Vulnerable Teenagers

Debate between Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top and Lord Addington

Thursday 26th January 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, this is one of those debates—and I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Armstrong for tabling it—where, as you listen to it, you think, “Yep, we’ve been here before. We’ve done this before and heard it before.” What you have not heard is the current context. County lines and the emphasis on knife crime are the new twist. Anyone surprised that gangs are full of 14 year-olds has not been paying attention. If you go into any prison, you will find that the scholars are the ones who stayed in the education system until the age of 14; most were out of the system way before that. That has been a depressing fact for a long time.

I do not think there is anything radical in the report, but bringing it all together is the important point. A tick-box culture of support—saying, “Yes, we’ve done this”, “Is this the job of the education sector or should it be somewhere else?” or “Which bit of the education sector system has done what at what time?”—leads to the discovery that the person we excluded from school has decided they do not like the alternative provision at the pupil referral unit and has disappeared, and now our criminals have realised that that person is an excellent delivery system for narcotics. That is not too far off the Artful Dodger, for God’s sake.

We have to try to have a more coherent attitude to this issue. We as the political class have to say that the current Government seem to have acknowledged that the problem is there and are moving away from “Let’s be tough”. Every time that anyone in any department says, “We’re going to be tough and do something about this”, I get a cold shudder down my back because they usually then create a new problem. If you send people to prison, as the current Government have realised, either you end up having several bouts of offending before they come get of it, usually because they are getting too old and it tends to be a younger person’s game, or they stay in because they have committed more serious offences. Unless we can start to break that cycle by having a more coherent attitude across the piece, we are going to continue having the same problems.

I do not know if society is incapable of removing the problem altogether but we can certainly reduce it. There are a variety of actions that have been identified that help here. By supporting and helping voluntary organisations and activities—youth clubs and so on—the state can create the right environment. I must declare one of my little interests here: sport is the ultimate voluntary activity. When someone starts participating in a particular sport, they join a tribe, not a gang, which will embrace them with its own ways and bizarre rituals. I must declare that I am a Rugby Union player, but all sports have that element.

[Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top (Lab)]

We all have our problems.