The Children’s Commissioner for England
report shines a light on the hundreds of children in England who are
locked up in institutions across the country. The report, “Who are they? Where are they? Children locked up”
gathers together for the first time all the data currently available
about some of the most vulnerable children in England – those living in
secure children’s homes, youth justice settings, mental health wards and
other residential placements, either for their own safety or the safety
of others.

The report seeks to identify who these children are and where they
living, the costs of keeping them locked up, whether these institutions
always meet their complex needs and whether different decisions could
have been taken to prevent these children being locked away.

Some of the main findings in the report include:

• There were 1,465 children in England securely detained in 2018, of
  whom 873 were in held in youth justice settings, 505 were in mental
  health wards and 87 were in secure children’s homes for their own
  welfare. However, this number is likely to be an underestimate due to
  gaps in the data.
• We spend around £300m a year on 1,465 children in England –
  excluding what we spend on those ‘invisible’ children whose settings we
  don’t have information about.
• Medium Secure Mental Health Settings are the most expensive form of
  provision, at £1,611 a day or £588,015 a year. Secure Children’s Homes
  have an estimated cost per child of £210,000 per year, with Secure
  Training Centres at £160,000 a year and Young Offender Institutions at
  £76,000.
• There are an additional 211 children whose Deprivation of Liberty
  has been authorised by a court, who are locked away but whose
  whereabouts in the system is invisible. These are children who do not
  show up in the published data because they don’t fit into any of the
  categories for which there is published data. This number is also likely
  to be an underestimate. We do not know where these children live or how
  long they have been there.
• Even for those children we know about, there is only limited
  information about how long children stay in secure settings, how long
  they wait for a place, whether they face delays in the transfer of care
  to the community and what happens when they leave.
• NHS England has provided the Children’s Commissioner with its
  current list of the specialism, unit type and number of beds for
  children in mental health units across England. In the South West, there
  is only one secure mental health bed per 100,000 children, while in the
  East Midlands there are nearly eight. The number of beds in England is
  significantly lower than the figures available for children detained
  under the Mental Health Act.

The Children’s Commissioner makes a number of recommendations in her report, including:

• Calling for local authorities to provide data to the Children’s
  Commissioner, Ofsted and the CQC on the number of children deprived of
  liberty in their area at any one time, the legal basis for that
  deprivation of liberty, and where those children are living.
• The NHS should ensure that data is published on the age, ethnicity
  and gender for all children detained at a given point in time in their
  annual report, and increase coverage of data returns to 100% of
  settings. The DfE should publish the ethnicity of children detained in
  Secure Children’s Homes, on welfare grounds.
• Data which is routinely collected on admission to custody, mental
  health wards or Secure Children’s homes about the mental health,
  learning or social care needs of children in settings should be
  published annually, and NHS England should publish figures about the
  length of stay in hospital for children sectioned under the Mental
  Health Act.
• The Department for Education, the Minister of Justice and Department
  for Health should set up a joint working group to looking at how data
  can be better collected, what lessons can be learnt on issues like
  restraint and segregation and which seeks a better understanding of the
  pathways of children into and out of the secure estate and between
  different sectors of secure accommodation. There is also not enough
  information about how these children are treated when in secure
  settings, for example how many times they are restrained or placed in
  segregation. Better information is needed in order to hold providers to
  account and reduce restrictive practices across all settings.

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