Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Debate between Baroness Neville-Rolfe and Baroness Butler-Sloss

Thursday 22nd May 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Butler-Sloss (CB)]

My Lords, I cannot resist picking up on what the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, said about the two children whose approach to education was so different. It happened exactly in my family. What I can tell noble Lords is that, as a parent, it makes life very interesting.

I particularly support the noble Baroness, Lady Spielman, and her Amendment 69. I also take this opportunity to strongly support Clause 4, and I will give two examples of its unbelievable importance. First, when I did the Cleveland child abuse inquiry, it was absolutely obvious that nobody was speaking to anybody—the police, social workers, paediatricians and the psychiatrists. Literally nobody was sharing information about anything.

Okay, that was a very long time ago. However, I was very recently at a conference where we were discussing certain aspects of safeguarding. A senior police officer told me that he was trying to work with Peterborough local authority, which would not speak to him about the issues he wanted to discuss. I have wondered ever since what on earth I could say about it, so I am raising it here today. It was last month that I was being told that.

The real problem is getting people to talk to each other. I understood and listened with great interest to the various problems that the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, raised, but at the end of the day, what really matters is that Clause 4 be agreed to with whatever alterations are necessary, because nothing could be more important than these two things: information sharing and sensible, adequate data.

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

My Lords, I am sorry not to have been able to speak at Second Reading, but I take a great interest in the effectiveness of public services and improving them where we can. I was sorry that there was not much discussion that day of the importance of information-sharing across agencies involved in social care, although the noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox of Newport, spoke about it, and we have of course heard eloquently today from the noble Baroness, Lady Spielman, in introducing her amendment.

Of the 12 million children in the UK, about 400,000 are in the social care system, which is far too many. History and avoidable scandals show that in this sector, poor recording and sharing of information, as well as, of course, poor follow-up, are sometimes responsible for failures in our care system, and the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, has borne witness to that again today. This lets down children, young people and the families who are served, and it is bad for social services, which find it harder to recruit, and spend time fighting fires rather than improving people’s lives. As the noble Baroness, Lady Longfield, has already said, intervention needs to be timely.

The fallout from mistakes also increases the ever-rising cost of the system and delays essential appointments and training, so there needs to be much more success in getting things right first time and intervening early enough. All of that means the sharing of information in a timely fashion is critical to the reforms to social care. In scrutinising this Bill, we need to be sure that the system of data collection, use and aggregation to improve the system learns from the best, and we need to understand how much of that will be in subordinate legislation—a question my noble friend Lady Barran has already asked.

I support Amendment 41 and other probing amendments in my noble friend’s name. She is rightly seeking answers to some important questions on consent, on the threshold for information recording and sharing, and on the compliance cost across the many bodies and agencies involved, including, as she said, even childminders.

However, I want to go somewhere different. I read with particular interest page 219 in section 8.8 of Josh McAllister’s Independent Review of Children’s Social Care. The report, I believe, is the inspiration for much of the Government’s reforms. For today’s purposes, the proposal for a national data and technology taskforce is of particular importance. The case study on the positive experience in Bristol, using the Think Family Database, is instructive. It brought together data from 30 sources, including the council, the police, the DfE, the NHS, the DWP and social care itself. That is the kind of joined-up approach we need—and it is happening here and now. I just hope that this is not one of the areas with issues.