Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Baroness Finlay of Llandaff Excerpts

Tuesday 20th May 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Meston (CB)]

My Lords, I was unable to speak at Second Reading and I will resist the temptation to make a Second Reading speech now. Rather, I wish to concentrate on Amendment 1.

Any consideration of a proposed purpose clause should take us all back to the Renton report, in which it was said that sometimes such clauses can be useful and sometimes they can be unnecessary, and that they should be used selectively and with caution. On one view, the scope and effects of this Bill are clear enough and there does not appear to me, at least, to be any complexity for which a purpose clause would help interpretation.

However, there is perhaps some value in this amendment, which uses the word “improve” three times, emphasising the intention of the Bill—and the Bill as amended in due course—to achieve improvement in the areas specifically mentioned, and not to maintain or simply tweak the status quo. For that limited reason, I would support Amendment 1.

[Baroness Finlay of Llandaff (CB)]

My Lords, in responding I hope the Minister will be able to point out that the purpose of the Bill has a golden spine running through it, and that is the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. The different clauses should be able to read across to the convention, and wherever the child is and whatever group they are in—and we have lots of groups in this Bill—fate can be extremely cruel, and we know that every day around 127 children lose a parent.

Bereavement is a major issue and hits different groups in different places at different times and affects their outcomes. I hope that we will have a statement from the Minister in responding to this which is about the principle of what we are really trying to do for children across the whole nation, everywhere.

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, I do not intend to make a Second Reading speech, but I am probably fairly unique in this House in that I was brought up in a children’s home. Indeed, the noble Lord, Lord Bird, who is not in his place, and I have a joke that he got to prison and I ended up in a children’s home but we both somehow ended up here.

What I find lacking in the Bill is that I have never felt that it is dealing with children; it is dealing with administration, with very worthy things. I do not feel that, when I was in a children’s home, I would have benefited from the feelings in the Bill. It just does not seem to take me anywhere. One of the problems we have to face is the attitude of society to children.

I am not going to tell a long sob story, but I was extremely badly treated by my parents. A lot of people tried to help—teachers, social workers, neighbours—but there was an air of embarrassed indifference. People wanted to help but did not feel they could; they did not know how to. One of the things we have to get away from is the idea that it is someone else’s job. For about five years I was chair of an outfit called the association of Labour social workers. That was when I was in the Labour Party, incidentally, I say to friends on this side. One thing that struck me was how difficult their job is. One false move and you are condemned. You often look at a child as a social worker and think, “This child should be in care. I should be going to a magistrate”. But as you work your way up the food chain, caution comes in. It is not cruelty; it is caution. People say “Are you sure? We don’t want to be all over the Daily Mail. We have to be careful. We have to respect the rights of the parents”. This is legitimate, but I do not think we should imagine that there is some golden, secret, easy way of dealing with this. I have said in this House before that you cannot privatise compassion. Whatever you do and however much you say, “Let the private sector deal with this”, you cannot deal with the human and emotional cost.

I will mention the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett. He was leader of Sheffield City Council, of course, some time after I was in its care. If anyone wanted to see a local government machine which worked, it was the county borough of Sheffield. I was extraordinarily well looked after. They probably put me in the Labour Party for about 30 years, before I found my natural home.

Sheffield, under the formidable presence of Alderman Grace Tebbutt—I think only the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, will remember that name—ran the children’s homes in an extremely compassionate and direct way because she knew what was going on there. She knew quite a lot of the children. The lesson I took from that was that you have to respect the children. I was not an easy child by any means—any more than I am easy now.

One thing I will give a man called John Freeman and his assistant Mary Armitage, the director and deputy director of children’s services in Sheffield, was that they listened. They were prepared to listen to a 13 year-old child. That helped enormously, because I felt suddenly that I was valued. Someone wanted not only to hear what I wanted but to explain why it could not happen, to help it happen or, often, to half help it happen, because I had not understood the situation and they had. They also understood the need to listen in order to shape the outcome to the need. That is why intervening on this amendment is relevant—because that does not come through in the Bill, and I am not sure I have the expertise to bring it through, but I am willing to work with anyone who thinks they have.

The old children’s department network was a success. When I began my official career as the research officer for the Committee on One Parent Families, Baroness Lucy Faithfull, who was a Member of this House and knew an enormous amount about children, and Barbara Kahan—who never joined this House but was the children’s director for Oxford and a member of the Finer committee—helped inform us of what it felt like to be a child. That was missing. We had a lot of seminars with very well-meaning people—often men, I have to say—who told us what children wanted, but, until Lucy Faithfull came along, we had very little contact with children who were actually in care, to try to shape things for them.

So I say to the Minister—this is not a criticism but is meant as a help—that we must try, if we can, to reshape the Bill just slightly so that it brings the child to the fore, rather than the administration, because it is the children who, at the end, will be affected by the Bill. It is they who will, in years to come, either bless or curse us for what is in it. There will not be much from the officials—we will all have long passed away—but it is the children, some of whom are not yet born, who will be the recipients of the policies we end up with.

We are all people of good will here—including the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, behind me, and the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, whom I knew by repute when he was leader of Sheffield, although I had long left—and we try to do our best. We must now extend that to the Bill, so that we have done our best.