Lord Harper (Con)

My Lords, I will not speak for very long on this, I hope. I also hope that the Minister does not feel that this is becoming a pattern—I am largely on the same side as him on this issue—and that I can bring a little bit of balance to the debate. Both noble Baronesses have mentioned the chief inspector. I looked carefully at his very balanced report. There are points on both sides. It is worth putting some of them on the record that the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, did not. The chief inspector made the point that accurately assessing the age of young people is undoubtedly difficult. It has always been very difficult. It was difficult when I was the Immigration Minister between 2012 and 2014. The same debates that take place now took place then. It remains difficult. One of the reasons it is difficult is because there is an incentive in the system because, rightly, we treat children differently from and more generously than we treat adults. If you are not careful, adults game the system and say that they are children when they are not. That is a problem: first, because you are putting adults in an environment with children, which does present a child protection risk; and, secondly, it enables adults who have entered the country illegally and inappropriately to try to avoid the consequences of their actions. That brings the system into disrepute, which is not good for anyone. The inspector makes the point that the Home Office gets some of its initial age decisions wrong and that it would be helpful if both sides accepted that. That is a point for the Minister to recognise: it is difficult and the Home Office does not always get it right. Importantly, he also said that the debate would be better if the Home Office and its critics could agree that some migrants lie about their age and that not to attempt to make some form of initial age assessment—which both noble Baronesses have criticised—risks incentivising more to do so. There is a balance to strike here. I am pleased that these two amendments will not be pressed to a vote because I would not be able to support them. Amendment 27 seeks to put a bright-line rule in place which will strengthen the incentive for anybody to claim that they are a child because it would mean that they went automatically into the process and were treated as a child until it had been shown that they were not a child. That would make the Home Office’s job, on behalf of us all, to have a functioning immigration system even more difficult. My concern about Amendment 57, given today’s fourth Oral Question and the pace of technology, is that subsection (3) of the proposed new clause does not specify how we should use technological methods of age estimation, including facial age estimation, saying that they must not “be used as the sole or primary basis for determining age, or … override the presumption” that someone is a child. My problem is that the pace of that technology is such that I do not think we should be ruling out its use as the determining fact in statute. My understanding—I am sure there are AI experts in the House who can correct me if I am wrong—is that this technology can get somebody’s age within a few years of the true age. I accept that that is quite important when a person is on the boundary between being a child or an adult, but the point is that that is pretty accurate and who knows where that technology will have gone in a few years? If we had a very accurate method, perhaps with other things, of determining somebody’s age, I would not want there to be something in primary legislation which ruled that out, given all the complexities around that.