The Harrow cabinet meeting on 17 September 2024 approved the Harrow Youth Justice Plan 2024 -2027 without any expressed reservations! But then this is a complex area, as the opposition leader, who could ask few questions, pointed out.
The Annual Plan is a government requirement to establish suitable Youth Justice Service and partnership arrangements in a local authority area.
Descriptive and less evaluative plan includes the local youth profile, their different needs, crime profile, relevant statistical information and what has been happening to tackle the challenges so identified.
The plan also has a strategic objective to ‘address’ the over representation of young Black men within the criminal justice system (not really to address but tackle ‘disproportionality’ as they can’t address why over-representation).
Over 60% of Harrow residents are from Black, Asian, and Multi-Ethnic backgrounds.
The report informs that the management team (to implement the plan) has been reduced, as well as the number of practitioners. Also, that in the wider context of the re-organisation the Youth Justice Service is a part of the Children’s Early Help Service, so integrated with the universal and targeted Youth Offer. However, Early help no longer sits under the same umbrella of one Assistant Director (as was previously the case) which may bring challenges.
No doubt, the multi-agency approach to implement the plan, involving the council departments, pockets of initiatives through the pocket of funding and outside ‘partners’ like Police, Health, Probation, Education and Community Safety with different institutional ethos, ‘cultural competence and understanding of structural and entrenched forms of endemic racist systemic arrangements’, is a big challenge.
The plan could have shown learning from the weaknesses in the multi-agency approach in Harrow: youth offending service, a part of the Harrow Youth Justice Service, inspected in December 2021 scored 17/36 with overall rating ‘requires improvement’ (i.e. not good) where the ‘partnerships and services’ also required improvement.
Harrow Strategic Safeguarding Partnership’s Joint targeted area inspection of Harrow on 24 May 2023 found: The Harrow Strategic Safeguarding Partnership does not have effective oversight or scrutiny of the multi-agency safeguarding hub (MASH), or early help offer in Harrow. Children and their families benefit from a wide range of early help services that support them to improve their lived experiences. However, this is uncoordinated without a lead professional or multi-agency focus and often provided through a single-agency approach at the exclusion of partners. This means children and their families need to tell their stories over and again to different agencies, and that the support the family receive is not always tailored to their specific needs.
What flows from all this is that the multi-agency approach needs robust central coordination to oversee the organisational arrangements as well as to monitoring the effectiveness of the youth-specific services provided across the board. Given such a demand and other circumstances like the youth justice team operating from a number of sites, the staff reduction is most unhelpful.
Another challenge is that the Youth Justice interventions are to deal with the effects rather than to address the cause, resulting in re-emerging effects. For example, the lack of any scope to question the socio-economic policies such as the benefit capping that have differential impact on the quality of life of different groups of youth, give rise to a concerning profile where out of 63,400 aged 0 to 19, approximately 6,500 children, 12.3% live in “deprived” households focused on Wealdstone, Marlborough, Roxbourne: data from the report.
Similarly, the youth justice service can have an ongoing action plan to tackle ‘disproportionality’ but has no scope to address why disproportionality.
While the Children vulnerabilities are looked upon, the plan gives no sense to address the possibility of the drugs related exploitation leading to violent crimes.
[According to the data in the plan, about thirty percentage of 1,598 Serious Violence offences recorded in Harrow in the twelve months up to September 2023, involved a person under the age of 25. Upward trend of non-domestic knife crime since March 21 where in the twelve months up to September 2023, 81 recorded offences compared to 56 in the previous period. Also, in the How Are You Harrow Survey, 38% of young people said there are areas of Harrow where they feel unsafe].
What stops the Harrow professionals and executive politicians to let the government know that the adverse impact of the socio-economic deprivation jeopardises the effectiveness of the hard-worked Youth Justice Plan? A council motion could do this!
The Annual Plan is a government requirement to establish suitable Youth Justice Service and partnership arrangements in a local authority area.
Descriptive and less evaluative plan includes the local youth profile, their different needs, crime profile, relevant statistical information and what has been happening to tackle the challenges so identified.
The plan also has a strategic objective to ‘address’ the over representation of young Black men within the criminal justice system (not really to address but tackle ‘disproportionality’ as they can’t address why over-representation).
Over 60% of Harrow residents are from Black, Asian, and Multi-Ethnic backgrounds.
The report informs that the management team (to implement the plan) has been reduced, as well as the number of practitioners. Also, that in the wider context of the re-organisation the Youth Justice Service is a part of the Children’s Early Help Service, so integrated with the universal and targeted Youth Offer. However, Early help no longer sits under the same umbrella of one Assistant Director (as was previously the case) which may bring challenges.
No doubt, the multi-agency approach to implement the plan, involving the council departments, pockets of initiatives through the pocket of funding and outside ‘partners’ like Police, Health, Probation, Education and Community Safety with different institutional ethos, ‘cultural competence and understanding of structural and entrenched forms of endemic racist systemic arrangements’, is a big challenge.
The plan could have shown learning from the weaknesses in the multi-agency approach in Harrow: youth offending service, a part of the Harrow Youth Justice Service, inspected in December 2021 scored 17/36 with overall rating ‘requires improvement’ (i.e. not good) where the ‘partnerships and services’ also required improvement.
Harrow Strategic Safeguarding Partnership’s Joint targeted area inspection of Harrow on 24 May 2023 found: The Harrow Strategic Safeguarding Partnership does not have effective oversight or scrutiny of the multi-agency safeguarding hub (MASH), or early help offer in Harrow. Children and their families benefit from a wide range of early help services that support them to improve their lived experiences. However, this is uncoordinated without a lead professional or multi-agency focus and often provided through a single-agency approach at the exclusion of partners. This means children and their families need to tell their stories over and again to different agencies, and that the support the family receive is not always tailored to their specific needs.
What flows from all this is that the multi-agency approach needs robust central coordination to oversee the organisational arrangements as well as to monitoring the effectiveness of the youth-specific services provided across the board. Given such a demand and other circumstances like the youth justice team operating from a number of sites, the staff reduction is most unhelpful.
Another challenge is that the Youth Justice interventions are to deal with the effects rather than to address the cause, resulting in re-emerging effects. For example, the lack of any scope to question the socio-economic policies such as the benefit capping that have differential impact on the quality of life of different groups of youth, give rise to a concerning profile where out of 63,400 aged 0 to 19, approximately 6,500 children, 12.3% live in “deprived” households focused on Wealdstone, Marlborough, Roxbourne: data from the report.
Similarly, the youth justice service can have an ongoing action plan to tackle ‘disproportionality’ but has no scope to address why disproportionality.
While the Children vulnerabilities are looked upon, the plan gives no sense to address the possibility of the drugs related exploitation leading to violent crimes.
[According to the data in the plan, about thirty percentage of 1,598 Serious Violence offences recorded in Harrow in the twelve months up to September 2023, involved a person under the age of 25. Upward trend of non-domestic knife crime since March 21 where in the twelve months up to September 2023, 81 recorded offences compared to 56 in the previous period. Also, in the How Are You Harrow Survey, 38% of young people said there are areas of Harrow where they feel unsafe].
What stops the Harrow professionals and executive politicians to let the government know that the adverse impact of the socio-economic deprivation jeopardises the effectiveness of the hard-worked Youth Justice Plan? A council motion could do this!
Harrow Monitoring Group 