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Secure Training Centres: Use of Restraint (JCHR Report)

My Lords, I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, for that powerful defence of human rights and for expressing how we need to ensure that the regime in secure training centres leads to people coming out of those institutions better equipped to fulfil their life within society. I am also grateful to him for giving this House the opportunity to discuss in detail the Joint Committee’s report and the Government’s response. I shall concentrate on two fine lines, which are revealed in the debate between the Joint Committee and the Government. The first fine line revealed is that between restraint and violence. The semantic debate between the committee and the Government on the distinction between force and violence demonstrates how difficult it is to make these distinctions. I hope that the Minister will confirm that any action that can be construed as violence has no place in a secure training centre. One problem is that restraint can so easily slide into violence. I have considerable admiration for those who undertake the care of challenging children and young people, and I know something of the pressures on them from my visits as a parish priest to such institutions. That makes it all the more crucial that there is clarity that violence is not a part of the sanctions available to them in their work. The quality of care needs to be constantly reinforced by training and by support for front-line staff. I very much welcome the emphasis of both the committee and the Government on the need for training and the improved training now available. I hope that the Minister will say more about the personal support that is, and must be, provided to staff. They need encouragement to develop a caring relationship with those for whom they are responsible, many of whom have experienced very little care or love in their own lives. They need to do all that they can to ensure that STCs are not themselves bleak and unloving institutions. In that context, I was particularly pleased to see in the Government’s response a reference to restorative justice, whereby in one of the institutions, at least, staff review the incident of restraint along with the young person concerned. This taking of responsibility by the young person is very much to be welcomed, and I hope that the Government will agree to encourage such developments in the other secure training centres so that restorative justice becomes one of the principles by which relationships are developed and love is shown in STCs. That taking of responsibility by the child or young person is necessary if we are to maintain another fine line, between restraint and punishment. Again the Government are clear that techniques of restraint are not used as punishment, yet I wonder whether it feels like that to the young person concerned. The difficult examples given by the committee, and to which the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, has referred, sound to me as though the children involved received that treatment as punishment—and undeserved punishment at that. We need to be clear that violence by a child upon child or staff will not be tolerated, but we need to be still more aware that what is perceived as violence by staff upon a child is more dangerous still. This quickly becomes the violence of authority escalating within the secure system and then beyond. I am currently attending the Lambeth conference of Anglican bishops from all over the world. Indeed, when I asked for consent to be here yesterday and today, the conference asked me to bring its best wishes to all in your Lordships’ House. I would not want noble Lords to think that my presence here means that either I or the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Lincoln were not invited to Lambeth or that either of us declined to go. Among the events in Canterbury is one organised by the Churches’ Network for Non-violence, which campaigns for an end to violence against children throughout the world and to whose work I am delighted to pay tribute. The conference gives us the chance to reflect on the violence of our world, as we pray alongside bishops from Zimbabwe and the Sudan, for example—as we speak with them, eat with them and share with them. People at the conference speak time and again of how easily violence becomes part of a culture in our contemporary world, becomes endemic in a society. We are not immune to that danger. We need to affirm that violence needs to be outlawed in all circumstances in our society, not least within the narrow world of the STCs, which we are talking about today. There needs to be a greater determination to do away with those restraint techniques which are or could become violent and to stress the importance—which has hardly been mentioned here, but which I hope the Minister will talk about—of relationships of personal care between staff and children. If the quotations in the committee’s report from the training manual about techniques of ““hair grab””, ““strangle against the wall”” or ““kicks on the floor”” are accurate, they are alarming. I hope that the Minister will be able to speak of positive moves towards better relationships in STCs and to an ending of such practices.