Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill

I did not intend to speak on this amendment but the powerful speech of the noble Baroness, Lady Linklater, impels me to comment. When I dealt with children in care and children with major problems as a family judge, I became very well aware that I needed to look also at their elder brothers and sisters, many of whom were 16, 17 or 18 and some of whom were also my charges in a sense when I was dealing with these cases. I needed to consider the extreme vulnerability of young people who have committed offences that are sufficiently serious for them to need to be incarcerated. It was very distressing to consider putting them in an adult prison such as Holloway or a young offender prison. My noble friend Lord Ramsbotham made a powerful speech about the conditions that he found in Holloway. It was distressing when a Tory Government did not do anything about it. As the noble Lord, Lord Judd, said, it is even more distressing when a Labour Government have not done it because one knows that in many ways the heart of a Labour Government is in the right place. But they do not actually deal with the vulnerability of children. A young person of 17 is not actually a child but he or she remains a very vulnerable youngster, however wicked the offence that he or she may have committed. I strongly support these two amendments.