Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Debate between Lord Jackson of Peterborough and Baroness Finlay of Llandaff

Thursday 22nd May 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

My Lords, I rise briefly to support the very good amendment moved by the noble Lord, Lord Hampton. If we are spending significant amounts of money on collecting this data and building a database and we have some of the best research facilities in the world, it seems to be sensible when looking at longitudinal studies to utilise that data properly.

My second and more prosaic point is that maybe I am missing something, but it seems to me that subsection (5) and subsection (14) are at variance with each other. They are quite loosely drafted in new Section 16LB. Will the Minister comment on that, because the great thing about the noble Lord’s amendment is that it has pointed out that there seems to be a discrepancy between the two subsections?

[Baroness Finlay of Llandaff (CB)]

My Lords, I shall briefly speak in support of these amendments and of research. We do not need to have a national database established in order to do research because, first, research has to go through research ethics committees, so that is carefully scrutinised. You could take a representative sample of areas and use properly anonymised data. We can do that now. We can anonymise properly rather than using the old-fashioned pseudo-anonymisation, which was not helpful.

But in all these areas, I am afraid, we lack the evidence that we need to make sure that all our services are best targeted. When we are looking at very vulnerable children, we need to know which flags that are currently yellow flags should become red flags and which items do not show a correlation—although there has been an urban myth that they do correlate—so that the index of suspicion is appropriately targeted. To pick up on the point made by my noble friend earlier about having criteria, it is only through good research that we will get good criteria to determine the point at which we trigger an alert that a child is at risk and get that to happen earlier. It may well be that we are missing some important pointers just because they are not in people’s current consciousness, and there is a real danger in reacting to what I would call urban myths.