Debate contribution: Justice Bill: Consideration Stage

Debate contribution by Ms Sian Mulholland on 15 June 2026.

MLA

Ms Sian Mulholland

Party at the time

Alliance Party

Date

15 June 2026

Type

Debate contribution

Business

Executive Committee Business

Heading

Justice Bill: Consideration Stage

Assembly identifier

Official Report component 5614507

Read the official Assembly record

Text

That leads me to a great example that I witnessed. I went to the Western Trust area to visit one of the areas in Derry/Londonderry that, I suggest, is probably best known on the news for some of that activity and particularly for young people being drawn into violence. The family response service supports families at a really early stage. It draws funding from the health service, the community and voluntary sector and others. It supports families really early, and it has a multidisciplinary team. It has youth practitioners, who come from the Department of Education, and social workers. That multidisciplinary team engages with police officers. It is all about building trust through sustained relationship work. The outcomes are so significant. There was a reduction in antisocial behaviour and stronger family engagement. Most importantly, however, I went up and met one of the young people and his mother, and his life had been transformed by this multidisciplinary approach of youth practitioners, social workers, the PSNI and others. He was back in full-time education, whereas, when he first came to the attention of the family support service, he was on reduced hours and, along with 12 of his peers, he had the threat of dissident republicans hanging over his head. The effect of that sustained programme of multidisciplinary approaches was incredible. At the end of the programme, which worked with him and his family, the threat from dissident republican paramilitaries was lifted from all 13 of those young men because of the change in their offending behaviour. The police who were there in the room on the day when I went up and met them all said, "We can't believe the difference. We have never seen anything like this". That is an example of what happens when you pool the resources of different Departments and approaches. As a youth practitioner — you can take the girl out of youth work. but you cannot take youth work out of the girl — I know how important it is to have someone doing that relationship-building and trust-building work in places where social services are sometimes not accepted and are met with a degree of fear and —.

Yes.

At no point did I say that the Youth Justice Agency is anything other than the things that you said it is. What I am saying is that the law needs to catch up with the diversionary elements that it already engages in. The other point that I want to raise is about the direction of Together for Families. That is a really important project and policy move that looks at providing the right help at the right time in the right place.

Yes.

Absolutely. That is the point that we are making here. It is not about which approach is seen as tougher; it is about which approach will give us the best outcome when we have the evidence before us. I will go back to some Members who talk about the need for evidence-driven policy.

Yes, expert-led, evidence-driven policy. We have the evidence and the data, yet we are being told that this is pie in the sky. I think that the phrase "beyond stupid" was used. I want to talk briefly about Together for Families because, for me, it represents a move that is key to all of this, in that it is about being joined up, trauma-informed, practical and local. We have to be honest: Together for Families is still developing, and we do not yet know the answer to every challenge. However, for me, it shows that the Executive already recognise a basic truth: supporting families early is better than waiting for a crisis. We have to be really clear about the sequence of events. First, the Assembly has to answer this question of principle: is 10 too young to be held criminally responsible? The evidence and the data point to the fact that it is. I believe that it is, and many others around the Chamber believe that it is. Secondly, we need to address implementation. What system do we build to respond to harm, to support victims, to safeguard children and to prevent reoffending? Those are not the same, but they are linked. The need to build such a system should not be used to avoid a decision of principle. The Minister of Justice has set out a responsible approach: legislate, but do not commence the legislation until an appropriate, victim-aware framework is in place. The choice is not between making an immediate change or putting the issue to one side without a plan and leaving it at age 10 indefinitely. That is a false choice. I want to move on to data. I have just made a point about the evidence. If we are to make good law, we need to understand the scale of the issue, the age of the children involved and how the system currently responds. The figures simply do not support the narrative that large numbers of very young children are running wild without consequence. However, neither do they show that no children are entering the justice system. What they show is something much more nuanced: there is a relatively small cohort of young children, some appearing more than once, in a system that already relies heavily on diversion rather than prosecution, sometimes after a child has already entered the formal process. That points to the reason why we need this law change. Surely the fact that children entering the justice process are given a diversionary intervention at a later date shows that we are already doing the diversionary work, even, at times, after a child has experienced the trauma of being criminalised. The last recorded data from the PPS, which is for 2024-25, shows that there were 654 prosecutorial decision events involving children aged 10 to 13. When we look at the breakdown, we see that 34 involved 10-year-olds, 75 involved 11-year-olds, 194 involved 12-year-olds and 351 involved 13-year-olds.

There is staggering there that means that we need to intervene earlier, before that behaviour is entrenched. That is what I see when I look at that data.

Yes.

1,026 words. Text as published by the Northern Ireland Assembly.

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Assessed 21 October 2026 at 15:55 UTC by jev-1.13.0 (requested as typesafe/jev) under rubric 2026.10-r9, methodology 1.9.

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