Crime Solicitors

Chair of the Youth Justice Board (YJB), Lord McNally, has visited Surrey’s Youth Support Service to find out how young people are being steered away from crime.

Surrey Youth Offending Service has set up a scheme which offers carpentry skills to help prevent young people from becoming involved in criminal activity.

The youth offending support service works closely with a number of local organisations to deliver restorative justice schemes, which are having a positive effect on the community.

The approach is used in cases of lower level offending by those under the age of 18 – and has reduced re-offending rates by 18%.

Carpentry workshops are offered to young offenders, often with no prior experience of carpentry – they craft a range of wooden items for the benefit of the community, or victims of crime, and gain job skills in the process.

The Youth Support Service works with projects including The Ashford and St Peter’s Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, where young people are using their carpentry skills to make activity equipment to improve dexterity for patients who have had a stroke or suffer from dementia.

They also make handcrafted wooden memory boxes for parents whose babies have died, which are given to the neonatal intensive care unit where they are made available for bereaved families.

At the Brooklands Museum in Weybridge, young people are making wooden crowd barriers for the motoring and aviation museum.

Lord McNally said:

“Surrey’s innovative approach to youth offending is clearly helping to divert young people away from crime.

“The Youth Justice Board, working through local youth offending teams and services, continues to play an important role in promoting restorative justice across England and Wales – and I am delighted to see how Surrey’s work has enabled many young offenders to make amends to the victims of their crime, while doing something positive for their community.”

Surrey County Council’s Cabinet Member for Schools, Skills and Educational Achievement, Linda Kemeny, added:

“Our approach is helping to steer young people away from crime, while keeping costs down for the taxpayer – and our team was very pleased to welcome the chair and chief executive of the Youth Justice Board to Surrey to show them first hand the groundbreaking work we are doing.”

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