HC Deb 11 August 1966 vol 733 cc2001-10

Motion made and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—[Mr. loan L. Evans.]

9.10 p.m.

Sir David Renton (Huntingdonshire)

I am fortunate, at this early hour, in being able to refer to the Gaynes Hall open borstal institution in the parish of Great Staughton, in my constituency, which has been an open borstal for about 20 years. As a former Home Office Minister, I am not against the principle of having some open borstals, and this evening my aim is exploratory rather than critical. But if we are to have open borstals I suggest that certain conditions should be observed.

The first of those conditions is that those lads who are likely to want to escape should not be sent to an open borstal. The second is that there should be adequate arrangements to check the whereabouts of the lads who are at the borstal. The third is that, if the lads do escape, they should not normally be returned to open conditions. They should know that that is so and, therefore, this should be one of the sanctions to prevent their escaping. I hope that no reasonable person familiar with this problem would dispute those conditions.

During its 20 years of existence, this borstal has been used mainly for those lads considered to be not only suitable for open borstals, but the most promising types for training and reform. As a result, Gaynes Hall probably has more advanced training facilities than any other borstal in the country.

The success rate used to be fairly high. I do not know what it is now, but I should like to know what it has been in the last year or two. The absconding rate at Gaynes Hall throughout the 20 years of its existence has varied considerably, but in the past 18 months it has been very bad indeed. In 1965, out of a total of 358 lads there during the year—that is, taking those who are there at the beginning of the year and those who came in during the year—no fewer than 101 absconded. The absconding rate, therefore, was 28 per cent. During the first six months of this year, the position was not quite so bad, but bad enough. Out of 276 lads there in that period, 49 absconded during the first six months. That is an absconding rate of 17.6 per cent.

If we take the total of 150 who absconded during the 18 months I have described, we find that 79 of them were sent back to open conditions at Gaynes Hall. In addition, 11 were still at large. It is, therefore, only the balance of 60 who were apparently returned to conditions of security instead of to open conditions.

I am grateful to the right hon. Lady the Minister of State for coming here this evening. I am thankful that I have not kept her, as once was feared, into the early hours of the morning, but, as it is, we are given a little more time to consider this very important matter. I should be glad if she could tell me how many absconded in July this year.

Many of those who have absconded in the past have committed indictable offences, including burglary, house-breaking, stealing cars and taking cars without the consent of their owners. Most of those offences were committed in my constituency and have given rise to much anxiety, and indeed indignation, locally. Local anxieties reached their climax when, on 20th April, a lad absconded and raped a married woman in the morning while her husband was away at work. The lad concerned pleaded guilty to that offence at the assizes held a month or so later and is now in prison. As this was the only case of this kind in 20 years I mention it only because it greatly increased the long-felt anxieties of people living in the neighbourhood and brought their fears to a climax.

Since then, I have twice seen the Home Secretary about the question of abscondings from this borstal and action has already been taken with a view to improving the situation locally. For example, there is now a police officer stationed there and living in the village of Great Stranghton nearby. I understand that the Home Secretary hopes to arrange for one or two local residents to be on the board of visitors. That will be a good thing and will increase the liaison between the governor and his staff and the local community.

I have been told that security arrangements for ensuring that the lads are present and have not absconded have been reviewed and improved, but I should be grateful if the Minister of State could enlighten me on the following matters. What is being done to improve the security arrangements? What steps are being taken to ensure that the high standards of selection which prevailed in the past will be carried on in future? Thirdly—and this a relatively new problem in relation to Gaynes Hall—what does the Home Secretary propose to do about the growing problem caused by the proximity of this borstal to Grafham Water, which was opened by His Royal Highness the Duke of Edinburgh last month?

This is not only the largest artificial reservoir in the country but it is rapidly becoming an important pleasure resort. The gates of Gaynes Hall are only about a quarter of a mile from the shores of Grafham Water. Grafham Water is already attracting over 1,000 cars and over 3,000 people who go there, and I am glad they do go to enjoy themselves, on Saturdays and Sundays in the summer. I realise that Grafham Water came many years after the borstal was established, but now that both are so close together the security risk is obviously increased. I do not wish publicly to go into details about this, for reasons which the House will apperciate, but I would be glad if the Home Office could bear in mind this factor and if the right hon. Lady could give us her views about it.

I hope that I have said enough to enable the right hon. Lady to give me a reply this evening which will reassure my constituents about the matters which I have raised.

9.20 p.m.

The Minister of State, Home Office (Miss Alice Bacon)

The right hon. and learned Member for Huntingdonshire (Sir D. Renton) has raised a very important question this evening. As he was a Home Office Minister and once occupied my position, I know that he appreciates the difficulties attendant upon prisons and borstals, keeping large numbers of people together, and open prisons and borstals. I shall deal, first, with the general subject of open borstals so as to set the background against which we must consider Gaynes Hall.

There are 12 open borstals in the country for about 2,000 boys. The functions of all borstals is to train these boys over a reasonable period to lead a useful, honest life and to change the attitude of mind which led the boy to get into trouble. It is the job of borstal to try to lead the boy to want to live a better life and to fit him to be able to maintain it once he has started. This, I believe, can best be done in conditions as nearly free as the freedom to which he must eventually return. We must help him, if possible, to learn to use this freedom.

Clearly, certain boys, especially those with backgrounds of violence, serious mental or emotional disturbances, and sexual offences, ought not to go to an open borstal, and boys of that type are never sent there. For them, training is more difficult. It is true that there are fewer escapes from closed borstals than from open establishments, but there are also fewer long-term successes, as I am sure the right hon. and learned Gentleman appreciates. Boys who get the opportunity to go to an open borstal get a better training and a better chance of ultimate success. For this reason, we feel that as many as possible should go to open borstal.

The second matter which I would like to discuss is the method of selection of boys to go to open borstals. This is done, as the right hon. and learned Gentleman will know, at an allocation centre. There are two of these, one in Manchester and one in London. In both, the boys are received as soon as possible after they have been sentenced. They stay in the allocation centre for at least two weeks while their records, health, educational standards and family background are considered. They are then allocated to the borstal whose training seems most likely to meet their needs.

The boys sent to Gaynes Hall are, in general, in the 18 to 20 age group, healthy and of good intelligence. They are the sort of boys who have the best chance of succeeding in their borstal training. Gaynes Hall has one of the highest success rates in the country, more than 50 per cent., although the right hon. and learned Gentleman will appreciate that the measurement of success rate is not exact.

I would now like to say a little about the conditions at Gaynes Hall. It is an open borstal, so that it has no perimeter wall, no bars and no bolts. The boys live in single-storey brick buildings and the establishment is surrounded by its own farmland and lies in the rural area of Huntingdonshire.

One of the prime needs of any establishment for young people, good or bad sick or well, is space; and open borstals, containing the concentrated energies of anything up to 200 young men, do need plenty of space. They also need work, preferably work which is both constructive and fairly heavy. For these reasons, most are in the country and have land enough for some farming and the like to be learnt. Gaynes Hall has its own gardens supplying its kitchens and selling salad crops locally, its cereal and hay, a pig-breeding unit, and beef cattle.

The boys learn and perform all the tasks involved and do them well enough to put up creditable performances in the county show and county rally. There are five vocational training courses for groups of 12 to 15 at a time, two learning motor mechanics, one building, one painting and decorating and one precision-instrument making. In addition, there is a smaller group doing baking. The borstal has the services of a tutor organiser, and of a number of teachers from the local education authority who come in in the evenings.

Boys attend the local church for Communion and special services and have assisted in archaeological digs, run fund-raising stalls for an orphanage, and taken part in other useful work for the community. I have mentioned already that they enter for the county show, and have done well in it. They also have a branch of the Young Farmers' Club and visit other clubs in the district. They also organised the county eliminator for the Royal Show Tractor Driving Competition last year.

A team was entered for the County Youth Public Speaking Contest and gained second place. Boys play cricket, rugby, soccer and five-a-side matches locally, and teams enter national canoeing events. They are keen members of a weight training and weight lifting club and they won 75 certificates in 1965 from the British Amateur Weight Lifting Association. All these activities are good in themselves but, more important, they let the community see and know the boys and prevent the boys from feeling hopelessly rejected before their adult life is begun.

The most important element of all is that they give a boy a foothold in the decent law-abiding community when he leaves the borstal. There will always be a risk of abscondings in open borstals, and because of the risk we have made special arrangements to pay compensation for material losses that are not covered by insurance, to people living in the immediate vicinity. This I readily admit, does not in any way compensate them for the alarm, anxiety and vexation. But we do try to take every possible step to protect the outside community. Within the borstal itself there are many ways of keeping the boys under supervision and of estimating their progress before they are judged ready for activities in which they would have the best opportunities for absconding, and of keeping check of their whereabouts.

There are nine roll calls a day, so that the absence of a boy comes to notice very quickly. We have the very valuable and watchful assistance of the police and, as a result of discussions with the right hon. and learned Gentleman, extra mobile patrols are now maintained. In addition the boys have a full and busy day. Absconding, nevertheless, occurs and a statistical table of these was published as a Written Answer in reply to the right hon. and learned Member on 7th July. As that Answer showed, there were 101 abscondings in 1965 and there have been 62 so far this year.

Seen as a proportion of approximately 160 boys, I know that it is a disturbingly large number. It must be said that this does not fairly represent the risk. There are 160 boys in Gaynes Hall every day of the year.

They are not always the same boys. Indeed, as I hope to show in a few minutes, absconding is largely restricted to one group of boys. But the risk is there for every boy for 24 hours a day every day. Seen in this light, although every absconding is a sort of failure, the total is less formidable.

As to the group most at risk and the group among whom there are most abscondees, 41 out of the 62 abscondings this year occurred within the first four weeks of the boys' arrival at Gaynes Hall and 21 of them within the first week of arrival there. There remain the other later ones, and these may be more serious.

The right hon. and learned Gentleman mentioned one particular case of an absconding which resulted in a youth being convicted of the rape of a local woman. As the right hon. and learned Gentleman knows, it is 20 years since any similar occurrence arose, although this does not make it any less distressing for the woman concerned and her family. I entirely share the concern which the right hon. and learned Gentleman has expressed at this distressing occurrence and I join him in expressing my sympathy and that of my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary for the victim and her family. I do not think that anyone would wish deliberately to give this case any more unnecessary publicity, which can only cause further harm to those most deeply concerned.

This was, for the youth concerned, his first period of borstal training, although he had previous convictions as a juvenile. I want to make it perfectly clear that the boy had no previous history of violence of any kind, nor of any sexual offences. He was undergoing borstal training after conviction for simple larceny. This offence was in line with those he had committed previously. I do not think that any fault could be attached to the allocation authorities in this case.

There are many reasons for a boy to abscond, as many reasons as there are boys. Some are harmless, even pathetic, and may include home difficulties, anxiety about a girl friend, or a quarrel with another boy in the borstal. Others are more serious, in that they represent deliberate attempts to escape and remain unlawfully free, or "on the run".

The former often cause little trouble. The boy may not get more than a few yards away or may himself return quite soon. At worst he will go home to try to sort out his trouble and usually is soon recovered. In these cases the governor might properly be willing to keep the boy in an open borstal. Whether he does so or not depends on the decision of an assistant director of the Prison Service, who will determine, in the light of the circumstances, whether the boy will remain in an open borstal or be sent to a closed establishment.

I can assure the House that absconding is never taken lightly and that a serious absconding will result in a boy's losing his place in an open borstal. It will also result in the boy's being sent for a period to the corrective training centre at Reading before his reallocation to a closed borstal. These facts are well known to the boys and are to some extent a deterrent.

There are, as the right hon. and learned Gentleman has told the House, changes coming to this area. In particular, a lido and recreation centre are planned for Grafham Water.

Sir D. Renton

It is already in existence. There is a sailing club and a fishing club. Everything is already going on there, except that swimming is not yet allowed. I think that it will be one day.

Miss Bacon

I thank the right hon. and learned Gentleman for his intervention. He knows the area, and I do not. There is the recreation centre and the lido at Grafham Water.

The right hon. and learned Gentleman suggests that in the face of all this, Gaynes Hall should no longer remain an open borstal. I cannot accept this. The borstal cannot be closed as if it were a door. Even if we were to build walls around it, or put bars on the windows or bolts on the doors, the boys would have to go on working outside the walls. The alternatives are for it to remain there as an open borstal or to close down Gaynes Hall as a borstal altogether.

Many hon. Members are already aware of the gravity of the present borstal situation. We simply do not have enough borstal places for the boys who are coming from the courts. The number of committtals has risen considerably over a long period. The closed borstals are full and the open borstals are coming under pressure. The allocation centres have, from time to time, to retain boys in a sort of queue waiting to go to borstals.

Steps have been taken to improve the situation as far as possible. The second allocation centre, to which I have referred, was set up this spring to relieve the congestion at the London centre. In addition, we have recently turned a former prison at Stoke Heath into a borstal because of the shortage of borstal accommodation. The borstal population is nearly 5,500, however, and it would be idle to suggest that we could possibly afford to give up a borstal at the present time. Gaynes Hall must, therefore, remain as a borstal, and for the reasons which I have given it must remain as an open borstal.

The boys at all borstals are encouraged within their limits to keep themselves in touch with the world to which they are to return. In a closed borstal, opportunities are limited and more must be achieved by encouraging the outside world to visit them rather than by sending them to it. The essence of an open borstal, however, is its ability to diminish the barriers, and at Gaynes Hall the boys participate in the life of the community as much as possible.

I have already mentioned all the activities at Gaynes Hall. I hope that I have shown that no boy need be driven back to lawbreaking by loneliness or boredom. The majority of inmates come from towns and cities and will return to them and must, therefore, come to terms with them. If our training borstals can help boys to do this, they will not altogether have failed.

Sir D. Renton

Before the right hon. Lady concludes, I wonder whether she would allow me to correct one thing? She accused me of saying that I wanted Gaynes Hall to become a closed borstal. I did not do so. My wish was to find out what the right hon. Lady and the Home Secretary had in mind in view of the new development at Grafham Water. The right hon. Lady has explained the position carefully, but I should not like it to go on record that I had made the suggestion which the right hon. Lady said I had made, but did not make.

Miss Bacon

I apologise to the right hon. and learned Gentleman. Later in my speech I thought that I had misinterpreted what he said. Perhaps I should have said that some people, but not the right hon. and learned Gentleman, thought that it ought to have been a closed borstal.

Question put and agreed to.

Adjourned accordingly at twenty-one minutes to Ten o'clock.