Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment he has made of the adequacy of the capacity of the NHS to contribute to the provisions for Multi Agency Child Protection Teams in the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill.

The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, introduced in Parliament on 17 December, will protect children at risk of abuse, by stopping vulnerable children from falling through the cracks in services. The bill will place a duty on local safeguarding partners to establish multi-agency child protection teams (MACPTs), aimed at strengthening the multi-agency child protection response to all types of harm. These teams will have a minimum membership, nominated by safeguarding partners, of a social worker, a police officer, a registered health practitioner, and a person with experience of education.

MACPTs have been embedded in 10 local areas through the Families First for Children Pathfinders programme. Based on the learning from these pathfinders, the teams are being rolled out nationally through the Families First Partnership (FFP) programme, launched in April 2025. The FFP programme guide enables flexibility in the composition of MACPTs, which are designed according to local need.

NHS England is supporting and learning from the nine integrated care boards (ICBs) currently working with the Families First for Children Pathfinders programme, which includes MACPTs. The national safeguarding leads are collaborating with the Department for Education and the Department of Health and Social Care to profile how ICBs might implement MACPTs alongside local statutory partners, using Section 75 collaborative funding arrangements in order to optimise the Spending Review budget for the national rollout of the Families First Partnership programme and MACPTs.