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I have visited all but one of the secure training centres, and I recognise the hard work and commitment that many people who work in them bring to the task. But they too do not have the predominating welfare approach that children need; and the evidence of the Carlile report on restraint, strip-searching and “single separations”—or solitary confinement in plain English—is enough to demonstrate that they are not geared to do the job appropriately or to give the care needed.
Once again I remind the Committee that one child has died while being restrained. While lessons have been learnt—and it was horrific for all involved—it reflects aspects of the management, culture, staff training and regime that are simply not appropriate.
Before 1997 the Labour Party strongly criticised the plans for STCs, which were then still not built. In 10 years they have been embraced by this Government wholeheartedly and have apparently become a key part of youth custody. That has not been found necessary in Scotland and nor should it be necessary there. These children are often extraordinarily difficult to deal with. They are indeed the young thugs, feral youths and hooligans that we read about in the red tops—and they are familiar to many noble Lords in this place who sit in court as sentencers. They require extraordinary levels of skill, understanding and
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For as long as they are children, we are duty bound to treat them with the same care as all our children. To do otherwise would be to betray them and to demean ourselves. I beg to move.
Lord Judd: It would be impossible to rise with more positive feelings towards an amendment than my feelings towards that which has just been moved by the noble Baroness, Lady Linklater of Butterstone. I always feel when I listen to her that she brings the moral authority of her Presbyterian background together with the authority of her engagement. In all my work over a lifetime in organisations involved in social engagement, I always think that those who speak with the authority of actually doing as distinct from just theorising are particularly powerful and should be listened to particularly carefully.
Many of the arguments that the noble Baroness has put forward have been elaborated on in previous amendments. She knows, and she agrees with me, that we should be concerned with children up to the age of 21 for the reasons that she put forward in connection with her own amendment.
We have been over this ground. I simply cannot understand our collective complacency about the issue. The noble Baroness referred to 1997. I worked with great enthusiasm—and I do not mind saying it—for the election of the Labour Government. Part of why I was working with enthusiasm was the Labour Party’s enlightened attitude on issues of this kind. I am sad that we have somehow rationalised ourselves into accepting the unacceptable. I do not see how anyone with civilized values who looks at what is happening in Britain can be anything but alarmed.
I look at the statistics again. Since 1990, 30 children have died in custody and care of the state; 28 of those deaths were self-inflicted; one was a homicide; and one was restraint-related. All of those, apart from the most recent which were in secure training centres, were in Prison Service accommodation in young offender institutions. How can we call ourselves civilized and live with that situation? Of course these are children and of course we must have special provision that is carefully designed and styled for the task in hand, which is to save them from a wasted life and enable them to be rehabilitated and to become full and positive citizens. Of course the aura surrounding a prison is all wrong from that standpoint, although I agree with the noble Baroness that excellent work is being done in some prisons.
I crave the Committee’s indulgence in drawing my next point to its attention because it relates to the noble Baroness’s point about raising the age. In the
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Lord Ramsbotham: I support the noble Baroness’s amendment and could not have agreed more with every word that she said. However, I do so with a certain sadness because what she said has been said over and again for the last 12 years—to my certain knowledge, because I have been involved in a certain amount of the saying of it. All I want is to add two words to Amendment No. 116, which states:
The relevant words are “prison or”. When I inspected Holloway in December 1995 the governor told me that there were four 15 year-olds in the prison. I asked where they were and why. She did not know where they were and I said that we would look for them during the day I spent with her. We did not find any of them that day but the following morning I found two of them when I went down to the antenatal unit and noticed on the wall a list of names and ages, two of which were 15. I asked the midwife, “Are those two girls pregnant?”. She said no. I asked, “Why are they here?”. She said, “Because they don’t know where else to put them”. I asked, “Are all the women pregnant?”. She said, “No, we’ve got psychiatrically disturbed and others”. I wondered how on earth a prison service could put two 15 year-old children into such a place in 1995. Having made a fuss then and had promise after promise made to me over the next five and a half years for which I was responsible for inspecting prisons, what disturbs me is that there are still young female children in adult prison accommodation.
Furthermore, during this time of overcrowding, about which we are all concerned, there are children who are being moved into adult prisons before they reach their 18th birthday as an administrative convenience. I personally think that it is utterly unacceptable that any child should go into an adult prison. It should not be necessary to include this in legislation because common sense should prevent it. But as we are spelling out precisely where they should not go, I do not think that it would be consistent with all that we have said about protecting the child if we did not add those two words to the otherwise excellent and complete summary of what is required that the noble Baroness has so ably put forward.
The Earl of Onslow: It is impossible to underestimate the support that I would like to give to the noble Baroness, Lady Linklater. Just before the 1997 election I remember a Division in this House in which I voted against what I thought was a piece of barbarism on the part of Mr Michael Howard. I think that I voted with the Liberals because Labour Members were voting with the Tories on that to get the Bill through quickly. I remember saying to the late and much respected and loved Gareth Williams, “After the election the Home Secretary will either be called Michael Straw or Jack Howard”, and I have been proved absolutely right.
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There is nothing new in this panic about children being feral. In my dim and distant youth when the late Lord Whitelaw was Home Secretary he started something called the short, sharp shock and we had a little experiment with detention centres, but what happened was that in went flabby criminals and out came very fit criminals. I seem to remember that throughout my life people have complained about the disgustingness of the young. The Committee has heard my story about going to schools and declaring that the youth of today have no manners and show no respect. The children all look horrified but then I say, “Don’t worry, that was written on clay tablets in Sumeria 2,500 years ago”. We have always had problems in this regard. But I thought the really interesting comment made by the noble Baroness, Lady Linklater, was when she referred to the difference between good places and bad places. Surely the money and the effort should be directed at bringing the good schools up to scratch, because they will stop the young getting worse. We must do our level best to achieve that. That is our duty to society. It is our duty as legislators to frame the legislation in such a way that that can be done rather than just say, “Oh, lock the little brutes up and put them down a waste disposal unit”, which can be a very easy reaction to have. Frankly, some of them are repellent beyond peradventure; they are not all Lord Goldsmiths. However, the noble Baroness, Lady Linklater, is taking a civilised and intelligent look at what is undoubtedly a serious, persistent and almost certainly impossible problem to cure.
Baroness Butler-Sloss: I did not intend to speak on this amendment but the powerful speech of the noble Baroness, Lady Linklater, impels me to comment. When I dealt with children in care and children with major problems as a family judge, I became very well aware that I needed to look also at their elder brothers and sisters, many of whom were 16, 17 or 18 and some of whom were also my charges in a sense when I was dealing with these cases. I needed to consider the extreme vulnerability of young people who have committed offences that are sufficiently serious for them to need to be incarcerated. It was very distressing to consider putting them in an adult prison such as Holloway or a young offender prison. My noble friend Lord Ramsbotham made a powerful speech about the conditions that he found in Holloway. It was distressing when a Tory Government did not do anything about it. As the noble Lord, Lord Judd, said, it is even more distressing when a Labour Government have not done it because one knows that in many ways the heart of a Labour Government is in the right place. But they do not actually deal with the vulnerability of children. A young person of 17 is not actually a child but he or she remains a very vulnerable youngster, however wicked the offence that he or she may have committed. I strongly support these two amendments.
Lord Mayhew of Twysden: The recollection of my noble friend Lord Onslow about the short, sharp shock detention centres is relevant because they seemed a good idea at the time. However, they were disappointing because they did not recognise the more sophisticated demands that were presented by the problems of the young people who were in them. I was trying to serve
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7.30 pm
Lord Bach: I pay tribute to the noble Baroness who has tabled these two amendments. Her record in this field is well known by all Members of the Committee, and on behalf of the Government I pay tribute to it. We agree with her that there is an anomaly that needs putting right about 17 year-olds who are treated as adults for remand placement purposes, but as children in every other respect of the youth justice system. We are committed to looking at the issue and we have stated that publicly, as the noble Baroness mentioned, in our response to the consultation, Youth Justice—The Next Steps. We also acknowledge that the United Nations Commission on the Rights of the Child has identified the issue as requiring resolution and we accept our obligation to consider how to reach an acceptable solution.
I reassure the Committee that we have not forgotten about this issue. Indeed, following the publication of Youth Justice—The Next Steps, the issue was the subject of an exhaustive and wide-ranging review. The aim of the review, like the aim of the amendment tabled by the noble Baroness, was to replicate the remand placement structure for 12 to 16 year-olds for 17 year-olds. However, it has proved an extremely complex issue for which we have as yet been unable to devise a workable solution. I hope the noble Baroness accepts this in the spirit in which it is intended: we have looked carefully at her amendment, but there are parts of that complexity that are not solved by it. I shall come to that in due course.
It would probably be helpful if I briefly set out the current remand position for young people. As Members will be aware, where a young person appears before a court on a serious charge and has been bailed to attend, the court itself will normally remand the young person, either on bail or in custody, until a fixed date. This test is essentially the same for all ages, although a young person may be refused bail if it is necessary for his or her own welfare. We should remember, though, that the criteria for bail are not the subject of the proposed new clause. The Bail Act applies to young and old alike.
For those aged 17 or older, if the offender is remanded in custody, the remand for 17 year-olds will be in a youth offender institution. For those aged under 16, a young person will normally be remanded to the care of a local authority and two options for dealing with that remand are then considered—whether to detain the child or young person in secure or non-secure accommodation. The Committee will know that that power is contained in Section 23 of the Children and
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The amendment would effectively bring 17 year-olds in line with the provisions applying to young people aged 16 and under. That would mean that a 17 year-old would be remanded to the care of the local authority and, subject to either the secure or the non-secure criteria, could be placed in a secure training centre or a local authority secure children’s home. Our position is that ideally we want courts to consider whether a secure or non-secure remand option is most appropriate for a 17 year-old. However, we do not believe that they should be remanded into the care of the local authority. Section 23 of the Children and Young Persons Act also provides for the placement of the very youngest and the most vulnerable young people into local authority accommodation. Are we wrong to think it inappropriate to introduce 17 year-olds to local authority care and allow them to mix with that vulnerable group of younger children, particularly those who are there for welfare reasons? That would be wrong in precisely the same way as it was absolutely wrong, in the days the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, was talking about, to have 17 year-olds in Her Majesty’s adult prisons.
The Earl of Onslow: Is not the logic of that that there should be special homes for 17 year-olds only? The Minister has agreed with the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, that they should not be in adult prisons, and he has said they should not be remanded to local authority homes because it is unsuitable for them to be with younger children. The logic of that is that you have special homes for 17 year-olds; it follows as night follows day.
Lord Bach: That may be a solution for some, it is true. At the moment they go into youth offender institutions, which are not adult prisons. If we rule out remand into local authority care, what would non-secure remand look like? It needs to be more robust than a bail package because it is different from bail but less restrictive than a custodial sentence. In effect, are we looking at the creation of a whole remand placement structure exclusively for 17 year-olds, which is the point the noble Earl has made so well?
A great deal of detailed work has been undertaken to find a solution to this issue. I hope, even if the noble Baroness is disappointed by the conclusion we have reached tonight about her amendment, that she and the Committee will accept that a lot of work is still going on to try to solve this issue. It is not straightforward. There is a whole catalogue of linking factors that, with great respect, her amendment does not cover; for example, the status of 17 year-olds under police bail, which is covered by the Police and Criminal Evidence Act. That would need to be examined to consider the impact on the police in terms of accommodation for 17 year-olds and issues such as the provision of appropriate adults.
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We also need to look at the care status of young people under such a provision. Frankly, we need to consider the Bail Act itself and whether it offers us the sort of powers we need to ensure that 17 year-olds are remanded where it is appropriate. For example, we have identified that 17 year-olds who are likely to interfere with witnesses and have been refused bail may end up with a non-secure remand. That cannot be right. The offence of interfering with witnesses is one of the most serious and goes against the principles of justice more than any other, and 17 year-olds can commit it just as much as adults can. Surely the Committee will agree that that cannot be right and that we are failing in our duty to protect victims and the public if we do not address that problem.
The Government have not lost sight of this issue. We are aware of our obligations to 17 year-olds in particular, under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and following our response to Youth Justice—The Next Steps. I repeat: we regret that we have not found a solution.
Before I finish with Amendment No. 115 and move on to Amendment No. 116, I should deal with the noble Baroness having mentioned 6,561 as being the 2005-06 statistic of 17 year-olds remanded. In fact, I am advised that that figure is the total number of young people under 18 who are remanded; the number of 17 year-olds was 3,194. That is still a high number. The Committee might be interested to know that the numbers of young people under 18 in custody now—that is, on 15 February, the last date for which figures are available—are 2,353 in youth offender institutions, 242 in secure training centres and 209 in secure children’s homes, a total of 2,804.
Not in reply, but adding, to what the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, was telling us, the Government have created completely separate estates for boys and girls, separating over-18s from under-18s. Girls under 17 are in secure training centres or secure children’s homes. Girls under 17 are in four new specific units built between 2004 and 2006. The advice that I have received, which was specifically asked for, is that there are no young people under the age of 18 in Her Majesty’s adult prisons at the moment.
A huge amount remains to be done, but I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, will accept, as I hope will other Members of the Committee, that that is an improvement on the position that prevailed previously and during the time when he was doing his excellent job a few years ago. As to her amendment, the noble Baroness could not be more right than to bring this anomaly and possible solution to the Committee. Her amendment is defective because this is such a complex issue and has many more difficult problems attached to it; but we are working hard to find a solution and we would be grateful if noble Lords could help us with that.
I turn briefly to Amendment No. 116. I shall try not to repeat myself, although I have to make some of the same points. In some cases when we need to safeguard young people—and in most cases regarding children under 15—the appropriate place will be a secure children’s home. However, children’s homes, as I have said, are for children. Most young people of 17
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Surveys indicate that most young people in custody are not worried about their safety, but those who feel unsafe believe that they are at risk from other trainees. Putting 17 year-olds, who may be large or aggressive or even both, together with children some years younger would not only make the younger children feel unsafe, but might put them at risk. We do not think that we should go down that path. However, we are committed to improving the safeguarding of young people in custody and we would argue that we have done a great deal to improve the conditions in which they are accommodated. Despite what another expert in this field, my noble friend Lord Judd, has argued, our record is not bad. To give the latest example, a new unit for more vulnerable 15 year-old and 16 year-old boys is being developed at Wetherby young offender institution.
We believe that that is a practical response to a difficult issue. I hope the noble Baroness will agree that we are taking the matter seriously and that she will withdraw her amendment.
Lord Judd: I hope my noble friend will not mind me pointing out that while he has given us an impressive array of statistics, there has been a great deal of talk of late in this realm of policy about “fit for purpose”. If our objective is the rehabilitation of the young, what is the reoffending rate among these young people and children, and what is the cost to society of that reoffending? He has not given us those statistics. If we are to measure how effective we are being, it is not just a numbers game about how many we have here or there, it is about whether these young people are really being won to positive citizenship or not.
Lord Bach: We all agree that if we possibly can we should keep young people out of custody. Where, alas, that is not possible—I think everyone agrees that sometimes it is not possible, whether it is before trial or as a result of sentence—it is vital that we differentiate between those who are over 18 and those who are under 18 as regards where they are placed. We would argue, too, that it is important that 17 year-olds are not placed with 14 year-olds. It is vital that all is done when they are in custody to try to rehabilitate them. We are all at one on that. The problem is that we do not solve this problem as quickly or as easily as we would like to and it remains a problem for one Government to another Government, and then maybe one day to a third Government. I hope the Committee will feel that this Government, as much as any previous or likely Government, are committed to trying to ensure that our young people, who have their particular problems and issues, are treated in a way that gives them the very best chance of being rehabilitated and leading ordinary, secure and lawful lives.
7.45 pm
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