Children and Families Bill

Baroness Walmsley Excerpts

Tuesday 28th January 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Walmsley (LD)]

My Lords, as many noble Lords know, I have campaigned for good, mandatory, quality PSHE, not just SRE, in all schools ever since I came to your Lordships’ House. This is because I believe that it is every child’s right to receive this information and because I believe that schools should be educating children for life and not just for a job. As you can imagine, I have some sympathy with the noble Baroness’s Amendment 53ZAAA, which sounds more like a battery or something to do with financial security than an amendment. But I have always regretted that the previous Labour Government did not see fit to make PSHE mandatory in all schools during the 13 years that they were in power.

However, if the noble Baroness thinks her amendment will ensure the objective that many of us agree about, I am sad to say that I think she is wrong. The amendment talks only about SRE and not the whole of PSHE. It is the whole of PSHE that educates children for life and helps them with their learning, which is why many of us have always campaigned for it.

The amendment also keeps parental withdrawal up to the age of 15, which I do not agree with. It is outrageous: the idea that information, particularly about sex and relationships should be kept from a child until they are 15 is completely mad in this day and age. The amendment, therefore, is only a partial solution to the patchy PSHE situation that was identified by Ofsted.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

The noble Baroness will know that the previous Government, when I was the Minister, tried to introduce compulsory sex and relationship education. Were we to agree the amendment with her support tonight, does she not agree that it would be delivered by PSHE teachers and members of the PSHE subject association—who gave me a standing ovation when I announced compulsory SRE, which is the only time I ever had one in the middle of a speech —and that that would take us a long way down the road she wants us to go down in terms of everyone getting the education for life that she has campaigned for with compulsory PSHE?

[Baroness Walmsley]

The noble Lord is right. It may well be a step in the right direction, but we need to wait until the end of this debate so that we hear what alternatives the Government have to offer. Then we will have to make up our mind as to which approach will actually ensure that more children get good quality PSHE in their schools.

In relation to what I have just said, I would like to congratulate my noble friends the Ministers on their new measures, intended to improve the spread of good-quality PSHE into all schools, which they plan to announce at the end of this debate, and did so in the letter that we all received. They are all extremely welcome, and I sincerely hope that they will encourage all schools to look carefully at their PSHE curriculum and the skills of their teachers and take up the opportunities, advice and teaching materials that will become available to them as a result of these new measures. I have great confidence in the PSHE Association, and with the new funding that the Government are providing for them, I am sure they will give schools very good advice.

However, despite the warm words in the introduction to the national curriculum, the failure to make PSHE mandatory sadly does not send out the very important message to schools that they should ensure that pupils get this information. Therefore, we are faced with a Government who are doing a great deal to improve the situation and an amendment that does not achieve what I would want to see. What does someone like me do about that? It is a very difficult situation.

Noble Lords are aware that the Government are a coalition Government, made up of two parties. On this matter, these two parties have different approaches. For the sake of clarity, therefore, I put it on the record that the Liberal Democrats believe that the whole of PSHE—not just SRE—should be in a slimmed-down national curriculum and should be taught in all schools, including academies, as a right of the children. I am afraid we have to blame the Labour Government for introducing the exemption of academies from the national curriculum.

Therefore, while I enthusiastically welcome what the Government have now agreed to put in place, it does fall a little short of what I would like to see. On the other hand, so does this amendment, so I have to consider which of these two approaches comes nearest to achieving Liberal Democrat policy and children’s rights. I hope that the Minister, in winding up, will be able to convince me that the Government’s approach will result in more children receiving their right to good PSHE teaching.

[Baroness Kidron (CB)]

I support both of these amendments, to which I have added my name. I want to associate myself with the words of the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Whitchurch, in order to skip over some of the arguments she made, and move on, because I know that there are other amendments tonight which we must get to with some alacrity.

I declare an interest as a film maker who has made a film about teenagers and the internet. It is specifically the subject of the internet that makes both Amendment 53 and Amendment 53ZAAA necessary and urgent. It is not the case that all things in the virtual world are harmful or dangerous. Indeed, there is an implicit danger that if we in this Chamber demonise the internet, our concerns will not be heard by the young, 99% of whom are online by the age of 16. The internet is in so many ways a liberatory technology; but in its wake, social and sexual norms are changing—social and sexual norms that, for millennia, were contextualised by family and community but are now delivered into the pockets of young children, largely out of the sight of parents, with no transparency, no accountability and no regulation.

Her Majesty’s Government make distinctions between the status of schools; the internet does not. In every sort of school, there are young people struggling to cope with the loneliness of looking at online lives that their contemporaries are leading, and finding their own lives wanting. They are struggling to do their homework on the very same device that holds their entertainment and communication tools, so inevitably they are interrupted and distracted. Young girls are made anxious by not being the right kind of beautiful to get enough “likes” and know that a sexual or revealing stance could get their numbers up. Young people who are curious about sex find themselves in a world of non-consensual sexual violence and are bewildered, excited and disgusted in a confusing introduction to what should be the most intimate expression of self.

What of the feeling of compulsion and addiction as the norm becomes to respond instantly day and night; or the culture of anonymity that is fuelling an epidemic of bullying; and the sense of absolute helplessness with tragic consequences when a young person is trapped and humiliated in full view by something done foolishly or maliciously? Then, of course, there is the immediate and pressing issue highlighted in the 2013 Ofsted report, Not Yet Good Enough, that found that a third of school pupils had gaps in their knowledge about sex and relationships that left them vulnerable to online exploitation and abuse.

Last week, I had a call from the head teacher of an academy who was in great distress. It was a good school with an excellent record. This is a woman trained to bring life into literature, who is now facing a tsunami of problems beyond her experience or training. She was not the first: indeed, she was one of scores of head teachers and teachers who have reached out for help. It is worth noting that, when I asked her which year group she would like me to talk with, she cited the different needs of the year 9s, 10s, 11s, 12s and 13s. She was reluctant to choose whom I should address because she felt that each group had its own very specific and urgent need.

The establishment of an expert working group to update the statutory guidance is excellent, a sign of good governance. Who could be against it? To update it in the context of the advent of internet and associated technologies is fantastic. However, guidance is not enough: we need age-appropriate, structured and expert SRE teaching that ensures that all of the guidance reaches all of the children in one coherent piece.

I was a little distressed at Question Time—I came late into the Chamber—and I believe I heard the noble Lord, Lord Gardiner, suggesting that suicide groups were something that could be dealt with by self-regulation of ISPs. I hope I am mistaken in that. He also suggested that e-safety would be taught in ICT by ICT teachers. This is a reckless approach to something that should unite us. The notion of “duty of care” is embedded into many of our laws and social interactions because we understand that the young can only develop responsibility in proportion to their maturity, and this is one of those situations.

The internet is as yet an unregulated space where sexual acts that remain illegal in the material world are available at the push of a button; where the economic needs of internet billionaires encourage compulsive attachments to devices from which young people are never parted; where young people are encouraged to play, shop and learn without an adequate understanding of their own vulnerabilities or their own responsibilities. This is a new technology that is central to and inseparable from an entire generation, to whom we in this House have a duty of care.

The connection between heavy internet use and depression, the rising incidence of self-harm and anorexia and the playing-out of pornographic scenarios creating new norms of sexual behaviour are increasingly familiar as we see them manifest in our schools and homes. At Stanford and MIT, in important work led by Professor Livingstone at LSE and within the European Union, people are working to quantify the real-life outcomes of internet use by young people. Meanwhile, we need to empower those same young people with knowledge, delivered in a neutral space by appropriately trained adults, in which their safety, privacy and rights are paramount. We know that the internet is not that neutral, safe or private place, and we know that parents alone cannot deal with the entirety of a young person’s life online.

I have said to the Minister before that in the absence of comprehensive SRE delivered to all children, the realpolitik is that you leave some children to be educated in sex by the pornographers and leave bullying and friendship rules to Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare. Guidance, however welcome, is only guidance: its application partial and essentially unequal. The statutory provision of fully rounded SRE that deals with the complexity of the new world in which young people live, written by experts and delivered by trained teachers is quite another thing.

If you can find me a child untouched by the internet, you can show me the child who does not need comprehensive education about its powers and possibilities. I urge noble Lords to put aside any constituency or consideration that might distract them from the urgent need to empower and protect young people and to support both the amendments.

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[Baroness Walmsley]

My Lords, I have added my name to this amendment but as the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, has explained it so comprehensively and so well, I will not say very much except that I believe that schools have the duty to their children to promote their academic, spiritual, cultural, mental and physical development. Schools will do it in different ways. Amendment 53ZA, crafted by the noble Baroness, accepts that. I have also come across examples where schools teach PSHE in specific lessons about particular topics, but in addition have a whole school ethos that promotes children having respect for each other, having resilience and self-confidence and all those soft skills that so many employers are crying out for as well, of course, as giving them that often life-saving information about sexual matters, drugs, tobacco and so on.

The amendment asks schools to tell the world how they are going to do this. They have this duty—it is right that they should have it—and if they have to make public how they are fulfilling that duty, it will make them focus carefully on the quality of how they deliver these things to the children and fulfil this duty to each and every one of their pupils.

[Baroness Perry of Southwark]

My Lords, it is good to be able to give a very warm welcome to one of the amendments put down by the noble Baroness, Lady Massey. I agree entirely with what she said in her introduction to this amendment. It is a very good amendment. I particularly like the fact that she is asking all schools to make this explicit to parents, school governors and pupils. We have not talked about the role of school governors enough as we have gone through this Bill. They now have such big responsibilities under previous legislation that to include them in the duty of the school to say what they are doing about the total development of children is very much to be welcomed, as is, of course, the duty to tell parents. We must continue to recognise the role of parents as the primary influences over children—they are primarily responsible for their children’s development.

I am very proud of the fact that it was this House which added the word “spiritual” to the national curriculum responsibilities. Before we had “moral”, “academic” and “physical”, but it was this House which added the word “spiritual” to that list. I am particularly delighted that the noble Baroness has included it in her amendment.

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[Baroness Walmsley]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Hughes, for supporting my Amendment 53A. I have considerable sympathy with her views about the need for childminders to be inspected. However, I think that if Ofsted has concerns, inspectors can inspect any childminder. My amendment focuses on quality. It seeks to introduce a requirement for Ofsted to inspect a childminding agency in respect of the quality of the care offered by the childminders registered with that agency. I noticed that in Schedule 4 there is no mention of this among all the references to the standard of services offered by childminders and the quality of leadership and management. It occurred to me that the most important matter is the quality of the child’s experience and that of its parents. However, that was not clear in Schedule 4 as originally drafted—hence my amendment.

Here I thank the Minister for agreeing with me on the principle that the issue of quality should be made explicit in the legislation, and for laying a series of government amendments to secure that. As he knows, I have my reservations about childminder agencies. I am prepared to give them a chance to prove themselves, but I will base my eventual judgment not on the services provided to the childminders but on whether they are successful in attracting more high-quality childminders into the sector and whether they provide childcare in the places, at the times and of the quality that parents want at a price they can afford.

I await my noble friend’s reply to this debate and welcome his amendments 53AA, 53AB, 53AC and 53AD, which will make it unnecessary for me to move mine.

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Moved by

[Baroness Walmsley]

54: After Clause 78, insert the following new Clause—
“No right to give corporal punishment: part-time educational institutions
In the Education Act 1996, at the end of section 548(7B) (no right to give corporal punishment), insert “except that it applies in relation to this section as if for paragraphs (a) and (b) of section 92(2) of that Act there were substituted the following words “for any amount of time during an academic year, no matter how little””.”

[Baroness Walmsley]

My Lords, I rise to move Amendment 54, which seeks to close a loophole in the law about corporal punishment in places of part-time education. In rejecting this amendment in Committee, my noble friend the Minister said, regarding physical punishment in madrassahs that,

“individuals have been charged, convicted and imprisoned for physically assaulting children in these settings. I therefore hope that this clarifies that the law already exists to protect children from violence in these settings”.—[Official Report, 18/11/13; col. GC 335.]

I am afraid this does not help, because the law does not protect children from frequent, painful or risky assaults in these settings and others. Teachers in part-time education, like parents, are entitled to use the defence of “reasonable punishment” under Section 58 of the Children Act 2004, for common assaults inflicted for the purpose of punishing misbehaviour. A common assault may not leave a bruise, but the definition does not include blows that risk injury—like a boxed ear—or cause a lot of pain, or humiliation, or that are inflicted multiple times.

My noble friend also said that the department was working with faith organisations,

“to develop a voluntary code of practice”,

but of course the difficulty about voluntary measures is that they are voluntary, not compulsory. As I said at the time, voluntary measures would not do for,

“the primary school round the corner”. —[Official Report, 18/11/13; cols. GC 335-37.]

The Department for Education celebrates excellent safeguarding measures in some areas but they are not universally applied. For example, in September 2012, after a madrassah teacher was convicted of child cruelty, the Lancashire chief prosecutor told the BBC:

“When we talk about three successful prosecutions in the last year in the North West and probably a dozen nationally, we’re talking about literally the tip of the iceberg. In order to meet the demand, schools are being set up left right and centre. There is no Ofsted, no inspection regime, they’re reliant entirely on a particular committee enforcing standards, ensuring discipline is correctly maintained. And if they are not up to the job, there’s nothing to prevent children being harmed pretty much on a daily basis”.

The Muslim Institute estimates there are upwards of 5,000 madrassahs in this country, and we do not know how many Sunday schools may operate the same sort of abuses. The department cannot seriously suggest that the voluntary code will be adopted and followed by all of them. I am pleased to say that my right honourable friend the Secretary of State has publicly stated he does not support the use of physical punishment. So it is incomprehensible to me why these part-time schools, the most unmonitored and uninspected, are exempted from an otherwise universal ban on an unacceptable practice.

There has been a suggestion that prohibiting physical punishment in madrassahs would “interfere with local discretion” or fetter child-protection professionals. Nothing could be further from the truth. A clear law would assist both those working in the schools and those responsible for child protection, bringing clarity to the situation that the chief prosecutor describes.

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[Baroness Northover]

My Lords, I thank my noble friends Lady Walmsley and Lord Storey for raising this very important issue. We have a great deal of sympathy for what they are saying. The Government are absolutely committed to the protection of children. I understand their concerns: nothing is more important than making sure that our young people are protected and safe from harm. Clearly, children will not easily learn in such circumstances. Assault of children is against the law in whatever setting it takes place. The real issue that we all want to address is how to prevent the unacceptable, and already unlawful, treatment of children. We believe the best way to do this is to support people in their communities to address these issues and uphold the law.

Everyone in society has a responsibility to make sure that children are safe from violence, abuse and neglect. Our job is to enable parents and communities to exercise that responsibility. We must address the culture that allows unlawful treatment of children to be viewed as acceptable or—and which may more often be the issue—that makes people reluctant to report, question or challenge it.

We have a strategy that aims to address this issue in all types of supplementary settings. As my noble friend Lady Walmsley has noted—though not with favour—we are working with a range of interests to develop a voluntary code of practice for supplementary schools. We believe that signing up to the code will mean that providers will establish robust policies in areas such as safeguarding and governance arrangements to help protect children and young people from harm. I hope that she will feel that it is a move in the right direction, even if it is not as much as she would like to see.

The code will send a clear message about the expected standards that all settings should meet. It will enable and empower parents to make informed choices about the provision of supplementary teaching for their children. Through targeted communications, we will inform parents about the code and encourage them to refer to it when selecting suitable provision for their child. Providers who sign up to the code will also naturally want to inform parents about it, to highlight the good practice they have adopted. We want to give parents the tools to make informed choices about the right provision for their child and to know what to do and whom to go to if they have any concerns.

We will be consulting on the draft code this spring. We will place a copy of the consultation document in the Library and would welcome comments from noble Lords. In particular, I hope that my noble friends Lady Walmsley and Lord Storey will take a very good look at this consultation document and feed their ideas into it. I assure noble Lords that we will review the effectiveness of the voluntary code over time. It will need some time to embed, but we believe that it will have a significant and lasting impact in changing culture, although we will review its effectiveness.

We all know that there is an issue to be addressed. There are different ways this could be approached, but we feel that the proposed new clause is not the best way to achieve the change we want. It seeks to amend other provisions, which themselves have not been commenced. If we were to commence the relevant provisions, including the regulatory regime for part-time institutions, that would require the Department for Education to register a large number of part-time education institutions, with all the complexity involved. More importantly, commencing these provisions would be unlikely to capture a wider range of settings, including those where there may be real cause for concern. Most supplementary schools are unlikely to qualify as independent educational institutions, so they would be unaffected by this change.

The real issue is not the technical difficulty that implementing this amendment would cause. The real issue is cultural: changing the culture which allows physical punishment of children to go unquestioned and unchallenged must be the right way forward. That is why we are focusing on this. I hope that my noble friends will engage with this next change and encourage my noble friend Lady Walmsley to withdraw her amendment.

[Baroness Walmsley]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend for her reply and my noble friend Lord Storey for his support. I hope that my noble friend does not think that I am against the work in the community trying to change the culture; of course I am very much in favour of that, and I am sure that we will both engage in developing the code of practice.

Are the Government willing to publish a list of those settings that refuse to sign up to the code? Can my noble friend answer that?

[Baroness Northover]

That is a very interesting idea, and I will write to my noble friend.

[Baroness Walmsley]

I thank my noble friend for that. I did not really think that she would be able to answer that at this moment.

It is highly desirable that we shine sunlight on these issues and on those settings that do not sign up to the code. I should also be very keen, when the time comes, to know how the Government intend to ensure that parents are informed that the code exists and told how to find out whether the setting to which they propose to send their child signs up to it, how it is monitored, and so on and so forth. Those things are very important.

I still feel that we need a level playing field between part-time centres of education and maintained schools, foster carers, and so on, because I do not think that cultural change was considered to be enough when we tried to eliminate those schoolteachers—usually schoolmasters, I have to say—who were terribly keen on wielding the cane. We did not rely just on cultural change there; we changed the law. It may very well be necessary to do that in the end, but I am obviously willing to give a voluntary code of practice a chance. I will certainly engage with the Government in developing it. In the mean time, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 54 withdrawn.

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Moved by

[Baroness Walmsley]

57: After Clause 79, insert the following new Clause—
“Part 4AProtection of childrenActions due to a belief of possession by spirits
(1) Section 1 of the Children and Young Persons Act 1993 (cruelty to persons under sixteen) is amended as follows.
(2) In subsection (1) omit the words “and has responsibility for any child or young person under that age,” and for the word “him” substitute “any child or young person under that age”.
(3) In subsection (2), after paragraph (b) insert—
“(c) in subsection (1) the meaning of “ill-treats” includes the communication by word or by action a belief that the child is possessed by evil spirits or has supernatural harmful powers—(i) to the child concerned, or(ii) to anyone connected to that child.””

[Baroness Walmsley]

My Lords, I return to this amendment about a form of child abuse, about which we had a very useful discussion in Committee and, following that, a very helpful exchange of correspondence with my noble friend Lady Northover, the Minister.

The purpose of this amendment is to fill two gaps in the law protecting children: first, to make clear that alleging that a child is possessed or has supernatural evil powers constitutes emotional abuse of the child; and, secondly, to ensure that people not directly responsible for a child are liable for child cruelty offences.

In Committee, and in her follow-up letter, my noble friend Lady Northover confirmed that making an allegation of this nature is child abuse. This confirmation is welcome and important and will be supported by those working in child protection. Children accused of possession or supernatural evil are almost always already vulnerable in some respect—outsiders, orphaned, ill, disabled, trafficked et cetera—and as a result of an allegation, they may well go on to suffer serious physical or social abuse. Yet it is the allegation itself that can inflict the most devastating emotional trauma on the child. AFRUCA has a number of case studies which, because of the late hour, I will not go into.

However, this is not understood by those making such allegations. A pastor or relative or member of the congregation who declares a child is possessed or is a witch may genuinely believe this to be the case and see it as their duty to take appropriate action. So we have a situation where an abusive practice, like FGM or forced marriage, is being perpetrated in ignorance of the fact that it is abuse. But here the gap in the law is more extreme. Offences already existed that criminalised FGM and forced marriage; for example, the offences of assault, rape and false imprisonment. Yet, government wisely saw that a more specific law was needed. In this case there are no laws criminalising accusations of demonic possession or evil powers in a child, so again a more specific law is needed.

My noble friend suggested in the last debate and in her letter that there were laws that could be used to prosecute those making allegations. She agrees that the main law on offences of child cruelty under Section 1 of the Children and Young Persons Act 1933 does not cover people who are not parents or acting in loco parentis, such as pastors or relatives. She proposed, however, that the Public Order Act, Protection from Harassment Act or the Serious Crime Act might be used against these people instead.

Unfortunately, this is wishful thinking. In practice no prosecutor would agree to a wholly speculative prosecution under these provisions against someone—for example, a pastor—who has alleged that a child is possessed or is supernaturally evil. For a start, if the pastor was told that he had perpetrated child abuse he could quite reasonably reply, “Says who?”. Government guidance on this issue addresses abuse arising as a result of an allegation of spirit possession, not the allegation itself.

More importantly, under all the provisions cited by my noble friend Lady Northover, the child would be required to give evidence that he or she feared violence or was alarmed or distressed as a result of the allegation. This is precisely the scenario this amendment seeks to avoid. The whole point is to protect children from the trauma of knowing that they are believed to be possessed by a devil or are supernaturally evil. If this amendment was adopted it would be possible to charge the accuser without involving the child at any point. I think that is highly desirable.

As importantly, the purpose of this amendment is prevention—preventing both the allegations and any subsequent abuse. None of the laws cited can have that effect because they do not specify the offence.

The Minister and others such as the noble Baroness, Lady Howarth of Breckland, have made reference to projects and working parties on child safety and spirit possession in which most of the participants were of the view that changes in the law were unnecessary. However, these views were based on a misapprehension of the law. No one picked up on the fact that neither the Children Act in civil law nor Section 1 in criminal law covers third parties, so the participants were told that a law was not necessary because, “This is already emotional abuse under child abuse laws”. That is wrong. In any event, the focus was on the abuse that followed from the allegation, not the allegation itself.

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[Baroness Northover]

My Lords, I too thank my noble friend Lady Walmsley for continuing to press the case with regard to these children, even if there are differences of view between us as to how this is best tackled. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Howarth, for her helpful contribution in Committee in bringing to our attention the Trust for London report on the issue, and she has contributed again from her wide and deep experience. I also thank my noble friend Lady Benjamin for her contribution.

Since this amendment was debated in Committee, my noble friend Lady Walmsley has in correspondence helpfully explained in detail some of the issues that concern her. I hope that I have been able to put her mind at ease on some, if not all, of them and I am grateful to her for the opportunity to explain the position. We share her commitment to safeguarding children from this and all other forms of abuse. A belief system can never justify the abuse of a child. We need to ensure that children are not subjected to abuse, or left vulnerable to potential abuse, because someone alleges that the child is possessed.

The Government believe that the current law is sufficient for this purpose: it provides adequate protection to children from the type of abuse that this amendment is trying to prevent. I will come to that in more detail in a moment. I set out much of the legislative framework during our debate in Committee. I shall not repeat those details again, but I reiterate that while the existing legislation does not specifically mention communication of a belief that a child is possessed by spirits, the current offence of child cruelty already captures conduct likely to cause a child unnecessary suffering or injury to health. Where the conduct could not be covered by the offence of child cruelty, it could be caught by other criminal offences, depending on the circumstances of the case.

I hope that my noble friend Lady Walmsley will be pleased that since Committee, to get further clarity on the guidance, officials discussed the issues around witch branding with the Crown Prosecution Service, which makes any decision on whether a prosecution should be pursued. The CPS was able to provide a copy of guidance for prosecutors that the service produced some time ago. That guidance, a copy of which I have sent to my noble friend, illustrates the legislation and offences that could be considered in different circumstances. We believe that it covered all situations where a child might face potential harm, including those where the perpetrators of potential harm are third parties, such as rogue pastors.

Our approach needs to ensure that the scope of the current legislation is better understood to enable it to work as it should. To do this we must raise awareness among the relevant communities and faith groups. We must provide support and guidance to practitioners to help them understand what behaviours could constitute a criminal offence. Department officials are working with the National Working Group on Abuse Linked to Faith or Belief, and will be discussing with it further how best to disseminate information on this issue to the relevant communities and groups. We understand that some members of the working group are also considering revising the 2007 guidance on this issue and we are grateful to the group members for this. They are the experts, and they have the links to the relevant communities. We are happy to support the development of the new guidance.

When bringing the CPS guidance to the attention of group members, officials took the opportunity to address any potential misunderstanding about which people are covered by some of the legislation. Some members of the working group felt that there had been confusion about whether the 1933 Act could apply to anyone other than parents or those in a parental role, as my noble friend Lady Walmsley said. Officials have now made it clear that while third parties, such as rogue pastors, could not be prosecuted under the 1933 Act, they are covered by other legislation, as set out in the CPS guidance.

Any person whose words or behaviour cause severe alarm and distress to a child could be prosecuted for an offence under Sections 4 or 4A of the Public Order Act 1986. There are other elements. Those responsible can extend beyond those with parental responsibility. For example, they can include babysitters or teachers while they have care of the child.

My noble friend Lady Walmsley will be extremely familiar with Blackstone’s Statutes on Criminal Law because it probably accompanies her noble husband everywhere. It covers this in B2.136 on page 283 on child cruelty. It states that other persons such as babysitters or teachers may also have a responsibility while a child or young person is their care. It is covered. I hope that my noble friend is reassured by that. I am sure that she will agree that, as pointed out by the noble Baroness, Lady Howarth, it is culture that needs to change. We need to tackle that, and schools can play an important role in protecting children from a range of risks. We are working with other government departments and representatives of head and teacher unions to develop processes to raise awareness among staff and pupils of safeguarding risks such as these. Of course, there is a range of other areas in which we are working to try to tackle this. I hope that my noble friend is sufficiently reassured and will withdraw her amendment.

[Baroness Walmsley]

I thank the Minister for her reply and other noble Lords who have spoken in this debate. I am quite unapologetic about bringing this back again because we have made some progress. We have now had clarification on two points: first, that telling a child that it is possessed by evil spirits is child abuse and, secondly, that this range of laws can apply not just to people with parental responsibility but to others as well. I have some reservations because, accepting that this is quite a small, albeit serious and important, problem, nobody has ever been charged with any of the offences in the long list that my noble friend attached to her letter. These offences could possibly be used, but they have not been.

I of course support all the work being done in the community and absolutely agree that a cultural change is required, but it was an important group of people from the community who came to me and asked me to table this amendment and get this debate for a second time because they feel that it is very important to clarify in law that you should not even tell a child that they are possessed, let alone do anything physical about it. That is what people from the community itself believe.

It is quite clear that I have not persuaded my noble friend, but I thank her because we have had made some progress and cleared up a few issues along the way. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 57 withdrawn.