Secure Training Centres at 30: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly?

 

The second of three blogs about Secure Training Centres (STCs) to mark 30 years since they were first announced in March 1993.

Plans for the new STCs didn’t get an easy ride in Parliament, opposed both by Labour and in the Lords. Former Tory Home Secretary Lord Robert Carr led efforts there to allow Secure Training Orders (STO) to be served in local authority secure units as well as STCs- but what amounted to wrecking amendments ultimately came to nought. Provisions enabling STOs and STCs became law as the first part of Michael Howard’s Criminal Justice and Public Order Act in November 1994. 

But delays in finding suitable sites, selecting providers and finalising what were novel private financing arrangements meant the first Centre had not been built, let alone opened, by 1997 when New Labour came to power.

Faced with the prospect of buying out costly contracts, Labour stuck with the STC programme. Medway, the first Centre opened in April 1998, Hassockfield in County Durham, and Rainsbrook in the Midlands a year later. As part of a comprehensive youth justice reform, the STO disappeared, wrapped into a new Detention and Training Order- and STC’s were opened up to the full range of children remanded and sentenced by the criminal courts.

Home Secretary Jack Straw, who’d previously described private prisons as “morally repugnant”, hatched a plan with the Chair of the new Youth Justice Board (YJB) to create 400 places in STCs. In the end, only one additional centre was built, Oakhill in Milton Keynes, though the existing ones increased their capacity.  Rainsbrook created a mother and baby unit specifically designed to care for detained young mothers and their babies, and those in the final stages of pregnancy.

As a YJB member, I’d reluctantly backed more STC places in order to reduce the numbers of children held in prison establishments. But with several other Board members, I was uneasy that part of the price was also a reduction in places in secure childrens homes, including the closure of the only two secure units in Greater London. When STCs were first proposed, Tony Blair, then Shadow Home Secretary, wrote that it was ‘insane to set up these new centres at the same time as the local authorities are having to close some of their facilities for disturbed young people in communities throughout the country’. Yet the government he was leading was doing just that.

Competitions to run Medway and Rainsbrook had been won by security company Group 4 (now G4S) who had been running the UK’s first private prison The Wolds since 1992 and were, for reasons I’ve never fully understood, keen to expand into childrens custody. There was money to be made of course but serious risks of reputational damage if things went wrong.

When working on secondment in the Home Office, I’d been concerned that the company didn’t fully appreciate the challenges of undertaking such a complex task. At one meeting at their Worcestershire HQ, they’d argued that professional training for staff was much less important than the ability to faithfully follow procedures as set out in a manual. So it wasn’t a great surprise when Medway got off to a difficult start and when the evaluation of its first two years’ operation found staff confused about the purpose of the Centre and ill-prepared to deal with the trainees. 

While improvements followed, 16 years later Charlie Taylor’s youth justice review found that many staff working in STCs “do not have the skills and experience to manage the most vulnerable and challenging young people in their care, nor have they had sufficient training to fulfil these difficult roles”. Promising recent initiatives to provide such training have proved too little too late.

So how should the lifetime performance of STCs be assessed?

The early years were overshadowed by the tragic deaths of two boys. 15 year old Gareth Myatt lost consciousness and died following physical restraint by three staff members at Rainsbrook in April 2004.  Four months later, 14 year old Adam Rickwood hanged himself not long after being restrained at Hassockfield. Inquests on Gareth and Adam each returned a damning verdict, not least about the failure of the Youth Justice Board to monitor the lawfulness and safety of restraint techniques used in STCs at the time. The Board, me included, should have been much more alert to what was going on and started work on the vexed question of physical restraint much sooner.   

What could be termed the middle years saw positive performance reported in each of the Centres with Ofsted rating Medway and Rainsbrook “good” or “outstanding” after each visit between 2007 and 2015, with G4S run Oakhill the same between 2009 and 2015. Serco’s Hassockfield was slightly more mixed but “good with outstanding features” in its final inspection in 2014 shortly before it closed, deemed surplus to requirements given big falls in the numbers of children in custody.  

Through this period however, levels of restraint remained high with a series of efforts to minimise its use achieving limited success. Routine strip searching was replaced by a risk assessment process in STCs in 2011 but still widely used. There were probably spells when the STCs provided levels of care and education comparable to that in secure childrens homes, although it is likely that a culture of control was prioritised over rehabilitation and safeguarding even then.

But it’s the years since 2015 which have been a disaster for the three STC’s that remained open.

In 2015, Ofsted reported serious incidents of gross misconduct by staff and managers at Rainsbrook with young people subject to degrading treatment, racist comments, and care from people under the influence of illegal drugs. Following its transfer to new provider MTC NOVO in 2016, Rainsbrook had problems recruiting and retaining staff with matters coming to a head during the pandemic.

In 2020 Rainsbrook was subject to an “urgent notification” (UN) to the Secretary of State when inspectors found children receiving a bleak and Spartan regime, with little encouragement to get up in the mornings and senior managers unaware of what was going on. Inexplicably, Rainsbrook deteriorated further, receiving another UN in 2021 after children and staff told inspectors of their concerns that a child or adult would be harmed or die as a result of the poor practice and management in the centre. The contract with MTC was terminated in December 2021 and Rainsbrook’s closure was confirmed at the end of last year.  

At Medway, in January 2016 an undercover Panorama documentary showing apparent mistreatment of young people and descriptions of deliberate falsification of records by staff prompted a police investigation, dismissals and resignations. Medway was transferred to the Prison service, who, incredibly, was unable to account for all of the keys on handover from G4S. Despite some initial improvements, Inspectors continued to rate Medway as requiring improvement, or in its final inspection, inadequate, due to ineffective strategies to manage serious and significant incidents. Medway closed in March 2020 and is currently being remodelled as the site of the first Secure School.

Oakhill was also made subject to the UN process in 2021 after an inspection revealed children living in a dilapidated environment, experiencing frequent incidents of violence and use of force, and being cared for by inexperienced staff.

Here at least, the situation has improved with the Youth Custody Service deciding to remove its post-Urgent Notification oversight procedures in January 2023 following sustained progress.  It is the last STC standing.

Despite the historically low numbers in custody, the closure of Medway and Rainsbrook has put pressure on the wider secure youth estate, forcing girls once again to be placed in a prison setting, albeit a specially designed unit at Wetherby Young Offender Institution.

Why did things go so wrong and so fast over the last eight years? Have children become more challenging? Good staff harder to recruit and keep? Or did inspection and monitoring arrangements fail?

Or are there more fundamental problems with a privatised model of care for some of the most vulnerable children?

Next month’s final blog in the series will offer some possible reasons for the catastrophic failures of STCs and whether they offer any lessons for the new Secure School due to open next year.