Arrangements to safeguard and promote welfare
Children Bill [Lords]
11:15 am
Mr Hilton Dawson (Lancaster and Wyre, Labour)
The amendment is, I believe, very important. It aims to address the scandal and disgrace of not only the huge number of children in prisons in this country—some 2,700 or 2,800—but the fact that so many of those children are so exceptionally vulnerable.
The fact that 14-year-old Adam Rickwood died in August 2004—he was the youngest person in modern British penal history to die in custody—is a fact that we should address through the course of the Bill. We should do everything that we can to try to ensure that the situations of Adam Rickwood, Gavin Myatt, Joseph Scholes and so many other young people who have died in prison custody in recent years are not replicated. Children in trouble are invariably troubled children, and we should attack the historic distinction that has been made in this country between those two categories.
The amendments aim to bring the courts into the safeguarding framework, requiring them to notify local safeguarding boards of decisions to detain children in custody. They aim to bring the Youth Justice Board into the—
It being twenty-five minutes past Eleven o'clock, THE CHAIRMAN adjourned the Committee without Question put, pursuant to the Standing Order.
Adjourned till this day at half-past Two o'clock.