Crisis in Youth Custody?

 

The task of finding alternative placements for the 33 children held at the unsafe Rainsbrook Secure Training Centre (STC) looks more challenging given today’s inspection report about the only other STC,  G4S run Oakhill in Milton Keynes.  

The Oakhill  inspection, prompted by two serious, violent incidents in which several staff suffered significant injuries, found that for a short period in the spring  “senior managers were in danger of losing control across the centre”. Inspectors were told that one of the factors leading to the instability was the arrival of a small number of children originally allocated to Rainsbrook after admissions there were halted.

Although by the time of the inspection at the end of last month, children at Oakhill were experiencing a calm, structured daily routine, because “uncertainties remain in the centre’s capacity to achieve a sustainable reduction in violence”, it would seem risky to move more than a very small number of  Rainsbrook residents there now.  Inspectors report that a high number of staff have left, many without notice after completing their induction programme and “a significant number have been dismissed”. The recruitment of new staff has not replenished the shortfall, which has been compounded by high sickness levels.  

There should be some options instead to move the Rainsbrook children to secure childrens homes, by far the best institutions in the closed estate for under 18s. At 31 March 2021, the Ministry of Justice were contracting  107 places in seven homes but only 55 children were placed in them by the Youth Custody Service (YCS). It is puzzling why the use of SCHs has fallen – 80 children were placed in them by the YCS a year earlier. 

The ultimate decision whether to admit a child rests with the SCH provider who must comply with Children Act regulations requiring them to accept only children whose needs they can meet alongside children already placed within the home. A recent study has found that “in practice, they will resist taking too many children with the same needs or risks, including those with sexually harmful behaviour.”  But most of those who have been at Rainsbrook should be moved to an SCH.

 If the YCS cannot reach agreement with secure childrens homes about all of the Rainsbrook children, they may look at transferring them to one of the five Young Offender Institutions, four of which are run by the prison service and one by G4S. Given that  “STCs hold children who are deemed to be too vulnerable to be put into YOIs”, it would be hard to square such moves with “the aim of promoting children’s safety and ensuring decisions are made with children’s best interests as a primary consideration” as placement guidance requires. But at the end of the day, such decisions are made  “against a view of the available accommodation”.  

At least as far as Detention and Training Orders are concerned , placements could conceivably be made not only in STCs, SCH’s and YOIs, but “such other accommodation or descriptions of accommodation as the Secretary of State may specify by regulations”.  Maybe it is time to explore these.

Ironically, this mess arises in the context of some good news. At the end of April 2021, the number of children under 18 in custody was 493, the lowest since records began. This is a decrease of 23 compared with the previous month and 171 fewer than in April 2020.  Despite this welcome and sustained  fall in numbers - there were nearly 3,000 children locked up 15 years ago- the failure to invest the savings in expanding and developing secure childrens homes together with the glacial progress of the new Secure School has exposed a fundamentally broken system.