Age of Criminal Responsibility Bill [HL]

Earl of Listowel Excerpts

Friday 8th November 2013 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Listowel (CB)]

My Lords, I am most grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Dholakia, for introducing this Bill and for his long advocacy on this issue. I declare an interest as a trustee of the Michael Sieff Foundation, a child welfare charity.

I noted what the noble Lord said about the evidence base. Dr Eileen Vizard, the eminent child psychiatrist, and Professor Sue Bailey, the current president of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, produced a paper on the age of criminal responsibility for the royal college which made very clear that the evidence shows that the current age for criminal responsibility is too low.

As treasurer of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Children, I highlight that in its recent report, the group recommended that the age of criminal responsibility should be raised. In what I say, I will draw on my experience as vice-chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Looked after Children and Care Leavers. I reinforce what the noble Lord said: these children are often the most damaged, the most traumatised and the most abused in our society, as well often the most troubling and destructive.

I strongly support the Bill. The current age reflects a lack of confidence in parenting in this country. Parents who lack confidence are often harsh and overly punitive towards their children. The current age is counterproductive and unkind to often our most vulnerable children. These children are often already overwhelmed by feelings of guilt. For the state to reinforce those feelings of guilt in young children is unhelpful and unkind. It is most encouraging that recently there have been indicators that we are becoming more confident parents. This Government have sustained the increasing reduction in the incarceration of children. There has been a very impressive drop in the number of children locked up in recent years. There has been a clear consensus that too many of our children were being locked up. Furthermore, the right honourable Iain Duncan Smith MP and Graham Allen MP have driven forward a much increased awareness of the importance of early years and attachment to their parents in young children and infants. Andrea Leadsom MP and Frank Field MP have led a cross-party campaign to increase support during pregnancy and in the months after birth to help build strong family bonds. Her Majesty’s Government have charged Louise Casey to meet the needs of trouble families, and the results have been very successful. I feel that we are becoming more confident about our ability to parent our children.

I shall remind noble Lords of who these children are. They are likely to be from working class families and to be growing up without a father in the household. They are quite likely to experience local authority care, to have a parent addicted to alcohol or drugs and are probably going to join a gang, if they have not done so already. They are more likely to be black than white, and it is probable that they have witnessed domestic violence. Looking at these children, it is hard for me not to think that this is a case of seeing the mote in the other’s eye and missing the beam in our own.

It seems that the worse a nation is at caring for its children, the lower the age of criminal responsibility. For instance, among the countries with the highest rates of absent fathers are the United States and the United Kingdom. Two-thirds of black boys in the US are growing up without a father in the household and, according to the OECD, we have an even higher rate of children growing up in lone-parent households than the US. We also have a low age of criminal responsibility compared with most of our neighbours. As the noble Lord said, ours is 10, and in the United States the age in most states is seven. Looking at the better performers, Denmark has an age of criminal responsibility of 15, and Germany of 14. Both are also among the countries with the lowest percentage of lone-parent families.

I remind noble Lords of the experience of the corporate parent. Does the same pattern hold true? Are poorer corporate parents more punitive? I am thinking particularly of local authorities caring for children in care. There has been much concern over the care of children in our children’s homes. I pay tribute to the Government for their focus on improvement here. I pay particular tribute to the previous Children’s Minister, Tim Loughton MP, and the current Children’s Minister, Edward Timpson MP. They are doing a good job for these children. However, they start from a low base.

Dr Claire Cameron and others based at the Thomas Coram Research Unit at the Institute of Education conducted comparative research on children’s homes internationally. They found that 90% of staff in Danish homes had a relevant graduate qualification; that 50% of staff in German homes had such a qualification; and that only 30% of staff in English homes have that qualification. Yet the children in our English homes have much higher levels of need that those in both Germany and Denmark, because they use residential care more widely there; it is only the most vulnerable children who end up in children’s homes. I hope that that information is indicative of the problem of those countries that are less confident in their parenting tending to criminalise younger children.

I ask the Minister a side question. The Association of Chief Police Officers produced a draft protocol on the kind of circumstances in children’s homes when police would be obliged to report a crime; there is a long-standing concern about the criminalisation of children in children’s homes here. That draft protocol has been sitting in a government department for some months now. I would be grateful if the Minister could look at what has happened to that. We do not wish children in children’s homes to be criminalised unnecessarily, and this would help. I have recently tabled a Question for Written Answer on this.

Why is it unhelpful to have such a low age of criminal responsibility? What does it matter that so few children are being placed in custody now that the Government have done welcome work to reduce custody use? Part of the reason it is harmful is that it reinforces the sense of guilt that these children have. For instance, many of these children will not have a father in their families. They may well feel responsible for the loss of their father. I heard yesterday of one of these children’s parents having committed suicide. The question the children were asking was, “What did we do wrong? How did we cause this?”. In my own experience, I had a dearly loved housemaster at school who had to move on to a new job. I remember wondering what wrong I had done to drive him away. It is plain from my experience of looked-after young people that many of them carry a heavy sense of guilt for things for which they were never responsible. When one listens to adults who have been through such experiences, they often have a sort of internal monologue by which they are told, “You are worthless. You can never do anything right”. If they do something well they will find fault with it because they have a deep sense of guilt, perhaps because if a parent does not love a child for whatever reason, the child will not think, “Well, the poor old parent is addicted so they cannot be around for me”. They will think, “There is something deeply wrong with me that causes my parent not to love me”. It is deeply unhelpful to reinforce children’s sense of guilt at such a young age.

Of course, the younger children are when they get caught up in the criminal justice system, the more likely they are to reoffend. I visited Feltham young offender institution some time ago and met a young man who was in for the third time. We do not want to perpetuate that.

I am sorry to have spoken for so long. In closing, I bring your Lordships’ attention to a recent visit to Parliament by a police officer, Police Constable Storey. He was one of a number of officers attached to schools. There is a programme of this kind. He told the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Children of his experience. His wife said that he really must take the job working in a school. She said, “You’ll be a natural for this”. We heard from the deputy head who said, “In the few months that this police officer has been in the school, he has turned around some of our children and he has helped teachers who were despairing of their relationships with some young people to mend those relationships. He has made a huge difference in just a few months”. Two of the boys spoke to us. One said, “The difference for me, in my experience with the police officer, is that in my first contact with him he asked me if I was all right”. He took an interest in the boy’s welfare. The officer said that he came from a very similar background to the boys and, “There but for the grace of God go I”. He really understood where they were coming from.

A discussion about mentoring and how important it is for young people came from that. I know that much good work goes on in mentoring but there needs to be a strategic lead from government given the very high number of boys, particularly, growing up with absent fathers. Under the aegis of the big society, we should be co-ordinating efforts so that many of our young people, particularly young men, get an interested adult, who is reliable and gets to know them over months and years, to help them make the transition to adulthood.

To conclude, I feel we are being unkind to these children, who are often extremely vulnerable. I fear we are shooting ourselves in the foot because, by making them feel more guilty, we are maybe leading them to hopelessness where they think, “All I can do is wrong. I am bad to the bone if the state says that I am”. We should not be visiting the sins of the fathers on the sons. The evidence is very clear that absent fatherhood is a key factor in contributing to criminality.

I wish this Bill every success through Parliament and I look forward to the Minister’s response, which I hope can be sympathetic.