Youth Justice

Lord Keen of Elie Excerpts

Wednesday 20th May 2026 Lords Chamber

It is not a choice between punishment and rehabilitation. It is about what works: protecting the public, cutting reoffending, and stopping vulnerable children—so often victims themselves—becoming tomorrow’s dangerous adult offenders. This Government will do whatever it takes to give more children the chance of a better future, and to keep the British public safe. I commend this Statement to the House”.

[Lord Keen of Elie (Con)]

My Lords, we on these Benches welcome any measures that genuinely and effectively prevent young people falling into a life of crime. Every young person diverted away from violence and offending is welcome. The continued reduction in the number of children held in custody is welcome. The fall from around 2,800 children in custody in 2003 to approximately 1,400 today reflects significant progress across successive Governments. We also recognise that the nature of offending has changed. Cases involving county lines, online exploitation, organised gangs and serious violence are often more complex than those faced by the justice system a generation ago.

However, while some of the Government’s individual proposals in this White Paper may sound reasonable in isolation, a deeper concern runs through the paper. Once again, the Government are at risk of confusing rehabilitation with the dilution of accountability. The White Paper is right to identify young people not in education, employment or training as being at heightened risk of offending. But, if the Government are serious about prevention, they must confront the economic conditions affecting young people across the country. The most effective intervention for many young people is not another review, another pilot scheme or another bureaucratic framework; it is to deliver an economy that can provide them and their families with stability.

There is a reference in the White Paper to reshaping the justice system. The paper records the Government’s proposal to undertake what they describe as a “fundamental look” at the role and purpose of the criminal courts for child defendants. This work will consider whether entirely different court processes should apply not only to children but potentially also to vulnerable adults and young adults. This raises material concerns. If the Government wish to reform sentencing policy to reduce reoffending, that is one debate, but gradually reshaping the philosophical foundations of our criminal justice system itself is quite another.

The Government appear to be intent on treating long-standing justice structures not as constitutional safeguards but as obstacles to be removed or redesigned. We have already seen proposals to weaken jury trial and other proposals designed to keep offenders out of prison. Now Ministers appear to be questioning whether traditional criminal courts themselves remain appropriate for wider categories of offenders. But where does such a process end? Accountability and punishment are being steadily downgraded within a system increasingly defined through the lens of vulnerability.

At this point, I turn to the issue of victims and public confidence. The Government proposed further consultation on the victims’ code, including consideration of a separate code for children. Once again, this Government are drawn towards creating new frameworks and pursuing new consultations rather than improving the operation of an existing system. If there are gaps in protections for child victims, strengthen the existing code. If the Minister believes the current code is unfit for purpose, why was that not addressed during the passage of the Victims and Courts Act just a matter of weeks ago? We must break from a constant cycle of consultation and restructuring. Improving outcomes is not synonymous with endless consultation and the expansion of bureaucracy.

The Government’s underlying philosophy of justice is perhaps laid bare in the sentencing proposals in this paper. For example, they explicitly reject vehicle theft as deserving of a custodial sentence, no matter how many vehicles an individual may have stolen. We do not argue that custody should follow in every case, but sentencing in all cases, youth and otherwise, must reflect individual circumstances. The issue before your Lordships is whether the Government still believe that custody serves any meaningful deterrent or punitive function. The message increasingly appears to be that more or less all young offenders should remain in the community. Once they remain in the community, the Government now stipulate in their White Paper that they

“do not intend on making electronic whereabouts monitoring mandatory”.

So offenders are not to be placed in custody, but nor are they to be monitored. The public are right to ask in these circumstances where the balance is between rehabilitation and public protection.

The White Paper also touches on the issue of remand in respect of young offenders. But the average number of children on remand in England and Wales at any time is now about 183, and some of those may be on remand for their own protection, so I wonder to what extent it is really a major or material issue for consultation at this stage.

The White Paper then turns to the age of criminal responsibility, and it is a concern to see that there is a specific section in the proposals on this issue and the idea that it should be a raised age. The Government state that they will consider a wide evidence base before making a decision on this important issue.

I wonder whether the intended consultation will consider the opinion of the Minister, who declared less than two months ago: “Raising the age risks removing an important safeguard in those exceptional cases where serious offending does occur”, and “setting the threshold too high may have unintended consequences, including the potential for older offenders to exploit younger children who fall below the age of responsibility”. We look forward to considering the scope of the consultation that is to follow.

The fact that this issue now appears in the White Paper inevitably raises questions about the Government’s intention. Ministers may try to present this as a neutral review of evidence, but many may recognise that this is the soft launch of yet another policy reversal. Once again, under the veil of consultation, the Government are moving further away from the important issue of accountability within the justice system.

In conclusion, of course we support the objective of reducing youth offending and preventing young people entering a life of crime—early intervention and diversion have important roles to play within any functioning justice system—but rehabilitation cannot come at the expense of accountability. This Government appear to view punishment, deterrence and public protection as outdated concepts to be eroded, rather than as essential pillars of a justice system. A system in which offenders are neither placed in custody nor monitored when out in the community, where courts themselves are the subject of constant redesign and where accountability is repeatedly softened under the language of reform is not a system in which the public will be able to retain confidence.

[Lord Marks of Henley-on-Thames (LD)]

My Lords, the success in reducing the number of children in custody has been a great achievement, and we should still be concentrating on further bringing down that number. That success has been largely achieved through the work of the Youth Justice Board, in which my noble friend Lord McNally played a major part during the coalition. We note the commitment to reform of the Youth Justice Board, but such reform should be constructive and committed to rehabilitation and reform, turning lives around, whether or not the youth justice service is at some stage in the future housed within the MoJ.

The Statement rightly emphasises how often the criminal conduct of children and young people is the result of instability, trauma and neglect, accompanying violence, addiction and abuse among those around them. But we must also address those factors that lead to Black children being so much more vulnerable to ending up in the criminal justice system. The Statement is right about that, as David Lammy was when he did his review in 2017.

On these Benches we have long sought to address these issues, but the Government now rightly highlight new hazards facing children and young people and leading to crime: online harms, criminal grooming through social media and exposure to extremist content. The £46 million to be invested in the turnaround programme is of course welcome, and the Statement is also right to call for early and effective intervention. But the likely success of new and recent measures—including parenting orders, youth diversion orders, youth intervention courts or reforms to the out-of-court resolution service—cannot yet be assessed. All these measures will take resources, and the amount is difficult to quantify. Can the Minister say a little more about the resourcing of the reforms promised? How, for example, was the £46 million figure assessed?

In proceedings on the Sentencing Bill, now Act, we discussed the extra resources needed for the Probation Service and others, not only for extra handling of early release, tagging and post-release supervision but to improve both the quantity and quality of the supervision of offenders and the help that the Probation Service necessarily provides to the courts.

So how, we would ask, is the need for resources to be kept under review, and what extra resources may there be to meet a need that is currently unforeseen? Is there sufficient flexibility to avoid the increases in offending that inevitably follow from underresourcing? Spending in this area is largely spending to save, given the massive direct and social cost of crime, and particularly of reoffending. Annexe A to the White Paper rightly sets out eleven “golden questions” for further research, saying there are “key evidence gaps”. What plans have the Government to fill those key evidence gaps?

Finally, the age of criminal responsibility is at last to be reconsidered. I remember the noble Baroness defending the present age of criminal responsibility— I disagreed with her then, and I do now—and I note the endorsement by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Keen, of her former views. There is also to be reform of the childhood criminal records regime, or that too is mooted and is welcome. We have long argued that to criminalise a child at the age of 10 flies in the face of all the evidence on developmental reform, and that it is inhumane and wrong. I ask, because this is an all-party and an all-public issue, how will this consideration proceed? Will there be formal public or all-party consideration? I certainly look forward to discussing these issues in depth, as I know others do.