Hear their voice: Exposure of broken care system to transform Children’s Hearings
Sheriff to lead taskforce promising biggest overhaul of system for 50 years to ensure vulnerable young Scots are given every chance
A taskforce has been launched to design and deliver the most radical reform of Scotland’s Children’s Hearings in 50 years, we can reveal.
A sheriff has been appointed to lead the group working to overhaul the hearings system to ensure the voices of young people and their families are heard more clearly.
The work has been ordered after the landmark Independent Care Review exposed a broken care system and is intended to secure significant change to hearings, where three-strong volunteer panels decide on issues around justice and the care and the protection of infants, children and young people.
The review warned Scotland’s care system is broken, with billions of pounds being squandered on a system that, it was warned, is not only failing some of Scotland’s most vulnerable children now but undermines their future.
Retired sheriff David Mackie has now been appointed as the independent chair of The Hearings System Working Group and will spend the next year drafting a blueprint for change.
He told how 15 years on the criminal court benches in Alloa saw him despair over what he describes as the wasted potential of young people caught in the system and unable to free themselves from a cycle of crime and court.
He said: “It was deeply frustrating to see the same faces coming through my court every Monday morning after a weekend of them being involved in disorderly behaviour and low-level trouble which would earn them convictions and prison sentences, but didn’t change their behaviour.
“Taking an interest in finding out why they were doing what they were doing, looking behind what was being presented to us, proved to me that so many of these young people flourished when they were given not just a second chance, but a third, or fourth or fifth.
“If we do nothing, the loss of potential to all of us as a society is overwhelming.
“But if we offer support, I’ve seen it leading to them pursuing jobs and careers, allowing them to have a home, a family, and become contributing members of society.”
Children in care are proportionately more likely to end up in the courts and prison system and proposals include keeping young people within the Children’s Hearing system until they are 18. Mackie said: “I learned that people who have experienced trauma in their lives are more likely to respond differently to situations than others, sometimes with violence, or drink or drugs.
“One young man I spoke to regularly when he appeared like clockwork in my court every Monday suddenly disappeared after I’d asked him to think carefully about where he’d like to be in five years’ time. He stopped me in the street a couple of years later and told me with great pride that he’d taken a job and stuck with it, he’d settled down, got a house and was taking his child to Disneyland Paris.
“I fully admit that I walked away all choked up, especially when he thanked me for helping him make those changes in his life.
“That’s what I call success, and that’s what we need to see happening because right now I know from my own experience on the bench, children in care end up appearing disproportionately within the criminal justice system.”
Mackie is under no illusion that while young offenders will be dealt with under the system until they reach 18, there will be crimes committed by young people which demand rigorous sentencing.
He said: “Sometimes it really is appropriate to impose a sentence that has a high level of punishment and custody for specific cases which warrant that.
“They will still happen. If somebody does something dreadful, they won’t get away with it just because they are 18. Thankfully, however, those kind of cases tend to be few and far between.
“The vast majority of cases we tend to see in court from teenagers are low