Police and Justice Bill

My Lords, I start by declaring an interest as the president of the Howard League for Penal Reform. As has already been said, I was able to spend a considerable time in the past year or so preparing a report for the Howard League on the use of restraints on children in custody. While preparing that report, I had the opportunity to visit a number of institutions and to talk to staff and children in them, and I learnt a great deal. I applaud the initiative of my noble friend Lady Linklater, who moved the amendment very eloquently. In moving this radical new proposal, I would that we could debate it before the threshold of the dinner hour in a much fuller House, rather than in the twilight of the Horlicks hour. Having said that, the issue loses none of its importance through being put on the record in a rather empty House. The fundamental question being asked by my noble friend Lady Linklater is, ““Should we be using the penal model for children, or is it now completely outdated, and should we not be moving towards a child-centred model?””. I support her view that we should be following the latter course. I share the views of the noble Baronesses, Lady Linklater and Lady Howe, that some good practice takes place in the youth estate, but it is not universal by any means. My headline would be that if you look at what is happening in the juvenile estate and to children detained in custody, you will see that the system is destructive, underfunded and unfit for purpose. Yesterday, I chaired a conference sponsored by the Greater London Authority, the Youth Justice Board and Nacro. Between 70 and 80 practitioners were there and I did not hear anyone demur from that view, including many chairs of youth courts in the Greater London area. All of them feel like King Canute and that is easy to understand. Briefly, I wish to mention eight points that seem fundamental to the criticism that many others now make of how young offenders are dealt with. First, the system is outrageously expensive. If you think about it, it is extraordinary that it is cheaper to send two children to Eton than to keep one child in many of the custodial institutions that we have been discussing. To put it another way, if a probation officer was appointed to stand next to one young offender every day of the year, we would save a great deal of money and probably achieve much more than by putting that young offender in custody. These disposals are not working and they are vastly expensive. Secondly, many young offenders are being sentenced to short terms in custody; nine weeks is a common period. Absolutely nothing can be achieved in nine weeks except to separate the young offender from his or her family, to dissociate them from normal life and to make them feel angry, vengeful and neglected. That view is based on my discussions of these short sentences with staff in young offenders’ institutions. My third point relates to education, which was raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Howe. The education provided in many establishments that hold young offenders is patchy. Occasionally, it is excellent, but it is desultory in some places. It is not sufficient in quantity and there is a terrible variation in standards. It is astonishing that while populations of such institutions have been allowed to grow, the Government have neglected to deal with the shortfall in education. Many youngsters go into these institutions unable to read, write or count properly and they emerge just as unable to read, write or count. My fourth point relates to something that astonished me as I visited these places. I was not aware of how small they were. You put sometimes hundreds of young males, all of whom have bags of energy, into an institution which has no playing fields. Young men spend months in these places and they never run. That is an extraordinary way to deal with young people. On any objective view of the education of the young, one of the first questions that a parent would ask would be, ““Is there space for them to do activities outside the classroom?””, or, if it is a boarding school, outside their dormitories. Yet, for some reason, Governments persist—this is a historic problem that is not necessarily attributable only to the present Government—in building or keeping these places in urban areas, often where property is extremely expensive and where staff cannot afford to live. My fifth point has been mentioned by both my noble friend Lady Linklater and the noble Baroness, Lady Howe: the separation of children from their families. There is no youth custodial institution in London. Feltham, which I believe houses 700 or 800 young offenders at present, is the nearest to London. But the young people do not stay at Feltham; they are dispersed all over the country. Yesterday, at the conference that I mentioned, I heard of many cases in which children are dispersed sometimes 200 miles from London. That is no way of treating them if they are to be reintegrated into the society that they have left. That brings me to my sixth point, which is about how release is dealt with. When I was preparing my Howard League report, I visited one institution where, entirely voluntarily, the staff had started an excellent scheme to ensure that when youngsters left the institution they knew where they were going, whom they were going to, why they were going there and that somebody would pay some attention to them afterwards. But the norm is often that a 15 or 16 year-old is put in what is in effect a taxi, with a social worker whom they have never seen before and who means nothing to them, they are taken to accommodation of which they know nothing and the following day they are out on the streets. What kind of sentence planning is that? My seventh point is about racial imbalance. If you go to any custodial institution, particularly those holding offenders convicted in London, you will find that something like 50 per cent of them come from a black or ethnic-minority community. What this surely demonstrates is that, in areas where there is a large concentration of black and ethnic minority youngsters, prevention of crime is not being dealt with adequately. In 1996, the Audit Commission produced an excellent report telling us that, at the money values of that time, £1 spent on the prevention of youth crime saved £7 later. That is particularly so in areas where there are large concentrations of minorities. My final point relates to mental illness. It is now a given that something like 50 per cent of the youngsters who are detained in custody are suffering from a diagnostic mental illness—a mental illness identified in one of the two international diagnostic manuals. It is also a given that children suffering from mental illness are far less likely to receive appropriate treatment if they are in custody than if they are not in custody. That surely is neglect by the state. I suggest to the Government that it is high time that the principle was accepted and put into practice that a child who is in custody and mentally ill has the same right to child and adolescent mental health services as any other child and that it is an act of neglect by the state if they are not given those services. What are youth custody institutions for? If they are for anything, apart from protecting society from a very small number of those whom we might have to acknowledge as very dangerous offenders, they are for setting boundaries, so that young people, when they leave those institutions, are more able to understand what they are permitted to do and what they will not get away with doing in the community. Are we achieving that? In my view, not at all. My view is that we are imprisoning more and more detainees and achieving less and less with every one. There is one certainty about the present system, which is that almost every youngster who serves a youth custody sentence of one kind or another will be back. That surely is the saddest reflection on the way in which we are dealing with young offenders. I ask the Government to take advantage of the new clause proposed by my noble friend and to tell the House that, at long last, they are taking this issue seriously and are prepared to have a truly radical look at youth sentencing.