Children and Families Bill

Debate between Baroness Tonge and Lord Knight of Weymouth

Tuesday 28th January 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Knight of Weymouth]

My Lords, I do not wish to delay the House for long, because I do not think I can add to the speeches made by the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, my noble friend Lady Jones and the right reverend Prelate on the reasons that we should do this. I shall talk about the notion of the expert group. When I occupied the office that the Minister now occupies, I set up an expert group to look at compulsory sex and relationship education. It included young people, educationalists, experts from organisations such as Brook and the British Pregnancy Advisory Service, and representatives from the major faith groups. There were representatives from the Anglican Church, the Catholic Education Service—I had very good conversations with Vincent Nichols and I warmly congratulate him on being made a cardinal—the non-conformist faiths, the Muslim faith and the Jewish faith. We achieved consensus around the need for compulsory sex and relationship education.

I therefore to some extent question whether we need to go around this track again. Once we had achieved consensus on the principle, we set up a second expert group to look at how we might implement it. So we have in a sense already been round this track not once, but twice. I urge noble Lords on all sides who are tempted to accept the sop of the expert group to remember that it is time to act. We have debated this long enough. I know it is awkward for my friends who are in the coalition that there is a Whip and that they have to do what they have to do, but I urge noble Lords who have been campaigning on this for a very long time to do what is right.

[Baroness Tonge (Ind LD)]

My Lords, as an independent Liberal Democrat, I am not bound by the rules of the group. I am very supportive of both these amendments. I am more supportive of Amendment 53ZA than I am of Amendment 53, because, as the noble Lord has just said, we have had review after review on this subject and I am thoroughly sick of it. It is quite often a means of kicking this into the long grass. The previous Labour Government did get there, only for it to be lost in the wash-up procedure at the end of that Government. That was a great tragedy.

Before I came into Parliament, I had worked for over 30 years in the health service. I was a GP and a family planning doctor primarily, and part of my job was to give sex education, as it was known in those days, in local schools all over the London Borough of Ealing. So I have a fair amount of experience, and I know that the expertise is lacking in a lot of schools. Nevertheless, sex education has to occur in schools, because parents simply cannot be relied on to give their children the right information. I hope that I was a good parent to my three children. I was a doctor, working in the field, knowing every single dot and comma about it, but there was still, particularly in the case of one of my children, a hesitancy and a reluctance to talk about these things with a parent. We have to accept that. A lot of parents find it very difficult to talk about these things, especially if they do not know much about it themselves.

Children were left to pick it up from television in the old days; now it is the internet. Why I would mildly support a review is because of the effect of the internet. I now have a lot of grandchildren and I see what they get up to. I am constantly vigilant that they are not looking at the wrong sort of thing, but I know kids and I know jolly well that they will be looking at the wrong sort of thing if they possibly can when my back is turned. We do have the parental guidance block, but there are ways round it. We have a computer genius in our family who can find his way round any parental block. So it is absolutely scandalous that in this country, in the United Kingdom, in the 21st century, we do not have compulsory, statutory PSHE, or whatever it is, in our schools.

We should compare this with the Netherlands and other countries. I have sat in on lessons in the Netherlands that are done superbly and naturally, with no worries among the teachers. They even set homework—not, I assure you, to have sexual intercourse—for example to handle condoms, to learn how to use the equipment they may one day need and to read about all the diseases they may catch unless they use the right sort of protection. It is done naturally and efficiently; the parents do not fuss about it; the children are taught in mixed classes; and I really do not understand why we cannot have it in this country.

Finally, I declare another interest as chair of the All-Party Group on Population, Development and Reproductive Health. In the past few years, among the reports that we have produced was one on female genital mutilation, which is more and more common in this country and more and more difficult to spot. There is a lot of work going on, and I pay tribute to the previous DPP, Keir Starmer, who did an enormous amount of work to find ways of spotting girls at risk of FGM before it occurs.

Last year, we did a report called, A Childhood Lost, about childhood marriage, which also happens in this country. Children are taken abroad for religious ceremonies and forced into marriages that they do not want. That is why we set up the Forced Marriage Unit. Again, the Government are doing a huge amount of work on this, but it is the sort of thing of which children should be made aware in their schools, with their peer group, by their teachers. It is very important that we address these issues, because it is going on all the time and all around us.

For these reasons, I hugely support Amendment 53ZA. I hope that we can get some progress on this at long last. I mildly support Amendment 53, providing that they concentrate on the internet and the influence that that has on young people.