Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill

Baroness Chakrabarti Excerpts

Lords Hansard - Part 2 & Lords Hansard - part two & Report stage
Wednesday 15th December 2021 Lords Chamber

Obviously, that is linked with Amendment 89. Of course, Scotland has regularised its new age of criminal responsibility to 12. For many years, the age of criminal responsibility in Scotland was eight but in practice it was only ever administered at 12. I understand that the rules have changed in Scotland so now it is 12. That raises an interesting question about what would happen if an 11 year-old was living in Scotland but committed a crime in England. How would that youth potentially be brought to justice in England when what they had been alleged to have done would not have been an offence in Scotland? I am sure there will be an appropriate way of dealing with that situation. Nevertheless, the Labour Party’s view, and my view, is that the age of criminal responsibility should remain at 10. I beg to move.

[Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)]

My Lords,

“No child should suffer such appalling abuse, especially from those who should love and care for them most.”


Who said that? It is not a Christmas quiz. It was the Minister repeating a sentence what feels like a long time ago, but it was earlier this evening in proceedings on this Bill in your Lordships’ House. What if the same child victim of cruelty or neglect survives and grows to act out as a damaged little person as a result of that neglect or abuse?

I am very disappointed to hear about my own party’s position on the age of criminal responsibility, not least because I was reading David Lammy’s comments in the Guardian just a couple of years ago in relation to concern that our age of criminal responsibility, at 10, is too young. I think that we as a society are failing some of our most vulnerable children, including victims of neglect and abuse, and we should not be criminalising them. Given what we know about child development, 10 is way too young. It makes us as a jurisdiction an outlier in the civilised world and that is not something to be proud of.

Perhaps understandably, much of the debate in Committee focused on some of the most notorious cases, including that of Thompson and Venables, but such horrific and notorious cases are few and far between. More often, we are talking about offences such as criminal damage, and it is often looked-after children who are criminalised for offences of that nature. They have already been let down in their lives by their natural parents and/or their adopted parents and are looked after by the state. They then get involved in something that is treated as criminal damage in a care environment and for which neither noble Lords’ children and grandchildren nor mine would ever be criminalised.

[Lord Ponsonby of Shulbrede (Lab)]

I have dealt with that exact point in my time as a youth court magistrate. It is not just children aged 10 or 11. In the past few years—let us say the past five years—I have never seen any child brought to court for criminal damage in their care home. They used to be brought to court because it was an insurance-related issue and a conviction was needed to get the insurance money, but that has been resolved as an issue. In my experience, care homes do not charge their children for criminal damage.

[Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)]

I am grateful to my noble friend; obviously I do not have his personal experience as a magistrate but just today I looked at published statistics from 2018, which showed that a small number of children were criminalised for criminal damage.

Whether children end up in court or not, if they have criminal responsibility, they can be criminalised. They may never get to court—they may accept an out-of-court disposal—but they will be criminalised and will potentially have a conviction that follows them around for a very long time. This is amoral; it is not the way to treat a vulnerable little person who has probably been neglected and/or abused. They are not ready for criminal responsibility—they are not responsible. All the scientific evidence suggests that their brains are not developed enough at the age of 10.

We weep hot tears for these children when we see them as victims of abuse and neglect, but we do not do so when some of them manage to survive but act out in ways that children will. Some children will never be criminalised for minor theft or criminal damage because they have the protection of their privilege. Other children will sometimes be criminalised, which is wrong in principle and says something very embarrassing about this jurisdiction—even compared with the neighbouring jurisdiction north of the border, as my noble friend pointed out. I do not want to repeat what I said about this in Committee, but I thank and pay tribute to the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, and the noble Lord, Lord Dholakia, who have campaigned on this issue for many years to stop us being an outlier in the world.

I note that next year my noble friend Lord Adonis will bring forward a Private Member’s Bill to lower the voting age from 18 to 16—something I will support but I suspect the Government will resist. The Government will insist on 18 for voting purposes and the age of majority, and perhaps take the view that children and young people are not mature enough to vote until they are 18, but heap criminal responsibility on them at the age of 10. That is a mismatch of eight years. Of course. children and young people—indeed, all people—develop slightly differently. Personally, in an ideal world, I would support 16 as a decent compromise. However, that is not the point.

The amendment in the name of the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, and the noble Lord, Lord Dholakia, to which I have added my name, settles on just 12. I am afraid that the fact that neither the Government nor my own party can support that, despite report after report from the UN on the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, is an embarrassment. We are choosing some children over others. These difficult issues about children and criminality are always about other people’s children. However, the difference between believing in and promoting human rights and not doing so is whether you care about other people’s children, and not just at Christmas—and not determining, as a noble and learned Lord said earlier, who is naughty or nice but caring for everyone’s children and all children.

With that, I will spare your Lordships any more of my thoughts on this issue—I feel very strongly about it. I wish your Lordships and your children and grandchildren a very good Christmas when it comes.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, and I agree with every word she just said. She noted that the UK is an outlier in the world in having an age of criminal responsibility of 10. However, I notice that my native Australia is now in the middle of the process of looking to raise its age from 10, which I think was inherited from UK law. With that development in Australia, we will be even more of an outlier.

I shall speak to Amendment 90, which appears in my name, but I stress that this is not in any way meant to compete with Amendment 89. I would support Amendment 89 but, like the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, I think it does not go far enough. My idea of a review is that if you were to hold a review, as the Justice Committee in the other place recommended last year, you would arrive at a figure higher than 12. Fourteen is the obvious one.

I apologise that I was not available to present the corresponding amendment in Committee because I was at the COP 26 climate talks. However, I thank my noble friend Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb for doing a great job of presenting it then, and the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, for supporting me at that stage. I also apologise for an administrative oversight on my part. There was extensive debate on the wording of proposed new subsection (2)(b). It was my intention to change the wording but I am afraid I did not. However, I hope noble Lords will look at the overall intention of this amendment rather than getting into the depths of discussion on the detail of the wording, since I have no intention of pressing this amendment to a vote tonight.

In particular, I want briefly to draw attention to proposed new subsection (4) in this amendment:

“The panel must consult with an advisory panel made up of young people currently and formerly in the youth justice system.”


There is a principle there that we should be following much more: people who have the lived experience of knowing what it is like to be the subject of the system have to be listened to, and we have to understand what the lived experience is like.

There is a risk in the situation I find myself in of thinking that everything has been said but not by me. I will try very hard not to do that. Rather than repeat all the arguments made in Committee, I will pick up one sentence said then by the Minister in response to the noble and learned Lady, Baroness Butler-Sloss:

“I have sought to set out why we believe that 10 is the correct age, given the way that our criminal justice system deals with children.”—[Official Report, 17/11/21; col. 263.]


In that context, I point to comments made by the former Children’s Commissioner, Anne Longfield, in late 2019. She called for a wholesale review of the youth justice system, saying that the youth court was

“not a child-friendly environment where you could really help a young person and is not meeting standards that we had hoped.”