ABSTRACT
Much has been written about the period of New Labour government and its legacy, and much of that has been critical, not least from the present author. It would perhaps be tempting to repeat much of that criticism here, but this would possibly be to misrepresent the dynamics of diversion to some extent. As has become increasingly clear over the course of this account, government intentions, changes in policy and major reorganisations of delivery mechanisms only bear a tangential relationship to changes in the organisation and delivery of diversion in practice. So, the spirit of interventionism and micro-control which certainly exemplified the period from 1997–2007 could perhaps account for some of the trends associated with that era; but in sustaining an intrusive and ultimately punitive approach to the crimes of young people, it could also be said to be simply extending the punitive shift of the early 1990s into the new millennium.
