Hindsight: Is the new Prisons Minister making a Quick Fix or Long term Plan for Youth Custody?

 

Just before Christmas, in a letter from Prisons Minister Damian Hinds to the Justice Committee, the government slipped out their decision that Rainsbrook Secure Training Centre (STC) will not be re-opening, for young people at any rate. The Ministry of Justice has spent the best part of a year deciding what to do with the empty centre since its contract with private provider MTC to run the child jail was terminated in December 2021.

Rainsbrook was the second STC to open, in July 1999. Five years later, 15 year old Gareth Myatt died there in shocking circumstances while being physically restrained by staff. Initial contractor G4S continued to manage the centre and for some time it probably performed the best among the four STCs. But in 2015  inspectors reported on serious incidents of gross misconduct by staff, including managers, with young people subject to degrading treatment, racist comments, and care by personnel under the influence of illegal drugs.

A year later, US company MTC won the contract to run Rainsbrook , but Inspectors raised urgent and significant concerns about treatment and conditions in 2020 and 2021. After being told it was unsafe for residents and staff, then Justice Secretary Robert Buckland removed the 33 children held there in June 2021. A third of these were “decanted” to Young Offender Institutions (YOI), including a small number of girls who were placed at Wetherby YOI. Girls under 18 had not previously been placed in YOIs for many years.

Earlier this year, the National Audit Office (NAO) reported that the MoJ was considering re-opening Rainsbrook STC at reduced capacity and with  increased staff-to-child ratios, possibly under prison service management. This would help meet the expected increase in demand for youth custody places. But now it seems, the capacity is no longer thought to be needed.

Despite projected increases the numbers of children in custody have remained under 500 during the course of this year.  Indeed, occupancy levels remain low enough for Hinds to tell MPs that the Youth Custody Service will keep more young people in the youth estate beyond the age of 18, instead looking  “to transition young people up to their 19th birthday where appropriate”. Girls will once again be held in an STC – Oakhill, the last one operating- although some may stay at Wetherby YOI.

Strangely, annual prison population projections, normally published in November, don’t seem to have been produced this year.  So there’s no update on whether the numbers of juveniles in custody are still likely to rise to 700 by 2025. Given the volatility of the youth custody estate, any increases could put at risk modest improvements in safety and regimes seen recently.  

In the meantime, what will happen to the Rainsbrook site? Hinds wrote that wider work is taking place to determine how best the site can be utilised in the future, and, somewhat delphically, that the decision “will allow us to focus on other areas of our work”. The NAO report suggested that the MoJ had ruled out turning it into a second Secure School because of the costs and delays of doing the necessary building conversion.

Turning Medway into a suitable site for the first Secure School has taken much longer than planned- and Hinds’s letter reveals yet further delays. The Medway school is apparently on track to open in Spring 2024 - later than the November 2023 to February 2024 window officials promised MPs on the Public Accounts Committee in May . It seems odd that no funding agreement has yet been signed with the provider- Oasis Restore- that was selected back in July 2019. No doubt the MoJ will explain when they provide the Committee with an update on progress against the timetable in January 2023.

Perhaps Rainsbrook will be used to provide extra places for the men’s estate which is under so much pressure that police cells have been made available to the Prison Service. It’s close to two prisons and while its design as an STC is not ideal for adults, Medway STC was briefly used for adults during lockdown, (before work got underway to make it more suitable for children).

The Justice Committee will surely want to question Mr Hinds early in the New Year about his planning for custodial capacity both in the childrens’ and adults’ estates.