Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill

My Lords, I, too, am grateful to the Minister for tabling his amendment. I, too, feel that it does not go far enough and I am also grateful to the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, for her contribution. Her contribution to all our discussions, given her background in the Family Court, has been invaluable and has given us an insight into how far the criminal justice part of dealing with children has moved away from the mainstream. I want to speak, in particular, to Amendments Nos. 37 and 40 in my name and those of the noble Earl, Lord Onslow, and others, and I am grateful to them for adding their names. The noble Earl, Lord Onslow, and I tabled these amendments as a result of the study of the Bill by the Joint Committee on Human Rights, of which we are both members. In his absence, I shall briefly try to do justice to our argument once more. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, to which we are party, says that in all measures imposed on children, the best interests of the child shall be paramount. The point of stating that in the convention is that children are different from adults. They are vulnerable, are not yet developmentally formed and are growing up, so we protect them. They are not allowed to marry until a certain age, go to war or drink. In its simplest form, that article in the convention applies also to the way in which we deal with those who have broken the law, are deemed to have broken the law or have done damage and harm to others. Nothing whatever anywhere in the convention suggests that a child puts him or herself beyond its terms by having been charged with a criminal offence, and in no country in the world does anyone claim that. Therefore, the system for dealing with under-18s should be different because it should be shaped by those ideas. One way in which it should be different is by imposing measures that look to solutions to the problem—solutions that aid the development of the child to grow up into a law-abiding adult. I am very grateful to the Minister for the Answer that he gave me yesterday to a Written Question. I must admit that I was astonished by the Answer. I was astonished, first, by the information in it and then I was astonished—and, indeed, ashamed—that I was not already aware of that information. I asked the Minister how many people under 18 were serving indeterminate sentences for public protection and the age of those people. Noble Lords may, or may not, be as surprised as I was to hear that 48 people under the age of 18 are serving indeterminate sentences for public protection and that, of these, 17 are aged 15. Since the sentence has been available, of those under 18 sentenced to an indeterminate sentence for public protection, five have had a tariff of one year or less and 56 have had a tariff of one to two years. Therefore, I make the assumption—I hope, rightly—that their offences were not murder, rape and so on or offences that threatened life, as there are other provisions in the law under which they would have been sentenced for such crimes. As of 31 January this year, not one of those 48 children had been released. That seems to be a very good example of why there must be a system of youth justice that puts the welfare of the child as the first priority. If we had such a system, I think that serious questions would be asked about the appropriateness of indeterminate sentences for public protection for 15 year-olds. I want to end with an example. This morning, I chaired a meeting organised by INQUEST to launch a publication about women who die in prison. One of the speakers was Kirsty Blanksby. Kirsty was one of two sisters who came from a troubled background and caused a lot of trouble when she was a child. She got into the mental health system, went to a therapeutic community and there she was, sitting on the podium in Committee Room 9 this morning, addressing a meeting in the Houses of Parliament—a very fine, articulate young woman. Her sister Petra, in the same situation, got into the justice system. Kirsty is living a normal, full life; Petra is dead. She killed herself in New Hall prison just as she reached the age of 19. I use that example to make the point again that putting the welfare of the child first is also putting the welfare of society first. Solving Kirsty’s problems was worth it for her and for us. I support the amendments.