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Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill

I understood the situation to be exactly how the noble Baroness, Lady Stern, described it. If you add that to the fact that some children are not even represented in court—I can conceive that it is only too easy that a child who is prosecuted for locking one of his mates in a garden shed would not probably get represented in court—the possibility of him not having a conditional discharge, or the police being given a rollicking for being so stupid as to bring the charge in the first place, which is possibly more sensible, not to allow the courts to have that flexibility is back to one’s old friend ““up-tariffing”” again.