Children and Young Persons Bill [HL]

The noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham—as do other Members of the Committee—brings huge experience and expertise on the issue of young people in custody. We appreciate that the intention behind the amendments is to seek to guarantee that local authorities provide the right kind of support to young people in custody whom they have looked after or who remain in their care. I stress that children who are looked after because they are the subject of care orders do not lose looked-after status when they enter custody. I emphasise that that is the context in which the remarks that I made in my letter to the noble Lord should be interpreted. Local authorities share parental responsibility for that group of children and, like any reasonable parent, they should arrange to visit those children in custody and plan for their support in the community once the custodial part of their sentence comes to an end. We are making the visiting requirement explicit through Clause 13. Furthermore, as part of our wider Care Matters programme, when we revise the regulations and guidance to the Children Act 1989, we will be emphasising the responsibilities of local authorities towards the children in their care who are in custody; setting out basic standards for their support. For example, we will be requiring local authorities to convene a statutory review of the child’s care plan chaired by an independent reviewing officer prior to any child in care being discharged from custody. The purpose of that crucial meeting will be to make sure that there are proper, realistic arrangements in place to support the child when they leave custody—arrangements that include making sure that there is a placement available to them that can meet their needs. I believe that that goes some way to meeting the concerns set out by the noble Lord in his amendments. Beyond that first group of children, other children acquire looked-after status by virtue of being remanded to or serving their sentences in accommodation provided by the local authority, under Section 21 of the Children Act 1989. That group of children will also benefit from the new duty on local authorities to arrange visits to all looked-after children under the provisions of Clause 13, which will apply to all looked-after children regardless of where they are living. In addition, we have made clear our intention to use the delegated powers in Clause 13 to impose a requirement for local authorities to arrange visits to those looked-after children who lose that status when they enter custody—namely, those voluntarily accommodated under Section 20 of the Children Act 1989. This further change will ensure that these children continue to receive the support they need and that the local authority is aware of their likely needs when they are discharged. We are determined that local authority staff visit and remain in touch with any child who has been in their care who enters custody, whether in a secure children’s home, secure training centre, young offender institution or prison. The purpose of these visits will be to assess the young person’s needs and establish the kind of continuing support that will be necessary to resettle the young person back into the community. For some young people this will involve ensuring that on release from custody they are provided with appropriate accommodation and continue to be ““looked after”” by the local authority. I hope, therefore, that the noble Lord will recognise that our new section has been designed to meet many of the objectives that he set out in Amendment No. 67. In addition to visits these children will also be entitled to receive advice, support and assistance when they seek it. Once the Bill is enacted, officials from my department, the Ministry of Justice and the Prison Service will seek to develop policies to encourage greatly improved contact between looked-after and previously looked-after children in custody and their responsible local authorities. I turn to aspects of Amendment No. 67 that differ from Clause 13. Where a young person aged over 18 is eligible for care leaving services, the local authority already owes a number of statutory duties towards them. All care leavers aged 18 to 21 must be provided with a pathway plan agreed by the young person and a personal adviser. A visit to the young person is necessarily implied by the personal adviser’s role in developing the pathway plan with the young person in custody, to have a face to face conversation about planning their resettlement. It will, of course, be essential that the personal adviser liaises with other agencies, including the probation services and housing services, about these resettlement issues. I can tell the noble Lord that revision of regulations and guidance that apply to local authority services for care leavers will include additional emphasis on the particular responsibilities of local authorities for arranging the right kind of support on a multi-agency basis for care leavers who have experienced custody. Finally, proposed new Subsection 1(c) of Amendment No. 67 imposes a duty on local authorities to visit children formerly looked after who have been released from custody. We do not believe that it is necessary to extend the duty to visit in this way, since as I have explained, where children are the subject of care orders or where they are aged 16 to 18 and entitled to care leaving services as relevant children, the local authority will be responsible for their accommodation and maintenance and will be actively planning for their future into legal adulthood and beyond. Where children who were voluntarily accommodated have lost their looked-after status because they have entered custody, one of the purposes of visiting them in custody will be to establish the kind of support that they will need on release. Depending on their needs, this could involve them becoming looked after again, which might be appropriate in certain circumstances, in which case the local authority will necessarily be involved to offer them accommodation and support on release; or it could involve supporting them in the community and again we would expect the local authority to work with their family, the youth offending team and other agencies in this case. I turn to Amendment No. 68 in the name of my noble friend Lord Judd. I fully appreciate his concern that young people who are sent to custody should be placed in accommodation that is appropriate to their needs. The new clause proposes that anyone under the age of 20 who receives a custodial sentence should be placed in local authority secure accommodation; that is, in a secure children’s home. We do not believe that this specific proposal is either practical or desirable. The new clause would apply to a wide age range, considerably wider than that of young people who may be tried in the youth court and one effect would be to require that 19 year-old adults are placed in a children’s home, perhaps alongside 12 year-olds. No one would deny that a twelve year-old, even one who has committed a very serious crime, is a young and vulnerable child. In law, a 19 year-old is an adult. We do not believe that it would be realistic or practical to place children in the same setting as potentially dangerous adults, yet this would be one implication of my noble friend’s Amendment No. 68. It is true that the new clause proposed by my noble friend enables the Secretary of State to make regulations, a power which could possibly be used to require local authorities to provide different establishments for different age groups. That would not be immediately practical, and the funding necessary to decommission much of the current secure estate in favour of completely new types of secure establishment that might resemble secure children’s homes would be considerable. The volume of local authority secure accommodation has declined over recent years. There are currently somewhat fewer than 400 places in secure children’s homes in England and Wales. The majority of these are used by the Youth Justice Board to accommodate vulnerable young people who have been sentenced to custody. It would not be possible to accommodate all under-18s who are sentenced to custody in local authority secure accommodation, let alone the 18 and 19 year-olds which the new clause would also cover. Since it assumed responsibility for commissioning and purchasing custodial places for under-18s in April 2000, the Youth Justice Board has created a diverse secure estate in which different types of establishment provide for different age groups and needs. We recognise that the balance of provision can be improved, with more accommodation specifically adapted to the needs of more vulnerable older boys in particular, and the Youth Justice Board is seeking to achieve this. But to move towards a single type of establishment to respond to the demands imposed by all children and young adults in custody under the age of 20 would be a retrograde and unnecessarily rigid provision. The new clause would also make a number of amendments to existing legislation, with the aim of ensuring that young people are not sent to adult prisons. As my noble friend is aware—he took part in the debates—this was subject to extensive debate both in Committee and on Report on the Offender Management Bill, where my right honourable and learned friend the Attorney-General explained that all young people over 17 who are remanded to custody are technically in prison from a legal point of view, even though they are remanded to a young offender institution appropriate to their age group. To remove the power to place in prison, as in my noble friend’s amendment, would, I am informed, undermine the remand system and make it unworkable. However, we very much share the concern expressed by my noble friend and other Members of the Committee that children and young people in custody need to be given the best possible chance of reform and rehabilitation. We agree that children who remain looked after, or who were looked after immediately before entering custody, should be provided with improved support on their release. Clause 13 seeks to deliver this objective. I apologise for the length of my response, but hope that I have covered most of the points raised in the debate.