Secure Training Centres (STCs) are
30 years old today, or at least the idea of them. It was on March 2 1993 that Home Secretary Kenneth
Clarke first told MPs he would give courts a new power to detain children
aged 12 to 15 “whose repeated offending makes them a menace to the community”. A
Secure Training Order (STO) of up to two years would be served in brand new
institutions provided by the public, voluntary or private sectors.
The first STC opened at Medway in
1998 and three more thereafter. Only one remains in operation today. Clarke promised MPs that they would be
different from anything ever provided before. If he was proved right, it is only
because their history has perhaps been uniquely troubled in comparison with the
custodial facilities which preceded them. But in truth, they represent an all
too familiar tale of institutional failure in the secure care of children.
STC’s were a highly controversial measure
from the off and still are. Only a few months before they were
announced, the minimum age at which children could be given a custodial
sentence had actually been raised, from 14 to 15 with the implementation of the
1991 Criminal Justice Act. This had also brought 17 year olds into the Youth
Court for the first time. But the progressive tide was to turn very far and very fast.
In the run up to the STC
announcement, the usual slow moving consideration through Whitehall’s
policy-making machine had been fast tracked following the terrible abduction
and murder of 2 year old James Bulger by two 11 year old boys in Liverpool three
weeks earlier. There were already powers
on the statute books to impose long periods of detention on children convicted of grave crimes. But what Clarke’s Labour Party shadow Tony
Blair described as “hammer
blows struck against the sleeping conscience of the country” added huge
impetus to demands for a new and decisive initiative on youth crime more
broadly and in particular on persistent young offenders.
So, on secondment in the Home
Office at the time, I found myself helping colleagues and Clarke to hammer out
the text of a speech that reassured his party and the public that serious
action would be taken to get the problem under control without making too many unacceptable,
unaffordable, or undeliverable commitments.
When Clarke had become Home
Secretary after the 1992 election, he’d been keen to revive the idea of Approved
Schools as a way of dealing with juvenile offenders. These residential
facilities had operated under Home Office supervision until the 1970’s when
they were renamed Community Homes with Education, integrated into a network of
childrens home organised by local authorities and regulated by the Department
of Health (DH).
Clarke was influenced in part by
his local
Chief Constable in Nottinghamshire and other senior police who blamed
rising crime on small numbers of young people, whom courts were allegedly powerless
to detain. Clarke thought that local
authorities, who could apply to lock up these children, too often prioritised
care over control and that anyway there were insufficient secure places
available in which to detain them.
Based on research and experience, civil
service advice was cautious to say the least about the value of a new generation
of closed institutions. DH officials with whom we, increasingly uneasily, shared responsibility
for juvenile justice policy, were downright hostile- disliking the idea itself
and what they saw as an assault on their territory. Until February 1993, the
Home Office was planning what a senior colleague described as a “very greenish
White Paper” to air some options for the future. The context was changed
inexorably by the horrific events in Merseyside and a mounting public and political debate on
law and order.
During a frenetic three weeks, Clarke
was adamant that both new court powers and new institutions were needed. Some
quick and dirty research suggested 200 places should be created in what were
initially to be known as secure treatment centres- “training” replaced “treatment”
not long before the announcement. There
were to be five of these new centres.
DH officials and even Health
Secretary Virginia Bottomley argued hard that expanding existing local
authority secure units- some, ironically, the successors of Approved Schools -would work far better than creating an untested new type of facility. Their, to my mind,
wholly sensible view was side lined after Prime Minister John Major
publicly argued that in fighting crime “society needs to condemn a little
more and understand a little less.” Furthermore Clarke was determined to give
every opportunity for the private sector to run his new centres. So the STC’s
were conceived.
After the announcement, we had to
put flesh on the policy bones and come up with a specification and sites for
the new STCs, as well as prepare legislation. To inform this work, with DH
colleagues, we visited existing open and closed facilities run by health, education,
and social services. These included three Training Schools in Northern Ireland
later found to have been sites of
systemic failings and abuse (though not necessarily at the time of our
visit); a deserted former therapeutic
community of international renown in Surrey badly damaged by fire a few
years earlier and destined to be sold for conversion to flats not long after; and
several schools for children with emotional and behavioural difficulties which
while offering positive care during term time sent their pupils home in the
holidays. It became increasingly clear that local authority secure units
offered by far the best model; but Clarke had ruled out children subject to an STO serving their sentence in them.
One of our visits was made with a
junior Minister, Michael Jack, to St Charles Youth Treatment Centre. The former
Approved School in Essex had been converted into a specialist adolescent unit run
directly by DH to fill a perceived gap in provision in the wake of a notorious murder
committed by a 10 year old girl in 1968. On the way into the car park, Jack’s
Special Adviser expressed the view that the staff must be paid too much because
of the quality of their cars.
On the way back to Queen Anne’s Gate,
Jack said he wished that we had seen all these places before the announcement of the new STCs, rather
than afterwards.
This is the first of three blogs about STCs:
Next month’s will look at how the Centres got off the ground and their track
record.