A Safeguarding Hub – 20-minute read

Last week, Anne Longfield, the Children’s Commissioner for England published a report looking at the hundreds of children who are detained in institutions across the country. In the first report of its kind, the Commissioner’s office has gathered data on those children detained and living in secure children’s homes, youth justice settings, mental health wards and other residential placements.

The report, ‘Who are they? Where are they? Children locked up’, examines why so many children are locked up, where they are accommodated, the cost of keeping them, whether their complex needs are always catered for within the various establishments and whether alternative decision making may have prevented their deprivation of liberty.

In the various media reports that accompanied the publication of the report, Mrs Longfield was critical of the current system relating to children deprived of their liberty, claiming that there are hundreds of children in England “growing up behind closed doors, locked away for their own safety or the safety of others”. For us, the most shocking part of the Commissioners report is that there appears to be no single authority or organisation that has oversight or grip of the system. In effect the “system” appears is in disarray.

One of the issues highlighted in the report was the problems that face local authorities finding suitable secure accommodation. This has recently drawn adverse comment from the judiciary who have criticised the fact that when beds are unavailable, some local authorities have instead been applying for deprivation of liberty authorisations, and then placing children in alternate unsuitable non-approved settings. This is detrimental to the child and potentially places that child at risk, either from themselves or others. The phrase ‘quasi-secure’ homes has been used by a senior Judge to describe this situation, criticising the fact that family courts are frequently asked to approve the accommodation of children, but have no means of checking or auditing the suitability of that accommodation.

At the same time that the Commissioner released her report, the United Nations raised concerns over the UK’s record on dealing and investigating the sexual abuse of children in detention. The committee at the UN relied on evidence from our own Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) looking at the sexual abuse of more than 1,000 children in detention between 2009 to 2017, in accommodation which included young offender facilities, secure training centres and secure children’s homes.

The Local Government Association (LGA) responded to the Commissioner’s report by pointing out that there had been a “significant rises in demand for urgent child protection work and a £3.1 billion funding gap facing children’s services by 2025”. We believe that LGA Chair, Cllr Antoinette Bramble was honest in her assessment, describing the lack of funding as a reason why local authorities were struggling to put in place early interventions and support for children before their issues escalate and become more complex. The Councillor called on the government to address the shortfall in their forthcoming Spending Review.

For those that work in secure children’s homes, the release of these two reports may well have been viewed as unfair finger pointing, a kick in the teeth and potentially a blow to morale. These news pieces may well have prompted a degree of irritation, if not anger. We think it is important to acknowledge that most of the managers and staff working in these homes are doing their absolute best when dealing with extremely challenging children with very complex needs. It is also important to recognise that the Commissioner’s report is not a criticism of individual homes, but focuses on the overall system and processes across all forms of children’s secure accommodation. In fact, within the report, the Commissioner acknowledges that “many children in these settings are likely being well cared for”.

It is a welcome document because it throws light on inconsistencies and failings that currently exist which include:

a lack of a data and how it is gathered (on those children in the system).
differing ways children can be detained and enter the system, with no single point of access.
differing ‘overseeing’ bodies – Ministry of Justice, Department for Education, NHS England and Local Authorities.
the appropriateness of the settings.
legal confusion.

The Commissioner makes it clear that this lack of transparency means that there are children in the system who are ‘invisible’. There is no doubt that secure accommodation is needed for the relatively small number of cases where it is the only option left to protect a child from significant harm. However, we now know that changes are needed to make processes and system fit for purpose – that is putting child’s welfare at the forefront, from the initial legal process, right through to discharge from the home and the care package thereafter.

The Commissioner’s report, a summary of the main findings and recommendations can be found on the Commissioners webpage.

Here is our brief guide to Secure Children’s Homes (primarily for children placed on welfare grounds).

What is a Secure Children’s Home?

Why are children placed in secure children’s homes?

What should the local authority consider?

Can a child be detained without the Court’s authority?

Is there an age limit on children being placed in secure accommodation?

What procedures are in place to monitor the child’s progress?

What should the home provide?

Where should children charged with a criminal offence and refused bail by the police be accommodated?

Children should not routinely be kept in the police station overnight, after they have been charged with a criminal offence. Children refused bail should be transferred from the police station to local authority accommodation. The legislation that covers this area is Section 38(6) Police and Criminal Evidence Act (PACE) 1984.

Where a child is arrested for an offence and subsequently charged, the custody officer, the officer in charge of a police custody area, can either grant the child bail to attend court, or refuse bail and keep the child in custody pending their first court appearance. The starting point for any custody officer is that any person, child or adult has a presumed right to bail. However, bail can be refused if there are reasonable grounds to believe that any of the following conditions apply:

the child’s identity is doubted or not known
that the child will fail to appear at court
to prevent the child committing further offences (but only applies where the child has been charged with an imprisonable offence
if it is necessary to prevent the child from causing injury to any other person or causing loss or damage to property
to prevent interference with the administration of justice or the investigation
for the child’s own protection
that it is necessary to take a sample under the PACE (age 14+ only)
of the child is charged with a serious violent/sexual offence (as listed in section 25(2) Criminal Justice and Public Order Act (CJPOA) 1994) and they have previously been held in youth detention for any listed offence and there are no exceptional circumstances to justify bail.

The application to refuse bail and keep the person in custody is made by the officer(s) investigating the offence(s). The custody officer should be impartial when considering the above criteria, being mindful that they have a duty under Section 11 Children Act 2004 to safeguard and promote the welfare of all persons under the age of 18.

Where bail is refused under 1 or more of the above criteria there is a duty placed on the custody officer to transfer the child to local authority accommodation, rather than keeping them in a police cell or detention room overnight. However, this doesn’t have to take place where a custody officer certifies that:

it is impracticable to move the child to local authority accommodation; or
the arrested child has attained the age of 12 and no secure accommodation is available and keeping the child in non-secure local authority accommodation would not be adequate to protect the public from serious harm from the child. Non-secure accommodation would include Foster care or children’s home.

If it is deemed impracticable to transfer a child, the custody officer must complete a Juvenile Detention Certificate which must then be produced to the court explaining why the transfer was not possible and child was kept in a police cell overnight.

Our view: This is clearly an area where both police and social care need to improve. From a police point of view more needs to be done to apply the legislation as the law makers intended it. This means looking at the wording. So, where it states, “impracticable to move the child to local accommodation” this pretty much means extreme weather or where repeated efforts to contact the local authority are met with no response. Most parts of the UK just don’t get the type of weather the legislators were referring to. Where a road is blocked in the Highlands of Scotland it is understandable, but you would have to stretch the imagination to justify not moving a child in a city area. Likewise, in 2017 there shouldn’t be a problem in communicating with the Local Authority out of hours. If there is then there is something seriously wrong and this should be rectified immediately at senior level in both services.

Protecting the public from serious harm has a high threshold test. Serious harm means ‘death or serious injury, whether physical or psychological’.

From a local authority point of view there should be a system in place to deal with both types of request (non-secure and secure) both in and out of office hours. When non-secure accommodation is requested, there is an absolute duty on local authority to provide accommodation whereas the same does not apply to secure accommodation, albeit every effort should be made to find a secure placement.

Remember for the child kept in a police station after charge, their legal representative will be intrusive as to whether both police and local authority have followed the correct procedures and where they haven’t, you can bet on the fact that they will highlight this to the court. This is a difficult area for both organisations to manage, often dammed if we do and dammed if we don’t. Even where the system works perfectly, there can be issues. For example, we have seen on many occasions, police and local authority working together and fulfilling their duty, with a child being transferred to non-secure accommodation, only for an hour later the child walks out of the accommodation and goes missing. Whilst one aspect of child safeguarding and care has ended (ensuring the child is not in a police cell) a new safeguarding issue now presents (missing). We can only do our best despite the criticism that the media and others often unfairly level at us.