With the leave of the Committee, I wonder whether I could try to complete what I was going to say, especially on Amendment 43C in this group.
The plan that a secure college should hold such a wide age group of 12 to 17 year-old boys and girls would seem inevitably to present enormous safeguarding risks. There are only ever very small numbers of girls in custody. Some 96% of those being held are boys aged between 15 and 17 years. The Joint Committee on Human Rights said:
“We note that the Government does not appear to have carried out any equality impact assessments of the proposed secure colleges policy, and we recommend that such assessments should be carried out and made available to Parliament at the earliest opportunity”,
assessing in particular the impact on girls and younger children of detaining them in large, mixed institutions holding up to 320 young people, including older children up to the age of 18.
While it is true that secure training colleges and secure children’s homes have a mixture of ages and sexes, the crucial difference is that they consist of very small units that are usually close to the child’s home with lots of intensive, one-to-one support from well trained and highly qualified staff. That is something which is light years from anything a 320-bed secure unit is going to be able to offer. The real problem is that without any pilots and with very little information on how they will be run and staffed, and about what programmes will be on offer, far too much detail is missing. That makes a realistic assessment by anyone impossible to do. It is a completely inadequate basis, I would suggest, on which Parliament can either judge or give its approval. What we do know is that this is a vulnerable, needy and challenging group of offenders for whom the risk of reoffending is very high. The
chances of their complex needs being met in an enormous institution are low at best. I shall be very interested to hear what the Minister has to tell us when he comes to reply and how he will meet so many profound concerns.
9.45 pm