Prisons and Secure Training Centres: Safety

Alistair Carmichael Excerpts

Monday 11th January 2016 Commons Chamber

[Michael Gove]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for stressing the range of services that exist to help ensure that young people are kept safe. When an allegation or a series of allegations such as those in the “Panorama” report are made we must of course take them seriously. It is also important to stress that the Youth Justice Board, the Ministry of Justice and others have continually striven over the years to try to ensure that young people are kept safe in custody. Of course we can never do enough, but he is quite right that there have already been interventions that have been designed to ensure that young people are safe.

[Mr Alistair Carmichael (Orkney and Shetland) (LD)]

I am sure that we will all watch “Panorama” with great interest, but, whatever we see, we have all known for years that there were problems with these institutions. That is why we have the recidivism rates to which the Justice Secretary referred. We must not be allowed to scapegoat the staff. They do an exceptionally difficult job, very often picking up the failures of other parts of the public services—the education system, the care system and the social work system. When he comes to give the remit to the inquiry that he has announced today, will he make sure that the work of all those different parts of the public services and others interacts with these young people before they end up in detention and is given proper scrutiny as well?

[Michael Gove]

That was a typically thoughtful intervention from the right hon. Gentleman. He is absolutely right. Ideally, we should prevent young people from getting into custody in the first place. Obviously, there are some people for whom custody is an appropriate response, but we should seek to intervene much earlier in the lives of these young people—whether that is through ensuring that they have appropriate education, that there is intervention from social workers in their family circumstances or that the criminal justice system is much more thoughtful in the way in which it treats them.