The Government's ten year record on youth justice came under attack today, after a report concluded that a massive increase in spending had had almost no impact on youth crime.

Ministers had overstated the success of the Government's reforms, said the report by the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies (CCJS) at King’s College London, which found that most youth justice targets had been missed.

The experts assessed the impact of reforms since the 1998 Crime and Disorder Act which set up the Youth Justice Board - the quango which oversees the way young criminals are punished - and youth offending teams in England and Wales.

They found that spending on youth justice had increased by 45 per cent in real terms since 2000/01, but that targets on reducing re-offending had all been missed. Targets on providing accommodation, education, training and employment, reducing substance misuse and improving mental health had also slipped, it said.

Richard Garside, the director of the CCJS, summed up the research: “The Government’s decade-long youth justice experiment was a bold attempt to deploy the full force of the youth justice system to tackle problematic and disruptive behaviour by young people.

“This new research suggests that the experiment has largely failed, if reported youth offending is the measure of success.

“As the Government continues to explore ways to control public spending, this research suggests that ever-growing criminal justice budgets are unlikely to deliver the long-term or sustainable success.”

Rod Morgan, who resigned as head of the Youth Justice Board last year because he disagreed with the Government's policies, said that the study showed that too much money had been directed towards prosecuting and imprisoning young people, and too little towards dealing with the social problems which push young people into crime.

“I agree whole-heartedly with the King’s College report that the centre of gravity of spending is distorted. It is precisely some of the trends they are talking about - the increased used of criminalisation, the number of youths we have in custody - that led me to resign," Mr Morgan told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

“If we are serious about preventing youth crime, it has something to do with the youth justice system, but it has much more to do with broader social policies relating to the family, relating to education and housing etc...

“We have got to shift spending from the excessive use of custody and criminalisation, to work with parents and work in the community to engage with young people who are falling out of mainstream services, particularly education.”

The Tories also attacked the Government. Nick Herbert, the Shadow Justice Secretary, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “The system plainly is not working in that young offenders who are incarcerated and then released are going on to reoffend in high numbers, and as the report devastatingly makes clear, reoffending rates are not moving.

“We need to look at the institutions themselves and ask why are they not rehabilitating young offenders. All this report is doing is reflecting public concern about continuing levels of anti-social behaviour and violence which frankly the Government is failing to deal with.”

The Government defended its record. David Hanson, the justice minister, told the programme: “One of the first things Gordon Brown did when he became Prime Minister was to bring together the Department of Children, Schools and Families and my department to tackle both the causes of crime and the long-term issues in the youth justice system.”

He added: “Where I do agree with the report is that we do have to focus on what we do to prevent (youth offending) as well as what we do involving custody.

“Custody is only about three per cent of people who enter the youth justice system. We need to look at parental intervention, social exclusion, issues like education and literacy and helping support people when they first come into contact by diversions from the criminal justice system.”

A Ministry of Justice spokesman said: “Much has been achieved in tackling youth crime. Reoffending among juveniles fell by more than 17 per cent between 2000 and 2005 and overall youth offending levels remain stable.

“However, there is clearly more work to do and we are pushing forward our efforts to reduce re-offending further, including by launching a Youth Crime Action Plan this summer."

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