Personal Independence Payment and Universal Credit

Baroness Spielman Excerpts

Monday 2nd November 2026 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Baroness Spielman]

To ask His Majesty’s Government what recent assessment they have made of trends in the level of people claiming Personal Independence Payment and Universal Credit.

[The Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Baroness Sherlock) (Lab)]

My Lords, this Government are concerned about levels of economic inactivity in our society. It is crucial that our social security system supports and incentivises work. This Government will transform the system from one that writes people off to one that gives people the support and opportunities to live their fullest lives. That means supporting those who can work to do so while always protecting those with the most severe needs.

[Baroness Spielman (Con)]

My Lords, if the Minister agrees that work is the best route out of welfare dependency, why did the Budget contain no measures that the OBR judged would have a material effect on employment?

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

My Lords, the Question was about levels of PIP and universal credit, both of which were creations of the previous Conservative Government, under which levels of inactivity went through the roof. The Opposition want to look at what we have done; we have already taken steps to reform the system. We have rebalanced universal credit to reduce the gap between the standard rate and the health-related rate. We have invested in the right to try, given out employment support and launched the biggest crackdown on fraud and error in the social security system. This month, reports will come from the Timms and Milburn reviews and, after that, the Government will show how this system can be created into one that supports work and pushes forward. I urge the noble Baroness to watch this space.

Jobcentre Plus and National Careers Service: Merger

Baroness Spielman Excerpts

Thursday 10th September 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

My Lords, I hope people would not just be turned away. We will always prioritise resources for those who need them most. One of the great things about the new service is that there are lots of different ways to get help. For example, those who are already in touch with the DWP because they are on benefits will have a work coach, but the work coach will now find it easier and more seamless in the journey for them to be referred on to help. We have also created the work hub, a brilliant new set of digital tools which allows people to use all kind of things—not only CV builders but AI tools to enable them to find a job, putting in their particular skills and challenges. But there are categories of people who at the moment are not covered by any of these things, and we will make sure they get the support they need. The aim is to make sure you can phone up a helpline or get help online. If you need particular kinds of help, you will get the help you need.

[Baroness Spielman (Con)]

My Lords, could the Minister address the part of the Question relating to the costs of completing this merger?

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

I said in opening that the outsourced part of the current service, which is merging into the DWP, costs £40 million. As I explained, the final cost of that will depend on two things. We are in the middle of the process, where the staff who work for the various contractors at the moment are going through the TUPE process to work out whether they come over to us. The final cost will depend on how many of them do. It will also ultimately depend on how we choose to shape that service; we are not simply going to replicate what is there now. At the moment, for example, some careers advisers spend a lot of time helping customers to build up a CV. We have lots of tools available now which can do the CV building for you, so we really want people to use those skills to work more directly with people to find out what they need and what their aspirations and skills are, and to develop them. There should be savings in some aspects of efficiencies, but the aim in the end is a better service. What we need now is to get people into work, whatever their challenges are. This is part of that enterprise and we are going to do it.

Pensions Commission

Baroness Spielman Excerpts

Wednesday 22nd July 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

I am grateful—I will never be so appreciated ever again, so I am really going to enjoy this session. My noble friend raises an important point. In a sense, it is up to individual schemes what their rules are for indexing their pensions. The minimum legal requirements for indexation have to be appropriate for all DB pension schemes, because they have to strike a balance between what members need and what the employer can afford. In the end, as he will know, the strongest guarantee is a good, strong sponsoring employer. However, there are two things that may help. One is, as he may be aware from the Bill, that the Government have changed the rules to allow a wider range of well-funded schemes to release any surplus that is there, with the agreement of trustees, which could be used to go towards paying for indexation, for example, if affordable and appropriate. At the other end of the scheme, the Government took action in that Bill to look at giving indexation to those who end up in the PPF or FAS for benefits earned before 1997. That will at least help.

[Baroness Spielman (Con)]

My Lords, the Pensions Commission is rightly worried about pension adequacy for a worryingly large and even growing proportion of the population and will of course make its recommendations in due course. But given the urgency of the problem, can the Minister tell us what the Government are doing now to promote greater financial self-sufficiency and reduced welfare dependency in retirement?

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

Yes. The single best guarantee of a happy retirement is a happy working life where people have the opportunity to earn enough money and to save enough money. We absolutely are doing huge amounts—I will not recite it all here as I have done many times before—and investing in all kinds of programmes to get people into work and to get them to progress in work and to be able to move up the income ladder to be able to save. However, one thing we know is that too many people are not working long enough to save or saving enough when they are in work and, in many cases, even if they put the right amount of saving in, the decisions they make at the point they come to retire—decumulation—can be crucial to how much they get to live on. We have to attack it on all fronts; no one of those alone will do it.

Maximum Temperature for Indoor Workplaces

Baroness Spielman Excerpts

Wednesday 15th July 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

After this question, I will take a long, hard look at Part O of the building safety regulations. My noble friend, who is enormously knowledgeable in this area, makes an important point. Not only do we need to take the adaptation measures that I mentioned in the previous answer and put in place investment in our public buildings to enable suitable adaptation and to recognise the impacts of climate change, but I am sure he is right that we also need to look at how our building regulations take into consideration the impacts of the sorts of heatwaves that we have had this year as well.

[Baroness Spielman (Con)]

My Lords, as the Minister has said, the workplace regulations already require employers to make sure that workplace temperatures are reasonable, which is a pragmatic and flexible approach, given the different conditions and circumstances of different workplaces. Can the Minister confirm that the Government will not impose further prescriptive regulations and that, if they do act, they will do so by helping employers address serious concerns, for example by making it less difficult and less expensive to install and run modern technologies for heating and cooling, such as we enjoy in this Chamber?

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

It is already the case that the Health and Safety Executive provides a wide range of options for how employers can fulfil their responsibility to ensure that the people whom they employ are able to work in reasonable conditions, even in heatwaves. I have already made it clear that the Government think that this approach, potentially looking at the thresholds of action that might be necessary as workplaces get to different levels of heat but nevertheless not mandating specific action related to a specific temperature, is the most appropriate way to go forward.

Industrial Training Levy (Engineering Construction Industry Training Board) Order 2026

Baroness Spielman Excerpts

Tuesday 14th July 2026 Grand Committee

[Baroness Spielman (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for introducing this order. We support the continuation of the Engineering Construction Industry Training Board levy for the 2026, 2027 and 2028 levy periods. This provides continuity for the industry without imposing additional costs. As others have said, the levy system clearly commands the support of the vast majority of those who pay for it. It works precisely because it is driven by industry need. Companies understand their workforce requirements far better than Whitehall ever can. The role of government should be to create the conditions in which businesses can invest, recruit and train, rather than to control industries with centrally designed employment schemes.

But it is important to look at the levy in the context of both current and likely future pressures. The scale of the challenge is considerable. The Minister cited estimates of a need for another 40,000 workers by 2030. Demand is rising in nuclear construction and decommissioning, offshore wind, hydrogen, carbon capture and storage, industrial decarbonisation, and the maintenance of existing energy infrastructure. The industry is competing for workers with other infrastructure sectors that need the same skilled trades and technical professionals. The central challenge is how to make sure that the country has the capacity and skills to deliver projects that are already planned.

Employers are facing considerable difficulties in recruiting and training. The workforce is ageing and few new entrants are coming through to replace retiring workers in key occupations. We need more and better technical education. Undervaluing technical and vocational education is a perennial British problem that stretches back for well over a century, and good technical education is not cheap. Successive Governments have wrestled with this for decades, and I can say with confidence that the problem will not be solved by a few soundbites about parity of esteem or by an education policy that is driven by social justice ambitions and that treats educational excellence, national prosperity and growth as afterthoughts. The Government should be taking a hard look at their equivalence and performance tables policy which, over 20 years, has done so much to push young people at school away from technical subjects at GCSE and into non-technical classroom BTECs.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

I thank the Committee for its contributions to the debate, and I welcome the noble Baroness, Lady Spielman, as this is the first time we have faced each other in her new role. I congratulate her on that.

The debate has underlined not only the importance of the ECITB’s work but the scale of the challenge facing one of our most economically vital industries, with a core workforce of 90,000 people and responsibility for £33 billion of output. As noble Lords have recognised, the industry plays a vital role in supporting our energy security, manufacturing capability and critical infrastructure.

As has come through clearly today, the engineering construction industry cannot meet the skills demands of the coming decade without a stable collective system of investment in training, alongside government support. I will return to this in a moment. The evidence is consistent that market forces alone will not deliver the pipeline of skilled workers that the industry urgently needs to meet the demand for new major infrastructure projects.

The ECITB’s levy is the mechanism that enables the collective benefits of a focused skills strategy for the engineering construction industry. It ensures that employers can access support for training and share the benefits of a skilled, competent and resilient workforce. It also opens opportunity, helping apprentices and other new entrants to complete high-quality training and helping existing workers to reskill or upskill to progress their careers.

I will respond to some of the specific points raised. The noble Baroness, Lady Coffey, rightly emphasised the need for success in the spending of the levy and the successful completion of training courses and apprenticeships. The ECITB has confirmed that it currently tracks apprentices and graduates while they are on programmes and receiving grant support. The data that the ECITB collects indicates a positive impact of its grant support on, for example, apprenticeship completion rates. Based on the ECITB’s latest available data for England, Scotland and Wales, of the apprentices who started an apprenticeship in 2020 and were supported by ECITB, 78% have successfully completed their apprenticeship as of December 2025. While we have seen improvements in the completion rates of apprenticeships over recent years, I think that is above the average rate.

The noble Baroness also raised the question of when the annual reports and accounts will be published for 2025. They will be laid in the autumn.

On the point about charitable status, it is not determined by the Government; it is determined by whether an organisation’s purposes are exclusively charitable and legally deemed to provide a clear public benefit. It was therefore a decision for the training bodies themselves—CITB, equally, is a charity—to take on that charitable status.

The noble Lord, Lord Palmer, raised the success of the levy consultation. It would be fair to say to the noble Lord that there are a lot of statistics around. Some of the statistics the noble Lord quoted related to the Construction Industry Training Board rather than the Engineering Construction Industry Training Board; perhaps it would be easier were the Government to decide to go ahead with the merger of the two. Nevertheless, they are different sizes and they do different jobs. The point he made is right: for the ECITB there is, if anything, an even greater level of approval as a result of the levy consultation than the figures he quoted.

Several noble Lords rightly cut to the chase of what the ECITB is responsible for. In other words: what does it actually do, and how, in the broader context, are the Government supporting the need for skills in the engineering and construction industry? On the former, the ECITB continues to invest in skills hubs, training standards and competence assurance across key sectors, including energy, nuclear and renewables. It has supported more than 6,900 new entrants since 2022 and invested £32.6 million in 2025 in training grants and new entrant programmes. During 2024, the ECITB funding supported over 2,000 new entrant starts, including over 1,000 apprentices and 500 graduates. Almost 64,000 learners were trained or assessed using ECITB-approved products, including more than 31,000 learners achieving industry-recognised safety passports and 2,763 learners supported through competence-related programmes. Of course, while the ECITB and the levy we are discussing are important for addressing some of the market failure in delivering skills in the engineering construction industry, it is just part of the broader work the Government are doing to support the engineering construction industry and wider skills. This relates to the points made by the noble Baroness, Lady Spielman.

The Government are delivering significant investment to strengthen engineering construction skills, as part of wider reforms, helping employers to respond to current and future workforce needs. This includes an additional £1 billion of investment to help deliver around 50,000 more apprenticeship opportunities for young people over the coming years—that is particularly important given the 40% fall in young people’s apprenticeships over the last years of the last Government—alongside increased flexibility through the new growth and skills levy and specific sector skills packages in engineering and construction that are worth over £800 million.

Additionally, we are providing targeted incentives for employers, including payments of up to £2,000 for taking on foundation apprentices. We have developed a new foundation apprenticeship in engineering, helping more young people to enter skilled careers, as well as other incentives, particularly for taking young people who may have been out of work on to these apprenticeships. We have continued and in fact increased investment in skills bootcamps and increased devolved approaches through mayoral strategic authorities, enabling local areas to respond to local employer demand and skills shortages.

The noble Baroness specifically raised technical and vocational education. I reassure her that this Government’s action, even in the two years that we have been in government, goes far beyond the soundbites that she characterised. A major reform of post-16 education is in progress, and stronger vocational routes are being developed through the new V-levels, an expansion of the possibility for young people to gain an in-depth technical education through T-levels, improved level 2 qualifications to get young people on to those vocational routes, and the investment I have already outlined in turning around the fall in the numbers of young people who have been able to start apprenticeships, ensuring that those opportunities are available for young people in the future.

Together with the ECITB support, these measures will strengthen the pipeline of skills available to the engineering construction workforce and support the delivery of major infrastructure projects across Great Britain. I hope that, in responding, I have reassured noble Lords about the role of this levy order, its importance in supporting the needs of small and larger businesses, ensuring maximum impact and value for money from employers’ levy contributions, and the important role the ECITB plays in ensuring that this key industry for growth, the development of infrastructure, energy security and manufacturing capability is supported both by the ECITB and the wider policies of this Government.

[Baroness Spielman (Con)]

Can the noble Baroness address my question about the impact of government policies enacted over the last two years on the engineering construction sector, particularly increased national insurance and employment rights?

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

I spelled out some of the impacts of the Government’s policy on the numbers of apprenticeships, the shift to vocational and technical education, the support this Government are providing to turn around the decline we have seen, and the £800 million of sector skills support we are providing for the industry. Is the noble Baroness genuinely arguing that this Government should now reverse the national insurance increases, which is where the investment in the National Health Service, which is also of considerable importance to employers, will come from? If she got her way and we reversed that, I think engineering employers, along with others, would not want their employees to be sitting on the waiting lists we inherited from the last Government.

Unemployment: People with Autism

Baroness Spielman Excerpts

Thursday 25th June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Spielman (Con)]

My Lords, if reducing unemployment is a serious government priority, the proportion of young autistic people beginning sustained employment must be improved substantially. Can the Minister therefore explain how the Government plan to use their funding and regulatory levers to ensure, first, that colleges place autistic students on the most suitable courses for them and, secondly, that colleges connect these courses to local job opportunities in sectors and roles where young autistic people can thrive?

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

The noble Baroness raises an excellent question about schools and education, and I reassure her that my department is working very closely with the Department for Education to address it. I am sure that she has read the interim report from Alan Milburn, so she will know that he identified problems not simply in getting young people into employment, but in making sure that schools were doing the right thing in transition and in making sure that health services were doing the right thing in engaging with prevention. We are developing plans across that piece. We are doing a lot, and I would be very happy to talk to the noble Baroness outside if she would like to pursue this.

Child Poverty

Baroness Spielman Excerpts

Thursday 18th June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Spielman (Con)]

My Lords, I, also, thank the noble Lady Baroness, Lady Lister of Burtersett, for this important debate today. I think we all agree that eliminating child poverty is an important aim. I went into education 25 years ago because I wanted to take forward the education approaches that are most effective with the most disadvantaged children, so I know how much work already goes on in all stages of education to support children in poverty. It was good to hear the noble Lord, Lord Kestenbaum, recognize this.

I have studied the Government’s child poverty strategy and its publications on deep material poverty. The first thing I notice is how hard it is to measure child poverty. Much effort has gone into the new measure. It gets closer than the relative measure to children’s actual experience. Do they have three meals a day, fresh fruit and vegetables, somewhere to do homework, games, toys, and outdoor equipment? Do they live in decent and warm housing? Can they get around on public transport? Can their families cope with an unexpected bill?

First, the measure suggests that there are just over 2 million children in deep material poverty. That is, of course, a concerning figure, but, startlingly, it correlates poorly with the Government’s preferred poverty measure of having less than 60% of median household income after housing costs. More than 70% of children in families below the 60% line are not in deep material poverty and, conversely, more than 40% of the children in deep material poverty are not in households falling below the 60% threshold. This clearly needs more examination and suggests that it is time to retire that arbitrary 60% number. It is good for political point-scoring, but is not very helpful for actual children and their lives.

We know the main risk factors, which the strategy acknowledges. Work, family structure, family size and geography all matter, and there are some striking ethnic disparities. All this is acknowledged, yet so much is ignored or glossed over in the strategy, and I will follow on from the points made by my noble friend Lady Coffey and several others.

First, I must talk about fatherlessness. I am not denigrating single mothers, most of whom make every effort for their children. Yet it is undeniably the case that, on average, children who do not live with their father have worse life outcomes on many fronts. It was good to hear the noble Baroness, Lady Paul of Shepherd’s Bush, and the noble Baroness, Lady Wheatcroft, touch on this. More than half of children are now born outside marriage. Most have cohabiting parents when they are born, but cohabitation is less stable than marriage, so too few children are growing up with both natural parents, and it is obviously unrealistic to believe that state support, however good, can entirely compensate for a parent-shaped gap in a child’s life. There are countries that have significant incentives for parents to marry and remain in stable unions. We have disincentives in tax, welfare and social housing, so it is worrying that the strategy does not even mention marriage, let alone set out policies to reverse a damaging social trend that is directly responsible for a lot of child poverty.

The strategy skates fairly lightly past at least 500,000 children—although published estimates vary—in families that have no recourse to public funds. Almost certainly, these children make up a hefty slice of the 2.1 million in deep material poverty. Some families will get leave to remain, in which case the full range of benefits and support will become available to them, and some will not and will leave. But, as the noble Lord, Lord Sahota, noted, these children’s interests are surely best served by resolving their cases swiftly. It is none the less a puzzlingly large number of children affected.

Linked to this, there is no mention of cultural differences that contribute to making some ethnic groups much heavier users of welfare than others and making their children more likely to be poor. Relatively few women of Somali origin work. Estimates range from 10% to 24% compared with over 70% of white women. Bangladeshi and Pakistani women are also far less likely to be earning. For balance, I point out that Haredi Jewish households are also particularly likely to depend on benefits. The strategy is silent on a real issue of fairness. Is it reasonable to expect families where both parents work to provide for their children to pay taxes to support families where at least one parent may be choosing not to? If not, how will the Government adjust the relevant incentives?

Improving parent skills should be a much bigger piece of the jigsaw. The labour market values mathematical competence, so improving numeracy helps. For many families in poverty from immigrant backgrounds, it would be hard for the adults to earn a decent wage until they speak better English. Many parents who have grown up in countries with more limited education systems will need some good vocational education to help them move beyond insecure casual work. As the noble Lord, Lord John of Southwark, noted in his excellent speech, a child poverty strategy is ultimately self-defeating if it ushers children of poorer families into adult lives of worklessness and dependency. Making sure that these children move from education into proper jobs and stay in sustained employment is critical.

I do not want to dismiss the Government’s measures, but I think I have shown where the real differences lie between these Benches and the Government. Too many current policies are sticking plasters to treat symptoms, not cures or preventive measures. They do not solve the underlying problems—the noble Baroness, Lady Wheatcroft, made some important points here. In essence, child poverty arises when a child’s parents cannot or do not earn enough to provide for their child. Of course, there will always be a small proportion of families who, for good reason, will not be able to achieve this, but most could. By definition, anyone over 21 working full-time on the national minimum wage will be earning 60% of national median income. Therefore, there are an awful lot of children in families that do not have the equivalent of even one full-time wage coming in.

If we are serious about eliminating child poverty, we need to focus more on better skills and a growing economy that generates better jobs and higher real wages, plus the kinds of support that help families become more secure and independent—such as the debt advice service mentioned by my noble friend Lady Coffey and the parenting service described by the noble Baroness, Lady Wheatcroft—I think I was the first person to talk publicly about the problem of children starting school in nappies, almost a decade ago during my time at Ofsted.

Economic growth is the most powerful lever to reduce poverty, but, sadly, the Government’s current policies are increasing the welfare burden while disincentivising work for an increasing proportion of the population—which in turn constrains economic growth and hence the capacity to fund benefits. I warn the Government here. The social contract that underpins the welfare system requires mutual trust and cohesion, which is more than a little frayed, especially in relation to disability-linked benefits for adults and children. The collective willingness to fund a comprehensive welfare system depends on those paying having confidence that all but a small minority will contribute to the system through most of their working lives, that claims will be genuine and that decision-makers will be effective in gatekeeping the system to prevent abuses.

I remind noble Lords that the benefits bill this year will be about £330 billion, which is around £11,000 per household. Since more than half of households are now net recipients of benefits, the annual bill paid by the minority of households who make a net contribution is higher still. We simply cannot afford fraud. So I was not reassured by the reply from the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, to a recent Written Question asked by my noble friend Lady Coffey about the number of prosecutions for benefits fraud since July 2024. All it said was:

“The information requested is not readily available and to provide it would incur disproportionate cost”.


I will finish by asking the Minister four questions. Will the Government set clear targets for moving families that are dependent on benefits towards independence, including parental employment rates and earnings progression, and report regularly against these? Will the Government set targets for successful labour market entry and continuing employment for all young people who grow up in benefit-dependent households and report regularly against them? Will the Government commit to publishing regular comprehensive information about children and families with no recourse to public funds, including their nationalities, how and when they came to Britain, how they are being housed and helped, at what cost, and how their temporary status is being resolved? And linked to my earlier point, will the Government commit to publishing regular updates on the incidence of benefit fraud, on the perpetrators and on the cost to the taxpayer, together with reporting on the effectiveness of steps that are being taken to deter and minimise fraud?

I will end by thanking everyone who has spoken today for recognising that there is a moral imperative here to do what is right for all our children and, above all, to do what is right for them in the long term, as well as in the short term, so that children live the best lives they can for themselves and as parents in their turn.

Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Baroness Spielman Excerpts

Consideration of Commons amendments and / or reasons
Wednesday 25th March 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Meston (CB)]

My Lords, I will confine myself briefly to supporting Motion B. It is commonly agreed now that the pilots of the pathfinder model in selected family courts have been a success and represent the way ahead. This model has been shown to reduce delays significantly and has forced the focus on to making things better for the child concerned, rather than on the parents’ disputes and confrontations. That model has developed sufficiently well, in that the delay in moving it on into the mainstream should really now be avoided. It means that the very recently announced expansion into child-focused courts will be welcome.

[Baroness Spielman (Con)]

My Lords, I will o speak to Motion K1, tabled by my noble friend Lady Barran. The Government are rightly acting to give local authorities the power to prevent children subject to a child protection plan being withdrawn from school. However, the scope of the Bill is clearly too limited, even with the amendment to give effect to a backward extension of five years for child protection plans.

I will briefly remind noble Lords of the characteristics of the children we are talking about. Clearly, they have all experienced abuse or neglect, but even apart from this we are talking about an exceptionally vulnerable group. Nearly three-quarters of children in care have special educational needs—often conditions they were born with that can make them particularly challenging to bring up and to educate—and often complicated physical or behavioural needs as well. Alongside that, these are children of parents whose ability to care for and protect their own children has already been shown to be inadequate, at least for a time. Even after a care order or child protection plan has been discharged, these are, in the main, children with serious challenges and complicated needs, whose parents have limited capacity. They are very often fragile families needing a lot of support and with a strong likelihood of further social care intervention being needed in future.

Therefore, there should be local authority consideration of proposals to home-educate any child who has been in care, had a supervision order or is under a child protection plan: first, to make sure that the child will actually get the education and support they need at home; and, secondly, to make sure that the child can safely be removed from view. Once a child is home-schooled, it may not be seen by any adult from outside the family for years. That may have been exactly the thing that was keeping that fragile family in balance.

Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Baroness Spielman Excerpts

Report stage
Tuesday 3rd February 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Mohammed of Tinsley (LD)]

My Lords, I want to share the experience of schoolteachers, particularly head teachers. I and the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, were on a call earlier this week with three head teachers from different parts of the country and from very different economic backgrounds. Their plea was: “You need to help us, because at the moment we have different policies on phones”. One, interestingly, was banning year 7s from having phones but not others. Another was to say: “Put it away. As long as we do not see it, it’s not a problem”. Others have pouches. A lot of their time is being taken up by a small group of vocal and often aggressive parents who demand that their children have their phones at school. Those head teachers are being distracted from their core duties to deal with this, and they were pleading with us, particularly with this vote tonight, to send a clear message to the Government that head teachers want to teach children rather than police smartphones.

The other thing I want to share is about the harms. We have talked a lot about social media, but often phones in schools lead to further bullying. We all saw a few years back the craze of happy slapping, where young people in playgrounds came behind others and slapped them, and the footage would be used and shared.

There is one other thing I want to share that is very personal. When one of my sons first started at a school in Rotherham, he was very keen to fit in—because we are from Sheffield—and he wanted to make friends. Unfortunately, a small group of so-called friends followed him into a toilet a few moments after he had gone in and, while he was sat on the toilet, they kicked the door in and took footage of him on the toilet. He did not tell me or the family. I got a phone call from a local community centre a week or two later to say, “Shaf, we are horrified by what we’ve seen. We’ve seen footage of your son. He didn’t know what to do, he couldn’t get up, and these kids were laughing. We saw it, and we think you should be made aware”. To their credit, the parents of the two young men who were involved came straight to our house when they found out; they were mortified. The school itself tried its level best, but, I have to say, we had to leave that school, and my son had to go to the other side of Sheffield to give him a fresh start.

There are real consequences. That is why, tonight, I will be backing the amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, and the amendment of my good friend and colleague, my noble friend Lord Addington, on the requirements for people with special educational needs.

[Baroness Spielman (Con)]

My Lords, I want to make just one point, following up on the points made by the noble Baroness, Lady Cass, and the noble Lord, Lord Mohammed of Tinsley. The medical devices exception in the amendment is already provided for. If a more general exception were made for special educational needs—that is already close to 30% of children—the pressure on parents and pupils would be to game this, and the proportion of children with a special needs label would rise to truly stratospheric levels, at which point the phone ban would clearly have no meaning whatever. I urge noble Lords to think about the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Cass, on other ways to provide the assistive functionality that might be needed.

[Lord Elliott of Ballinamallard (UUP)]

My Lords, very briefly, it will come as no surprise that, when I was going to school, I did not have a smartphone, just like many of you here this evening, probably; we did not have that opportunity.

I fully support the principle of Amendment 215. I find a difficulty, though—this is a follow-up to the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan—on the policing of this issue in schools. Doing your homework is a requirement at school; not every kid does it. Bullying and fighting in the playground are not allowed, but it still happens. I fully appreciate that the son of the noble Lord, Lord Bethell, is not allowed a smartphone, but not every young person is accommodating like that: not every young person has the respect for their parents, let alone for their teachers.

It is okay making these laws, but, unless we have some type of policing and enforcement, it will not be of any benefit, because you are going to punish the people who willingly give up their phone when going into school. The noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin, says, “It is okay, they will simply be asked to leave their phone at the door”, but they will not all leave their phone at the door. Some will have a phone hidden. How do we police and manage it? That is my serious question, because I absolutely know that not every young person will willingly do it. What do you do? Are you going to criminalise teachers for not taking the phones? Are you going to criminalise parents for allowing children to go to school with their phones? It is not that simple.

I fully support the principle of the amendment. Let me be clear: I wish phones had never been allowed in school. But the management, policing and enforcement of this is something totally different and it is not dealt with in this amendment or anywhere that I can see in this legislation. I am willing to support this amendment, by the way, but it needs a lot more doing to it before it is finished.

Does the noble Lord, Lord Mohammed, think that, if those kids had been asked to leave their phones at the door, it would have stopped them breaking into the toilet cubicle with a phone hidden in their sock or down their shirt? This is an incomplete amendment that I am willing to support, but unless something better and deeper is come up with that allows it to be enforced and policed without criminalising teachers and parents, I am afraid it is not going to be of much use.

Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Baroness Spielman Excerpts

Report stage
Tuesday 3rd February 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, and largely to agree, although I would go somewhat further and say that I think we have reached the situation of a market in schools in which very crude judgments are being applied by Ofsted, and schools are being pushed to game the system. That is why I signed Amendment 230 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Addington, and why the Green group will oppose Amendment 199 should it come to a vote.

The noble Lord, Lord Addington, was charitable when he said that there is a strong suspicion that off-rolling is going on. I am afraid I have no doubt that off-rolling is going on because up and down England, particularly in some of the most deprived communities, I have spoken to parents, often parents from very disadvantaged backgrounds themselves, who have said, “I’m trying to home-school my child now because the head teacher said they thought that was the best thing that could happen”. That was not home schooling by choice. That was usually pupils with special educational needs that the school just did not want to deal with. I have some sympathy with head teachers. Having been a school governor, I know how much pressure head teachers are under to keep up with the results. The problem is that we have created a competitive system where schools compete against each other instead of working together to create the best result for every pupil.

Amendment 230 is very modest. It simply calls for a review. I can tell my anecdotal stories, but I cannot say how big the problem is. I have seen it in many places, and I am sure that it is quite widespread. I do not believe the noble Lord intends to put this to a vote, but surely we can ask the Government to look at this anyway. As other noble Lords have said, it is something we should know about because this is one way in which we are failing some of our most disadvantaged pupils. Amendment 199, if it were to be passed, just furthers that sense of competition, which is the last thing we need in our schooling system.

[Baroness Spielman (Con)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 198 and will touch on Amendment 230 from the noble Lord, Lord Addington. Listening to noble Lords around the House, I find it surprising that they consistently believe that inspection, for which I was responsible for seven years, does not place a heavy emphasis on inclusion. Certainly throughout my time it did. The current framework has increased that focus almost to the point of giving up on looking at education, for which one learning walk and the results are about the extent of the coverage. Inclusion is and has long been taken extraordinarily seriously.

There are two issues that I want to touch on. The first is that however much we might want to believe that every child’s special needs can be coped with, there are times when those special needs consist of problems that inflict real harm on other children. The most awful parental complaints that came across my desk were about children who had been seriously assaulted and harmed, on occasion raped, by another child who had been admitted by a school either conscientiously trying to include a child for whom the local authority was desperate to find a place or that had been directed to take a child. That is agonising to learn about. We have to acknowledge that the interests of other children need to be considered when placing the most difficult children. That is important for children most of all but, of course, it is important for staff as well. If people are trying to work outside their capacity, schools tend to deteriorate, and that is not good for anybody.

Linked to that, I want to make a point about off-rolling, which has been touched on. In my time we put more of an emphasis on looking for signs and pursuing that—inquiring into it—where we found it. One of the things we discovered is that it is extraordinarily hard to characterise definitively whether an individual case is a case of off-rolling. There is typically quite a long history, a deterioration of the relationship between the child and the school. It is not a clean and tidy yes or no. Getting to a point where you could definitively say what the extent was would be extremely labour-intensive. The issue, in my view, is not a lack of regulation to prevent this—inspection is perfectly capable of disincentivising it—but we have to acknowledge that it needs a lot of resource that simply does not exist in Ofsted or anywhere else to dig into individual cases and establish the extent and the remedies.

[Lord Sentamu (CB)]

My Lords, I will speak on Amendments 198, 199 and 230. I will give some historical background. The word “education” is derived from two Latin root words. The first is “educare”, which means to impart knowledge. For too long, some schools have seen themselves as imparting knowledge. They have emphasised too much that first root of the word, “educare”.

The other Latin root word is “educere”, which means to draw out knowledge. The best schools often do both. They impart knowledge but they also realise that a person is not a blank sheet of paper on whom you simply impart knowledge and do not draw out the best that is in them. In most schools that do both, the pupils all thrive.

That being the case, I think we have gone through a short-term revolution. Her Majesty’s inspectors, as they were then, saw themselves as helping the school to do better. Then Ofsted arrived and seemed to give simple judgments on the school, sometimes on very narrow elements. If the school failed one of its elements, it was totally judged to be a failing school.

I declare an interest here. The Archbishop Thurstan School in Hull had been there for many centuries. It was not performing as it should be and, therefore, there was a decision by the Secretary of State that it should be rebuilt. The council agreed to have it rebuilt and that it should be given a name that would be canvassed for in Hull. To my surprise, the pupils, staff and council decided that it should be called the Archbishop Sentamu Academy. That was the beginning of academisation.

We were very fortunate that the Labour Government, who lost the election in 2010, had agreed to provide the money. I was told by John Prescott, “Be quick, make sure that you get this money, because the new Government may not want this to happen”. Anyway, we got the £45 million and the place was rebuilt; the place was thriving. Students in Hull were thriving and doing excellent work for the first time, going to university for the first time. Four of them went to the University of Liverpool to read maths, which had never been dreamed of.

So the school was doing well but, as it went on, there was a problem in one of the departments and there was an Ofsted inspection, which said, “The school has failed”. If a school fails, the schools commissioner has a job to do: the school has to be brokered and brought into a much larger group, and that is what happened. What shocked me was that Ofsted would not then visit that school for three years. I said, “As a parent, if I had a child in that school and you judged it to be failing, I would like to know whether it had improved by the following year”.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Bousted (Lab)]

My Lords, I shall speak against Amendment 199, and I am following the very wise words of my noble friend Lady Morris in doing so. I just do not understand how this amendment would allow the management of school places and the good use of taxpayers’ money. Year 7 places in the capital, London, are expected to fall by 7.6% in the next five years and reception places by 6.4% in the next four years. That means that those schools will see altogether about a £45 million cut in their budget. That cannot just be left to chance.

There needs to be a way of managing the school population, ensuring that taxpayers’ money is well spent and that children are placed in schools that are viable and have enough pupils that they can be offered a full curriculum. We do not want the situation in Northern Ireland, where the grammar schools fill up and the secondary modern schools are left with completely variable roles year on year and are unable to offer a full curriculum or to give the children in Northern Ireland who most need it the education they deserve.

Amendment 199 would take market forces to a ridiculous level and would mean that the Government and the local area could not manage school places to ensure a broad and balanced curriculum for each child. That would be particularly the case with the new curriculum, which will be broader and more balanced and is long overdue. It is important to reject Amendment 199 because there needs to be a mechanism for the most vulnerable children.

I am afraid I have to disagree with the former chief inspector. Everyone knows there are certain schools that do not take the children with special educational needs that they should, and that other schools are then dumped on since they have to take far too many children with profound special needs, to the real detriment of those children and other pupils in the class. Everyone knows that in reality, that happens. The noble Lord, Lord Nash, is nodding—it is true.

[Baroness Spielman (Con)]

Can the noble Baroness say at what point I said that there were schools which did not take children? I do not think I did.

[Baroness Bousted (Lab)]

If that was the case, let me apologise for saying that. They have got better at inclusion, and the noble Baroness is quite right to upbraid me on that.

However, it is really important that there is a power to direct schools to take pupils in order that they get an education. Secondly, we need a way of organising an admissions system which allows all children within the locality to have a viable education with a full, broad and balanced curriculum.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I have added my name to Amendment 207 to create a duty to keep schools open for attendance. The speeches that have been made excellently explained why.

I arrived in this House during lockdown, and I was shocked—genuinely, to the core—by the ease with which people in this House on all sides clamoured to close down schools. It was an extraordinary thing to witness. I could not justify it at the time and argued against it. That argument—which was a minority argument, not just put forward by me—was treated as though somehow those of us who were worried about schools closing were the irresponsible ones; whereas I think it was the other way round. I genuinely think that many of the issues that the Bill is trying to tackle—many of the real problems and challenges that we face with young people today—were created, exacerbated and turbocharged as problems during that period. Schools were closed down, which meant that adults broke the social contract with children—not for their sake but ours—and it was against all the evidence. I am very keen to hear the Minister’s response to this, even if it is not tested in a Division of the House, as I think that this will be a huge, important lesson for us to learn.

I will note a few of the problems that have already been raised. We have a mental health crisis, which we talk about regularly—as we will later and have been throughout the Bill—as though it came out of nowhere, but there is serious reason to imagine that young people’s mental health suffered during that period. But we are also talking about behaviour. A lot of teachers will tell you that once that social contract was breached, it created discipline problems because pupils were no longer in class. We have increasing numbers of parents withdrawing their children from mainstream schools. The habit of going to school was broken. We have spent a huge amount of time in this Bill talking about home-schooling, which is going up, and that is partly because schools were no longer considered necessary. I said then that if you tell pupils that truancy is okay in certain circumstances, it will be hard to get back to normal. If you say, “You shouldn’t come into school”, it will be hard to say, “You must come into school”.

Certainly, as a teacher, I lectured young people—many a time—saying, “There is nothing more important than going to school. There is nothing, nothing, nothing more important than your education”, and then suddenly as a society we said, “Oh, there are lots of things that are more important than going to school or your education”, so they learned a very bad lesson.

We will come on to talk about the problems with smartphones. What did we do when we sent all those young people home? First of all, we told them to look at screens to get lessons—a lot of the time we did not bother even supplying the lessons on the screens—and what they did was spend a lot of time on their phones. They were not out socialising. They became desocialised—anti-social.

The final reason why we have to remember that this is so important is that a cohort of young citizens was told, “If there is a problem, you stay at home, you withdraw”. I think that if we say to young people, “If you feel ill, you aren’t up to coping with going out and being part of society”, we are creating a medicalised fragility and an acceptance of illness as a reason to withdraw that have led to massive social problems. We are now paying for that with a huge welfare bill. Many young adults now lack the resilience to become economically active.

The cost of what we did was enormous and we are yet to come to terms with it. The Bill is trying to deal with a lot of the problems created by that period, and this amendment is therefore important in raising the possibility that we should not, as a default, close schools. The default should be that we do not, that we owe it to children to have their education and that schools are kept open for attendance. There has to be an extremely good reason why schools are closed, and that should be thought through deeply. As someone who was here when we were deciding, let me assure noble Lords that it was not.

[Baroness Spielman (Con)]

My Lords, I too support the amendment. We have relied through history on a presumption that schools will stay open, even in adverse circumstances such as epidemics or bombardments. But once we closed schools for Covid, we set children adrift because there was nothing in law to balance their interests against those of adults. Children stayed locked up for months, learning little even when schools made great efforts to provide online learning.

I shall not repeat what others have said, but the story of the continuing harm to children—their academic progress, social development, health and happiness—is still unfolding. Ofsted did some of the earliest work on this in autumn 2020, when my inspectors made a series of fact-finding visits to schools and published monthly reports on the impact of Covid on schools and children. They reported that children were lonely, bored and miserable—the advance warnings of the lasting problems that we now see. I spoke about this publicly a number of times, but the tide of emotion was too strong for people to hear.

With hindsight, the existence of a formal duty and a mechanism to ensure that the available evidence, such as the reports I mentioned, is considered and weighed up against the representations of the adults who work in schools, health sector representatives, and so on might have helped to focus minds. I believe that there is an opportunity here for the Minister to get ahead of potential recommendations from the Covid inquiry.

[Lord Sentamu (CB)]

My Lords, I am sorry if I sound like a dinosaur, but I will. Hindsight is always a harsh, cruel science. It makes us think, “If only we did not do this”. The evidence is very clear; as the inquiry went on, the lessons to be drawn have not yet been concluded, and the nation needs to take those lessons into its lifeblood.

We are talking about legislating for an assurance that if a huge pandemic breaks out—or, let us say, a war—we need to go to Parliament every two weeks to consult. But perhaps Parliament will be permanently shut. I would not want us to reach a stage where we have not fully learned all the lessons. I have grandchildren who, because their parents were working, were seen as those who needed to be supported at school during the pandemic. Even then, there were infections, and shutting down schools looked like protecting children. When something like Covid happens, our first look is to the vulnerable, such as children and other vulnerable people. I would find it difficult to support a measure which thinks that Parliament will always provide security.

Do you remember the Second World War? For their own protection, pupils had to be taken out of areas where the bombs were dropping pretty fast, so let us learn the lessons. We may return to this proposal, but for the time being let us support what the Bill as drafted is doing.