Resilient Care Home Team

ACTION

In Care, Out of Trouble, published last year by the Prison Reform Trust following a review chaired by Lord Laming, calls for "close joint work" between police, social care and others to protect looked-after children from criminalisation. These children are six times more likely to be cautioned or convicted of offences than others, according to government figures, and 13- to 15-year-olds in children's homes are six times more at risk of this than looked-after peers in other placements, according to the 2016 Howard League for Penal Reform report Criminal Care: Children's Homes and Criminalising Children.

When taking up post in March 2015, Jennie Mattinson, West Mercia Police's chief inspector of uniform operations, based in Shropshire, was struck by the challenges of policing a county with one of the highest numbers of children's homes - there were 72, run by 19 providers. Young people from 91 local authorities had been placed in Shropshire homes - a group most vulnerable to missing episodes, abuse and criminalisation, according to a 2014 Ofsted review. West Mercia Police attended 2,010 incidents in 118 children's homes across Shropshire and neighbouring authorities in 2014/15, the highest number cited in the Howard League's Criminal Care report.