Policing and Crime Bill

I have to intervene to support my noble friend Lady Harris of Richmond. I find myself very much in disagreement with the noble Lord, Lord Borrie. Young people are quite capable of expressing themselves in a very serious way about very serious issues. Over the weekend, in fact, I was reading about a local authority that was setting up a junior children’s safeguarding board, to consult children about matters as serious as safeguarding other children in their community. My other point is this. The police authorities obviously want the arrangements that they make for policing to work, and many of those who are most affected by policing arrangements are young people, including the arrangements made to ensure that young people are safe when they go about their local community and the arrangements for ensuring that when minor misdemeanours are committed, the police do not overreact with young people and drag them into the criminal justice system in an unwarranted way. All those arrangements really do affect young people’s lives. There is such a thing as the "not invented here" syndrome. I think that we are all aware of it. We are much more likely to co-operate with something of which we take ownership ourselves. We take ownership of something when we are consulted and we have our own input. The Government are very aware of the "not invented here" syndrome. Only this morning, I was talking about two reports on the primary school curriculum, one of which was commissioned by the Government and the other of which was not. I am sure your Lordships will have a very good idea of which of those two the Government are taking notice—the one that they commissioned themselves. They have ownership of that report and not of the other one. If we want young people to co-operate with the police—and we do—then it is very important and beneficial to the whole community, not just to the young people, and to the police in their ability to do their job well, that we should consult young people. Local authorities already have duties to consult young people on a whole raft of issues. That means that they have already developed the skills needed to talk to and listen to young people and to interpret what they are saying—even very young children in some cases, as in relation to the provision of nursery places. So, with local authorities, the skills are already there and are developing all the time. The need is there, and the benefits are obvious.