Amendments 10 to 19, which stand in my name and that of my hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith (Mr Slaughter), relate to the Government’s proposed introduction of secure colleges. Let me set out some context. It is welcome that youth crime has come down substantially since the late 1990s, but it has led to new challenges in our youth justice system that need to be addressed. Reoffending rates are too high, and the cohort of young people in custody is a lot smaller now compared with a decade ago. These young people have complex needs and present very different challenges. We need a youth custody regime that can effectively meet those challenges, and effectively punish, rehabilitate and bring down reoffending. The question is whether creating secure colleges is the most effective solution.
More than a year has now passed since the Government consulted on these proposals, but in all that time, the key facts have remained the same. The Government have come to the House today with a set of proposals that they claim “will transform youth custody”, but there are no expert organisations expressing any enthusiasm for secure colleges. The Government claim that the colleges will put education at the heart of rehabilitation, but they cannot say how it will be delivered in practice. They claim the proposals will reduce the cost of youth
custody, but it is not clear where the £85 million is coming from, and they have not produced any hard evidence to support this policy.
When we debated these changes in Committee, we said that we would listen to what the Government had to say and work with them constructively to improve the legislation. We also said that if Ministers wanted our support, they would need to present proper supporting evidence to justify going ahead with this experiment and address the serious concerns being raised by experts in the justice sector. Alas, no such evidence or improvements to the Bill have been forthcoming, which is why we cannot support these proposals, and why we have tabled amendments 16 to 18 to delete the secure college proposal from the Bill.
We all know the value of education, and how it can and should play an important role in rehabilitating young offenders. I am sure that everyone across the House agrees with that. The issue is that there are four areas where Ministers have plainly failed to make the case for secure colleges. Let me take each in turn. First, there has been a chronic lack of evidence to justify the creation of secure colleges. It is true that levels of educational attainment and purposeful activity are not good enough in many young offender institutions, and that education provision in the youth estate can and should be improved. We are agreed on that, but it seems the Justice Secretary is the only person who believes that the only way these problems can be solved is to plough tens of millions of pounds of public money into creating an entirely new type of institution.
Members of the Bill Committee took evidence for two full days, yet not one witness had a single word of support to offer for the Government’s plans for secure colleges. The deputy children’s commissioner, Sue Berelowitz, said that
“a 300-bed secure college will result in a large impersonal environment that does not adequately meet the emotional and mental health needs of children in custody.”
Similar concerns have been echoed by experts across the sector, including the Prison Reform Trust, the Standing Committee for Youth Justice, and the Howard League for Penal Reform. Even the Government’s own impact assessment states:
“The Secure College model has never previously been tested.”
It confirms that these plans are untried, untested and that the results would be unpredictable. There is no quantifiable evidence that the secure colleges would reduce reoffending rates. Such little detail has been provided that it is hard to see how the reduction will be achieved in practice. So what alternatives to secure colleges has the Minister’s Department considered? He will recall that I asked him in Committee what assessment his Department had made of how the £85 million budget for the secure college could be alternatively spent. For example, instead of building the secure college, that money could be invested in improving educational provision in the existing youth estate. I would be grateful if the Minister could confirm whether that option has been considered, and if not, why not.
The second failure relates to education and welfare provision and goes to the heart of this debate. The Government’s objective is for secure colleges to transform the rehabilitation of young offenders through better education and training. That is a laudable ambition, but
it needs to be placed in the context of the existing cohort of young people in custody. We know that the lives of the majority of those young people are characterised by multiple layers of complex disadvantages that include mental health issues, learning disabilities, self-harm issues, and problems with drugs, alcohol and family breakdown. That raises two fundamental points. First, those are not challenges that can be overcome through education alone—significant specialist health and welfare provision would also be required. Secondly, if secure colleges are to deliver educational outcomes over and above what has been achieved in the youth estate before, one of several things would need to happen: secure colleges would need to offer more hours of education and purposeful activity than existing institutions; they would need to have a higher calibre of teaching staff and a higher student-staff ratio; or they would need to offer some new model of transformative teaching that we have not seen before.
Secure colleges would also need to overcome a particular challenge identified by the Justice Committee in its youth justice report last year. It pointed out that the average time spent in custody is only 79 days.