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.

--- Later in debate ---

[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.

Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Tuesday 16th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I really want to challenge the assumption of some of the amendments in this group that what we need is more dedicated mental health practices and provision in schools. One of the problems is that there is too much emphasis on mental illness and mental health in education at the moment. That awareness is taking up too much time in school life, is over-preoccupying young people and is becoming a real problem.

If you look at what is going on in schools at the moment, there are indeed endless numbers of staff, volunteers and organisations with responsibility for emotional well-being: mental health leads, support teams, emotional literacy support and assistance, mental health first aiders, counsellors, and well-being officers. If you go into any school, the walls are covered in information about mental illness, mental health and so on; it is everywhere you go. Yet despite this booming, school-based mental health industrial complex, almost, the well-being of pupils continues to deteriorate—or that is what we are told.

Mental health problems and diagnoses are rising at the same time as all the awareness initiatives are taking place. Something is going wrong and that at least needs some investigation, but these amendments just assume that we should carry on doing the same and more of the same. Along with the noble Baroness, Lady Spielman, I think that real, critical thinking needs to be done around some of the awareness campaigns.

I want to challenge the idea that schools are the vehicle for tackling the undoubted spiralling crisis of unhappiness among young people. It is also important that we untangle that from the crisis of CAMHS. There is actually a serious problem in NHS mental health support for children, and I would like that to be taken on. That is very different from the kind of discussion we are having here about schools, which is that mental distress becomes such a focus of all the discussions in schools.

I tend to agree—for possibly the only time—with Tony Blair on this. He said,

“you’ve got to be careful of encouraging people to think they’ve got some sort of condition other than simply confronting the challenges of life”.

That is true. Starting with children, we are encouraging the young to internalise the narrative of medicalised and pathologised explanations and the psychological vocabulary of adopting an identity of mental fragility, and that is not doing them any good. That can then create an increasing cohort of young people and parents demanding official diagnosis, more intervention and more support at school.

Dr Alastair Santhouse, a neuropsychiatrist at the Maudsley, argues this in his new book, No More Normal: Mental Health in an Age of Over-Diagnosis. He says that it has become crucial to reassess what constitutes mental illness, so that we can decide who needs to be treated with limited resources and who can be helped in other ways. He is talking about the NHS, and he warns that the NHS has buckled under a tsunami of referrals for some conditions. He also says that other state services such as schools are straining to the point of dysfunction in dealing with this issue, and I tend to agree with him.

I admire the passionate intervention by the noble Lord, Lord O’Donnell, calling for measurement and evidence, but one of the problems is that I am not entirely sure we know what we are measuring. There is no clear definition of well-being to measure. The psychiatric profession is making the point that the definitions of what constitutes mental illness are now contended—there are arguments about them. What are you measuring? This woolliness of definitions is becoming a problem in schools.

The counsellor Lucy Beney, in her excellent recent pamphlet, worries that this means that mental illness in schools is leading to a kind of diagnostic inflation itself, as pupils compare notes on what they have got and go to different professionals to ask what they have got and so on. It can create a sort of social or cultural contagion, enticing the young to see all the ups and downs of life through the prism of mental health, which can be demoralising and counterproductive. There is no doubt that too many children and young people are not thriving mentally and emotionally in the UK today, and I would like to have that discussion, but I do not think that well-being and mental health is necessarily the way to do it. Schools are definitely not the places to solve it.

A lot of the well-being initiatives, counselling and therapeutic interventions encourage young people to look at life through the subjective filter of their own feelings and anxieties. That, in turn, is likely to lead to inward-looking, self-absorbed children. The role of education in schools is to introduce new generations to the wonders of the millennia, of knowledge outside their experience, which takes them outside themselves. That is what schools are for. That is what teachers are good at. It is not just about gaining credentials. In fact, I hate the credentialing aspect of it. But if you get into a brilliant novel, the law of physics, the history of our world or evolution, you forget your troubles. If you are constantly talking to the counsellor about your troubles, yourself and endlessly thinking of your own well-being, it is boring, demoralising and stunting. It is enough to make anybody depressed, including the young. It is important that schools do not get completely obsessed with this issue. I fear that they have, and it has made matters worse.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, first, I want to reassure the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, that the World Health Organization has a clear definition of well-being:

“Well-being is a positive state experienced by individuals in society … Well-being encompasses quality of life and the ability of people and societies to contribute to the world with a sense of meaning and purpose.”


So this is not about self-focus; it is clear that it is about people being in a position to contribute. The WHO goes on to say that a society’s well-being can be

“determined by the extent to which it is resilient, builds capacity for action, and is prepared to transcend challenges”.

Perhaps most of us can agree that that is something society needs to do much better.

I am afraid that I disagree entirely with the contribution of the noble Baroness, Lady Spielman. The noble Lord, Lord O’Donnell, said that the Dutch score particularly highly, along with Denmark, in the recent PISA figures on children’s well-being, and we score astonishingly badly. I was looking at a publication from a few years ago, The Dutch Way in Education. The publisher of that notes how the Dutch system measures not only academic achievement but also the well-being and involvement of students. I can reassure the noble Lord, Lord O’Donnell, that I have raised the study he referred to a number of times. I would like to raise it tonight, but in the interests of the Committee making progress, I will not. Every time we are told how much progress our schools have made, saying, “Look at the exam results”, I say, look at the state of well-being of our pupils. I say particularly to the noble Baroness, Lady Spielman, that if we measure only the exam results, that is what we are going to judge our schools on. That is what we have been doing, and it is what has got us into this position.

[Baroness Spielman (Con)]

Ofsted, where I was chief inspector, took personal development, including children’s well-being, very seriously; it was one of the judgments there. I have never suggested, nor would ever suggest, that academic outcomes were the only thing that mattered for children.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

In responding to the noble Baroness, I can speak as a former school governor, and I have my own opinions of Ofsted. I want to put it on record that the Green Party wishes to abolish Ofsted, so that is where I am coming from.

It is important that we speak in support of Amendment 502YG about allergies. I also went to an event with the Benedict Blythe Foundation where I learned about this crucial issue, and the work of that foundation absolutely needs to be acknowledged.

There are two amendments in this group that have not yet been introduced. The first is Amendment 502B in my name, kindly backed by the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, and the noble Baroness, Lady Willis. I am also going to speak to Amendment 502Y, which was tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Willis, and backed by the noble Baronesses, Lady Parminter and Lady Boycott. The noble Baroness, Lady Willis, apologises greatly that she is unable to introduce her own amendment. Like me, the noble Baroness had a train to catch and, while I have now given up on mine, she had to catch hers, so she has departed.

Both amendments focus on the importance of nature in the physical spaces in and around school buildings, and to promote active-based learning and teaching in the school curriculum. It is important to say that far too often that is seen as a “nice to have”—an additional something for schools that have the resources to get money from parents to plant trees, make nice gardens and so on. It is a great pity that the noble Baroness, Lady Willis, is not here because this is something that she has literally written the book on. I am sure that many noble Lords already know that the title of her book is Good Nature: The New Science of How Nature Improves Our Health.

I shall highlight the difference between the two amendments. My Amendment 502B says:

“The Secretary of State shall have a duty to promote school pupils’ access to nature”,


and says there should be one hour of access to nature each week for every pupil. This is something on which there is bountiful evidence. The amendment from the noble Baroness, Lady Willis, is much more limited but still important: it would require a review to be conducted on the benefits of nature-based learning to children’s health and well-being.

I have vast amounts of notes here that noble Lords will be pleased to know I am not going to read out, but it is worth focusing on just one study from 2015 that the noble Baroness, Lady Willis, highlights, focusing on 3,000 primary-aged children in four standard urban schools in Barcelona. The test scores of children who were looking out of the window at green space were better than those of the children who did not have that view of green space. We are not talking here about forest schools; they were normal inner-city schools. The addition of trees and green infrastructure in the playground has real impact on exam results. More than that, there is significant evidence about improvements in anti-social behaviour, levels of mental health and teenage anxiety, and even reduced truancy, something that noble Lords and the Government are very concerned about.

The second part of the noble Baroness’s amendment is about nature-based skills. In other parts of the economy, in the Planning and Infrastructure Bill, we are focusing on the need to look after green spaces in our communities. Who is going to do the work of looking after that? It is crucial that we have the training.

The noble Baroness, Lady Willis, has given me a great deal more information and I feel guilty that I am not going to pass it on, but in the interests of time I am going to sit down now and urge noble Lords to read the noble Baroness’s book.

[Baroness Kennedy of Cradley (Lab)]

My Lords, I support Amendment 502YG. I declare my interest as the chief officer of the Natasha Allergy Research Foundation, the UK’s food allergy charity.

Regrettably, we have an education system completely unprepared for the growing numbers of food-allergic children in the UK, with safeguarding standards varying widely from school to school. Recent incidents underscore the urgent need for thorough staff training and well implemented allergen management policies. Food allergy-related deaths, which for the most part are preventable, while uncommon, tragically occur in school.

A few months ago, as the noble Baroness, Lady Berridge, noted, the inquest into the death of Benedict Blythe, who was aged just five, concluded. Today, as we discuss this amendment, I know that Benedict is in our hearts and our minds, as is his mother, Helen. She is the driver behind Amendment 502YG, which would be a critical addition to the Bill.

There are of course excellent examples of food allergy management in some of our schools. However, with two children in every classroom having a food allergy, and one in five allergic reactions to food occurring in school, too many schools lack policies for effective allergy management and staff are inadequately trained. There is also a lack of understanding around allergy in our schools. That all impacts on children’s attendance and puts them at risk.

At the Natasha Allergy Research Foundation, we regularly hear from parents about schools that ignore their requests for reasonable adjustments or, worse still, are dismissive about a child’s allergy. These persistent challenges are faced by thousands of allergy families across the country, and they reinforce that allergies should be treated with the same seriousness and attention as other medical conditions in school settings. That is why, at the Natasha foundation, we launched Allergy School, which offers free practical resources to help teachers create inclusive and safe environments for children with food allergies.

However, charities and foundations cannot deliver change alone. The Government need to do more to help schools and early years settings be better equipped to manage food allergies, from improved staff training to safer food management practices. This amendment would achieve that. It would ensure that all schools had proper staff training; effective policies in place; data—I emphasise that for the sake of the noble Lord, Lord O’Donnell—on allergic reactions, which is woefully lacking; and spare AAIs, or adrenaline auto-injectors.

There are very few chronic conditions that can take a child from perfectly fine to unconscious in 30 minutes, but food allergy anaphylaxis is one of them. Who can disagree with life-saving medication being on site and quickly and easily accessible to save a child’s life? I look forward to my noble friend the Minister’s reply.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Whitaker (Lab)]

As it is late, I shall just register my support for Amendments 465 and 471. I agree that a large number of young people and their parents do not adhere to a religious faith. It is clearly valuable and important for them to learn about the central faiths that influence our culture, but they are also entitled to have access to moral and ethical frameworks which do not depend on a religious faith so that they may arrive at their own moral compass. These amendments would enable that positive development.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I offer Green support for all three of these amendments, but in the interests of time I shall make two brief remarks about Amendments 463 and 465.

On Amendment 463, I agree with all the contributions made thus far, but with a focus particularly on the relationship and sex education part of it. I think that it is also important that we focus on the PSHE element of that. This is education about the financial sector and managing personal finances, something that it is generally agreed there is a real shortage of. This is education about physical and mental health—and I cross-reference the earlier amendment from the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, about the importance of physical literacy in particular. It is also about rights and responsibilities. We have to note that, with votes at 16 now being government policy and coming in this direction, it is surely important that we provide education about voting and our political system to young people in our further education system.

When I say that we need that kind of education, people sometimes say that that is an argument against votes at 16. I think that 16 year-olds are as well informed about our political system as 60 year-olds, and they all need more information and more education. Educating 16 and 17 year-olds will also provide information that will disseminate out into the general community through their family, friends and colleagues in the workplace.

On Amendment 465, I want to respond directly to the noble Lord, Lord Weir, who, I think, suggested that there was something odd about the idea that the noble Baroness, Lady Burt, had previously brought two Private Members’ Bills—I have spoken in support of both—and that their subject was now being put forward as an amendment to a government Bill. There is a very well-trodden path for—

[Lord Weir of Ballyholme (DUP)]

No, I did not. In case there is any misunderstanding, I was simply pointing out that this was, in effect, a transposition. I did not suggest that it was some sort of irregular route or that there was something wrong with it. I pointed out that, if it were to become part of the Bill, it would not have gone through the same level of consultation as the rest of the Bill. However, I did not suggest that this was an oddly trodden path—in case there was any misunderstanding on that.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

I thank the noble Lord for that clarification. Of course, what he just said applies to any amendment that your Lordships’ House inserts into a government Bill.

The argument for Amendment 465 has already been powerfully made, but we are talking about a law that dates back to 1944. This is a 20th-century arrangement for the 21st century, which, as others have said, simply does not fit our society any more. A poll in 2024 said that 70% of school leaders wanted to get rid of the current legal arrangement.

On alternative moral, spiritual and cultural development, we hear from all sides of your Lordships’ House regular lamenting about how much cultural education we have lost from our current system and how little space there is to fit into the curriculum things such as cultural activities and cultural learning. This provision would be one way to create a little more space for something that is pretty well universally agreed as being essential.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, I will very briefly say a few words about this group.

On Amendment 463, the noble Baroness, Lady Blower, may have taken up the baton from somebody else, but she did it pretty well—nobody has disagreed with her. It seems agreed that she is on very solid ground. The amendment is about useful information that people should have. I hope that the Government are at least friendly to the amendment.

On the two amendments tabled by my noble friend, I very much doubt that one assembly a week will change anybody’s religious views either way. Not making one point of view compulsory will probably not change religious views either way. The similarity in the values of religions—the fact that we should be nice to people seems to be common across the board—is something that we can probably convey elsewhere; it does not have to be put forward in this way. I do not think that it will make much difference. It would certainly bring it in line with a bigger chunk of the population. If people want spiritual activity somewhere else, it would be available.

I turn to the final amendment in the group. I hope that my noble friend will not hit me too much when I say that the provision should already be there. Any education about religion must include the contrary arguments, so I think this is really belt and braces. I am not getting snarled at by my noble friend, so I think I am not too far off in saying that. I hope that the Minister can confirm that Amendment 471 should be covered, at least partially, in all current religious education.

Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Wednesday 10th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

My Lords, I am optimistic for a hat trick from the Minister. Clause 50 is one of the clauses that leave me most worried about the Bill because it risks directly damaging the education that children receive. Again, that is obviously not what Ministers intend, but it appears to ignore the impact on the school performance of sponsored academies—to be clear, not every single sponsored academy, but I know that the Minister will agree that, overall, the evidence shows a really important impact on the lives of children in those schools.

To be clear, I do not think that anyone on my Benches thinks that autonomy is a magic bullet to solve the problems of any school, whether or not it is failing. The key is how that autonomy is used. Some MATs have used their autonomy to focus on developing really great and deep expertise in turning around struggling schools, supporting staff and transforming outcomes for pupils. Others have focused on developing great curricula. There are lots of other examples; of course, there are also examples of professional generosity in the maintained sector, too.

There are now 2,796 sponsored academies in England —more than 23% of our secondary schools. As we have heard from a number of noble Lords, including my noble friend Lord Sewell earlier, trusts have led to extraordinary turnarounds in some of the most difficult schools in our country; I pay tribute to everyone involved in that critical work. However, Clause 50 changes that. No longer will a failing maintained school automatically join a strong MAT. In her Written Ministerial Statement, published yesterday, the Secretary of State wrote:

“Subject to the passage of the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, structural intervention through issuing of academy orders will continue to be the default approach for schools in special measures, because no child should be left in a school that does not have the capacity to improve”.—[Official Report, Commons, 9/9/25; col. 29WS.]


I am genuinely confused by that because I do not feel that that is what the Bill says, as it removes the section in the Academies Act 2010 that facilitated this intervention. I hope that the Minister can explain that and reassure me.

The Government have argued that we should intervene earlier in schools that are struggling. Nobody would disagree with that; we were already doing that in the department when I was in office. Of course, if that works, it is the best outcome for children.

The other argument that the Government have put forward is that directive academy orders are too slow. I think that, if the Minister has time to dig into the detail, she will agree with me that the ones that are slow are really complicated. They may need significant financial help, which the department is struggling to find down the back of any education-shaped sofa; that might be in relation to capital or to revenue. There may be very complex governance issues, or—as in one case that I can remember, which was very slow—there may be crippling PFI contracts in place.

However, even that does not stop immediate help being put in. The Minister will be familiar with a number of cases where that has happened, often with trusts taking significant risk and commitment of resources without any guarantee that they will end up being the sponsor for the school. They do it because it is the right thing to do.

My Amendment 445B aims to address the Government’s concern about delays while still keeping the urgency that is necessary to address the weaknesses in a particular school. It says that, if

“no suitable sponsor is available, the Secretary of State must, within 14 days, publish a plan to secure appropriate governance and leadership of the school and to secure its rapid improvement”.

This would bring about the clarity and transparency that will be crucial in retaining the confidence of parents, pupils and staff. I think that that aligns with the Secretary of State’s Statement yesterday but, if it does not, I hope that the Minister can explain where the gap is.

My Amendment 446A aims to address a problem that is likely to emerge as a result of the Government’s approach—namely, an increase in the number of judicial reviews of academy orders. Schools will want to understand why they are not being given more support or more time to turn around. However valid any individual case might be, the outcome will be a slowing down and reduction in the use of academy orders, leaving pupils in failing schools for longer.

My Amendment 446B aims to reintroduce the automatic academisation of maintained schools that have received from Ofsted a significant improvement judgment, or whatever the latest language is—however the department and the chief inspector judge that to be framed—and where the RISE teams believe that a school is “significantly underperforming”.

The Bill fails to address another problem: the schools that, under the previous Ofsted framework, were repeatedly graded as requiring improvement, some as many as seven times or more. None of us in this Committee would want our child to attend or work in a school that is so stuck in a rut of underperformance. I know that the decision to intervene in the so-called 2RI+ schools—to use the secret language of school intervention—was not universally welcomed, including by my noble friend Lady Spielman, and she and I debated this many times in her previous role. The aim was to send a strong signal about the priority we put on addressing underperformance in a timely and effective way. Sadly, the Secretary of State reversed this approach very early on in her tenure.

I ask the Minister to reconsider whether this clause should stand part of the Bill, particularly given the Secretary of State’s comments yesterday. Where is the evidence that the department’s proposed approach will be more effective? Children in failing schools need urgent action, as the Secretary of State herself has said. Sometimes the leadership of that school does not want to become part of a trust, but, ultimately, we need to be clear that the interest of the pupils must always come first. I beg to move the amendment in my name.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendments 447 and 447ZB, which appear in my name. I must begin by apologising to the Committee and the Minister for failing to introduce my amendments in the group before the break. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, for picking up the slack. My only explanation is that it has been a long 24 hours.

This Bill, as currently drafted, sits in an awkward position. On the long-term disastrous policy of academisation—too often forced academisation and rarely resisted successfully by local and school communities —the Bill makes half a U-turn. It ends the presumption that all new schools must be an academy and removes the duty to force schools into multi-academy trusts. As the National Education Union has said, this a welcome shift in policy. But this is not a full U-turn but a half U-turn. It leaves far too many schools stuck, pointed awkwardly at 90 degrees across the flow of history, like a vehicle on a traffic island with fast-moving lorries approaching from both directions.

The Bill does not provide the option for schools and their communities that are unhappy in their current situation to leave multi-academy trusts and join the local authority system or other groups that are better suited to their needs. Making that provision would provide the chance of escape and allow schools to get out of the iron grip of dangerous and failed ideology into the empowered position of local choice and decision-making—the kind of devolution that the Government say they are in favour of.

This is an area of policy that the Green Party, as on so many others, has been leading ever since it resisted from the start the disastrous push to free schools and academies that has fragmented our systems and seen enormous sums flowing into fat cat executive pay—something we may come to in the next group—and big supply profits hoovered up by multinational companies on the contractor bandwagon. These two amendments take two possible approaches to dealing with this and starting to untangle the mess.

Currently, schools in multi-academy trusts lack separate legal entities. Leaving it to the MAT board to decide which powers, if any, it chooses to delegate to each academy is a profoundly unequal relationship. Amendment 447 does not seek to directly prescribe how to get out of this undeniably complex situation; rather, it would create a new clause in the Bill directing the Secretary of State to set out, within 12 months of the Act passing, a report with proposals for converting academy chains, individual academies and free schools into maintained schools under local authority control.

--- Later in debate ---

Clause 50 is about empowering the Secretary of State to act in the best interests of children. Far from leading to the weakening of school improvement, it will accelerate it. For that reason, and because of the assurances I have provided, I hope that noble Lords will feel able to withdraw or not move their amendments.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

I am taking some encouragement from the Minister’s remarks. I wrote down and underlined that the Government have no immediate plans. That is interesting, because it is a statement of a possibility for the future. We all know how hard it is to get parliamentary time to get Bills through Parliament—the Government will certainly attest to that. I ask the Minister to consider future-proofing. Would it not be a good idea to provide the potential here, without the necessity to activate it, and set up some mechanism for the possibility of getting the kind of diversity that she says she is looking for?

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

I also said that the proposals run contrary to our policy. I would not want the noble Baroness to run away with anything that is unlikely to happen—so no.

Universal Credit Bill

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

2nd reading & Committee negatived & 3rd reading
Tuesday 22nd July 2025 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle]

At end to insert “but regrets the impact of the Bill, particularly with regard to age discrimination, the impact on people with high levels of need and mental health conditions, and the overall impact on rates and severity of poverty among people with disabilities, and notes the human rights concerns expressed by the United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.”

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler. I echo her concerns about the way in which this is being rushed through procedurally and how its being declared a money Bill denies us the broader debate that we might otherwise be having. I thank the Minister for introducing the Bill, welcome the noble Baroness, Lady Shawcross-Wolfson, and express my sadness at the departure of the noble Baroness, Lady Bryan of Partick.

I begin, perhaps surprisingly, by agreeing with the Minister and the noble Viscount, Lord Younger, that we have a problem with ill health—but it is not a problem with providing benefits for ill health. The noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, referred to the delays and problems with NHS treatment and social care. I add that we are a deeply unhealthy society; we have food systems and housing of terrible quality, and problems with air quality, nature and the environment, low pay, and insecure work. All these things make people ill. We very much need to tackle those issues, but if we deny people enough money to live on and to be able to afford healthy food, that will not make them healthier. That is the basic reason for my regret amendment.

I have spent more time explaining what a regret amendment is in the past couple of days than I might have expected. I know that a lot of people are listening tonight, so it is worth stressing that the House of Lords has no power to stop or amend this Bill. A regret amendment is the strongest thing that I am able to do. Its practical effect is absolutely nothing, but I intend— I have tried to make sure everyone is aware of this—to put it to a vote, because it is really important that people out there who will be affected by this Bill have the chance to know that there are people supporting then. In the other place, 47 Labour MPs and many others indicated at Third Reading that they did not want this Bill to proceed.

The regret amendment notes the effects of the Bill on

“age discrimination, the impact on people with high levels of need and mental health conditions, and the overall impact on rates and severity of poverty among people with disabilities, and notes the human rights concerns expressed by the United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities”.

That reflects the perspective of the Disability Rights UK briefing on the Bill, which I have widely circulated:

“Debt and poverty are already a fact of life for existing Disabled claimants of UC, with many unable to afford essentials such as food, energy and housing or the additional costs of disability. The cuts will exacerbate this grave situation even further, pushing people into deep poverty”.


I and many other noble Lords, I am sure, have received a flood of briefings from organisations representing disabled people, including Scope, Sense, the Cystic Fibrosis Trust, Parkinson’s UK, the Mental Health Foundation and Amnesty International. The last of those clearly identifies, as the UN did, that this is a human rights issue, as the regret amendment points out. The latest letter from the UN committee points out that this is going backwards, when it had already identified that there was a problem. Looking at what that means, recent research from the Trussell Trust and YouGov found that one in five people receiving universal credit and disability benefits now has been forced to use a food bank in the past month. What will that do to people’s health? How will that equip them to find work, if that is even a possibility?

There is a further joint briefing involving many of those organisations, as well as the Disability Benefits Consortium, the Trussell Trust, Citizens Advice, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, the Child Poverty Action Group, the New Economics Foundation, Z2K, Turn2us, the MS Society and Carers UK. It highlights how the Bill as it stands means that the existing recipients of the health element of universal credit will not see their payments frozen but will also not feel most of the benefit of the £250 per year increase in the standard allowance, which the Minister and the Government have made much of. About 50,000 more disabled people and people in households with disabled people are predicted to be in poverty by 2030 as a result.

Perhaps the most pernicious part of this is the key Clause 2, which cuts the limited capability for work and work-related activity, or LCWRA, element of universal credit—generally known as the health element—and will affect more than 750,000 disabled people by £3,000 a year, an effect that will only continue to grow unless we get a future Government who are concerned about the rights of disabled people and basic humanity. That means effective age discrimination, since younger people are far more likely to be affected.

As Sense points out, if the people with complex needs whom it represents received £47 less in support each week, a quarter would be pushed into debt—often further debt—and one in five say they would be forced to go without essential support to basically live their lives. The Government claim, and the Minister said, that some people with terminal illness and lifelong conditions will be protected, but the impact assessment confirms that fewer than 10% of new claims would be saved by this. The Cystic Fibrosis Trust says that few of the adults it represents are likely to meet the severe conditions criteria,

“despite the fact that a typical person with cystic fibrosis on the health element of universal credit is someone who cannot walk 200 metres within a reasonable timescale, the majority of the time is at risk of voiding their bowels and/or bladder, and would spend a significant portion of their day performing their daily treatments”.

Those are the people the Bill explicitly targets for benefit cuts. If the Minister can tell me that they are going to be protected, I am interested to have that on the record, but that is not what charities that are experts in this area believe. Parkinson’s UK notes that it has legal opinions from two different experts concluding that the severe conditions criteria are likely to effectively prevent people with Parkinson’s getting the higher-rate health element.

I came into your Lordships’ House promising to share the voice of the voiceless. As I am sure many others have, I have received hundreds of emails from individual disabled people and their carers, setting out their situations. I am going to use just one, with permission, although I will not name the person to protect their and their family’s privacy. This woman is a former elected Labour councillor and former NHS professional. She is a carer for her young adult autistic son and a parent with multiple sclerosis. She says, “I am currently advocating for my son, who has applied for universal credit and is now undergoing the LCWRA assessment. Without me helping him, my son could not negotiate this system. Cutting the health element for these young people is wicked. This is how they end up on the streets when there is no family to support them. This generation has been shafted by the SEND system. Most did not achieve their potential due to unmet needs and lack of support in school. They are at higher risk of mental health issues; they are less likely to gain employment”. She notes that the first requirement of most job ads is excellent communication skills. She says, “My son is selectively mute. He is at an immediate disadvantage”. Can the noble Baroness, Lady Stedman-Scott, responding for the Official Opposition, confirm that, having listened to the speech by the noble Viscount, Lord Leckie, she agrees that this family needs the strongest possible support? I hope the noble Baroness can confirm that.

I conclude with remarks from this former Labour councillor, who said, “I am shocked and appalled at this proposal. It really will destroy lives”. I am sorry that I will not be able to respond individually to everyone who has emailed me; the volume is just too great. It is a collective testament to the fact that disabled people in our society are not feeling how Sir Keir Starmer told the Liaison Committee yesterday that he wants them to feel. They are not feeling secure and supported; they are feeling the opposite. I beg to move.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for her typically comprehensive response within the limits of the time available. I thank everyone who has contributed to this extremely rich debate.

Your Lordships’ House has done what we can within the limits of the procedure allowed us, and I particularly note the highlights of the maiden speech and the valedictory speech. However, this debate has inevitably left many questions unanswered. The noble Baroness, Lady Lister, noted that what we heard from the Minister today and what we heard in the other place do not square with what is actually in the Bill on constant and continuing. Had we had further stages of the Bill here, we would have been able to explore that at depths that we simply have been unable to do today.

I note the equality points about age, raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Browning; about gender, raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton; and about nations, especially Wales, raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Smith—and we did not even get into the regions of England. A particular highlight was the strong and powerful contributions of the noble Baronesses, Lady Grey-Thompson and Lady Brinton, in which they attacked some of the disgraceful stigmatisation and victim blaming that this debate has almost been free from, with a couple of exceptions. We have seen far too much of that in the public debate and in the other place.

The issue of finances is still hanging. The noble Lord, Lord Hendy, rightly pointed out that the justification for the Bill, when we started, was to cut government spending. The noble Lord, Lord Sikka, highlighted that we really have no idea what impact the Bill will have on raised costs for the NHS, social care, local councils and lots of other people. I should declare that I am a vice-president of the Local Government Association.

On jobs, the noble Lord, Lord Elliott, said that we need to do more to encourage employers. I am afraid that I am with the noble Baroness, Lady Bryan, in thinking that employers should provide jobs, ensure that those jobs are open to disabled people and make appropriate accommodations.

The right reverend Prelate said a very powerful phrase: we have to embrace those who do not fit the model of financial productivity. People can contribute to our society in many ways. The noble Baroness, Lady Stedman-Scott—I am sure that she did not mean to say this—spoke about a sense of purpose coming from paid work. I am sure she will acknowledge, as all sides of this House have acknowledged, that there are people who will never be able to take paid work, but those people’s lives can still have a sense of purpose. They can still contribute to communities—through caring and through volunteering—if they get the appropriate support.

The tone of this debate has very much been one of regret. The people listening to this debate need to hear as much support as they possibly can, so I beg leave to test the opinion of the House.