Calls have been made to raise the age of criminal responsibility in Wales, with warnings that criminalising people as young as 10 “creates a conveyor belt of future crime.”

A 10-year-old is too young to leave the school gates without a parent’s permission, let alone cast a ballot.

They can’t work a paper round, open a bank account or see a 12A film without an adult.

They are, in almost every sense, dependent on the grown-ups around them.

Yet, the moment they cross a certain line – that protective bubble vanishes.

Under current law, a child still in primary school is considered mature enough to stand in a dock, be questioned under caution and carry a criminal record that could follow them for decades.

This paradox was at the heart of a Senedd debate on 14 January as Plaid Cymru’s Adam Price called for the age of criminal responsibility to be raised from 10 to 14.

He told the Welsh Parliament: “A child still in primary school can be arrested, questioned under caution, prosecuted, convicted, and marked, sometimes for years, by an encounter with the criminal courts.

“I believe we should raise the age of criminal responsibility to 14.

“That's not to be soft on crime, as some would see it – it's to be smart on crime, clear-eyed, with a hard-headed focus on what the evidence tells us.

“The evidence is all in one direction: criminalising 10, 11, 12 and 13-year-olds is to create a conveyor belt of future crime, pulling children deeper into the system, widening the net, turning one incident into the beginning of a longer offending career.”

The former Plaid Cymru leader criticised the “crude” current threshold, saying: “the age of criminal responsibility is not just a number, it’s a line that determines whether we treat a child primarily as a child who needs help or an offender to be processed.”

Rhian Croke, a human rights expert at the Children’s Legal Centre Wales, has warned of a “glaring contradiction" within the Wales and England legal system.

She wrote: “This legal mismatch is not just technical – it reflects a deeper inconsistency…. On the one hand, we delay rights like voting, full medical consent or signing contracts until 16 or 18.

“On the other, we impose adult-like punishments on children still in primary school.”

Dr Croke pointed out that the age of criminal responsibility in Wales is the lowest in Europe.

Warning Wales and England is an international outlier, she said: “Further afield, it may be interesting to learn the minimum age of criminal responsibility is higher in China and Russia.”

Dr Croke cautioned that criminalising children as young as 10 can cause significant and lasting harm as well as make reoffending more likely – not less.

Jane Hutt, Wales’ social justice secretary, stressed that while the Senedd can debate the issue – the power to change the law remains locked in Westminster.

Reiterating calls for powers over youth justice, she committed to raising the issue during a forthcoming meeting with the UK youth justice minister.