Lynne Featherstone (Shadow Minister, Home Affairs; Hornsey & Wood Green, Liberal Democrat)

I beg to move, That the clause be read a Second time.

This is a probing new clause. It is about trying to end penal custody for children, following the publication of the Carlile inquiry report. We believe that the Bill offers the perfect opportunity to improve the situation. Figures from the Children’s Rights Alliance for England show that about 83 per cent. of children who are locked up are held in state-run prisons, 9 per cent. are held in private prisons or secure training centres and the rest are in local authority secure children’s homes.

Children should only ever be detained in local authority secure children’s homes, where child care standards are upheld and social care professionals can intervene positively in the lives of children and their families. Secure children’s homes provide young people with support tailored to their individual needs. Currently, they are generally used to accommodate young offenders aged 12 to 14, girls up to the age of 16 and 15 to 16-year-old boys assessed as vulnerable.

In order to give children a chance of having a future and improving their lives, instead of learning new ways of being a criminal from more experienced criminals in the state prison system, we ought to stop sending them to places that do not address their needs and help them out of the criminal system. Children in penal custody are known to be among the most disadvantaged in our society. More than a quarter have the literacy and numeracy ability of an average seven-year-old, 85 per cent. show signs of a personality disorder, over half have been in care or involved with social services and most have been excluded from school.

Mark Pritchard (Wrekin, The, Conservative)

Will the Minister give way?

Lynne Featherstone (Shadow Minister, Home Affairs; Hornsey & Wood Green, Liberal Democrat)

Promoted so soon!

Mark Pritchard (Wrekin, The, Conservative)

I am grateful to the shadow Minister for giving way. I have a point about children in care, which is a slight deviation, but hopefully a helpful one.

Does the hon. Lady agree that, although these measures are dealing with the end problem, it would be better to deal with children in care by ensuring that social services monitor their education, so that they do not leave school without qualifications and become encouraged, through their circumstances, to enter into a life of crime? We should be helping such children while they are in care, many of whom have good intellects and skills; in fact, they all have skills—just different ones. We should be addressing the front end, not just the outputs.

Lynne Featherstone (Shadow Minister, Home Affairs; Hornsey & Wood Green, Liberal Democrat)

I could not agree more with the hon. Gentleman. Clearly, we should be thinking about what can be done in advance, because prevention is preferable to cure. However, the cure would be blighted were the children to be put in prisons where it is likely that they would not get the help that they needed.

Penal custody does not address the problems of severely disadvantaged children, but local authority secure children’s homes do. Some 82 per cent. of children who leave young offender institutions reoffend after incarceration. The Minister and I have previously discussed our keenness to change behaviour and to give people pathways out of criminality. I hope that she will answer positively, albeit this is a probing new clause.

Fiona Mactaggart (Parliamentary Under-Secretary, Home Office; Slough, Labour)

I thank the hon. Lady for raising this important issue, which has been extensively discussed in Parliament. It is right that we take great care in those rare circumstances—unfortunately, not rare enough—where children end up in the custody of the state following offending.

The first responsibility, as the hon. Member for The Wrekin (Mark Pritchard) said, is for the state to intervene in a preventive way, to reduce the factors associated with offending by young people. Education is a factor, and others relate to family offending patterns, lack of parental support and so on. Indeed, much of the work done by my right hon. Friend the Minister of State on the respect agenda and support for parenting has played an important part in reducing offending among children.

Mark Pritchard (Wrekin, The, Conservative)

While the Government have for many months—indeed, for many years—lectured parents throughout the land on how to be a good parent, the fact remains that the worst parent in the land is the state itself.

Fiona Mactaggart (Parliamentary Under-Secretary, Home Office; Slough, Labour)

What the hon. Gentleman means is that the outcomes for children in the care of the state are often the worst outcomes. I am afraid that his remark did not deal with causation, because such poor outcomes are among the factors that make it likely that a child will come into the care of the state. Those children are often themselves victims of horrendous crimes. They have often had several very damaging experiences before coming into the care of the state. The hon. Gentleman is right to be passionate about the need to improve their care. I assure him that much has been done to that end by the Government. However, he is not right to assume that the nature of state care is the only cause of the problems of those young people. Indeed, their problems are, as I have said, among the reasons for bringing them into care.

The secure estate for children and young people, to which the new clause relates, is diverse, with different types of establishment adapted to the needs of the different age groups, and the varying degrees of vulnerability of the children who are detained. Young offender institutions provide for the upper part of the   age range—15 to 17-year-olds, apart from the most vulnerable of those. It is reassuring that we have now gone past the stage during which rare cases occurred of 17-year-olds—mostly young women—in the mainstream prison estate. That group is now separated from the adult offending population.

Secure training centres are predominantly for those younger than the 15 to 17-year-old group—the younger trainees. The centres are particularly focused on education. They can accommodate some offenders whom local authority children’s homes find too difficult to manage. An issue arises of the difficulties of managing some of those young people. The effect of the new clause would be to limit custodial provision for all under-18s to secure children’s homes. Those are valuable institutions and they form an important part of the secure estate. They are used primarily for younger offenders. Precisely for that reason, however, they would not be able to cope with a large influx of 16 and 17-year-olds. Introducing large numbers of people of that age group into secure children’s homes, even if it were practical, would put younger children at risk. I understand why the hon. Lady has tabled the new clause, but our approach of segmenting age groups seems to me wiser than the one that the new clause would require us to take.

The Government have always made it clear that custody can only be a last resort for offenders who are children. That is the point on which we can agree. We believe that there is scope for reducing the number of under-18s in custody. The Youth Justice Board has a specific target of reducing the under-18 custodial population by 10 per cent. In many ways that would, I believe, be the first place to start in reducing the detention of children, wherever that might be. However, we are firmly persuaded that in the case of serious or dangerous offenders—even though they might be young—custody should be available to protect the public. We would be failing in our duty if we did not take the necessary steps to achieve that.

I recognise the excellent intentions underlying the new clause, but removing under-18 places in young offenders institutions and secure training centres would do nothing to reduce crime, and would not help the troubled young people that the proposal is intended to serve. By putting older young people and young people of a younger age in the same institution, it could endanger many of them.

Lynne Featherstone (Shadow Minister, Home Affairs; Hornsey & Wood Green, Liberal Democrat)

I thank the Minister for her cogent and intelligent response. I do not think that either of us has cracked the problem completely, because I accept that there is an obvious danger in putting someone who has behaved dangerously together with younger children. The 10 per cent. target for reducing the number of under-18s who are given custodial sentences is a good start. Nevertheless, I feel that something is still missing for 15 to 17-year-olds, in terms of giving them what they need to get back on a path into society with the skills that they need. However, on the basis that neither of us has reached a   totally satisfactory solution, and that we are all seeking to move in the same direction, I beg to ask leave to withdraw the motion.