Youth Custody: Restraint Techniques

(asked on 20th January 2021) - View Source

Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many children in custody have been reported by his Department as being placed in (a) handcuffs or (b) restraints in each of the last twelve months; under what circumstances those children were handcuffed or restrained; and in which local authority these incidents took place.


Answered by
Alex Chalk Portrait
Alex Chalk
Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice
This question was answered on 29th January 2021

Data on the use of force and restraint on children in the youth custodial estate is recorded and collated locally in incident reports at each custodial establishment. This data is aggregated annually in the “Youth Justice Statistics” report which are included in the Youth justice statistics series. The latest report for 2019/20 was published on 28 January: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/youth-justice-statistics-2019-to-2020.

Information on use of force, broken down by establishment and reason, can be found in the supplementary tables. The total number of Restrictive Physical Interventions (RPIs), are broken down by month in table 8.1. This provides figures on all restraints of young people that satisfy the definition of being RPI, and the relevant line of table 8.24 provides the subset of those that involve handcuffs.

For ease of reference, the number of times that handcuffs have been used to restrain children is also provided in the attached table. It should be noted that this does not take place in secure children’s homes.

The use of restraint and force is only ever used as a last resort to protect children from further harm.

Reticulating Splines