Secure Training Centre (Amendment) Rules 2007

My Lords, I support the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, in his Prayer to annul. Much of what I would have said has already been set out splendidly by him, my noble friend Lady Stern and others, so I will confine myself to one or two points. The amount of restraint used in secure training centres is quite astonishing. If, as the Government hope, the techniques of restraint are used only as a last resort, it seems extraordinary that they are used so often. It is most people’s experience when dealing with children of this kind that they are indeed the most troubled and troublesome, and that almost all of them have profound long-term mental difficulties. Many, as we know, will go on to self-harm for several years and many will remain in institutions for the rest of their lives. They form a profoundly disturbed group. As the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, said, we have stakeholder comments in the briefing from the Youth Justice Board about when such techniques might be used. He did not give us an example, but I hope that he will allow me to quote one provided for us in its notes on 27 June: "““For example, if a young person on a house unit refuses to go to bed, a number of staff members may need to sit with him or her. If this means there are insufficient staff on hand in the unit to carry out duties such as monitoring other young people who may be at risk of self-harm, other young people may be at risk. PCC””—" restraint— "““may have to be used if all other avenues fail. Similarly if all young people on a house unit refuse to go to bed, there would be a breakdown of the safe operation of the unit””." So we progress ineluctably from a simple refusal to go to bed to a violent act, albeit sanctioned, in the name of prevention when clearly there are a number of other ways in which someone might be able to intervene in such a situation. That strikes me as one of the worst circumstances in which to use techniques of this kind. If we look at the figures for the use of restraint in the four centres, there is a threefold difference between the use of restraint in one centre and its use in another. There are three possible reasons for this. The first is that incidents are being recorded in different ways. However, the guidance on how to record incidents suggests that that is unlikely. The second possibility is that there may be a different range of children with different problems in each of the four units. That is a real issue and the Minister may be able to tell me whether that is the case. However, I suspect, of course, that one unit is better staffed than another, has better training and leadership from its managers, and has staff who have learnt how to use their personal resources to control situations by spotting a potentially difficult one coming up and defusing it, thereby diverting the potential energy elsewhere. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Warner, that I do not want to diminish the difficulties faced by the staff in these units, or the challenges that these children pose for them. None of us knows how to deal adequately with these children. We have maintained a pretty old-fashioned approach. There has been no real shift in our understanding of what are the best techniques to handle difficult and violent children from what it was 20 or 30 years ago. We know that the more use of violence there is, the more it will be perpetrated in further acts of violence as the child grows up. As was said by the right reverend Prelate, violence begets violence. Too many of these young people will go on to live lives where their only relationship with other people is exercised through further violent exchanges. I hope that we will look seriously at reviewing the use of these techniques, and consider the point made by my noble friend Lord Dearing about the totally unacceptable and dangerous acts which are both difficult and dangerous for the person perpetrating them but far worse for the children on the receiving end, who are at serious risk of death from asphyxia or cardiac arrest, particularly when they are taking mental health medication. Further, we should look rather more closely at what research there is into how to manage these children. I suspect that we are putting them into secure training centres of the kind we have at the moment, into our criminal justice system youth offending institutions, and even local authority homes because we really do not know what to do with them. Let us take a closer look at this.