Member

I suggest to the Committee that that is not the correct approach, and I do so for this reason. The National Age Assessment Board was specifically set up in the 2022 Act and has been carried on, I am glad to say, very sensibly, by this Labour Administration, to bring in-house the making of age-assessment decisions, to gather together expertise and to provide training to those who make age assessments of those who claim to be under 18. These are the experts in assessing age—I see the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, shaking her head, but I am afraid I disagree with her. These are the people who know exactly what is going on, in a way that when it was diffused across the local authorities was not the case. So the National Age Assessment Board is the expert body. As such, the conventional position in public law is that the court should defer to those expert bodies and overturn their decisions only in the event that they have done something which is illegal in public law terms—so either Wednesbury unreasonable or otherwise unlawful in public law terms, without an assessment of the evidence.