Disclosure of Youth Criminal Records

Debate between Theresa Villiers and David Lammy

Thursday 28th March 2019 Westminster Hall

[Mr David Lammy (Tottenham) (Lab)]

I am hugely grateful to the Justice Committee for this excellent work and the way in which the hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Robert Neill) outlined the importance of this area.

My concern with criminal records arose from the review that I did for the Government on the disproportionality of black, Asian and minority ethnic individuals within the criminal justice system. When I began that work, I did not really understand the effect that our criminal records regime was having on disproportionality.

It is important to fully understand that while this is an issue for all young people, whatever their backgrounds in the criminal justice system, we also know—following work done by the Department for Work and Pensions over the past two decades and a range of other research—that we are unfortunately still living in a society where people from black, Asian and minority ethnic backgrounds have a penalty in the public sphere, in relation to employment. That penalty, unfortunately, is that there are still aspects of discrimination when ethnic minorities apply for employment, particularly for those who have a criminal record.

That is why this issue came under the purview of the report that I was asked to do by the then Prime Minister, David Cameron, and that I was pleased to present to Theresa May when she took over as Prime Minister. It is important to emphasise that I conducted that review in a cross-party spirit, as did the advisers to the review. I am pleased that the issue of disproportionality in our criminal justice system remains an issue that concerns all political parties in this House. It is above the day to day of politics.

Reoffending is estimated to cost the taxpayer between £9.5 billion and £13 billion per year. A third of those on jobseeker’s allowance in our country have previous convictions. We note very sadly that recidivism rates among black men in our country are the highest in the system, with 45% going on to reoffend within two years. That is extremely concerning.

However, this issue really came across to me when I met the Trident team of police officers in the Metropolitan police, who deal with gang violence day to day. They were the ones who said to me, “Could you put this into your review? We are aware of a group of offenders who reach about 25 or 26 years old and want to move away from their criminal past but continue to reoffend because, as they grow up, they cannot get a job due to the regime that we have.” That testimony of police officers dealing with those young men day to day persuaded me that this cohort get trapped into a life of crime at the point at which they want to get out of it.

I therefore did some further research. Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, a quite well known child psychologist on Radio 4, Professor Peter Jones, Dr Aamodt and many others have now established that the brain continues developing well into a person’s 20s before it concludes—perhaps not concludes, because I hope we are all still learning. It is now understood that adulthood really kicks in somewhere between 25 and 30, so for all those reasons it is important to think about the age of maturity.

[Theresa Villiers]

Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that there is medical evidence that, up to the age of about 25, the brain’s development indicates that young men in particular are prone to an inappropriate attitude to risk? The research is clear about that, which reflects the experience of my hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Robert Neill) with the criminal justice system. That is another reason that we should frame disclosure rules on youth criminal records differently from those related to offences committed later in life.