Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Debate between Damian Hinds and Helen Hayes

Monday 17th March 2025 Commons Chamber

[Damian Hinds]

My right hon. Friend and near constituency neighbour makes a very important point, and I am sure she is running a very effective campaign. We look to the Government to come forward with what we know will be a large and broad special educational needs reform package. We do not yet know what will be in it or what the implications will be. Of course, we want all children to be wherever is right for them. For some children, that means being educated in a mainstream setting where they can benefit from that. However, we also know that for some children, it is right to be in special school. Having the full range of provision is therefore incredibly important.

There is a great deal in this Bill that I could speak about, and which we did speak about in Committee. However, in pursuit of brevity—as I know you would wish, Madam Deputy Speaker—I am going to limit myself today to talking about two aspects: one thing that is in the Bill, and another that is conspicuous by its absence. The thing that is in the Bill is a peculiar thing to raise on the Floor of the House of Commons, because it is something with which I have not yet heard anybody disagree, and on which there is no amendment to speak to —although, to remain orderly, Madam Deputy Speaker, I can speak with reference to Government amendment 114, which is right next to it in the legislation.

I speak neither in favour nor against the principle of what I am about to cover, but raise it for what is, I think, an important reason. In this House, it is sometimes precisely with measures on which there is no disagreement that the greatest dangers lie, because this House, with its oppositional layout, thrives on people finding holes in what is being proposed and objecting to them; when everybody is saying the same kind of thing, there is a real danger that things will get through without the proper attention.

I have not yet said what I am referring to, have I? I am referring to the provisions on unique identifiers. A couple of speakers have already mentioned the importance of these measures. The hon. Member for Hitchin (Alistair Strathern) was talking about a number of almost invariably serious case reviews identifying the problems that have occurred. A lot of that centres around the lack of proper data sharing, where different agencies both knew the same child, but did not join together what they knew about that child in order to be able to act in their best interest. Having what is, in the systems world, called an “index term”—a terrible way to refer to a child—or a unique identifier for every child, so that everybody knows when they are talking about the same child, is very important. The Chair of the Education Committee, the hon. Member for Dulwich and West Norwood (Helen Hayes) spoke about the potential for this area to be genuinely transformational— I think that was the phrase she used. All of that is true.

Clause 4 allows for the creation of a single unique identifier for children and introduces new duties around data sharing. Here is my worry: sometimes when we legislate, something passes through without too much debate, and then, two or three years later, all sorts of other things start happening, and when we query why they are happening, people say, “Well, you lot voted for this. You passed a law about it. Perhaps these are some of the consequences.” I think something along those lines might have happened with GDPR, for example, and some of the things that we now see coming through on rules around children’s social media use and ages.

The creation of the single unique identifier is a massive change in the way we keep records on people in this country. With the potential to join up different databases, there are great positive implications for things like child safety, but there are other implications around privacy, data security and so on. It has been suggested that the NHS number would be the unique identifier used for each child, which, at first glance, seems an obvious and sensible thing to do. As a former Minister in the Department for Work and Pensions, Madam Deputy Speaker, you will know that in the past, various projects have proposed using the national insurance number as a unique identifier for adults, which, at the time, also seemed like a sensible and clever thing to do. However, when it was prodded further, it turned out that the national insurance number database is not perfect, and I am afraid the NHS number database may not be, either—it just was not designed for this kind of purpose.

We are obviously not going to have a big debate on this issue today, although they may do in the other place when they talk about the Bill. However, over time, I think we will have to unpack what this whole new system may imply. For a start, is it talking about using the existing NHS database and the index term—the unique identifier for individuals—or is it talking about taking those numbers and putting them into a new database or system, which would have significant cost and time implications? If it is using the current NHS database, we need to think about the implications.

There has been a different debate going on about AI and the use of large amounts of data for academic research. What would be the implications of having this huge database with every child in the country potentially linked to all sorts of other databases, with details about them, for that kind of research? How secure would the system be? We can probably safely say that the system would not give the same number to two different children, but I am not 100% certain that we could say with total confidence that the same one child could not, at different times in their life, have different numbers, particularly with immigration and re-immigration, change in family structures and so on. What would that mean for the system?

More broadly, though, once we had this unique identifier and a national database of this sort, we could use it for quite a few things other than child protection. Some of those things might be considered by many of us in this House to be pro-social things that are worth pursuing. We have been having debates about age verification and the use of electronic devices and social media, for example; such a database would probably be the most reliable identity system for under-18s.

What about after age 18? If children have grown up with this database and with a number and identifier attached to them, that would not disappear just because they pass the age of majority. In theory, they could carry on having a linked database that potentially links up child protection sources, NHS sources, police national computer and so on—who knows what else could be joined up. We might then find that we have a system of national identity cards without having sought that in the first place.

[Helen Hayes]

The right hon. Gentleman is raising a number of technical considerations about the implementation of a project that is no doubt very ambitious. But does he not hear the cries from parents of children with SEND who are so weary of having to tell their story again and again to different parts of the system that are supposed to help them, and are currently being hampered in those efforts by exactly this want for information about a child being held in a single place? Does he not think that, ambitious though this project is, and important though the technical considerations are, it is worth delivering, and that it is worth giving parents the confidence that we in this House will scrutinise it and do that job? There are big gains to be had from pursuing this course of action.

[Damian Hinds]

I think the hon. Lady was here for the first two or three minutes of my speech—that is broadly what I said. In fact, I quoted her talking about the transformational potential of this measure and its importance. I do not want to go through it all again, but I said that when we all agree on something, there is sometimes a danger of unintended consequences. I then said that we may not talk about all this today—we do not have to do so today—but I think the Government will probably have to come back multiple times for Parliament to be able to consider all the much wider potential implications of creating such a database. I think, not for the first time in our in our lives, we are not a million miles away from one another.

The other thing that I want to talk about, in a less consensual tone, is what is glaring in its absence from the Bill: new clause 36 on mobile phones and social media, tabled by my right hon. Friend the Member for Sevenoaks (Laura Trott). There are four parts to it: the first two state that the chief medical officer should be commissioned to issue a report, and the Government will conduct research on the effects of social media on children and young people. That was in the Bill introduced by the hon. Member for Whitehaven and Workington (Josh MacAlister), which we discussed a couple of Fridays ago.

The third thing was in the wider package, as colleagues will remember, but the Government did not agree to it: a phone ban during the school day. That is point of contention, although I know that many hon. Members across the House, including in the Labour party, agree on it. There are limits to the approach. An argument that is always made when asking, “Why not ban mobile phones at school?” is, “What about out of school?” That is a good question, but it is not a reason not to do the first part. I readily admit that most online harm happens outside school. We know from research, including the recent study from the University of Birmingham, that a school ban does not necessarily reduce the total amount of time that young people spend online—it just displaces some of it. That does not necessarily improve things such as sleep, which is a big worry for teenagers, nor does it address wider issues of attention span, eyesight and so on.

Rules are still important, for the sake of both children and schools, but three things in recent years have changed the context for behaviour in schools. The first is a set of things that happened around covid—a sort of attitude shift that seems to have happened to a large extent throughout society. The other two things are vapes and phones. Of course, there is a universal ban on vapes at school. That does not mean that they never get through, but pupils are not allowed to vape in any state secondary school in this country. Phones are the other thing. We know—I say that because it applies to us as well—that if we have a phone in our pocket, even if we are not looking at the screen in front of us, it is still something of a distraction, because it could buzz at any time. In fact, we might be wondering if it will buzz when someone replies or comments on a post or whatever it might be.

The school day in its entirety should be devoted to school. That means not just lessons and learning things, although that is the primary aim, but being a child or young person, being with friends and growing up without those distractions.