Luton council service to keep young people out of crime 'doing extremely well'
Luton’s youth partnership service continues to outperform comparable local authorities regionally and nationally, culminating in a “fantastic” quarter three of 2025/26, a meeting heard.
This service manages to “buck the trends seen elsewhere”, Luton Borough Council’s scrutiny crime and disorder committee was told.
Conservative Poets councillor Aslam Khan asked about “people not known to the youth justice system being at risk” and wondered whether “anyone has been able to get closer to those individuals”.
LBC’s head of youth partnership service Dave Collins replied: “Quite clearly quarter three of 2025/26 has been fantastic for this service.
“We’ve outperformed all of our key comparators. The lower the number of children coming into the criminal justice system, the more successful we are at preventing that from happening.
“Multi-agency gang panel (MAGPan) referrals are down, which is a clear indicator that we’re reaching the right children and the right demographic. A young person getting into MAGPan has to be either mapped to a known gang or heavily associated with someone who is.
“There were close to 300 cases, last year. Currently it’s about 117 now. So we’re doing extremely well at this moment around understanding that kind of message.
“We also haven’t had a serious incident for some time. Clearly I don’t want to tempt any fate and I hate saying things like that out loud.
“Much of what we’ve done during the last couple of years, not just as our service but as the wider community safety partnership (CSP), we learn from every incident and fatality. That’s colleagues from children’s services, Bedfordshire Police and from around the council.
“We heard from the police about identifying vulnerabilities earlier,” he explained. “One of the things which came out of the tragedy of Ashraf Habimana’s death in September 2023 was a commission for an early screening tool from the University of Bedfordshire around contextual safeguarding.
“All the research has been done now and it’s due for delivery. That’s quite an innovative development, and we’ll be looking to pilot it within a school in September. This is likely to have a really huge impact around identifying much earlier in children, so as nine- or ten-year-olds.
“It’s the types of vulnerabilities that later bring them into exploitation. So we’re really looking at the relationship between adolescent childhood experiences and trauma, with the impact those have on behaviour and eventual violence. That’s going to be a game changer.
“My key performance indicators (KPIs) get reported within the youth justice plan and it’s very positive currently. You asked about the way we’re achieving against those KPIs.
“We’re outperforming our statistical family, the national and the regional, in all of our KPIs. This is in relation to first time entrants, reoffending and use of custody. That gives an indication of just how this partnership is bucking the trends we see elsewhere.
“We often get described as a London borough,” he added. “Actually Luton is more densely populated than some of these boroughs with more people per hectare. So on paper we’ve no right to outperform them, but we are and that’s a metric of which we can all be proud.”