Sentencing Bill

Baroness Longfield Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 12th November 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Longfield (Lab)]

My Lords, I pay tribute to Baroness Newlove. I had the privilege of working alongside her when I was the Children’s Commissioner and she was the Victims’ Commissioner. It is a hugely sad loss, and she was a fantastic advocate. My thoughts are with her family.

I welcome and support the Bill, and I thank my noble friend for his leadership in bringing it to us. However, the changes it is making are designed for the adult system; as it stands, children and young people are excluded from these positive changes and will potentially have to spend longer in custody, with poorer results. That is what often seems to happen, and it is an example of the way that the rights of children in custody can often appear to be sidelined in a way that is less likely in the adult secure estate. While not included in the Bill, reform of the youth justice system is urgent for both the young people involved and wider society. My remarks today are about the changes that are not included but are needed.

The starting point is that there have been huge gains in the state of youth justice in this country over recent years. We should be pleased that the number of children in custody has been falling for many years; there are now—although it is of course still too many—fewer than 500 young people in custody. So let us do all that we can to make those numbers continue to come down, and to make sure that children in custody are supported to leave with options and opportunities and do not end up reoffending.

While there are now fewer children in the secure estate than there were, those who receive a custodial sentence are almost always in prison for very serious crimes of violence or harm. We need to look at why they got there, how it came about, what went wrong and whether we could have prevented it—and the answer is almost always yes, we could. When I have met young people in the secure estate, many have told me about the missed opportunities that could have diverted them from becoming involved in crime or serious violence. They talk about the experiences that made them particularly vulnerable to exploitation and put them at a higher risk of harm, and many have similar stories to tell. Over three-quarters of children in youth custody were persistently or severely absent from school, and more than half of those were out of education at least one academic year before moving into the secure estate; one-quarter of children in youth custody had been permanently excluded while at school; and over one-third of all children in custody grew up in the 10 poorest areas of the country. The signs and alarm bells are all there.

Neurodivergent children excluded from mainstream school are disproportionately likely to be in custodial settings. Looked-after children have long been overrepresented in the youth justice system, with more than half of looked-after children born in 1994 receiving a criminal conviction by the age of 24, compared to just 13% for those who had not been in care—that is 52%, a number that we should really take note of. Often, those young people are not getting the advice, support or conditions that can support them to thrive and to rehabilitate. The Covid pandemic revealed a system that is frequently not child centred, with children spending very little time out of their cells and having in-person visits stopped, and children in custody not included on the vulnerable list to be eligible for face-to-face education.

When I was Children’s Commissioner, I saw how the justice system so often focuses on adults, with young people seeming to be bolted on as an afterthought. I found that, at every stage of a child’s journey through the criminal justice system, opportunities were missed to get to the root causes of offending and to put children’s best interests at the heart of the response. We need to improve that significantly, and we should be ambitious and impatient for that reform.

There is much to do on reducing the numbers of children on remand. Nearly half of children held in custody are on remand, a figure that has doubled over the last 10 years, yet almost two-thirds of them do not subsequently go on to receive a custodial sentence. Urgent reform is also needed to the YOI system to rehabilitate, educate and reintegrate. One in three go on to reoffend, with reoffenders committing four further offences on average—the highest rate in 10 years—and the costs to the taxpayer and new victims of crime are of course high. I know that my noble friend, Minister MacAlister at the DfE and Minister Richards at the MoJ want to do everything they can to drive down these numbers, and I will support them however I can.

I hope the fact that young people are not included in the Bill means there will be other opportunities to push forward on the reforms that are urgently needed in the youth justice system across prevention, remand and rehabilitation. Otherwise, there is a risk that children will be placed at an even greater disadvantage. There are parts of the Bill that could provide springboards for reforming the youth justice system if applied. For example, the new progression measures allowing people to be released after serving one-third of their sentence if they refrain from poor behaviour should be applied. There is no reason why a child should serve more of the same sentence than an adult.

Any future measures for the youth justice system should focus on rebalancing resources from crisis to intervention; a clear plan to tackle the cumulative impact of racial inequalities—the problems set out so succinctly by the current Lord Chancellor in the Lammy review still exist and still demand action; a comprehensive, long-term strategy for keeping children safe and ensuring that custody is a last resort and that, when children are in the secure estate, their rights and dignity are not forgotten; and a greater focus on preventing reoffending through boosting skills and education in the secure estate. We cannot expect young people who have committed serious crimes to slot back into society without supporting them to succeed and tackling the root causes of their actions. After all, we are a country that believes in holding people to account for their actions while providing most with a second chance and the possibility to thrive and to be active citizens who contribute to society again. Let us not miss the opportunity to do so for those young people in the youth justice system.

Crown Court Criminal Case Backlog

Baroness Longfield Excerpts

Thursday 20th March 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Longfield (Lab) (Maiden)]

My Lords, I draw attention to my interests in the register. It is a privilege to be part of this debate today, and an honour of my life to be giving my maiden speech in this great House.

I start with thanks to all my new colleagues on these Benches and to noble Lords from across the House for their warm welcome. I thank my sponsors, my noble friends Lady Armstrong and Lady Andrews, for their huge support and encouragement, not just lately but over the years. I thank the House staff for being so helpful and kind as I find my way around this place, with its corridors and procedures. They have been tolerant and courteous, and have always pointed me in the right direction.

I chose this debate today because it relates to so many of the issues that I have spent 40 years of my working life focusing on: families and children growing up in poverty, in poor housing, with poor mental health, living with domestic abuse and addiction—those children most likely to fall through the gaps.

I will come back to that, but I wanted first to give noble Lords an idea of my own journey to this place. I grew up in Otley, a small town in West Yorkshire. My father’s family worked as engineers, and he designed engines for aviation. My mother was a carer for her parents, who had lost their sight early on in life. We all lived in the same house, so I knew first hand the challenges that life could bring, and how vital support was. Their values of hard work, enterprise, caring for your community and a strong dose of that Yorkshire “get on with it” spirit, alongside a good deal of encouragement from some great teachers, were what I took with me when I left home to be the first in my family to go to university, and afterwards, as I threw myself into working with children and families in communities in east and west London.

New to the capital in the 1980s, I found the inequalities of childhood experiences stark. The families that I worked with in the East End had no expectations that the explosion of creativity, enterprise and wealth happening along the river in Canary Wharf would change their lives at all. However, they showed me how things might be different: how, with the right support at the right time, families can overcome challenges and share in the opportunities available in this great country.

I have spent the last four decades working to enhance those opportunities for all children. I led a national children’s charity and worked with the noble Baronesses, Lady Harman and Lady Hodge, on the delivery of the Sure Start programme in the No. 10 strategy unit. I campaigned for many years for better childcare at a time when many saw the issue as quite niche.

As Children’s Commissioner for England, I spent six years championing the rights and interests of children with those in power who make decisions about children’s lives. I am particularly proud of the pioneering work that my office did in highlighting the barriers that hold back children and their life chances.

My last year as Children’s Commissioner coincided with the Covid pandemic. I saw then how children can too often slip from view and be an afterthought. We should of course celebrate that most children and families in our country are doing well, but a sizeable group are not, and we need to be ambitious for them too. We have lost so many of the early intervention programmes—Sure Start, youth clubs, family support projects—and now pour billions into acute late intervention services. These are the £1 million kids who come into care too late and cost £250,000 a year and more to care for. We should also pay attention to the corrosive impact of issues of misogyny and violence online, so powerfully portrayed on our screens at the moment in the drama “Adolescence”. If your Lordships have not seen it, please tune in.

That brings me to this debate today and young people in the criminal justice system. When I have asked children in prison how they ended up there, almost every one can pinpoint when things got worse and what could have been done differently. It is almost like a blueprint: the first exclusion at school, mum losing her job, the professional interventions that came too late. Some four in 10 children in custody now are on remand and most will not receive an immediate custodial sentence once they get to court. That is why I have argued that we should do everything we can to keep most children out of custody during remand. We are seeing promising results from a Ministry of Justice pilot that keeps children on remand in the community in Manchester. It would be great to see more of those.

It will not surprise noble Lords to hear that I will continue to work on causes such as this in the House. I believe in the potential of public services to stand alongside people to bring about that positive change. I also believe—as my mother used to say to me quite often—that where there is a will, there is a way. I know everyone in this House wants children in our country to flourish, but experience has taught me that it will not happen on its own for a lot of children. They need help to prevent problems becoming barriers. I will be doing all I can to ensure that we in this House do all we can to provide the kind of help and support that can change those lives.