Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Debate between Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle and Baroness Boycott

Thursday 3rd July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

My Lords, I put my name to Amendment 202A in the names of the noble Baronesses, Lady Parminter and Lady Bennett. This is a fantastically important amendment, and I will be very distressed if the Government do not seize the moment as the knowledge comes into view about what these kinds of chemicals in cheap clothes provide and are putting into our children’s systems.

Jeremy Grantham, who many people may know, has been one of the main funders of climate change research across the world over the last 40 years and indeed was one of the funders behind the LSE and Nick Stern report. I met him about three weeks ago and he said he is no longer providing climate change funding, largely because he thinks it is a more or less foregone conclusion that things are not going well. He has turned his entire industry and scientific might behind looking at PFAS and the chemicals that are in not just our clothing but our soils.

Let us look specifically at clothing around the world. American Airlines has recently been sued because it produced very cheap uniforms for its stewards and stewardesses. They have started to develop incredible ranges of different skin illnesses and internal illnesses. As the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, found, research in Denmark has shown that prenatal contact to cheaply made fabrics with PFAS in them has led to reductions in IQ among children. France is banning all school uniforms containing PFAS from next year.

Interestingly, Fidra, a big company that works on and looks at the environmental impact of chemicals, says that people want these chemicals in clothing because it is very easy to wash, it dries almost immediately and you never need to iron it. But interestingly, it discovered that people treat these clothes in exactly the same way as they treat something of better quality. Every time you wash it—it is not just when you put it on your skin—bits come off in the washing machine. They are now in circulation: they are in breast milk, placenta and our plants. Our plants are looking at 25% reduction in whole fertility within the next 10 years.

Some of the work that Jeremy Grantham is doing is looking at male fertility. Some people may say we have too many people in the world, but this is probably not the way we want to do it—crashing male fertility and all sorts of things. These are dangerous.

As everybody knows, I have worked on ultra-processed foods. One of the interesting things about these chemicals is that a single one of them on their own may not be dangerous, but they are if you mix them up. That is the whole point of chemistry. That is why we went into chemistry labs for our GCSEs and had fun making things explode. They change.

Those chemicals go into these fabrics. They can be manufactured at immense volume and cheapness. As I say, it is not just the school uniforms but the stuff kids are buying when they can buy 20 garments for 20 quid through a company such as Shein. These are dangerous. We can stop this.

I completely support all the amendments in this group. Yes, I want school uniforms because they are fair, and I want them to be cheap, but I do not want them to be dangerous to our children. Please can the Government start doing something about it? Europe is ahead of us. Other countries are ahead of us. We can do this.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Baronesses, Lady Boycott and Lady Parminter. The noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, just made an extremely powerful case for Amendment 202A, to which I attached my name. In the interests of time, I shall mostly focus on the two amendments that appear in my name in this group, which are Amendments 202B and 484.

Amendment 202B is essentially an expansion of the amendment from the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott. She focused on the health impacts of PFAS; I am focusing on the broader issues of the health of school uniforms. This amendment

“seeks to allow the Secretary of State to regulate school uniforms, given the human and environmental health risks they represent”.

That is not written in the amendment, which is written broadly to have a review within a year, but I say that in the explanatory statement and that I am particularly thinking about

“artificial fibres and chemical constituents”

—so it includes PFAS, but is much broader than that.

This is actually a narrower version of an amendment I tabled to the Product Regulation and Metrology Bill that was debated on 11 December. I included a great deal of evidence in that that I do not have time to include today, but I said then that these products, chemicals, plastics and other substances are accumulating in our bodies day by day. That picks up the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott: we have a cocktail effect of bodies being bombarded from our clothing, our environments and our food. We are talking about young people, who are going to live for decades, accumulating more and more PFAS and more and more plastics in their bodies.

This is particularly important when we think about school uniforms, because we are forcing pupils to wear them. This is the state mandating that our children wear clothing which is highly likely to be doing them harm. Think about how it will go from the clothing into people’s bodies: for a blazer, a pupil is running for the school bus or running around in the playground. Smaller children touch their clothing and then they put their hand in their mouth, or they touch something else. They will be ingesting whatever is in their clothing.

It is literally week by week now that we get more medical and research reports on the impacts, but just this week microplastic particles have been found in human semen and female reproductive fluids. There is great concern about the potential impacts on fertility, as has already been referred to. There are microplastics in samples of human penises, and this may have a role in erectile dysfunction. There is a study out just this morning from the Netherlands. Every person in the Netherlands—and there is no reason to think that we are any different—has multiple types of PFAS in their blood, and virtually all of them are above healthy limits. We do not have a detailed explanation of exactly what impact this cocktail has, but we apply the precautionary principle to the environment, so surely we should apply it to the health of our young people and the clothing we are putting them in.

As has already been referred to, France is moving towards a ban on most PFAS imports and manufacture, and by 2030 will ban all PFAS-treated textiles. I note that, in the debate on the Product Regulation and Metrology Bill, the noble Lord, Lord Sharpe of Epsom, who is not currently in his place, got quite concerned about what had made his shirt non-iron. I had to go away and look this up: it is formaldehyde. Europe has stepped up and has stronger regulations on formaldehyde exposure in products than we do.

In 2019, the National Trust recognised that the artificial fibre fleeces it supplied to its staff and put in its shops shed an estimated 1.7 grammes of microfibres every time they were washed. It was also concerned that, when people walked through its wonderful, beautiful, natural environments with them, they were shedding plastics everywhere. This is, of course, an environmental health issue as well as a human health issue, but in the context of this Bill, the human health issue for children and young people is overwhelming.

Shifting topics slightly, my second amendment in this group, Amendment 484, is about school hair requirements. It says:

“Pupils must not be denied opportunities to take part in classes, or any other school activities, by reason of their hair style or cut, unless for reasons of health and safety”.


The origins for it go back to a couple of events I have been to with the World Afro Day campaign group. To quote Michelle de Leon, the founder of that group, the bias against Afro hair has become ingrained in some parts of the education system.

Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Debate between Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle and Baroness Boycott

Thursday 19th June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley. I attached my name to Amendment 161 on automatic enrolment for the Healthy Start scheme, as indeed did the noble Lord, Bethell—so if we are looking for broad, cross-party-political spectrums, this is one of those.

The noble Baroness has already set out the powerful case for this amendment—I will just add one thing. She spoke about the Government’s apparent lack of data in this area. In the other place, my honourable friends asked the Government a whole series of questions about this. The response was that the NHS Business Services Authority, which operates the scheme, does not hold any data on the number of people eligible. That is surely fixable, so it should surely be fixed.

I will focus on Amendment 175 in my name, which is kindly supported by the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott. It would insert a new clause to provide for

“holiday … and activity programmes for pupils in receipt of free school meals”.

This would be a lot of pupils. Before the Government’s recent changes, about one in four pupils were already eligible for free school meals. Those were extremely tight criteria; the Government have now opened them up a little. There is some debate about the number of children affected. None the less, these are children whom the Government have acknowledged, and most of whom the previous Government acknowledged, really need the support of hopefully healthy—I will get back to that—hot meals during term time.

However, what happens at weekends? There is a reason why #HolidayHunger has almost become a cliché. Those children come from families whose budgets are at the absolute edge anyway. Then, the holidays come, and they cannot be guaranteed to be fed.

This amendment would also ensure that there are activities and programmes relevant to those children during the school holidays. One thing we have seen in many of our areas, particularly some of our poorest areas, is that the availability of free activities during the school holidays has fallen and fallen. We have seen the privatisation of public spaces, the fencing-in of playing fields and the removal of public spaces that then become privatised and can be quite hostile to children. If you go out and you need access to a loo, you have to buy something, and that is just not available to people. So, this amendment would ensure that there is a meal and a holiday programme that supports those children and those families. It is tackling poverty and tackling some of the very acute issues of public health that the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, referred to.

I note, declaring my interest as a vice-president of the Local Government Association, that this would have to be funded from the centre. The noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, referred, I think, to difficulties with the free school breakfast programme and how some schools have had to pull out of it because they did not have the funding. Certainly, local government would really struggle to fund the proposal in this amendment, but I would argue to the Government that the relatively modest costs would be far outweighed by the benefits for public health of the inclusion of some of the poorest children in our communities, giving them a space that is constructive when otherwise they might be spending their time in potentially destructive ways.

I think it is worth noting that this is not just something that I have dreamed up. My honourable friend in the other place, Ellie Chowns, tabled a similar amendment. We have only to go to the Republic of Ireland, which quite recently announced a programme for the coming year that looks remarkably like this: activity programmes for two to four weeks aimed at the children at most risk of disadvantage and those with complex special educational needs. In Ireland, 58,000 pupils took part last year and they are expecting more next year, so this is something that a very broadly comparable society is already doing, acknowledging the need and acting on it.

Finally, there are a huge number of positive amendments in this group, and I am not going to speak to anything like all of them, but I particularly want to highlight Amendment 190, to which I would have attached my name had I got my act together, and Amendment 194, to which I would have attached my name if it were not already fully subscribed. Both are about the quality of school breakfasts and lunches, which is so crucial. I make one general point in this context. The Times Health Commission reported recently and it had a really interesting look at Japan and what a contrast Japan shows compared to us. In Japan, just 4% of adults are obese, compared to 26% here. In Japan, fewer than 2% of under-fives are overweight: they are essentially all at a healthy weight.

What we have is school systems. The Times journalists visited the school system and saw what school lunches are like at Kohoku primary school. The children were eating spiced baked fish and vegetables sprinkled with dried bonito and rice and they were ladling out the food themselves. A pupil got up at the start and explained why the sweetcorn in the rice had a beneficial nutritional advantage. The school is built around a giant kitchen with windows on every side, so pupils can see the chefs preparing the meal.

I wanted to say that because I was reflecting on the Committee’s debate a couple of days ago, when we were talking about children’s social care and I had an amendment that said we should end for-profit provision in children’s social care. It struck me when I read Hansard afterwards that nobody had actually defended the idea of a market in private provision of social care. All the people speaking against my amendment said, “Oh, well, we are where we are now and it’s too difficult to change”. I think that when it comes to free school meals or school meals—on a later group I am going to say that there should be school meals for everybody—we have to say that this needs a giant leap of change. We cannot allow this to continue as it is now. We have to have the imagination to think, yes, we are in a bad place, but we can do significantly, massively better than this, not just try to have a little improvement.

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

I shall be brief, because the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, has set out comprehensively so much about the amendments that I support, Amendments 175 and 194. Amendment 175 echoes what the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, said about the need for “holiday hunger” to be sorted out in this country. For a parent the summer holidays are a cliff edge in all sorts of directions. Not only are you deprived of the possible childcare while struggle with your two jobs, your mortgage and so on, but your children are also deprived of possibly the only decent meal that they might get in the day—and I shall qualify the word “decent” when I come back to it in a minute.