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Secure Training Centres

My Lords, I thank and congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Linklater, on obtaining this important and timely debate. I say important, because I believe that any time spent discussing the safeguarding of tomorrow’s generation is important. I say timely, because the inquiry of the noble Lord, Lord Carlile of Berriew, of which I was very privileged to be a member, only recently published its report about the safeguarding of children. Only two days ago the Government’s response to the paper produced by the joint chief inspectors on the safeguarding of children was also published. I was the Chief Inspector of Prisons when, for some reason or other, the previous Home Secretary, Michael Howard, decided it would be appropriate to introduce into this country a disastrous development in America known as the boot camps as a suitable way of dealing with our young offenders. I disagreed with him fundamentally then, and I disagree now. I quote from a report I wrote in 1997 about the treatment of young offenders:"““Young prisoners will return to the community, and therefore it really does matter how they are treated in prison. The choice is ours. Either we can give them education, to make good the ravages of what they have denied themselves by truancy or been denied by exclusion, and opportunities for personal development within a structured, caring environment—which many have been denied in the chaotic circumstances of their home lives—and which we implicitly hold to be the way that can best lead to the development of responsible citizens, or we can continue on our present course, with all the damage that that is doing not only to the young people themselves but to the society to which they will return””." I referred in the report to the tremendous inconsistency in the way in which we were treating children in custody. At the time that Michael Howard had the idea of secure training centres, there were local government secure homes, many of them extremely well run and very well staffed. At the other end of the scale, there were a number of young offender establishments in which, frankly, the treatment was outrageously poor and not only was the staffing negligent, the numbers of staff were far too few. On the first inspection of a juvenile establishment that I carried out, when I took an inspector of social services with me, he said that if this had been a social services establishment, it would have been closed because the treatment and conditions were not up to what was required by children. Then came the secure training centres. From the word go, they did not fit in anywhere—secure homes are part of social services provision under the Department of Health and young offender institutions are part of the Prison Service, coming under the Home Office. Secure training centres, run by private sector companies, did not come under either; they came under the Youth Justice Board when it started, which added a third source of direction. I seriously recommend that the Government look once again at the management and the direction of children in custody, wherever they are. Unless you have someone responsible and accountable for the delivery of what is done, working out what is appropriate and making certain that it is delivered, it will not happen. I recommended that in the same report in 1997—no action has been taken and there is still nobody in charge. The Youth Justice Board has oversight but that does not mean it checks what happens overall. I believe that until you get that right, you will not get the consistency of treatment which is crucial when you are dealing with children. I personally think it is an abomination that the age of criminal responsibility in this country should be 10. It is an abomination that children should be in prison. They should not be in prison—those are adult places. They should be somewhere else. But if they are in custody, the critical thing is to make certain that staff are trained and capable of looking after them. Again, we find inconsistency everywhere. Those in the social services centres are trained; those in the Prison Service are not yet properly trained. The secure training centres suffer from the problems that I have found with all private sector establishments. Turnover was too high, largely because of wages, and they were greatly understaffed. I was interested to see that the recent inspection reports of all four STCs showed serious staffing implications. At Oakhill, staffing numbers were regularly below acceptable levels for 80 places. There were no regular staff meetings. There was no external line manager to monitor the performance of the secure training centre. At Rainsbrook, roles and responsibilities for managers in the new structure had not yet been made sufficiently clear for lines of accountability to be fully understood. At Medway, active staff numbers are to continue to remain low, placing significant pressures on the establishment. The external manager for the centre was acting as the director; therefore, the centre did not have an external manager to monitor its performance. At Hassockfield, supervision of staff needs to occur and to be recorded more consistently. Management development should be a feature of the next stage of development planning. And so on. We have heard a lot of about the treatment, the conditions and their unacceptability. There are masses of solutions and ideas out there; they all refer to the same things—direction and staffing. I really hope that the Government will at last listen to what people have been saying, year after year, and put those two things right, because they are fundamental to any development which has this desperately important role of safeguarding the treatment of our children who are in custody.