To ask the Secretary of State for Justice how many persistent young offenders there are in each criminal justice area. (276847)

A persistent young offender (PYO) is a young person aged 10 to 17 who has been sentenced guilty by any criminal court in the UK on three or more separate occasions for one or more recordable offence, and within three years of the last sentencing occasion is subsequently arrested or has an information laid against them for a further recordable offence.

This definition is designed to measure the speed and efficiency of the youth justice system, through monitoring the pledge to halve the average time from arrest to sentence for dealing with PYOs in England and Wales from 142 days in 1996 to 71 days. However, the definition is not designed to provide a reliable measure of the level of youth offending over time, and it will give a misleading picture of the true trend if used for this purpose.

The above pledge was first met over a full calendar year in 2002 and has been met in all but one calendar year since then. Youth sentencing is therefore now more timely, and for repeat offenders more frequent, than it used to be prior to 1997. As the PYO definition relies on repeat sentencing occasions, a side-effect of the Government’s success in bringing much swifter justice to young repeat offenders is that more of them end up being defined as PYOs.

The table shows the number of individual PYOs sentenced in 2008, for each police force area.

On 10 December 2008, Official Report, columns 58-59WS, I announced in a written ministerial statement that the PYO pledge would be dropped with effect from the end of 2008. This is therefore the last year for which PYO statistics will be published and compiled.