Report reveals teenage crime levels

More than one in four teenagers has committed a crime in the last year, leaked Government research has found.

The Audit Commission has concluded that 1.25 million juvenile criminals cost the country at least £10billion a year and account for almost a fifth of all crime.

The report, yet to be published, also found the number of juveniles convicted or cautioned for violence, drug offences and robbery is rising and the number of teenagers locked away in secure facilities has increased over the last decade.

The new research is a follow-up to the Audit Commission's Misspent-Youth study from 1996 which prompted the Government to change its youth crime policy.

The initial research concluded that the juvenile justice system systematically failed to deal with youth crime, criminals and their victims. In response, the Government established the Youth Justice Board in 1998 while announcing a plan to halve the arrest-to-sentence times of young offenders from 142 to 71 days or fewer. It met that target in July 2001.

The follow-up study welcomes those policy changes as "the new arrangements are a significant improvement and a good model for delivering public services".

But it concludes that more resources should be allocated to deal with persistent young offenders and warns that confidence in community sentencing among the courts and the public must be improved.

A second unpublished report on youth justice has found high offending and reoffending rates among young criminals.

The report, from government spending watchdog the National Audit Office, found that 84 per cent of juvenile criminals who have been held in detention go on to commit crimes after their release, and 60 per cent of those given "high tariff ", or intensively supervised, community sentences end up back in court.

It concluded that 268,500 young people aged between 10 and 17 were arrested in England and Wales between April 2002 and March

2003. That represents five per cent of the total for the age group, or twice the arrest rate of 2.4 per cent for the adult population.

It points to the lack of educational opportunities before and after offenders have been sentenced as a significant factor in reoffending. It found that 60 per cent of pupils expelled from schools commit crimes, compared with 26 per cent of children at school.

Courts sentenced 93,200 of the young people arrested by police in England and Wales last year.