Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Lord Young of Cookham Excerpts

Tuesday 17th June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hampton (CB)]

My Lords, I added my name to Amendment 165. In the spirit of brevity pioneered by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, I also support Amendment 118 in his name and Amendment 144 in the names of the noble Lords, Lord Watson of Invergowrie and Lord Russell of Liverpool. As a teacher, I can only quote the noble Baroness, Lady Sanderson of Welton: they are so sensible that you are surprised they are not law already.

[Lord Young of Cookham (Con)]

My Lords, I added my name to those of the noble Lords, Lord Russell and Lord Hampton, on Amendment 165. It replicates an amendment tabled in the other place that got strong support. The background is that, sadly, more and more homeless people are being accepted under the homelessness legislation and placed in temporary accommodation. By the nature of that legislation, most of those people are families and they will have children. A child in temporary accommodation is obviously in a less advantageous position than a child coming from a stable background. So we need to do all we can to make sure that child gets access to the services that he or she is entitled to before—hopefully, not after too long—they are placed in suitable long-term accommodation.

The amendment simply requires the local authority to notify the GP and the school of the child’s circumstances. As my noble friend Lady Sanderson said, this should be good practice and Manchester does it. If I were the head of a primary school, I would want to know which of my pupils were in temporary accommodation. If I were a GP, I would also want to know which of my child patients were in temporary accommodation. A GP is meant to treat the patient as well as the illness. There are real risks of a child being off-rolled by a school because the head simply did not know that they were in temporary accommodation, they had decided to stay at the same school from which they were moved and the bus just takes longer to get there. Likewise, if they are not registered with a GP, they may miss out on prescriptions and all the other universal services that they are entitled to. So this simply seeks the establishment, as the noble Lord, Lord Russell, said, of a formal notification protocol.

After the debate—again, the noble Lord, Lord Russell, referred to this—there was a meeting with the Ministers concerned. Looking at the record of that meeting, it does not seem to me that there were any game-changers that meant that this could not happen. Yes, there are some technical issues that need addressing—perhaps some change to the technology used by local authorities so that these things are done automatically rather than manually, as is the case at the moment—but given that the title of the Bill includes the words “Children’s Wellbeing”, it seems to me that this is something the Minister could smile on and perhaps agree to, with, if necessary, changes on Report.