Baroness Levitt (Lab)

My Lords, I both thank and admire my noble friend Lady Chakrabarti and the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, for their long-lasting and ongoing commitment to the cause of ensuring that children are not inappropriately criminalised. As the noble Lord, Lord Davies, has just said, we debated in Committee at some length the issues associated with the change proposed by my noble friend, who, at that stage, proposed that the age of criminal responsibility should be 14, now reduced to 12 in the present amendment. The Government’s position remains, as I said then, that setting the age of criminal responsibility at 10 provides critical flexibility to respond appropriately to children who engage in criminal activity. This includes diverting them away from formal criminal justice procedures when appropriate. I do not intend to rehearse those arguments today, but I must repeat that this is a complex and sensitive issue. Any policy change would need to be informed by in-depth engagement with legal, youth justice, child development and welfare experts, as well as victims and the wider public. My right honourable friend the Deputy Prime Minister, together with the Minister for Courts, recently met the Bar Council, which has set up a working group to consider the need to increase the age of criminal responsibility in England and Wales. We welcome this scrutiny on the matter and look forward to considering the findings in due course. In the meantime, I invite my noble friend not to press her amendment tonight.