YOUTH OFFENDING TEAM

25 May 2008

Readers of this column will be aware of my scepticism about the
effectiveness of huge centralised bureaucracies.

One of the reasons for my scepticism is the tendency of such
bureaucracies to deal with individual "cases" on the basis of rules
and regulations, rather than on the basis of human needs, sensitivity
and commonsense.

Of course, this isn't because the people working in centralised
bureaucracies are any less kindly or conscientious or sensitive than
those working in the voluntary sector or in community-based
organisations of various sorts. The problem is not the people, but
the culture that surrounds them.

Once kindly and sensitive people are put in a large office somewhere
far from the scene of the action, and are told to run things according
to rules that are "fair" and "orderly", they quickly learn that the
only route to a tolerable life is to apply the rules in a rigorous way.

But there are, of course, exceptions – particularly when the
bureaucracy is local rather than central and a lot nearer the scene of
the action.

I came across a case like this last week when I visited Dorset's youth
offending team. The remarkable thing about this team is that it
doesn't exist within one particular bureaucratic silo. Instead, it is
a mixture of a large number of services and authorities, each of which
has something to do with young people in Dorset who get into trouble
(or who might get into trouble later).

The County Council are there; but so are the police, the Probation
Service, the magistrates, the Connexions Service (which used to be
called the Careers Service) and the Primary Care Trust from the NHS.

Why all these different people? Well, because young people in trouble
with the law tend to have a whole heap of reasons for behaving badly,
usually starting with their family background and going on to things
that have gone wrong in school, with alcohol or drug abuse, inability
to get a job, and so on.

So the youth offending team bring together people with a range of
skills and powers locally who can together deal with the young person
in question as a human being in the round. As I sat listening to the
tough but sensible and kindly way in which the people who do this work
explained what they were up to, I had the wonderful sense that in this
little corner of the bureaucracy, the tendency to deal with cases
rather than people had actually been, at least to a considerable
extent, overcome.