In January, a 12-year-old girl was locked into a “seclusion” room in a hospital in Staffordshire. The room contained a platform with a mattress on it, a moulded basin and toilet, and nothing else. For almost 24 hours a day, her only human contact was through a hatch in the door. She was held in that room just short of eight weeks.
“Becky” has complex emotional and behavioural needs, and seemed determined to kill herself. The latest crisis involved her being taken by social workers to an emergency placement in a Travelodge, where she trashed the room and assaulted staff and police. Although she was just 12, police brought her before magistrates. In the holding cell, she tried to overdose. En route to another emergency placement, Becky escaped from a car, ran along a motorway, climbed a building and tried to jump off. After she had been checked out in A&E, it turned out there was not a single Ofsted-regulated and, importantly, secure placement anywhere in the country for Becky to go.
In an investigation for Tortoise Media, Children locked away: Britain’s modern bedlam, I discovered that the system for protecting children like Becky is in freefall. When a child with complex needs reaches crisis point, there may be a need for “secure” accommodation: a home, with typically one to five beds, in which a child can be closely supervised – even restricted from leaving the property – for their own safety, that will allow expert therapeutic care to be offered.
In January this year, the most senior family judge in England and Wales, Sir Andrew McFarlane, ordered the education secretary, Gillian Keegan, to come to his court to account for the failure to provide enough of the right kind of care for children in these life-threatening crises. In a devastating judgment, he accused her of “complacency bordering on cynicism” and expressly disagreed with her position – put forward by the barrister she sent to court in her place – that the government had nothing to contribute on the lack of secure placements for children in urgent need.
It was “shocking”, the judge said, that the Department for Education “seemed to be simply washing its hands of this chronic problem”. He expressed surprise that the secretary of state’s response was “simply to say that this desperate situation was not her responsibility and, indeed, it would be a waste of public money even to engage with the court in considering the mismatch between the demand for secure welfare placements and the supply of them”.
Nobody in power can pretend they don’t know this is a crisis in full swing. Six years ago, Sir James Munby, McFarlane’s predecessor, published a judgment that resulted in national headlines. He was concerned with a highly distressed and repeatedly suicidal 16-year-old-girl, known only as “X” – and his language was thunderous. X needed a secure paediatric mental health bed to stop her killing herself. But there was none to be had. Munby’s judgment read: “If we, the system, society, the state, are unable to provide X with the supportive and safe placement she so desperately needs, and if, in consequence, she is enabled to make another attempt on her life, then I can only say, with bleak emphasis: we will have blood on our hands.”
These children in deep distress can be as young as 11 or 12; they may have learning disabilities, mental health conditions, autistic spectrum disorders, or have been trafficked or otherwise abused. Throughout their childhoods, the specialist services they need have frequently not been available. As they get older, and their behaviours become more volatile and disturbing, a comprehensive and sustained failure by councils to commission enough secure therapeutic placements – and a lack of political will from national government to fix the system – means that when many of these vulnerable and volatile children hit rock bottom, there is simply nowhere for them to go.
Each individual child’s case can only be a snapshot. I wanted to understand the overall situation. Through freedom of information requests sent to the DfE and to all 172 councils providing children’s services in England and Wales, I discovered there are just 128 secure welfare placements in 13 children’s homes in England (though there are others specifically for children in the criminal justice system). Scores of children are chasing every bed. On one day in September 2022, 58 children were on the waiting list for two beds. A week later, 62 children needed a bed, but only three were available. Our Tortoise investigation showed that some children had waited not just months but up to three years for a regulated secure placement. Some councils told us the wait went on so long they “gave up”.
When children can’t get regulated placements, councils have two options: they can send children over the border to Scotland, hundreds of miles from their families, or they can spend tens of thousands of pounds on unregulated placements that they commission on an ad hoc, last-minute basis. Applications to high court judges for “deprivation of liberty” orders that permit councils to impose a “secure regime” on children in unregulated settings are projected by the Nuffield Family Justice Observatory to reach a high of 1,300 in the 12 months to July – a more than tenfold increase on the 2018 figure of 103.
The highest cost we found being paid for this type of setting by councils was £62,000 a week, equivalent to £3.2m a year. And, when we asked how many children had died in these unregulated placements over the past five years, we were told the number was at least nine. At least four of those children had taken their own lives, including a 13-year-old boy.
The government refused to answer questions based on our freedom of information data, nor would the DfE grant us an interview. In an echo of the contempt with which the education secretary treated the high court this year, we were simply sent background information, a minister’s recycled quote, and told about £259m for building new children’s homes – a figure that is regularly quoted and which will not solve the workforce crisis in children’s social care. When we repeated our interview request, we were told the government had “nothing further to add”.
Why has a wealthy nation ended up without enough secure therapeutic placements for children in urgent and immediate crisis? Why are so many fragile children being locked up in accommodation operated without any independent scrutiny? Why are they dying, and killing themselves, in unregulated “care”.
In a hearing I attended last Thursday, it emerged that Becky is still locked away, and, despite the judge’s express orders made at the last two hearings, the council has still not designed a detailed care plan that would allow her to return home.
There has been an utter failure of political will to address the needs of these children who are seen as reputationally risky, aggressive, expensive and “difficult”. Local councils cannot be expected to individually commission expensive placements that they may not be able to use. The DfE needs to stop batting away responsibility. Central government must ensure more secure and regulated placements are commissioned, so that our most vulnerable children aren’t destroyed in unregulated ones.
• Louise Tickle is a freelance journalist who writes on education, social affairs and family law
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