The youth justice White Paper

It can’t be stated enough that the story of youth justice in the last two decades has largely been one of real progress. When I started working at the Howard League in 2007, under the last Labour government, there were 3,000 children in custody in England and Wales. In March of this year, there were 345. As the current Labour government’s new youth justice White Paper acknowledges, the last two decades have seen significant reductions in offending by children of around 88%. 

That isn’t to say there don’t remain problems, which we’ll come to. But against this overall backdrop, one might wonder why the government sees the need to publish a White Paper promising “once-in-a-generation reform of youth justice in England and Wales”. It is a little alarming to see David Lammy, in his foreword to the White Paper, cite the terrible murders in Southport as a justification for reform to the whole youth justice system. Too often criminal justice policymaking is based on the worst and most extreme cases. We should be wary of this happening yet again. 

The reason so many children were in custody 20 years ago was due to a surfeit of interventionist policy by the then Labour government. The police were actively incentivised to arrest children and ask questions later, if at all. An entire industry of youth offending teams was set up around the country and so much youth offending was indeed found and duly processed. The ‘Respect’ agenda targeting anti-social behaviour with civil orders drew in many children, who found themselves being criminalised once they breached their orders. Detention and Training Orders (DTOs), short prison sentences followed by spells under surveillance in the community, were handed out by the courts like confetti.   

It took years to recognise the damage all this criminalisation of children was doing and to steer agencies into much better practice. For all that this new White Paper acknowledges the harm of criminalisation on young lives, there are elements of its 89 pages that make me feel distinctly queasy.

The government’s renewed desire to “intervene earlier – and more effectively” risks a return to a hyperactive State meddling in young people’s lives.

Early intervention – done proportionately – is of course key to steering children away from crime. But the government’s renewed desire to “intervene earlier – and more effectively” could risk a return to a hyperactive State meddling in young people’s lives, and in the lives of their families. The ingredients are there in this White Paper. 

On the face of it, a pledge to ensure out-of-court resolutions are more consistent is a reasonable step, but it could result in a more formalised and less discretionary approach that drives down the use of diversion. Similarly, a pledge to “widen the range of community-based sentencing options available to courts, to ensure responses are proportionate, credible and capable of managing risk” might seem reasonable, but it is widening the criminal justice net and may scoop up more children to deposit them into some pretty punitive community orders.  

For example, the government is seeking to reduce the use of more informal referral orders when a child pleads guilty to a first offence, in favour of utilising more youth rehabilitation orders (YROs). As the White Paper itself says, YROs can last up to three years (a long time for any child!) and there is an ambition to increase the use of onerous “intensive supervision and surveillance” for children who “present higher levels of risk”. And while the government seeks to reduce the use of the shortest DTOs by raising the minimum term in custody to 12 months, there is a possibility that this will simply up-tariff children to these longer spells behind bars. The DTO really should have been abolished in its entirety. 

In addition to all this, the government also plans to expand the use of parenting orders to further intervene in the family home, and there is a desire to use “machine learning and advanced analytics…to support early intervention”. The latter would be applied “reasonably”, but like much else in this White Paper it is hard to know how this will translate into practice.

The one area in youth justice where things have got worse and not better over the last two decades is in youth custody.

All that said, there are also real positives in the White Paper. There are welcome steps around the use of deferred prosecutions for children. The government is looking to reform the childhood criminal records regime and is prepared to “carefully consider” raising the minimum of age of criminal responsibility from 10. There are also welcome pledges on addressing inequalities around care experience and racial disproportionality – although not much in the way of detail on how the latter will be tackled. 

The one area in youth justice where things have got worse and not better over the last two decades is in youth custody. It is therefore hugely welcome to see the government aiming to reduce the use of custodial remand for children by 25%. It is also good to see the government acknowledge that Young Offender Institutions (YOIs), where the majority of children in custody are held, are “fundamentally not fit for purpose”. A “Youth Custody Transformation Plan” is to be published in autumn 2026, setting out long-term ambitions to move the custodial estate away from “large, outdated institutions and towards smaller, more child-centred settings”.  

Earlier this year the Howard League published figures revealing that boys in YOIs are typically being kept in their cells for about 20 hours a day and getting much less than 15 hours of education per week. Levels of violence in these institutions are also unacceptably high and the rate of self-harm incidents among children increased by 32% on the previous year in the latest safety statistics. Concerns around safeguarding in the secure estate are so serious that the government has already commissioned a review into the matter by the Chief Social Worker for Children and Families. 

While it is welcome that the government has recognised the state of youth custody is unacceptable, it’s significant the White Paper has actually very little to propose or say beyond a diagnosis of the problem. A huge amount of activity will now take place to rearrange parts of the youth justice system that were already largely functional, while we must wait a few more months to find out how serious the government is about transforming the one area where the system is most signally failing children. 

Andrew Neilson
Director of Campaigns

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