Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Debate between Lord Hampton and Baroness Walmsley

Monday 9th June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Walmsley (LD)]

My Lords, I am very sorry to hear the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Jackson of Peterborough. I believe he totally misunderstands the point of the amendment so ably introduced by my noble friend Lady Finlay. He used “smacking” quite a lot. I will never use that word myself, because it trivialises what we mean. We are talking about a hit—about a physical assault on a child. The reasonable chastisement defence is only ever likely to be used in a court of law, and it has been.

As I think we know, the rationale is that every battery of a child starts with a hit, but not every hit of a child leads to battery. One recent case illustrates the point. On the first day of the trial of the killers of Sara Sharif in 2024, the prosecutor, Bill Emlyn Jones, told jurors that Urfan Sharif called British police, having fled to Pakistan after Sara’s death. He said:

“He used what you may think is an odd expression. He said: ‘I legally punished her and she died’”.


I wonder where he got that phrase. I can tell your Lordships: it appears in Section 58 of the Children Act 2004, and for the last 20 years, I and others have tried to delete it. The presence of those words in the law sends a message that it can be lawful to beat a little child.

Back in 2002, the Adoption and Children Act acknowledged the damage done to children from witnessing violence in the home. So long as the reasonable chastisement defence remains, babies and children who witness violence still have greater legal protection than those who are directly assaulted.

Emlyn Jones said that Urfan Sharif also told the police:

“I beat her up. It wasn’t my intention to kill her, but I beat her up too much”.


An intention to kill is not necessary. An intention to cause serious harm is sufficient for a murder conviction if death ensues. The prosecutor said that a note in Urfan Sharif’s handwriting was found next to his daughter’s body, which read:

“I swear to God that my intention was not to kill her. But I lost it”.


Sara had more than 70 injuries to her ribs, shoulders, fingers, spine and brain, and a burn from a domestic iron to her buttock. She had numerous bruises, scald marks from hot water, restraint injuries, and human bite marks. These injuries did not occur on one occasion when her father “lost it”.

This sort of case is not new. When Maria Colwell died in January 1973, she had black eyes, fractured ribs and brain damage. This was inflicted by her mother and stepfather, William Kepple. Kepple was convicted of Maria’s murder in April 1973, but the charge was later reduced to manslaughter. Officials repeated the mantra: “It must never happen again”. But it has, and it does.

Victoria Climbié, who died on 25 February 2000, was rushed to hospital suffering from hypothermia, weighing just three stone and ten pounds and suffering 128 injuries.

In arguably one of the most notorious child deaths, Peter Connelly, known in the media as baby P, died in London on 3 August 2007, aged just 17 months, after suffering more than 50 injuries. He had been seen 60 times by healthcare professionals and social workers.

On 3 March 2012, four year-old Daniel Pełka died after being severely battered by his mother and her partner. Daniel had suffered 22 injuries, including 10 to his head.

Arthur Labinjo-Hughes was murdered after months of abuse in 2020. Arthur, aged six, was tortured to death by his father, Thomas Hughes, and stepmother. After months of horrific abuse, he was starved and poisoned with large quantities of salt. When he died, his skeletal body was covered with 130 bruises and he suffered 93 different areas of injury.

On 22 September 2020, Savannah Brockhill caused baby Star Hobson catastrophic injuries after inflicting months of brutal abuse alongside her mother. Medics said that her injuries were usually seen only in car crash victims. Boris Johnson vowed that action would be taken to stop such shocking and heartbreaking tragedies in future, but it has not been taken. Many other fatal cases have hit the headlines, and there have been hundreds of beaten children who did not die but were marked for life by their experience. Briefings we have received from the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health have made it clear that hitting children is not harmless; it is harmful.

Yes, there were serious shortcomings in the actions or inactions of various public services in the cases I have just outlined, but the social workers and police did not kill these children; their parents and carers did. They did it because they thought they could get away with it. Every terrible beating started with a single hit, a single physical assault: the sort of thing that recently lost an MP his seat and his liberty.

The reason why these children died was that they did not have the voice or ability to stop it and they were not sufficiently protected by the law. If the early stages of any one of these cases had been perpetrated on an adult, the attacker would have been imprisoned long before the pattern of assault became fatal. The fact is that children do not have equal protection against assault under the law, because of the excuse expressed in the chilling words “reasonable punishment”. These assaults are not reasonable by any measure, and they are not punishment either.

No child was ever naughty enough to deserve such abuse. It is not punishment; it is an expression of the anger, hatred and frustration of the perpetrator, leading to actions that should be classed as criminal, without mitigation. These children are calling from the grave to make them so. Let us do it at last by carrying this amendment.

[Lord Hampton (CB)]

My Lords, I rise to speak to Amendments 67 and 505 in the name of my noble friend Lady Finlay of Llandaff, to which I have added my name and to which she spoke so eloquently. I am afraid that I am unable to comment on the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Jackson of Peterborough, because my cerebral cortex received so many messages of complaint that it shut down quite early on.

I have lived on this planet for 60 years, I have been a parent for 20 years, a cricket coach for 15 years, a teacher for 10 years and a kinship carer for over a year, and I have never hit, slapped or smacked anybody, except one unfortunate time in a tour game against Tredegar Ironsides, and the opposition scrum-half started it.

As has been mentioned, this is the children’s well-being Bill, but it is quietly going on its way without mentioning a fundamental problem of well-being: legalised violence against children. That is what we are talking about. Not a quick clip around the ear, not a short, sharp shock that teaches them right or wrong. Not something that was done to us and we are no worse for it. No, we are grooming our children to believe that violence is acceptable by the powerful against the weak for their own good. That is not an acceptable message.

I believe that the results from Wales and Scotland are showing no major increase, if any, in prosecutions. I suspect that, for most people, it will not be a surprise that hitting a child is a bad idea, so a change in the law would remove the defence only for those who really aim to harm children. The rule of thumb is an urban myth. It has never been acceptable to hit women. Why do we still allow violence against children?