Crime and Policing Bill

Baroness Fox of Buckley Excerpts

Thursday 27th November 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)]

My Lords, I support my noble friend Lady Brown of Silvertown, but she may not need much support, having received the much-coveted gold star from the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, who, I am very proud to say, supports a later amendment of mine on raising the age of criminal responsibility—which, I am ashamed to say, is barbarically only 10 in England and Wales. The UN recommends that it be 14. In Scotland it is 12 and the heavens do not seem to have fallen.

I have a couple of specific points to make in support of my noble friend’s amendment. If I may, I will be as bold as to predict what my noble friend the Minister and his advisers might be about to say in response. If they are about to say that my noble friend’s definition is unnecessary because the definition can be taken from the offence itself in Clause 40, I would like to get in first with two points to counter that. If I am pessimistic and wrong, so be it. Noble Lords know that I do not mind looking a fool.

The first point, which has already been made clearly by my noble friend Lady Brown, is that we need a definition that is about not just a specific criminal offence but interagency working and interventions across services, well in advance of any investigation or prosecution for a criminal offence.

I do not think the second point has been made yet. If the Committee compares the elements of my noble friend’s definition with the definition of the criminal offence in the Bill, it will see that the Government’s approach misses something very important that is to be found in my noble friend’s definition: enabling the child, not just causing the child, to engage in criminal conduct. That addition is important because “causing” is a harder thing to prove and a greater step in grooming. Currently, the Government’s definition is

“causing the child to commit an offence”,

or, indeed, “facilitating” somebody else to cause the child to commit the offence.

To prove causation in law is a serious matter. Enabling—making it easy, making the tools of the trade available, providing the opportunity—is a lower threshold, which is appropriate in the context of children. My noble friend made the point that currently in law they are treated as victims but also as perpetrators, and sometimes it is a matter of luck as to whether you will find the adult and the public service who will take the proper approach, in my view, of always treating the child as a child and as a victim, and not criminalising them. This is the point about “enabling”.

My noble friend the Minister is very experienced in these matters. Whatever he comes back with, I would like him and his advisers to consider the question of the lower threshold of enabling, not just causing. If there is to be a further compromise that includes some element of my noble friend Lady Brown’s amendment, I hope that that is taken on board.

The most formative time in my professional life was as a Home Office lawyer. I know what it is like to work on big Bills and to defend them as originally crafted and drafted. But it is wise, especially in this House, to take good advice and to bend a little when it might improve legislation for the benefit of victims.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, first, I absolutely congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Brown of Silvertown, on her excellently motivated amendment. It is very thought provoking. In particular, this sentence caught my attention:

“The victim may have been criminally exploited even if the activity appears consensual”.


That is one of the most difficult challenges. For some years I have been involved in the grooming gangs scandal, and one of the most horrible parts of that was when the police took the decision that the young 14 or 15 year-old, precocious though she—a general “she”—may have been, was somehow actively consenting to her own rape or sexual exploitation. It was about the notion of this being a child, because the young girl may have looked more adult—it was literally as superficial as that—and about the type, if we are honest, in class terms. Therefore, it was said that she could not be a victim and she was accused of being a prostitute, and so on. We are familiar with that. That is the reason why that sentence stood out to me.

However, I have some qualms, and I want to ask genuinely what we do about those qualms, because I do not know where to go. I am slightly worried, because county lines gangs, as the noble Baroness will know, are a young men’s game. Some of the gang leaders are younger than one would ever want to imagine in your worst nightmare. That is a problem with this, in a way, and with how you work it out. If you have a general rule that this is always a child, how do you deal with the culpability and responsibility of a 17 year-old thug, not to put too fine a point on it, who is exploiting younger people or even his—and it is generally “his”—peers? I am not sure how to square that with what I have just said. It also seems that there is a major clash with the age of criminal responsibility. I am very sympathetic with that not being 10, but how do you deal with the belief that someone aged under 18 is a child, yet we say that a child has criminal responsibility? Perhaps I am just misunderstanding something.

My final reservation is that if we say that everybody under 18 has to be a victim all the time, would that be a legal loophole that would get people off when there was some guilt for them to be held to account for? I generally support this amendment, but I want some clarification on how to muddle my way through those moral thickets, if possible.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I join in congratulating the noble Baroness on how she moved the amendment. It is very nice to see a Government Back-Bencher introducing an amendment and taking part; I wish we had slightly more of it.

To bring one back to Professor Jay’s review of child criminal exploitation, she made several important recommendations, of which the first and arguably most important is at the heart of what we are talking about at the moment. She called for a single, cohesive legal code for children exploited into criminal activity, and detailed what that needed to contain. The noble Baroness’s amendment goes to the heart of that matter. Having well-meaning explanations put into advice or regulation is not enough. There needs not only to be a common understanding across all government departments and agencies involved in dealing with these children and gangs; it needs to be completely clear for the police in particular, who are clearly looking into the criminal activity, exactly what it is and what it is not.

With the next amendment, to which the noble Baroness, Lady Armstrong, and I shall speak, we will talk about ways in which a child who is both a victim and perpetrator can be defended—but we will discuss that in the next group. As for this group, I think that I probably speak for all noble Lords who are concerned about this issue in saying that absolute clarity about the definition, so there is no argument about it whatever, would be a giant step forward. The best-meaning attempts to deal with child criminal exploitation over the past decade have been hindered severely by the lack of consistency.

I ask the Government to listen very carefully to what the noble Baroness has asked for. She has said clearly that her wording may not be perfect—I think that in many Bills the wording is not necessarily perfect, even in the final Act—but we have a chance to get this right. I look forward to what the Minister says in response.