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Young Offenders

Volume 508: debated on Monday 22 March 2010

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice how many and what proportion of young offenders supervised by youth offending teams were in full-time training and employment in (a) England and (b) each youth offending team area in each of the last four years; and how many and what proportion of young offenders were on secure remand in each youth offending team area in each of the last four years. (322241)

Data relating to this question have been placed in the House Library.

Education, training and employment: Table A shows the number and the proportion of young people on relevant youth justice disposals in each youth offending team in England who were in full-time education, training and employment (ETE) in each of the last four years. ‘Relevant youth justice disposals' are defined as programmes resulting from a Final Warning with intervention, relevant community-based penalty or the community element of a custodial sentence. Relevant community-based penalties include Referral Orders, Reparation Orders, Action Plan Orders, Drug Treatment and Testing Orders, Supervision Orders (with or without conditions), Community Rehabilitation Orders (with or without conditions) and Community Punishment and Rehabilitation Orders.

Full-time ETE is defined here as 25 or more hours for young people of school age and 16 hours for those above school age.

Secure Remands: The number and proportion of young offenders on secure remand in each of the youth offending team areas in the last four years is not held centrally. However the YJB has figures for the average number of young people aged 10-17 on custodial remands in each YOT area in England in each of the last four years, which is shown in Table B. Custodial remand includes young people who are remanded in custody, convicted awaiting sentence or subject to court ordered secure remand. These data take a snapshot of young people who are on remand at a particular point in time which is then averaged out over the year.

The data have been supplied by the Youth Justice Board and have been drawn from administrative IT systems, which, as with any large-scale recording system, are subject to possible errors with data entry and processing and may be subject to change overtime. Differences in counting rules may mean that figures from other databases are not directly comparable.