Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Siobhain McDonagh Excerpts

Monday 17th March 2025 Commons Chamber

[Damian Hinds]

The hon. Member makes a powerful point very effectively. There will always be arguments about needing exceptions for this case and that, but we can have exceptions, and school headteachers are pretty good at knowing when they need to make an exception to a rule.

It would be helpful to have a national policy in this area. That would not preclude exceptions for children with a special educational need or young carers. Crucially, it would also not preclude children from having a phone as they go to and from school, where the school and the parents want that. Parents often think about that, for safety reasons. There are various ways of dealing with this, such as the pouches that the hon. Member mentioned, or lockers.

I have noticed a shift. A couple of years ago, some people argued against a ban on principle. Now, the only real argument that I hear—I do not say that this is a trivial point—is about the big cost of buying pouches or lockers. If that is what we are arguing about, that is material progress. It is time for us to stop talking about whether, and to start talking about how.

[Dame Siobhain McDonagh (Mitcham and Morden) (Lab)]

Madam Deputy Speaker, may I, through you, wish all Members of the House a very happy St Patrick’s day? I rise to speak on new clause 14. What it proposes is not brain surgery, and it is not new or exciting, but it is an essential part of how we approach the enormous problem of children living in temporary accommodation miles away from their home, their home borough, their school and their doctor.

The hon. Member for Harborough, Oadby and Wigston (Neil O’Brien), who spoke for the Opposition, said that he thought we would look back at the issue of mobile phones in schools and think, “What were we thinking to allow that to happen?”. We should already be thinking, “How did we come to have tens of thousands of children in temporary accommodation, which is almost exclusively in a terrible state of repair, miles away from anybody who is watching them?”.

Many of the families we are talking about are not just homeless, but are the most vulnerable in our community. They include children with special needs, and children and families who experience great difficulty in their day-to-day lives. There are those who have disrupted families, those who move frequently, and those who just find things difficult. As of right now, there are 164,040 children living in temporary accommodation. On average, 54 children from homeless families are placed in temporary accommodation every day.

In London, the area that I understand best, one in every 21 children is living in temporary accommodation—that is at least one in every school class. In schools in central London, 50% or 60% of children could be living in temporary accommodation. That was certainly the case for Harris Peckham. Last year, an article in The Sunday Times identified it as having 60% of its children in temporary accommodation. That school, like all schools in the Harris Federation, tries to do its best for those large numbers. It has set up a drop-in centre in the school, to allow parents to take their children to school, spend the day in school, and go home with their children in the evening.

We constituency MPs probably understand a lot more clearly than most in our communities the impact of what is going on. In Merton, we have just under 700 families in temporary accommodation. That is probably the lowest number in London, but to me it is an extraordinary number that I worry about every day, every night, and at every advice surgery. Some 80% of those families are placed outside the borough. When they are placed somewhere outside the borough, the council is required to place only two notifications: one with the receiving borough and one with the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government—it does not have to inform the schools or the GP—and nothing happens, so all these boroughs are taking on families that they know nothing of.

Families often do not want their GP to know that they have moved, because they worry about being removed from their list. They worry that that would mean their children being removed from the children and adolescent mental health services list, which we know can be as long as 12 months, being removed from operation lists at local general hospitals, and generally being displaced along with being misplaced in accommodation. This also means—we probably consider this far less—that the health visitor does not know that a family with young children has moved into the area.

I have a great friend, Debbie Fawcett, a Queen’s nurse who is the homelessness health visitor to families in Merton. Part of her job is to regularly go to hostels, converted warehouses and converted office blocks in and around my constituency to find out where these children are. She gets no notifications; she simply walks round the blocks and gets the families she already knows to be her spies, in order to find out if families are moving in. She has been known to run into flats after delivery drivers to see if she could find a baby. These families are often placed in accommodation that is so small that the children cannot learn to walk. They are displaced from the support of grandparents, churches and other community groups. They desperately need Debbie’s help, but she does not know they are there.