My Lords, I speak in support of my noble friend Lord Marks and will make two points. First, over recent years, I have been involved in a lot of work and study about the treatment of young offenders, partly during the time I spent as president of the Howard League for Penal Reform and partly in preparing reports requested by others. One of the givens of studies of youth penalties—of youth sentencing—is that short sentences by and large are not beneficial: they are usually destructive. They destroy ties with education, they damage ties with family, and they remove ties with good friends as well as, of course, bad friends. This has been recognised by the Youth Justice Board. One of the reasons for the reduction in the number of children in custody, as mentioned by my noble friend Lord Marks, is that it has been seen by the courts that non-custodial dispositions, on the whole, are far more constructive.
That leads me to my second point, which is about judicial—or court—discretion. I do not want to dress this up too grandly, because most of the group we are talking about appear before a youth court in their own local areas, and there is much about youth courts that needs to be reformed. That said, whenever a case comes before a youth court, the court hears all the
facts about the young person concerned. It hears the facts of the case; if the defence is properly prepared, it hears about the young person concerned and about everything that has happened in their past. Many of those children who appear before courts—there is no difference in this regard between 16 and 17 year-olds and the immediately younger age group—come from very deprived backgrounds. They usually have had very little attention paid to them and more than half of them have at least one mental health issue—some have multiple mental health issues—that needs to be addressed. To deprive an experienced court of the discretion to impose a non-custodial sentence when that might fly in the face of the merits as set out in the facts and reports before the court is really an astounding proposition. I challenge the Minister to produce any empirical evidence—any studies— showing that this is a proposal that is justified on the merits. I urge him to accept that it is an error of judgment to include 16 and 17 year-olds in this provision.
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