A ‘hard rain’ is needed at the Ministry of Justice

When was the last time you read about a cabinet minister saying officials had him ‘played for a fool'? Our Lord Chancellor, Robert Buckland, is nobody’s fool but he’s certainly had the mushroom treatment when it comes to conditions at the privately-run Rainsbrook secure children’s unit. It’s a sign of a much deeper cultural malaise familiar to all of us who once worked for the Ministry of Justice or its agencies. 

A report into Rainsbrook’s operation released this week by the Commons Justice Select Committee exhausted superlatives when it described the incompetence of the contractor running the unit and its legions of state monitors, which allowed the institution to lock youngsters in their cells for 23 and a half hours a day for a fortnight. Free range livestock have more freedom than these young people had.

Rainsbrook Secure Training Centre, near Rugby, is a purpose-built institution designed to hold 76 boys and girls between the ages of 12 and 18 convicted of crimes or remanded in custody. The number of juvenile offenders in detention has fallen consistently over the years. While there were nearly 3,000 young detainees when I ran the Youth Justice Board in South West England in the early noughties, now there are fewer than 600. This will inevitably mean that the young people being cared for today are more complex and challenging than ever – and often more dangerous, as assault rates on staff demonstrate. It also ought to mean that there is more expertise available to help a smaller number of young people who are profoundly victimised as well as being victimisers.

That’s not what’s happening at Rainsbrook. In spades. The Justice Committee report describes a situation where on-site state monitors and the director couldn’t or wouldn’t see what amounted to solitary confinement of children, only a two-minute walk from their offices. 

Inspectors visited the site in February, October and December in 2020. During this time they revealed high staff turnover, low levels of experience and children refusing to go to poorly organised education classes. But recommendations for improvement were largely ignored. The final report of that year by inspectors resulted in an ‘Urgent Notification’ to the Justice Secretary put in place to alert ministers to the most alarming system failures. It describes the daily experience of children as ‘bleak’ with a spartan regime and little encouragement by staff to get them up in the morning. In response to this, the Justice Secretary put his name to a letter, presumably created by the same officials asleep at the wheel, that provided assurances on improvement action that simply did not happen.

Our Prison and Probation Service is fond of the word ‘assurance.’ Assurance processes abound within a system screened from public view where the state and its agents have huge power. But they are only as good as the people doing the assurance and the competence – or appetite – of senior managers to correct poor practice. Neither is remotely evident in this example. And if this level of incompetence and blindness to the facts is seen in the custody of young people, why would it not be the case with other riskier groups such as terrorists or organised criminals? The ‘failure to see’ and ‘failure to challenge’ at Rainsbrook is a microcosm of corporate failure evidenced over and again by prison inspection reports across the system. Not a good look for a law enforcement agency with a public protection priority.

One answer could be the almost bizarre lack of accountability evident in the senior corporate ranks of HM Prison and Probation Service. Nobody ever seems to carry the can when things go wrong. It is a closed shop where incompetence is too often rewarded with promotion.

Perhaps now that a senior minister has been so publicly embarrassed there will be change. Certainly Mr Buckland has warned of ‘serious consequences’ for those who mislead him again. I suggest he puts his special advisors to work across the system urgently auditing the veracity of the data he receives on conditions inside prisons. Change matters. 

The children locked up in Rainsbrook are some of the most damaged young people in the country. Close to 40 per cent of children and young people leaving custody reoffend and little wonder if they are banged up in such dystopian joints. We have a moral responsibility to look after these kids better and a practical imperative to stop them destroying their own lives and hurting others in the process. 

The Government is committed to changing the ethos of youth custody with the introduction of secure schools. This is a welcome change but like much of the assurances given to the Justice Secretary it won’t be worth the cost of the rebranding if the same officials and contractors are in charge. No one worth listening to thinks these institutions are easy to operate but this sorry episode is symptomatic of a Government department and agency that urgently needs a culture shock to excise people and practices that are more attuned to self-preservation than public service. Dominic Cummings departure is unlamented in much of Whitehall. But after Rainsbrook there’s one place much in need of a dose of his ‘hard rain’ – the Ministry of Justice.