Age of Criminal Responsibility Bill [HL]

Earl of Listowel Excerpts

Friday 29th January 2016 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Listowel (CB)]

My Lords, I support the noble Lord in his call for a Second Reading of this important Bill and I wholly endorse and support every word that he has said. I hope particularly that what he said about the pitiable experience of 10, 11 and 12 year-old children going through a criminal court process—he mentioned a court process of nine months—will speak particularly to the Minister’s experience.

As vice-chair of the all-party group on children and young people in care and leaving care, I know only too well the background of many of these young people. Of course, 45% of children—55% of girls—in the criminal justice system have had an experience of foster care or children’s homes, so in my experience the noble Lord’s assessment is absolutely right.

I thank the Government for the efforts they have made to reduce the numbers of children in the criminal justice system over recent years. The Government have reduced it to one-third of what it last stood at, so from 3,000 to about 1,000. That is helpful in this area because it has reduced down to 300 the number of children we are talking about today.

That need not necessarily continue. Listening to the scientific evidence, many of us might assume that in the course of time, this will come about—we will have the same age of criminal responsibility as civilised countries have. However, this cannot be taken for granted and we need to act urgently on this matter. It takes only one ambitious unscrupulous politician to come along and say, “Look, we must be tough on crime and on the causes of crime”. We saw that in the past— I certainly saw in this House what happened then. We saw the numbers of children being criminalised shoot up and more and more children incarcerated because of a policy which is wholly counterproductive and which all the evidence speaks against. However, there is always that risk that an unscrupulous politician will choose to make political capital out of these young people.

I am very pleased to see the noble Baroness, Lady Massey of Darwen, in her place and to see that she will speak later. Of course she has for many years chaired the All-Party Group on Children and chaired our children and the police inquiry. I have no doubt that she will refer to our finding and recommendation that the age of criminal responsibility should be raised to at least 12 years of age.

Many of us will be sending a cheque to the taxman today or this week. I am very happy to pay for state services—I know how important they are. However, I rue sending a single penny that is not spent effectively. To incarcerate 10, 11 and 12 year-olds is an ineffective, wasteful use of public money. I think that the Government will particularly understand that. At a time when we are seeking to pay down the deficit and the Government are making very tough decisions, we cannot afford to indulge in policy which is counterproductive and wasteful for the public purse. No hard-working taxpayer wants to pay money to sustain legislation which is clearly counterproductive, and all the professional evidence points to that.

I recently had the opportunity to speak to parents who lost their children as victims of violence. Last year, I communicated with a number of parents whose children had, very sadly, taken their own lives, having been incarcerated in police cells. I spoke to one mother whose very troubled daughter had ended up in a police cell over the weekend. She had been very distressed and took her life shortly afterwards. Thanks to the work of those parents, the work of Just for Kids Law, which represented them, and the hard work of the Minister, we managed to change the PACE Act, and now it is not permitted for such children to be incarcerated.

My sense from talking to those parents was that they were not out to punish the state for what had happened—they were not pursuing it for criminal negligence—but they wanted to see that no other mother experienced the loss of a child as a result of incarceration. Generally crimes committed by children are physical crimes against other children. In that situation, many parents would want to be assured that the state was doing all it could to prevent such things happening again. That would be a primary consideration for them. We know that if we bring children into the criminal justice system, a third of them will reoffend within a year, and they receive, as it were, a schooling in crime by going through various institutions. As adults, they may well have a criminal record and it will then become harder for them to get a job. They are labelled as criminals and they may be confirmed in a career of crime. They may well go on to have children, who may follow in their footsteps.

If one says to a parent whose child has been harmed by another child or who has lost a child through violence from another child, “We are going to try our best to stop this happening to another child”, then the right, and effective, approach is a welfare one, with all the protections and the secure accommodation that the noble Lord referred to, rather than the wasteful, ineffective approach that we currently take.

I hope that institutions such as Mumsnet and the Mothers’ Union will look at this debate and seek to take up with the Government concerns about the welfare of these children and about protecting children from each other. Often, we are talking about very troubled children and we need to do something about them, but simply maintaining the status quo fails to protect our children in the most effective way. It is time to act. It would be the right thing to do to pass the noble Lord’s Bill. It would be the right thing for our children and for our hard-working taxpayers. None of us wants our tax to be wasted in the way that it currently is.

There is always the risk that we will go backwards. Towards the end of his career in the House, Lord Onslow learnt how many children we were incarcerating in this country, and I remember how passionately he advocated reducing the numbers. We could go back to increasing the number of children in that situation. Therefore, I ask the Minister—he may prefer to write to me—how much the youth justice system costs and how much would be saved if we raised the age of criminal responsibility to 14. That age is much more the norm in civilised countries, and I hope that this Bill will be a step towards that. If he could do some modelling, looking at the longer-term impact of a reduction in the number of children having a career of crime and coming back into the criminal justice system again and again, that, too, would be helpful.

Finally, I commend the noble Lord for his perseverance and for bringing this issue back again and again. It is, ultimately, a question of children’s rights. Here we are, in this country, punishing the very children who often we as a nation most let down. The noble Lord is absolutely right to keep persevering, and I am very glad that he has brought this to the House.