The head of the Youth Justice Board has said young people in custody are being put at risk by recent increases in the population of the juvenile secure estate.
Rod Morgan, the chair of the board, said the number of young people in custody has been increasing since May.
"This is serious because we risk losing many of the gains we have made in the past five years since we took responsibility for the area," he said.
The latest figures show that at the end of the second quarter of this year there were 2,811 under-18s held in secure accommodation, up from 2,722 the previous year. A small number are currently held in local authority-run secure children's homes and in secure training centres, run by several different private companies, but the majority are held in Prison Service-run young offender institutions.
