My Lords, it is an absolute privilege to follow the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, to associate myself with every word he spoke just now and to have signed his amendment. Amendment 43 and, to some extent, the others in the group, go to the heart of who we are as a society and, indeed, to the heart of what dangerous, important law enforcement is all about if not, ultimately, to protect children most of all.
It is unconscionable that children should be used as agents per se. Unfortunately, as I have complained before, we cannot do anything about children being used as agents in the Bill, but we can amend it to prevent those children being put in even greater harm’s way by authorising them to commit criminal conduct, which is normally the opposite of the message we send to our children. Indeed, we condemn those who, elsewhere in the world, groom their children for crime or to act as soldiers even in grave situations of war, and such children have often sought refuge in the United Kingdom.
One of my fears in relation to children being used in this way is that many of them are particularly vulnerable children to begin with. Some of them may actually be wards of the state; they may actually be looked-after children who do not have a normal, viable, stable family to protect them. If these children are looked after by the state and then used by the state in this way, that is a double abuse, it seems to me, by all of us as a community.
There must be other ways to ameliorate this problem. There are young people, as I once was, who look far younger than their age well into their early 20s. There must be other, more proportionate ways to do some of the work that needs to be done, exceptionally. It is a very serious human rights violation for any state to put children as young as 15, as the noble Lord, Lord Young has said, into this kind of situation, with long-term consequences for their emotional health and, indeed, for their lives.