Crime and Policing Bill

Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top Excerpts

Wednesday 19th November 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top (Lab)]

My Lords, the amendments in this group, as the Minister has explained, are about child criminal exploitation. This is something that, quite honestly, when I started my career, we did not think of—it is something that I think we all became aware of in the last decade, particularly during Covid. I declare my interest as having worked with Action for Children and its previous iteration, National Children’s Home, for many years—most of my life, really. I was in its governance for 10 years and have been a long-term ambassador ever since.

Action for Children has worked with a number of children who have been criminally exploited. Some of them we would talk to when they had been picked up during Covid, for example, and exploited by being made to carry drugs and move them around the country. The threat that they and their families are frequently under is unbelievable and harmful to them, their future and family cohesion. Even where I lived in County Durham, where the police used to say we were among the safest in the country at one stage, the grandson of some friends of mine, who was bored and had been left just playing on his computer, went into the small town and met up with his mates, but they were spotted and the exploiters got them involved in drugs. The result was massive mental health problems and lots of suicide attempts. The family have worked and are still working to try to bring some reality back to their lives, make them safe and enable them to continue to grow, learn and develop. I cannot tell your Lordships how excruciating the life of the family has been. I know this is an important issue, and I am relieved that the Government are looking at it and seeking to address it in the Bill.

It is important that the Government are introducing a new criminal offence of criminally exploiting a child, along with other measures, to deal with those perpetrators. That is a positive move that has my full support. However, Action for Children thinks that there needs to be a means of protecting the child victim, whatever happens to the perpetrator—because sometimes it is difficult to find and catch the perpetrator. One of my later amendments deals with introducing another measure to protect the child even more, but I shall deal with the amendments in this group first.

Amendment 218 simply tries to be clearer about what is involved in the exploitation of children in these circumstances. I just want to make sure that all of us recognise that this is something that police forces are only just now coming to terms with handling. In the past, they have not had to think of the child as both a perpetrator and a victim. How do they do something totally outside their normal activity? Instead of simply treating the child as a perpetrator of a crime, they can now recognise that that crime has come about because of the manner of the exploitation of the child. Because this is new, and because police forces and others in the criminal justice system have not dealt with this sort of thing for very long and are really not sure how to handle it, we thought that it would be useful for Parliament to discuss it and consider putting more detail about what has happened to the child in the Bill. That is what this amendment is, and I would be interested to know what others and the Minister think. Being more specific, I recognise there are problems with that in any legislation, but I also think that, because this is so new in many senses in the criminal law, we really need to be a bit more forthright in how we describe what can happen.

Amendment 219 really relates to the fact that, as the Bill stands, a child would need to be coerced into criminal actions, but very often the actions of the child may not in themselves, if you just saw the instance, be criminal. For example, they may have been asked to carry money—but actually that is exploiting them and leading them into danger, which will have subsequent consequences. Again, it is very difficult to work out how you handle people. This is simply about trying to make sure that even if the act, such as holding or carrying money, is not in itself illegal, it is none the less part of the exploitation that makes the life of the child virtually impossible because of the threats around whether they carry the money and whether the offender gets the consequences of the child carrying the money in the way they want. That then becomes very serious for the child, even if the act itself was not illegal. This amendment will make it clear that an action that supports or facilitates criminal activity, while not being a crime itself, should none the less be taken into account. I think that would be helpful to the police, prosecutors and the courts as well.

Amendment 222 is just about how we determine that a child is 18 or not. There is a lot of debate on that in a series of areas of work at the moment, many of which my noble friend on the Front Bench will be pleased he does not have to deal with. Well, I suppose he does have to yes, in the Home Office. There is a big debate around migrants: how do we actually know how old the child is?

This amendment has been tabled because we are concerned that there would be a defence in the Bill that the perpetrator thought the child looked 18. We must think about that, because we need to know that children are children until they are 18 and that young people are still exploitable. We have to take account of this and say, “That is wrong, and you cannot do it”. Simply saying “I thought they were 18” is not a good enough excuse. I know so many young people who are leaving care at around that age. Criminals may believe that it is okay to exploit them, because yesterday was their 18th birthday, and they are now out of the foster care or children’s home that they had been in. That happens, and it is unacceptable not to think about it, at least, when we are looking at this provision. We need to understand what this order is about, and what we can do to make sure that we more effectively protect children than we have been able to do in the past.

[Lord Hampton (CB)]

My Lords, I speak to Amendment 222 in my name and that of the noble Baroness, Lady Armstrong of Hill Top, which she has so ably explained. All the amendments in this group seem to be a good idea. I also acknowledge the help of the Children’s Commissioner and the children’s coalition.

This is a very simple amendment: there is a concern that the offence of child-criminal exploitation, as written in the Bill, gives the perpetrator a defence if he or she reasonably believes that the child is over 18. We understand that this is a common part of legislation around other forms of abuse and exploitation; we believe that it will hinder the prosecution of perpetrators. During the Jay review into child criminal exploitation, many witnesses pointed to the role of adultification and racism in the criminalisation of children. The Modern Slavery Act 2015 is clear that children cannot consent to their own exploitation. However, the Jay review found that perceptions of children’s complicity in their exploitation meant that some groups of children, and black boys in particular, were not receiving an adequate safeguarding response. We strongly recommend that this part of Clause 40 is removed. It is a small piece of text that would have a profound effect on young victims.