More focus on early intervention
This is the second in a short series of blog posts summarising the Government’s plans to reform the youth justice system “Cutting Youth Crime. Changing Young Lives” which was published on Monday (18 May 2026). This post focuses on the second of its four chapters “Intervening early, changing trajectories before children commit crime”. The White Paper sets out the Government’s ambition to:
“drive the youth justice system to be more focused on intervening early”.
Changing trajectories
The chapter starts by setting out recent activity by the Government and plans for this parliament which include:
Investing in upstream programmes across education, health, employment and children’s social care to help address the drivers of youth offending.
- Extending the Turnaround programme
- Opening 50 Young Futures Hubs bringing together services at community level to increase access to opportunities, improve mental health and wellbeing, and help divert children away from crime.
- Publishing an ambitious refreshed ‘protocol’ this year to reduce the criminalisation of children in care and care leavers in England.
- Introducing the youth diversion order to provide a new risk management tool for the increasing number of children and young people showing signs of involvement in terrorism-related activity.
- Identifying children with a parent in prison so that they can be offered timely and effective support to enable them to achieve and thrive.
This chapter tries to strike the balance between providing support to children who need it to prevent them getting involved in crime and diverting them from the CJS which we know is likely to increase their chances of following an offending lifestyle.
The Government promises to tackle the criminalisation of children in care, improve safeguarding work and tackle child criminal exploitation and County Lines.
Early intervention
The White Paper says that:
“A modern early intervention system therefore depends on strong multi-agency collaboration, reliable identification of risk of harm, and clear, timely pathways into support – ensuring that children receive the right support, before harmful behaviour escalates or becomes entrenched.”
Its key tools to implement this approach are:
- Extending the Turnaround Programme
- Investment in Young Futures Panels and Young Futures Hubs and
- Strengthening the impact of Serious Violence Duty partnerships
Transforming the state’s response to escalating risks
This section is partly driven by the Southport Inquiry which found that the downside of having such a range of structures and programmes across different agencies means that there can be no clear responsibility on one actor. Its analysis of fragmented and incompatible information systems, often at key transition points such as between community and custody settings and youth and adult custody systems will be recognised by many readers.
The Government say its goal is to develop a:
“modernised, more joined-up information systems which will support practitioners to build a fuller, shared understanding of a child’s risks, needs and previous interventions, reducing delays in decision-making and helping ensure that no child falls between services due to gaps in information-sharing.”
Key areas of harm – knife crime, VAWG and terrorism
The Government prioritises these three particular areas of harm and sets out a range of initiatives to address each of them. Many of these initiatives have already been announced but implementation work has mainly not yet begun.
Preventing harm
The final section of this chapter merely states that preventing harm is the central purpose of this renewed focus on early intervention and again tries to phrase the key challenge of prioritising early support while being prepared to escalate responses when behaviour does not change and risks to the public are serious.
The next blog post in this series will look at the Government’s plans for what it calls “Right response, right time”, saying that:
“Children who come into contact with the youth justice system need timely, fair and proportionate responses that reflect both the seriousness of their behaviour and their potential for change.“
