Notes on a Scandal: Why We Need More Secure Accommodation for Children

 

Not for the first time,  a senior judge has described the shortage of secure accommodation for the most troubled children in England and Wales as a “national scandal” after being told that last Friday 62 beds were needed and only two available.  The girl whose case the judge was considering was being cared for in an unsuitable hospital setting where most other patients were adults.

Last summer,  Supreme Court Judge Lord Stephens slammed the lack of proper provision for children who need to be detained to protect themselves or others as “disgraceful and utterly shaming". More than four years ago the most senior family judge was concerned at how many young people were having their liberty deprived in units which had not been approved as secure children's homes (SCH).  

So what’s the position? At the end of March this year, 220 approved places were available in 14 secure childrens homes in England and Wales, eight fewer places than in 2019; and 71 fewer than in 2010, down by a quarter in 12 years.  16 SCH’s have closed since 2002.

105 of the 220 available beds were contracted to the Ministry of Justice for children remanded or sentenced by the criminal courts, leaving just 115 for so called welfare cases. These are, in Lord Stephens’ words, “unfortunate children, who have been traumatised in so many ways, are frequently a major risk to themselves and to others. Those risks are of the gravest kind, and include risks to life, risks of grievous injuries, or risks of very serious damage to property”.

In their annual report for 2020-21, Ofsted said that around 25 children are waiting for a secure placement on any given day, at times substantially more. They also reported that on average 20 children from English local authorities were living in Scottish secure homes, having been placed there due to a lack of places in England. Ofsted said that the Scottish government had decided not to accept placements from local authorities outside Scotland from 2022, but I don’t know whether this has happened, further reducing available places.  The number of secure beds for children in the health service in England fell from 222 in 2017 to 188 last year.  

It's also true that some children’s needs are so complex and demanding that SCHs can’t always run at full capacity. This helps explain why a third of places in SCH’s were unoccupied at the end of March.  

So what have the government been doing to address the long standing problem? 

The 2021 Spending Review announced a welcome £259 million capital funding to increase both secure and open children’s homes, but details of the “transformational investment” is hard to find beyond a press release from the end of last year.  This says that final numbers of places in secure children’s homes being created will be confirmed in due course but as recently as June the picture has been opaque. New places require the commitment of local authorities but a clear plan setting out what is being funded over what timescale is surely overdue.

In the meantime, the Independent Review of Childrens Social Care has recommended that there should be enough SCH places not only to meet the needs of welfare cases in every region but  to end the use of “inappropriate and damaging” Young Offender Institutions and Secure Training Centres (STCs) for children in the youth justice system. At the end of June, I estimate there were 365 children under 18 in YOIs and STCs, with numbers projected to increase substantially over the next few years. While increased demand may be met in small part by 49 places in the new Secure School due to open in early 2024, accepting the Care Review’s recommendation would entail more than doubling the size of the existing SCH estate.

As the Care Review put it, “the prospect of recommending an increase in the number of secure children’s homes, or detaining children for justice and welfare reasons at all does not always sit comfortably”. But in cases where depriving a child of their liberty is genuinely necessary, SCHs provide much higher quality care than other options. Much more urgency is required to ensure there are sufficient beds to avoid placements in unapproved settings, to close Secure Training Centres and phase out prison service accommodation.   

Last year, Lord Stephens thought the scandalous lack of provision contained “all the ingredients for a tragedy”. We need to know what is being done to avert that.

Fires in Prison- A Neglected Issue of Safety ?

 

Statistics out today show an unwelcome uptick in fires in prison in the last financial year.[1] 

According to Home Office data, Fire and Rescue Services attended 840 incidents in prisons in England (plus a further 11 in what are referred to as Young Offender Units). For prisons, that’s almost 30% up on 2020-21, though thankfully lower than the year before Covid. The chart below shows pretty unclear trends over the last decade- unlike fires in hospitals (the yellow line) which have shown a slow but steady decline.

  

  

Fortunately, fatalities and casualties were reported in only about one in 10 fires, with "casualties" covering not only those with injuries requiring hospital attention or first aid at the scene but also those advised to have precautionary checks.

In the vast majority of fires, either no damage resulted, or it was limited to an area of less than 5 square metres. In most cases, evacuations were not necessary although on more than 180 occasions up to 5 people had to be “directed from a dangerous place to somewhere safe” and on one occasion more than 20 people.  In 170 incidents, people “received physical assistance to get clear of the area” involved.

More than nine out of ten prison fires were started deliberately with paper/cardboard and clothing/textiles being the commonest items ignited. Faulty apparatus or leads caused 17 of the accidental fires, misuse of equipment nine and “playing with fire” three. 

87% of fires were discovered immediately or within 5 minutes of starting, but 52 fires took between 5 and 30 minutes to discover. In 92% of incidents the fire service were called within 5 minutes. The first vehicle arrived within 5 minutes in 70% of incidents and within 20 in 97%.

While most prison fires look to be small scale and the response generally prompt, it is troubling but unsurprising to find that in 751 out of the 840 fires there was no fire safety system in place such as sprinklers. In 625 cases an alarm went off but in 81 there was no alarm and in 134 it did not operate or in fact raise an alarm.

Prisons chief Phil Copple told MPs in May that “we have about 35,000 prison places across the system that do not meet current fire regulation standards, and we have “temporary mitigations” in place agreed with the Crown Premises Fire Safety Inspectorate (CPFSI) to make sure that they can continue in use”. CPFSI enforces the 2005 Fire Safety Order in government buildings. This says that any person who has some level of control in premises must take reasonable steps to reduce the risk from fire and make sure people can safely escape if there is a fire.

In June, the Justice Committee asked then Prisons Minister Victoria Atkins about the temporary mitigations, and when she expected that all prison places will meet fire safety regulations. They haven’t had a reply – probably delayed due to the turnover of Ministers, the Committee has explained. CPFSI did tell me that the mitigation they accepted "related to single point smoke alarms for each individual cell. This was only a temporary measure until the programme to install automatic in cell fire detection is completed". CPFSI have previously reported that "it has proved to be a major managerial challenge for prison staff to prevent tampering and vandalism to these domestic smoke detectors."  

We know from Copple’s letter to the Assistant Coroner for Kent and Medway last year that the rollout of automatic fire safety systems across the estate “is forecast to be delivered and completed within the next five to seven years.” His letter was in response to the report of an Inquest into a prisoner who died in 2019 by smoke inhalation when a fire developed in his cell at HMP Swaleside. 

Copple told the Coroner that across the estate, interim safety measures are in place including- in addition to the portable fire detection devices in all cells that do not have automatic systems- more water mist firefighting equipment and portable smoke ventilation fans. There are annual inspections of fire safety equipment and of arson reduction strategies. There is improved staff training. 

The Independent Monitoring Board at HMP Styal in Cheshire has recently reported that as a result of an Enforcement Notice from CPFSI, the prison had to provide improved fire alarms and fire doors and remove all non-fire retardant furniture, bedding and soft furnishings. Moreover, "prison staff have endeavoured to reduce the fire risk for prisoners in the affected houses by implementing measures such as not locking them into their cells at night."

In his report, the Kent Coroner suggested that as another interim measure, in-cell fire detectors could be added to a small number of cells for prisoners that pose a higher risk of self-harm, barricading and fire setting. This was rejected by the Prison Service as "not feasible".  

I proposed last year that the Home Affairs and Justice Committees hold a short inquiry into fire safety in prisons and other places of detention. The latest figures add weight to the case for greater scrutiny of a neglected issue of safety. 

The Committees should also look at whether the CPFSI has the resources it needs. It has yet to publish an annual report for 2020-21, let alone 2021-22.

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[1] Prison data is available in the pivot tables in the “Other building fires dataset” https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/fire-statistics-incident-level-datasets

Separate and Silent

 

The prisons inspectorate (HMIP) published its first ever report on Separation Centres for terrorist prisoners today. First established five years ago, there are currently centres at Frankland and Woodhill high security prisons with a mothballed unit at Full Sutton. Their aim is to prevent prisoners with extreme views from radicalising others in the mainstream prison population, planning terrorist acts or disrupting good order in the prison.

Because  the use of the centres “has never fully taken off” , Prison inspectors possibly haven’t thought it worth their while to visit up until now. It's true that there are only 28 places in the three prisons, with only nine prisoners in the functioning units during April’s inspection visit. In fact there have only been 15 held in the centres over the last 5 years, all Muslim men; and only 21 referred for placement between 2017 and the end of last year.  These are much smaller numbers than are held in the longer established Close Supervision Centres (CSC) which hold prisoners posing the highest risks to other prisoners and staff and which HMIP visited in 2015 and 2017. 

But the Separation Centres should really have been inspected sooner, certainly well before the Government decided that they, along with the CSCs, should be more widely used.  Separation Centres also hold some of the most challenging and dangerous prisoners in the system, who are rightly subject to high levels of security and control. These can inevitably raise human rights concerns. Prisoners at Woodhill have in the past made allegations that institutional racism caused the Prison Service to establish such units only for Muslim prisoners.

Not least as the body leading the National Preventive Mechanism (NPM) which focuses attention on practices in detention that could amount to ill-treatment, HMIP should have taken more of an interest. Their inspections are based on international human rights standards, and according to the Ministry of Justice, some prisoners have used the Human Rights Act to frustrate their placement in a Separation Centre. Tellingly however, “the decision to locate a prisoner in one of the centres is part of wider national security and, as such, not within the remit of the Chief Inspector of Prisons to comment on”.

Making it easier for the prison service to use the centres in the future followed recommendations to that effect earlier this year from Jonathan Hall QC, the Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation (who I was surprised to discover is also a member of the NPM).  Hall’s report on Terrorism in prisons implied the centres were underused, blaming a low referral rate on an undue focus on the damage that separation might cause to the individual’s rehabilitation, with insufficient attention to the wider benefits of removing a radicalising individual from the wing.

As for the centres themselves, Hall was perhaps a little unwise to rely on a 2019  process study, undertaken entirely from a staff perspective, to conclude that regimes were “comprehensive in meeting the needs of the men and ensuring individuals were not disadvantaged by being separated”. In the study, "staff reported working tirelessly to provide a regime comparable to that provided in the main prison.”

Three years on, inspectors paint a more troubling picture. At Frankland “prisoners had collectively decided not to engage with the regime” and Woodhill’s day to day regime was often curtailed by serious staffing shortages. The decision by staff and leaders in both jails to describe the centres as “just another wing” meant that “opportunities were missed to think more creatively about how to work with prisoners”.

It’s encouraging that in today’s report, the inspectorate find outcomes to be good on safety- no violence was recorded in the year to April - and reasonably good on respect. But it’s puzzling that they rate management as reasonably good when “Governors and the separation centre management committee did not have a jointly agreed strategy and action plan, setting out the centres’ specific function that could be understood and acted on by staff”.

Less surprising is that work on “progression” - how prisoners can get back to normal location in the main prison- was not sufficiently good.  Most men refused to take part in formal risk reduction work, which made it difficult to identify any changes in behaviour which would evidence a case for ‘deselection’ from the centre.  

Even with a new policy leading to an increased number in Separation Centres and the likely re-opening of the Full Sutton unit, dispersal will rightly remain the predominant approach, with concentration reserved for the most dangerous few. For as the UN has said, keeping violent extremist prisoners separate from the general prison population can generate as well as reduce risks, elevating their status in their own and other prisoners’ eyes, reinforcing radicalised attitudes and/or enhancing rejection or stigmatization.

Hall is right that public confidence in the criminal justice system is shaken if terrorism occurs in prison or if people enter prison only to come out more dangerous; and the ability of prisons to function is gravely degraded if prison officers fear imminent terrorist attack. Finding the best way to prevent these outcomes must be a priority.

But as the UN has said, there is no one right answer to dealing with terrorist prisoners. What’s needed is more evidence about the effects of the Separation Centres and of other ways of accommodating them in England and Wales. Today’s report makes a welcome if overdue start to collecting it.