Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill — House of Lords, 2021-12-15
Topic: Law and Crime
David Wolfson (Conservative, Centre-right): My Lords, we have two amendments before us in the sense of concept. I will take Amendment 88A first and then Amendments 89 and 90 together—they raise quite discrete issues Amendment 88A is twofold. It requires the centralised monitoring of youth remand decisions made by the court and the laying of a report of findings before Parliament on an annual basis. On centralised monitoring, as I made clear in Committee, courts will now be required to provide the reasons for their decision in writing. This will be provided to the child, their legal representative and the youth offending team, and it goes beyond what courts already do at present. The record will therefore provide qualitative information, which is not currently readily available. That will enable us and partners in the criminal justice system to understand and better monitor the reasons given for the use of custodial remand However, those decisions are complex. We should not prescribe in law at this time how the information should be collected and processed. I am also mindful not to impose unrealistic burdens on operations. As I have indicated previously, HMCTS is also currently designing a new digital case management system, which will deliver better data capturing and reporting. We will consider the best way to collect, analyse and, if appropriate, publish that information On the second point, as I explained in Committee, my department already regularly publishes statistics on remand: youth justice statistics are published annually; youth custodial statistics are published monthly. I hope the noble Lord, Lord Ponsonby, will agree that our objectives are in fact aligned here, and understand the need for pragmatism at this time. I therefore urge him to withdraw Amendment 88A Amendments 89 and 90, spoken to by the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, would raise the age of criminal responsibility from 10 to 12 years and require a review of the age of criminal responsibility. As I have said before, the primary objective of the youth justice system is to prevent children offending in the first place. Where it occurs, we must provide the police and courts with effective tools to tackle offending. That is why we believe that setting the age of criminal responsibility at 10 is the correct response. It provides flexibility in dealing with children and allows for early intervention with the aim of preventing subsequent offending Importantly, having the age of criminal responsibility at 10 does not preclude other types of intervention where they would be a better and more proportionate response. This could include diversion from the criminal justice system in the first place. I can answer with a simple "yes" my noble friend Lord Attlee’s question about whether the age of the child is taken into account by the CPS as part of the public interest test. Diversion from the criminal justice system is happening in practice. There has been a dramatic fall since 2009 in the number of children aged between 10 and 12 years in the youth justice system. We want that downward trend to continue As I said in Committee, no 10 or 11 year-old has received a custodial sentence since 2010. The noble Lord, Lord Ponsonby, talked about never seeing a 10 or 11 year-old in court. In response to the specific point about criminal damage or arson, in 2020, 171 children were proceeded against for either criminal damage or arson. Of those, the number aged either 10 or 11 was zero. We discussed the appalling Bulger case in Committee. It is a rare case, but it is important that when awful cases such as that arise, we have the correct mechanisms to deal with them. The fact is that there are a range of approaches across Europe—and the wider world—to the age of criminal responsibility. Other European countries also have an age of criminal responsibility set at 10. The noble Baroness, Lady Blower, said that she was astounded that we had the age of 10, but so does Switzerland—not a country one normally associates with human rights breaches—and I suggest that neither Switzerland nor the UK is in contravention of our international obligations.