Formal sentencing principles for young adults aged 18 to 25, similar to the Sentencing Council guidelines that are in place for children, would assist the courts and improve sentencing outcomes, a new report recommends.

Sentencing Young Adults: Making the case for sentencing principles for young adults presents research by the Howard League for Penal Reform, a founding member of the Transition to Adulthood (T2A) Alliance.

The report, which draws on Howard League participation work with young adults, sets out how principled guidelines would help judges and magistrates to understand young adults better, and provide a legal framework to achieve better sentencing decisions.  It recommends that the principles should consider the relationship between immaturity and blameworthiness, capacity to change, and the impact of race and histories of care.

It considers how the welfare principle – the principle that, when a court is dealing with proceedings relating to a child, its primary consideration shall lie with the welfare of the child – might be extended to apply to young adults, in recognition that full maturity and all the attributes of adulthood are not magically conferred on young people on their eighteenth birthdays.

The Howard League has brought together an advisory group of experts to help draft sentencing principles for young adults, drawing on the charity’s legal and participation work and the growing knowledge base about the needs and characteristics of young people.

More than 140,000 young adults aged 18 to 24 were sentenced in criminal courts last year.

Imprisonment of young adults can have tragic consequences. Between 2006 and 2016, 164 young adults aged 18 to 24 died in custody, 136 of whom lost their lives through suicide.

Leading ethical bank, Charity Bank, has launched a campaign to encourage charities, businesses and individuals to move some of their savings or reserves to an ethical provider.

The Follow the Money campaign is supported by NCVO, NAVCA, Social Enterprise UK, Social Enterprise Mark CIC, Locality, Responsible Finance, Big Society Capital, Barrow Cadbury Trust, ShareAction, CAN, Clinks, the Finance Innovation Lab, Good With Money, The Ethical Company Organisation and Ethical Consumer.

The campaign, launched a decade after the global financial crisis, will see 38 of the charities and social enterprises supported by Charity Bank loans open their doors to showcase how money saved with an ethical provider can have a positive impact on society.

It comes as research*, published by Charity Bank, revealed that 7 in 10 people agree that charities should invest their savings and investments ethically. And more than half (57%) said they prefer to buy from businesses that act ethically.

Charity Bank is now calling on charities, businesses and individuals to question how their savings are currently used. It’s asking them to consider whether that money could go beyond simply earning a fair return and be channelled into the social sector to help make a positive contribution on society.

Follow the Money, now in its 10^th year, takes Charity Bank savers to see for themselves how their money is being used to support charities and social enterprises. This year’s 38-stop tour, corresponds with Good Money Week 29 September – 5 October.

Keep up to date with the Follow the Money tour and support the campaign.

We are very pleased to announce that our new Chair of Trustees from 21 October 2017 will be Erica Cadbury, succeeding Helen Cadbury who died at the end of June.  Helen approved this succession and was pleased about it.  We are all grateful to Anna Southall for stepping in as Interim Chair meanwhile.

Erica has served on the Board for many years and brings her long experience in governance and voluntary sector management to the role, having led a CAB in Yorkshire for a long time.  Have a look at her mini-biog to learn a bit more about her.

 

In a new report, The Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), the progressive policy think tank, makes the case for a new deal on migration as part of the Brexit negotiations that allows free movement but only for those working in particular occupations or sectors. IPPR argues that in a UK-EU agreement on migration, the government should consider how to secure an ambitious free trade deal, and how best to avoid negative effects on the labour market, as well as address public concern on immigration.  According to the report migration is expected to be front and centre in the forthcoming EU negotiations and, given the importance of Brexit in the 2017 General Election, all political parties will need to make a decision on the issue of immigration for their manifestos.

IPPR analysis shows that:

• Based on evidence from past trade deals, opting to exclude immigration from the Brexit negotiations would significantly increase the likelihood of a limited and disadvantageous trade deal.

• Certain sectors, such as hotels and restaurants and manufacturing, rely heavily on lower-skilled EU labour – 28% of the food manufacturing workforce and 19% of domestic personnel are EU nationals in lower-skilled work.

• Only 11% of the UK public expect full control over EU immigration post-Brexit and, excluding the ‘don’t knows’, a majority accept that there is a trade-off between restricting freedom of movement and accessing the single market.

Read the summary or view the full report.

Equileap, an organisation set up to accelerate progress towards gender equality at work, is issuing the first cross-sector ranking showing for the first time how well the world’s top public companies, across all sectors and countries, perform on gender equality.  It is part of a new toolkit designed to cut the 118 years it is estimated it will take for equality to be achieved at the present rates of change.  The toolkit includes:

• The 2017 Gender Equality: Global Report & Ranking, presenting the Top 200 Companies, key findings on gender equality , as well as detailed insights per country and per sector.
• Company Reports, custom-made documents with detailed information and aggregated figures on individual companies
• The Family of Equileap Gender Equality Indices (Global, US and Europe,) designed to track best performing companies in terms of gender equality.  These Indices will be used both as benchmarks and underlyings of various financial products.

Read the report.

About 60% of adult prisoners and 30% of young offenders have a history of traumatic brain injury.  The specialist Disability Trust Foundation Linkworker scheme for female offenders with a brain injury at HMP Drake Hall near Stafford is  the first scheme of its type in a women’s prison in the UK.

Someone with a brain injury may experience poor memory, lack of concentration, aggression, problems sleeping and other difficulties which impact on their everyday lives and may make it difficult to engage with rehabilitation programmes.  The pilot Linkworker service will deliver direct one-to-one support to women with brain injuries and develop partnerships with health, social care, probation, homeless, and drug and alcohol services to ensure each woman has the appropriate network in place on discharge from prison.

Each person with a brain injury will be identified on admission, using the Foundation’s simple Brain Injury Screening Index (BISI) questionnaire before being referred to the specialist Linkworker.  Prison staff will also be provided with brain injury training and given simple tips – speaking more slowly without distractions to allow information to be processed, suggesting diaries and written reminders to assist with memory problems – to support the women concerned.

This two-year, £107,000 pilot scheme aims to establish whether specialist support following a brain injury, even years after it was sustained, means an individual has a greater chance of engaging with services, integrating with the community and breaking the cycle of re-offending.  Funded largely by the Barrow Cadbury Trust and The Pilgrim Trust, the service mirrors the brain injury Linkworker services previously provided by the Disabilities Trust Foundation in male prisons and Young Offender Institutions.

The aims of the project at HMP Drake Hall are to:

• identify women with a brain injury who enter custody
• develop a care pathway and provide dedicated support to women with a brain injury
• raise awareness of brain injury within the female prison population
• explore causal links between self-harm, violence and brain injury in the female prison population

The Disability Foundation is commissioning an external evaluation of the pilot programme, as well as undertaking a research study to look at the relationship between traumatic brain injury (TBI), female offenders, violent offending, in-prison behavioural problems and reoffending rates.
About 60% of adult prisoners and 30% of young offenders have a history of traumatic brain injury

A new Report published today by the Centre for Responsible Credit for Fair for You shows the social impact on lower income households of having access to reasonable and ethical credit is huge.

The report, coming the week after the Joseph Rowntree Foundation call to solve poverty, shows that fairer credit for lower income households can have a significantly beneficial impact on people’s lives.

The independent research on behalf of the not-for-profit high cost credit challenger, Fair for You showed that as a direct result of taking a loan from Fair for You:

• More than half (58%) of people said that they were better able to run their home – this increased to two-thirds (67%) for lone parents.
• 45% of all respondents said they felt less anxious, stressed or depressed
• Over half (56%) of customers with a health condition or disability said they felt less anxious, stressed or depressed
• 61% of people with a health condition or disability said they were better able to save money as a result of a loan from Fair for You, compared with high-cost alternatives.
• Half of all respondents (50%) said they were better able to budget and manage their money.
• More than one-third (37%) said they were better able to pay rent or a mortgage or other household bills including rent, council tax, gas and electricity and television licence.

Report author, Damon Gibbons, said: “Our research shows that Fair for You is making a real difference to its customers’ lives. These are people who would otherwise have to use high cost credit, and they are making considerable savings by choosing Fair for You instead.  Those savings mean that they are better able to pay their rent and household bills, eat more healthily, set aside money for a rainy day, and in many cases increase their spending on their children.

The report’s authors call for local authorities, utility companies, social housing providers, and a wide range of voluntary and community agencies to support Fair for You’s challenge to the high cost lenders and to actively promote it to their service users to offer a positive, national, alternative to the high cost credit rip off that has existed in this country for far too long.”

Fair for You founder and CEO of the charity, Angela Clements said: “This report is the first social impact report to clearly show the positive impact on lower income households when we design credit products that meet their modern borrowing requirements. In essence, by creating structured credit solutions with the flexibility, visibility and support needed for customers that juggle fluctuating income, you can help lift them out of poverty.

“The fact that a £300 loan for a washing machine can do that, as well as help relieve the symptoms of stress, anxiety or depression, rather than trap them with penal debt, where they have to make choices about whether to spend on their heating or groceries because of the amount taken out of their home by the high cost credit provider, is something I find quite difficult to understand in modern Britain”.