Secure Training Centres: Not A Very Happy Birthday

 

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.