Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill
Baroness Finlay of Llandaff Excerpts(2 days, 19 hours ago)
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Baroness Sanderson of Welton (Con)
My Lords, the Minister may mention this in her response to my noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe’s question about the data task force, but I just wanted to mention the Cabinet Office Evaluation Task Force, which is tasked with improving and addressing data across every area of government. Obviously, it cannot do that with every area of government, so it picked 10 priority areas, one of which is children’s social care. I mention it in the context of the excellent amendment from the noble Baroness, Lady Spielman, because it could make a huge far-reaching difference. If it were to be looked at, then perhaps speaking to the Cabinet Office might be useful.
Baroness Finlay of Llandaff (CB)
My Lords, briefly, these clauses are going to be incredibly important to empower information sharing, but I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, for having raised so many of the practical concerns. The noble Lord, Lord Meston, has just asked for some objective criteria, but from my experience in general practice and, many years ago, in paediatrics, there did not seem to be a clear line very often—there were of shades of grey, an index of suspicion and a sense that something might not be right long before you could establish any objective evidence. The objective evidence sometimes came far too late.
I will never forget a child who, 50 years ago, had been dipped in boiling water. I was the admitting person in the A&E department as a junior doctor, having only just started in paediatrics. There were children admitted with injuries, and then when we went into it, we discovered that things had been going wrong for a long time previously. Later on, when I was on the health authority for Gwent, we had some tragic cases there, which I cannot disclose details of, but one of the recurring themes was that people had not put together the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle or connected the dots to realise what was happening.
So I worry that we will not ever be able to have absolute criteria; we have to allow discretion, which is what this amendment does. I note that subsection (7) of the new section states that:
“A disclosure of information … does not breach any obligation of confidence owed by the person making the disclosure.”
That is helpful, because, hopefully, you will see the person over and over again once you have an index of suspicion to try to ascertain what is going on before you trigger the referral, and the Bill says that each of those encounters must be documented. So you would document why you had not triggered at that point but you might trigger later.
It would be really helpful if, when the Minister responds to this debate, she can outline the way that the system is thought to work in practice and where the central repository of data will be. There is a concern that you can put data into a system, whatever the system is, but if you do not mine that data—if you do not have flags that come up that put the pieces together—you may get a lot of people, all saying, “Oh, but I reported it in”, and it goes into some kind of data black hole without really being joined up. There will need to be a responsibility for saying, “This looks like more than a one-off occurrence. There’s something going on here and it needs to be investigated”.
Baroness Barran (Con)
My Lords, my remarks on this group have shrunk somewhat, thanks to the Minister’s earlier reply, so this is really an opportunity for her to confirm and clarify some of her earlier comments in relation to the use of the NHS number, which is addressed through my Amendment 51, which I think shares the aims of Amendment 52, which the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, presented in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler of Enfield, earlier.
The context for considering this group of amendments is the long debate that has run for many years about whether there should be a consistent identifier for children and, if so, what that number should be. I know that the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler of Enfield, has campaigned on this very actively over many years, so I am sure she is here with us in spirit.
I was very reassured to hear the Minister say that there would not be a database and therefore that we do not have to worry about some of the concerns surrounding ContactPoint and other similar projects today. As your Lordships’ House knows, the Children’s Commissioner and leading children’s charities all support this move and believe that a consistent identifier
“will enable a child to be identified with more confidence”
across the multiplicity of information management systems that we know exist and therefore allow information
“to be shared more efficiently and securely when consent has been received or a safeguarding decision has been made to do so”.
Rightly, the assumption in their statement is that is that information can be shared only with consent—or, to be fair, if a safeguarding decision has been made to do so, which implies that there is no consent. So obviously, this will apply in both cases.
My amendment would do two things. First, it would put in the Bill that the consistent identifier would be a child’s NHS number. Many commentators on the Bill have said that it is important to do this rather than leaving it to regulations, and we need to be clear that the Government are not tempted by another major IT adventure in this area. Secondly, it would allow the Secretary of State by regulations to make provision relating to the consistent identifier. Our intention is to get clarity in the Bill that it is the NHS number, but then give the Secretary of State the flexibility she needs to keep the approach up to date. I know that the Minister has said—I do not want to put words into her mouth—that the Government are exploring using the NHS number, and it looks like the front-runner. Those are definitely not the words she used. I wonder whether she could elaborate a little, to the extent that she feels able, on whether it is really the NHS number or whether anything else is realistically in contention. Therefore, if that pilot was not successful, how much time and money would this set us back?
In debates on earlier groups, other noble Lords mentioned the limitations of the NHS number. Of course, there are children who do not have one, including unaccompanied asylum-seeking children, but the Minister has already given a constructive way through that, and there are also adoptive children. I know there are real concerns that adoptive children should have a single NHS number that does not change. I felt there was a hopeful hint behind her words, but maybe she can expand on that. I think there have been cases where changing numbers and not having that history of a child’s health has not been in the best interests of the child.
It would also be good to hear the Minister’s reflections on the concerns expressed by my noble friend Lord Jackson about families who might be driven away from registering with a GP because of concerns about how their data might be used, thus preventing access to basic healthcare for their children. How real a risk does she believe that to be? Either way, we think that those risks just pale in comparison with those of another new IT project and a number created purely for these purposes. If I have understood correctly that the NHS number is the front-runner, could she expand a little more on the Wigan pilot? Is it the only pilot that the Government are intending to run? How long will it run for? Will there be others? Will they be evaluated? Can she give us any hint on a timeline? I assume there will be no wider rollout until that work is complete. With that, I beg to move.
Baroness Finlay of Llandaff (CB)
My Lords, I support the amendments in this group and strongly congratulate the Government on having picked up the concept of a unique child identifier. I was part of the group, with the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, when we did not get there on previous legislation, and we were told that one reason was that the Department for Education could not see how it could do that and link with health, so seeing the Department for Education involved is particularly cheering.
I will make a case quite strongly for the NHS number rather than anything else, partly because I think we need to learn lessons from other number systems. If we look just at hospital records, different hospitals have different numbers and then there is the NHS number, and that has resulted in all kinds of clinical muddles and potential errors. The other thing is that children move around. People do not stay in the same area all the time, and the NHS number moves with them. If they have one number and move to a new area and register with a GP, for example, and then go to register with a school, if there have been major concerns then eventually those case notes will come through and people will become aware.
Going back to my previous experience, sometimes we found that the families with the highest risk had multiple addresses, out of town and in different cities. The other advantage is that, although we have devolved healthcare systems, we have a unique NHS number so, if people move between Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and England, that number will persist. That is not a central database; it is simply saying that the number is there.
Children’s names change and their “known as” also changes. They may be known as another name but the number, a little like their genetic make-up, is fixed, which is really helpful. It will also avoid problems of lots of children having the same name, which is when muddles happen. I am from Wales, and we have a lot of people called David Jones and David Evans, and quite a few called David Williams, let alone Siân and Ceri. They are great names but, if you are trying to differentiate between them, you have to be really careful.
The final reason why I think this is particularly important is about transition and children who have learning difficulties and neurodiversity. Transition is an extremely difficult time for children. In those late teens, hormones are kicking in all over the place and all kinds of things are happening. Their relationships with the people who have been their carers through childhood change, and they can be at particular risk during those times, particularly during puberty if they have real learning difficulties.
I really hope that the pilot with the NHS number continues. When the Minister responds, it will be very helpful to know what kinds of numbers are being evaluated in those pilot areas—I hope there are more than one—so that the studies are sufficiently powered to be valid. Where have the objections come from? Who has not complied with being engaged? There may be some education needed to remove any sense of threat, because it will make safeguarding easier for people who have responsibility for children.
Lord Meston (CB)
My Lords, I was not going to intervene but, after hearing my noble friend, I cannot help but recall having to deal with some of the children of a man who, on inquiry, had had 11 sons by 11 different women. Because he was the sort of man he was, he insisted that each of them had his name.
Baroness Finlay of Llandaff (CB)
As the Minister was speaking, I was thinking that the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health has been campaigning for this for a very long time. I hope that she will be able to confirm that her officials would have involved the royal college in any discussions over any difficulties and doubts, because I think it would want to be very helpful. It represents, of course, the group of doctors who end up seeing some of the most severely damaged children.
Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
I am pretty certain that officials will have already consulted with the royal college, but, if they have not, I give the noble Baroness an undertaking that they will.
Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)
My Lords, I rise briefly to support the very good amendment moved by the noble Lord, Lord Hampton. If we are spending significant amounts of money on collecting this data and building a database and we have some of the best research facilities in the world, it seems to be sensible when looking at longitudinal studies to utilise that data properly.
My second and more prosaic point is that maybe I am missing something, but it seems to me that subsection (5) and subsection (14) are at variance with each other. They are quite loosely drafted in new Section 16LB. Will the Minister comment on that, because the great thing about the noble Lord’s amendment is that it has pointed out that there seems to be a discrepancy between the two subsections?
Baroness Finlay of Llandaff (CB)
My Lords, I shall briefly speak in support of these amendments and of research. We do not need to have a national database established in order to do research because, first, research has to go through research ethics committees, so that is carefully scrutinised. You could take a representative sample of areas and use properly anonymised data. We can do that now. We can anonymise properly rather than using the old-fashioned pseudo-anonymisation, which was not helpful.
But in all these areas, I am afraid, we lack the evidence that we need to make sure that all our services are best targeted. When we are looking at very vulnerable children, we need to know which flags that are currently yellow flags should become red flags and which items do not show a correlation—although there has been an urban myth that they do correlate—so that the index of suspicion is appropriately targeted. To pick up on the point made by my noble friend earlier about having criteria, it is only through good research that we will get good criteria to determine the point at which we trigger an alert that a child is at risk and get that to happen earlier. It may well be that we are missing some important pointers just because they are not in people’s current consciousness, and there is a real danger in reacting to what I would call urban myths.
The Earl of Dundee (Con)
My Lords, I support these very useful proposals, which, as my noble friend has just outlined, would ensure that child contact centres are adequately funded and their staff and volunteers properly trained to guard against domestic abuse.
However, I would add a further recommendation, also made within the final report of the Ministry of Justice on research into safeguarding processes in child contact centres in England. This urges a greater exchange of learning and good practices, to improve consistency across contact centre procedures and policies. Child contact centres themselves can benefit from learning networks, across and beyond their region or local authority, by comparing notes on what is necessary and what works best, including not only the prescriptions of this proposed amendment but the advocacy of certain other proven expedients, whereby the spread of knowledge of their collective efficacy then serves to raise standards, both here and abroad.
Baroness Finlay of Llandaff (CB)
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Pickering, for her generous words.
These centres are really important for children who have come from extremely disturbed backgrounds. One thing that they need to be able to do is to have contact with the parent with whom it is not safe for them to be in custody in another area. As they grow up, if they do not have that contact, they can end up feeling resentful towards the state, and that the state separated them from the parent, rather than understanding what happened. I will not go into the various cases and stories, but there are certainly quite a lot to illustrate that issue.
The reason this amendment is important is that we know that there is a lack of basic safeguarding training in some contact centres; in others, it is at an extremely high standard. There is variability of practice around picking up and escalating concerns, and challenges are faced by the courts in identifying safe and affordable contact arrangements. As has already been alluded to, the harm panel report of 2020 highlighted that child contact centres have a role.
I could speak for a long time about them, but I will not. I hope that the amendment speaks for itself, and that we might be able to have some conversations beyond Committee and before Report about whether there is some way that the Government would like to incorporate in the legislation the principles behind this amendment, accepting that they may not like the wording as it is on the page at the moment.
Lord Meston (CB)
My Lords, I would like the Government to incorporate the wording of this amendment into the legislation—it seems admirable. I am asked by my noble and learned friend Lady Butler-Sloss to indicate her support for it as well. Accredited child contact centres are safe, neutral places providing for both supported contact and supervised contact arrangements—that is an important distinction. They allow children in separated families to see and enjoy contact with the non-resident parent and sometimes other family members.
The Earl of Effingham (Con)
My Lords, this has been a valuable discussion, and I thank all noble Lords for their insightful and knowledgeable contributions. Child contact centres do indeed play an integral role in allowing parents to see their child in a safe environment for both parties involved. They allow parents not only to see their children, which is precious, but can act as a service to reconnect following significant time with no contact. Wherever safe and possible, parents should be able to see their children, and child contact centres allow this to happen.
Amendment 65 seeks to introduce regulations on child contact centres to ensure that they are accredited as regards safeguarding and prevention of domestic abuse. Child contact centres appear to be mostly under the umbrella organisation, the National Association of Child Contact Centres. This is a charitable organisation and, while these regulations appear sensible, we are concerned about the ongoing cost of implementation and structure. It would require inspections to take place, which would be a further financial burden, requiring additional staff to ensure compliance with these standards. We know that charities are already under pressure from increased national insurance contributions.
Of course, we respect the views of the noble Baronesses, Lady McIntosh, Lady Finlay and Lady Burt, and the noble Lord, Lord Meston, and we absolutely agree that these child centres should operate as a safe and enjoyable place for children to play, but we believe that this amendment has the potential to act as a regulatory burden on those very charities that are providing the service.
Baroness Finlay of Llandaff (CB)
I slightly question the noble Lord’s assumption that inspection would be required at the level that he has outlined. Very often, you have a very caring parent who is extremely worried about the welfare of their child or children, who is then having contact with another parent about whom there has been a great deal of concern. If that very caring parent finds that the contact centre to which they have been referred has not had mandatory training—and I would expect them, in this day and age, to look up on the internet details about the contact centre on its website—they are likely to raise a complaint early, and waiting until there is a formal inspection may be too late. The problem is that, if we do not require training and set some standards, it becomes extremely difficult for a court determining what is to happen to a child to be able to go in-depth and know whether its recommendation and judgment are going to be in the best interests of the child.
So I respectfully slightly challenge the noble Lord over that and suggest that other people, such as grandparents and aunts and uncles, who are very concerned too about what will have been a tragic situation in their family, would be very likely to check out whichever contact centre it is and would want to know the standards that should be there—because they can see whether they are happening or not. A bit like the Care Quality Commission doing spot checks on hospitals, that is how they will get the data: not through a formal inspection. So identification of problems could emerge if this is written into the Bill.
The Earl of Effingham (Con)
I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, for her intervention and contribution. It was very interesting to hear the noble Lord, Lord Meston, say that a lot, if not all, of the contact centres are accredited. According to the NACCC website, there is DBS checking and there is provision in place. I take on board what the noble Baroness is saying, and that is why we are having this discussion—to get everyone’s views aired and come to an agreement.
Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill
Baroness Finlay of Llandaff Excerpts(4 days, 19 hours ago)
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Lord Meston (CB)
My Lords, I was unable to speak at Second Reading and I will resist the temptation to make a Second Reading speech now. Rather, I wish to concentrate on Amendment 1.
Any consideration of a proposed purpose clause should take us all back to the Renton report, in which it was said that sometimes such clauses can be useful and sometimes they can be unnecessary, and that they should be used selectively and with caution. On one view, the scope and effects of this Bill are clear enough and there does not appear to me, at least, to be any complexity for which a purpose clause would help interpretation.
However, there is perhaps some value in this amendment, which uses the word “improve” three times, emphasising the intention of the Bill—and the Bill as amended in due course—to achieve improvement in the areas specifically mentioned, and not to maintain or simply tweak the status quo. For that limited reason, I would support Amendment 1.
Baroness Finlay of Llandaff (CB)
My Lords, in responding I hope the Minister will be able to point out that the purpose of the Bill has a golden spine running through it, and that is the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. The different clauses should be able to read across to the convention, and wherever the child is and whatever group they are in—and we have lots of groups in this Bill—fate can be extremely cruel, and we know that every day around 127 children lose a parent.
Bereavement is a major issue and hits different groups in different places at different times and affects their outcomes. I hope that we will have a statement from the Minister in responding to this which is about the principle of what we are really trying to do for children across the whole nation, everywhere.
Lord Balfe (Con)
My Lords, I do not intend to make a Second Reading speech, but I am probably fairly unique in this House in that I was brought up in a children’s home. Indeed, the noble Lord, Lord Bird, who is not in his place, and I have a joke that he got to prison and I ended up in a children’s home but we both somehow ended up here.
What I find lacking in the Bill is that I have never felt that it is dealing with children; it is dealing with administration, with very worthy things. I do not feel that, when I was in a children’s home, I would have benefited from the feelings in the Bill. It just does not seem to take me anywhere. One of the problems we have to face is the attitude of society to children.
I am not going to tell a long sob story, but I was extremely badly treated by my parents. A lot of people tried to help—teachers, social workers, neighbours—but there was an air of embarrassed indifference. People wanted to help but did not feel they could; they did not know how to. One of the things we have to get away from is the idea that it is someone else’s job. For about five years I was chair of an outfit called the association of Labour social workers. That was when I was in the Labour Party, incidentally, I say to friends on this side. One thing that struck me was how difficult their job is. One false move and you are condemned. You often look at a child as a social worker and think, “This child should be in care. I should be going to a magistrate”. But as you work your way up the food chain, caution comes in. It is not cruelty; it is caution. People say “Are you sure? We don’t want to be all over the Daily Mail. We have to be careful. We have to respect the rights of the parents”. This is legitimate, but I do not think we should imagine that there is some golden, secret, easy way of dealing with this. I have said in this House before that you cannot privatise compassion. Whatever you do and however much you say, “Let the private sector deal with this”, you cannot deal with the human and emotional cost.
I will mention the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett. He was leader of Sheffield City Council, of course, some time after I was in its care. If anyone wanted to see a local government machine which worked, it was the county borough of Sheffield. I was extraordinarily well looked after. They probably put me in the Labour Party for about 30 years, before I found my natural home.
Sheffield, under the formidable presence of Alderman Grace Tebbutt—I think only the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, will remember that name—ran the children’s homes in an extremely compassionate and direct way because she knew what was going on there. She knew quite a lot of the children. The lesson I took from that was that you have to respect the children. I was not an easy child by any means—any more than I am easy now.
One thing I will give a man called John Freeman and his assistant Mary Armitage, the director and deputy director of children’s services in Sheffield, was that they listened. They were prepared to listen to a 13 year-old child. That helped enormously, because I felt suddenly that I was valued. Someone wanted not only to hear what I wanted but to explain why it could not happen, to help it happen or, often, to half help it happen, because I had not understood the situation and they had. They also understood the need to listen in order to shape the outcome to the need. That is why intervening on this amendment is relevant—because that does not come through in the Bill, and I am not sure I have the expertise to bring it through, but I am willing to work with anyone who thinks they have.
The old children’s department network was a success. When I began my official career as the research officer for the Committee on One Parent Families, Baroness Lucy Faithfull, who was a Member of this House and knew an enormous amount about children, and Barbara Kahan—who never joined this House but was the children’s director for Oxford and a member of the Finer committee—helped inform us of what it felt like to be a child. That was missing. We had a lot of seminars with very well-meaning people—often men, I have to say—who told us what children wanted, but, until Lucy Faithfull came along, we had very little contact with children who were actually in care, to try to shape things for them.
So I say to the Minister—this is not a criticism but is meant as a help—that we must try, if we can, to reshape the Bill just slightly so that it brings the child to the fore, rather than the administration, because it is the children who, at the end, will be affected by the Bill. It is they who will, in years to come, either bless or curse us for what is in it. There will not be much from the officials—we will all have long passed away—but it is the children, some of whom are not yet born, who will be the recipients of the policies we end up with.
We are all people of good will here—including the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, behind me, and the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, whom I knew by repute when he was leader of Sheffield, although I had long left—and we try to do our best. We must now extend that to the Bill, so that we have done our best.
Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill
Baroness Finlay of Llandaff Excerpts(3 weeks, 2 days ago)
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Baroness Finlay of Llandaff (CB)
Children are the fabric of the future, to paraphrase the excellent maiden speech from the noble Lord, Lord Mohammed. Legislating for the welfare of children is crucial, and we must take this opportunity to provide equal protection of children in law from assault. The Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health strongly supports such amendment. Its report last year showed that children who experience physical punishment were up to 2.6 times more likely to experience mental health problems and more than twice as likely to be victims of serious physical abuse. This is because the definition of “reasonable punishment” is unclear.
Last year, Worcestershire’s safeguarding review into the murder of nine year-old Alfie flagged up the difficulty in distinguishing
“between what is lawful and proportionate and what is harmful and abusive”.
The preceding year, after the death of Child AK, Norfolk’s review concluded that the current law was confusing by allowing a defence of reasonable chastisement in criminal prosecutions for assault. I was glad to hear others raise this and hope the House will support this overdue change. Scotland and Wales have already tackled this; giving children equal protection against being assaulted in the name of chastisement does not criminalise parents. The Scottish Government’s implementation group has not noticed a significant impact on work in the Procurator Fiscal Service or Police Scotland. Wales introduced a rehabilitative alternative to prosecution with no increased criminalisation of parents. We cannot leave the current legal confusion in place and leave children living in fear of common assault.
Ten years ago, the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health called for a single unique identifier, using the NHS number, but we failed to get it into previous legislation. Sadly, the Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel reported that 485 children were affected by serious child safeguarding incidents in 2023-24 and the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care recently emphasised that a consistent identifier is essential for frictionless sharing of information between public agencies. So this clause is to be welcomed, but red flags must be rapidly acted on. I hope the Minister can tell us how, and how the process will be evaluated.
A unique identifier will help healthcare professionals quickly identify who has parental responsibility, especially for children in kinship care or with complex needs. This is especially important in emergency and palliative care, and the prevalence of children with medical complexity has risen almost threefold since 2000. Having kinship carers on the face of the Bill is welcome. Like any parent, they must be involved in decisions about their child, especially when the situation is critical and life-threatening. Sadly, parents in crisis at such times can feel inadequately listened to by clinicians and others.
There is a gap between the two parts of the Bill. This relates to bereaved children. No data is collected on the number of children bereaved of a parent or sibling, and half of bereaved children, young people and adults who spoke to the UK Commission on Bereavement said that they received little or no support from their educational setting after their bereavement. More than half of kinship carers said that their kinship children had mental health difficulties, often linked to bereavement. We must put well-being at the heart of education, especially for children who are bereaved, abused or vulnerable. We have work to do.