Debate contribution: Justice Bill: Consideration Stage

Debate contribution by Mr Jon Burrows on 15 June 2026.

MLA

Mr Jon Burrows

Party at the time

Ulster Unionist Party

Date

15 June 2026

Type

Debate contribution

Business

Executive Committee Business

Heading

Justice Bill: Consideration Stage

Assembly identifier

Official Report component 5615247

Read the official Assembly record

Text

I agree. The amendments are beyond rescuing. They would need to be fundamentally rewritten. The change would have to be made in a youth justice Bill. That is the appropriate and responsible way of dealing with the issue. In principle, I would like to strengthen some of the provisions of the youth justice system and put in place a legislative presumption of diversion for many crimes by 10- and 11-year-olds that would operate in practice under our current legislation. I will work with the Minister. I do not claim to have any expertise, but I spent 25 years in policing and commentating on policing. I have two degrees, including a master's degree, in this stuff. I have studied it for most of my adult life. I passionately believe that what we are doing is wrong. Let me turn to investigative capability, which is one of the things that have been missed because of the fundamental misunderstanding of what the minimum age of criminal responsibility is. It affects the ability of the police to investigate a crime. Currently, under the Police and Criminal Evidence (Northern Ireland) Order 1989, the police can carry out a criminal investigation of a crime only if the perpetrator is aged 10 or over. From there comes the power of arrest, interviews, bail conditions, taking samples and fingerprints and putting on an ID parade. Let us go back to the Bulger murder case. Say that we have two suspects and a witness says, "I believe that it was those two", and the police want to arrange an identity parade. Quite simply, they could not. They would not have the power to arrest the suspects and put them in an identity parade. Members on the other side of the Chamber will say, "That is really just a minor issue, is it not?". It is not a minor issue for the parents of the murdered toddler; the woman who has been upskirted; the victim who has been tied up and raped; the person whose car has been burnt; the person whose home has been burnt down; or the person whose daughter has been driven to suicide by online abuse. Nowhere did I hear that from the Members on the other side of the House. They kept saying, "The children, the children, the children" in the frame of suspects. They talked about "the children, the children, the children" as the victims. The girls who are bullied and assaulted; the women —.

No, I will not give way at the moment.

Can we just be polite to one another? Let me go back to investigative capability. The criminal law is not just about punishment; it is about ascertaining the facts, gathering the evidence, securing justice and proving or disproving an offence. In fact, if you look at the duties of the PSNI, you will see that one of them, alongside bringing offenders to justice, is to prove or disprove offences. Anyone who understands criminal law knows that the police have a duty to find inculpatory evidence, which rules you in, and exculpatory evidence, which rules you out.

If you were accused of a serious crime at 13 and a half years of age — let us say that it was a very serious crime — the police, because they are not able to investigate it, would not be able to eliminate you and identify who the suspects were. I heard constantly from people on the other side of the House that there are other ways of dealing with the suspect, such as through social services. However, if the suspect denies the offence, how do you establish who did it without a criminal investigation? Are you, then, going to say to someone, "You are going to go through the youth" —

Thank you for that. Are you going to say to someone, "You are going to go into child protection because we think that you have done something heinous", even though they did not do it and have no way of getting it disproved, because the police will not go out and arrest the real suspect. Those are real-life examples that those with criminology degrees and no common sense who belong to the lobby groups and the academic elites do not consider. This is the real world as it is, not as we want to see it. What about repeat offenders? The amendment is silent about repeat offenders. If you have a 12- or 13-year-old who is out of control, the amendment would render the police unable even to put bail conditions on. I know about the attacks on the Fountain interface. It has been under serious attack for decades. When the police are able to intervene, they make an arrest. Someone gets bail conditions that state that they are not out during the summer or near the interface or that they cannot go within 200 metres of the victim's house. None of those is applicable. We would wipe away the police's ability to prevent crime. We talked about prevention here, in the woolly, nice sense of sitting down on a beanbag and chatting about it over a cuppa, when there are people who do bad things to innocent victims. Sometimes, you need the law to say, "No, you are not going out tonight", "No, you are on remand", and, "No, you are getting your fingerprints taken". I know that no one wants to listen to the hard facts here. What about the cases where a suspect has committed a sexual offence but the Police Service says, "Well, that is not a crime, so we cannot deal with it", and it cannot take a DNA sample. That DNA is not on the system, meaning that, years later, if that person commits a serious crime and rapes someone as an adult, there is no comparison sample that would lead to their being arrested. Do you even consider those things when you draft these amendments? Do you consider that women in our society could be raped and there would not even be a DNA sample?

I will take an intervention, Miss McAllister.

1,018 words. Text as published by the Northern Ireland Assembly.

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Assessed 21 October 2026 at 15:57 UTC by jev-1.13.0 (requested as typesafe/jev) under rubric 2026.10-r9, methodology 1.9.

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