Child Houses for Child Victims of Sexual Abuse

Lord Carlile of Berriew Excerpts

Tuesday 9th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

I am grateful to my noble friend for her question. She will know that the Government have accepted—certainly from the Home Office’s perspective—the recommendations of the report on child sexual abuse from IICSA. Some recommendations have been mirrored by the recent report on grooming gangs by the noble Baroness, Lady Casey. One recommendation is that we do exactly what my noble friend has said. As part of our response, we are including an ambitious proposal for therapeutic support, and we are going to work across government to look at how we can future-fund support services to enable victims and survivors to access and receive better care and support. In doing so, we have in this year doubled the support funding for adult victims and survivors of child sexual abuse to a total of £2.59 million.

[Lord Carlile of Berriew (CB)]

I welcome the Minister’s excellent Answer to the Question from the noble Baroness, but will he go a step further and tell us that the Home Office will use the Lighthouse project as the template around the country, given that it is cheaper than existing less specialist sexual abuse services, helps children recover more quickly from terrible trauma and enables quality court decisions to be made when necessary?

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

I am grateful to the noble Lord for that point. As I said in my initial Answer to the Question, we have recognised the great importance and success rate of the Lighthouse model. As part of the response to the recommendations from IICSA, we are looking at how we can roll that out. That is a cross-government issue with other government departments as well as the Home Office, but we are intent on ensuring that we have an ambitious proposal for therapeutic support, and that model is certainly one we are looking to roll out still further.