Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill

I do not—I am sure that the noble Lord, Lord Kingsland, will forgive my saying this—make a practice of supporting Front-Bench opposition amendments, but on this occasion the logic of my experience leads me to strongly supporting the noble Lord’s arguments. I think that I have referred before in our deliberations to the fact that, with the good offices of the Home Office as previously constituted, I visited a youth offending team and was incredibly impressed by the work that it was undertaking. The team was candid with me and made it clear that the anxieties about what might be happening to young offenders were not simply a preoccupation of academic sociologists or criminologists but were the very real concern of the people whom we charge with implementing such referral orders and tackling the front-line work. They completely shared the anxiety—as expressed informally to the Joint Committee on Human Rights, of which I was then a member, by the Council of Europe commission on human rights—that we were unnecessarily in danger of criminalising the young. It seems to me that lying behind what is now proposed is the inference that a referral order is a sort of soft option. I see my noble friend Lord Bach shaking his head, but I am talking about how things are perceived. It is seen as a soft option—as an alternative to a stiffer sentence by a court. Of course, as I understand it, that is not the rationale or the logic of the procedure, which is to say, ““Here we have vulnerable young people who have committed anti-social behaviour and who are in jeopardy of becoming criminalised. Therefore, we must work with them as best we can to reintroduce a sense of social responsibility and social discipline so that they do not drift into criminal behaviour and become subject to the criminal court procedure””. Here, we say that, if something goes wrong in the way that a particular referral order is being handled with the young person concerned and a breach of some kind occurs, there is no alternative but to push that young person into the criminal procedure. The youth offending team, to which we have entrusted the responsibility of working to prevent the criminalisation and to effect the rehabilitation of the youngster, may be arguing hard and saying, ““In this particular circumstance, yes, there has been a breach but there really is a chance of getting things back on to a steady course””, rather than simply and unimaginatively saying, ““There is no alternative now but to commit the person to the criminal procedure””. The trouble about what is now proposed is that it undermines the enlightened, sensible logic of what we did by introducing such orders. I hope therefore that my noble friend can say something positive and reassuring in answer to this amendment. As we keep saying, and I will not tire of saying, in our deliberations, surely our objective must be the rehabilitation of the young person. Of course society must be protected, but the rehabilitation of the young person not only matters in terms of that young person, but is the long-term way to protect society. If we jeopardise it all by thrusting those young people into the criminal procedure, we are in danger of turning them into hardened offenders with all kinds of costs and hazards for the community down the line. It is just a most mistaken and unimaginative approach. I hope that my noble friend can say something reassuring.