Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill

I rise warmly to support this amendment. In doing so, I hope that the Committee will forgive me if I make a personal observation. We are fortunate to have in our midst someone with the experience of the noble Baroness, Lady Stern. She has unrivalled experience in her leadership of Nacro and her work since. I usually sat next to her when we both served on the Joint Committee on Human Rights and she always struck me as one of those people who has learnt so much from life that she goes on learning and responding to what she learns. She often helped the committee to reach its conclusions because of the wise way in which she approached matters. For that reason, it is terribly important to take anything she says in our deliberations very seriously indeed. I want to make a couple of points. First, either we believe that the principal and overriding objective of our penal system should be rehabilitation, or we do not. Of course the public must be protected, and the way some of the more irresponsible press suggests that if you are emphasising rehabilitation you are somehow not taking the job of protecting the public seriously is really quite iniquitous. Those of us who emphasise rehabilitation take the protection of the public very seriously—not only in the immediate situation but in the long term, which lies in the realm of successful rehabilitation. What disturbs me is that there is a great deal of evidence that children and—dare I say it without diverting too much attention?—young people caught up in the system as it is at the moment begin a life of criminality. The system institutionalises their exclusion from society and their criminalisation. That is not the case for all, but for a very considerable number. That is not only wrong, but stupid because it works against the interests of society and its protection. This amendment is timely in the sense that it gives us an opportunity to think about all this. I say that because for no one is it more important to make rehabilitation a priority than it is for the young. The second point is that I do not for a moment doubt the good intentions of Ministers to make imprisonment a last resort, as the right reverend Prelate has just said, but I suggest that it is important always in public policy to examine the difference between intention and what actually happens. If we are going to make intention a success, it has to be explicit from the outset and it has to be spelled out whenever the opportunity presents itself over and again. Perhaps I may conclude with just two anecdotal examples. It can be dangerous to use anecdotal evidence because it can be very untypical, but sometimes such evidence enables us to see more clearly the underlying issues we are facing. I have mentioned the first in Joint Committee and at Second Reading. In my nine years as president of the YMCA, I became particularly interested in the first-rate work it was doing in detention centres and prisons. I do not believe in being only theoretically informed so I went to see this work in several prisons and detention centres. The stories that the staff were telling me over and again of the young people with whom they were dealing, which were beginning to come out in the context of the real and deep relationships that had been formed, were a terrible reflection on society. It was difficult not to come to the conclusion that many of the children caught up in the system were victims themselves. Their anti-social behaviour of course cannot be tolerated—the noble Baroness made this point—because it can create mayhem and absolute hell on earth for some of the communities in which the delinquency takes place. No one wants to sideline that, but it would have been quite extraordinary if they had not started to behave in that way because of the reality of their lives. My second anecdotal story and my final point relates to a dear friend of my family and a close colleague in my political life, the late Baroness Lester. She was a very close friend of us all in my family and godmother to one of my children, and if I refer to her as ““Joan”” it brings her alive for me. When Joan was a Member of Parliament, I remember her coming to our home in an uncharacteristic state of real distress. Joan was experienced in life and not the kind of person normally to get distressed, but she was really in a state. In the context of her responsibilities as a Member of Parliament, she had been to visit one of the children responsible for the appalling and dreadful murder of James Bulger. I shall never forget what she said: ““What is so terrible about this situation is that the child involved in the murder has never been loved in his life””. In view of all her work with children, this had become abundantly clear. Just as I have said that we either believe in rehabilitation or we do not, we either understand that children are children—wherever they are, whatever they have done—or we do not. If we understand that, we need to spell out, not only by exhortations and undertakings but in the detail of our legislation, that they shall at all times be treated as children, and that paramount in our considerations should be the best interests of the child. As the noble Baroness brilliantly put it, by having the best interests of the child in mind one will be serving the best interests of society.