Rights of Children (Police Custody)

Holly Lynch Excerpts

Tuesday 28th June 2022 Westminster Hall

[Holly Lynch (Halifax) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Mr Hollobone. I pay tribute, as others have done, to my hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham East (Janet Daby), who shared individual cases and statistics revealing that children and young people spend lengthy periods in custody. I thank her for securing the debate, for being a true champion and campaigner on this issue, and for the all the different ways she has used the parliamentary tools at her disposal to keep the spotlight on securing best practice.

Children and young people are a protected group with specific age-related vulnerabilities. Their treatment in detention is governed not only by domestic law, but by the UN convention on the rights of the child, which the UK has signed and ratified. Legislative requirements and best practice are outlined in various documents, including, most significantly, the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984—commonly referred to as PACE—and its codes of practice, guidance from the College of Policing, and the Home Office’s concordat on children in custody.

It is absolutely right that officers must take into account the age of a child or young person when deciding whether statutory grounds for arrest apply. Police should pay particular regard to the timing of any necessary arrests of children and young people, ensure that they are not detained any longer than necessary, and avoid holding them overnight in police cells unless it is absolutely necessary.

The College of Policing is right to stress in its guidance that

“Everyone who works with children has a responsibility for keeping them safe.”

That means that they have a role to play in identifying concerns about a child’s safety and wellbeing, sharing information and taking prompt action when it is needed to protect a child. A child who has been detained and is in police custody presents an opportunity to understand why, to disrupt their behaviour if it is criminal, and to safeguard them and the public from further harms.

West Yorkshire police’s violence reduction unit has undertaken several pieces of significant research to better understand the relationship between young people and violent crime. Nationally and in West Yorkshire, the number of proven offences committed by 10 to 17-year-olds has fallen dramatically, particularly over the past five years. The number of young first-time entrants into the criminal justice system has also plummeted. However, worryingly, in 2019-20, more than half of the offences committed by 10-17 year olds were violence against the person, compared with 39.7% in 2013-14.

We know that children and young people are capable of committing serious crimes and we cannot shy away from that, given the impact on victims, who are often children themselves. One comprehensive piece of research undertaken by Crest with the West Yorkshire and Harrogate Health and Care Partnership and the violence reduction unit found five key health inequalities that are influential in the lives of young people in West Yorkshire and their journey either towards or away from violence and exploitation: deprivation and socioeconomic disadvantage, trauma and unmet mental health need, education engagement, poor quality or lacking service provision and delivery, and contextual harm. More than 61,000 of 11 to 25-year-olds in West Yorkshire—13% of the population—were at risk of serious violence as a result of income deprivation and high levels of neighbourhood crime. One reality drawn out of the research that I find particularly depressing is how young people are being drawn into gangs and criminality by family members who are already involved. The report found that young people are often recruited by their own family. The reasons young people get involved in crime and find themselves in police custody serve as a reminder that some children’s lives could not be more different from our own and that harm and risk is all around them.

How can we ensure that encounters with the police and any time spent in custody have a positive impact on these children’s trajectory and do not compound the negative experiences surrounding them? The West Yorkshire violence reduction unit research recommended the development of trauma-informed practice across partnerships such as the complex childhood trauma steering group, which should be used to evaluate and standardise the trauma-informed offering across the region, and more and better mental health support for young people, all of which could and should be a feature of a child’s limited time in custody. The aspiration has to be that the more we understand the risks and recognise the value of targeted intervention upstream, the more time in custody can be avoided entirely for children and young people.

One of the key features of the opening speech from my hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham East was about the provision of appropriate adults. Research conducted by Dr Miranda Bevan of Goldsmiths, University of London, and Dr Vicky Kemp from the University of Nottingham, and shared by my hon. Friend found that it is not unusual for appropriate adults to not arrive until six or more hours have passed. Having got a better understanding of some of the reasons for that from my local police just today, I am sympathetic that trying to make contact initially with parents, who may or may not be available and who, sadly, are sometimes not willing to attend, then approaching the emergency duty team within child social care, and then, if they can still not get someone to attend, approaching the National Appropriate Adult Network, starts to show where the practical barriers to making swift progress are—and that is when attempts are made straightaway, which, as we have already heard, is not always the case.

From speaking to colleagues in West Yorkshire’s liaison and diversion team earlier today, I know that problems are often exacerbated when looked-after children are in custody. Lines of parental responsibility prove harder to establish at a time when some of the most marginalised children are required to make serious decisions, without support, in conditions that are designed to be uncomfortable. Indeed, the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon), who it is always a pleasure to see in Westminster Hall, made the right and powerful point, which has been supported by almost all the speakers made here today, about asking these children to decide for themselves if they want or require legal representation, when it should be the default.

In its research, the National Appropriate Adult Network points out that children in custody are disadvantaged by more than just cognitive development. They are much more likely than other children to have poor mental health, to have a learning disability, at up to 22% for that cohort compared with 4% in the wider population, to have a communication disorder, at up to 90% versus 7%, to be autistic, at 15% compared with 1%, and to have suffered a head injury with loss of consciousness for more than 20 minutes, at 18% versus 5%. If we are looking for confirmation of why appropriate adults are essential for children in those circumstances, the statistics could not make the case any clearer.

We know that there are routine delays in getting someone to attend on behalf of a child. Are we not able to establish a model of best practice that works for both the police and the child, and moves things forward by having someone skilled on hand to provide that service? I hope the Minister will share her thinking on that when she responds, and address the pilot scheme that my hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham East outlined, which appears to be delivering significant results. Once we have that in place, it opens up conversations about how swiftly we can move a child through police custody, and we can look again at 24 hours.

I am very much taking into account your comments, Mr Hollobone, but the Minister will be aware that alarm has been raised about strip searches in recent weeks. In response to a written question tabled by my right hon. Friend the Member for Hackney North and Stoke Newington (Ms Abbott), the Minister for Crime and Policing confirmed that the Ministry of Justice is supporting a project with the National Police Chiefs’ Council with the aim of addressing the difference in experience of ethnic minority children and adults in police custody. My hon. Friend the Member for Battersea (Marsha De Cordova) shared some particularly powerful experiences of her constituents.

The Minister for Crime and Policing said that a wide range of agencies and independent advisers have contributed to that work, which engages a number of police forces across the country and builds on existing initiatives in the workplace, including a dedicated independent strip search scrutiny panel in Norfolk and Suffolk police. He said:

“From December 2022 we will be including more detailed custody data in the annual Police Powers and Procedures statistical bulletin which will include data on whether an appropriate adult was called out for a detained child and the number of strip searches & Intimate searches carried out, broken down by age, gender, ethnicity, and offence type.”

My hon. Friend the Member for Battersea also spoke about the importance of data. That piece of work is welcome, so will the Minister confirm when it will be concluded and published? It struck me that the response to that written question said that the research will determine if an appropriate adult was called. I very much expect to see that that requirement was upheld entirely.

I have spent a great deal of time trying to improve the modern slavery provisions in the Nationality and Borders Act 2022, and looking at when children come into custody. If there are concerns that they are victims of child criminal exploitation, county lines gangs or trafficking, the push to keep children out of custody for all the right reasons cannot mean that we cut corners and miss opportunities in our safeguarding obligations. Where the police arrest children and seize drugs or cash due to unlawful possession, they and other statutory agencies should fully understand the potential dangers for those children of being releasing without them, potentially back into the grasp of those who have been criminally exploiting them. We must work through that by involving all the relevant safeguarding agencies to truly disrupt the criminal activity that has a grip of the young person, and deliver that wraparound support as urgently as possible.

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham East once again for securing this debate, and I look forward to hearing the Minister’s response to her powerful calls for best practice, scrutiny and oversight, and for making sure that children in custody are recognised and treated as children.