Criminal Justice and Courts Bill

Yasmin Qureshi Excerpts

Monday 1st December 2014 Commons Chamber

[Yasmin Qureshi (Bolton South East) (Lab)]

The Minister may be aware that when the Bill was in Committee, we heard from a number of experts, including charities, doctors and other people working with young people and offenders, and they said that the way that the secure colleges had been set up as large institutions was completely unsuitable for young people.

[Andrew Selous]

I hope that I can reassure the hon. Lady on that point. I understand the concerns that she raises. Is she aware of how the secure college is designed? We will, for example, have 12-bed units for the more vulnerable groups, which could include girls and children under 15. There are 20-bed and 10-bed units. We believe that it will be possible to offer that proper support. The set-up will allow smaller groups of young people to foster that sense of community, belonging and close relationship with those that will be looked after.

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[Dan Jarvis (Barnsley Central) (Lab)]

I rise to speak against the Government’s motion to disagree with the other place, and in favour of Lords amendment 74. I give notice of our intention to vote against the Government’s motion tonight.

This debate is about sparing girls and young children—the most vulnerable offenders—from a flawed, expensive and potentially dangerous institution, with which the Government should not be going ahead. I listened very carefully to what the Minister said and will respond to some of his specific points in a moment, but would not the Government’s proposal for secure colleges be a step in the wrong direction for our youth justice system? It is a plan without any real supporting evidence.

Even the Government’s own impact assessment accepts that their plans are untried and untested and the Government have not been able to produce a single independent expert to vote for the proposal. The NSPCC, the Royal College of Psychiatrists and nearly 30 other leading children’s charities have publicly condemned the plans as “expensive and dangerous”.

Let me be clear: improvements need to be made to youth custody. Reoffending is still too high and education can and should play an important role in the rehabilitation of young offenders, so I welcome the efforts that Ministers are making to improve the delivery of education in young offenders institutions where it is not good enough. At a time when the youth custody population is falling, however, Labour does not think that construction of a new type of prison is the correct way to proceed.

[Yasmin Qureshi]

Does my hon. Friend agree that one aspect of rehabilitation is being able to keep in contact with family and close ones? It is proposed that this college will be in Lincolnshire and there will be only one in the whole country, so my hon. Friend can imagine the travelling that the parents of the children will have to do to visit. That completely defeats the object of rehabilitation.

[Dan Jarvis]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. All the evidence explains that small units that are closer to home with a higher staff ratio are more suitable, particularly for girls and young offenders who have complex needs.

Let me respond now to some of the Minister’s points about the accommodation of girls and young children. We know that girls and children under the age of 15 are overwhelmingly in the minority in the youth custody population. In 2012-13, 95% of children in custody were boys and 96% were aged between 15 and 17. If those ratios were reflected in the 320-bed secure college, the Government would be accommodating fewer than 20 girls and about a dozen younger children together with nearly 300 older and troubled teenage boys. That has all the makings of an incredibly intimidating environment with real safeguarding concerns for the most vulnerable offenders and it is why large facilities such as young offenders institutions only accommodate boys over the age of 15. It also helps explain why, as I have just said to my hon. Friend the Member for Bolton South East (Yasmin Qureshi), all the evidence shows that small units closer to home with a higher staff ratio are most suitable for girls and young offenders with complex needs. Ignoring the evidence in deciding the composition of the secure college would create a near impossible task for the college principal as the regime would inevitably need to be designed to cater for the needs of the majority, making it all the more likely that the needs of the minority would slip through the cracks.

The problem is compounded by the fact that Ministers have not carried out an equality impact assessment on how girls and younger offenders would fare in a secure college. That was confirmed in a written parliamentary answer to me on 16 June and by the Joint Committee on Human Rights earlier this year. The Committee’s report on the scrutiny of the Bill stated:

“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.”

I remind the Minister of his Department’s response to the Committee’s report. It claimed:

“We believe that the pathfinder Secure College, an establishment”

comprising

“distinct accommodation units and capable of supporting different regimes for the various groups of young offenders, will provide…an individualised service.”

My simple question for the Minister is as follows: how? How will those warm words be delivered in reality? The House has been given no credible information about what life inside a secure college would be like for those young people.

We know that young people in custody have complex needs: mental health issues, learning disabilities, drugs, alcohol and problems of domestic abuse and family breakdown. However, the Government have proposed no credible plan for how the secure college would cater for those needs. They have not explained how they will be able to deliver better results at a lower cost than has been possible in other youth custody environments or how they would do so when the average time young offenders spend in custody is only 79 days.

Right hon. and hon. Members do not have to take my word for it. Let me remind the Minister of the Secretary of State’s letter to the Chair of the Joint Committee on Human Rights earlier this year. Describing the secure college proposals, he said:

“The Bill establishes the secure college in law. Beyond the legal framework, the legislation does not specify details of the regime to be delivered within the secure college.”

The most obvious example of that is the secure college rules.

--- Later in debate ---

The Minister also talked about plans to house girls and the youngest offenders in distinct accommodation units, which makes the design of the secure college very important. I invite all right hon. and hon. Members to look at the proposed plans for the secure college, as it does not take an architect's eye to see that this is not “a school with a fence around it”, as the Secretary of State has described it. The plans are all but identical to the plans for a young offenders institution to be built on the very same site that the Government cancelled earlier in the Parliament. Although there might be plans for distinct accommodation in the secure college, the Bill contains no requirements for separate facilities in any future secure colleges.

[Yasmin Qureshi]

Effectively, the secure colleges are the old-style Borstals, and everybody knew that they did not work.

[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.