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Children: Secure Children’s Homes

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lady Linklater on her ability in presenting, and on securing, this debate on an important and valuable subject. I also congratulate my noble friend Lady Shackleton on her excellent maiden speech. I found it quite moving, coming from the same parental and grandparental background that she does. She may find that that background is a real driver towards contributions on matters on which one feels strongly in this House—where good argument is heard with patience and respect, and where bad argument is rejected with mere politeness. I am sure that she will make a great contribution to our affairs. I recognise in the speeches that have been made so far, and in some of the briefings that heralded this debate, the statistical soup that can surround this subject about offending children and young people. It points in many different directions but always produces the same unpalatable reduction, which is that we are not succeeding in reforming the activities of children in custody and sending them out quickly into society as people who will not be go through the revolving door of custody, time after time. Unfortunately, the picture is of a very fast-revolving door. The cohort of residents in custody has multiple issues to face up to. They are troubled and we do nothing to deal with that trouble constructively, except in a relatively small number of cases. We have one of the lowest ages of criminal responsibility in the world, yet we have a higher recidivism rate among children than almost anywhere else in the world and, despite having spent many years looking at this subject, I do not quite understand what we are doing wrong. However, I believe that the kind of regime provided in local authority secure children’s homes has been far better designed to reform than anything provided in secure training centres or young offender institutions. Five and a half years ago I chaired an inquiry for the Howard League for Penal Reform, of which I am currently the president, on the use of restraint, strip-searching and isolation among children in custody. It was not happening in local authority secure children’s homes. It was happening in other institutions. It is still happening in other institutions. The Howard League this year conducted a two-day evidence hearing that I chaired to see what had happened in the five years since the report was produced in 2006. Some good progress had been made; the provisions made for young people in custody have improved the situation, and I share the view that it is good news that far fewer young people are in custody—particularly those between 14 and 16 years of age—than before. Nevertheless, far too much restraint is still being used. What is it that secure children's homes provided that enabled us to avoid those pitfalls of restraint, strip-searching and isolation? It was a number of qualities. First, they were small; they are small. It is within something that is much more like home that children learn the habits of a home. One of my observations, having visited secure children's homes and other custodial institutions for children and young people, is that most of the young people in them have never enjoyed the sort of home to which my noble friend Lady Shackleton referred movingly in her maiden speech. Putting them into an animalised, brutalised structure contributes to that feeling of dissociation. Next, secure children's homes have high ratios of well trained staff, specialist staff who understand children. It is self-evident that we should deal with children as children, not as criminals, if we are to succeed in reforming them and turning them from children into adults, rather than from child criminals into recidivists. Next, they have education. Secure children's homes, in my view, have a very high standard of education. With that, they combine therapeutic and behavioural provision tailored to children's needs. That provision is not being made adequately in the other parts of the child and youth custodial setting. Therefore, the Government should be looking at more, smaller units, far more like secure children's homes, rather than going in the opposite direction, towards larger institutions, which appears to be policy at present.