My Lords, once again I admire the skilful advocacy of the Minister, this time in his presentation of a case that I totally reject, for reasons I will explain. I am grateful to him for providing me with an advance copy of his report proposal last night, but it does not answer the point made in Amendment 74, namely that boys under the age of 15 and girls should not be sent to a secure college under any circumstances. It is true that they are currently mixed in smaller secure children’s homes and secure training centres, but those are smaller places. Having small units within large units on a large site is not satisfactory, not least because the numbers of boys under 15 and girls are likely to be swamped by the vast majority of those older children who will be on the remainder of the site. What the Minister has outlined is not that Parliament will be given an opportunity to debate the issue, but merely how the Secretary of State will inform it once he has decided to send them there. Noble Lords will not be surprised to hear that I find that totally unsatisfactory.
I have a confession to make about the whole secure college proposal. For the first time in my life, I feel ashamed to be British because I am so appalled that anyone should have dreamt it up, let alone tried to blandish Parliament with spurious claims that an entirely untested and unevaluated proposal involving increased education will reduce children’s offending. All the available evidence, not least that the smaller the establishment the better when children and young people are detained—which I recognise from my experience when inspecting young offender institutions, secure training centres and secure children’s homes—points to the proposal to establish the biggest children’s prison in the western world being far more likely further to damage some of the most vulnerable and damaged children in our society with their multiplicity of problems and needs, not just lack of education.
I make no apology for yet again quoting some of Winston Churchill’s immortal words describing a decent criminal justice system. He said that the way in which
it treats its crime and criminals is the true test of the civilisation of any country and marks and measures the living virtue in it. Would that he were here to pronounce his verdict on the proposal, because he would do it so much more effectively than I can.
In his letter dated 4 December, the Minister described the secure college proposal as a pioneering approach to educating young offenders and tackling stubbornly high reoffending rates. He is absolutely right to describe laying a proposal before Parliament about which no one, not even the proposer, knows any details, as a pioneering approach, but I hope that it is one that will never be repeated. I fear that those in both Houses who have voted for the proposal thus far have done so because they are attracted by the word “pioneering” and seduced by the blandished prospect of past failure being swept aside. But if anyone who voted in favour bothered to probe deeper into what the proposal actually meant other than the provision of more education, they would find nothing other than the assertion that the market will find the solution.
So far, the Secretary of State has awarded a building contract for a paper plan on a site with planning permission for an earlier young offender institution. One would assume that the education provider would have a say in the build of a new college with education at its heart, but no. Bidding for the educational contract has not yet started, nor do there appear to be any criteria against which competitors will be judged. One would presume that bidders would be required to compete for the delivery of a specified regime, but that, too, is far from the case. Rather than lay down a regime, the Secretary of State says that it will be the content of the as-yet-unknown winning bid. I admit that I cannot imagine any business daring to function like that or it would fail. But to personalise the point, would anyone consider sending any child with a multiplicity of problems to any school unless they had a very clear idea of how those problems might be treated?
Two weeks ago, the All-Party Parliamentary Penal Affairs Group, which I co-chair, and the packed audience at the annual Longford lecture, heard Nils Öberg, head of the Swedish prison service, describe how after long and careful scientific research into the characteristics, problems and needs of their young offenders, the Swedish authorities had concluded that the invariable multiplicity of young offenders’ needs could best be treated by trained experts in small, local establishments containing no more than 10. They knew that this was bound to be expensive because of the number of appropriately trained staff required—child-skilled staff do not come cheap—but they had a duty to secure the future for all Sweden’s children; a duty that applies in every civilised country, which ours still purports to be.
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That is why I agree with the noble Lord, Lord McNally, that staff are the key factor in decent child detention, and disagree with the Secretary of State both when he says that educational outcomes are more important than staff selection for this damaged and vulnerable group and when he persists in suggesting sending boys under 15 and girls to his college. This is where it is abundantly clear that the Secretary of State
has not done his homework. He claims that the market will provide a better result at less cost than the present arrangements. Children under 15 and girls will need a completely different staff from those responsible for the vast majority of boys over 15. These will have to be provided from the overall budget, which means that they are bound to be at the expense of the older children. That is precisely what happened in young offender institutions when resources had to be taken from those over 18 to ensure that the Youth Justice Board’s contract requirements for those aged 15 to 17 could be met, the resulting paucity of regimes for young adults being a national scandal.
Of course reoffending is too high and too many of our young offenders have appalling educational records, but on what evidence does the Secretary of State base his belief that a commercial contractor can succeed where others have tried and failed? Why has he not released any research, scientific or otherwise, proving that he is right and that every single organisation and individual in the country who knows anything about dealing with troubled young people is wrong? Where is any analysis that he has researched the multiplicity of the children’s problems, or specification of the number of expert staff who must be on the site to cope with them?
At Third Reading, I mentioned the need for healthcare, particularly mental health care, to be of equal status with education in deciding the ethos of the secure college. Since then, I have heard yet more evidence that healthcare provision is imperfectly understood in the Ministry of Justice. I have told the House of the number of children in custody with speech, language and communication needs, and the remarkable results that speech and language therapists can achieve with them. I was told last week by the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists that young offender institutions were refusing to allow boys to attend therapy because their absence from education counted against the target of 30 hours’ education demanded by the Secretary of State. Until March this year, the Lucy Faithfull Foundation conducted sex offender programmes in a number of young offender institutions. The Ministry of Justice then instructed that its contract was to be passed from the Youth Justice Board to NHS England. However, sex offender programmes come under offender management, not healthcare, and now there is total confusion, with young sex offenders being denied programmes. You could not invent such stupidity.
I could go on and on, but I will come to the crunch. At Third Reading, I asked the Minister to refer the matter to the Prime Minister because the future of our children is a national interest. I also wrote to the Prime Minister, pointing out that the Secretary of State was bulldozing ahead with a pet proposal in defiance of not only all the evidence but of the Government’s own announced social justice policy. I asked him to examine the evidence and state publicly whether he backed his Secretary of State or whether he felt it sensible that the proposal should be withdrawn for further consideration. I pointed out, as I have done since Second Reading, that the Secretary of State had a perfectly valid reason for withdrawal because, thanks to the success of the Youth Justice Board in reducing the number of children in custody, the nature of those who were left was very
different from the previous number, not least because of the multiplicity of their problems. I have not yet had a reply to my letter and ask the Minister whether the Prime Minister has responded to my question on Report.
When the time comes, I invite the whole House, both those in the Chamber and those waiting to be whipped, to cast aside party politics and approach this issue from the point of view of a parent, grandparent, uncle, aunt, close relative or friend of a child with a multiplicity of problems, whom the Secretary of State for Justice intends to detain in his proposed secure college. I ask your Lordships to ask yourselves whether, knowing what you do about the proposal, you could live with yourself if an errant child in your family or of your acquaintance was to be detained in such an establishment. I realise that there is no exact parallel, because while we all know children with learning difficulties or disabilities, or mental health or behavioural problems, I doubt whether anyone in our immediate ken has been subjected to unspeakable parental neglect, or sexual or domestic violence, or to a lifestyle at what passes for home is best described as chaotic and dysfunctional. Of course these children have committed crimes, but that does not mean that they should not be decently treated.
Therefore, when your Lordships vote, I ask you to follow your conscience as opposed to party diktat. This is the last chance that we have of preventing something that I would contend to be a stain on our nation, whether or not it contains boys under 15, and girls. I beg to move.