Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd February 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords, I will make a few comments on this group of amendments. On Amendment 230, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Addington, I have great sympathy with what he says, and I hope that it may be an issue that the Minister will address when the SEND reform plans are presented in due course.

I understand the intention behind Amendment 198 and have a lot of sympathy with it. I can think of lots of schools that have been put in quite difficult positions and lots of children who have not had a good deal having being allocated to a particular school. The problem here—something that was not addressed by the noble Baroness, Lady Barran—is that, on the whole, schools are not queuing up to take the most challenging children. They might want to do their best by them and believe that that is their job, but, with the accountability mechanisms the way they are, it tilts the balance away from schools taking children who offer particular challenges.

If you put in legislation a whole set of reasons to say no to a given child, that does not make the child or the family feel very good, and you would have to work hard to make sure that it was for a valid reason and not an invalid reason. My approach would sooner be that you put support in and make the SEND system work. I am an optimist. I do not think we have to give protection to some schools from taking challenging children. I think we have got it in us to adjust the policy framework, go in there and help them succeed. That would be serving every child and not discriminating against them.

My main comments relate to Amendment 199. We semi-rehearsed this in Committee, so I will not go over that again. I would never support a situation where a school that was unlikely to succeed had more children allocated to it at the expense of a school that was doing well. If that was the only decision, I would probably end up supporting the amendment, but it is much more complicated than that.

There is a bit of a conundrum at the heart of this, and it goes to what the noble Lord, Lord Hampton, said. I agree with parental choice but I do not agree with the market in schools, and there is a difference between the two. Parental choice is right and good and desirable, and we should write the law to facilitate it whenever we can. In a market, however, you do not intervene; you let things fail. They wither away on the vine, and that takes time, and then they fail and then close, and that leaves a gap. Look at the high streets in some of our small towns and cities—we cannot have that for schools. We cannot have a schools policy that has in it an acceptance that some schools will wither on the vine and fail. It is not good for the children who are there. I know that the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, when she was a Minister, and her colleague, the noble Lord, Lord Nash, would have gone into such schools to intervene and try to make them improve. That is why I have never used the term “market” in relation to schools: parental choice yes, but market, no. Somehow, that is at the core of my concerns about this amendment.

There are two issues. If it was about not wanting to go to the surplus places, I would agree with the noble Baroness. If there are more children, let us try to put them in the schools that are flourishing. But if it is a situation where the number of students on a roll in a given geographical area is falling, something has to happen. If you can merge them together, that is great, but you can get the difficult situation where you have to do something else. That is where I would manage parental choice and whatever market there is. I worry that if we say that their numbers cannot fall but their numbers can fall, all we do is make it more difficult for every school to thrive and succeed.

A school that is just turning that corner, as the noble Baroness on the Opposition Front Bench described, that has been taken over by a good academy, got itself a new head and perhaps has a new housing estate nearby is on its way. It would fall under this because it does not have a good Ofsted inspection or anything like that.

If we look at Camden, 96% to 100% of schools are good or outstanding. I do not know, but I suspect that Camden is going to have falling rolls at some point because it is a London borough. This would give protection to every school in Camden because none of them is failing. Most of them are maintained schools, not academies, but it does not matter as they are all doing a good job. This clause would not work there. The way that schools would read this is that there is now a law that if it has had a good inspection in the last three years, it is protected. If you tried to enact proposed new subsection (5D)(a) and (b), there would be an almighty row because schools would have been given protection by this clause.

I would sooner play to our optimism. Where schools really cannot succeed, let them go and manage a good education for the pupils, but in cases of falling rolls we have to do everything we can to plan appropriately across a geographical area to make sure that we give every school the best possible chance of doing well.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, and largely to agree, although I would go somewhat further and say that I think we have reached the situation of a market in schools in which very crude judgments are being applied by Ofsted, and schools are being pushed to game the system. That is why I signed Amendment 230 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Addington, and why the Green group will oppose Amendment 199 should it come to a vote.

The noble Lord, Lord Addington, was charitable when he said that there is a strong suspicion that off-rolling is going on. I am afraid I have no doubt that off-rolling is going on because up and down England, particularly in some of the most deprived communities, I have spoken to parents, often parents from very disadvantaged backgrounds themselves, who have said, “I’m trying to home-school my child now because the head teacher said they thought that was the best thing that could happen”. That was not home schooling by choice. That was usually pupils with special educational needs that the school just did not want to deal with. I have some sympathy with head teachers. Having been a school governor, I know how much pressure head teachers are under to keep up with the results. The problem is that we have created a competitive system where schools compete against each other instead of working together to create the best result for every pupil.

Amendment 230 is very modest. It simply calls for a review. I can tell my anecdotal stories, but I cannot say how big the problem is. I have seen it in many places, and I am sure that it is quite widespread. I do not believe the noble Lord intends to put this to a vote, but surely we can ask the Government to look at this anyway. As other noble Lords have said, it is something we should know about because this is one way in which we are failing some of our most disadvantaged pupils. Amendment 199, if it were to be passed, just furthers that sense of competition, which is the last thing we need in our schooling system.

[Baroness Spielman (Con)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 198 and will touch on Amendment 230 from the noble Lord, Lord Addington. Listening to noble Lords around the House, I find it surprising that they consistently believe that inspection, for which I was responsible for seven years, does not place a heavy emphasis on inclusion. Certainly throughout my time it did. The current framework has increased that focus almost to the point of giving up on looking at education, for which one learning walk and the results are about the extent of the coverage. Inclusion is and has long been taken extraordinarily seriously.

There are two issues that I want to touch on. The first is that however much we might want to believe that every child’s special needs can be coped with, there are times when those special needs consist of problems that inflict real harm on other children. The most awful parental complaints that came across my desk were about children who had been seriously assaulted and harmed, on occasion raped, by another child who had been admitted by a school either conscientiously trying to include a child for whom the local authority was desperate to find a place or that had been directed to take a child. That is agonising to learn about. We have to acknowledge that the interests of other children need to be considered when placing the most difficult children. That is important for children most of all but, of course, it is important for staff as well. If people are trying to work outside their capacity, schools tend to deteriorate, and that is not good for anybody.

Linked to that, I want to make a point about off-rolling, which has been touched on. In my time we put more of an emphasis on looking for signs and pursuing that—inquiring into it—where we found it. One of the things we discovered is that it is extraordinarily hard to characterise definitively whether an individual case is a case of off-rolling. There is typically quite a long history, a deterioration of the relationship between the child and the school. It is not a clean and tidy yes or no. Getting to a point where you could definitively say what the extent was would be extremely labour-intensive. The issue, in my view, is not a lack of regulation to prevent this—inspection is perfectly capable of disincentivising it—but we have to acknowledge that it needs a lot of resource that simply does not exist in Ofsted or anywhere else to dig into individual cases and establish the extent and the remedies.

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[Lord Norton of Louth (Con)]

My Lords, I reinforce what has just been said and endorse what the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, said. He and I have made common cause on this for some time.

I shall be extremely brief, because I want to make just one point. It is not so much about the substance of the amendment but why, as has just been said, it is essential that we take citizenship teaching seriously in this country. It is crucial because, at the moment, there is a problem with public trust in government and in Parliament. It is slow and declining and, unless we do something about it, we are going to be in real trouble. We need to invest resources into the teaching of citizenship. That means making sure that schools take it seriously and have the incentive to do so. It is no good just saying it is in the curriculum. Schools have to realise, “We have to teach this, we’ve got the incentive to do it and we have the resources”. It cannot just be left to any teacher on a wet Wednesday afternoon to teach citizenship. It is crucial and has to be taken seriously. I regard this amendment as absolutely key to British democracy.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I entirely agree with the noble Lord, Lord Norton, except that I do not believe that we can put all the pressure on schools, which have so many other pressures on them.

[Lord Norton of Louth (Con)]

I totally agree. I should have said that I regard this as necessary but not sufficient.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

Schools have faced so many other pressures with exams, results and Ofsted judgments, that saying “And you’ve got to shove citizenship in here, but you’re not really going to get rewarded for it” is not going to work. The direction has to come from the centre.

It is interesting that this group of amendments has been so rich and apparently so varied. Actually, what it does is talk about education that prepares students for life, not just for exams or jobs but to be citizens, members of communities, neighbours and possibly parents, and it prepares them to have healthy bodies while they are doing that. That is the only point I will make on the amendment from the noble Baroness, Lady Sater, who made her point powerfully. Physical education has been totally downgraded, and that has to stop and be reversed.

In responding, I have to start with the suggestion from the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, that respect for the environment was “twaddle”. I looked it up in the dictionary. Among the definitions were “trivial” and “foolish”. I am assuming that the noble Baroness understands that she had to breathe to be able to deliver that speech. That relies on plants, algae and cyanobacteria to generate the oxygen to allow her to breathe. So that label is obviously incorrect. I will leave that there.

I turn to Amendment 220, which the proposer, the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, has not yet introduced. Schools do need practical and lawful guidance, but forcing the Government to bring that guidance in on the day that the Bill becomes an Act will inhibit schools’ ability. The guidance was always intended to be non-statutory, including when it was first published in draft by the previous Government. I acknowledge that we have not yet heard from the noble Baroness, but I do not think that, in Committee, we heard any explanation of why the guidance needs to be statutory.

I will speak very briefly on the two amendments that I actually signed. Amendment 208 has been very ably spoken to by others; I am just going to make one additional point. This is about providing relationship and sex education to persons of 16 and 17 in education. Your Lordships’ House chose to call for a ban on social media for under-16s. We do not know where that will end up, but, if the ban comes in and, assuming it works, young people at 16 start accessing a whole range of previously banned material, surely, they will need the help of education and support to be able to work through, process, understand and think about that. So we should think about how those two things fit together.

The other thing is that the noble Baroness, Lady Burt, knows that I have backed her Private Member’s Bill at least twice previously. She introduced it very clearly. The one thing I will add is that, in terms of education for life, we ask schools to create more space in school time in particular for cultural and social education, but where are they going to find the time? That assembly time could be a really useful time and, if that is preparing people for life—developing cultural interests, developing artistic interests, developing a love of the theatre or a love of music, all things that help people prepare for a rich and satisfying life—that is what we need our schools to be doing much more of.

[Baroness Evans of Bowes Park (Con)]

My Lords, I shall very briefly add my support to Amendment 243C and, in doing so, declare my interest as a member of the board of the London Marathon Foundation. As we have heard, schools play a crucial role in the formation of lifelong activity habits, but they need to be properly supported, both to provide more opportunities within school and to ensure that what they offer meets the needs of the various interests of young people and children, to make sure that they fully engage with physical education. A national strategy would give schools the structure they need to guarantee consistently high-quality physical education, as well as help them build partnerships with community sports organisations, creating pathways that link school-based activity with accessible opportunities outside school.

In its recent submission to the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee’s inquiry into community and school sport, London Marathon stressed the pressing need for national and local government, schools, governing bodies and charitable and commercial organisations to align behind tangible shared objectives to get children and young people active and, most importantly, keep them active. By mandating the publication of a national strategy for physical education and sports in schools, this amendment will be an important step to delivering just that.

Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd February 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Freyberg (CB)]

My Lords, Amendment 209 goes to the heart of what families rightly expect schools to do: keep children safe. This is not a novel or radical proposal. It responds to a long-standing and well-evidenced failure of the current system. For too long we have relied on guidance and good will, yet allergy safety in schools remains inconsistent and, in some cases, dangerously inadequate. This amendment matters because it moves us from aspiration to assurance.

Children continue to experience severe allergic reactions at school. Some have died. Families live with the daily fear that a simple mistake—a contaminated surface, a misunderstanding, a delayed response—could be fatal. The tragic death of Benedict Blythe exposed not a single error but a systemic lack of preparedness. His family’s determination to prevent another such tragedy deserves our respect—and action. I also recognise the work of the National Allergy Strategy Group and its member organisations. Its position paper, produced with the Benedict Blythe Foundation, sets out in calm, forensic detail why voluntary guidance has failed.

Schools are under huge pressures, as we have heard, and without a statutory framework, allergy safety too often slips through the cracks. I understand that the Minister met the group yesterday, as we have heard, which is welcome, and I hope she will update the House on the outcome of that discussion and any assurances given.

I became involved in this issue for a simple reason: a neighbour’s child is afraid to eat in his own school canteen because of his allergy. When a child cannot safely eat at school, something is plainly wrong. That quiet daily anxiety is shared by thousands of families. Amendment 209 is proportionate and practical. Without legislation, we cannot guarantee consistent protection for all our children.

The four amendments in my name are probing. I seek reassurance on how the framework will work in practice. Amendment 210 addresses a well-known gap: external catering providers. Compliance with allergen labelling law does not in itself create a safe school environment. Unless a school’s allergy policy clearly applies to caterers and is reflected contractually, responsibility becomes blurred and children are put at risk. There must be no opportunity for third parties to argue that the school’s policy does not apply to them.

Amendment 212 extends that principle to other external providers. Schools, as we know, are busy places and well-meaning third parties can inadvertently introduce serious risk if they are not bound by the same policy. I have heard of a case where a third-party supplier brought a box of sweets into school as a gift, entirely unaware of the danger this posed.

Finally, Amendments 213 and 214 raise a practical question about costs and responsibility. Who should fund adrenaline auto-injectors, and how should supply and replacement be organised? An approach that relies on individual schools risks duplication, inconsistency and waste, particularly where children already receive these devices from the NHS. The same question arises in relation to training to use them. If the provisions in Amendment 209 become mandatory, responsibility for funding and facilitating proper training must be equally clear.

We have done this before. As the noble Baroness has said, the Government funded defibrillators in all schools, because the case was compelling and the cost proportionate. The same logic applies here. I hope the Minister will address these points directly, but, if the drafting of Amendment 209 is not quite right, I urge the Government to bring forward their own amendments at Third Reading. What matters is not ownership but outcome. We must not miss this opportunity to put allergy safety in schools on a statutory footing and prevent further, avoidable tragedies. I beg to move.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I will speak briefly, having attached my name to Amendment 209, as the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan of Cotes, so powerfully introduced. I express my strongest possible support for Amendment 209 and commend the noble Lord, Lord Freyberg, for making important points in his amendments.

I will tell a little tale of how I got involved in this. Like most people involved in politics, I have encountered around the country parents who say that they are worried about allergies and their child at school. In my case, I was walking down a corridor of this House, past the dining rooms, and the Benedict Blythe Foundation was holding an event to highlight the issue. I was almost literally dragged in to meet Helen Blythe, who has such a tale of horror but a powerful voice to say that she does not want this to happen to any other parent’s child. That is a demonstration of where we have got to today: campaigning works and people can make a difference through their actions. I particularly want to record that.

The case has been powerfully made, and the noble Baroness, Lady Cotes, said that there may be further technical solutions to injector pens. We do not need to argue about that. It is about the idea that every school has these instruments, whatever they are, guaranteed to be in date because the law says they have to be, and has teachers and other staff confidently trained to be able to use them in a moment of crisis. That should be absolutely basic. There should never be any question that, when something goes wrong, people are asking, “What do we do?”, “Who knows?”, “Where do we find it?”, “Is the cupboard locked?” We all know that those kinds of things can happen, unless the rules are set down in black and white in legislation. That is why I very much hope we will hear positively from the Minister that the Government are prepared to put this in the Bill, whatever the fine detail, because a child’s life is so important.

[Baroness Ramsey of Wall Heath (Lab)]

My Lords, I support Amendment 209, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan of Cotes, to which I have added my name. I declare my interest as a parliamentary ambassador for the Natasha Allergy Research Foundation.

In doing so, I will not see my youngest daughter this evening, who is severely allergic to peanuts, because of the rather unusual hours that our House sits. I hope I will see her tomorrow evening, Chief Whip permitting, as she will be off to school in the morning very early—and, like the rest of us, I need to sleep sometimes. No doubt she will use this opportunity to ask me to explain, not for the first time, what exactly it is that we do in the House of Lords and why so much of it is done after dark. I very much hope that tomorrow, I will be able to give her the best of all possible answers.

I will remind her that, a few months ago, on 16 September to be exact, rather late that night, along with many other noble Lords who I see sitting here in the Chamber this evening, I was adding my voice in support of an amendment designed to keep children safe—children like her, in fact, who have the misfortune to suffer anaphylactic shock if they come into contact with a small piece of peanut or some other food, as she has twice, frighteningly, done. Along with others, and with the excellent support of the Natasha Allergy Research Foundation, Allergy UK, Anaphylaxis UK and the Benedict Blythe Foundation, I argued then that the Government should ensure that all schools have spare EpiPens available in case of such emergencies and that staff are trained in their use.

As the clock ticked towards midnight that night, my noble friend the Minister responded as follows:

“The measures to support children with allergies proposed in this amendment could be achieved without requiring primary legislation; we will consider how we might take them forward”.—[Official Report, 16/9/25; col. 2187.]


Tonight, I am hopeful that this is precisely what has happened, and that my noble friend the Minister will stand up and confirm that the Government will shortly be issuing statutory guidance setting out in detail how all schools will be required to properly protect children with allergies, and, in particular, that noble Lords will be assured that there will be statutory guidance requiring schools to have effective allergy policies in place, to have adrenaline devices such as auto-injectors available, and that staff will receive mandatory training on the use of adrenaline devices such as auto-injectors. In which case, I will be able to tell my daughter that these late nights can achieve remarkable things, and that it is precisely because of the way the House of Lords works that this has been achieved.

After all, we are talking about an amendment which has strong support across the House, led by the noble Baronesses, Lady Morgan and Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, and the noble Lord, Lord Freyberg. It is supported by my noble friend Lady Kennedy, among others, who has professional expertise in the subject, and has been encouraged by those impressive charities. To give due credit, we are talking about a Government who listen to the evidence and act accordingly, assuming that I have understood correctly what my noble friend the Minister will announce shortly.

I would still prefer to see my daughter in the evenings more often, but I am happy not having been able to do so on 16 September last year and this evening if the House acts to protect children at school with allergies. She will be happy too, and, in due course, so will thousands of parents and their children at risk of anaphylaxis. What an honour it is to be a Member of this House which can change lives so effectively.

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[Baroness Lister of Burtersett (Lab)]

My Lords, I will speak very briefly in support of Amendment 233, as I was not able to speak on it in Committee. I am supportive of the other amendments in this group too.

The Labour Party manifesto stated that

“nothing says more about the state of a nation than the wellbeing of its children”,

which is music to the ears of many of us. But if we are to know what the state of our nation is through the lens of children’s well-being, we need to measure that well-being nationally, comprehensively and regularly.

Many of us warmly welcomed the idea of a children’s well-being Bill but, when it emerged, were a bit disappointed that it did not have that much to say about children’s well-being explicitly. This amendment would help to put well-being explicitly at the heart of the Bill, with implications for both the main parts. I hope the Government will now look favourably on this modified version of the amendment.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I will speak very briefly. I strongly support Amendment 233, as I did in Committee, as well as the other amendments in this group. It is a great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, who reflected what many of us have been saying: the children’s well-being Bill has been short on well-being. Earlier—much earlier, yesterday now—we were talking about sport, culture, PSHE and citizenship education. But we need to see what does and does not work if we are going to deliver some of the changes that are clearly so urgently needed.

I will refer to one survey: the National Parent Survey 2025, conducted by Parentkind, which found that unhappiness among children doubles between primary and secondary school. The parents said that the chief reason that their children were unhappy was that they were finding lessons uninteresting: the figure was 42%, which really is telling.

I return to the Children’s Society’s Good Childhood Report 2025, already referred to, which of course was reporting on the opposite. One of its recommendations was:

“Introduce a national wellbeing measurement programme”.


It is just such an obvious thing for the Government to do.

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

My Lords, on these Benches, as is true across the House, of course we want our children to have the highest standards of mental health and well-being, and the data to support this, but, as in Committee, we do not support the specifics of these amendments.

On Amendment 233 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord O’Donnell, presented this morning by the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, we felt that the Minister’s response in Committee was a constructive way forward and substantially addressed the goals of the amendment, albeit perhaps not in the way that the signatories would prefer or advise. My reading of the Minister’s remarks was that the Government did commit to providing non-statutory guidance, including a standard set of questions and additional tools and resources to support implementation.

As in Committee, I am sympathetic to the gap in provision that Amendment 237 from the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, seeks to address: in particular, the postcode lottery that she highlighted in her remarks this morning. I also recognise that it expressly prescribes the provision of qualified practitioners and implicitly prescribes that any interventions have a sound evidence base. As my noble friend Lady Spielman pointed out in Committee, too many interventions have been used in schools in relation to both mental health and well-being, which Amendment 242 from the noble Lord, Lord Watson, addresses, which have been shown subsequently to have caused more harm than good. That is clearly something we need to avoid.

I return to the point I made in Committee and that we have heard fervently debated on Report, including today: the single most powerful thing this Government can do to restore the mental health, well-being and sense of belonging of our children would be to keep smartphones out of school and prevent access to social media for the under-16s. Teachers, parents and their children will not thank this Government for being slow to act.

Women’s State Pension Age Communication: PHSO Report

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Monday 2nd February 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

My Lords, tempting though it is, I will save my wider comments on the Pension Schemes Bill for tomorrow, when I look forward to seeing the noble Lord once again in Grand Committee. It has been a great delight in recent weeks and I look forward to having the pleasure of discussing these things again tomorrow.

In answer to his questions, the decision was not inevitable. The Secretary of State looked at the evidence, assessed it all carefully and made a decision. Having made that decision based on the evidence, he issued a statement and put his reasons for the decision in the decision document which has been placed in the Library of the House.

I have two further points. One is serious, in that I agree on the importance of people saving. The Government are pursuing the Pension Schemes Bill and all the measures in it to make sure people get proper returns on their money, to ensure people can save more. That is why we set up the Pensions Commission to look at questions of adequacy. Secondly, if the noble Lord’s Government had really wanted certainty on this matter, they could have made their decision at any point before the election—but they did not.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, following the previous question, I note that saving for a pension is extraordinarily difficult for so many people who are struggling to put food on the table and keep a roof over their head. It is really important not to preach to them about savings that they cannot possibly make.

I declare an interest in that I first met the WASPI women in 2015 and advised them on their first petition to Parliament. I am afraid I had to somewhat gently say that yes, they would get 100,000 signatures on that petition and Parliament would debate it, but it did not mean that the obvious sense of their argument would suddenly win. Politics does not work like that. So, here we are now in 2026.

My question to the Minister refers to one particular WASPI woman I met on the road outside here. She had quit her job at the age of 59 because her company was making redundancies. She thought she would get a pension very soon, so she left and took the redundancy so that younger people could keep their jobs. She then found that she would not get her pension for years. She ran out of the redundancy money and ended up on jobseeker’s allowance. She applied for job after job and did not get them. She had been an office manager for decades for a medium-sized enterprise. Then, the Department for Work and Pensions insisted that, to keep her jobseeker’s allowance, she must go on a CV-writing course and a whole lot of other really basic pieces of training. She felt utterly mistreated and abused.

I understand why the terminology in this Statement is the way that it is, and that the Government are talking in careful legalese, but as we have seen in reports today, the WASPI women are planning to fight on, and good on them. More than that, can the Minister understand how people who have been put through that ringer of a decade of poverty and struggle, and of being thoroughly disrespected by the system, would also like to hear words that acknowledge that?

Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Wednesday 28th January 2026 Lords Chamber

Just the other day, I received a letter from the Work and Pensions Secretary which, with reference to the baseline report, refers to the development of milestones. Could the Minister say more about this or, if not, perhaps report back to the House at Third Reading? A clear commitment to non-statutory targets and milestones at least would do much to strengthen the strategy’s credibility with stakeholders.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the powerful and important speech from the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, and the equally important speech from the noble Lord, Lord Bird. I signed the similar amendment in Committee, but I left a space on this one in the hope against hope that a party less likely than mine would have signed up to it and that a broader spread of support might have been shown—but that did not happen.

On the point the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, made about a yardstick, I was thinking—perhaps because I have been out campaigning on the doorstep this morning—about an additional argument that was not made in Committee or here: this would be of help to voters. A Government starts out and sets targets; then, as you get to the end of the Parliament and the next election, voters would have a clear sense of whether they had met their targets and done what they intended to achieve. It would also put great pressure on all parties competing in the next election to say, if they are elected to be the Government, what their child poverty reduction target will be. That would be useful, clear and obvious to voters.

We must acknowledge where we are now. We have already heard about child poverty, but must refer to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s analysis of the OBR figures, which says that the headline poverty rate between 2026 and 2029 will stay essentially the same. The poorest are getting poorer. The noble Baroness, Lady Lister, referred to the addition of deep poverty to this amendment: 6.8 million people across these islands are in deep poverty, the highest level on record. It has hardened—a technical term that I have just learned —as the average person in poverty is now 29% below the poverty line; that was 23% in the mid-1990s.

One of the obvious things that would address this target and make a big difference would be the abolition the overall benefit cap. I applaud the Government’s action on the two-child cap, but removing the overall benefit cap would immediately lift 300,000 children out of poverty. We would be able to see progress towards a positive target.

Like the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, I will reflect on Scotland, as it shows the impact that targets have. With the Scottish child payment, the lowest rate of child poverty on these islands is in Scotland. It is still not great, and should be much better, but Scotland’s 23% compares with 31% in England and Wales, and 24% in Northern Ireland. Setting targets focuses minds and enables voters to make judgments.

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[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

I very much support all the amendments around trying to make uniforms more affordable, but I want to speak about a health time bomb that we are sitting on, much in the way that we spoke about smoking some years ago, or ultra-processed food. It is the whole question about PFAS in our systems: in everything we eat and touch, but in particular, in this case, in school uniforms. Uniforms that are made from fabrics that contain PFAS constantly contact your skin and the results and the emerging evidence are now incontrovertible. I also support Amendment 119A from the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, about the health, generally, of uniforms.

Forever chemicals, as they are commonly referred to, are a group of over 10,000 chemicals that exist over many products. We call them “forever chemicals” partly because they are so widespread and partly because, so far, they do not appear to break down. They are relatively new, so we do not know whether they are going to break down in 100 years. Right now, though, they are not breaking down. The quickest way for any of us here to find out whether we have them in our system is to get the test, give a drop of blood and find out what is in your body.

Serious evidence is emerging. Yesterday morning I signed an NDA with Netflix in order to watch its newest documentary on the question of forever chemicals. In particular, this was around children, babies and fertility, but it obviously stretched to the wider implications for all of us, and in particular our children, because they have grown up in the plastic era. There is now evidence from Denmark to suggest that prenatal exposure is associated with reduced IQ scores in seven year-old children, and in Germany, there is new research showing that PFAS is significantly associated with reduced tetanus, rubella and diphtheria immunity. So it has effects all over the place. We must remember that these chemicals have been put into systems: not just our food and what we touch, or what we make things out of. There has been no FSA approval and there has been no FDA approval—it has just happened. All these chemicals are made by oil companies; plastic is a product of oil. Saudi Aramco is now the largest producer of plastic in the world, and production is growing as I speak.

Kids are thought to be particularly vulnerable; they have been found to have higher concentrations of PFAS in their blood than adults. One route of exposure is through the skin, and this brings me to the subject of school uniforms. They are often used in clothes to provide what they call “extra qualities”. So, if you get clothing that is “stain resistant” or “easy iron”—which, of course, is very tempting to someone on a time budget—these qualities in fact last for very little time. As you wash the clothes, they disappear, and then those chemicals end up in our watercourses. They are non-essential. There is no cost implication whatever to using them, apart from a gimmicky bit of advertising. I do not feel that the Minister really addressed this in Committee. Among other things, she said that

“the UK product safety laws require all consumer products to be safe, and manufacturers must ensure the safety of products before they are placed on the market”.—[Official Report, 3/7/25; col. 907.]

Turning this around, could the Minister update the House on whether the Government believe that the now overwhelming body of evidence that is emerging that PFAS is causing detrimental health outcomes is incorrect? Do the Government believe that the approach of our close neighbours, such as France and most of Europe, which have banned the use of over 10,000 substances, is in vain? At present, neither our product safety laws nor UK REACH is preventing harmful products being placed on the market. They are not working to protect children or adults.

In the summer, the Minister in Committee said there was work

“across government to help assess levels of PFAS occurring in the environment, their sources and potential risks, to inform policy and regulatory approaches”.—[Official Report, 3/7/25; col. 906.]

That was quite a long time ago. What work is being done, or are we just acknowledging a problem and not doing anything?

I appreciate that this is largely the responsibility of Defra, but it seems that our current approach is waiting for this disaster to happen. Would it not be more prudent to take steps at least to make schools and parents aware of this growing risk? An example of this is in Jersey—I appreciate that it is not part of the UK, but I happen to have been born there—where people are being treated with bloodletting, essentially leeching without leeches, because firefighting foam got into the watercourses and drinking water and filled them with PFAS. The state has taken some steps to reduce that, but, even then, our response was glacial.

I was disappointed that the revised environmental improvement plan, which was published before Christmas, said almost nothing about PFAS, but that the Government were

“investigating whether to restrict other PFAS in fire-fighting foams”.

I do not understand why we need to expend resources investigating what should be incredibly obvious. There was nothing about PFAS from other sources, and, unironically, the following paragraph said that we were a leader on chemical management. That is hard to believe. If this is the only work that the Government have done since Committee, I put it to the House that it is inadequate.

However, we have a chance here to make some small progress. This amendment would ban the use of PFAS in school uniforms. Subsection (2) of the proposed new clause would set the limit for residual PFAS and textiles to

“no more than 50 mg”.

This would not allow producers to use a small amount of PFAS, because it is so prevalent in the water systems and in all our systems that you cannot—as was confirmed in the Netflix documentary that I watched last night—get the level back to zero. Noble Lords should find this fact alone really disturbing and I hope that it serves as an impetus. Our close neighbours in France and Denmark have banned the use of PFAS in all clothes, not just kids’ clothes. Indeed, in France’s case, it is banned much more widely, and there is an expectation that an EU ban will come quite soon.

While my amendment has been drafted within the confines of the Bill that we are debating, I urge the Minister to encourage her colleagues to match the EU’s approach, which is following the OECD’s definition of over 10,000 substances as PFAS and banning their use, rather than inventing our own definition and a new list. I accept that there is much about PFAS that we do not know for certain, but, as I say, I watched a Netflix documentary on this last night and, without a doubt, there is hard and fast evidence linking chemicals in our blood to declining birth rates, falling sperm counts and all sorts of other very complex medical situations.

I therefore ask for two things in the near term. First, can we change the statutory guidance that schools follow around considering

“sustainability and ethical supply chains, as well as engaging with parents and pupils when tendering for uniform contracts”.—[Official Report, 3/7/25; col. 907.]

Could something more specific be added to that guidance, so that the school uniform providers that are invited to tender must provide details of whether their garments contain PFAS? We are not saying “Remove it”: just put it on the label. Can a recommendation that schools aim to source school uniforms without PFAS possibly be included? If this is not possible, and they go ahead and contract a supplier whose uniform items contain PFAS, can those suppliers be required to label items so that schools and parents can make an informed decision? That is not going to cost us more money, and it is not just about saying that everything must be made of cotton. Cotton is obviously better, but cotton gets given stain-removal qualities and so on, which can also be bad. But this would put the responsibility fair and square on the producer.

Secondly, can the Government, at the very least, urgently consult on a wholesale ban of PFAS? If we do not, we risk becoming the dumping ground in Europe for all the school uniforms and other garments that the European Union is going to start rejecting and is starting to reject from now. That would be a very bad place to be.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, who has powerfully made the case for Amendment 119. She referred to the Netflix documentary that we have not yet seen. I am going to go back a little further to a review article that came out in January last year, titled Effects of Early-life PFAS Exposure on Child Neurodevelopment: A Review of the Evidence and Research Gaps. It looked at 35 studies, most of which were in the previous five years. It found subtle but potentially very significant impacts of low-level exposure on population-wide neurodevelopment. What does that actually mean? It means reduced cognitive development and language development in infants and increased behavioural issues such as hyperactivity in childhood.

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[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords, this is a big change in the education service. I welcome the Government bringing this amendment, because it was not there in Committee and I think it is a response to speeches made on both sides of the House, so I want to put on record my thanks to the Minister and her team for working in between Committee and Report to give us something. It deserves a longer debate than it will get at this time of the night, so it is a shame that it has arrived so late.

I want to seek one reassurance. It must get the prize for the longest amendment because it is pages long. But it also gets the prize for the longest amendment that does not say very much. That is basically the first question I want to ask. Will the Minister give assurance that we will have opportunity to discuss the detail of this? It is a big change, and some of the points raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Spielman, need to be addressed. Secondly, and this is the most important thing for me, could the Minister give an assurance that she will endeavour to make the inspection such that schools do not feel they have been inspected twice, and that it is an inspection of the MAT ownership or governance and not the schools themselves?

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I will speak chiefly to Amendment 196A in my name and to Amendment 197 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Storey, to which I also attached my name. Given the hour, I am going to restrain myself on a lot of things. It is a great pity that we are doing this important business at this hour. The Minister, in introducing this group, talked about the need to improve the accountability of multi-academy trusts, which has not kept pace with the growth of MATs. We have heard agreement on that from right across the House. With that in mind, I am going to start with Amendment 197, which we have not yet heard the formal introduction of. I will not go through it in detail, but it looks at the remuneration of chief executives of multi-academy trusts. It includes the provision, under parliamentary scrutiny, to impose limits on that pay.

It might be a difficult job, but I think I am about to shock the House at 11.23 pm. A few days ago, the website Education Uncovered produced some figures on the pay of CEOs of multi-academy trusts—not the biggest ones but the group of the next biggest ones, ranked from 11 to 25 on the number of pupils. A £220,000 salary is becoming standard for these multi-academy trust CEOs—and you can add a pension of about £50,000. This is significantly more than the Prime Minister is paid. We have a fat-cat pay problem right across our society, but here we are talking about public funds allocated for children’s education going to fat-cat pay.

I said that the Education Uncovered figure was for 2025. For the largest trusts, I had to go back to a Schools Week investigation from last March looking at some of the highest pay, and a year ago the CEO’s pay at one of the multi-academy trusts had crossed the £500,000 a year threshold, while three more were on more than £300,000 a year. Unsurprisingly, the National Governance Association told Schools Week that benchmarking seemed to be leading to inflationary pressure—something some noble Lords here who know quite a bit about the financial sector have seen happening. It really is obscene that this is happening in our schools.

The Education Uncovered study shows that the larger trusts are spending more per pupil on these highly paid staff and less per pupil on pupils in the classroom than are smaller trusts and, particularly in England, local authorities and local authority schools. This is a huge problem of accountability, and I commend the noble Lord, Lord Storey, on bringing forward this amendment and seeking to deal with it. I cannot think of a reason why the Government would not think this a good idea.

I come now—very briefly, given the hour—to my Amendment 196. This follows attempts that I made in Committee, with the assistance of the National Education Union, to create something that would allow schools to get out of this mess when they are just fed up with it. It would allow parents fed up with multi-academy trusts that are not working—we have seen a lot of examples recently of multi-academy trusts imposing on local school communities disciplinary rules that have caused a great deal of upset, concern and fear for the well-being of pupils—a way to get schools out of this system that is not working for them.

In Committee, I brought forward the idea of an academy reversal order. It is very complex, given that schools in multi-academy trusts no longer have their own legal entity, but I made an attempt at doing that. I also attempted to say that it was a duty of the Secretary of State to produce an order like that.

Now, on Report, with Amendment 196A I am calling for the Government to create a duty for them to produce a report on the demand for, desirability of and mechanisms for the conversion of academy-run schools to maintained schools, within two years of the Act calling for a report. That would not direct anything to happen, but it asks for a direction to the Government to think again, in a Bill that already acknowledges that there are huge problems with the academy trust model, ends the presumption that all new schools must be academies and removes the duty to force schools into multi-academy trusts. We are clearly heading in that direction. Let us get ahead of the game and prepare for a future where we put schools back under local democratic control.

[Lord Mohammed of Tinsley (LD)]

My Lords, regarding the amendments by my noble friend Lord Storey, research has shown no correlation between the pay of the CEOs of multi-academy trusts and the schools they have responsibility for. I hope the Minister can say whether there will be a mechanism to look at the pay of some of these highly paid officials and what responsibilities they have. There could be cases where people have responsibility for eight to 10 schools but get paid more than people with responsibility for higher numbers. That does not seem fair or right. I know it is late, but I thought it important that I raise this point on behalf of my noble friend.

Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Wednesday 21st January 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Grey-Thompson (CB)]

My Lords, Amendment 90 in my name and that of the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, seeks to require the Secretary of State to report to Parliament on the barriers preventing parents of critically ill children being by their bedside.

I have been working with Ceri and Frances Menai-Davis for around a year. After their son Hugh passed away, they could have stepped back. Instead, they made a conscious decision to stand up and try to change the lives of other families. They are in the south-west Gallery today, as they have been for previous debates. They have turned the most devastating personal loss into a determination to make sure that other parents are not left to face the same failures that they experienced.

When Hugh died in 2021, Ceri and Frances left the hospital at 11.30 pm. When the doors closed behind them, Hugh was still in there, and suddenly they were out of the system. They stood outside with their bags, trying to work out how they could carry on. They had a three year-old child at home whom they had not seen for three weeks. There was no transport, which they did not expect, and they took an hour and a half taxi ride home in silence while the driver chatted about football and the weather, unaware that their world had just collapsed.

When they walked through their front door, everything was still there: toys, unfinished drawings and the remains of Hugh’s birthday cake still in the kitchen. The pain was unbearable. They woke the next morning and sat in silence. Then, Hugh’s younger brother, Raife, woke up, who they had not seen in three weeks, and said, “Where’s Hughie?” There was no guidance and no support, and they had to do what no other parent should ever have to do: look online.

Ceri tried to access mental health support, but no one could help. The GP was unaware of their situation and just offered sleeping pills. Charities said that there was a 12-week wait. Ceri has been very clear with me that he simply would not have survived 12 weeks without immediate support. By chance, he was introduced to a trauma clinic, and it literally saved his life. The GP and the community team never called; the family were literally on their own.

This experience is not rare. Research consistently shows that between 30% and 50% of parents of critically ill children meet the diagnostic threshold for PTSD, with symptoms beginning at, or shortly after, diagnosis, not years later. Studies show that mothers of seriously ill children face around a 50% increased risk of early death, driven by prolonged stress, cardiovascular strain and mental health deterioration. Fathers face significantly elevated risks, including higher rates of depression, substance misuse and suicide, yet are even less likely to be able to access support. Siblings—the forgotten children; the children not in the hospital bed—are often the most overlooked of all. Research indicates that they are up to three times more likely to experience long-term emotional or behavioural difficulties, including anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress symptoms.

Despite these known risks, the NHS does not wrap its arms around these families. Instead, families are signposted to charities—charities that are themselves underfunded, overstretched and increasingly unable to fill the gaps left by statutory services. There is no consistent proactive pathway where a family is treated as a unit when a child receives a serious or terminal diagnosis. This stands in stark contrast to the support available for families with babies with a terminal diagnosis.

The amendment does not seek to assign blame for what has happened in the past. It does not mandate immediate spending or prescribe a single solution. What it asks for is something far more basic and overdue: it asks the Government to undertake a systematic review of how parents, siblings and families are supported when a child is critically ill or dies: from diagnosis, through treatment and, when it happens, into bereavement.

The amendment mentions

“preventing parents … from being by their children’s bedsides”,

but that does not have to be solely a physical presence. All too often, this means parents being mentally and emotionally available and present for their child. It seeks to ask why support is reactive rather than proactive; why mental health screening is not routine and moved into the community, with GPs and community nurses providing a unified effort to support these parents; why siblings remain invisible; and why families so often fall into the gaps between services. This is about understanding what works, where best practice already exists and how we can ensure that families are not abandoned at the point when they need support the most.

Just over two months ago, Ceri walked from the hospital where Hugh passed away to Downing Street, where he placed Hugh’s shoes on the steps of No. 10 —over 105 kilometres in two days. He carried a 20-kilogram rucksack on his back to signify the weight Hugh was when he died. He did this to signify the weight that parents carry when their child is diagnosed with a serious illness: a weight that most of us will never know or, thankfully, experience.

The amendment is about recognising that a child’s well-being cannot be separated from the well-being of their family. It is about making sure that no parent ever again has to walk out of hospital into the darkest moments of their lives and find that the system they relied on has simply disappeared. I beg to move.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I will speak extremely briefly, having signed the amendment so powerfully introduced and presented by the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson. I did so after having met Ceri and Frances. I saw that the amendment did not have a second name attached to it and thought that there needed to be a demonstration that there is broader support there. I have no doubt that many noble Lords will have been moved by what we have just heard and would absolutely agree that action is urgently needed. We need to assess the situation and come up with a plan to deal with it, so other families are not put in this situation. Happily, this is relatively rare, but some 3,000 families a year are placed in this situation and they must be supported. I hope that we will hear some positive words from the Minister.

Briefly, Amendment 99 has not yet been introduced, but it seeks to address another tragic situation, where, again and again, children are born and taken away, usually from the same mother. I spoke extensively on that in Committee, so I will not repeat it now.

This is an important group of amendments. I hope we can see some positive direction forward and a further demonstration in your Lordships’ House that campaigning, often by people who have suffered so much, can make a difference and improvements in our society.

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[Baroness in Waiting/Government Whip (Baroness Blake of Leeds) (Lab)]

My Lords, I have absolutely no desire to stifle debate, but I ask anyone who wishes still to speak to be very mindful of the number of votes we are expecting at the end of this group. We also have very important dinner break business scheduled for tonight. Please be brief and to the point so we can move on with this important debate.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I have two original points to make that have not been covered at all. We should bring ourselves back to the fact that there is an enormous amount of agreement around this Chamber. I think everyone will say we feel enormous sympathy for the families, some of whom are here today, who have lost family as a result of contact with social media. We all accept that we want 16 year-olds on the day of their birthday to be able to stride out into the world confident, capable, ready to step into adulthood. Most of us want to rein in the overwhelmingly powerful digital companies which have been allowed to run wild across the world by political decisions made by adults. I particularly commend the right reverend Prelate for naming the spectre in the room—Donald Trump and his tech bro friends. He is a spectre here and is now recorded in Hansard.

I say to the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, that we have very broad agreement that the Online Safety Act has been a total failure and Ofcom is not delivering what it should be doing. Those are the points of agreement. Where my conclusions drive me is that I would back Amendment 91 from the noble Baroness, Lady Penn, with some caveats, which I will get back to, but it is not my intention to vote for any of the ban amendments before us today. I have a great deal of sympathy with the Lib Dems’ brave effort to find a way through a middle road and the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, almost swayed me that we should make a gesture. The case I put, argument one, is that your Lordships’ House is not the right place: we are not the right people to be making this decision. Many of us have joined since the depths of Covid, but those who were here then will remember when the House went largely remote and lots of people who had never used a computer before were suddenly on Zoom. We met their grandkids: “There you are, Granny. You are off mute now”.

I invite your Lordships to look at the people around you. We are extraordinarily unrepresentative of the country in many ways, but particularly in terms of age. This is where I draw on the argument made by the noble Lord, Lord Russell, but come to a different conclusion. I was also in the learning centre and spoke to some of the same pupils. They overwhelmingly said, “We do not want a ban”. My argument is that we must stop doing politics to young people. We must give young people agency and a sense of control. We have bequeathed to them a disastrous, damaging world; failing to give them a say in this is absolutely the wrong way forward.

On that point, I have a serious proposal for the Minister. In the consultation, are the Government prepared to include a people’s assembly that represents young people from around the country? Rather than just asking young people to tick a box in a survey—we all know what happens with “yes” or “no” votes—this would give them the chance to deliberate on how they think we can control the future and improve their situation.

My second point is important and has not been said before. In this debate we have heard a huge amount of scapegoating of social media. Social media is a mirror: it reflects the misogyny, violence, racism and fake news that runs across and through our society, it does not create it. If we could wave a magic wand and get young people off social media, they would still be affected by the dreadful levels of poverty and the schools that operate as exam factories, putting them under tremendous pressure and subjecting them to unbearable discipline. They would still have parents who are struggling to put food on the table and keep a roof over their heads. They would still encounter all the misogyny and racism in our society. When we are debating and voting on this, we must understand that social media is a mirror; it is not creating where we are now.

[Lord Tarassenko (CB)]

My Lords, I will speak briefly about the lack of scientific evidence for Amendment 94A in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Nash. No one disputes that rates of suicide, depression, anxiety and self-harm have increased among teenagers in the last decade. However, the question before us is whether a social media ban for under-16s would decrease those rates.

I know that this has been raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Cass, but I still believe that evidence from randomised controlled trials is important, even in this context. There have been no randomised controlled trials of social media bans or restrictions for healthy under-18s. The lack of experimental evidence in adolescent populations may be because it is difficult to experimentally manipulate social media use in such an age group. There was one RCT of 220 adolescents and young adults aged 17 to 25 with pre-existing emotional distress, who were asked to reduce their social media use to one hour a day for three weeks. However, the sample participants selected were all experiencing at least two of four symptoms of depression and anxiety, and should therefore be classified as a clinical sample, not a representative sample of the general population.

There is an RCT of adolescent participants from which we can learn, even though it has not started. It is funded by the Wellcome Trust and it will take place in Bradford and feature adolescents between the ages of 13 and 16. The intervention will not be a ban, but will involve a smartphone app that, importantly, limits the use of social media apps using a co-produced combination of a daily budget of one hour per day and a night-time curfew between 9 pm and 7 am.

The co-production of the trial is very important. We need to hear the voice of young people when designing these interventions. They themselves are very concerned by the negative impacts of social media. Perhaps not surprisingly, the feedback from the teenagers in Bradford schools was that they would be against a ban, but they would be willing to accept significant time limits on their use of social media.

Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Monday 19th January 2026 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Manchester]

My Lords, I am grateful for the amendments in this group. We are continuing, as the Bill makes progress, to strengthen the offer that is made to care leavers. In the previous group, we discussed matters that, assuming they are voted on in a little while, will improve conditions and improve what local authorities have to publish.

My Amendment 95, which I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler of Enfield, for signing, would simply extend that to make sure that care leavers have a clear understanding of what their local authority is willing to offer and what it is not, particularly given that so many care leavers at age 18 or 19 end up leaving. Some, I am delighted to say, go to university and end up in a different town in perhaps a different part of the country entirely; others, for whatever reason, may decide it is appropriate to move and perhaps go back to be closer to friends from former times.

It is therefore not just the people who are already in a particular local authority who need to really know what the care leaver offer is; it is young people who might be considering moving to that area. As became clear in discussion of my own Bill a few months ago, that is often where people fall through the gap: they move for good and solid reason from one part of the country to another, and in that new part of the country they find that the services they expected are not there because that local authority either chooses not to provide them to anybody or, as is sometimes the case, chooses to provide them only to young people who have been in its care through the previous years.

I hope that we can get some support for Amendment 95. Understanding procedure—I am slowly learning this place, after about six years in—I know we probably will not get to a vote on this tonight, so maybe the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, and I can agree between now and Wednesday whether this matter should be put to a Division or not.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the right reverend Prelate. Having signed his amendment in Committee, I did not manage to catch up on Report, and I encourage him to think about putting it to a vote if necessary when it gets to that stage.

I support all the amendments in this group, but will speak to Amendment 59, which is about continuing the Staying Put arrangements to the age of 25. As the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, said, I have signed this amendment, along with the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, who is not currently in his place, and the noble Lord, Lord Watson. You could say that that is the broadest possible range of political support imaginable for this amendment.

I spoke extensively on a similar amendment in Committee, so I will not go into it at great length here. I cross-reference the horrific tale I told in Committee about Duncan, who was dragged with no notice at all out of his fostering arrangements and dumped into wildly unsuitable accommodation. That is the kind of thing that is happening to young people now. If we are to think of the state as a statutory parent, as it is to children in care, surely we should expect the same kinds of things from it that we expect from other parents, such as the societal expectation that parents will often have their children at home until age 25 or later. That is a reality that the state should be making provision for.

To pick up a point made by the noble Lord, Lord Watson, even this amendment would not finally cover the financial issues here. The Fostering Network notes that three-quarters of foster carers who continue caring after 18 end up financially worse off. The idea that housing benefit or wages—we know how low wages are for young people—might be able to top that up does not reflect the reality of our society.

I was discussing this morning the intrusion of private equity into the fostering system. A quarter of all places in fostering are now provided by private equity-based companies, which are making massive profits. There is a commodification of fostering. We would really like to think about how we can address that issue more broadly and whether there are ways to ensure that massive profits are not being made from this important additional provision that the state should be providing.

[Lord Storey (LD)]

I very much look forward to the Minister’s reply on this group of amendments. There are 80,000 children in care—12,000 more than a decade ago—all of whom have different needs and requirements, mature at different ages and experience different feelings. I do not think you can put an arbitrary date on when somebody has to leave. Nationally, young people increasingly stay with their family into their 30s and get all the support that a family gives them. A friend of mine and his wife, the Kellys, foster regularly. They had two foster boys; one came to the age to move on and just said, “I am not going—I am staying”. Malcolm, being the sort of person he is, said “Okay”. That child needed that. He needed that support from the family. I hope the Government will consider this carefully.

On the amendment from the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester, I do not understand what the problem is. Why can this information not be available? It seems to me good, solid practice for society generally and for people in care and care leavers. I do not understand why we cannot say yes. Will it cost more money? Do we think local authorities do not have the expertise to do this? I would be interested to know why the Minister thinks it cannot be agreed.

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[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, as the noble Lord, Lord Young, said, I tabled this amendment in Committee. I also pay tribute to Siobhain McDonagh for having pursued this for many years and the way in which she has worked with different parts of government to try to work through the issues. It was always really about the children and not about the problems that government has in doing this. I will now make a very lengthy peroration and simply say thank you.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, as the noble Lord, Lord Young, said, I supported and spoke to a similar amendment in Committee. Again, I will not be very long.

I want to celebrate this great example of when campaigning works. I pay tribute to Justlife, which worked alongside the Shared Health Foundation for the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Households in Temporary Accommodation. I want to stress the importance of this, and will not apologise for repeating what are such horrific figures. From 2023 to 2025, 80 children died while in temporary accommodation; that was 3% of total child deaths. From 2019 to 2024, temporary accommodation was cited as a factor in the deaths of 74 children.

Having said that, I want to stress, as I think the noble Lord, Lord Young, was hinting at, that it is crucial that this comes into effect as soon as possible. We could potentially save a life if GP surgeries and schools know the situation that children are in. Much more broadly, we need to get to a situation where we do not have children in temporary accommodation for the long periods of time they are now. Please let this be done as soon as possible.

[Lord Hacking (Lab)]

I give heartfelt thanks to the Minister from these Benches for moving this amendment. I have not dared count the number of amendments my noble friend has tabled, but this is a magnificent example of a Minister and a Government listening.

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[Lord Meston (CB)]

My Lords, I too support these amendments. The debate in Committee threw a light on the working of the deprivation of liberty jurisdiction, which, one could not help noting, was not altogether familiar to many.

Typically, these orders are made when parents cannot provide good enough care and the child concerned needs protection from outside pressures and their own risk-taking behaviour. Before they come to court, the local authority, the guardian and the court have to do their best to provide placement in appropriate settings and to enable the child to maintain significant relationships, both of which are easier said than done. Problems that follow the initial order can include unstable placement and repeated changes of placement. These are not easy to manage. I have read of a child saying that it was pointless to try to build up any relationship in the setting in which she was placed because she knew that she would be moved again or the staff would leave. That is a very unhappy state of affairs.

There can be review hearings by the court, but they are not always satisfactory in my experience. Therefore, sensibly, Amendment 54 would require review by the director of children’s services to ensure proper monitoring and adherence to the objectives of the original authorisation to deprive liberty. Therefore, among this package before us, I strongly support this amendment, which would also comply with the child’s right to regular reviews in accordance with Article 25 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I will briefly focus on Amendment 53, on the right to education. I want to bring in the voice of one child who spoke to the Children’s Commissioner in her report on this issue. Talking about the lack of education they were receiving, this child said:

“I don’t think it’s fair that they’re making us miss out on our education because they don’t know where to put us”.


That child understands the situation they are in, and it is just unacceptable. All but two of the children whom the Children’s Commissioner spoke to said they were receiving less education when subjected to deprivation of liberty than they received in their otherwise often very chaotic circumstances. We have to make sure that these children continue with an education.

[Baroness Tyler of Enfield (LD)]

My Lords, this is a very important and sensitive area of law, and valid issues and concerns are raised in the amendments spoken to so ably by the noble Baroness, Lady Barran. I also pay tribute, as she did, to the work of the Nuffield Family Justice Observatory in this area. I know the Government have been working hard to see what can be done and to give various assurances. I hope the Minister can provide further assurances today so that we can all be satisfied that they are taking this issue very seriously and have a clear plan to tackle it.

Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Monday 19th January 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Lister of Burtersett (Lab)]

My Lords, I am pleased to support Amendment 77, to which I have added my name. I take this opportunity to thank my noble friend the Minister for the helpful meeting that I and stakeholders had with her to discuss the other issue I raised alongside this in Committee.

As my noble friend has said, I and other noble Lords have been pressing for many years the case of children who have not claimed the citizenship status to which they are entitled, including the high fees that can act as a barrier. Indeed, we have earned the label of “terriers” on the subject. I am delighted to welcome my noble friend Lord Moraes to the noble band of terriers. Like him, I speak as a patron of the Project for the Registration of Children as British Citizens.

This amendment, so ably introduced by my noble friend, would help to ensure that these children’s citizenship rights are not overlooked by local authorities in their role as corporate parents. As he emphasised, this concerns a statutory entitlement to citizenship and is not a matter of immigration or discretion: all too often, the Government have conflated the two in the past. The consequence of this right not being given effect has been spelled out by the High Court, which noted that children who identify as British but who have effectively been deprived of citizenship can

“feel alienated, excluded, isolated, second-best, insecure and not fully assimilated into the culture and social fabric of the UK”.

I also echo my noble friend’s welcome for the consideration the Government are giving to how better to support these children in establishing their right to citizenship. The White Paper, Restoring Control Over the Immigration System, stated that in the “near term” the Government will ensure that

“children who have been fully in the UK for some time, turn 18 and discover that they do not have status, are fully supported and able to regularise their status and settle. This will also include a clear pathway for those children in care and care leavers”.

This amendment, which also relates to some children born in this country, will make it less likely that children in this situation will turn 18 without having claimed their right to citizenship. So there is a good case for the Government accepting it. Given that the White Paper commitment was made last May, and related to the “near term”, what have the Government done to realise it?

These are important issues for children’s citizenship rights and well-being, so acceptance of this amendment would strengthen the Bill as it relates to some of the most marginalised children in our country.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, as I have many times before on this subject, joining the terrier pack yet again. It is a great pity that that pack still needs to form; all the other occasions were under the previous Government and we were hoping that we might be able to disband and head on to other things.

I join the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, in welcoming the noble Lord, Lord Moraes, and thank him for tabling this amendment, to which I attached my name very late in the day. I just caught up with this Bill along the tracks.

The noble Baroness and the noble Lord have both made the case overwhelmingly for Amendment 77, so I will not go over the same ground as they did. I will just highlight again the campaigning work of Citizens UK in particular, which has focused on the incredible difficulty of the cost of more than £1,200 for a citizenship application and the fact that so many people are unaware that it is necessary.

I will make one additional point. We have seen in the Windrush scandal that the British state failed to meet its responsibilities and failed to do the right thing by British citizens. With the reality of Brexit, many children with European links and European families but with the right to British citizenship risk being trapped in the coming years unless their situation is sorted out before they turn 18. Let us not create another Windrush scandal for those Brexit and indeed other children.

[Lord Storey (LD)]

My Lords, I will talk briefly to Amendments 75 and 76. These amendments are very important, and it is a great pity that we are discussing them at the end of the day. I always think of the saying that

“words without actions are the assassins of idealism”

and I wonder if these are not too general. I do not know what “alert” means. I can be alert to something and do nothing about it, where I actually want something to happen. It says “have due regard to”; I can have due regard to the fact that it is raining and choose not to put my umbrella up or not to warn other people that it is raining. I want something more definite. I think the spirit—dare I say that to an Anglican bishop?—is there in the amendment and I very much understand what the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester is saying in this amendment.

I also like that the right reverend Prelate mentioned silos and silo working. I suggest that he talks to those noble Lords who served on the then Children and Families Bill during the coalition period. We came up with education, health and care plans, but the health service was not interested at all. It wanted to work entirely in its own silo, and every attempt to get them to work across failed completely. I do not know what to say further; I am not being very helpful here, I am afraid. It is important to listen to children’s voices and to do things. There must be good practice up and down the country, and we need to know about that. Perhaps the Minister’s department knows about good practices where children’s voices are being heard and something then happens.

From my professional experience, I remember one group of young children in a care home who formed a care children’s council and met each month. Somebody from the education department came along and listened to what they said. They had to report back to the councillors and then come up with an action plan and go back to the school council. That actually brought some results. Not least, it gave the young children the confidence to stand up and speak, and to challenge why things were not being done. These amendments are important, but we need to spend more time pinpointing what we need to do.

Pension Schemes Bill

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

2nd reading
Thursday 18th December 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Coffey, and to hear nature-positive sentiments from the Conservative Benches. We are hearing a wide range of perspectives in that space, and I am glad to hear those. I declare my position as a vice-president of the Local Government Association and the National Association of Local Councils.

I echo the noble Lord, Lord Vaux of Harrowden, in enjoying seeing so many familiar faces on the pensions trail. My first ever Committee was on the Pension Schemes Bill some six years ago. It is also nice to welcome new faces such as the noble Baroness, Lady White of Tufnell Park. I very much look forward to her speech as someone who, when in London, stays just across the border in Kentish Town. I also join the noble Lord, Lord Vaux, in his expressions of concern about any forced investment in private equity. It is an extractivist, exploitative model which benefits a few at the cost of the many and does not have the long-term perspective that we surely need when talking about pensions.

I will start by looking at the context. We are starting from when the Chancellor initiated a pensions review in August 2024, led by the DWP and HMT, aimed at bolstering investment in the UK and dealing with pension adequacy—or rather, the significant levels of pension inadequacy that so many now suffer from.

Picking up the point about pension age raised by the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, although from an opposite perspective, I note that when the state pension age rose from 65 to 66, between December 2018 and October 2020, the percentage of 65 year-olds in income poverty more than doubled from 10% to 24%. A quarter of a million more 60 to 64 year-olds are now in poverty than in 2010, when the state pension age began rising. These figures are from a report by the Standard Life Centre for the Future of Retirement. According to the research, the poverty rate for 60 to 64 year-olds increased from 16% to 22% from 2009 to 2024. There are now 8 million people in their 60s in the UK, up from 6.7 million in 2010, and that is expected to peak at 8.7 million in 2031. Many of those are pre-pensioners now, but they are very soon going to be pensioners. Some are pensioners already, and we have a huge poverty problem there. The noble Lord, Lord Willetts, said that this has to be a fiscal consideration. I am afraid we have to look at it much more broadly and consider the state of public health in the UK, whether many of those people are indeed fit to work, and the huge inequality of health at age 60, 65 or 70 that operates across different communities and social groups.

We also have to acknowledge that 2.8 million pensioners are now living in households below the minimum income standard. I note that the House of Commons Work and Pensions Committee said in July:

“No older person should be unable to have a minimum, dignified, socially acceptable standard of living”.


The Green Party concurs with that. I know the Minister will be interested that women make up 67% of those pensioners in poverty. There has been some improvement in the situation with the new state pension but, as the committee noted in July, there are “blind spots” in policy-making. The reality of women’s lives is still insufficiently recognised. I cannot see anything in this Bill that deals with that, but I would be interested if the Minister could contribute anything on it.

Staying with the context, because it is important that we think about where we are before we get to the detail, according to ONS data we now have 44% of adults aged 16 and over actively contributing to a pension pot. This compares to 34% a decade earlier. Obviously, auto-enrolment is a really important factor, but according to the recent Scottish Widows 2025 Retirement Report, 39% of working-age adults are not on track to achieve what the Pensions and Lifetime Savings Association deems a minimum lifestyle in retirement, and that is a 1% increase since 2024, so we are headed in the wrong direction.

The Minister said this is all about security and dignity in retirement. Before we start talking about private pensions, we have to acknowledge that the financial sector’s private pensions are not going to meet everybody’s needs. There are great risks with the financial sector in this age of shocks, and we have to acknowledge that the state pension must be the anchor of security, certainty and freedom from fear for everybody in our society.

Picking up the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Coffey, on our Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee report, there are a couple of extra facts from that report that I think are telling and concerning. At 149 pages, the Bill’s delegated powers memorandum is nearly as long as the Bill itself, which is 161 pages. The number of delegated powers in the Bill—119—nearly exceeds the number of clauses, which is 123.

I have spent quite a bit of time on context because I think it is important, but I turn now to a couple of points that I expect to raise in Committee and possibly later. One of those is the term “fiduciary duty”. Lots of people have been asking me, “What are you doing in the last week before Christmas?” and I have said, “I am going to be talking about fiduciary duty for pension schemes”. I have then got lots of blank looks.

But this is something I have actually long been familiar with as a Green, as we have been struggling over many years to ensure that local pension schemes in particular are able to avoid investing, say, in the merchants of death, big tobacco, because that is bad for pensioners in a broader context, or able to avoid investing in fossil fuels because of their health and environmental impacts, and also because of the financial risks of the carbon bubble. So things like “fiduciary duties” roll off my tongue so easily.

Noble Lords will know that this was debated very strongly in the Commons. They have started the work in some ways but have left us with an unfinished piece of work. In response to the amendment in the Commons supported by 34 MPs, including all four Green MPs, the Pensions Minister has now committed to legislate to bring forward statutory guidance—again—on fiduciary duty. However, as I understand it—I am happy to be corrected by the Minister—the statutory guidance provided by the Government would not apply to the whole range of pension schemes and would not provide the legal clarity that schemes would need to wish to act on these issues. Any statutory guidance of course need not be followed and is at risk from potential future Governments.

Although this sounds technical, it is of course terribly important. I note that Liam Byrne in the other place said that there is currently confusion—and what the Government are proposing does not seem to deal with that confusion. With confusion comes caution. Then, we see trustees understandably following the safe path, rather than the one they can actually see is the right path.

The noble Baroness, Lady Coffey, has covered a lot of what I was going to say about nature, so I will not repeat that. But it is worth looking at this from my perspective of six years in this place. I am delighted to see the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, in her place, because she has been a leader in finally getting successive Governments to put climate and nature into Bills. To get the climate and nature bit in because the Government initially left it out has become almost the standard part of the role of your Lordships’ House. That is something I am sure we will return to.

I have one final point to make on the Bill. The Financial Conduct Authority has, to be charitable, a chequered regulatory history. The Minister said that the FCA would have this extra responsibility and that extra responsibility, which is deeply concerning. I am interested in the suggestions from the noble Baroness, Lady Coffey, on how we might look at that regulation. I do not have a view on that yet, but I would be interested in the debate.

I note that, a year ago, the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Investment Fraud and Fairer Financial Services—I declare I am a Member—published a report on the effectiveness, or not, of the FCA, and blamed it for doing too little, too late, and doing nothing to prevent or punish alleged wrongdoing, with errors being all too common. That is really important, given that we are giving it oversight over some significantly increased powers for trustees, where trustees will not be referring back to members of the scheme.

Finally, I come to the fun bit. Given that this is the last contribution from a Member of the Green group for this session before Christmas, I sincerely thank all the staff—the doorkeepers, clerks, Library, catering, security and cleaning staff—for the many hours they have laboured for us, all too often hours very late in the evening. To offer a wish for all of them and all of us, my hope for 2026 is that we might see more sensible working hours for your Lordships’ House and for all our staff.

Post-16 Education and Skills Strategy

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Wednesday 22nd October 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

As my noble friend knows, there is a sector skills plan that goes alongside the creative industries’ inclusion in the industrial strategy. Of course, it is already the case that among the sector skills packages—for example, the digital package, with £187 million behind it—we will be developing important skills for the creative industry. As well as the sector skills plan, jobs plans will be developed in each of the areas, and I am sure my noble friend will maintain her pressure to make sure that this makes the difference to skills in the creative industries that I know she wants to see.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, on the reality of student debt, for the cohort that started to be liable for paying off debt in April 2025, the average debt was £53,000. In the government stats for students starting in 2024-25, it is expected that about 56% of full-time undergraduates will repay in full, which of course means that 44% of those students will spend 40 years paying off a loan they will never finish paying off. Can the Minister tell me, either now or in writing, what these increases in fees will do to those two figures?

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

The noble Baroness has identified the very different nature of student loan provision from an ordinary form of borrowing. What a student repays is dependent neither on the size of the debt nor on the interest rate; it is dependent on the student’s level of income once they are working. The noble Baroness can shake her head, but that is the reality of the way the system is designed. Therefore, there is both a student contribution and, in many ways, a taxpayer contribution to ensuring that there is no upfront cost to students going to university. The noble Lord makes an important point that we need to clarify the nature of the student loan system, in order that we do not discourage young people from going to university.

Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Thursday 18th September 2025 Lords Chamber

When it comes to some of the other amendments, I fully acknowledge the desire to think about parents in particular—I am one myself—and their belief systems. All I will say is that the belief systems of some parents are not entirely compatible with what one might wish or expect to find within our society. Some parents’ belief systems are wonderful, but there are some that most of us would find slightly bizarre or extreme. For a parent to feel that they have the right to impose on their child a belief system that many of us might feel was slightly unfair on the child is to go down a dangerous course, because, ultimately, the decisions of parents are heavily subjective, which is understandable. As parents we feel a sense of responsibility and ownership for children, but I feel that we have to balance that with trying to ensure that our belief systems and the way in which we choose to live our lives does not inadvertently put our child in a position where their experience of trying to interact and integrate with other members of society becomes particularly difficult and, occasionally, unfortunate.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to take part in this rich and terribly important debate, having attached my name to Amendments 469 and 470, which are also signed by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Gloucester and the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley. They have broad cross-party support, and we have heard much more support from all corners of the Committee.

It is a pleasure to follow the noble Earl, Lord Russell, even though he pre-empted—

Noble Lords: The noble Lord, Lord Russell.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

The noble Lord, Lord Russell. There we are—promotions are good. It is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Russell, even though he pre-empted one of my lines: imagine having on the front of every Bill a statement that says, “This complies with the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child”—what a step forward that would be.

I want to return to the comments made by the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, about listening to children—indeed, this is where the noble Baroness, Lady Blower, started us: nothing about us without us. The noble and learned Baroness referred to how important it is to listen to children. She said that children have really good ideas and a clear psyche. It is important that we follow Article 12 of the UN convention and ensure that we follow the right of children to be listened to and taken seriously. That is crucial for children’s mental health and well-being. The sense of agency really is important; a lack of that sense of agency is a problem across the whole of our society, but particularly for our children.

Turning that round, children have really good ideas. We are facing a polycrisis: we are exceeding our planetary boundaries and we are damaging our health with the state of our world. Children have ideas, with very clear sight of how to tackle those things—fresh ideas that we would all benefit from listening to.

On the specifics of the rights impact assessment proposed by Amendment 469, I will take us back to 2010. I declare an interest here that I was on the board of the Fawcett Society. In 2010, it took a judicial review over the lack of a gender impact assessment on the Budget that year. In the classic way of these cases, the Fawcett Society lost the judicial review but it won from the Government an acknowledgement that there should have been a gender impact assessment on various aspects of the Budget. Creating this right would force Governments to think harder to do the proper impact assessments that the noble Lord, Lord Russell, referred to. This could have real impact. It is not a panacea; it will not suddenly fix everything if we put it in the Bill, but it is an important step in ensuring that questions are carefully examined, not just brushed aside.

We have already heard from a former Children’s Commissioner, but I note that, in the last few days, the current Children’s Commissioner, Dame Rachel de Souza, carried out a national census of school leaders and found that schools are being left to plug more and more gaps. Children are not getting the right to the services that they should have and schools are trying to fill in the gaps. I refer to that because I suspect there might be quite a few people out there listening to our debate who think that Britain is a good, developed and successful country and that we must therefore be meeting all our obligations under the convention on children’s rights. But of course we are not, demonstrably.

Our very respected Joint Committee on Human Rights, chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Alton, who is not currently in his place, is starting an inquiry into the human rights of children in the social care system in England, having identified that there is a problem. I will cross-reference our recent debates on the Mental Health Bill—an attempt to deal with the needs of some of the most vulnerable people in our society. We have improved the law there, but there was broad agreement that we have not got the resources to deliver the improvement in the law. Ensuring that we are signed up to this convention is crucial.

I will briefly cross-reference an earlier amendment of mine which called for a place efficiency duty for local authorities. One of the less noted elements of the UN convention is Article 31.1, which states that:

“States Parties recognize the right of the child to rest and leisure, to engage in play and recreational activities appropriate to the age of the child and to participate freely in cultural life and the arts”.


An academic article in the Human Rights Law Review of June 2025 by Dr Naomi Lott sets out how we could deliver on that. This takes a global perspective, but it is still highly relevant to the UK.

My final point is a large one and takes a global perspective, thinking about where the world is today—this is particularly relevant in the light of a certain ongoing state visit. As the noble Lord, Lord Banner, says, signing up to the UN convention was done by the Thatcher Government. The principle of respecting human rights and the rule of law has been embedded in British society over decades. However, on a global scale, human rights and the rule of law are under threat like never before. Previously leading countries in defending human rights, to at least a degree, are now stepping out and expressing opposition to them. We often heard from the previous Government, and we hear from the current Government, a desire to be world-leading. Wales and Scotland have been world-leading here. It is time for England and Westminster to step up to the plate.

This matters terribly for practical reasons of human rights and the rule of law and impact assessments and all those things within the UK, but it also matters on a global scale if we are to be leaders and say that human rights and the rule of the law apply to all citizens. The noble Lord, Lord Meston, referred to the right of a child’s identity. As he was speaking, I was thinking of the Ukrainian children kidnapped into Russia and being denied their identity. We cannot stand up for this unless we stand up for ourselves on our own soil. This is a globally important debate, as well as crucial for the children of England.

[Baroness Spielman (Con)]

My Lords, I oppose Amendments 469 and 470. I recognise that they are proposed with the very best of intentions and at first blush sound wonderful, yet it is blindingly obvious that they would be likely to do more harm than good in practice. They embody a fundamental misconception that children have no real rights in the UK except to the extent that they are specified in supranational charters and conventions. This is simply not the case. We have a long and generally positive history of acknowledging and protecting human rights, including those of children, and recognising the ways in which children need to be treated differently from adults. We do an enormous amount to give children a voice.

I will turn to the negatives. First, the amendments would create a vast and costly administrative burden for very little additional value. The amendments specify that children’s rights impact assessments would have to be published for every single ministerial decision, including operational decisions. Scotland and Wales have been repeatedly cited as models to follow, yet it is genuinely hard to find ways in which children in Scotland and Wales are doing better than children in England and easy to find ways in which they are doing worse. I am afraid that the educational comparative studies, on record for all to see, show very big gaps. The impact of lockdowns was no less harsh for children in Wales and Scotland. All countries have experienced a spike in persistent absence post-lockdown. Whereas the latest persistent absence figure in England is 23%, when I looked it up a couple of months ago, in Wales it was 31% and in Scotland it was 37%. I may have got those two the wrong way around but one is 31% and one is 37%. It is not obvious that those two nations provide a clear example of why we should adopt this approach.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Carter of Haslemere (CB)]

I quickly respond to a point that the noble Baroness, Lady Coffey, made. The wording in my amendment is not my wording; it is already in the convention. I am not trying to incorporate it into our law, because it is already incorporated. That ship has sailed, really. All I am doing is pointing out its relevance to a Bill that I perceive as seeking to restrict parental choice in various ways. To pick up on one point that the noble Lord, Lord Russell, made, I entirely respect what he said about the importance of being aware that parents may make wrong choices. The assumption built into this provision of the convention is that they are entitled to make what they consider to be good choices. Otherwise, you would take away all rights of parents altogether, if you make the assumption that they are not. On children’s rights in respect of schools, it is their parents who have chosen to send them there. That was the parental choice.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, responding to the noble Baroness about vaccination, I think it is important that we put facts on the record. She suggested that vaccination of children was primarily to protect other age groups—

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

She said flu vaccination.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

Yes, flu vaccination—I have just been looking at the Health Security Agency website about the vaccination of children against flu, and it says:

“Flu can be an extremely unpleasant illness in children, with those under the age of 5 being more likely to be hospitalised due to flu than any other age group. Vaccinating children helps protect them in the first instance, so that they can stay in school”.


I think it is important, given the debate around vaccination, that that is put on the record.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Finlay of Llandaff (CB)]

My Lords, I have a probing amendment in this group, which came about because it struck me that we need to be prepared to think of the unthinkable. Sadly, there have been some tragedies in different schools in different places. There have been bus crashes and knifings. We know that defibrillators on sports fields have saved lives by having a programme that was rolled out. We know that autoinjectors of adrenaline, which are now in schools as a spare autoinjector, have been saving lives.

However, I am not sure that children really know how to cope with some of the life-threatening emergencies that can occur before emergency services arrive: particularly, how to manage if a child seems to be bleeding out from a severe injury—there are some very simple measures that can be taken—how to manage choking if someone is choking on a bolus of food in the dining room, and how to manage a chemical attack. I should say that my own grandsons attended the school—one is still at the school—where there was a chemical attack on a pupil in the street that hit the news. I was very struck many years ago when those same grandchildren were much younger and at nursery, where they were taught a very simple rhyme to shout if there was a fire: “Fire, fire. Do not hide. Run outside”. It was terribly simple. We chanted it in the home with them. It was an important lesson, because things can be incredibly dangerous and can happen very fast.

The purpose of my amendment is to probe the extent to which we are taking seriously some of the unthinkable things that could happen to our schoolchildren and making sure that they are prepared for responding in a way that does not further endanger them when there is serious danger in front of them. It is a probing amendment—I know that it is not well drafted—but I felt that when we are going through such enormously complicated legislation, putting so much onus on schools, we have to think about the unthinkable.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lord, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, and to share in her concern about the need to prepare pupils in this age of shocks where we literally do not know what is around the corner. I have often spoken in your Lordships’ House about the need for first aid education in schools. This amendment is broader than that.

We need education that prepares people for life and not just for exams. I note that recently some basic questions about first aid have been introduced into the driving licence test, which shows that there is some recognition by the Government of the need to act in this space.

I shall speak chiefly to my Amendments 502YB and 502YK and I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, for her support for them. Amendment 502YB, which would require a review of climate adaptation in schools, very much fits with the noble Baroness’s Amendment 502P, but her amendment is focused largely on the physical fabric of schools while mine is focused to a large degree on how schools behave and are arranged. It is more of a behavioural kind of question.

I note that the UK Health Security Agency has published updated guidance about heat for schools and early years settings. That guidance allows schools to relax uniform policy in the heat. It suggests that students should wear loose, light-coloured clothing and sun hats with wide brims, stay in the shade as much as possible, and wear sunscreen with high sun protection factors, et cetera. It also says that teachers should encourage students to take off their blazers and jumpers. But all that is in terms of encouragement and suggestions.

I put it to the Minister and the Government more broadly that we are in a situation now, particularly when we have so many schools with an unreasoning and almost religious attachment to rigid uniform policies, where there should be rules that say that schools must act to keep pupils safe. I note that the National Education Union suggests that 26 degrees should be set as an appropriate point at which to identify additional measures—so let us make some rules about taking action to protect our children.

On the broader point about climate resilience, the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, referred to a London study; I shall refer to a London programme that may have followed from that, Climate Resilient Schools. In 2022-23, the Mayor of London funded measures in 100 schools to make them more resilient, but when we look at the website, we can see that that programme has now ended. Surely, we need an ongoing programme to make our schools more climate resilient.

I come now to Amendment 502YK, about the prevention of the transmission of respiratory and other diseases in classrooms and schools generally. I was looking at Amendment 502YH in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, which would introduce a new clause headed:

“Statutory standards of filtering and monitoring systems deployed in schools”.


I thought, “Oh, this might be similar”, but, no, that is an amendment about computer or digital viruses. We have just had a very long debate focusing on those digital safety issues, but, somehow, even despite the Covid pandemic, we have rather less focus on biological virus risks—mine is the only amendment that does that.

You might call this the Covid amendment, and certainly I speak in the context where it is very clear that Covid is not over; a new variant, Stratus, is spreading fast and raising levels of concern. That means that Covid is still spreading and that more and more people are not just becoming ill in the short term but, as we know, getting long Covid. The pulmonologist, Binita Kane, has recently started an NHS long Covid clinic and notes that there has been a refusal to acknowledge the problem of long Covid, and the continuing problem. If we look at the history of the world’s medical treatment of so-called chronic fatigue syndrome, or myalgic encephalomyelitis, we see that there has been a refusal to acknowledge the issue of broader post-viral syndromes and the fact that people get ill for a long time.

There was a study out at the end of last year whose headline said that after two years 70% of the children who had shown the symptoms of long Covid were no longer displaying them. That means, of course, that 30% of the children who had been diagnosed a couple of years ago with long Covid still have it, and it is still affecting their lives. That is something that we cannot ignore about Covid—but, of course, this is not just a Covid amendment. Just because we have had a Covid pandemic, that will not have any impact on the continuing acute risks of a flu pandemic, something that the world has known much of in the past.

Ventilation and air filtration are also good for pupil concentration. It is good for general health to have fresh air in the classroom, and we need to be able to look after the health of pupils. I have a direct question for the Minister—I shall understand if she wants to write to me on it later. In 2021, England spent £25 million on providing all state-funded schools and colleges with a portable CO₂ monitor for every two classrooms. There was further funding in November 2022 for the remaining 50% of classrooms. The recommendation is that CO₂ levels should be kept below 800 parts per million, with indoor air at 600 to 800 parts per million being a relatively good level of ventilation. Can the Minister tell me now or in the future how many of those monitors are still in use and what kind of results they are showing?

[Lord Storey (LD)]

The hour is late, so I will be very brief. I make three observations. First, we react to situations; we do not prepare for them. Secondly, we then set up a particular programme or campaign but we do not embed it; we do it until people have lost interest or media attention has moved on to something else; thirdly, schools or parents often come up with something, following a particular event occurring in a school and it starting a campaign—it is a pity that this is not shared.

It is not quite the same, but I think of the example of EpiPens and defibrillators in schools. In Liverpool, a poor boy aged 11 had a cardiac arrest in the swimming pool and tragically died. His family and immediate friends started a campaign, the Oliver King Foundation, to get defibrillators into every school in Merseyside, and that happened. All these amendments are certainly worth consideration.