King’s Speech

Baroness Leaman Excerpts

Tuesday 19th May 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Leaman (LD) (Maiden Speech)]

My Lords, for the past seven years, I have served as chief of staff to my right honourable friend Sir Ed Davey. While I declare this interest, I must say that it has not all been wet suits and splash parks. I am not sure that my new leader, my noble friend Lord Purvis, is up for bungee jumping between votes on College Green either.

Together with an extraordinary team of colleagues, including my noble friend Lord Dixon, whose own maiden speech I am very excited to hear later in this debate, Ed and I had the task of rebuilding our party. At the last election, the Liberal Democrats returned our largest number of MPs in a century. I say this because it matters. With populism on the rise across the world, it matters that we have a thriving liberal force in this country: one committed to holding Governments to account when they fall short, and, crucially, prepared to stand firm against those who would drag our politics and our communities to the extremes of left or right. Division and demagoguery are not inevitable, but they must be resisted, and I intend to play my part in that resistance from these Benches.

In joining this House I follow in the footsteps of many former political staffers across all Benches. I would like to acknowledge two of them in particular today: my sponsors and friends, my noble friends Lady Grender and Lady Suttie. They have been generous mentors to me over many years, providing wise counsel, encouragement, wine and, on occasion, the perfectly timed piece of rather blunt advice. While I thank them, I also thank Black Rod, our doorkeepers and attendants and staff across this House for their support and good humour in helping me find my way at this end of the Palace, as well as our wonderful team in the Liberal Democrat Whips’ Office. I would like to add my congratulations to the noble Lords, Lord Hobby and Lord Blackwater, on their maiden speeches, both of which gave a real sense of the contribution they will make to this place.

It is a huge privilege to speak in this debate on His Majesty’s gracious Speech. It certainly feels a very long way from Chipping Sodbury where, along with my brother and sister, I was raised by my lovely mum. Mum spent more than 40 years as a nurse in the NHS, promoting the health and protection of children and those who look after them. I was fortunate to be able to draw on the values mum instilled in me to support Ed Davey to tell his story of care, and to place the millions of unpaid carers across our country at the front and centre of our general election campaign to help make the case for those who form the invisible backbone of our communities—those who constitute an economy within the economy: uncosted, too often uncounted and still, overwhelmingly, women.

I am going to focus my remaining remarks on the families who are often part of that same story of care: children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities, and the parents and carers who spend months, often years, fighting for support. The SEND system is broken. That is the lived reality of families across the country. Children are failed every day. Parents are forced into exhausting battles simply to secure what their child should have been entitled to from the start. Teachers and school leaders are doing their best in a system stretched beyond capacity. Meanwhile, local authorities are being driven to the brink by costs they cannot meet.

That is why reform is urgent, and why I welcome the education for all Bill as a step in the right direction. But reform will succeed only if children and families are placed at its heart. If reform means removing rights from parents who already feel powerless, weakening routes of appeal or disrupting settled placements, it will fail. This is particularly true for neurodivergent children. Understanding of autism, ADHD and other forms of neurodiversity has grown enormously, but support has not kept pace. Too many children wait years for assessment. Too many families are told to come back when things are worse. Too many children learn far too young that school is a place where they are misunderstood.

I know this not only as a matter of policy, but as a parent. My son and daughter each waited three years for their diagnoses. In my daughter’s case, I am not sure she would have been referred at all had it not been for one teacher, Miss Holmes. She saw my daughter clearly when the systems around her did not, and advocated for her when she could not yet advocate for herself. But I think of the children who do not have a Miss Holmes: the children whose distress is quiet; the girls who mask until they break; the young people whose underlying neurodivergence is missed, as my own was.

The challenges within the SEND system are complex and fixing them will not be cost-free, but failure is not cost-free either. We pay for delay in crisis placements, parental exhaustion, children’s mental health and lost potential. I look forward to working with colleagues across this House, of all parties and none, to make the case for children who cannot wait, for the families who should not have to fight, and for a country that is at its best when it sees, hears and values every child.