Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Debate between Baroness Barran and Baroness Spielman

Monday 9th June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Spielman (Con)]

My Lords, I speak to oppose Amendment 69AB, well-intentioned though it clearly is. I have several levels of concerns about the imposition of yet another duty. I believe that the expectations for looked-after children are generally well understood—whether they are actually carried out in practice is another matter. This particular amendment has some obvious holes. For example, there are kinds of intimacy in normal, healthy parent-child relationships that absolutely would not be appropriate between local authority staff and children.

More generally, there has been a proliferation of duties in legislation in recent years. For example, I became chair of Ofqual 14 years ago. After a particular duty was raised in my first board meeting, I asked my legal director for a session to talk me through all the duties that applied. To my astonishment, I discovered that we already had 28 duties, with a handful more in the pipeline; I am sure it is a lot more since then.

This imposition of duties as the go-to solution has several problems. First, it creates problems of overload. Normal human beings simply cannot hold so many different duties in their thinking simultaneously. Secondly, they get imposed in isolation. They are usually added without reference to previous duties, with which they often overlap but sometimes push in different directions. How do you reconcile them? They can lead to skimping. If duties that have been imposed need resource but are not funded, you can end up with everything being done less well—not only the thing that the duty is aimed at but all the other functions—which reduces the quality at the receiving end. It takes away the ability of public services to prioritise intelligently. It can divert resource away from the main purpose that the duty is intended to protect and towards the kinds of activities that demonstrate compliance with the activity.

Finally, if there is a surplus of duties and an impossibility of giving full effect to them all, a sort of cynicism builds up that can corrupt an organisation’s culture. When everybody knows that they are really only paying lip service to an enormous list, people stop believing in the ability of the organisation to fulfil its real purposes.

Tempting as it is to think that another duty is the great solution that will protect children from all the awful harms that have been talked about today—they are a great salve to all our consciences—we need to resist and make sure that we get to the essence of the things that will do the most to help children.

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

My Lords, I will speak very briefly to this group of amendments. The noble Lord, Lord Watson, again reminded the Committee that vulnerable children in the care of a local authority do not always receive the care that they deserve. We should never lose sight that that should be our goal. My noble friend Lady Spielman put it very well in her remarks and I will pick up on what she said. Local authorities understand their duties in this area. The noble Lord himself cited some of the legislation and guidance on the spirit of their responsibilities. The question, as ever, is around implementation, and I share my noble friend’s concerns about adding yet another duty to local authorities.