How the parties line up and what campaigners want from them

Labour

• Establish 3,500 Sure Start children’s centres by 2010.
• Introduce fixed penalty notices for disorder for children under
  16.
• Introduce new powers to require parents to pay compensation for
  damage committed by children under 10.
• Reform and improve youth services and early intervention
  schemes for children at risk of involvement in crime.
• Develop children’s trusts across the country by 2008 and
  provide £85.5m to help implement Every Child Matters
  reforms.

Conservative

• Increase discipline in schools and give powers to head teachers
  to expel the most disruptive pupils.
• Give young drug users the choice of a treatment programme or
  appearing in court.
• Provision for 20,000 extra prison places including places for
  young offenders.
• Introduce supervision orders for parents of children who
  persistently break antisocial behaviour orders, and block housing
  benefit for families of young people who are convicted of more than
  three antisocial behaviour offences.

Liberal Democrats

• Strengthen the post of children’s commissioner by making its
  power rights-based and wholly independent of the government.
• Reform child support by putting child maintenance payments in
  the hands of the Inland Revenue.
• Ensure that child custody decisions are made on an individual
  basis, with the best interests of the child paramount.

Manifesto for children from Barnardo’s, Save the
Children and the NSPCC

• Increase the age of criminal responsibility.
• Review the use of restraint, strip-searching and solitary
  confinement in custody and invest in alternatives to prison for
  children.
• Put an end to the policy of detaining refugee children and
  ensure access to mainstream services for them.
• Produce a national strategy for reducing child deaths from
  maltreatment.
• Decriminalise children’s involvement with prostitution.
• Invest maximum resources into tackling child poverty.
• Ensure that improving the educational attainment of children in
  care is a main priority.

The Howard League for Penal Reform

• End the use of prison service custody for children and seek to
  end child deaths in custody.
• Introduce more restorative justice programmes.
• Abolish antisocial behaviour orders and impose a statutory duty
  on local authorities to use community conflict resolution
  schemes.
• Detention of children only in appropriate secure accommodation,
  such as local authority secure children’s homes.