Lord Blencathra (Con)

My Lords, I will speak to my Amendments 3 and 10. Superficially, Amendment 3 may look radical, in seeking to reduce the age from 18 to 14. The noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, certainly might not like it, but, if we want to tackle the lack of respect or anti-social behaviour of those aged 18-plus, that will not be possible unless we tackle all the anti-social behaviour that has built up from age 10 or even younger. We cannot get into pre-14 behaviour today, but I discovered some frightening statistics from the Met Police, which it was forced to publish under an FOI request last year. They show that, for the year ending December 2023, 879 crimes were committed by children aged 10 to 17. Of these, 173 were violence against the person, 64 were robbery, 81 were theft, 28 were arson, 385 were drug offences and 81 involved possession of weapons. That is fairly frightening. But if that was not bad enough, the Met also published a breakdown of crimes committed by children aged one to nine, of which there were 653 offences. Some 128 were theft and 95 were arson and criminal damage, but the really frightening statistics were the 85 sexual offences and—the largest group—191 crimes of violence against the person. As I say, we cannot deal with that age group today, but I simply ask what kind of sick society we are becoming when in the Met area alone we have 85 children aged between one and nine accused of sexual offences and 191 accused of violence against the person.