My Lords, I will discard most of my speech because all the points I was going to make have been made articulately. We will support the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, if she chooses to test the opinion of the House and I thank her for the thoroughness with which she introduced her amendment to the Motion. I agree with her that this SI is not yet ready to be put on the statute book.
The Minister set out the figures, which have been repeated a number of times as the debate has progressed. A number of questions were put to him about the issue of consent, the state of the European Convention on Human Rights, and answering the questions put by the Children’s Commissioner and other bodies which have expressed their extreme concern about the measures being put forward by the Government.
The noble Lord, Lord Murray, just intervened, giving examples of European countries which do some form of tested age assessment. However, this is of
course a contested area in many European countries; we are not unique in this being a politically contested issue.
Noble Lords also made a point about the review mechanism that the Government propose to put in place so that, as this progresses—if indeed it does progress—the Government can keep an open mind about how effective it is and whether further changes in assessment methods need to be made. However, I want to conclude on a different point which no other noble Lord has made, and to talk slightly wider than the SIs themselves.
Last May, with my noble friend Lord Coaker, I visited the old RAF Manston airfield and the landing site, Western Jet Foil, in Dover harbour. I repeat my thanks to the noble Lord, Lord Murray, for facilitating that visit. What became apparent to me then is that all the political debate, including today’s debate, is about the vast majority of young men who are potentially claiming to be under 18, and the impact that has on them. That is the totality of the political debate. However, there is another group of young men, which was drawn to my attention, who appear to the officials to be under 18 but are claiming to be adults. They are doing that because they want to work, either legally or illegally. Many of them will have started working in their home countries when they were 14, and they will have had a few years work under their belt and are coming here to better their prospects.
What tracking is there of those young men? I have raised this issue with the noble Lord, Lord Murray, and as far as I am aware, there is no tracking of them. Whether they are more likely to abscond once they go into the adult system or whether the Home Office tracks them at all, it is a significant, not an insignificant cohort. It was drawn to my attention when I made that visit and I will be very interested to hear the noble Lord’s answer, maybe by letter, on how those young men are tracked.