Children in Care

Lord Howarth of Newport Excerpts

Thursday 30th April 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Berridge]

My Lords, Transforming Care activity oversees such situations to ensure that there are not unnecessary in-patient admissions and that quality of experience while people are in-patients is maintained, subject of course to safety and the need to self-isolate. The chief executive of NHS England wrote to NHS trusts yesterday to say that care and treatment reviews should carry on and should be on a digital platform. I shall write to the noble Baroness regarding her request for statistics.

[Lord Howarth of Newport (Lab)]

My Lords, aside from the recklessness of deregulating the children’s care sector at a time when need is sharply rising, is it not a constitutional abuse for the Government to have used the emergency coronavirus legislation to make a major and highly controversial policy change of a nature which was previously explicitly rejected by Parliament in 2017 and to do so by way of statutory instrument without proper consultation—as my noble friend Lady Massey said; I understand that the Children’s Commissioner for England, with her statutory responsibilities, was informed but not consulted—and without parliamentary scrutiny?

[Baroness Berridge]

My Lords, I can assure noble Lords that this is a minimal change to the procedural requirements in relation to children’s social care. The Coronavirus Act has not been used in this regard; we did not take powers under that Act because it was clear that the secondary legislation could be amended to ensure that there was limited use of the extensive powers granted by Parliament in the emergency legislation. The legislation is under review. The regulations will fall on 25 September if they are not renewed by Parliament. There is scrutiny in the Commons as well as in the Lords in relation to the new regulations.