Lord Murray of Blidworth (Con)

My Lords, I had better rise at this stage to introduce my Amendment 203H. As with my last amendment, the mysteries of grouping have left me slightly confused, because this amendment does not actually relate to the Illegal Migration Act. This is an amendment which I offer to the Home Office as a sensible amendment that will save public money. It will be a sensible and useful use of time, and I implore the Minister, who I know to be a sensible and reasonable person, to look at this carefully. Amendment 203H refers to the National Age Assessment Board, which was set up under the Nationality and Borders Act 2022, before I was in this House—I know there are some noble Lords here who remember the debates about that particular Bill. The Bill presently before the Committee does not repeal any provisions in the Nationality and Borders Act. The National Age Assessment Board was set up by the 2022 Act to bring into the Home Office the system whereby those who claimed to be minors would be assessed. Prior to these provisions coming into force, that was done by local authorities. What had routinely been the case was that a person who purported to be younger than 18 and who wished to challenge a decision would then seek a judicial review of the assessment made by the local authority. There is a whole run of cases in which the courts considered what the test should be, on judicial review, of a social worker’s evaluation of the person’s age. Across the country, different local authorities had different approaches. In a case called A v Croydon, the Supreme Court, led by the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Hale, determined that age assessments would not be made on the usual basis of a judicial review. As noble Lords will be well aware—and I am sorry that I am teaching grandmothers to suck eggs, but in case there is anyone watching who does not know this—a decision on judicial review is not normally taken by means of a court looking at the decision afresh, considering the evidence and taking a decision for itself; instead, what the court does is to look at the decision to see whether it is lawful and not unreasonable in the public law sense, which is classically defined as being so unreasonable that no decision-maker could have reached that decision —the “Oh gosh” test, as it has been described previously.