My Lords, it is very good to see the Committee refreshed and to have the opportunity to meet earlier in the day, so I thank the powers-that-be for making this possible.
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I hope also that noble Lords who participated in proceedings on Monday night did not come to enjoy the type of correspondence that I have had in the hours and days that followed. I say that not out of fear or any sense of wanting to wallow in victimhood, but just to suggest that the toxicity of some of the debates that this Committee has to navigate around the Bill and matters in general is far from one-sided.
Moving on to this group and the issue of criminal responsibility in particular, I signed both the amendments on this. The noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle—I had a senior moment there and could not remember her name first thing this morning—put her amendment down first, and that is why I signed that with alacrity, but I want to be clear that I much prefer Amendment 220. She is not able to be here today, and I know that her noble friend Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb will represent her ably in a moment. I suspect that she would not necessarily disagree with me. I do not know if it is the time for reviews and so on, though they can happen.
Personally, I would like to see the age of responsibility be even higher than 12, given the data now available about the maturing of children and young people’s brains and so on, and given where we are in the world and what an outlier we are beginning to be even in the United Kingdom, let alone Europe. I would prefer the age to be 14 or 15, but we must bag 12 immediately.
I pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Dholakia, who is not able to be here, and wish him a speedy and full recovery. I also pay tribute to the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, who, like him, has been pushing this agenda in very difficult times over so many years. It is an absolute honour to have my name on this amendment paper next to them both. I remember them pushing this when I was a young lawyer in the Home Office in 1996 and 1997. I pick those dates to show the bipartisan nature of the problem as well as, I hope, the solution.
I am sorry that my noble friend Lord Blunkett is not in the Committee at the moment, but I would like to see the kind of statesmanship that he demonstrated on Monday applied by all noble Lords to this debate, because it is nothing short of barbaric for us to treat 10 year-olds as having criminal responsibility—and I try to use language carefully. We are such an outlier. This is so wrong.
I know we have had this law-and-order arms race for many years, but I feel the beginnings of an opportunity in this Committee to de-escalate it. Where better to begin? Perhaps we began on Monday in the context of the IPP anomaly that remains. We must certainly continue now with children.
The question that has been put to me, including by noble friends, is, “But what would you do about these bizarre cases of children who kill children, such as the tragic Bulger case?” The answer is to treat them as the child protection issue that they are. Some children, for whatever reason—quite possibly to do with the way in which they have been treated at home and elsewhere—are dangerous. We are not talking about them being allowed to continue in their current arrangements. We are talking about treating such cases in the appropriate
way—as a child protection issue. We have the means and mechanisms to do this without throwing people away—criminalising them—at an age when they are really not capable of criminal responsibility.
I have made the point about the bipartisan nature of the problem. It is not for me to speak for my noble friends or, indeed, for noble Lords opposite who have been dealing with appalling, very difficult tabloid campaigns over the years. I am afraid that, at times, those have toxified any hope of rational debate about matters as serious as law and order. But I do think there is an opportunity to do better now. I wait on tenterhooks to hear from my noble and learned friend Lord Falconer. If he offers a bipartisan hand in relation to the age of criminal responsibility for children, I hope that the Minister will take that hand and shake it off. This is such an important issue, not just for the jurisdiction of England and Wales but to send a signal to other jurisdictions elsewhere.
I do not often think we should learn lessons on incarceration and criminal policy from the United States. There is a range of ages across different states, and some are really quite young. We could begin a conversation with people elsewhere in the common-law world by moving in this right direction. Jurisdictions such as India and some of the states in the US are not in good shape on this issue. This could be global Britain showing a bit of leadership by putting our own house in order first.
So, if there is to be a commission, by all means let it explore broader issues around youth justice, including the possibility of raising the age higher still—to 14 or 15. For now, in this Committee on this Bill, I say, “Let’s go for 12 as a bare minimum. Bag it now. Bag it on Report”. If noble Lords—in particular the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, and the noble Lord, Lord Dholakia, when he has recovered—seek to push an amendment on Report around 12, I shall certainly support them.
The noble Lord, Lord Sandhurst, has tabled an amendment to the amendment from the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, about a review. I thank him for trying to help us navigate the kinds of issues that we discussed on Monday. I will say no more about that. I understand what he is trying to do. But that is obviously a probing amendment. As I said at the beginning of my remarks, I much prefer the formulation from the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, and the noble Lord, Lord Dholakia, which was so ably, eloquently, bravely and wonderfully endorsed by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood.