Criminal Justice and Courts Bill

Sarah Champion Excerpts

Monday 1st December 2014 Commons Chamber

[Dan Jarvis]

Indeed. One of the fundamental problems is that there is no credible evidence to support the proposal and no independent experts who are prepared to put their names to it.

Let me ask the Minister for a number of guarantees. If separate facilities are his solution to the issue, why are they not provided for in the Bill? Even if they were, fencing off girls and the youngest offenders is not the answer. It is likely that they would still be in the minority in the separate areas and they would also be cut off from the facilities on the main site for most of the time. There would also still be times when girls and children as young as 12 would need to be moved and escorted across the main site. That would be a recipe for intimidation and it is precisely why youth custody has moved away from accommodating different age groups on the same site. Such sites are more difficult to run and mean that children have to spend more time locked up and fenced off for their own protection, hindering any hope of rehabilitation.

Let me finish by putting it on the record that if we are elected in five months’ time, the next Labour Government will not wish to go ahead with this poorly thought through proposal. The Government have said that they want to cut the cost of youth custody, but wasting £85 million of public money on a vanity project that will do little to rehabilitate young people is no saving at all. Last week, Leicester city council refused a planning application that looks likely to delay the project. Will the Minister say when he expects construction to start and whether the final contract will be signed before the election?

Anyone and everyone who has scrutinised the secure college proposal has seen it for what it is: an ill thought through cost-cutting exercise with a veil of education draped over it. Throwing girls and the youngest children into the mix would be an accident waiting to happen. The other place has had the wisdom and common sense to say so and this House should agree with them.

[Sarah Champion (Rotherham) (Lab)]

The Minister is aware that I am strongly against the creation of his secure college. Of all the witnesses we saw in Committee, not one was in favour of creating this prison for children. Indeed, most considered it a joke as it goes against the evidence and recommendations on rehabilitating vulnerable young children. The Government’s proposal for a secure college will introduce a new and dangerous kind of child custody. The Government plan to detain girls and boys aged between 12 and 17 in a 320-bed prison.

There is no doubt in my mind that if these plans go ahead, younger children will be extremely vulnerable. It is inevitable that they will experience higher levels of intimidation by older children and that their needs will be relegated because of a focus on the majority. Evidence shows that girls and younger children are likely to withdraw by refusing to engage in educational programmes or other activities in that environment, which completely counters the professed reason for creating this prison. There has been no impact assessment, so it is impossible to comprehend the implications for those groups.

Currently, young offender institutions only hold boys over 15 because it is recognised that larger institutions are unsuitable for younger children and girls. Girls and under-15s are currently held in secure training centres or secure children’s homes, which are smaller and have a higher staff-to-child ratio. Why cannot that tried and tested model be allowed to continue?

The reality of the secure college is that girls and younger children will still be sharing the same resources. Yes, they may have segregated use, but they will still see, hear and be intimidated by older boys. The vast majority of girls in the penal system have a history of sexual abuse. Imagine what it will be like for them in a testosterone-fuelled environment of boys trying to out-macho each other for fear of appearing weak. The Minister said that he has daughters so I am sure he can imagine how it will be for those girls when they try to sleep at night. How will they move on from the horrors that plagued their earlier lives or be able to develop as individuals when they are outnumbered by 19 to one?

The idea of a giant prison for children is a bad one. We have excellent youth offending schemes that have very positive results in rehabilitating young people. However, I have been in Parliament long enough to know that once the Government have decided on something, they plough on regardless. I beg the Minister to do the right thing and allow Lords amendment 74 to stand.

[Julie Hilling]

The notion of a secure college is flawed. Nobody except Ministers thinks it is a good idea—no educationalist, nobody who works in young offender institutions, nobody who works in the criminal justice system and nobody who campaigns for improvements in the way we treat children and young people in the criminal justice system. It seems to be based on a notion that going off to boarding school is a good thing, but this is not going to be like Eton. It will bring together large numbers of young people from very disturbed backgrounds who have committed serious offences. That is not a good idea.

Let us think about many of the young people who are in custody. Many have spent time in care and are likely to have had an absent parent. They have probably experienced neglect or abuse, and the prevalence of mental illness is high. Some 86% of young people in the criminal justice system have been excluded from school, 23% have learning difficulties and 36% have borderline learning difficulties. Boys aged 15 to 17 in prison are 18 times more likely to commit suicide than children of the same age in the community, and 11% of children in prison have attempted suicide. Simply trying to put knowledge into these young people without addressing their fundamental issues is doomed to failure. Young people need to be in the right place psychologically before they can start to learn. Simply trying to shove knowledge into young people who are disturbed, who have come from bad backgrounds and whose mental health is rubbish will not work; they need to be in the right place if they are to learn.

The average length of time spent in custody is 79 days, so how are those young people really going to learn a great deal in that period? The Minister talked about young people learning to read in a short period of time. There might be some successes in basic literacy and numeracy, but I do not see how it can work for their wider education process. We will be putting them in a college many miles away from home and the other support services they will need after their time in custody. They will then, after 79 days, have to reintegrate into their old school, or into a new school, and into those support services, which will not be on the doorstep to help them with their drug problems, mental health problems or all the other issues that young people face.

In Committee it was indicated to us that the teaching staff will not necessarily be qualified teachers. We are not sure about that, because the Minister will not tell us. The Government cannot just say that they will leave it until they have had a competition for people to apply to run the institution. Surely to goodness they need to lay down some firm guidelines on the qualifications and experience that those who will be working with the young people should have.

Why on earth will the Government not look at models that actually work? They should look to Scandinavia, where learning environments are in the community, where people down the street will not even know that the house on the corner is a youth custody premises, and where young people are treated holistically so that not just their education is dealt with, but all the other problems that have lead them to offend and have messed up their lives. They need that whole range of support services. We need that sort of therapeutic community, not a place where 320 young people will, as my hon. Friend the Member for Rotherham (Sarah Champion) said, vie for attention and to prove who is the most macho.

I do not believe that a secure college is a place for 15 to 17-year-olds, but it is very definitely not a place for girls and younger children, who should be in the community. The therapeutic programmes that work for young people are those that are close to the community and that are small and specific. As my hon. Friend said, so many of the young women who end up in the penal system have suffered sexual abuse and other forms of physical abuse. The Government should rule out ever putting them in a place with 320 young boys, which would make the experience awful for them.

I do not believe that we will change reoffending by locking up 320 young people together. I do not believe that we will change educational outcomes for those young people by doing that. I really wish that the Government would accept the Lords amendment, but I also wish that they would reconsider the whole proposal. If nobody else thinks that it is going to work, why are the Government arrogant enough to believe that it will? Surely they should start listening to the professionals, to those who work with young people and understand them, and not go ahead with the college, and they should certainly never contemplate putting young children and women into that place.