Disclosure and Safeguarding: At-risk Children

Ashley Fox Excerpts

Monday 13th April 2026 Westminster Hall

[Sir Ashley Fox (Bridgwater) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Mundell. I thank the hon. Member for Sunderland Central (Lewis Atkinson) for introducing this debate, and other Members for their contributions. In particular, I thank the hon. Member for Blaydon and Consett (Liz Twist), who described so movingly the circumstances leading to Maya’s death and the campaign led by her family. This important issue unites us across party lines, because it is about the safety of children and ensuring that we protect the most vulnerable members of our society. I pay tribute to the work of Maya’s family, who have called for new legislation to focus specifically on child abuse and neglect, which would seek to ensure that alarms are raised if caregivers pose a risk to children.

This petition received more than 110,000 signatures and calls for four significant changes. First, it calls for the introduction of a child risk disclosure system—CRDS—which would seek to capture a broader risk history of caregivers. Secondly, it seeks to require statutory services, including the police, social care services and health workers, to disclose relevant history to the child’s parent or legal guardian when a risk is identified. Thirdly, it seeks to establish multi-agency protocols, particularly where child contact, custody or unsupervised access are being considered. Fourthly, it seeks to empower professionals to raise safeguarding alerts and initiate family safeguarding interventions where known risks exist, even if not currently under active investigation.

Under the previous Conservative Government, several measures were introduced that provided a template for how the CRDS could work. For example, Sarah’s law was introduced in 2011, which established a child sex offender disclosure system. It allows an individual to formally ask the police whether someone who has contact with a child has a record of child sexual offences or poses a risk to the child for some other reason. In 2014, the last Government introduced Clare’s law, which established the domestic violence disclosure system, which enables the police to disclose information to a victim or potential victim of domestic abuse about their partner or ex-partner’s previous abusive or violent offending.

The shadow Solicitor General, my hon. Friend the Member for Maidstone and Malling (Helen Grant), has highlighted that, in some cases, such as with the perpetrators who abused Tony Hudgell, there is a risk that they will finish serving their sentence but questions about how they will be supervised and monitored will remain following that. My hon. Friend the Member for Harborough, Oadby and Wigston (Neil O’Brien) has raised the issue of information-sharing gaps with the Government. The Government need to consider how they can best support local authorities in delivering their child protection duties under section 47 of the Children Act 1989.

I hope that the Minister will agree that the priority is to ensure that all preventable abuse is indeed prevented. Given that more than half of serious case reviews cite communication failures as a primary cause, does the Minister agree that more needs to be done before an offence is committed? It should be a priority for the Government to ensure that safeguarding is co-ordinated, and that children do not fall through the cracks of the protection system. Those who are a risk to children should be monitored and managed. Can the Minister outline how the Government will ensure that safeguarding is prioritised? The UK Government’s actions need to support safeguarding data sharing, including at a local level, because we must not risk safeguarding becoming a postcode lottery where some areas are more at risk.

I very much hope that the Minister appreciates the sentiment of the tireless campaigners who brought this petition: that one death that could have been prevented is one death too many.