2nd opinion: Villains or vulnerable?

Last month I was appointed a member of the Youth Justice Board, the public body responsible for young offenders.

By any yardstick young offenders are among the most socially excluded in our society. Many live in the poorest areas, are from broken homes, excluded from school and have few educational qualifications. Yet they are also often the bullies of younger children, members of gangs who attack defenceless old ladies or the thugs who make life unbearable for tenants on the worst housing estates.

The challenge is to find ways to turn young offenders away from crime – and their belief that they have little to look forward to – and towards a different and better future.

For the last three years, the Youth Justice Board has been spearheading some radical reforms. The aim is to find alternatives to placing young people in custody, develop effective community sentences and do everything possible to prevent offending and re-offending. Encouragingly, these reforms seem to be working: last week the Home Office published statistics showing a 20% reduction in re-offending among young offenders.

The local engines for this new approach are youth offending teams, which bring together staff from social services, police, probation, health and education to deliver a wide range of programmes. These include the use of orders requiring parents to take responsibility for the behaviour of their children, police final warnings and bringing young offenders face-to-face with their victims to apologise and offer reparation.

The evidence shows that targeted prevention work with young people who are most at risk in high-crime estates cuts crime and disorder, improves school attendance and improves the quality of life for those communities. Last summer the Youth Justice Board funded 370 "Splash" holiday schemes in high-crime areas, with more than 90,000 young people taking part in activities from sport to art classes to drug awareness. In some areas, reductions of 30% in street crime and robbery were reported.

Positive results are also coming from the Intensive Supervision and Surveillance Programme, a rigorous community sentence which now provides an alternative to custody for over 3000 persistent offenders.

Young people who desperately need help are being let down, making it more likely that estates will be ravaged by antisocial behaviour, robbery and violence

Participants in the programme have at least 25 hours a week of purposeful activity and supervision – twice as much as for those in custody – including weekend and evening sessions and close surveillance, which may include home curfews and tagging.

Sadly, too often these reforms are being undermined by a lack of appropriate accommodation. There is a mass of evidence showing that young people who are homeless are at higher risk of offending. A survey carried out with the youth offending teams found two-thirds experienced problems in finding accommodation, and that every month more than 150 young people were placed in secure accommodation because it was not possible to find them somewhere to live in the community.

Of the Youth Justice Board's annual £400m budget, 70% is spent on secure accommodation – every place in custody costs £45,000 a year. The board's target is that young people in custody must have at least 20 hours a week of education, training and personal development activity – yet the evidence is clear that putting young people in prison increases the risk of re-offending. And two-thirds of prisoners who are homeless on release re-offend, compared to less than a quarter of those who have satisfactory accommodation.

The provisions in the 2002 Homelessness Act should be making a real difference. Under the new priority need orders, local authorities have new duties towards homeless 16- and 17-year-olds and people leaving institutions, including prisons. Young offenders should clearly be assessed as vulnerable, and local authorities have a duty to secure appropriate accommodation. It is not acceptable simply to offer a flat without any support or to place them in bed and breakfasts.

Local authorities must work with voluntary agencies to ensure there is a range of supported accommodation for young offenders so that they can take part in effective community programmes.

In many areas this is not yet happening as it should. Young people who desperately need help are being let down, making it more likely that housing estates will be ravaged by antisocial behaviour, robberies and violence.