Executive To Tackle Youth Offending

Measures designed to give a more rounded and reliable picture of young people’s behaviour will be brought in by the Executive to replace the previous administration’s indicator of persistent young offenders.

Minister for Community Safety Fergus Ewing announced today that he intends to introduce a range of measures to focus on reducing the volume, frequency and seriousness of offending and increasing communities’ confidence in action being taken to address this behaviour.

Figures released today by the Scottish Children’s Reporter Administration show that the new government inherited a three per cent rise in the number of persistent young offenders last year – continuing the upward trend of recent years.

Mr Ewing said: “The vast majority of our young people are not offenders and they are certainly not persistent offenders – they are well behaved. However we can’t let the small minority run riot on the streets and give everyone a bad name.

“I have looked at the persistent young offender target and I don’t think it really addresses the issues or captures the right information. The focus is far too narrow and it tells us more about the habits of the adults referring young people to the hearings system than the behaviour of young people themselves.

“It makes no distinction between minor offences and more serious ones. Under this method petty vandalism is treated the same as a serious assault. We need to take all types of offending seriously, and to do this we need good quality information. I simply don’t believe this collects the information we need to help us tackle youth offending and antisocial behaviour.

“That’s why I’m going to bring in a new system to give a much more rounded picture – one that will help the Scottish government and local agencies to really help the young people who are offending or are in danger of falling into a pattern of offending.

“It will not simply count instances of a young person being referred five or more times, it will take into account changes in the volume, frequency and seriousness of youth offending. That’s what the public are really interested in. The new approach will be about using information to help local teams address and identify young people who need to help and support as well helping them to tackle more serious behaviour.

“This approach will complement our efforts to reward good behaviour as well as bad and use money recovered from the proceeds of crime to give our young people more positive activities to occupy their time.”

COSLA President Pat Watters said: “COSLA fully supports the decision to review the current indicators. We have long argued about the need to consider the different nature of offences and that the current system does nothing to identify means of tackling offending behaviour of any type.

“We will seek to work closely with the Scottish Executive to develop meaningful indicators and meaningful ways of addressing youth offending.”

Sandra Paterson, Deputy Convener of the Association of Directors of Social Work’s Children and Families Standing Committee, said: “The impact of the persistent young offender target has been that it lumps together young people who have committed very minor offences with those who have carried out serious offences. This has resulted in a disproportionate use of resources. In addition, there is evidence to show that if you intervene too heavily and too early in response to lower levels of offending, it can lead to increased offending in the long-run.

“ADSW welcomes the Minister’s proposals to clearly distinguish between the needs of young people who are involved in low level disorder as well as those who are concerned with more serious offending.”

Assistant Chief Constable Maureen Brown, ACPOS Portfolio Lead for Youth Criminal Justice Issues, said: “ACPOS welcomes this review. While it is important to have a focus on persistent offenders, prevention and detection are equally important, as are early intervention and diversion programmes which divert young people away from offending behaviour. We continue to work closely with partner agencies and services with the aim of providing appropriate responses and measures for young people.

“The importance of appropriate performance management is reflected in the recent publication of the Scottish Policing Performance Framework. This new framework is effective across Scotland and is a significant step forward in the way that policing performance will be measured, reported and ultimately managed. We recognise that young people represent an important part of our communities and that it is still a minority of young people who actually offend.”

Principal Reporter for the SCRA Margaret Cox said: “The Scottish Children’s Reporter Administration is supportive of this new approach and will work with our partners in the Children’s Hearings System to develop and implement the new system.”

The persistent youth offender statistics were published today by the Scottish Children’s Reporter Administration. The Scottish government is currently working on new measures to give a broader picture of young people behaviour and a new system for measuring this will be announced shortly.

In 2002 the then Ministers set a target to reduce the number of persistent young offenders by 10 per cent by March 2006 and a further 10 per cent by March 2008.

The target to 31 March 2006 was not met at a national level. The number of persistent young offenders increased nationally by 16 percent between 2003-04 and 2005-06 from 1201 to 1388. The data for 2006-07 shows a continuing rise in numbers. The number of persistent young offenders increased nationally by a further three percent from 1388 to 1429.

A persistent young offender is currently defined as a young person with five or more offence referrals to the Children’s Reporter in a six month period.