Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Tuesday 17th June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Walmsley (LD)]

My Lords, I support Amendment 117, in my name and that of my noble friend Lady Tyler and others. The decision on where a child is cared for in the system is crucial to the child’s life, so we should listen to children with care experience. As we heard from the noble Baroness, Lady Longfield, it may affect their ability to keep contact with wider family and friends, and other factors were mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Meston. It will make a difference even to their ability to keep in contact with a teacher who they might trust—that can be quite important in children’s lives. It can otherwise be very disruptive to their education if they are put a long way from where they previously went to school. As we know, children with care experience usually have less of a chance to get good educational qualifications than other children, and that has an effect on their whole-life chances.

As my noble friend says, it cannot be left to the Secretary of State under the title of “such other persons”. The category of those most directly affected by these regulations must be named in the Bill, and it is vital that children have the confidence that they will be heard. The slogan, “Nothing about us without us”, is very apt in this context.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

Since we are forming a set for Amendment 117, I will stand up now, having attached my name to it, and will focus chiefly on that amendment.

The noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, has stolen my starting line with her final line: nothing about us without us. I first used that phrase in a debate on rather similar amendments to the Health and Social Care Bill. I think that your Lordships’ House and the country are increasingly coming to realise that we have to listen to children far more.

In this context, I will cite an interesting case from the past week, where a 14 year-old who had been tricked by his parents into going to Ghana took his parents to court. The Court of Appeal ruled that he should have the right to come back to Britain, as he wanted to do. That is an interesting court case that shows how, generally, our legal system is starting to listen more and more to children. It is important that our legislation does so and that that is in the Bill.

This raises issues that I will come back to on a later group, but the basic point about the regional care co-operatives is that they will take decision-making further away from local authorities. People have been studying this, and the care review evidence group, for example, said that

“care will need to be taken that these structural reforms do not dilute local accountability mechanisms”.

Making sure that children are actually heard in the making of regulations is in some way a counterbalance to the risk that quite a lot of experts have identified in taking this approach.

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendments 116A, 117A and 119ZA in my name. As we have heard, the proposals to create regional care co-operatives came from the independent review into children’s social care. In principle, we support them. However, we are aware that a number of regions are already using informal co-operation agreements, so I question whether we need more legislation to make this happen. Maybe the Minister can comment on this when she sums up. The Secretary of State is taking the power to direct areas to create one of three models of co-operation, but it is important that we understand how this will work in practice, because, presumably, if areas are not adopting this approach voluntarily, there would be significant barriers and potentially good reasons for doing so. Can the Minister clarify those few points when she closes?

The Local Government Association has stated its support for the narrower requirements of a regional care co-operative, as being used by the pathfinder areas —namely, on

“strategic planning and placements for children with more complex needs”.

However, the Bill states in proposed new Section 22J(3)(c) that regional care co-operatives will be responsible for commissioning

“the provision of accommodation for children being looked after by the local authority”.

There is a real worry about mission creep and confusion over responsibilities, which I have tried to address through my Amendment 119ZA, as has my noble friend Lady Cash through her Amendment 117B.

Will the Minister comment on the concern expressed by organisations such as Barnardo’s that this model will squeeze out some of the smaller providers, increasing even further the dependence on independent providers in the private sector, many of whom, as we know, have a combination of very high profitability and high debts?

Can the Minister confirm the start date for the pathfinders, and when there will be publicly available evidence from them, either via the evaluation or from any other data? Does the department have an idea that it can publicly share of the likely size of each of the areas? The two pilot sites, Greater Manchester and the south-east, are both very large, with about 3 million people within them. Is that the size the Government expect to be typical?

Amendment 116A would remove a power equivalent to a Henry VIII power from the Bill. Clause 10(2) defines strategic accommodation functions as

“(a) assessing current and future requirements for the accommodation of children being looked after by the local authority,


(b) developing and publishing strategies for meeting those requirements,


(c) commissioning the provision of accommodation for children being looked after by the local authority,


(d) recruiting prospective local authority foster parents and supporting local authority foster parents,


(e) developing, or facilitating the development of, new provision for the accommodation of children being looked after by the local authority, and


(f) any other functions relating to a local authority’s duties under section 22A, 22C or 22G that are specified in regulations made by the Secretary of State”.


New Section 22J(3)(f) gives the Secretary of State a power akin to a Henry VIII power to add to the above list of strategic accommodation functions by regulations. In justifying the power, the department goes on to say:

“The Department has sought to achieve the right balance between confining the scope of the delegated powers through primary provisions and leaving necessary matters of detail to regulations. This is the first time the Secretary of State has sought to bring local authorities together to collaborate in the delivery of their strategic accommodation functions. Regional co-operation arrangements (known as Regional Care Co-operatives) … are currently being tested via pathfinders … in two local authority regions. When the pathfinders are evaluated, the Secretary of State may need to prescribe additional functions. There may also be a need for additional functions to be specified in the future depending on the needs of a particular area and to keep pace with the changing children’s social care placements market. The power has been limited to one which enables additional functions to be added to the list in the future. It does not enable the Secretary of State to amend or remove any of the functions already listed in the clause and so it is not a Henry VIII power”.


My amendment is a probing amendment, as this feels like another example of the Government introducing legislation before they are quite ready. Why not wait until the pathfinders are evaluated to be clear what additional strategic functions might be needed? Maybe the Minister can inform the House if the department is aware of any gaps in the current strategic powers that have been identified in areas using this approach already. It would be good to understand whether the Government have in mind any particular powers that might be needed, or whether this is a belt and braces, “just in case” kind of power, without having anything particular in mind.

My Amendment 117A seeks to ensure that Ofsted inspects regional care co-operatives. It is obviously important that we have an independent assessment of their effectiveness and impact and whether they are achieving the Government’s goals—and, perhaps even more importantly, the needs of children. There may be other ways of achieving this and, if so, it would be helpful to understand what those are.

More specifically, my amendment aims to bring a spotlight on the use of unregistered provision. My understanding of the regional care co-operative approach is that it will anticipate and commission capacity in a more effective, and cost-effective, way. One outcome of this would be a drop in or complete removal of the use of unregistered provision, something I know local authorities are keen to see, as are noble many Lords across the House.

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[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I have attached my name to Amendment 165, but as three noble Lords have already spoken to it, I will be brief. I declare my involvement with the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Households in Temporary Accommodation.

Here is one stat to feed into our debate. In the year to September 2024, 80 children who were in temporary accommodation died, and the figures from the National Child Mortality Database from 2019 to 2024 show that, for children who died, temporary accommodation was listed as a causal factor in their death in 74 cases. That obviously speaks to the GP issue.

Many noble Lords—I can see quite a few in this Chamber—take part in Learn with the Lords, the House of Lords education programme. We have many new Members of the House, so I want to take this chance to commend to all the newer Members who may not know about it what a great programme it is. One of the things we are doing is taking news about the House of Lords out around the country into schools, but it is also a chance to encounter and speak to teachers and head teachers, and share with them what we are doing here in your Lordships’ House and get their reaction.

I have not got permission, so I will not identify the person too clearly, but in the Midlands I was speaking to a head teacher at a school serving a very deprived area and I told her about this amendment, and she just went, “Yes!” Many people might think that surely the school will already know, but children and parents may feel that this is a cause of shame. There is no reason why they should, but none the less, the reality is that they may well feel it is a cause of shame, and go to great lengths to try to hide the fact. So it is important that the school, as well as the GP, be notified.

As we have had a huge outbreak of agreement, I shall briefly express my reservations about Amendment 119, about boarding school places. Joy Schaverien, the therapist, wrote a book, whose subtitle is The Psychological Trauma of the “Privileged” Child, reflecting on the impact of boarding schools on British society. Indeed, we might all reflect on their impact on our politics, but that is a subject for another day. She identified issues of abandonment, bereavement, captivity and disassociation associated with boarding schools.

I am sure that boarding schools today would say that things are different now from what it was like in the old days, but we are still talking about an institutional environment. That, by definition, is what a boarding school is. It is not a home environment. I would not say that there would never be a case where a boarding school might be an appropriate place for a child; there may be cases in which that is the best option available, given the overall circumstances. But I have trouble with the idea of offering it to all looked-after children at secondary age. I do not think that is the appropriate approach.

[Baroness Evans of Bowes Park (Con)]

My Lords, I add my support to Amendment 134B, in the name of my noble friend Lady Sanderson. As she said, it seeks to build on the Government’s commitment in Keeping Children Safe, Helping Families Thrive to look at options to reform the planning process to enable providers to more easily set up homes where they are most needed and to support the delivery of small children’s homes.

To pick up another issue that noble Lords across the Committee have raised on this group of amendments, I should add that that paper also noted that the lack of appropriate and affordable homes in the right places for children means that we are seeing a worrying trend in the rise of the use of unregistered provision.

The CMA’s 2022 report on the children’s home market outlined a number of issues with the current planning system and specifically recommended that the Government do what my noble friend suggests in her amendment, and consider

“whether the distinction, for the purposes of the planning regime, between small children’s homes and domestic dwelling houses should be removed”.

The CMA concluded that the easing of planning restrictions would lead to both an increase in number and a better geographical spread of children’s homes.

On the basis that the Government have accepted this recommendation and say that they are considering options, I look forward to hearing from the Minister how government thinking has developed, particularly in relation to further planning reforms in this area. Can she outline where, if not in this Bill, they may be intending to take their action?

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[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, Amendment 131, in my name, appears in this group. I will not quite say that it is a pleasure to follow the contribution of the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, but it was a terribly important contribution, and I can only very much agree with what she said. The issues that she has outlined—about children as young as seven, with two-thirds continuing still at six months—are hugely disturbing.

My amendment seeks to address a particular issue concerning children subject to deprivation of liberty orders and children in care in general. As I said to the Ministers when they very kindly had a briefing on the Bill, this arises from a campaign that I encountered in 2023, called Hope Instead of Handcuffs. This campaign came from a small group of people—a single operator of the provision of secure transport for children—who were calling for a ban on the automatic use of handcuffs. Yes, I did say the automatic use of handcuffs, which some privatised providers of secure transport were using on children who were subject to deprivation of liberty orders—or who, as it was described, were on the edges of care. They were being put in handcuffs to be transported. These are not children who have been accused of any crime; these are simply children—very vulnerable children, obviously—who have been subjected to something that I think any of us would find traumatic and disturbing.

This reflects testimony that was given in 2021 to the inquiry of the Joint Committee on Human Rights on protecting rights in care settings. Serenity Welfare testified that, as I have just said, many providers of secure transportation services for children who were on the edge of care were using handcuffs as standard. I quote from its testimony:

“The practice is unregulated and unmonitored, as there is no obligation on these providers to report any instances of handcuffing to the appropriate authority”.


As a result of that campaign in 2023, I and a number of other Members of both Houses wrote to the Government inquiring what was happening. The response we got was, “We will look into it”. To the best of my knowledge, none of this has progressed since then, so I particularly wanted to put down this probing amendment to draw attention to the issue.

I have not addressed just transport, because I want to know what is happening in other settings for these children as well, which is why I have included them in the amendment. This is perhaps a much more limited issue than the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, was outlining, but I look forward to hearing from the Minister that the Government are planning to do something about it if, as I have no reason to doubt, it is still continuing, and to stop it.

[Baroness Berridge (Con)]

My Lords, Amendment 126, in my name, is in this group. This amendment relates to a discreet issue for children who are under a High Court deprivation of liberty order but who are not also looked-after children under the Children Act. Approximately 96% of those children under a High Court deprivation of liberty order are also looked-after children under the Children Act, but then they end up at the High Court, as there is a shortage of Section 25 secure accommodation. Only in Section 25 accommodation under the Children Act can a looked-after child be restricted of their liberty—that currently means a secure children’s home—so they are also put under a High Court DoL so that the local authority can deprive them of their liberty in non-Section-25-type accommodation. It seems that by the move to the phrasing “relevant accommodation” the Bill will regularise in law their situation, which is that 96% of these young people are currently under that inherent jurisdiction deprivation of liberty order. However, there are currently 4% of children under a High Court deprivation of liberty order who are not also looked-after children under the Children Act.

I want to thank the President of the Family Division, Sir Andrew McFarlane. I believe that it was his work that brought in the Nuffield Family Justice Observatory, when High Court DoLS—as we would call them—began to be used as a jurisdiction. It is due only to that work that we know that, within that group, we have this little group—the 4%—who are not also looked-after children. Even an amended Section 25 of the Children Act refers only to looked-after children having their liberty being restricted in what would now be known as “relevant accommodation”. They would still be left under the High Court jurisdiction, with fewer safeguards. The whole purpose of Clause 11 is to bring from the inherent jurisdiction these children under a statutory system of protection, safeguards and reviews.

This 4% of around 1,280 children last year are often children coming out of the mental health estate. They have been taken into hospital for their own protection and for treatment; then they are discharged but, for health reasons, their home is no longer suitable. In my view, they are not going to pass the threshold test under the Children Act 1989 to be a looked-after child, because the threshold test—philosophically and in practice—is about harm by the care or neglect of the adult who should be caring for them or the fact of their being out of control. Neither of those circumstances seem in most cases to apply to a young person who has gone into the mental health estate and then been discharged.

While I recognise the imperfections of the current drafting of Amendment 126—for instance, it might trigger other provisions of the Children Act if we deem these children to be looked after-children—I chose that mechanism to try to bring them under the safeguards that we will have for children under Section 25 who are looked-after children, and not leave them still to be under the inherent jurisdiction of the High Court. I hope that that serves to be a mechanism for the Minister to explain what the situation is for that small group of children.

I imagine it was envisaged by Sir Andrew McFarlane that he would get the data through the Nuffield work, so that we would come to Parliament, legislate and take this into statute law, out of the inherent jurisdiction. It seems to me, from Amendment 126, that unless we do something for this small group of children, he is going to have to continue needing Nuffield, because there will be a need for this type of deprivation of liberty order under the inherent jurisdiction for the group of children I have just outlined.

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[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

I will clarify that in the letter.

On Amendment 131 tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, on the important matter of the use of restraint on children in care and subject to deprivation of liberty orders, it is vital that children are safe and that restraint is used only where appropriate, including when they are moving between settings and services. We take these concerns very seriously. We will consider guidance on restraint in due course.

However, the question about children being handcuffed remains, and I will endeavour to get more detail about that and to come back to the noble Baroness. Providers, in conjunction with placing authorities, are under an obligation to use the minimum appropriate restriction to keep a child safe.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

I may be a little too soon, but I wonder whether the Government are minded to ensure that there is, as my amendment would provide, some kind of reporting mechanism to keep track of things. There may be cases where that is necessary. Surely this is something there should be an annual report on so that we can see the direction of travel and whether there is a problem that needs to be tackled.

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

Noble Lords are very premature today. I was coming not quite to that but to something that I hope will be satisfactory in relation to that reporting mechanism.

Ofsted, as the independent regulator of children’s homes, manages incidents of restraint on a case-by-case basis under its inspection framework. The children’s homes regulations place a requirement on homes to record any incidents of restraint and on the registered person to inform Ofsted of any incident in relation to a child that they consider to be serious. We think that Ofsted inspectors are best placed to scrutinise individual incidents of restraint and the circumstances around them and to ensure that care providers are minimising its use. We are not clear that a yearly report to Parliament aggregating that data would add anything in this case, although it would create an additional burden and risk distraction from this important work. It would, in fact, probably be significantly less effective in safeguarding children and recording the incidents than the Ofsted approach currently being used.

Amendment 133 tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, seeks to promote family and other social relationships for children subject to deprivation of liberty orders by publishing local authority plans to support children in that regard. As mentioned in respect of earlier amendments tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, I reiterate the Government’s agreement that, wherever possible, it is vital for a child’s welfare to have positive family and social relationships. Given that the Children Act 1989 and the supporting guidance already seek to ensure that family and other relationships for looked-after children are promoted while keeping children safe, and that this forms part of Ofsted’s inspections of local authorities, I am not sure it is appropriate or necessary to increase the burden on local authorities by mandating them to publish that information. I recognise the points made by the noble Lord, or it may have been somebody else speaking on his behalf, about the effectiveness of the lifelong links programme. I think we referenced that previously, and I can see the enormous benefit that can come from it.

Amendment 134C tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, seeks to ensure the affirmative procedure for regulations made under Section 25 of the Children Act 1989. I agree with the noble Baroness that it is important to ensure that regulations on this matter are subject to the correct scrutiny. She referred to the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee’s report in which this was raised. We are grateful to the committee for its scrutiny. We are carefully considering its recommendations and will respond in due course.

Amendment 506B in the name of my noble friend Lord Watson seeks to delay commencement of Clause 11 until regulations are made to ensure that non-means-tested legal aid is available in relation to applications to deprive a child of their liberty under Section 25 of the Children Act 1989. I assure my noble friend that where an application is made to deprive a child of their liberty as a result of any measure the Bill brings forward, those children will be eligible for state-funded legal aid representation using the same criteria that currently apply to all children subject to orders under Section 25. This means that children will be able to access legal aid without needing to satisfy means testing.

I hope that noble Lords think I have provided nearly all the detail requested in these amendments. On that basis, I commend the government amendments to the Committee and hope that noble Lords feel able not to press theirs.