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Letwin unveils shake-up for youth policy

Ian Burrell Home Affairs Correspondent
Tuesday 08 October 2002 19:00 EDT
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Oliver Letwin, the shadow Home Secretary, said yesterday that a Conservative government would force the Home Office to hand over much of its responsibility for fighting youth crime to the voluntary sector and embrace a radical crime-fighting idea thought up by a retired Royal Marines officer.

In an interview with The Independent before his speech today to the Conservative Party conference in Bourne-mouth, Mr Letwin made a scathing attack on the "institutionally suspicious'' nature of Whitehall.

He said the Home Office was unable to put fresh policies into practice. "Within this system, change of a radical character isn't going to happen. There are too many institutional forces acting against it," he said.

He said he aimed to "foster a range of non-statutory providers to take over the task'' of reforming prolific young criminals. Mr Letwin predicted that, in the long term, the plan would lead to prison and probation staff leaving their jobs to take up new roles in the voluntary sector.

Mr Letwin stressed that by voluntary sector he did not mean an "army of volunteers'', but qualified professionals backed by charitable and public funds and with "an independence of spirit''.

The Conservatives, Mr Letwin said, would base their youth crime policy on an idea devised by a former marine, Lieutenant-Colonel Trevor Philpott, who runs a centre in the Devon countryside for helping young offenders.

Mr Philpott's scheme, called the Centre for Adolescent Reoffending, involves young men aged 18 to 25 attending an 11-week course, which com-bines literacy and numeracy teaching with rock climbing, potholing and other outdoor activities.

On completion of the course, the young people are found accommodation and a job or a place in education.

Mr Philpott said that less than one third of the 117 men who attended the centre, paid for by the European Social Fund, local authorities and the Department for Education and Skills, had been reconvicted. The national reconviction rate for offenders aged 15 to 21 is about 75 per cent within two years of release.

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