Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill

I am most grateful to all noble Lords who have taken part in this debate. I take on board what the noble Lord, Lord Judd, said; we must avoid demonising children and young people. The noble Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, said that some children are bad and others have appalling backgrounds. I am not really a believer in original sin—particularly this afternoon, when I have become a grandfather for the sixth time. I do not think it would be appropriate to take that position. The noble Lord, Lord Elystan-Morgan, and I come from a background and a history where oral reports to the court were frequent, and they have not stopped. It is only a matter of two weeks since I was asked by a judge whether I thought an oral report would be enough in a very serious case. In fact a written report was required, and that was for someone under the age of 18. The noble Baronesses, Lady Linklater and Lady Stern, have referred to the temptation for local authorities to shift the financial burden from the local authority to the Youth Justice Board’s budget. It is important that the court should bear that in mind when it is considering whether a young person should be sent to prison. We are concerned not about what a probation officer can offer but about what services provided by the local authority have been, or could be, used to avoid that final determination by the court. If your Lordships look more closely at our amendment, you will see that we are not suggesting that the local authority should itself be under a duty to provide a report to the court but merely that the pre-sentence report includes information from the relevant local authority. In other words, the youth offending team that is putting the pre-sentence report together should have a paragraph or more in that report that outlines the local authority’s attitude to the individual child or young person. That is really what we are concerned with; not the provision of more reports, but that the youth offending team should have that very much in mind. Although we have heard of the guidelines and the assessment tools, which seem admirable in themselves and which have been laid down for youth offending teams to utilise, the Minister has demonstrated that, according to the annual report, there are failures in the provision of the necessary information.