My Lords, I am sorry, I was looking around the Chamber to see who was poised and trying to be too polite. It is an absolute pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Carlile of Berriew, who many members of the Committee will associate with his legal expertise, but it is to be remembered that he has a considerable track record, to say the least, in matters of penal reform.
It is also a pleasure to have my name associated with this amendment in the names of the noble Lords, Lord German and Lord Marks of Henley-on-Thames. It seems totally anomalous that local authorities should be excluded from giving this provision, for all the compelling reasons given by the noble Lord, Lord German, about the expertise that they have accumulated in relation to education, children, care and so on. It can be only an ideological justification—I must not be too smug about ideology because I have a little of my own. Although there are always political debates about the role of the state in relation to all sorts of goods and services, most people, across politics and across the Committee, have some sort of notion of the irreducible core of the state. Personally, I think that, as with policing and the Army, incarceration ought in general to be a primary responsibility of the state itself, for obvious reasons to do with the vulnerability of those incarcerated and the responsibility, including democratic responsibility, of politicians, whether at local or national level, in relation to powers of coercion and the incredible vulnerability of people who, of course, cannot even vote.
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Unlike the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, I have not had the privilege or the experience of visiting incarcerated children, but I have seen bad things in the privatised detention estate in the context of immigration and asylum. My biggest fear in relation to establishments
that are privately run is of buck-passing when conditions are poor: one contractor responsible for some services blames the contractor responsible for the others, everybody blames whoever it is at the top of the tree—the Home Office or the justice department—and nobody is responsible. That is why I have a huge problem in general with vulnerable people of whatever kind being incarcerated for profit in private hands. Noble Lords need only to look to the other side of the Atlantic to see the logical conclusion of an ever more privatised and ever-growing state of incarceration.
Whether I am right or wrong about that, and I have friends on the Benches opposite who think that private prisons are fine, and whatever your view on private prisons, incarcerated children are in a particularly vulnerable position. We as legislators, and government, national and local, have particular responsibilities for this cohort, for the reasons set out so ably by the noble Lord, Lord Carlile.
I will say one final thing on this to the Minister; I do so rather crushed by the way the debate on the previous group ended, with the door being slammed on even reviewing the age of criminal responsibility. We debated very serious crimes and rightly so, such as the Bulger case and so on, but for many other children criminality is about things such as common assault, slightly more serious assault, criminal damage or crimes of dishonesty. The reality of family life and children’s lives is this: one child will be treated one way because they have the support of their family, and another child, in particular a child who comes from a chaotic family with a lack of support and parenting, or who is looked after by the state, will face a very different outcome and will be much more likely to find themselves incarcerated, under whatever label of institution. That is why it is particularly pernicious that any such institution should ever be run for profit. We the community have already failed that child and we need to compensate for our failure when we look after these most vulnerable children. That is why I support noble Lords’ speeches and the amendment from the noble Lord, Lord German.