In his annual report on prisons in England and Wales, Charlie Taylor notes that while the number of children in custody fell to historical lows during the pandemic and noted that numbers had not increased meaningfully during the last year, “managers at all sites faced major challenges in recovering from the impact of Covid-19 and reintroducing education, offending behaviour programmes and resettlement provision”.
Despite a series of poor inspection ratings at both young offender institutions (YOIs) and secure training centres (STCs), progress in implementing recommendations to improve has been slow across all settings except Parc in Wales, Taylor said.
He notes that across Cookham Wood, Wetherby and Keppel YOIs, just 17 per cent of the inspectorate's key concern recommendations in the area of safety.
No key recommendations around the care of children had been achieved, the report adds.
It also highlights major concerns found by inspectors at both Oakhill and Rainsbrook STCs.
Conditions at both facilities in 2021/22, had “deteriorated” since previous inspections leading to both settings being issued with urgent notices to improve.
“Both sites were graded inadequate overall and the joint inspectorates invoked the urgent notification process for both.
“This was the second time an urgent notification had been issued for Rainsbrook within a year – the first occasion followed a monitoring visit in December 2020 that found there had been little improvement in remedying the serious concerns previously highlighted by the inspectorates,” the report states.
Concerns over high levels of violence, high turnover of staff, poor safeguarding processes and poor standard of education were cited by Taylor as issues contributing to a lack of improvement across both STCs.
The report also highlights concerns around the treatment of unaccompanied asylum-seeking children and children arriving with their families at immigration centres in England.
Across three centres – Tug Haven, the Kent Intake Unit (KIU) and Frontier House – on the south coast “families, women and children were held for long periods, sometimes days, alongside unrelated men, and in several cases detainees with severe health problems or experiences of trauma were detained without adequate support”, the report states.
“While social workers had been brought into the KIU to conduct age assessments, their skills were not used to support children or vulnerable adults,” it adds.
It also raises concerns over the detention of 15 children held at Yarl’s Wood immigration removal centre prior to age assessments after it was wrongly assumed they were adults.
“I remain very concerned about the haphazard arrangements in place for those who have crossed the Channel in small boats. Promised facilities in Dover had not materialised when we inspected in November 2021, and we found that some families were sleeping on the floor in flimsy tents with inadequate bedding or crammed into facilities where some basic safeguards were not in place,” Taylor said.
