Justice Secretary David Lammy is planning an overhaul of the youth justice system that would see the parents of young offenders more likely to be fined or even jailed for failing to deal with their children’s behaviour. The Ministry of Justice is planning to strengthen the power of parenting orders issued by the courts in the hope it will help prevent children from embarking on lives of crime.
Lammy is right: parents do bear moral responsibility for the conduct of their children, and the state must not be embarrassed about saying so. The inquiry into the 2024 Southport attack found not only grievous failures by agencies but also ‘significant parental failures’: the parents of the attacker, Axel Rudakubana, did not provide boundaries, allowed knives and weapons to be delivered to the home, and failed to report crucial information in the days before the atrocity. A civilised society cannot pretend that such dereliction is morally neutral or bears no sanction.
The danger is that Southport becomes the pretext for a bout of moral theatre
But the politics of Lammy’s latest announcement are less novel than advertised. Parenting orders are not some bold new instrument forged in response to youth violence in 2026; they are old Blairite hardware upgraded. The Crime and Disorder Act created parenting orders in 1998, enabling courts to require parents to attend counselling or guidance sessions and comply with directions when their children offend or become involved in antisocial behaviour. A breach of those orders is already an offence punishable by a fine of up to £1,000. The real novelty in Lammy’s package is not the idea that parents can be legally compelled to engage, but the shift to sharper enforcement and floating jail time for parents who wilfully refuse to comply.
That matters, but it should be described accurately. Lammy’s policy is a reheat, not a revolution. This new proposal borrows as much from family law enforcement as from any fresh thinking about youth crime. In family court proceedings, a parent who persistently defies a court order can ultimately face prosecution for contempt and, in serious cases, imprisonment.
Lammy’s move is essentially to drag parenting orders closer to that logic: support first, sanction second, custody at the far end if the grown-ups simply refuse to play ball. Ministers may present this as bracing realism. In truth it is a familiar ratcheting of powers the state has long possessed in adjacent proceedings. And, of course, meaningless without actual enforcement.
The more serious objection is not that the state is being too harsh with parents, but that it is in danger of mistaking a headline for a strategy. England and Wales already have structures designed precisely for early intervention: youth offending teams – the multi-agency bodies that bring together criminal justice, social care, education and health around at-risk children.
The latest youth justice statistics show a system with mixed results. The proven reoffending rate for children fell slightly to 31.8 per cent in the year ending March 2025, but the frequency of reoffending rose to a ten-year high of 4.44 reoffences per child who reoffends. Sentencing occasions involving children rose again to around 13,000, while around 610 custodial sentences were imposed. That is not evidence of a system starved of powers; it is evidence of one that needs sharper, earlier, more competent use of the powers and structures already on the books. Where early intervention is skilled and tough it is of far more use than retribution after a foreseeable atrocity occurs.
The government’s own analysis of serious youth offending points in the same direction. The children who go on to commit the worst crimes are almost never invisible; they are already known to schools, police, youth offending teams, children’s services and our child mental health agency for persistent truancy, entrenched behavioural problems and criminal peer groups. Those are exactly the warning signs the system is meant to catch early. If the lesson ministers draw from Southport is just a sharper soundbite about jailing ‘feckless parents’, they will be punishing at the back end that which a broken lattice of agencies failed to grip when those red flags first cropped up.
That is why the Southport lessons need handling with some care. Yes, the inquiry was rightly scathing about the attacker’s parents. But it was just as devastating about the public authorities that knew at least as much about Rudakubana’s cumulative risk but then fell apart when action was required.
The report found a ‘fundamental failure’ by organisations or multi-agency arrangements to take ownership of the risk; repeated failures in information sharing; and a tendency across agencies to explain away violent behaviour rather than confront it. The inquiry’s point was not that parental irresponsibility somehow absolved the state. Quite the reverse: agencies had to be ready to deal with parents who were unable or unwilling to act, and they were not. To respond by shifting the emphasis too heavily onto parental punishment would therefore be to misread the case that supposedly prompted these proposed reforms.
There is a coherent conservative case here, but it is sterner and less theatrical than Lammy’s rollout. Start with an obvious truth: that parents matter and that some parents are culpably negligent. Keep parenting orders and, if necessary, strengthen them. But do not pretend this is a legislative moonshot. It is a revival of old powers, dressed up in the language of urgency. The real test is whether ministers will invest political capital in earlier intervention, transformed risk management and harder-edged multi-agency action long before a child turns up with a knife, a murderous mindset and a long trail of missed warnings.
The danger, in short, is that Southport becomes the pretext for a bout of moral theatre. Britain does need more honesty about parental failure. But it needs even more honesty about official failure: about services that do not share information, professionals who explain away danger, and systems that wait too long to act. Tougher rhetoric about parents may be popular. Tougher competence from the state would be more useful.
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