No decision on girls in secure colleges, government adviser claims
Neil Puffett
Thursday, July 10, 2014
A final decision on whether girls will be held alongside boys in secure colleges has yet to be made, a senior government mandarin has insisted.
Speaking at a Westminster Legal Policy Forum event in London, Paul Candler, deputy director for youth justice at the Ministry of Justice, conceded that the government is yet to consider the potential negative implications of such a move.
Asked by Jo Phoenix, a criminologist at the University of Leicester, whether ministers had reflected on the “downsides” of boys and girls being held at the secure college due to open in 2017 at Glen Parva, in the East Midlands, Candler said: “They haven’t yet, because no decision has been made on whether girls will in fact be included in Glen Parva.
“We are very clear that we are a long way off 2017. We don’t know what the population [of the youth secure estate] is going to look like.”
Candler’s comments come just a month after a report by the joint committee on human rights revealed that the government “intends secure colleges to accommodate both boys and girls between the ages of 12 and 17”.
However, Candler said that the “approach at the moment” is to ensure girls “could be accommodated within a secure college if that’s the decision taken nearer the time”.
He added: “Ministers are very clear too that girls have particular needs that would have to be addressed and accommodated within a secure college if a decision is made to place them from 2017.”
Candler also addressed concerns about the proposed size of the establishments and concerns that if the current secure estate is replaced with just a few large secure colleges, young people held there could be hundreds of miles away from home.
Plaid Cymru MP Elfyn Llwyd, a member of the justice select committee and chair of the conference session, asked Candler whether it is not better to have a greater number of smaller places that would be closer to home.
“Surely if this is going to be successful, these centres are going to have to be within reasonable travelling distance of [the young offenders’] families, otherwise rehabilitation will falter,” he said.
But Candler warned that the future shape of the secure estate is likely to be based on available resources.
“I think the numbers of young people in custody going down makes it very difficult in terms of the financial constraints of government we are working in to think about having secure colleges perhaps everywhere we would want,” he said.
“Very much work has been done to site the pathfinder in the Midlands, because that is an area we know we currently have provision.
“And I think similar approaches will be taken if secure colleges do replace young offender institutions and secure training centres in the course of the future.”