This was the Youth Custody Service's (YCS) contribution to meeting the “acute surge” in numbers of adults in prisons, a surge largely created by the present government's policy of imprisoning more adults on longer sentences.
It has always been the practice to hold some 18-year-olds in the secure estate for children when they only have a short period of their sentence to serve, to avoid harmful disruption. If not technically a child-centred policy, this approach was certainly a humane policy. A decade ago, a typical month would see about one in 10 people in children's prisons being just past their 18th birthday.
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