This was partly accounted for by an unexplained rise in the number of children on remand, but Morgan blames the free and easy use of anti-social behaviour orders (ASBOs) by councils and police. One of his main aims is to reduce the number of young people in custody and that isn't helped by the rush to make orders. One of his priorities is to educate councillors and magistrates on ASBOs.
"Since they are civil orders, ASBOs are being made in many parts of the country, circumventing youth offending teams. The first they know about a young person subject to an ASBO is when the child is back before the court for a breach," he explains.
"By then, he's already several rungs up the ladder because the court is considering custody at that stage and there hasn't been an initial assessment.
"I think that is contrary to what everyone thinks the Youth Justice Board embodies and we've got to get this right. There must be a full assessment of the risk and needs of a child before court action is taken."
Morgan aims to work with councils and the Magistrates' Association to ensure the imposition and attached conditions of any ASBO are appropriate.
"I'm slightly worried that we've heard that, in some parts of the country, there may have been pressure for quotas to be set when making ASBOs. We hear stories that police are setting quotas, almost as a performance indicator.
I don't think that's appropriate. We need to establish if an ASBO is appropriate for the individual."
When children do end up in custody, Morgan has to decide where to place them. His budget is 390m, 72 per cent of which is spent on the 2,750 children in custody. He has three choices: young offenders' institutions, local authority secure child-ren's homes and privately run secure training centres. "Local authority secure children's homes range quite a lot in the quality of what they provide and it's very expensive - extremely expensive," he says.
It costs 185,000 to keep a child in one for a year, compared to a mere 50,000 in a young offenders' institution. "If the proportion we spend on custody rises, we will have less money to give to local authorities and youth offending teams to develop community alternatives to custody.
It's like chasing one's tail and it's a really difficult dilemma.
"We have to look searchingly and incisively at what value for money we get from the three sections of the secure estate, and we've decided that we can increase the proportion of provision for juveniles in custody outside the young offenders' institutions through secure training centres."
Another disadvantage of local authority homes is that they may turn down the children the board wants to allocate, so they are often placed well away from their family homes.
But Morgan insists the four secure training centres, which always accept allocations, will fill the gap. "When I go to conferences, people from social services imagine secure training centres are more akin to young offenders' institutions, but they're not. They're very child-centred and the educational regime is excellent."
He would like to get as many young people as possible out of young offenders' institutions, but in the meantime he'd like to see better provision. "Children in custody should be dealt with in regimes designed for children and staff there should be trained," he says. "We haven't yet achieved that."
Morgan accepts criticism over the teenager who died in custody at Stoke Heath YOI: "Probably, some young people who are in young offenders' institutions ideally wouldn't be there," he says. "Searching questions have to be asked and we are intent on asking those questions."
BACKGROUND - A career in law and criminal justice
- He had been HM Chief Inspector of Probation for England and Wales for three years when he took up the post
- Prior to that he was professor of criminal justice in the law faculty of Bristol University
- He was a lay magistrate for more than 20 years, during which time he was chairman of a youth court and member of an independent monitoring board for a remand centre
- He is an expert advisor to the Council of Europe and Amnesty International on custodial conditions and process.
