Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Debate between Baroness Butler-Sloss and Baroness Lister of Burtersett

Monday 23rd June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Lister of Burtersett (Lab)]

My Lords, I am moving Amendment 166 with the support of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Chelmsford, to whom I am grateful—she regrets that she cannot be in her place—as I am to the Refugee and Migrant Children’s Consortium, the RMCC, for its help.

The amendment would introduce an entitlement to an independent guardian for separated asylum-seeking or trafficked children, in line with international law and the provisions already made in Scotland, building on and expanding the existing independent child trafficking guardian service run by Barnardo’s.

Imagine that you are a child who has fled persecution or conflict, travelling across Europe and then making the perilous journey across the channel, all of which makes for a pretty traumatic experience. You arrive frightened, wet and cold. You are given no time to recover but, instead, almost immediately are faced with questions that you may not understand and age-assessment procedures that can all too easily wrongly determine that you are an adult. I will not go into that today, other than to say that research shows how these age assessments can undermine children’s mental health and well-being. You then face incomprehensible bureaucratic procedures and have to navigate complex systems, such as social care, immigration and criminal justice, as you make the difficult legal journey involved in claiming asylum.

How different might it be if you had a legal guardian to support you? The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child sets out that legal guardians are a crucial component of a protection system for children who temporarily or permanently lack a family environment and are unable to have their interests represented by their parents. An independent legal guardian in this context plays a key role in supporting unaccompanied children by connecting them to all the support they need, instructing solicitors on their behalf and, most importantly, representing their best interests throughout.

An evaluation of the Scottish guardianship service, now called Guardianship Scotland, showed that it played an invaluable beneficial role in supporting unaccompanied children. In particular, it helped them with navigation and orientation, gathered and provided information for stakeholders, supported interactions with immigration lawyers, and provided emotional support.

The RMCC applauds the crucial role played by the service, which, it says,

“highlights the transformative power of dedicated advocacy and care”.

Barnardo’s points to the evidence of the positive impact on mental health during often lengthy asylum waits, with qualitative feedback emphasising that guardians are viewed by asylum-seeking children as their primary source of stability, advocacy and protection. It told me that seven independent evaluations of the trafficking guardian service that it runs found that having a guardian helps reduce children’s likelihood of going missing and their vulnerability to harm.

The effects on children have been both immediate and long-term. Barnardo’s quotes asylum-seeking children supported by its service in Northern Ireland:

“I trust you and rely on your support”,


and

“my friend does not have an independent guardian working with him and this is so bad. I would have really struggled with that”.

Yet the limited reach of the traffic and guardianship service in England and Wales, and the lack of any such service for asylum-seeking children here, means that thousands of vulnerable children are having to struggle every day as they try to build a new life.

Compelling evidence of this comes from a new study of unaccompanied asylum-seeking children and young people by the LSE and the University of Bedfordshire, as I referred to in our previous sitting. It focuses in particular on their well-being. The children and young people themselves identified a number of aspects of their lives that were important to their well-being, including

“not being lonely and having reliable people to talk to”

and

“professional support and knowing professionals are taking responsibility for you and your needs”,

along with

“having hope for the future”.

Moreover, they viewed integration as key to their well-being.

Happily, a significant number of the children and young people were being supported by a charity operating an independent guardian-like service. For them, that was often the difference that made the difference, but, the report said, these specialist casework interventions happen mostly by chance and after procedural drift and poor mistakes in and around the asylum decision-making process, rather than systematically or at the early stages of children and young people’s asylum applications.

The report talks of a “protection gap”, in which the children and young people felt very much alone. Their sense of well-being was closely associated with the extent to which they felt cared for by professionals—to have what the authors call a “scaffolding of care” built around them to help give them hope and belief in themselves and their future—and hope for the future was crucial to their well-being.

The importance of caring support from a social worker cannot be stressed enough but not all enjoy such a relationship, and social workers do not necessarily have the requisite understanding of the asylum system. This led to the recommendation by the children and young people themselves, echoed by the academic researchers, for

“independent guardians from the start and throughout their journey, who understand the asylum, immigration, modern slavery and social care processes, who understand the unique challenges”

and who are accessible.

As that study illustrates, the case for extending the guardianship service lies primarily in the positive impact that it will have on a particularly vulnerable group of children, in line with international standards. It is also a very cost-effective measure. UNICEF UK and the Children’s Society calculated some years ago that a system of guardianship for all unaccompanied children could save £1.25 for every £1 spent over three years, rising to £2.39, taking account of the benefits once the children become adults. That detailed cost-benefit analysis estimates an overall saving of over £62 million arising from reduction in social work time, police resources, interpreting time, judicial and legal expenses, and the time of other professionals.

Ultimately, what is at stake here is the mental and physical well-being of children. That is what the Bill is all about. As one of the young people in the study I cited commented:

“Children are not just a category. You need to be living all your childhood”—


a maxim that we might apply to the Bill as a whole.

The RMCC concludes:

“In light of the substantial financial savings, improved systemic efficiency, and enhanced well-being of unaccompanied children, implementing a nationwide guardianship service in the UK is both a fiscally responsible and morally imperative decision”.


In her recent oral evidence to the Home Affairs Committee, the Minister, Angela Eagle, suggested that the Home Office

“may start to look at how we can provide a voice for migrants—an advocacy service, a help service”.

I do not know what she had in mind, but I suggest that a guardianship service for unaccompanied children would be a good place to start.

I am not looking for such a decision today, but I believe the case is compelling from the perspective of children’s well-being. I therefore ask my noble friend the Minister to commit to talking to her Home Office colleagues and, together with them, to give the proposal serious consideration, with a view to possible implementation in the future. I beg to move.

[Baroness Butler-Sloss (CB)]

My Lords, I strongly support this amendment. I declare that I am vice-chairman of the Human Trafficking Foundation and co-chair of the all-party group against modern slavery. Ten years ago, the Modern Slavery Act introduced child advocates who are informally called guardians. It is a brilliant scheme, but I understand that it is still in a pilot stage, which is one of the sadnesses of the implementation of parts of the Modern Slavery Act.