Lancashire children as young as eight are being supported by a programme designed to divert kids away from crime.
The county’s Prevention Service is working with some youngsters even before they reach the age of criminal responsibility, at 10.
The scope of the scheme – operated by the Lancashire Child and Youth Justice Service (CYJS) – was revealed at a recent meeting of Lancashire County Council’s children, families and skills scrutiny committee. Members also heard that the volume of work undertaken by the CYJS could have to be cut back if government funding due to run out in the spring is not renewed.
The service has received £1m over the last three years as part of the Ministry of Justice’s ‘Turnaround’ initiative, an early intervention project which aims to help children at risk of entering the criminal justice system – and put them on a different path. The Turnaround cash is set to expire at the end of March and it is not yet known whether the government has any plans to extend it beyond that point.
In order to retain the temporary staff funded by the Whitehall grant while the future of the initiative is decided, the CYJS partners – which include the county council, Lancashire Police and the NHS Integrated Care Board for Lancashire and South Cumbria – have come up with the money to continue running Turnaround at a local level for a further six months.
Just over 300 children have been supported by the scheme, which helped expand the CYJS’s existing activity in Lancashire.
Of the 270 youngsters who had been through Turnaround by the end of September 2024, 82 percent had had no further contact with the CYJS, while 11 percent had received a form of youth caution or other judicial decision against them and the remainder had been referred back into the service once again.
Hannah Blower, the county council’s child and youth justice senior manager, said the stats reflected the “excellent” outcomes for the scheme that had been seen nationwide.
Explaining why the CYJS’s wider work can involve children up to two years younger than the age at which they could be charged with a criminal offence, she said it was an attempt to “get upstream” of potential future problems by doing the “preventative work” needed to head them off.
“When children are that young, it’s very much a safeguarding response rather than a criminal justice one,” Ms. Blower stressed.
The Prevention Service was established in 2018 and its sister Diversion Service 12 months later – three years before Turnaround funding was made available.
Prevention works with children identified by agencies as being on the cusp of falling into the criminal justice system, while Diversion supports young people referred by the police following an offence, whom it is hoped can be steered away from further crime.
Preston has more referrals – of both types – than of any of Lancashire’s dozen districts, accounting for 48 percent of all open CYJS cases.
Of the 146 youngsters who were offered a personalised Diversion programme during 2023/24, 71 successfully completed it – and only five of them, or three percent, then went on to enter the criminal justice system. In contrast, of the 55 who did not complete their programme, 23 – or 42 percent – fell into the system.
Seventy percent of those who completed Prevention programmes last year also had no further criminal justice contact afterwards.
However, scrutiny committee member Matthew Maxwell-Scott questioned whether those who had engaged with the various CYJS initiatives would have gone on to make good life choices of their own accord even if they had not received any such support.
He said the most powerful argument for securing future funding would be to prove the service was “turning people around who wouldn’t otherwise have been turned around, just because people grow up”.
However, Hannah Blower said she was confident that many of those who had received intervention would not have “been fine” without it – and had either gone on not to offend or reoffend or just to have “better life outcomes” as a direct result.
“What we’re finding is a lot of unmet need… particularly unmet health need…[and] poverty and systemic disadvantage.
“Of those [who] have engaged, a lot of the time we have had to keep going back and keep trying to get them back in – it’s not always been plain sailing,” she said.
A sample assessment of those children who did not complete their Prevention and Diversion programmes is now under way to determine why.