The House is considering this Bill and these amendments at a time when we recognise the difficult job that we ask our security services, and indeed our police, to do to keep us safe. However, these practices have gone on for some years and it is right to legislate to give the protection of a framework as to how they can happen. It is important that that framework is protected. I therefore want to speak in support of amendment 4, tabled in the other place by Baroness Kidron and supported by a cross-party group including Lord Young, Lord Kennedy and Baroness Hamwee, which sets out the protections and safeguards that we should ask for if we expect children or vulnerable people to commit crimes on our behalf. Like others, I thank the people in the Lords who have done a huge amount of work to get us to this place on these protections. I also thank the previous Minister, the right hon. Member for Old Bexley and Sidcup (James Brokenshire), and his counterpart in the Lords, Baroness Williams, both of whom have listened to concerns with regard to this amendment. I know that the Minister has come to this matter late and he wants to listen too.
That is why I want to put on record how sorry I am that we have not yet got to agreement across this House and across this Parliament. If the Minister was listening to the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis), who I recognise also has strong feelings about this, he would see that there is concern across this House about how we best protect children. I think that everyone in this House knows that when it comes to other people’s children, it is a fundamental principle that we should want for them what we want for our own. Sadly, some children will not be as loved as others, as well cared for as others or as well-behaved as others, but they are all children.
That is why, although I listened carefully to the Minister’s comments on amendment 4 and why he will not accept it, I want the Government to go further and give assurances about what will happen next. Ministers have yet to acknowledge that if we do not include amendment 4 in the Bill, there is no alternative provision to cover this scenario and the inconsistencies in the arguments that they are making today. The Minister has said that there are no new powers in the Bill with regard to child CHISes, but there are no protections either. He will be well aware that the Government were taken to court by Just For Kids and the court said that children were put in harm’s way as a result of these proposals. Therefore, this House does have to act. The Government’s own guidance accepts that participation in criminality is an inescapable feature of being a CHIS, including for children. Ministers have said that there is increasing scope for young people to be used as they are increasingly being involved in criminality—that as the criminals use more children, so should we.
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That is particularly the case when it comes to county lines. The Children’s Society estimates that there are 46,000 children involved in such gangs, with 4,000 in London alone. The Government are asking us to treat these often broken and scared young people as capable of consenting to engage in criminal behaviour. We spend so much of our time trying to get children out of harm, but the Government are now trying to argue that, in order for that to happen, we must put them directly in
harm’s way. There is almost a risk in what the Solicitor General said of implying that these children have to help the police in order to be helped by the police; I am sure that that is not what he wishes to say. Many of us may argue, why use them at all? There is merit in the simplicity of simply prohibiting children from being CHIS, but we recognise that there may be circumstances—exceptional circumstances—in which we would consider that to be necessary, with careful supervision. That is what Lords amendment 4 does. It writes on the face of the Bill the principle that no child should be asked by the state to commit a crime except in exceptional circumstances, and by “exceptional” we mean when there can be no doubt that the child would not come to harm. It upholds our obligations under the United Nations convention on the rights of the child to treat all people under 18 as children.
Currently, if a child is arrested for shoplifting at the age of 16 or 17, an appropriate adult would oversee their interactions with the police. That is because we recognise that there is a fundamental power imbalance between anybody who is working with the police and a child. Under the Government’s plans, the police will be under no obligation to appoint such a person for those 16 or 17-year-olds. That means that a 16 or 17-year-old could be recruited without anybody knowing—not their parents or a social worker. They could be asked to inform on anyone, including their own parents, or asked to remain in dangerous situations at great personal risk, without any legal advice, independent voice or help to say no if they want to.
Baroness Hamwee set out the case, described by the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis), of a young girl who was in a sexually exploitative relationship with a man and eventually witnessed a murder as a result of being in that relationship. She was maintained in that relationship in order to provide information to the police. What is crucial to our debate is that that young girl was 17. Under the Government’s proposals, there is no guarantee that there would be an appropriate adult overseeing that relationship with her and raising the necessary questions. The Government say that this is because, by the time a child is 16 or 17, they become increasingly independent and mature. Are we really comfortable with the argument that if a child shoplifts, they are childish and need a guardian when they talk to the police, but if they spy and commit crimes for the police, they are mature and they do not?
Ministers simply cannot have it both ways: there is an apparent presumption of an appropriate adult, so we do not need to write that on the face of the Bill, and having an appropriate adult with a child raises the risk that they will be revealed as a source. When the Solicitor General makes that argument, he fails to explain why we then require an appropriate adult for under-16-year-olds. If having an appropriate adult involved raises the risk of a child being unveiled as a CHIS, that is surely true at any age, so why deny this to a 16 or 17-year-old?
By including Lords amendment 4 in the Bill, we would be in line with our obligations under the UN convention, which defines every person under 18 as a child. I hope Ministers can tell us whether a child rights impact assessment has been carried out on the legislation and, if so, why the Home Office feels that it can ignore those obligations to the UN when the Department for Education has recently said that we must reaffirm them.
Lords amendment 4 also extends the protection of having a second pair of eyes and the principle of exceptional circumstances, so as not to put somebody in the face of foreseeable harm, to vulnerable people and victims of trafficking or modern slavery. Those people may be older than 18 but are no less at risk of being placed in harm’s way, and they, too, may struggle with notions of consent when faced with state authorities.
Lords amendment 4 is not prohibition. It is rooted in the real and dangerous world of criminality in which many of these children and vulnerable people already live. If the Government will not accept it, they must commit today to put on the face of the Bill the protections that they claim exist—the protection of not putting somebody knowingly in harm’s way, the protection of an appropriate adult for all under-18-year-olds and the protection of the presumption that they would have that person. If what the Solicitor General says is true, none of those requirements should be onerous, and then he can understand why his objection and resistance to doing that is so worrying.
The Government argue that these children often want to help, and the more people who know that they are involved, the more at risk they are. But with the police offering them money for their work, and being in the scheme the sole arbiter of what is in their best interests, the conflicts of interest in this are manifest. That is why it is right that MPs should step in. Every one of us has a responsibility, to all the children we know, not knowingly to put them in harm’s way. We act in loco parentis as if they are our child and ensure that their welfare comes first, even if it means that an investigation might be denied their insight. Today, every MP has an opportunity to let children be children, not child spies.