An Independent Review into Youth Diversion in Nottinghamshire: Report and Recommendations to the Office of the Nottinghamshire Police and Crime Commissioner

Programmes designed to intervene into young people’s lives to prevent the escalation of risk are crucial to the effectiveness of the criminal justice system. During the late 1990s to around 2007, unprecedented investment in youth support services and programmes saw a range of interventions that sought to reduce the risk of (re)offending, better support victims and provide a more positive pathway for young people.

Despite this significant investment, there remained a challenge in addressing long-standing and intergenerational social problems, largely on account of a failure to move early intervention into the centre of service design. It is now accepted that the more entrenched a social problem becomes, the more costly and less effective interventions become with late intervention seen as a major policy failure. The Allen Review into early intervention argued that ‘the bleak truth is that decades of expensive late intervention have failed’, a situation that has been arguably worsened by accelerated public service retrenchment continuing to occur as a result of prolonged austerity. Youth services have been amongst the hardest hit, with service budgets cut by as much as 75-100%.
In Nottinghamshire there are particular challenges facing children and young people, including reductions in spending for children and young people’s services set against the rises in weaponenabled violence and more sophisticated understandings of vulnerability and risk.

Further afield, there is an abundance of evidence available of particular programmes and interventions that have led to positive outcomes for young people (though this remains patchy), particularly in building individual assets and guarding against the risks of criminality. Some of this evidence concerns ‘what works, for whom and in what contexts’ but interventions and programmes on their own are worthless without the critical ingredient of a trusted adult-young person relationship, identified throughout the literature as a major factor in securing positive impact. This independent review has been commissioned by the Nottinghamshire Police and Crime Commissioner to:

Develop a local understanding of need and demand for both universal and targeted youth diversion services, consolidate the evidence base on what works in the provision of these services, review the PCC’s contribution to youth diversion in the context of other statutory provision available and explore how outcomes in this area can be maximised for the benefit of all stakeholders.