My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, and I agree with every word she just said. She noted that the UK is an outlier in the world in having an age of criminal responsibility of 10. However, I notice that my native Australia is now in the middle of the process of looking to raise its age
from 10, which I think was inherited from UK law. With that development in Australia, we will be even more of an outlier.
I shall speak to Amendment 90, which appears in my name, but I stress that this is not in any way meant to compete with Amendment 89. I would support Amendment 89 but, like the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, I think it does not go far enough. My idea of a review is that if you were to hold a review, as the Justice Committee in the other place recommended last year, you would arrive at a figure higher than 12. Fourteen is the obvious one.
I apologise that I was not available to present the corresponding amendment in Committee because I was at the COP 26 climate talks. However, I thank my noble friend Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb for doing a great job of presenting it then, and the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, for supporting me at that stage. I also apologise for an administrative oversight on my part. There was extensive debate on the wording of proposed new subsection (2)(b). It was my intention to change the wording but I am afraid I did not. However, I hope noble Lords will look at the overall intention of this amendment rather than getting into the depths of discussion on the detail of the wording, since I have no intention of pressing this amendment to a vote tonight.
In particular, I want briefly to draw attention to proposed new subsection (4) in this amendment:
“The panel must consult with an advisory panel made up of young people currently and formerly in the youth justice system.”
There is a principle there that we should be following much more: people who have the lived experience of knowing what it is like to be the subject of the system have to be listened to, and we have to understand what the lived experience is like.
There is a risk in the situation I find myself in of thinking that everything has been said but not by me. I will try very hard not to do that. Rather than repeat all the arguments made in Committee, I will pick up one sentence said then by the Minister in response to the noble and learned Lady, Baroness Butler-Sloss:
“I have sought to set out why we believe that 10 is the correct age, given the way that our criminal justice system deals with children.”—[Official Report, 17/11/21; col. 263.]
In that context, I point to comments made by the former Children’s Commissioner, Anne Longfield, in late 2019. She called for a wholesale review of the youth justice system, saying that the youth court was
“not a child-friendly environment where you could really help a young person and is not meeting standards that we had hoped.”
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I will give some statistics from the end of 2019. I hope the Minister can tell me that these have got better but, knowing everything I do about the state of the court system during Covid, I doubt that they have. Cases involving children were taking 40% longer than they did in 2010, with the slowest region, Sussex central, taking 491 days on average to deal with a child’s case. Reoffending rates for children were higher than they had been 10 years before, with more than 40% of children committing an offence within a year of being convicted or cautioned. That is nearly double the rate for adults. Picking up a point made by the
noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, the proportion of children receiving a youth caution or sentence who were black, Asian or minority ethnic had almost doubled since 2010 from 14% to 27%.
The Minister may say that the number of children being dealt with by the courts has gone down significantly. What experts say in response is that the children coming before courts now are much more those who come from the most dysfunctional and chaotic families —or who were taken into care after having been in that environment—where drug and alcohol misuse, physical and emotional abuse and offending are common. They do not need judgment; they need help. They are children who have already been failed by our society and putting them into the criminal justice system—I fully acknowledge that individuals within the criminal justice system do their best for these children—is not the right place.
In Committee the Minister said that the Government do not accept that they are breaking the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, but I cannot see how that can be squared with the declaration by the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child that 14 should be the minimum age of criminal responsibility.