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Policing and Crime Bill

My Lords, I listened, as always, with immense care to what the noble Baroness, Lady Stern, said. She is one of the wiser Members of your Lordships’ House. I pay that compliment with great sincerity; I believe it to be right. We must be very careful about criminalising younger and younger people. Surely, if the Government do not accept the idea of raising the age to 18, it should be kept at 16, which seemed to be appropriate last year—or was it the year before?—when they passed a Bill saying that 16 was the right age. I cannot see why that should suddenly change in two years. I accept, in spite of my remarks about the Venerable Bede, that there is a problem of young people drinking, but it is surely a problem of social disorder and lack of parental control and should be much more carefully dealt with by voluntary bodies and the probation service as applicable, rather than by dragging these children into the criminal system. We have, I think, the youngest age of criminal consent of any country in northern Europe. Some countries have it at 18; in my view, that is probably slightly too low, but we should be careful about the police, the courts and everyone getting involved with children as young as 11 and 12.