Police and Justice Bill

The noble Baroness, Lady Linklater, has done us a service in raising this issue, because it will be the first of a long series of debates that we will need to have on the implications of the Bill as regards younger people. I wish to put on record my gratitude to the Standing Committee for Youth Justice for its briefing on this and other matters and, in particular, for coming along as a group last week to brief noble Lords on a range of issues covered by the Bill. We now come to a difficult issue. Certainly, we on these Benches do not oppose the use of street bail. It can be extremely useful, not only to the police, for obvious reasons, but to the person who receives it. If I was stopped at midnight as a young person under 17, perhaps I should not have been out, or perhaps I was out because I had been at work—who knows? But it may not be convenient for me to appear at a police station immediately. So, street bail has its practical good uses. However, as soon as conditions are applied to it, we get into greater difficulties. I shall not stray into the issues that I shall raise in my AmendmentNo. 85, but this amendment focuses our minds on the appropriateness of making a wide range of conditions available to the police to apply to young people, for the reasons that the noble Baroness, Lady Linklater, has adduced. We can all underestimate the ability of young people. They can be perfectly able to commit the most amazing and gratuitously wide range of crimes and can be unable to remember, apparently, something that they have been told a moment before about a condition that they may need to obey. But we have to cope with all those who may fall foul of street bail. We have to realise that some may genuinely be unable to understand conditions and that, for them, such conditions may be inappropriate. It is important that the Minister should explain how this power will be used proportionately in relation to young people.