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Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill

My Lords, the noble Earl deserves thanks for and congratulations on having brought this matter before the House again. He need not, in his most Francophile, chivalrous moments, apologise in any way for any lack of comparative eloquence. He put his case as strongly and effectively as possible. That case is meritorious. We have been told over and over again—the matter cannot be overemphasised—that in the incarceration of children, compared to the other countries of Western Europe, we are again at the head of that unmeritorious league. We incarcerate more children than Germany, France, Holland and Norway put together. The same is true of the incarceration of young people and adults, so there is a damnable consistency, if I may say so, in our attitude to incarceration and loss of liberty in general. That is a wider point. I concede that the Powers of Criminal Courts (Sentencing) Act 2000, to which I think that the noble Earl, was referring, and the Criminal Justice Act 2003 between them contain very considerable restrictions on the incarceration of children—and of young people, for that matter—but they are not working. That is the strength of the noble Earl's amendment. Anything that brings home to the mind of a sentencer the necessity of using incarceration —by that, I mean the loss of liberty in general—more effectively than at present will be very much to the benefit of the community. I urge the Minister to consider that this matter deserves further consideration. After all, all that has really been asked for is that practically the same wording as is contained in many criminal statutes passed over the past 15 to 20 years in respect of adults is applied to children. The exact words of those statutes seem to have been incorporated in the amendment.