Youth Justice Reforms in Wales

Our key call for change:

• Fully devolve youth justice and policing powers to enable a coherent, trauma informed and children’s rights based system, that aligns with the requirements of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.

While we welcomed the proposed reforms of the previous Welsh Government to youth justice and, in particular, the move toward a more clearly defined and expanded role for the Welsh Government, we believe these changes have taken far too long to implement. The delivery of youth justice services in Wales has evolved significantly since 1998, with the majority of activity, staffing and funding now rooted in devolved systems. Furthermore, while we welcome the devolution of funding for remand reduction and early intervention programmes from April 2027, we do not believe any more time should be taken to devolve the entirety of the Youth Justice Core Grant.

The call for the devolution of funding to enable services in Wales to align more closely with national priorities, to reduce unnecessary bureaucracy, and support more responsive, innovative, and locally tailored interventions for children, has repeatedly been made over the last decade.

Wales has long demonstrated leadership in youth justice. Since the early years of devolution, there has been considerable success in diverting children away from the formal youth justice system. Wales was, for instance, the driver of the concept of ‘Children First: Offender Second’, with all activity in Wales underpinned by an early commitment to a “child first” approach, alongside a model grounded in children’s rights and trauma-informed practice.

A more coherent and integrated system will better support children, families and communities, and improve outcomes across Wales. We have been waiting a long time for these reforms, which are needed to build on that strong foundation and further embed these principles across the system.

We also believe that further progress is needed to fully align the system with international children’s rights standards and to meet the requirements of Wales-specific legislation, including the Rights of Children and Young Persons (Wales) Measure 2011. In particular, there have been repeated calls in Wales to raise the age of criminal responsibility in line with these standards.

We are also concerned that the absence of devolution of policing powers continues to create inconsistencies and challenges. Policing practices have a significant impact on children’s rights, and we remain concerned about issues such as the use of strip searches on children, overnight detention in police custody, the use of tasers, and the deployment of facial recognition technologies involving children etc.

We therefore welcome that Plaid Cymru has made clear commitments in their Manifesto for the devolution of policing powers and justice more broadly to Wales – including raising the age of criminal responsibility and replacing centralised custody with locally based rehabilitation, embedding trauma informed practice and restorative justice – enabling a more consistent, rights-based approach across all aspects of the youth justice system. This would better align practice with the UNCRC and international children’s rights standards that Wales has committed to upholding.

In a new briefing, Dr Rhian Croke (Children’s Legal Centre Wales) and Professor Anthony Charles (Swansea University) highlight that while the UK Government’s Youth Justice White Paper Cutting Youth Crime, Changing Young Lives published in May 2026, marks a welcome shift towards prevention, diversion and reducing custody, it falls short of delivering a coherent, rights-based youth justice system when measured against the standards established by the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and largely ignores Wales’ distinct rights-based context, including Wales specific legislation on children’s rights. Please access briefing here.