Age of Criminal Responsibility Bill [HL]

Lord Ramsbotham Excerpts

Friday 8th November 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ramsbotham (CB)]

My Lords, I, too, congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Dholakia, on introducing this Bill and on the impeccable way in which he presented his case. I remind the House of the 1985 Standard Minimum Rules for the Administration of Juvenile Justice, which were endorsed by the 1990 Convention on the Rights of the Child. The rules say that each state party must enforce a single minimum age of criminal responsibility at the minimum age of 12, although somewhere within the range of the 14 to 16 age range is the most desirable. There we are, with the age of 10, at the bottom of the league table that the noble Lord, Lord Dholakia, read out, with Brazil at 18 and China and Russia at 14.

I have often quoted Winston Churchill in this House. On 20 July 1910 he said in the other place that the way in which it treats its crime and criminals is a true test of the civilisation of any country. I was thinking about that when my noble friend shot my fox by mentioning the report written by Professor Sue Bailey, who once briefed me on the situation regarding the two people publicly pilloried over the years for the killing of Jamie Bulger. Both boys were aged 10, but Professor Sue Bailey told me that they had a developmental age of four. Bearing in mind the background from which they came, that confirms everything that the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Derby said about the context in which these children are brought up.

In thinking about that, I wonder whether those responsible for producing the last confirmation of the age of 10 in the Green Paper Breaking the Cycle had really paid any attention at all to the huge amount of development in evidence of the neurodevelopment of children since that date. Here I don my hat as the chairman of the Criminal Justice Acquired Brain Injury Interest Group, members of which have been responsible for a great deal of this development. I am going to deliberately focus on that and spell out some of the things to which, I suspect, the Government paid no attention, any more than they did to the United Nations obligations that I have spelt out already, when drawing up that confirmation of the age of 10.

The emerging picture of adolescence is of a period in which individuals may be near mature levels of competency in some areas while far from those in others. Understanding neurodevelopment is of direct relevance to three questions that must be asked when examining them in the context of improving the youth justice system. We should remember that the aims of that system are the prevention of offending, safeguarding the public and the delivery of justice. The relevant three questions are as follows. How culpable are young people for the unlawful behaviour in which they engage? How competent are they to participate in the criminal and youth justice systems as individuals alleged of having committed a crime? What is the impact of involving them in the criminal justice system as a whole? I think that there are developmentally informed answers to each of these questions, combined, as I have mentioned already, with an understanding of the children’s rights that the United Kingdom has agreed to protect. Examination of these issues confirms that the current age of 10 is far too low to achieve either the stated aims or to satisfy the logic of neurodevelopment.

Three domains undergo substantial development during adolescence, which I will not examine in detail—executive functioning, emotional processing and social cognition. First, I want to focus on executive functioning: that is, the skills involved in the control and co-ordination of thoughts and behaviours, including working memory, selective attention and inhibition of emotional responses. They are used in everyday tasks such as decision-making, problem solving, long-term planning and social interaction. The evidence says that maturation of these is not completed until the age of 18, and that on the way to that maturation there is the likelihood of impulsivity, sensation seeking and risk-taking behaviours —all the things that we experience in our own children and grandchildren. As other noble Lords have said, that does not mean that young people bear no responsibility for their behaviour but it does mean that they are likely to be less responsible.

The noble Lord, Lord Dholakia, rightly mentioned the ability to take part in the legal process, what is described as adjudicative competence, fitness to plead and effective trial participation. We should think through what that actually means. It means understanding the court processes, charges, defences and their possible consequences, deciding how to plead, challenging jurors, instructing lawyers, giving evidence and responding to cross-examination. That is not just a list that I have drawn up, it is the official list as laid down for adjudicative competence. Pre-adjudicative competence was listed by the Home Office in 2008 as including fitness to be interviewed and understanding the purpose of interviews, the questions asked and the significance of answers given. Do any of us think that at the age of 10 anyone is capable of going through all that? What worries me about the present Government is that not only is the age of 10 the age of criminal responsibility but next week we start work on an anti-social behaviour Bill which could, if carried, mean that I could take out an injunction for nuisance and annoyance against my 10 year-old grandson for having refused to eat the boiled egg that I cooked for him last weekend. I say to the Government, “Come on, wake up”.

As other noble Lords have said, there is a very high level of correlation between juvenile offending behaviour and the multiple disadvantage that is the lot of too many juvenile offenders. All this suggests to me that the prevention of offending, which is the aim of all this, depends, at least in part, on effective action to tackle those deep-seated and complex needs. To my mind, that points to addressing the welfare and well-being of these young people rather than focusing first of all on the punitive approach. As someone who cares very deeply about the reputation of this country in the world, I wish that the Government would listen to the sentiments and wise words of their late leader.