Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill

I am grateful for all the contributions. We know simply that the young offender population has teetered around an unacceptable 3,000 for several years. I am grateful particularly to the noble Lord, Lord Judd, for his amendment to my amendment. He was right that nobody knows better than the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, just how even more deprived are these prisoners and how they can deceive us by looking so big, tough, frightening and dangerous. We have only to look at the figures. Well, we looked at the figures for suicides. We looked also at the figures for self-harming, to which nobody has referred today, and which are the biggest and loudest cry for help. It is in this age group that it is the most frightening. In response to the reservations that have been expressed, I say that the proposed new clause at least offers a strategy for trying to put a lid on what is already such an unacceptably high figure. It might help the Government to focus on this if I said to them that the Ministry of Justice’s figures for December 2007 show that the vast majority—78 per cent—of the 5,291 children aged 15 to 17 who were sentenced to imprisonment in 2006 was not convicted of sexually related offences or violence against the person. They were not those most serious offenders. In other words, this down-tariffing or scooping-up of younger children into custody is one of things that we must find strategies to counteract.