The courts will bring together judges, youth justice services and specialist support to tackle the causes of offending. They will provide ‘intensive supervision and tailored interventions, including health or educational requirements, while closely monitoring compliance to break cycles of repeat reoffending’, according to the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) white paper, ‘Youth justice’, this week.
Parents and carers may face tougher accountability measures, with Parenting Orders—the use of which has declined in the past seven years—being strengthened and expanded. Youth Rehabilitation Orders may also be strengthened, with additional powers to impose electronic monitoring, intensive supervision and surveillance in the most serious cases.
The government has also committed to ending unnecessary custodial remand for children by at least 25% this Parliament. This will ensure children awaiting trial or sentencing are not held unless public protection requires it.
The government has earmarked an extra £15.4m per year for the next three years for children at risk of entering the youth justice system. Ministers also want to widen the range of community sentences for young offenders, and to tackle adults who draw children into offending by creating a new child criminal exploitation offence.
Kirsty Brimelow KC, chair of the Bar Council, welcomed the white paper ‘with the caveat that funding must be sufficient and must not lag behind’.
Brimelow said: ‘There needs to be a shift from criminalisation—which long has been shown to set a child onto a path of crime—to rehabilitation. Protecting society and protecting childhood should not be competing aims and children should not be defined as criminals at a very young age.
‘Knowledge about child development has moved on substantially and yet the minimum age of criminal responsibility remains at 10 years old in England and Wales. It is the youngest in Europe and we are an outlier in prosecuting young children.’
A Bar Council working group is due to produce a report in the next few weeks on the minimum age of criminal responsibility.
