Secure Training Centre (Amendment) Rules 2007

My Lords, since STCs were first created we have witnessed the resolute determination of the Government to expand child prisons, via the private sector, despite strong opposition from many quarters, including in your Lordships’ House. Even by the crudest measurement of results, they have failed to deliver—reoffending is over 80 per cent—but it is the day-to-day management of the children which is the chief cause of our deep concern today. Before 1997 there were no STCs, but these children were contained, managed, treated and helped in secure children’s homes, psychiatric units and other facilities in the community. Yet, with a similar clientele, Scotland has found it neither necessary nor desirable to go down this route—thank God. It was confirmed in a technical amendment during the Offender Management Bill that STCs are indeed classified as prisons, something that has been unclear in many minds when the YJB commissions places at both STCs and secure children’s homes for young offenders; of course, the latter are emphatically not prisons. The Bill also clarifies government policy that imprisonment is indeed the proper punishment for even our youngest, most difficult and troubled children, with a regime that will physically restrain them in the disturbing ways we are discussing. I take the view, along with most of the distinguished groups and organisations cited by my noble friend Lord Carlile, that penal custody is inappropriate and wrong for children. The profile of the children themselves, who are as young as 12, is very important. The most telling phrase which has been used to describe this group is that they have a ““disproportionate experience of loss””. This includes, literally, loss through bereavement or loss of family ties, loss of education, loss of mental health and well-being, loss of any place in the world, and loss of love. To have lost or never to have had such things in life is a terrible thing. There is overwhelming evidence that these children have a disproportionate experience of abuse—physical, emotional, sexual—and neglect. What flows from this, inevitably, is that such children are extremely difficult, challenging and disturbed. Some are capable of terrible things and displaying truly awful behaviour, sometimes to themselves and sometimes to others. Skill and experience in the management of these children—a hugely difficult task—is essential; it is important that that skill and experience is present. They are crucially and centrally still children—with all the needs and vulnerabilities, as well as the rights, of children—to whom we have a particular duty of care, both legal and moral. Yet we have managed to create regimes in which not only are they being forcibly restrained but where the process for restraint can and does damage them, not only emotionally—as we have heard, one child, Adam Rickwood, committed suicide following restraint—but also physically, including broken bones. On one occasion, tragically, a death resulted from a restraint called the double-seated embrace. I agree with Ms Sally Keeble in the other place, who was mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Stern, when she referred to a lack of sense of horror on the part of officialdom at the gruesome death of a boy and the catalogue of systemic failures on the part of various bodies, such as the YJB and the Home Office, which have taken years to come to light in an official inquiry. Tonight we are looking at the use of restraint and the extension of its permitted use from the specifically defined purposes of preventing harm, either to the child or to others, escaping, damaging property or inciting others to do the same, to include good order and discipline. PCC—physical control in care—includes restraints called distraction techniques, involving the nose, wrist or thumb, which can cause pain, sometimes bruising and nose bleeds. My noble friend Lord Carlile was absolutely right to say in his important report on restraint, segregation and strip-searching of children in STCs that such techniques should never be used to enforce compliance or as punishment. The fact that such techniques have been used over 3,000 times in one year demonstrates that they are commonplace and used in ways specifically ruled out by my noble friend Lord Carlile. A culture of restraint has developed. To allow the vague criterion of ““good order and discipline””—swearing or refusing to go to class are examples that have been given—would be to condone and endorse restraint unacceptably. I have visited three of the four STCs, where I was welcomed and met staff whose commitment and good intentions were clear. I have even had the double-seated embrace—the one which killed Gareth Myatt—demonstrated to me. These are indeed places of imprisonment and, as the figures show, places of punishment—not only by virtue of being in prison but because of the way in which the children are managed when they misbehave. I have learnt only recently that metal handcuffs are used in STCs although they are not used in prisons. It is the underlying ethos, the management styles—starting with the language of ““trainees”” and ““custody officers””—and the perception of roles and duties that demonstrate a failure to understand the extremes of damage and need of the children in this care. I have mentioned before in the House that there was once a chance to earn a teddy bear for good behaviour—itself a graphic little detail—but that has since been withdrawn at Medway. The minimal training is totally inadequate to meet the huge challenges of dealing with incidents in these STCs except, as so often, through force and inflicting pain. There is the lack of opportunity properly to review an incident with the child, the failure of the monitoring process or proper reporting and, finally, even the inspection process is through CSCI, which knows all about children’s homes but not so much about prisons. It need not be like this. At a secure children’s home in Scotland, St Mary’s Kenmure, whose clientele is exactly the same as those in the STCs, the ethos, management styles, skills and philosophy are very different. A crucial difference is the belief that the size of the place is important and should not be more than around 30 to 40 at most—half that of most of the STCs. All the large secure homes in Scotland are now closed. This is closely linked to the belief in the necessity of all the staff to really know and have a strong professional relationship with the children. For this, the whole environment must be small. To have a large place split into separate units is not the same and does not achieve the same thing. Part of the aim of the regime and the relationships is to bring the children to the point where they can start to control their own behaviour. The development of self-belief in the children grows from the understanding that the staff actually believe in them. From that comes the possibility of change and the child wanting to change. This is not just good thoughts and thinking, but in that place a reality. It is a different world from that of the STC. The idea of restraining children using painful techniques is anathema. That is not to deny that there are sometimes challenging and alarming incidents which the staff have to deal with, chiefly using TCI—therapeutic crisis intervention—techniques, a process of de-escalation, talking wherever possible through the event and always, after any incident, a restorative process of discussion. Importantly, the debriefing is also there for the staff. Training is a pre-condition with care staff, as you might expect. Care staff have a minimum of an SVQ or an HNC, the teachers have degrees and all staff have twice-yearly training and refresher courses. This is an acknowledgement of the challenging nature of the task of working with these children and of the skills required. By 2010 St Mary’s Kenmure will be registered with the Care Commission, which also requires all staff to be properly qualified. If we believe in our duties to children and in the possibilities for change and if we believe that it is wrong to harm any child—even our most difficult—while we work towards change, then it is imperative that we support my noble friend Lord Carlile against the unacceptable move to make it easier to do more harm under the pretext of good order and discipline. I would definitely welcome a review.