This Mothering Country

It will no doubt come as a relief to the great British nation that the use of living children, besides dead ones, as police and intelligence assets occurs only when Her Majesty's Government finds it appropriate. Juvenile covert human intelligence sources (children, in Standard English) are being assigned to collect information about gangs and drug dealers, which naturally involves keeping them in the milieu rather than anything so namby-pamby as taking them out; so it is certainly fortunate that this happens only when that repository of cool-headed competence, the British Home Office, considers it a good idea. According to the dead-eyed warden's spokesbeing, utilisation of currently viable juvenile covert intelligence sources is "governed by a very strict legal framework" which the Home Office has naturally been trying to undermine: at the moment agencies can only utilise the juveniles for a month at a time before applying to re-register the asset in question, but Her Majesty's Government is concerned that intelligence target throughput is not being appropriately facilitated, and believes that four months represents a fairer chance for the resources to pay their debt.