By Mairéad Seymour

There is increasing recognition within the criminal justice system that strategies that engage individuals and encourage cooperation in the first instance may be more effective in promoting compliance with legal requirements than rigid, front-end enforcement approaches. One of the most recent examples is the ‘4 Es’ framework adopted as part of policing public health regulations introduced in England and Wales at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. Based on guidance issued by the NPCC (National Police Chiefs Council) and the College of Policing in March 2020, the framework espoused engagement, explanation and encouragement as police strategies to promote public compliance, with enforcement utilised only as a measure of last resort. Aitkenhead et al.’s (2022) analysis of policing the pandemic from a public and police perspective, reports that the ‘4 Es’ approach helped to uphold police legitimacy while securing compliance with Covid-19 regulations and avoiding ‘any major breakdown in the relationship between the public and the police’ (p.7). In the youth justice domain, there has been a notable shift in England and Wales away from enforcement towards engagement in policy discourse and practice guidelines. The most recent case management guidance from the Youth Justice Board (YJB) emphasises that every effort should be taken to engage children to complete their order, with breach proceedings identified as a measure of last resort and initiated in exceptional circumstances (Youth Justice Board, 2022). The approach aligns with the YJB’s recently introduced central guiding principle of ‘Child First’ (Day, 2023; Youth Justice Board, 2021) and is in stark contrast to a decade or more earlier when the language of enforcement, in the form of mandatory warnings and breach proceedings, was embedded in policy discourse (Youth Justice Board, 2010). Offending statistics published by the YJB (2023) identify that ‘breach of statutory order’ has fallen by 89 per cent over the last ten years. While a multiplicity of factors are likely to underpin this figure, policy and practice shifts that emphasise support for compliance, rather than enforcement for non-compliance, provide at least partial explanation for the trend. There have been substantial reductions in new entrants to the youth justice system and in the number of children in custodial detention facilities over the last decade and beyond (HM Inspectorate of Prisons, 2023; Youth Justice Board, 2023). While the result is lower Youth Offending Service (YOS) caseloads, HM Inspectorate of Probation (2022) argues that the needs of children entering the youth justice system are increasingly complex and far-reaching with the Covid-19 pandemic further exacerbating their circumstances. Harris and Goodfellow (2022) reiterate the point, explaining that vulnerability and marginalisation among many children in or on the periphery of the justice system, has led to them being the most adversely impacted by the pandemic. They describe the pandemic for these children as ‘an additional trauma to an already extensive list’ (p.4). It is against the context of the above developments and circumstances that this paper explores theory, policy and practice in supporting children’s compliance on community-based court orders. It begins by considering the term ‘compliance’ as well as the mechanisms that underpin decisions to comply (or not). Thereafter, the focus turns to unpacking what compliance means in the context of children and young people on community supervision before exploring strategies that pro-actively support and encourage compliance and respond to their non-compliance in ways other than formal enforcement procedures

Academic Insights 2023/04. Manchester, UK: HM Inspectorate of Probation 2023. 16p.