Rainsbrook: Government urged to take over private youth jail

The government is being urged by MPs to consider taking over a privately-run youth detention centre where children have been kept in their cells for all but 30 minutes a day.

Rainsbrook Secure Training Centre, run by MTC in Northamptonshire, had previously been told it must improve.

The House of Commons Justice Committee said the government should take action by June if issues were not addressed.

MTC said it was working with the Ministry of Justice.

In its report, the committee said conditions at Rainsbrook were "tantamount to solitary confinement".

The committee's chairman, Conservative MP Sir Bob Neill, said: "The experience of the inspectors over the past year has shown that some of the promises made by MTC are worth less than the paper they are written on.

"But even worse, in a way, is that the competent public authorities - from the Ministry of Justice down - have failed in their oversight of this private contractor."

The centre, near Rugby, holds up to 87 boys and girls convicted or awaiting trial for serious offences who typically have complex behavioural problems or other vulnerabilities, such as self-harming.

The centre is meant to provide an education as close as possible to school.

In December, Ofsted, the HM Inspectorate of Prisons, and the Care Quality Commission issued a rare urgent notification to Justice Secretary Robert Buckland over the "continued poor care and leadership" at the site, amid concerns that vulnerable children were subjected to a "bleak regime".

Inspectors found little progress had been made, despite assurances two months earlier that immediate action would be taken after concerns that newly-admitted children, some as young as 15, were being locked in their bedrooms for 14 days and only allowed out for 30 minutes a day.

The committee said senior Rainsbrook management and MoJ staff working there were unaware of these conditions, despite having offices just two minutes' walk from the cells.

It recommended that MTC and the youth custody service branch of the MoJ report to it by June.

If substantial improvements had not been made by then, the committee said the government should consider taking Rainsbrook "back in-house".

MTC said it accepted the recommendations made by inspectors and was working with the MoJ to address them, and that a new leadership team and new education provider had been put in place.

An MTC spokesman said a new permanent director - a youth custody specialist - was joining the centre and added it was committed "to make the changes we all want to see at Rainsbrook".

Find BBC News: East of England on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. If you have a story suggestion email [email protected]