Again, I am grateful to the hon. Members for Enfield, Southgate and for Cambridge for speaking to the amendments.

Let me state at the outset that I believe that it is important that young people who have offended accept responsibility for their actions and, where possible, do something practical to offer reparation that will benefit the victim, or indeed the community as a whole. That is why, in the Bill, we have included reparation in the requirements of the youth rehabilitation order. We also propose—this is the crucial difference between the amendment and our thinking—to maintain the reparation order as a separate sentence beneath the YRO for the courts to exercise. We have done that for a number of reasons, which I hope the members of the Committee will understand.

I believe that reparation is very important. In my previous role as a Northern Ireland Minister, I was responsible for the Youth Justice Agency there, where restorative justice was a particular aim. My hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of State for Justice also had a brief sojourn in Northern Ireland for six weeks, following my departure, before moving to her current post. She joined the Ministry of Justice to take forward very positive activity too. The use of restorative justice has been proved to show great benefits to the community at large and to the individuals who undertake it. We are currently undertaking a number of restorative justice pilots in England and Wales to see whether there would also be benefits here. In my experience in Northern Ireland, the victims of crime and, very often, the young people or others who have been involved in crime benefit greatly from undertaking that process, so I feel that restorative justice has merit.

The argument between us today is, I believe, about whether we retain a separate reparation order or simply subsume it into the YRO. I take the view that we should have a separate order, because I want to see it used to prevent the escalation of activity by young people who are made the subjects of such orders.

I pray in aid what the Committee heard last Thursday from the representatives of both the Youth Justice Board and the Children’s Society. They strongly supported retaining the reparation order as a separate sentence. Indeed, Ellie Roy, the chief executive of the Youth Justice Board, told the Committee that

“there is value in having reparation in its own right”.——[Official Report, Criminal Justice and Immigration Public Bill Committee, 18 October 2007; c. 109, Q229.]

Making reparation to the victim of the crime is central to the youth justice system and I believe that it can both assist the rehabilitation of the offender and help the victim.