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Children: Secure Children’s Homes

My Lords, I declare an interest, which the Minister may think singularly inappropriate—I am a member of the Out of Trouble advisory group of the Prison Reform Trust—and I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Linklater, on introducing the debate. The background to the debate is that in this country we criminalise children at much too young an age, much younger than in most other jurisdictions. We lock them up five times more on average than similar societies do. For example, to compare ourselves with Finland, we have 2,000 youngsters under 18 in custody, whereas Finland, with one-tenth of our population, has precisely six. Finland has 4,000 adolescent treatment centre places, whereas this country, with 10 times the population that we have, has a mere 1,100. There is also the significant cost, to which the noble Baroness has referred; it costs £51,000 a year to keep a child in a young offender institution and £165,000 in a secure training centre. Of course, we now have cuts of 20 per cent in the YOTs budget—23 per cent, actually, in London—at a time when, as we have heard in the past couple of weeks, reoffending rates in 70 per cent of youth offending team areas are beginning to rise. The noble Baroness has referred to the background of many of these youngsters. Three times as many suffer from mental health problems as in the general population and 25 per cent of them have special needs, while 23 per cent of them have IQs of less than 70 and 36 per cent between 70 and 79. That is nearly 60 per cent with IQs of under 80, and 60 per cent have poor communication skills. All too often, they are in custody because of breach of an order, such as an ASBO, and not necessarily for serious offences. In cases of non-violent, less serious offences resulting in custody, about 61 per cent arise from a breach of an order. The Prison Reform Trust recently published a document on this whole process, pointing out that far too often it is the breach of an order that leads to custodial sentences, and it made eight significant recommendations for improving that situation, including topics that one might have thought would be useful across the whole of the system: involving children in decisions taken about them; improving the quality of intervention in the community; and identifying and meeting welfare needs leading to offences in the first place, dealing with the problem before it translates into a criminal offence. That involves not just the criminal justice system. Clearly it goes much beyond that and involves the health system, children’s services and, arguably, the whole issue of family responsibilities. This issue certainly needs to be progressed. Other factors also cause concern. In the population of young people in custody, a disproportionate number of children are from black and minority ethnic backgrounds, particularly in remand. They do seem to have a significantly higher propensity to be remanded in custody than other children. The position of black and minority ethnic girls receiving custodial sentences is also distinctly out of line with either their male counterparts from those communities or with the non-BME population. If those issues are to be tackled, we need to get to the children well before the problems manifest themselves. In the mean time, we must also look at non-custodial ways in which to deal with these children, including justice reinvestment. Involving young people in community payback and giving them a skill while they are doing that has proved to be effective in reducing reoffending rates. Contrary to the public myth peddled by some of the tabloid press, there is a willingness on the part of the public to accept that custody is not necessarily the best solution and that properly constructed schemes involving young people in community activities and the like can be very effective. I end by quoting the following passage: "““Just threatening to lock young people up will not break the cycle. Of course criminals need to face penalties for their actions but we desperately need to deal with the reasons why they are committing crime in the first place. Otherwise we move from being ‘tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’ to being ‘tough on headlines, soft on the causes of the headline’””." That is a quote from the report from the Centre for Social Justice, produced by Iain Duncan Smith’s working party.