Policy paper

YJB anti-racism statement

Published 1 November 2024

Applies to England and Wales

The YJB is committed to actively opposing racism and discrimination and promoting racial equity.

This statement is our public commitment about how we will set conditions which will:

1) achieve our ambition to become a truly anti-racist organisation with values and actions that reflect our aspiration to remove systemic barriers to equity and diversity and contribute to creating an environment where every member of our team can thrive by feeling valued and safe.

2) use our oversight of the entire youth justice system to lead efforts to identify, expose and confront the entrenched systemic inequalities that result in the over-representation of children with Black and Mixed heritage as well as other ethnic minorities.

We are an organisation that is committed to using evidence and data to focus on effective changes that can have the most impact. This will form the basis of our approach in 2024/25 when we are committing to deliver the following activities:

• Improve the available evidence and insight about why individuals continue to experience disparity because of their culture, colour, nationality, race or ethnic background. We will review the current available data and evidence on ethnic disproportionality and publish a summary to enable us and others to benchmark the experiences of children and hold ourselves and others accountable to drive improvements.

• Help local partners understand and address disparity in their area by continuing to publish summary and case level disproportionality tools. Alongside this, we will publish a report with case studies of good local practice in tackling racial disparity by youth justice services across England and Wales.

• Support local youth justice partnerships through our YJB Oversight Teams to highlight areas which have been identified for action and challenge them to drive the changes we want to see.

• Provide funding to support innovative practice through the development of a pathfinder project to explore ethnic disparity in the West Midlands. This work will be comprehensively evaluated, and we will be transparent by sharing emerging practice and learning over the course of the project.

• Continue to work with partners in Wales to support the ambitious commitment for Wales to be an anti-racist nation by 2030.

• Within the YJB we have internal Race Champions to support staff and ensure that we retain a clear focus on working towards racial equity for all groups across the organisation. Alongside this we will continue to improve our safe spaces for conversations about race, review our data on equity of opportunity and maintain our ongoing work to achieve the Cultural Cohesion Quality Mark (CCQM).

We will be transparent about these activities so we can be held accountable for what we achieve each year.  We will review this statement on an annual basis to ensure that it is a living document which reflects upon our efforts and resets our ambition each year.