My Lords, in moving Amendment 22KB in the name of my noble friend Lord Ramsbotham, I shall speak to Amendments 22KC, 22NZA and 22NZB. My noble friend apologises to the Committee for his absence. He has a long-standing commitment and asked that I might present his case for him. There seems to have been a little confusion. His amendments were tabled late in the day and I, also late in the day, called for a clause stand part debate. I do not think that I will need to call for a clause stand
part debate, given the useful amendments tabled by my noble friend. The amendments deal with Clause 29, on the breach of orders, and Clause 37, on offences. They would take minors out of both those clauses.
As an aside, several of my colleagues who would be interested in our debate are involved in the Children and Families Bill, as am I, and there has been confusion about the timing of that Bill, which may have been an obstruction to colleagues interested in the area of children to come to discuss this Bill. If the Minister has not agreed to this already, perhaps there may be an opportunity to meet with him and officials to discuss how this Bill affects children with those Peers who are particularly interested in the welfare of children.
Over the past few years, there has been a welcome reduction in the number of children in custody, as a result of the recognition by Her Majesty’s coalition Government that imprisonment is not an effective way to deal with children’s offending behaviour. As your Lordships will be aware, the new police dispersal power to tackle anti-social behaviour is introduced by the Bill. Children who breach the order and are convicted of failing to comply with the police dispersal order are to face a fine and/or up to three months in prison. I suggest that those sanctions are disproportionate, counterproductive, incompatible with children’s rights and risk reversing the positive downward trend seen in children’s custody numbers.
As a bit of background, currently, nearly seven in 10 children breach their anti-social behaviour orders. That is typically due to a lack of support, rather than wilful non-compliance. It is a much higher breach rate than for adults. Imprisonment is imposed as a sanction for juvenile ASBO breaches in 38% of cases, with an average sentence of just over seven months.
The purpose of the amendment is to remove imprisonment as a sanction for children when they fail to comply with a dispersal order. The amendments replace imprisonment with robust community alternatives. I have mentioned several times my concern about the guilt that many of those young people will carry with them. They will feel responsible for the failures in the family. I have spoken to young men who have made it their job to be at home when their father has returned home from the pub so that they can stand between their mother and their father at the time. I have already spoken about those boys who grow up without a father in the home. Of course, there are young men who are beaten by their father on a regular basis. Those young men feel responsible for having to stand up to their father and protect their mother, for being beaten by their father or for having their father absent from the home.
My wide experience of this is that children do not think rationally in those times. They tend to think that they are responsible for those failures. Being too harshly punitive of young children may be counterproductive. I spoke recently to a lawyer with several years of experience of working as a defence lawyer for such children. To get them prepared to stand up in the witness box and give a reasonable case, he would say to a child, “Look, Richard, I know that there is good in you. My partner, Margaret, knows that there is good
in you. You can make the choice. You can do the good, the right thing or you can choose not to”. By speaking in those terms to the child, he gets the best from them.
My concern is that if we are overly harsh, if we imprison children, if we punish them too severely, they will be confirmed in their belief that they are bad to the bone, that they are responsible for all the bad things in their life and will go on to be a nuisance to society and cost society a large amount of money when they are later imprisoned. A further problem, to which I just alluded, is that once children get involved in the prison system, there are much more likely to get involved with it again. They will be returnees. I look to the Minister for some reassurance in his response.