Richard Monkhouse, Frances Crook and Sarah Salmon gave evidence.

We shall now hear from the Magistrates’ Association, the Howard League for Penal Reform and the Criminal Justice Alliance. First, please will the witnesses introduce themselves for the record?

Richard Monkhouse: It should be ladies first, but I am Richard Monkhouse, a magistrate in Trafford in Greater Manchester and chairman of the Magistrates’ Association. I have been a magistrate for about 17 or 18 years in the adult and the youth court, although not in the family court, so I have some experience of the practical issues.

Frances Crook: I am Frances Crook, chief executive of the Howard League for Penal Reform, a charity working for less crime, safer communities and fewer people in prison.

Sarah Salmon: I am Sarah Salmon, interim director of the Criminal Justice Alliance, a coalition of 74 organisations that focus on various things to reduce the size of the prison population and to ensure a responsible, accountable and effective justice system.

I want to follow up on the issue of secure colleges, since we have just been discussing them. I read the Howard League’s briefing. On the issue of how effectively we are going to use staff, it seems to me that one of the problems is that we have some very dedicated speech and language therapists, for example, who are having to be peripatetic at the moment. Could one of the advantages of a secure college be that we could have a permanent presence of specialists in place, which would allow a day-by-day rapport to be built up with individual young people who need intensive help?

Frances Crook: I am very worried by size. We have to remember that these institutions are the children’s homes. First and foremost, they live there. This is a home and it has to replicate a home environment. On top of that we then build an edifice of treatment, education and training, but the most important thing is that it has to be a home  environment. I support the Children’s Commissioner’s office in saying that they have special needs—a range of needs—and that to force too many programmes on them would be a mistake. We have to work with children as individuals. When we have hundreds of boys together—I am assuming that most will be boys—our experience, having done this several times before, shows that that fosters violence, aggression and staff cuts, not staff involvement, especially since the indication is that there is going to be very little money spent on this.

The money that has been indicated to build this is tiny. Prisons normally cost three or four times that amount for this number of people—that is for adults, never mind children. Looking at the history of investing in buildings for education in custody, it costs a lot more than this. It looks as though the capital expenditure and revenue expenditure is going to be done very spartanly. I doubt, therefore, that the money will be there to be spent either on making these places homely and safe, or on providing the range of speech and language training, educational training, health therapy, physical therapy and outdoor exercise that the children will require.

Q 17

If there is a consolidation of some of the other, smaller units, surely there will be a ploughing back into the system of the revenue that would have been spent on that. With careful design will come some of the benefits you rightly raise. For example, there will be a cohort of young men with, let us say, SLT needs, and another cohort with attachment disorder. Would there not be more prospect of day-to-day involvement than—with the best will in the world; I am a great supporter of SLT services—with the peripatetic approach? Sometimes, once a week will not be enough for the young people we are talking about.

Frances Crook: Most of these children will be there for only a short time. They will have come from very disruptive backgrounds and will be very angry. Identifying their needs will often take several weeks, and then they will be ready for release. That is the experience now in many of our institutions. Most of the children are there for only a short period.

Q 18

So the intensive work is vital, is it not, because of the brevity?

Frances Crook: There is a fundamental problem here. The assumption behind your question is that we are sending children to custody to get services to deal with their language or educational needs. That is not what we should be doing. We have to make sure that those deficits are dealt with in the community. Furthermore, even if such services are intensively provided for a few weeks in custody, what happens afterwards? The focus on custody is misplaced; it sucks in limited resources, which are then taken from the community. I am very worried about that.

The research that we are about to publish shows that many of the young people ending up in custody are there not because they have committed serious and violent offences at all, but because they have failed, or been failed, in the community. The community sentences and children’s services are not delivering the support that those children need, so the sentences are being breached and the children are going back into custody as a result. It is a wrong-headed and expensive approach  to focus support in a custodial institution when we could prevent that and the damage it inevitably brings from happening in the first place.

The Children and Families Bill will do a lot, I think, to try to bring together services around young people. Everyone in the room agrees about the importance of early Intervention. However, there will still be a cohort who slip through the net whose needs are not identified at an early age and who end up in the criminal justice system. The point is that there will still be a small—reducing, I hope—number of young people who will need such intensive help. If it is administered and done correctly, is not this more concentrated approach potentially more helpful to the young people who end up in the criminal justice estate, as opposed to a more pick-and-mix approach, which can happen now?

Frances Crook: I would like to say something very positive about what has happened in the last two years. The Government have overseen a significant drop in the use of custody for children; there are only about 60 young girls in custody today, which is a fantastic achievement and much to be welcomed.

The small, local authority-run secure homes remain. They have a track record of success and provide a model of success for children. They are safe, the children are not restrained in the same number of ways, the reoffending rate is better and the care that the children receive is much better as a whole, looked at in the round—all the services that they need are provided. That is the model that we should look at: a home for children who need it.

Q 19

As you rightly said, there will not be a lot of money for the secure colleges that are being proposed. It is not clear at the moment whether they will be segregated by gender. Bearing in mind that 95% of the children in question are male, would it be appropriate to have both genders together in the same institution, given the psychological, social and other backgrounds of the children?

Frances Crook: I think that would put the children at considerable risk in a big institution, with hundreds of boys and maybe a small number of girls. Think of the ratio at the moment—there are about 1,200 children in custody, of whom about 60 are girls. If you put that ratio into one large institution, that is putting the girls at considerable risk. I have seen it happen.

One of the secure training centres, which has about 100 children in it, had both boys and girls; the girls were so seriously at risk and things were going so seriously wrong that the girls had to be taken out. It now takes only boys. When you have big institutions like that, the girls are at risk of sexual assault and exploitation. More subtly than that, it is not just about the levels of violence; it is actually that the girls cannot flourish because there are so few of them and the institution is run for men by men. They cannot flourish into young women because of the threats they experience daily. It is a completely inappropriate environment for girls.

Q 20

Leading on from the challenges that occur in these secure colleges, a proposal is to be debated about using reasonable force in secure colleges to ensure “good order and discipline.” How do you see that working in reality and what do you think “reasonable force” means?

Frances Crook: I think this was slipped in by mistake, and I hope the Government will look at the mistake that has been made and take it out. I know that the Minister in Parliament said that it was not in the Bill and it is because it is in the schedule. I think there has been an error, because it is illegal at the moment to inflict pain and force on children.

The Howard League for Penal Reform is also a law firm and our lawyers have represented children who have had their arms broken by staff in secure training centres and had serious injuries from staff. Many staff in the STCs are not qualified teachers and not qualified psychologists. They are barely trained and they are not able to deal with many of the very complicated issues the children bring in challenging them.

Allowing staff who are not qualified to deal with children to use pain and force to secure compliance—“You will go to your room”; “No, I won’t!” Those of us who have had teenagers know that that is what happens. If you then allow staff to use force, you put the children at risk and you also set up conflict. We know that the deaths of the two children who died in the secure training centres were linked to exactly that kind of interaction. One child died while he was being held down by staff in a restraint—choked on his own vomit. The other 14-year-old hanged himself after just being restrained. It was in exactly that kind of conflict. The restraint was not part of a violence reduction; it was to secure good order and discipline. This is unlawful and it is very ill advised. I am sure the Government when they look at it will withdraw this.

Q 21

I have a final question on this part and I will not ask any more questions after that. What do you think about the situation facing young women and girls—children aged 12 to 14—in secure colleges?

Frances Crook: I would be absolutely terrified if that was my daughter—a 12-year-old girl going into an institution with hundreds and hundreds of boys. I cannot think of anything more dangerous and more ill advised. I will keep it as simple as that.

Q 22

Good morning. I want to follow up briefly on the earlier questions. The ratio of female to male in our secure estate for children is one in 20. Is that because males are 20 times more likely to offend or are we more reluctant to send young women and young girls to these kinds of institutions? Perhaps you can answer that first and then we will see.

Frances Crook: You were right first time. Males are more likely to offend. Across the whole criminal justice system, if you look at arrests, prosecutions and convictions, males are between 10 and 20 times more likely to be involved in criminality than women. If you really want to solve the crime problem—I should not really say this, but I am going to—you have to make men more like women.

Q 23

Thank you—that is useful. We will make a note of that.

Frances Crook: I am not sure that you can enshrine that in legislation, however.

Q 24

No. Why is it that, as we heard from our previous witness, girls who are in the system seem to be having more extreme experiences than their male counterparts? Is it because it gets very extreme very quickly? What could we do to help?

Frances Crook: I am not sure that that is true. The irreducible minimum of girls who are in there tend to be the most damaged and the most vulnerable, but there are also some very damaged and vulnerable young boys in there. My lawyers have represented boys, one of whom, for example—obviously, I cannot go into too much detail—had parents who were both heroin addicts, so when he was born he was just tied into his cot. He was tortured, basically, as a child, and he then acted that out and he was a very difficult, damaged boy later on. He was very vulnerable and very fragile, and his self-injury was a bloodbath, which was disgusting to hear about and really distressing.

So, there are some very damaged and challenging boys in the system as well. I think the trouble is sometimes that they are bigger, so you see these strapping great 16-year-olds, but actually they are babies inside and they have not developed emotionally. They have not had the opportunities, and they are very damaged. Both boys and girls can be very vulnerable.

Q 25

Finally, presumably you would think that giving them more opportunities for education, however that is achieved, is a positive.

Frances Crook: I am an educator, and my background is in special needs teaching. I think everybody should have the opportunity to have an education, right the way through, in every way. I am absolutely, passionately committed to giving people education as a route into being a responsible citizen and flourishing as a human being. However, it is one of many things that children need, and I go back to the original point I made—that this is meant to be a home and a safe place for them to be as well.

Q 26

But combining the two is not, in itself, a bad thing.

Frances Crook: No.

Q 27

I have got three questions, the first principally to Mr Monkhouse. The aim of clauses 24 to 28 is to simplify the process in the magistrates court. That comes out of the document “Transforming the Criminal Justice System”, in which the Government say that they want a system

“which is faster and right first time”.

It certainly looks as though it will be faster, but is there anything in this that makes you think it will not be right first time? I am thinking particularly of the fact that we have got the bare minimum of magistrate cover, going down from three to one, and we have also got decisions taking place in settings other than a formal courtroom session. Do you have any concerns about decision making having to be revisited—or, indeed, about transparency of justice?

Richard Monkhouse: Transparency of justice is the main issue. I do not think that we have got any real issue about single magistrates sitting in the sorts of cases  where the two wingers wonder what they are adding to the justice system from the point of view of either transparency or competence. We handle the DVLA cases in our court, and it is a dread. I always say to people, “Who would like to go home?” because it adds absolutely nothing.

The transparency issue is quite important, because one of the problems is public perception. There was a report recently that suggested that magistrates might operate in police stations, and I remember the horror that went down our backs about that. That is an issue about transparency, and about the public thinking, “Is this not important enough for justice to be delivered in an open space where somebody could come in?”

We know full well that most regulatory cases—the uncontested motoring cases or the guilty plea to a motoring case—are simply served by reading of the guidelines and application of the guidelines, and there is very little argument. The safeguards that need to be there are for that magistrate who is sitting in that position to be able to say, “I’m sorry, but this one needs to go before a proper court. This one needs to be seen.”

There is an issue, particularly with motoring offences. Speed can often be ignored in driver records. We hear about drivers driving round with 40 points or more. We are not sure why that is. Sometimes it is because of exceptional hardship, but very often I suspect it is because of a lack of knowledge. These cases coming into that environment will actually present a lack of knowledge unless we are very careful. If the driver has not actually been given the information, or the motorist charged has not been given the information that the court might use, is that fair?

So I think there are elements where safeguards need to be put in. We also wonder whether the absence of a prosecutor is a good thing, because prosecutors can add value. They can add the discipline that two people sitting in front of a computer screen might not have. I think that that is potentially an issue.

Q 28

Clauses 29 and 30 require the court to impose the charge to pay for part or all of the costs of the hearing. If this is an additional charge going on to other financial penalties and costs, how do you see this working? Given that you will be dealing with defendants of defined means, is it likely that you will simply have the same cake and you will divvy it up more between the different types of penalty that you impose? If so, can you see much point in it?

Sarah Salmon: The problem with this charge is that there are already a number of financial penalties. There are charges and you might get a fine or another sentence. By heaping this on top of the existing costs orders that are already made—court charges; the victims levy—it is just another sum that somebody sees when they are sentenced. If it is going to be added on to a custodial or other sentence, it is just another penalty that can be dragged out. It goes on for a long time for people on very limited means.

This has to be seen in the light of changes to the benefits system that people are already suffering from. When it is a financial penalty imposed on somebody—many offenders do not live on their own; they live within families in various relationships—it is just another cost to the household, and it might not necessarily reflect just on the offender. It is simply seen as a penalty.

We know that prisoners find difficulty with information. Generally, on offenders in the community, are they really clear about what they are being given? It is just a sum. They have to pay it off. It is going to be deducted from their income, whatever their income is. What is the purpose of it? I am not sure how much it is going to cost to collect the fines and how many are unpaid. I think more research is needed into what will actually be recouped by this extra additional charge.

Richard Monkhouse: It seems to us that the motorist is going to be the person who pays for this, because you have effectively got five financial penalties, only two of which are proposed to be mandatory. Those two are the victim surcharge and this new courts cost. All the rest are at the discretion of the sentencer. The only people who come in on a regulator basis who can afford to pay that are the motorists.

You talk about young 20-year-olds on jobseeker’s allowance of £56.25 a week, and you have got these five potential financial penalties that we could be putting on them. At the moment, there is already a little balancing out in practice in the court. We really need to have discretion for the sentencer, otherwise we will be penalising one particular cohort of people and this could be seen as a money-generating exercise, rather than as a financial imposition.

Q 29

Frances Crook, you have given us a brief that deals with some of your specific objections to the changes in part 4 to judicial review, but if these changes go through unamended, how will that make a difference to the way the Howard League operates? You do not have to refer to any judicial reviews of the Ministry of Justice that you are taking at the moment—I do not want to upset the Minister too much—but more generally, how will it affect you?

Frances Crook: At the risk of being a little philosophical, judicial review is a fundamental protection for the individual against the overweening power of the state. It is absolutely right that decisions by Government, at any level, should be open to challenge to make sure, to test whether, they are lawful, appropriate and just there. Judicial review is that last bastion of support for the individual.

It is very rare for organisations like mine, charities, to take judicial review as themselves. Apart from the one we are doing at the moment, we have done it twice. The first one was 14 years ago, when we took the then Home Office and prison service to judicial review for child protection reasons for children in custody, and we won. We said that children in custody should get the same child protection support as children outside. The second time that we were part of a judicial review was more recent. If a child is arrested, if my son or daughter is arrested, I would want to know; otherwise at 2 o’clock in the morning, I would be phoning the hospitals and be absolutely terrified. We changed the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 so that all children under 18 have an appropriate adult and get the appropriate protection. This is really fundamental stuff that affects a lot of people’s lives, and it is very important that organisations can do this, but as a charity we will not be able to do it, because the financial risk and the financial penalties will be so great.

The other side to it is the suggestion that interveners should also be at risk of huge financial penalty. We have done interventions in judicial reviews, sometimes at the  request of the court. That makes us independent experts giving evidence, not on one side or the other, but to the court in a judicial review. The proposal in the Bill means that we would not be able to do that because we might be liable for all the costs of the other side that that incurs, so the court would not get expert evidence from interveners. I think that some of the proposals are actually damaging to democracy—I say that advisedly—and will also damage court proceedings because expert evidence is not available.

Q 30

I should probably start by making a declaration, which I hope will cover the entirety of the proceedings: I am a former prosecutor and legal aid lawyer and I am still owed money by the state, so I have a vested interest. Will the legal aid Minister please organise the backlog? Four years on and I still have not been paid for a number of criminal cases—don’t worry, that’s standard. Also I wrote a book called “Doing Time” of which, amazingly, a few copies are still available in the shops—all proceeds go to charity not to me, I hasten to add—which addressed a number of these issues.

I start with quick yes or no question: do all three of you agree that the single magistracy proposal is a workable and feasible option?

Richard Monkhouse: Yes.

Ladies?

Sarah Salmon: I would have to do more research. It is not an area that I am up to date with at the moment.

Frances Crook: It is not something that we have taken a view on.

Q 31

Okay. Without characterising or criticising in any way the Howard League, which I know very well, or the Criminal Justice Alliance, is it a fair comment that your views are strongly influenced by your fundamental desire to see fewer people go to prison?

Sarah Salmon: Our views are based on evidence that is gathered in a variety of ways—on academic research, practice and what our members see, reoffending rates and what we know happens to people in prison. It does not seem that sending large numbers of people to prison has the outcome that most people would want: that they would stop committing crime.

Q 32

I am with you, but I want to have a context. A fundamental ethos of the Criminal Justice Alliance is to reduce the prison population.

Sarah Salmon: For those good reasons.

Q 33

We can argue and discuss the reasons, I accept. Similar points would apply to the Howard League, surely.

Frances Crook: As long as you understand that it is not an ideological position; it is an evidential position.

Q 34

I understand that. I want to come back to you, Frances, on the point on which you were originally questioned by Robert Neill. You seemed to suggest, and I want to be clear that this is what you are really maintaining, that having irregular once-a-week  training, rather than regular intensive training, would be a better proposition. I suggest that the opposite applies: that if you take a young offender, you wish to give them the intensity of training, education and rehabilitation for the limited amount of time that you have such a person in your institution, whatever its merit or otherwise, rather than have a random once-a-week operation.

Frances Crook: The children we are talking about need a very wide range of interventions appropriate to their particular needs. My experience, many years ago, of teaching children with special needs, and what I have seen in institutions—I have visited two thirds of prisons and all children’s prisons—is that you cannot sit many of these children in a classroom and give them a lot of time in that way. They need a wide range of different things. They need a lot of physical exercise—they are teenagers and are like puppies; you have to run them about a lot.

You should try representing them; it’s harder.

Frances Crook: They don’t stay still. It is right that they need intensive support, but often it is better delivered in short bursts rather than over a longer period, because they will need a whole list of interventions and support if they have attention deficit disorder, learning difficulties or mental health problems or if they have been abused. They need a whole range of different things. It is not the intensity but the range that matters.

Q 35

No one is disputing that you need an holistic approach and a range of interventions to deal with the vast Majority of young people, male or female, who are in these institutions. I want to press you on the point that if the fundamental purpose is changing the character and behaviour of the individual through mentoring and education, that is best done on a relatively intense basis, even though that may not constitute non-stop education, as in a normal classroom. I suggest that you do need a more intensive training regime.

Frances Crook: I absolutely agree, but would add a caveat. I would be very careful because I am having flashbacks to the discussion we had when the secure training centres were set up. Exactly the same debate took place. It was of course bipartisan—the idea was introduced by one party and the actual establishments by the other party—so it is not a partisan argument I am making. There was exactly the same discussion about how the secure training centres would provide intensive support, lots of education, language training and all that—and they have failed so to do. We keep repeating the mistakes of the past and thinking that that is somehow going to change. The argument that it is going to be a bigger institution and therefore better is fundamentally false.

Sarah Salmon: Before I had this role, I worked for many years for an organisation called Action for Prisoners’ Families. It is now widely accepted that prisoners, offenders, children—whatever you want to call them—people in custody need links with their families. Not all families of these very damaged children who end up in custody are going to be the nuclear family that you want, but there may well be somebody in that familial role, whether related by blood or other links important to that family. Holding people many miles from home means they cannot make those links.

We know that this is a very short intervention that is going to be given. They are going to go back to their home area. It is impossible for people to keep in touch over long distances. They need to have relationships with whoever it is—older brother, sister, aunt, step-grandmother—for them not to be someone who is terrified and a long way from home. People need to be near their local communities so that they are able to link in with the services that will be provided to them when they are released.

Q 36

On localisation of prison services, I do not think a single person in this room would disagree with you. Regarding the persons involved, do you agree—I accept that it is a broad principle—that what matters is not necessarily the amount of money that you spend, but the quality of the leadership, the mentors and the individuals carrying out the programmes?

Frances Crook: Yes, that is absolutely the case. Sometimes, a bigger institution, if it has strong and excellent leadership and high-quality, well trained, well paid and well supported staff, can work reasonably well. My slight problem is that, if that is not the case—if you get a bad leader or if your staff are not well trained, well supported and well managed—a big institution can go fundamentally wrong incredibly quickly. If you read the inspection reports of the big YOIs over the past 10 years, you will see that they go up and down, up and down. In a 300-bed institution while it is on a down, you have hundreds of children who are being damaged and made worse by that institution. In purely practical terms, an institution with 12 children that is going through a bad patch is only damaging 12 children; an institution that has 300 over two or three years will be damaging several thousand children.

Q 37

In reality, the broad principle is that it is no different from a school, which we all see in our constituencies. If it has a bad head and governors, similar comments would apply. Clearly, all of us would want to see better quality leadership and mentoring.

Frances Crook: But it is much worse when you are locked up. If you are in a school, you can go home and get tutoring or your mum to help you, but if you are locked up for several months in an institution that is out of control, or where there is a lot of violence and bullying, that is really bad.

Q 38

Would you agree that there is scope for increased involvement of organisations such as the Shannon Trust, the St Giles Trust and others in an institution of the sort that the Government are thinking about?

Frances Crook: They should be children’s charities that are specialists with children. It is proposed that very young children could be held in these institutions, which is completely contrary to what everyone else in Europe does. I know that there has been some concern among children’s charities across Europe, and reference has been made to the United Nations and the Council of Europe because we seem to be out of step with our international obligations—

Q 39

I am cutting you short not out of rudeness, but because I am about to be cut short. I have a couple of quick questions.

Simply, would you prefer—I am asking the two ladies here in particular—girls to be held in a separate prison?

Frances Crook: Girls should be held in local authority units.

Sarah Salmon: They should have specialist provision, undoubtedly.

Q 40

Specialist provision and not be together? Even though—I just want to run this by you—that would mean that they might be far away from their family environment?

Sarah Salmon: The danger of putting so few girls in is the same as in the adult estate: everything is run for the male contingent, and there will be no specific provision. Provision for those small numbers is going to be expensive, because there are so few of them.

Q 41

Can I ask both ladies briefly: are we right not to go back to IPPs?

Sarah Salmon: Yes.

Frances Crook: Yes, you are getting that right.

Q 42

My last question is about judicial review. [ Interruption. ] Not at all. I must disagree with you on judicial review. There should be financial risk relating to the application. When I took legal aid judicial review applications, the state assessed the merit of the case. If you believe that you have a case with better than 51% prospects of success, or you have such a strong and passionate belief that you must get involved in the case irrespective of the prospect of success, should you not have a financial risk that you should pay for that?

Frances Crook: There are already stringent tests to go through the judicial review hurdle. That is, as you say, absolutely right. However, you need to make the risks and the hurdles proportionate and appropriate. The proposals in the Bill are not.

Q 43

If your case is so good, why do you not get a protective costs order?

Mr Opperman, we are not in court; we have only an hour, not three weeks. We will move on.

Q 44

I have some quick questions on some points that came up earlier. I want to ask you all—although you may not have an opinion—whether you think the proposed secure colleges will be cost-effective and a good use of public money?

Richard Monkhouse: I have not talked about this yet, but I have experience of two establishments in our area—Hindley and Barton Moss. The latter is secure accommodation and concentrates on training, and I know which I think is the better of the two: Barton Moss. Hindley is such a horrific place; Barton Moss has a lot of things going for it.

I would like to see more of this outside prison. I would like to see us stop sending people to prison because there are real alternatives. That is why, over the past 10 years, magistrates have reduced the percentage of people they send to prison. There are realistic alternatives  when we are dealing not with serious offenders but with chaotic people who cannot follow community orders. More should be put into community orders than prisons.

Frances Crook: I agree with Richard.

Sarah Salmon: We agree.

Q 45

As the proposals stand, do you think there will be sufficient skills in the college? You mentioned children being kept down, but do you think that the wide range of skills required are present in the proposals?

Frances Crook: I am completely mystified as to where the idea came from. The prison population of children has plummeted. We do not need to invent new ways of locking children up. What you need to do is get rid of the secure training centres as the contracts come to an end, because they are very expensive and not helping children. We need to keep and maintain the local authority secure homes, which are very effective, child-centred and small; they are primarily homes. Then, provide all the services that the children need and take them out of prison. That is happening—we are on that trajectory and the magistrates are leading it. Everybody agrees that it is the right direction to go in—I have no idea where the idea of a secure college came from. It is a complete mystery and a terrible waste of public money.

Sarah Salmon: The money should be invested in robust, supportive community sentences.

Q 46

So the idea is to put more money into local authorities—that is the way we should be going.

Is there any recent research on whether children excluded from the education system have ended up in the criminal justice system?

Richard Monkhouse: It has been very easy for them to come in because whereas a situation that arises in a family home would not involve the police, the same situation in a care establishment would. To cover all angles, the police are called, and the child comes into court and is automatically criminalised. The outcome depends on the seriousness, but looked-after children have been a real issue. It has gone up and down, and we really think that a better way could be organised to reduce the number of looked-after children coming into court in the first place.

Frances Crook: I would just like to add that an experiment has been going on in several areas, but particularly Manchester, wherein local authorities have been given money to incentivise them to keep children out of custody. That is starting to pay off and work well, so it is a good use of public money. It is much cheaper and it means that the children get long-term, consistent care. Rather than getting a short battering for a few weeks in an institution, then being dumped somewhere without any support, and all the educational facilities falling away, the pathfinder experiments have given the money that would have been spent on custody to the local authority to spend on the child. That provides consistent support—often for many years—which is exactly what they need. It keeps them out of trouble, reduces reoffending, which I think we all want, and also supports the child throughout their formative years, rather than them having short bursts of interventions. That is something to look at. It works—why not do what works?

Q 47

Could you expand on where it is?

Frances Crook: It is in Manchester.

Q 48

Could you be a bit more specific?

Frances Crook: It is run by the local authorities together—I think there are 10 local authorities in the Manchester area. It is a partnership with the Youth Justice Board and the 10 local authorities in Manchester. Money has been taken out of the secure estate and given to the local authorities to keep the custody rate down. The money follows the children and support is provided. It has reduced reoffending and crime and made Manchester a safer place.

Q 49

And it is more cost-effective than a secure college?

Frances Crook: It is much more cost-effective; it is cheaper.

Q 50

I do not want to put words in your mouth, but would you describe a secure college as an old-style borstal?

Frances Crook: Yes; it is a prison.

Q 51

So what were they like? Effective or not effective?

Frances Crook: Dreadful. I don’t remember them.

Q 52

In your opinion, were they effective?

Frances Crook: No. This country has a history in the last 100 years of reinventing ways of locking up children. We had borstals, secure training centres and lots of other things, but the only way that has worked well are the small, secure children’s homes. They offer support to some of the difficult children, who often have to stay for long periods because they are very damaged and quite dangerous. That has worked well. That is the only time in the past 100 or 200 years that we have locked up children and it has worked well. We should be looking at small children’s homes. If we have to lock up children, it should be a small number and that is the model that works.

Q 53

Thank you. May I move on to the single magistracy, which you mentioned, Mr Monkhouse? Are you satisfied that people who appear before a single magistrate will have had legal advice on their case? You mentioned uncontested DVLA cases, but we all have colleagues who have ended up in a difficult position because of simple DVLA issues.

Richard Monkhouse: That is where the safeguards are. The intention is not to have people who want to come to court be dealt with by a single magistrate. In a normal court, if any part of the process is contested—for example, if somebody pleads guilty to speeding, but they make a request for exceptional hardship—it must be heard by a bench of three; there is absolutely no doubt about that. Many cases—we have heard about television licence evasion over the weekend; 12% of cases come to court, and I have never seen a defendant come in to contest a case—can be dealt with perfectly appropriately by a single magistrate, but that single magistrate must have the authority to say, “In this case, no. This is going back to a court.” That is where some of the difficulties lie. If you are dealing with a case  from, say, Cumbria in Devon, which is entirely likely and is plausible, how can you do that quickly? It must be sent back to the original court.

I have seen some of the software developments, and they look really promising. At last, we are getting a digitisation system that is next year’s, rather than 10 years ago. It is up to date. In those circumstances, yes, that will be able to work, but until we have that in place, it will be difficult to process those cases, which are often used as fillers in the magistrates court. Something goes down, the trial goes off, and rather than send people home, you can deal with these types of cases. That can be dealt with perfectly well with one magistrate, but safeguards must be put in so the magistrates can say, “No, this needs to be seen by a bench of three.”

Q 54

I am slightly concerned about uncontested cases that may suddenly turn into something more difficult. It is up to the magistrate to do that. Do you envisage there being many collapsed cases?

Richard Monkhouse: I cannot think—

Q 55

Has an impact assessment been done on that?

Richard Monkhouse: No. The principle is sound, but the practical issues must be gone through in some detail, because they will cause the difficulties. Should a prosecutor be there? That might help the situation. Should we have a legal adviser or a court associate? A legal adviser provides the legal knowledge that a magistrate does not have—we may have it, but magistrates do not need to have any legal knowledge. Safeguards must be built in, and access to the safeguards must be available. That is why they need to be somewhere in the court building. It is about the practicalities.

Q 56

It used to be the clerks.

Richard Monkhouse: It still is the clerks. It is proposed that the clerks will still remain, but that is down to the detail. A lot of work must go into the detail of how it is implemented, and that is where the safeguards will be built in. The principle of one magistrate dealing with an uncontested case or several uncontested cases, where you can dispose of them very quickly simply by looking at guidelines, is perfectly logical.

Q 57

Thank you. You know that the Home Department has conducted the Ellison review into the Stephen Lawrence case. Will that review have an impact on the simple cautions? Should we wait for a further review before we move to simple cautions?

Richard Monkhouse: I am glad to note the outcome of the work that we have done in the past four or five years. I should have said in my introduction that I am a statistician, and I did a lot of the physical work in trying to dig out all the information as to why the out-of-court disposal system was inappropriate in many cases and was being overused. The simple caution is very, very valuable, but only in the right cases—only for those cases that are not so serious, or where the offender is not a repeat offender. In the latter case, we need to look at how you define a repeat offender. For a summary offence, two years is fine; for a serious offence or an indictable offence, is two years actually the right level? A lot more work needs to go into the detail of how that will work.

The worry is that you get to a senior officer in the police, and that is where the problems always started, because with 43 chief constables, there were 43 ways of handling it. That is why in one area you can get 73% of people being given a simple caution or being dealt with out of court, and in another area 30% of people are dealt with out of court. All of that needs standardising, so that people know that wherever they are picked up for an offence, they will be dealt with in the same way.

Frances Crook: There is some interesting research going on, which does not happen much in the criminal justice field. There is a randomised controlled trial going on in the west midlands. It is a scientific research project in which they are randomly taking people either going to court or being dealt with through police cautions and other police interventions, which involves restorative justice interventions. It will be very interesting to see what comes out of that project, because a lot of legislation is based on emotion, not on science. It is about time that we did a scientific study of what we do with people on a large scale. Of course, we should treat people as individuals, but if you can show that one big intervention works better than another one, we should follow that. The introduction of proper randomised controlled trials and scientific interventions in justice would be a great step forward.

Sarah Salmon: On the simple caution, limiting the discretion of well trained professional officers may lead to injustice and to more people being caught up in the criminal justice system, and we would not want to see a net-widening effect.

Thank you.

Richard Monkhouse: Can I add that the addition of the scrutiny panels is very valuable, where you have different parties who look retrospectively at cautions that were given and at whether they were appropriate. It is a learning exercise, and those that have been set up in places such as Cheshire have been very valuable.

We will finish this session at 10.30. I have a number of Members who still want to ask questions, so I would appreciate brevity.

Q 58

On the subject of youth detention, I am not sure whether it was part of the case put by any three of you, but want to be absolutely clear: are you saying that all of those young people currently accommodated in the custodial estate could properly be accommodated in secure children’s homes, or do you concede that some other type of institution is necessary for at least some of those young people in custody?

Frances Crook: I think that there are around 1,200 in custody, mostly boys. A third of them are on remand, and there is a real question about whether they should be in custody at all, because most of them will not get a custodial sentence. You could therefore take a good third of those children out of custody and deal with them in the community straight away. Another significant cohort of children have gone into custody for minor offences, or for breaching the support network that they are given in the community. Again, those children should not be in custody, because they could be dealt with in the community. That trajectory is already taking place  and it is to be welcomed massively. You would then be left with a small number of young people, who have committed serious and violent offences and who represent a danger, and who could be accommodated in local authority units. That is the only kind of custody that we would like to see.

Thank you.

Richard Monkhouse: I do not really have a view.

Sarah Salmon: Going into custody should not be the prerequisite of a child getting the interventions they need. That is our main concern.

Q 59

You may be right, but that was not the question I asked. I was simply asking whether you think that a secure children’s home is suitable for all those who are sentenced to detention in the youth estate.

Sarah Salmon: I think if they are secure and children are safe and they are given the appropriate interventions that is where they should be held.

Thank you.

Q 60

I should like to bring the panel back to the simple cautions. Will the restrictions that are being proposed have an impact on the flexibility to do things such as restorative justice?

Richard Monkhouse: I hope not. I think that restorative justice could be used an awful lot more if courts were allowed to use it. Currently only magistrates courts in Thames Valley use that as part of their disposal. If it is such a good disposal, which I think everybody would agree it is, why not broaden it throughout? I do not see why the simple caution proposed would restrict the use of restorative justice.

Frances Crook: I hope not.

Sarah Salmon: I hope not, too.

Q 61

Mr Monkhouse, how much information do you get on what happens to your sentences? Whether they are about reoffending after particular types of sentences or in the context of the court charging proposals, what fraction of the money that you charge ever comes back?

Richard Monkhouse: We get very little and we wish we had an awful lot more. We are looking at ways of involving the magistracy in case reviews and sentencing supervision. Hopefully that will start to give us more information. But the information we have is very sparse and getting sparser.

Q 62

And on court charging in particular, do you get any information at all about how much is ever repaid? Do you have any way of assessing how much of the money charged for this could ever come back?

Richard Monkhouse: No, and we have tried to do some work on this to try to split Her Majesty’s Courts and Tribunals Service funding to try to decide which is which. They cannot tell us, so it is guesswork. We know an allocation was made with victim surcharge. We do not know whether that was recouped; that allocation  for each case was effectively hived off. We know that there are proposals for contracting out enforcement. That may add value.

Q 63

Ms Salmon, what impact, if any, will the creation of secure colleges have on the sentencing of young offenders?

Sarah Salmon: As with the detention and training order, I would hate it if it were seen as a glossy, new, wonderful secure college, and not as a prison, and that more children were sent into custody as a result of the creation of this new-build, all-singing, all-dancing secure college.

Q 64

Mr Monkhouse, you spoke of transparency in the magistrates court. That is very important. But in your experience in low-level cases where you have non-payment of TV licences, where people have three extra points added to their licences, how many members of the public or journalists turn up to hear the papers being read?

Richard Monkhouse: Very, very few, but I do not think that is the point. The public need to know that it is transparent. To try to make it not transparent and to shut the doors on it is to say, “This is private. You cannot come in.” That is a very dangerous move.

Order. That brings us to the end of the time allocated for. I thank them on behalf of the Committee.