Blog: Lessons learned from the creation of the Youth Justice Board

The government’s announcement of the creation of a Women’s Justice Board (WJB) creates positive echoes of one of the more successful justice initiatives of the last Labour government, the creation of the Youth Justice Board (YJB) in 1998.

The YJB, now more than 25 years old and having survived all the political changes since that time, is a remarkable testimony to the gains to be made by a concerted focus on an apparently unsolvable penal issue, in its case the rising tide of numbers of children in custody. Although the YJB has always had other objectives, the headline has always been ‘To reduce the number of children in custody’. The success story hear is remarkable.

After some false starts the YJB has overseen the reduction of the numbers of children in custody at any one stage from 3,200 in 2008 to 445 in 2024. This achievement, unaccompanied by a rise in most types of offending by children is arguably unique in the history of penal policy in England and Wales. So, the occasion of the creation of the WJB seems a good time to reflect on why the YJB has been so effective.

I was Chief Executive of the YJB between 2009 and 2013, the period where we really began to turn around the performance of the youth justice system. What follows are my highly personal interpretation of what underpinned the success of the YJB.

So here are some strands of lessons, listed in their apparent order of importance, with the most important first.

1. From the outset seek to establish a hegemony of thinking about the undesirability of imprisoning all but the most serious of women who offend. In 2009 my Board Chair Frances Done and I persuaded a reluctant Jack Straw that we were going to promote more loudly than before the desirability of decarceration of children from every platform available to us. We quickly realised that ours was in no sense a unique vision. There were many other voices, from all walks of life, who shared this vision, so we consciously set out to build as large and wide-ranging a series of alliances as possible to promote decarceration as a desirable end. We were overwhelmed with the response. This became a cause with many, many advocates. ‘children deserve better’ became a rallying call from all quarters. Now we all need to be saying ‘women deserve better’.
2. Develop a ’whole system’ analysis. Phrases like ‘whole system’ can easily become cliches. Yet from its earliest days the YJB was very clear on how important upstream interventions were in avoiding later incarceration. Children are typically in contact with a wide range of services for 18 months or so before custody looms. Making this early contact was key to reducing later incarceration. This will be of central importance to the WJB. If its gaze is simply on the criminal justice system, its impact on numbers of women in custody will be reduced.
3. Who can lead change? The political founders of the YJB, Lord Norman Warner and Alun Michael MP, were clear then and now that radical change of this sort could not be led by the civil service, so they created the YJB as a Non-Departmental Public Body (“quango”), led by public but not civil, servants. This always gave the YJB more flexibility to challenge the status quo and court controversy in a way that would be anathema to a civil service led organisation. Whisper it quietly but we were a bit quicker at doing things than was the civil service. Ministerial accountability is important, but delivery does not need to come from a civil servant whose past career may not equip them for this particular role.
4. Understanding the criminogenic nature of many of our existing systems. New Labour funded the YJB and its programmes with considerable early largesse. This option is not available in the current economic situation anyway, but the lessons of the early history of the YJB will include the fact that throwing too many resources at a criminal justice issue may actually suck people into the system, widening the criminal justice net if you will. Understanding what makes a system criminogenic is more important than throwing money at a problem. If pooled with deliberate licence to “build back better” we may be surprised by how much we can reinvest.
5. Valuing research. In the early days the YJB had very considerable research budgets. But these were not often handled well, not least because the YJB quickly developed a very thin skin, from which any criticism easily led to not including leading researchers in the search for answers. The WJB needs to develop a broadly formed group of criminologists and other researchers, and then make sure that their conclusions are listened to and followed.
6. ‘Marginal gains’ and theories of change. Another distinctive contribution that Frances Done and I made was to champion a theory of change in youth justice that was in effect a copy of ‘the concept of marginal gains’ (small incremental improvements in any process amount to a significant improvement when they are all added together, otherwise as ‘the 1% factor’), echoing an approach that was working well in sports. This takes me back to point two above. We attempted to look at the whole system of youth justice, and nudge changes in each part, changes that might appear minor in their selves but added up to something much more significant. So we focused on improving court work, supporting allies in the police forces developing child friendly policing, working with major children’s and criminal justice charities etc. This is a model that the WJB could easily adopt.

In all of these points I have tried to avoid talking too much about the scale of the YJB and how big the WJB needs to be. It is obvious that the level of resources available to the YJB Board and me as Chief Executive was very different to what is available now to the WJB. But these pointers hold true regardless of size. We have had several attempts at creating overarching committees to talk about women’s justice including the Ministerial Advisory Board on Female Offenders (ABFO), and the latter Women in the Criminal Justice System Expert Group. But the ambition behind the government’s announcement seems much more that these. Labour needs to look into its recent past and have the ambition to mirror one of the greatest successes of its last period in office.