Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Debate between Lord Addington and Lord Jackson of Peterborough

Thursday 22nd May 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, these are probably the sorts of things that we should be doing in Committee. The noble Baroness introduced these amendments very well but I did, I am afraid—having known him for a long time—see the hand of the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, in them. It is definitely his style, as all those who have known him for a long time would say. These are definitely the sorts of questions that we need answered, about the practicality of what is going to happen. All systems will have their flaws, but this is about having the structure to cope with those flaws. Getting that through would be very valuable.

To give fair warning, I will not move my amendment on the NHS number identifier later on.

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

I support Amendment 50, as well as the amendments in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, who gives his apologies to your Lordships’ Committee, as he is unable to be here to speak to his own amendments. I do so in the spirit of my noble friend Lady Cash, because these are probing amendments by and large, from a position of broad support for the objectives that the Government have laid down in this part of the Bill. Nevertheless, they are amendments that seek clarity in respect of the proposals that the Government are putting forward.

We need more information about the Government’s intention in adding new Section 16LB to the Children Act 2004. Such scrutiny is essential given that it would enable the Government to set in train a process that will be achieved through regulations—secondary legislation —but nevertheless is very far reaching and potentially re-establishes a regime that, as we have heard previously, was abolished in 2010 by the coalition Government for reasons that I will come on to.

It is hard to disagree with the logic that a single unique identifier would prevent children getting lost in systems that are meant to keep them safe, for example, if they are known by different names or their names are not spelled correctly, as happened in the tragic case of Victoria Climbié. I absolutely concur with my noble friend: the name Maria Colwell and other tragic cases hang over someone like me, who served on a social services committee, and many social workers and other professionals over many years. Ensuring that children do not slip through the net or disappear without services knowing where they have gone is paramount, as so many appalling national scandals involving dead or desperately abused children have shown.

It is appropriate that we look at the history and genesis of ContactPoint. It is important to be mindful of the need for qualitative data, not just quantitative data collection; there is a difference. Hence in 2003, in his report about the death of Victoria Climbié, the noble Lord, Lord Laming, recommended the establishment of a new national children’s database for all children under the age of 16. While scrutinising this report six months later, the Health Select Committee in the other place expressed reservations, saying:

“We believe that establishing a national database for children along the lines envisaged by the Laming Report would represent a major practical and technical challenge that should not be underestimated”.


The committee was instinctively open to the concept, likely for the same reasons that many are advocating for it today: if good data can save children’s lives, it of course needs further exploration. The committee went on to say that the implementation difficulties should not be a deterrent and endorsed the recommendation of the noble Lord, Lord Laming, for a feasibility study to explore the value and practicality of setting up a national database for children.

In 2004, as we heard, trailblazer pilots were conducted to assess the feasibility of implementing a children’s information index. Nine local authorities piloted a range of IT applications and a government study of the indexes concluded that implementation was operationally and technically feasible. By 2009, the Children’s Information Sharing Index had been renamed ContactPoint, with the aim of all local authority ContactPoint management teams having access to the database by autumn 2009. In old money, the estimated development and set-up cost of ContactPoint was £224 million and the estimated maintenance cost in 2009-10 was just under £44 million; most of this latter sum was for local staff to operate, maintain and ensure the security of ContactPoint.

Some giving evidence to the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill Committee in the Commons—and arguing strenuously for the SUI—were among those running ContactPoint back then and benefiting from those sizeable contracts. In their defence, they saw this as part of a bigger package and emphasised the need for early intervention in communities and strong relationships with families. The Children’s Charities Coalition said that,

“to really shift the dial we need further investment in early intervention and early help across our communities, and much greater focus on embedding that consistently and universally”.

It also called for further clarification on how the single unique identifier will be effectively applied.

Returning to the ContactPoint database, which was, as I said, abolished by the incoming Government in 2010, it was designed to contain names, ages, addresses and information of all children aged under 18, as well as information about their parents, schools and medical records. Respected organisations such as the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust quantified the scale and financial cost of data collection, the methods used to maintain and secure the data, and the treatment of critical issues such as consent, as part of a wider study. Its researchers found that children are among “the most at risk” from what they called Britain’s “database state”, with three of the largest databases set up to support and protect children failing to achieve their aims.

Football Governance Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Addington and Lord Jackson of Peterborough

Committee stage
Wednesday 15th January 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, I find myself agreeing with both the noble Lords, Lord Watson and Lord Pannick. It would be good if we could know what has been said and, if there is no big objection, we could move on. It was suggested that we had to comply with UEFA’s rulings in our own law. That is patently absurd. But, if there is no problem, let us know about it. We have not been told that English clubs will be banned if this goes ahead, so presumably it is not that big a deal. Surely, finding out about it now would be sensible.

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

My Lords, I support the noble Lord, Lord Markham, and express my concern about the non-appearance of this letter. We have been debating whether there is a letter or what the letter says. We have been speculating on what it might or might not say for several weeks and several sessions of this Committee.

I have carefully read the Written Answer that the noble Baroness gave my noble friend Lord Moynihan on 8 January. She does not, interestingly, pray in aid any Cabinet Office guidance or recommendations on the release of so-called private correspondence that forms a part of government policy formation. She just says that

“it would not be appropriate to publish private correspondence with any stakeholders in the Library of the House”.

If it were an individual divulging personal information in the course of their letter to a Minister or a government department, that would be a separate issue. Noble Lords will be aware that, for instance, freedom of information is quite circumscribed as to what can be released in terms of impinging on someone’s privacy, or if it would interfere with an ongoing judicial case. This is not the case. This is not a private letter; this is a letter from a corporate representative body. It may not be a government body or a non-departmental agency in the UK, but it is a representative body of some standing with a rulebook which governs the practice of football in our country.

On that basis, at the very least it is incumbent on the Government to produce that letter. If we have overegged the pudding and, in respect of the backstop, UEFA has no qualms or serious misgivings about this legislation as a whole, and particularly the backstop, I for one am happy to be disabused of my cynicism. In the meantime, we, the media, noble Lords and others in the other place when this goes there will be suspicious unless that letter is produced.

So I respectfully implore the Minister to think again and place that letter in the Library of both Houses so that we can inform a proper debate on specific issues that are germane to this Bill: in other words, the attitude of an important and prestigious organisation such as UEFA.

Football Governance Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Addington and Lord Jackson of Peterborough

Committee stage
Wednesday 4th December 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

My Lords, I rise to support the three amendments in the name of my noble friend Lord Parkinson.

On Amendment 45, it is very important that we have Chinese walls around media interests and that we preclude, if possible, any potential conflict of interest. We are not talking about a corner shop; we are talking about very serious big business and huge amounts of money for broadcasting rights. The information that will be contained within this regulator and the expert panel is phenomenally important in terms of its commercial confidentiality. Therefore, it is appropriate to put in the Bill a protocol which precludes the possibility of any interference from those who have a vested interest in media, and particularly in the workings of the expert panel.

We can look at models across the world whereby you have to keep secret from many people confidential information that is market-sensitive and may affect stock and share prices. Some of the information in the United States’ Securities and Exchange Commission would fall into that category. This is not quite as lucrative, but it is very big business. Therefore, we need to protect individual clubs that do not have economic heft, and bigger clubs that may be affected by a leak of information or inappropriate use of information from the expert panel.

Amendment 47 strikes a balance on the ability to pay an expert the appropriate amount of money. You want someone who has accumulated knowledge, skills and experience of football on the expert panel, but you do not want to pay them more than, for instance, the Prime Minister is paid. You want to have a set amount, and I think it is appropriate to put it in the Bill, in primary legislation. We know that £91,346 is pretty much two and a half times the average salary. It is a decent amount of money for the services that will be provided by the members of the expert panel.

The amendment I support most strongly is Amendment 49 because, as Judge Louis Brandeis, a Supreme Court judge in 1913, said, daylight is the best disinfectant. That was not said by a British historian, as people think, but by a Supreme Court judge. He was absolutely right about this in all the ways government is conducted. This gets the balance right, because there will be Chinese walls between different functions within the independent football regulator. This is light-touch transparency. It would not divulge the intricate proceedings of the expert panel within the IFR, but it would allow people to make a value judgment on how key decisions had been reached and who had made them. There would be accountability and transparency, as you would know not only who was making a case but the reasons why they did not support a decision. It is right that we would not include detailed minutes of the deliberations of the expert panel, because that would not be in the interest of the game and good governance, but it would be important to understand how decisions were made.

If you put that together as a complementary mechanism, with parliamentary oversight and scrutiny of the independent football regulator as a whole, it is a very useful amendment for making sure there are key checks and balances. It would make sure that certain clubs are not dominating and certain other clubs are not being pushed out, and that everyone has an opportunity to have empirical evidence, data and proper facts put before the expert panel. Ultimately, the panel will be accountable, first, to the IFR, then to Parliament and then to the wider public, including the fans.

I am not saying that the IFR is exactly the same as the Securities and Exchange Commission, but, for those reasons, I think there is a framework here that can be used to make sure that we deliver a decent and effective IFR—but in a fair and equitable way that is open, transparent and, above all, accountable to the taxpayers and people of this country.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, I will speak briefly. The middle two of these amendments are effectively a rehash of arguments we have already had—fair enough, so I will not comment on them. But, on the first one —about the numbers on the panel—and Amendment 49, what are the Government’s plans? Do they have any idea what would be a top number, or have they ever given this any consideration? That would be helpful to know—20 would seem to be a reasonable figure.

On the transparency of decision-making, the Government must have some idea, at the very least, about reporting, because it is almost impossible not to have some plan for reporting. If they have a standard or are thinking about one, it would help if we heard it now.

A couple of these amendments are well worth discussing, particularly the one on transparency. But I suspect that the Government have a plan for this—if they do not, they should have—and I look forward to being reassured by the Minister.