A day at Ashley Youth Detention Centre costs more than the Ritz

It costs more to keep a young offender at the Ashley Youth Detention Centre for a day than it would to fly to London for a night in a top hotel, federal figures show.

The Ritz Hotel.

It costs more to keep a young offender at the Ashley Youth Detention Centre for a day than it would to house them at the state’s most luxurious resort or to fly to London for a night in a top hotel, federal figures show.

The Productivity Commission has released the first tranche of state-by-state comparisons for the year.

The Report on Government Services has released detailed figures revealing relative performance on aged care, child protection, youth justice and housing and homelessness.

The data reveals that it costs $4346 per day to keep a young person in detention in Tasmania.

A room at Saffire Freycinet is around $3100 a night.

A flight to London and a superior king room at the Ritz in London for a night can be had for around $3600 in total.

The cost of housing detainees is 30 per cent higher than the national average, despite Ashley being the subject of multiple findings of serious human rights breaches.

The cost of youth detention does not include the government’s $75m payout to settle a class action brought by former detainees abused at the centre.

The Ritz Hotel, London. Picture: Alamy

There were 19 assaults resulting in injury to detainees at Ashley in 2023/24 and 27 of staff, the figures show. Both rates are the highest in the nation.

The centre houses an average of 16 young people, most of whom have not yet been sentenced.

Fifty per cent of those in Ashley are back in custody within two years, although that figure is down from 57 per cent a decade ago. There were three escapes in 2023/24.

The government has committed for years to close the facility but hasn’t.

The figures on housing show that 46 per cent of those in the greatest need for public housing wait longer than two years: making Tasmania the slowest state in the nation to house the most needy.

Just 2.6 per cent of households in the greatest need are found housing within three months — the national rate is 29 per cent.

The number of public housing dwellings has fallen from 7243 in 2015 to 5066 in 2024, largely because the state government transferred 2,027 homes worth $674m to community housing organisations in 2021/22.

The figures show the number of homeless people in Tasmania increased by 44 per cent between 2016 and 2021.

The number of homeless people rose from 1622 people in 2016 to 2350 in 2021, the latest year for which figures are available.

The aged care figures reveal there has been a steady decline in the number of residential places aged care per 1,000 people aged over 70 since 2015, when there were 79.2 beds per 1,000 people.

In 2024, there was 58.9 — the second-lowest proportion in the nation.

The aged care figures reveal there has been a steady decline in the number of residential places aged care per 1,000 people, new report shows.

The figures showed that 17 per cent of Tasmanians aged over 65 needed more formal assistance than they were currently receiving in 2022, the second-highest rate in the nation.

Tasmania also had the nation’s highest rate of pressure injuries in aged care, the highest rate of significant unplanned weight loss and the second-highest rate of falls.

The proportion of care recipients that experienced a decline in their ability to perform activities of daily living was the highest in the nation at 26 per cent.

The figures on services for people with disability showed government expenditure on disability services has been static in real terms over the last three financial years at around $282m.

The data also showed that 40 per cent of investigations into notifications of child abuse or neglect or abuse took longer than 90 days, double the national average.

Just 32 per cent of children in care have a documented case plan. The national average was 88 per cent and the next-worst state, Western Australia, recorded 73 per cent.

Tasmania’s figure was down from 44 per cent the year before.

Originally published as A day at Ashley Youth Detention Centre costs more than the Ritz