Written evidence to be reported to the House
Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill
1:15 pm
Stephen Shaw: No, it is not. My office would like to see an extension of the remit on complaints in respect of children held in secure training centres. Under the current sentencing framework, two children could be convicted of the same offence and receive the same sentence, but one might go to a secure training centre and the other to a young offender institution. The child in the young offender institution would come within my current and future statutory remit, but the child in the training centre would not come under my remit regarding complaints. I do not think that I am betraying any secret by saying that the Youth Justice Board, my office and the MOJ have been looking at that. My own view is that the remit should be extended to secure training centres, and I am hopeful that that will be agreed during the passage of the Bill.
When it comes to local authority secure accommodation, you have two potential anomalies. The anomaly at the moment is that, as I said, two children convicted of the same offence could receive the same sentence and they could go to a secure training centre or to a young offender institution, but of three children convicted of the same offence and receiving the same sentence, one could end up in a local authority secure home. You could argue that that is an anomaly: should not the same protections apply?
The trouble with that is it runs into the other potential anomaly, which is that many children in local authority care in the same home are not offenders and would not have access to me. My understanding is that children in the local authority accommodation have other routes through which they can complain. I personally am content that that is the case and that it would create more of an anomaly if just a small number of those children were able to come to me and the rest not.