The plan represents the first ever cross-government plan for dealing with the full range of issues around youth crime from enforcement, to better targeted support, to early prevention.
The Children’s plan aimed to enable all children and young people to achieve their full potential and yet challenges remain. The Government is pledging additional funding of almost £100 million for measures which will focus on cutting youth crime including emerging problems such as violent crime, the use of weapons (in particular knife crime) increased binge drinking and drug related crime. Action is aimed to cut these problems in the short-term and prevent it in the long-term. The aim should be to concentrate on the local communities who directly feel the impact of these crimes.
The plan delivers a clear message: there are clear boundaries and clear consequences for those who step over them – but support for those young people and their families who try to turn their lives around.
Youth crime is unacceptable and can have a devastating effect on communities and young people themselves and must be tackled head-on.
The key themes of the plan
The plan highlights the need to match punishment with prevention by focusing on three key areas:
1) Tough enforcement where behaviour is unacceptable or illegal.
2) More non-negotiable support to address the underlying causes of poor behaviour, including more parenting orders and the new Youth Referral Order requiring young people to attend education, go to an attendance centre for group work, undertake treatment for drug and substance abuse etc.
3) Better prevention to tackle problems before they become serious or entrenched.
Key Facts
· One in twenty young people are responsible for over half of youth crime.
Increasingly we are able to identify these young people early, and intervene to address the root causes of their behaviour, including by supporting and challenging their parents in meeting their responsibilities. This plan represents a step-change in the Government’s ambition in this area, expanding successful pilots in recent years including work with children excluded from school, Family Intervention Projects to deal with disruptive families, Intensive Fostering, Family Nurse Partnerships and other schemes. As a result, all the families assessed as currently fitting this profile will now receive a targeted intervention – many will receive several, more closely coordinated as a result of the other changes in this Plan.
· The views of young people are crucial.
They must be involved in developing local solutions in a way that lets them know their opinions are valued. In particular we want to offer better support to all victims of youth crime, especially young victims who are the most vulnerable.
Key measures
· There is close to £100 million available over the next three years for the Youth Crime Action Plan:
· Extra investment in all areas of England to support families with most entrenched and complex problems
· An intensive programme of action for priority areas where problem of youth crime is greatest; including taking unsupervised young people off the streets at night and requiring young people to complete community service on Friday and Saturday nights
· A menu of effective options for these areas that they can tailor to their local needs, achieving the right balance between enforcement action to tackle the problems on our streets and prevention measures to ensure future generations do not make the same mistakes.
Measuring success
The Youth Crime Action Plan sets out two clear goals to reduce youth crime:
Our aim is by 2020 to reduce by one fifth the rate of young people aged 10 to 17 entering the criminal justice system from the current levels. [Currently each year around 100,000 young people aged 10 to 17 enter the criminal justice system for the first time.]
We will introduce a new national goal substantially to reduce the number of young victims by 2020.
We have already announced we will extend the British Crime Survey to under-16s. We will set the goal when this has given us a clearer picture of the current situation.
These two goals are complementary. We know that the majority of young victims are victimised by other young people; by reducing youth crime we will also reduce the number of young victims.
For more details on the Youth Crime Action Plan please visit: http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/documents/youth-crime-action-plan/
