not a young person gets transferred when they turn 18. Previously they did not transfer that many in London. Now we are getting significantly more, so there is a resource implication for us.

Q376   Chair: I understand that. Is there more that you can do at the moment to pool your budgets in devolved areas?

Andrew Hillas: There is certainly scope for us to work more closely with YOSs to deliver intervention. The age of 18 is not a magic changing date. We ought to be able to deliver interventions that work for 17-year-olds who are being supervised by the YOS and 18-year-olds who are being supervised by ourselves.

Chair: Sure. We understand that. That is very helpful. Thank you very much for your time and your evidence. It is very much appreciated. Both your written evidence and the oral evidence that you have given us today has been very helpful.

Examination of Witnesses

Witnesses: Bernie Kastner, Community Services Manager, St Giles Trust, Mat Ilic, Justice Strategy Director, Catch22, and Bex Mullins, Young Women’s Keyworker, Advance Minerva, gave evidence.

Q377   Chair: Thank you very much for being very patient. Everything has to pause for the choreography to be rearranged, folks; I am sorry about that. Just for the record, it would be helpful if you introduced yourselves and the organisations that you represent.

Bernie Kastner: I am Bernie Kastner. I represent St Giles Trust, where I am the community services manager. As the name suggests, I manage all our services in the community in London. I would like to point out that I am a very last minute sub; I have just come off the bench. I knew about this only last night, so if it is okay with you, I will be referring to my notes.

Q378   Chair: Don’t worry at all. I am grateful to you for taking the time to come along. I know St Giles’s work from London, as Rupa and others do. It is very much appreciated, so thanks for coming.

Bernie Kastner: Thanks very much.

Bex Mullins: Hello. My name is Bex Mullins. I work at Advance Minerva. I am the young women’s key worker there. My role is funded by Barrow Cadbury, as part of its T2A agenda. My role is to work with young women on a one-to-one basis. I also deliver training to police about working with young women.

Q379   Chair: It is worth mentioning how much work Barrow Cadbury does around this, isn’t it? I think that it is unsung. Do you want to tell us a bit about how they help you?

Bex Mullins: They have been really helpful in terms of funding my role, which is a prevention role. I work with young women who at the point of arrest or at court, when it gets dismissed, would otherwise not get any support and might get picked up only much later, when they enter the probation service. No one else is coming into contact or working with them. Barrow Cadbury has given services a lot of information about young adults and understanding their particular needs. It has been very helpful.

Q380   Chair: It is a charitable trust that has done a huge amount, it seems to me, in the fields you were talking about.

Mat Ilic: Hi. I am Mat Ilic. I am a strategy director at Catch22. We are a forward-looking social business with over 200 years of public service delivery. I am also executive director at Only Connect, which is London’s creative criminal justice charity.

Q381   Chair: You have heard a lot of the evidence already. I would be interested to hear your comments on it and your specific thoughts from your perspective, as the voluntary and NGO sector. What would you add to what has been said? What do you think we are missing out on?

Mat Ilic: I suppose that we are here to represent the interests of the voluntary sector, to some extent. From our perspective, the voluntary sector has a critical role to play in the criminal justice agenda, particularly with young adults. I feel that the sector can deliver better outcomes for the same amount of money—or less. It is quite a vast sector. There are 2,500 criminal justice charities in England and Wales, most of which have under £1 million in income, but 98% of them bring philanthropic income from the likes of Barrow Cadbury and others into the space. It is a place where there is a lot of resource to bring into the discussion. The other benefit of our sector is that we can work with young people in a way that statutory agencies cannot, by focusing on a strengths-based approach, being incredibly personal, being completely separate from the statutory imperatives of criminal justice and trying—

Q382   Chair: It can seem a bit judgmental sometimes, can’t it—a bit enforcing, rather than taking pity?

Mat Ilic: Exactly.

Q383   Chair: I understand that. How does that work in terms of your experience of Transforming Rehabilitation and the whole programme there? Do you find that that is working well with young adults, against the background that Mat set out well? Any thoughts on that?

Bernie Kastner: My first point concerns the role of the voluntary sector. A lot of the earlier evidence was about how the voluntary sector works with the statutory sector. The advantage of the voluntary sector is that we are able to be more flexible, adaptable and creative. We respond quickly to emerging needs, especially when we are a small or mid-sized agency like St Giles. I see the voluntary sector as the R and D department of the social care world. We come up with lots of ideas. If we are very lucky, we get some funding and then we pilot them. Quite a lot of that has been followed up and is now being embraced by TR. If it were not for the voluntary sector raising ideas early on, and piloting things like gangs work and through the gate, which we have been doing for quite a number of years, TR could not have taken them on.

The key to our success is credibility, because credibility equals engagement. As we all know, disadvantaged young people can be very difficult to engage and they can mistrust authority. Charities, especially those like St Giles, which deploy ex-service users to provide the services, are more likely to connect with them. We are seen as an honest broker. In a way, if young people do not trust or buy into the service, there really is no service. We need to provide professional, well-managed services, which, effectively, work in partnership with TR and the statutory sector. We are a buffer between the statutory services and the young person. That is appreciated from both sides, usually, as we understand both points of view.

Q384   Chair: Do you think that the T2A report on effective approaches to young adults made a difference in practice? Are you seeing any difference in service delivery there?

Mat Ilic: In light of the questions earlier about evidence and data, personally I feel that there is quite a lot of evidence in relation to the young adult cohort, both from T2A and, indeed, from Government sources. The MOJ has released three evidence reviews on this topic in the last quarter. There is a ton of stuff out there on what works. The underlying points are probably what we summarise as the three Ps: people, place and purpose. It is about having the right people around you, being in a safe place—a place you relate to and can gain strength from—and having a purpose, which is something meaningful to do. That is the consistency across all of this. For us, both as practitioners and in terms of how we interface with the sector, those are the key things.

Q385   Chair: In your experience, are the hubs, the one-stop shop that we are getting with transforming rehab, working in your sector and the work that you are doing?

Bernie Kastner: From a St Giles perspective, I would say that there are some challenges. We feel that the hub is a more expensive model. In gangs work, certainly, it can cause problems around territory and young people not being able to come to one hub. There are also some safeguarding concerns around, for example, a women’s service or a DV service being placed in the same location as a gangs service. Our preferred option would be an outreach team that embeds its youth, gangs or resettlement workers in other teams, such as a community safety team or a troubled families team, as we do in the integrated gangs units in various London boroughs.

Bex Mullins: It is really important for young women to have a safe place they can go to. We operate from a women’s centre. That is so important, because most of the abusive experience they have had has come from men. I have had texts saying, “I am coming to your building. I feel safe there.” That evidences how they feel. It also gives you means to do empowering things. On our walls we have images of women, their achievements and their quotes. Young women come in and take pictures of that. There are other benefits you can get from having a safe space, as has been said.

Q386   Chair: That must involve a lot of training. How do you deal with the training of your folk so that they can deal with these sorts of issues?

Bernie Kastner: As in specialised training for our staff?

Chair: Yes.

Bernie Kastner: Anyone who works with vulnerable young people needs to be carefully selected and trained. I do not think that there is a specific post-custody resettlement training course. You would be quite rash to take that on, because it is very niche and there are limited career prospects for that. We look more at a high quality, generic qualification. We stand by the level 3 information, advice and guidance qualification, which is much more generic and can be used across the social care sector. We rely on our specialist detail from within the organisation or from our partners.

Bex Mullins: There is a lot of trauma-informed practice. The training around that is really helpful for practitioners, as is specialist training around women and girls. That is what my role has been, in terms of going out to police and trying to train them about the specific needs of the 18 to 25-year-old young women who are offending. There is a lack of understanding in lots of parts of the sector—we also train social services or do briefings at antisocial behaviour meetings—about young women and their risk of going on to offend. You have to go right back to address the question of the difference between young women and young men, or older groups. If people do not get that, all the evidence and stats do not add up.

Mat Ilic: There are three key areas of training that we focus on in relation to this group. There are issues of maturity, neuroscience and brain development. There is the subject of children in social care and care leavers; we talked earlier about the preponderance of that group in this cohort. There is also the effect of gangs on young people, particularly young people in custody, and how we deal specifically with that. There are specialists in our custodial teams who focus on that particular issue.

Q387   Chair: I get the sense that the public do not understand at all the extent of the importance of gangs within young offending. It is a much bigger driver than the popular press or others like to pick up, isn’t it?

Mat Ilic: It depends on your perspective. It is a really challenging issue. It is a challenging issue in terms of the community hubs—who you can work with and where. It is an issue in terms of the movement of people in custody and what you can achieve within an establishment as a result of that. Of course, it is an issue subsequently, on release. There is everything from having gang tattoos that prohibit you from going to work through to dissociation—

Q388   Chair: If you have the wrong tattoo, you cannot work with the guys with a different tattoo.

Mat Ilic: Exactly.

Q389   Chair: In a sense, disrupting the gangs at the beginning is the key thing, before you can get into the environment you are dealing with.

Bernie Kastner: Early intervention is really crucial. St Giles has an SOS team. We have an SOS+ offer that goes into schools, pupil referral units and youth centres. We deliver tailored sessions on the issues around gang associations, knife crime and peer pressure.

Q390   Chair: Getting them out of the gang at the very beginning is the thing.

Bernie Kastner: Yes.

Q391   Marie Rimmer: It is very difficult to get out of a gang.

Bernie Kastner: Once you are in there, it is very difficult, isn’t it? We have found that once you move on and are in the secure estate, staff in prisons are not particularly aware of the issues around gangs.

Q392   Chair: Aren’t other people within the custodial environment aware of the issue?

Bernie Kastner: I don’t think they are. There is a training issue. They need to look at training on the dynamics of gangs and gang associations. Even in London prisons, we have had examples among the young people we have been working with. A young person from Lambeth who was remanded in a London prison was put on a wing with people in a known gang. He was in direct conflict with them. That young person was beaten, humiliated, tortured and filmed in his cell. That was then put on to YouTube—

Q393   Chair: Which prison was that?

Bernie Kastner: I think it was HMP Thameside. We managed to get in touch with Catch22, which alerted the prison, and the young person was moved, but it is about the sensitivity of his being shipped there in the first place.

Q394   Chair: We have visited Wandsworth and other prisons recently. It is about finding it out on the very first day, isn’t it?

Mat Ilic: May I refer to some evidence from Thameside? In spite of that particular case, there have been some successes. You are absolutely right. The induction period is key in understanding the balance of the regime, who can go where, who can associate with whom and so on. We have an intervention at that induction period in HMP Thameside. Evidence suggests that it has led to a 77% reduction in prison violence since November 2015. Suffice it to say that the prison had quite a lot of issues when it opened, for the reasons that Bernie outlined. A lot of it is to do with the regime and what it can cope with, particularly for young adults. In other places such as Wormwood Scrubs and Pentonville, we have seen that the introduction of young adults leads directly to an increase in peer-on-peer violence in custody. Young adults can complicate prison regimes.

Bernie Kastner: The difficulty with the risk assessment is that a lot of young adults in gangs will never say that they are in a gang. Unless they tell you, it is very difficult at the beginning.

Q395   Chair: Is that because it is almost seen as a bad thing to own up to when you go into prison, for example?

Mat Ilic: It varies. You might be scared of retaliation, or you might suggest that you are in a gang in order to get protection. We have peer workers at the induction phase who can relate, instead of just relying on police and Trident data and other official stats that tell you the answer.

Bex Mullins: There is sometimes a kind of blindness to young women who are on the periphery of gangs or who are involved in gangs, until it gets to the conviction stage. The young women I am working with, who are committing fraud because they feel frightened to say no to gang members—

Q396   Chair: It is a coercive relationship, mostly, isn’t it?

Bex Mullins: Yes. It may involve weapons or firearms possession for the person they love, who is gang involved. Often, young women are not mentioned in these conversations, until we hear about them in media headlines about gang involvement. There needs to be a lot more training about why young women are involved in gangs and the relationship aspect of that.

Bernie Kastner: Young women are much more likely to be victims and to be used just to hold weapons or drugs, or to be sexually exploited. It is very difficult to find those women and engage with them. We have a project in Lambeth called Expect Respect. It is a very small project, based in youth clubs around the borough. It is for young women aged between 12 and 16. The idea of that is that usually they are invisible on those estates, and they do not come to the youth club, because it is ruled by the boys. We have trained female workers, one of whom used to be in a gang herself, who run sessions there. It is early intervention stuff, but these are girls who are at risk. I was laughing the other day, because one of the sessions was a combination of baking and a discussion around sentencing—together. I thought that was very good; they managed to bake something while they were talking about the implications of sentencing for various offences.

Bex Mullins: I have worked with a young woman who was arrested for a drunk and disorderly offence. There was no way that the police would have known that she was gang involved, but when I started working with her and built a relationship with her, a lot of information came out about how she was escorting young girls in care to prison to see gang members and how she was cleaning money through her account. That only comes out when you have a relationship with someone.

Q397   Chair: That is almost grooming.

Bex Mullins: Yes.

Q398   John Howell: I want briefly to pick up one point to do with the difficulty of young people with a criminal record finding employment. Earlier in the year, the Prime Minister suggested that we should have a US-style ban the box system, where a person applying for a job does not need to disclose prior convictions until a later stage in the process. What do you think of that?

Bex Mullins: There is a real stigma around criminal records, as well as a real lack of understanding. Three young women I have worked with had offences related to firearm possession. While they were rebailed again and again—they did not even know whether they were going to get a record—they stopped all education, because they felt that there was no point in going forward. It was at a critical time, when they can access funding and their peers are doing that. It goes back even to before they apply for jobs; there is also the impact on accessing education. Women are especially affected if they get a conviction. A lot of the jobs they go for are jobs in the care sector—teaching or working with children—so the stigma of having a criminal record is massive.

Bernie Kastner: I will disclose right now. I am an ex-offender—an ex-drug user, an ex-service user and an ex-prisoner. Many years ago, I then became a statutory sector caseworker, a voluntary sector caseworker and a voluntary sector manager. I am a fairly niche Venn diagram. I do not think that there are many of us who have done all those things.

Back when I started working, there was not even a CRB. Obviously there were huge risks involved, so that had to come along, but in those days there was not the same issue. Now we need to manage those risks, but St Giles would certainly support banning the box. We would take it much further than that. We feel that employers need to be actively incentivised to take on people with criminal records, possibly through reductions in national insurance or business rates. Cost savings from a reduction in offending would make economic sense.

The other thing is that ex-offenders need to see examples of people like myself and a lot of people at St Giles Trust, who have managed to change their lives. They need to see that kind of living proof. That is something St Giles really believes in.

Q399   Chair: Yes. At the end of the day, lecturing to people does not work very well, does it?

Bernie Kastner: No.

Q400   Chair: You have to see the reality.

Bernie Kastner: You need to see the example of other people having done it.

Q401   Chair: That is right. I had a case—I do not know whether this rings a bell—where there was a domestic issue at home and the police turned up. They did not have the time, the resource or the inclination to work out where the real issue lay, so they said, “It is six of one and half a dozen of the other. Give them both a caution.” Further down the track, she wanted a job as a care worker, but the caution was a potential impediment. Is that a common experience?

Mat Ilic: Bernie’s points are absolutely spot on. Banning the box takes us in one direction and sets that tone, but incentives need to be in place. We have seen great success with apprenticeships, for example—employers being encouraged to take on apprentices. You could create a similar impetus.

The point that Mr Greenhalgh made earlier about London getting younger is fascinating. While that is the case, the whole point about adolescence is interesting, because you have 30-year-olds who are living at home with their parents and are out of work. That is something to consider in this debate. Most of the young people I come across in our work want work. Most of them want meaningful jobs, rather than menial jobs. Lots of them are interested in entrepreneurialism, but there is quite an optimism bias with us, in that we see the handful of young entrepreneurs who make it, not the many who do not. There is a challenge around disclosure and DBS. You need some really progressive employers to step forward. A third of our employees have criminal records. I am delighted to call them my colleagues, but it takes really proactive work on behalf of employers for them to step up and be able to say that.

Q402   Chair: We need more Timpsons.

Mat Ilic: Yes.

Chair: It was quite inspirational to listen to him on “Desert Island Discs”. That is really interesting.

Q403   Marie Rimmer: From listening to the panel, it is clear that you have tremendous experience, particularly with young people. What do you consider should be the role of the voluntary and community sectors in liaising with sentencers to improve their knowledge of the needs and characteristics of young adults and of appropriate interventions available to the courts? Young adults are very vulnerable, particularly when they have been in YOIs and are going into a more adult setting. They may have suffered and been bullied.

Bernie Kastner: As a voluntary sector organisation, we are very cautious about being involved in any kind of sentencing discussions or influence, because we do not want to become part of enforcement. If we did, we would lose all the advantages we spoke about earlier, to do with our independence and not being seen as part of the statutory sector.

I recognise that quite often we attend court with a client and say, “We are here to support this client,” and that will influence sentencing. Quite often judges are looking for the opportunity to give a non-custodial sentence, but there has to be a credible alternative. Our role is to try to come up with that credible alternative. It has to be something that is robust and effective and not seen as a soft option by the fluffy voluntary sector, but it must also deliver on outcomes and be a successful alternative. For that, we need funding. It is as simple as that, really. Statutory funding must be provided to us to enable us to offer things like the RARs, where we were able to go to court and say, “This is the alternative to custody.” We have to be mindful of not being too closely connected to sentencing.

Q404   Marie Rimmer: It is more of an advocacy role—to sell a young person’s strengths and the opportunities available for that young person.

Bex Mullins: Yes. It is helping them to understand what a sentencer will need to know. I went to court with a young woman who had told her solicitor that she had resisted arrest because she had panicked with the police. I encouraged her to explain that she also had post-traumatic stress disorder and that she had a medical letter in her bag that she could show them. That makes such a difference in court. We were able to influence her having an absolute discharge for that offence. What concerns me are the young people who do not have an advocate, or the magistrate who has had no training around 18 to 25-year-olds and sees them just as adults, or who sees a young woman and does not think about the multiple disadvantages and the trauma she has most likely gone through in her situation. I agree with you; that does need to be put in place.

Q405   Marie Rimmer: Do you all agree with that?

Mat Ilic: Yes. We have direct experience of that. Before Transforming Rehabilitation, we had community workers liaising outside HMP Doncaster and trying to get better sentences for under-25s. We saw a 5.7% reduction in reoffending because of those better outcomes. That advocacy role is absolutely key with regard to those alternatives, as well as the feedback loop of the effect those alternatives have had, as opposed to a custodial disposal.

Q406   Chair: Sometimes it is about the sentencer—the magistrate or the judge—knowing what is available in their area.

Mat Ilic: Yes.

Q407   Chair: Out of interest, Bernie, what statutory funding do you get for St Giles?

Bernie Kastner: For the gangs work, we still get quite a lot of funding through MOPAC. We have about 20 gangs workers, and probably about half of them are funded through MOPAC currently. The rest is a patchwork of various charitable trusts and rich individuals, sometimes, if we are very lucky.

Chair: A lot goes into it.

Q408   Marie Rimmer: What evidence is available for the effectiveness of Advance Minerva in diverting young women from the criminal justice system?

Bex Mullins: The role that I have at the moment is being evaluated by Sheffield Hallam University. It is a three-year pilot, looking at the impact of prevention work with young women. They are going to look at the data. They will also interview staff, service users and partner agencies. That report will come out next year and there will be a lot of evidence in it.

I would like to explain a bit about why our approach works with young women. We focus a great deal on their experience of abuse and trauma, and on relationships and how to have better coping mechanisms. The young women I am working with have multiple experiences of abuse and trauma. They all have different reactions—there is no one size fits all—so my approach with them will be very individual as regards what support they need and what they want to work on.

It is taken into account that as well as their support needs around homelessness, debt and lack of employment opportunity, they have specific needs because they are young women. They are often the primary care givers for family members who have mental or physical health needs. They are also the primary care givers for children—the sole primary care giver, if they have their children between the ages of 18 and 25. Their experience of abuse and exploitation means that we see a lot of behaviours around self-harm, eating disorders and addiction, so our work will really focus on how you can start to cope in a different way. As I said previously, a lot of their offending is because of the men in their life or for the men in their life, so we look at healthy relationships, having the confidence to say no, when it is safe to say no, and building expectations that are not around relationships—“What do you want to be when you are older that is not about that?”

Q409   Marie Rimmer: What examples are there around the country of programmes for young adult offenders in general that are working?

Bernie Kastner: St Giles Trust runs a programme called the SOS project. That is a gangs project set up by a guy called Junior Smart, who still works on it. It started as one guy, coming out of YOI Rochester and High Down to work with young people coming back to Southwark and Peckham. It has grown from there to 20 staff, working in 13 boroughs. We work in the major trauma centre in the Royal London hospital. Earlier, Stephen mentioned the teachable moment, when someone reflects on their life and thinks, “I’ve just been shot. My life plans aren’t really going very well at the moment.” That is a time when they may well change.

We run the SOS+ programme around schools and are looking at new projects around county lines. We are really interested in that at the moment, because it is something that comes up again and again in all the London boroughs we work in. A lot of the clients we should be working with are actually missing children. Occasionally they come back. We know what they are doing and where they are. It is just a question of setting up some kind of process—

Q410   Chair: Because there is no home base, in effect, is there? There is no family and no structure.

Bernie Kastner: Exactly. The other thing we are looking at and developing at the moment is family-gangs work, because we recognise that they are very closely and inextricably linked. The family work is linked to the gangs work, so we are trying to develop a programme where we have the more traditional gangs caseworker, who will be an ex-offender—usually an ex-gang member—and a family worker, who will scrub up more in a social services meeting and be able to work more closely with the family. Those two workers work together with the gang member and the family.

Marie Rimmer: That is very interesting.

Chair: Dr Huq has some final questions on gangs.

Q411   Dr Huq: We have heard quite a bit about gangs—some very rich description, too. We have heard about the MOPAC gang exit scheme. Do you think that central Government are doing enough to combat criminal gang activity, particularly with reference to BME young men?

Mat Ilic: We know that BME young men are disproportionately represented, particularly in relation to young adults in the criminal justice system. Earlier, there was a debate about the role of central Government in this whole agenda, not limited to gangs. The Home Office has done a lot on ending gang and youth violence and putting that at the forefront of the policy agenda, in particular. The stance that MOPAC is taking with London gangs—we are part of that programme—is incredibly bold and is the first step for a pan-London programme of that type. It is multimodal, so it is thinking across all the different aspects of gang involvement—and thinking about the local as well. The shorthand for me is that central Government have done a lot to push the agenda forward. This is a brilliant opportunity to think about devolution, particularly in terms of accountability and the relevance of local territory to gangs.

Q412   Chair: What is your sense as to where devolution might go? What bits do you think need to be devolved?

Mat Ilic: My personal feeling is quite in agreement with it. I have to confess that I worked at City Hall at one point. There is massive potential for what city mayors can do on this kind of agenda. The power to draw agencies together—the convening power that Mr Greenhalgh described—as well as the relevance of the different types of solutions, be it housing, policing, criminal justice services or education, is a massive opportunity.

Chair: You know of the interest that I have. As a local government person, I agree that we underestimate massively the power of local action.

Q413   Dr Huq: Do you have any particular views on how to manage gangs within young offenders institutions, which are in a different category? We have heard that they do not come on their own.

Mat Ilic: Absolutely. One of the challenges is that there are official data telling you who may or may not be in what gang, but there is also the formal and informal stuff young people affiliate to—what they do and why they do it in custody. At the heart of what we feel might be the solution is restorative prison. That is a conversation between all the prison staff and young people about why they are acting in a particular way. It may be that they are just locked up for too long. They may have various impulsive behaviours, so there is a bit of mental health work that needs to be done—special outreach and so on. It is really about trying to get underneath, to find out what is the underlying cause of the aggression and violent behaviour, as opposed to the surface of it. Sometimes gangs are at the core of it, but sometimes they are just an excuse for a bun fight in the lunch hall.

Q414   Chair: I understand that. There are often mixed motives, aren’t there?

Bernie Kastner: To go back to the issue of central Government funding, at the moment, given the way that gangs work is funded in London, it makes sense to continue providing that funding to individual boroughs, who understand the local issues. The county lines work seems to be nobody’s particular problem. The borough the young people come from is not so interested, because they are not offending in that borough, and the regional town where the drugs are being sold is not so interested, because they are young people from London. That looks to me more like an initiative for central Government.

Q415   Chair: Yes. It involves, for example, PCCs talking to their neighbours in a way that I get the sense they very often don’t at the moment, because it does not get them a cheap headline.

Bernie Kastner: Exactly.

Chair: Thank you all very much. I am very grateful to you. It has been a long evidence session, but thank you for your time and your evidence to us. It is much appreciated. Thanks also for what you do.

              Oral evidence: The treatment of young adults in the criminal justice system, HC 397                            32