You’re a teenage girl and you’ve been locked in a bare hospital room for more than 15 months. Your bed is a platform attached to the floor. There’s a plastic toilet and a sink moulded into the wall. Your only human contact is through a hatch in the door. Sometimes you get to hold your mum’s hand through it.
You’ve tried to kill yourself multiple times, including trying to throw yourself off a bridge over the M6. That was after escaping being driven to an unregulated children’s home miles away from your family. You can’t understand why your mum’s not able to look after you, as she does with your two siblings.
You’ve tried to show everyone how distraught you are, over and over again – you’ve trashed your room and the Travelodge where you were dumped when the council had nowhere else to put you. You keep running away – you were removed from one unregulated placement when staff there abused you – you’ve cut yourself to ribbons, attacked staff, taken overdoses and tried to ligature yourself. The police keep being called, adults keep physically jumping on you to restrain you – to keep you safe, you’re told – and you’ve been arrested and charged and put in a cell at the magistrates court. That was when you were 12.
Anyway, you’ve just turned 14. You’re still locked in this hospital room. A high court judge called it “solitary confinement” and said you were being treated “worse than a murderer”. You’re stuck here, you’ve worked out, because nobody in the country wants you. And now the hospital is kicking you out too. In three hours.
Meet Becky.
I first heard about Becky, a then 12-year-old girl, in January last year, when a judge was asked by Staffordshire council – which had taken Becky into care – to make a deprivation of liberty order that permit councils to impose a “secure regime” on children, for her safety. Everyone in court was clearly terrified of the phone call that would tell them that Becky – suicidal and with severe emotional and behavioural difficulties – was dead.
At hearings over the next 15 months, I watched, raging, as a child the same age as my son had her life ruined by the state. As reported in my Tortoise podcast, “Children locked away: Britain’s modern bedlam”, the institutions responsible for Becky’s care have said repeatedly that being deprived of her liberty in a hospital room is actively causing her harm. She has had no therapeutic input in all these months. Out of society’s sight, she has effectively been warehoused. This is no life for a child. It is barely an existence.
At an emergency hearing, her court-appointed guardian told the most senior family judge in the country, Sir Andrew McFarlane, that in her view, locking Becky in the hospital had become unlawful – in other words, she was being arbitrarily detained. At a second urgent hearing a week later, McFarlane pleaded with North Staffordshire NHS Trust – which has accommodated Becky since her crisis admission in January 2023 – to extend its mandatory discharge deadline for a second time as the council had nowhere for her to go.
The trust reluctantly acceded to another 48 hours. Come midday on Thursday 9 May, Becky was driven to an unregulated placement that had been found just in time. Within 24 hours, she had damaged the property, run into a road, attacked staff, been handcuffed by police, swallowed the contents of a packet of antihistamines left in her supposedly “secure” transport, been taken to hospital, and had her placement at the home terminated after spending just a single night there. Social workers had nowhere to take her other than a placement that Staffordshire council had earlier informed McFarlane was unsuitable and unsafe. She arrived on Saturday at 1am.
Everything that could go wrong for Becky has gone wrong. But this is not just happenstance.
The frustration of senior judges asked to make deprivation of liberty orders, which undoubtedly stretch the edges of legality, has been an education in how little power the courts have, when an entire system of social care that should protect the most vulnerable and needy children has degraded to the point of complete collapse.
The problem is not only about big private providers trying to squeeze profits out of kids. Wary of taking on the risk associated with volatile children, and with their budgets slashed, councils have for years outsourced looking after children such as Becky, and used their procurement processes to drive down the price they pay for a bed. As a result, many small specialist providers have been forced out, which in turn means an increasing number of children end up supported by non-specialist or poorly qualified agency staff in unregistered care settings, where their needs are not met.
When disaster ensues and the placement breaks down, social workers must try again to get those children into registered homes. Knowing that a child is in crisis, councils will sometimes withhold vitally important information on their level of risk. Aware of this, many registered providers refuse to respond to emergencies as the danger to their staff, and to other children they are looking after, is just too high. And so Becky, and hundreds of children like her, end up ricocheting around unregistered settings. To be clear, these placements are illegal.
Senior judges have repeatedly appealed to the secretary of state for education to step in to fix this broken system. In vain. Last year, McFarlane accused Gillian Keegan, the education secretary, of “complacency bordering on cynicism” in a scathing judgment concerning the case of a suicidal girl known as X.
Keegan declined McFarlane’s invitation to engage in the case. He expressed surprise that her response was “simply to say that this desperate situation was not her responsibility”. The government has failed to take responsibility to address the systemic problems that beset local authorities, which seem unable to improve the experience of these desperate children.
The harm caused to Becky in the care of the state is the distillation of a crisis that has become a national scandal. As she was driven back to Staffordshire last Friday night, her mother messaged me to explain what was happening. “How are you doing?” I wrote back. “I have no words for how I am feeling,” she said.
Nor does she have any idea of what will become of her daughter.
• Louise Tickle is a reporter for Tortoise Media
• In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org
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