Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Baroness Spielman Excerpts

Wednesday 14th January 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Spielman (Con)]

My Lords, I shall speak to the amendments proposed by my noble friend Lady Barran. We have heard from a number of Members of the House about the changes that this part of the Bill is making. A fundamental rebalancing of responsibilities in social care is being carried through in the pilots. It is putting much more on to the shoulders of less-qualified staff. The reforms are intended to streamline the system and manage rising costs but, as my noble friend has pointed out, there are many concerns from experts such as Professor Eileen Munro and from many practitioners about the implications of inexperienced staff finding themselves doing child protection work, which, paradoxically, could lead to more Section 47 investigations, not fewer, which was one of the aims of the reforms.

Taking one step back, the hypothesis behind the reforms was the idea that the social care system had become weighted too much towards individual children in isolation rather than children in the family context, and that more of the support available should be diverted to families rather than given to individual children. However, little account was taken of the profile of the children most likely to be in the care of a local authority. They include children with severe disabilities and special needs, often children who are most likely unavoidably to live in social care as adults. They are children whose parents simply do not have the capacity to manage at home, even with extensive support. Indeed, the strain of trying to manage a child’s needs has sometimes fractured parental and other family relationships. More family support and more kinship care is often simply not a solution.

Then we have to acknowledge that there are some children who simply do not have a decent parent nor any other decent adult in their family and realistically never will have. It is horrible, but true, that there are children who simply do not have a family member able and willing to give them the care, attention and love that they need. We have somehow to recognise and face this.

A substantial minority of looked-after children are unaccompanied migrant children, typically boys in their late teens. These children are not here because they have a dysfunctional family network that needs support and intervention by our social workers. They need help, but other kinds of help. There are, of course, risks to these children, and there are also risks to others from some of them.

Together, these kinds of children account for a substantial proportion of the social care caseload, yet the reforms that are being pushed through do not acknowledge their particular needs. For all these reasons, considering all these kinds of children, Amendment 17 in particular, which would defer carrying through the full reforms until the full findings from the pilots and pathfinders are published, discussed and understood, and any necessary changes reflected, is important. It would be unsafe to proceed.

[The Minister of State, Department for Education and Department for Work and Pensions (Baroness Smith of Malvern) (Lab)]

My Lords, creating new multi-agency child protection teams through Clause 3 is not, as the noble Baroness, Lady Spielman, suggested, about saving money; it is about bringing together social workers, police, health and education colleagues with experience in child protection to take swift and effective action that protects children from harm at the earliest opportunity. I hope that I will be able to respond to the points raised in this short debate, as we did at length in Committee and have continued to do since then through engagement, which noble Lords have acknowledged, including, in my case, directly with directors of children’s services.

Government Amendments 12 and 14 broaden the range of police staff who can work in these teams to include police officers and other police staff experienced in child protection. The need for this amendment arose as we talked more closely with the National Police Chiefs’ Council and the College of Policing to make sure that we were providing the scope for the correct representatives from policing to be on these teams. We are confident that this will improve front-line operational capacity through the right people with the right skills working in the team. Regulations will be clear that individuals must have appropriate levels of experience, seniority, qualification and expertise. I will come back a little later in my remarks to how we will ensure that those appropriate levels are delivered.

Noble Lords have heard me speak before in Committee—in fact, at some length—about the Families First Partnership programme, where we are investing £2.4 billion over the next three years to change the way that we help, support and protect children. One element of that—introducing new multi-agency child protection teams—brings a sharp focus to better multi-agency working, information sharing and decision-making. I therefore welcome the opportunity to address amendments relating to these new teams, to clarify what we are learning through the national rollout and how this will inform the future legislative framework on day-to-day operations.

I turn first to Amendment 6 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, on the important matter of child protection for very young children in legal proceedings. Of course, as the noble Baroness identified, these are children who are widely represented in the system and for whom we need special care. However, Amendment 6 would require specific senior sign-off for the decision to end a child protection plan when proceedings have been initiated or care or supervision orders are issued for children under five. As I have outlined before, these plans should end only through a child protection conference, when multi-agency practitioners are confident that a child is no longer suffering or likely to suffer significant harm, and not automatically when proceedings are initiated.

I know the noble Baroness is concerned that children in these circumstances may fall between teams or services deciding whether staying at home will keep them safe from harm. I want to reassure her, and other noble Lords, that I am confident that reforming the system of family help, with new multi-agency child protection teams wrapped around, is about exactly this: making sure the whole system holds the safety and well-being of children as the number one priority.

I will now speak to Amendments 11, 13, 15 and 16, also tabled in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Barran. These amendments focus on the operation and delivery of the new multi-agency child protection teams. Amendment 13 seeks to ensure that the new teams would operate within the existing statutory framework, Working Together to Safeguard Children 2023, and that these teams have sufficient access to health safeguarding expertise, specifically in relation to the NHS intercollegiate document, Safeguarding Children and Young People in Care: Competencies for Health Care Staff.

I reassure noble Lords that these teams, as part of the safeguarding partners, will absolutely be required, under the existing duties in Sections 16E, 16G and 16K, to comply with the expectations set out in the working together statutory guidance and local arrangements. We are working closely with health, police and local authority national leaders to ensure that practitioners in the teams have the skills, expertise and knowledge they need, or need access to, to deliver effective child protection interventions.

On the specific point about the police, I want to be clear that the intention of broadening the category, as we have done in the government amendments, would not suggest that a volunteer special constable would be suitable for one of these roles, but we could envisage police staff who would be appropriately qualified. In fact, as I have said, regulations will set out the requirements for the skills and qualifications, including police representatives.

The College of Policing’s professionalising public protection programme is developing resources to make sure that the police workforce has enough of the right professionals, with the right competences, qualifications and experience, to work in multi-agency child protection teams. There are good examples of police forces providing expert staff for child protection work: Thames Valley Police deploys experienced senior police representatives to its local multi-agency safeguarding hubs, including detective sergeant equivalents. They are decision-makers and offer expertise to support their police representatives at all levels. Thames Valley will take this approach to staffing multi-agency child protection teams as well.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Sentamu (CB)]

My Lords, I too support the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, on her amendment. In the Church of England, we had trouble with giving and passing information—having ways of doing certain things. What most people have been looking for is practical outworking of these policies. As the noble Baroness said, people could give information, but more is needed than just that: they need to be empathetic and to step into the child’s shoes in order to say what needs to happen practically for that child. The passing of information is important, but there are other consequences. If the children being safeguarded feel that the system has still not caught up in its internal ways of working, we are going to fail those children yet again.

The Government are on to a good thing, but can they, through this amendment, recognise what needs to happen? At the end of the day, a lot of children, particularly those in care, need far greater attention and more resources. It will be helpful if the Minister, when she responds, explains the practical outworking of this. What are the expectations and how will we know that they have been delivered?

[Baroness Spielman (Con)]

My Lords, I will speak only very briefly. I express my most sincere thanks to the Minister for Amendment 21, concerning an information standard. It directly reflects an amendment that I proposed in Committee, which, in turn, drew on the work of Professor Sir Anthony Finkelstein in his capacity as adviser to the social care review steering group. I am delighted to see that provision and glad that the Government are taking the opportunity to introduce that power.

I express my support for the amendments proposed by the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, above all else that concerning the explicit use of the NHS number. Information sharing is hard. In the thematic and joint inspections we carried out at Ofsted—the joint targeted area inspections and the area SEND inspections—time and again information sharing came up as a theme. Whether we like it or not, data protection legislation has not made it easier to do that, so everything the Government can do to make it as straightforward and uncomplicated as possible in the situations where it is needed is deeply welcome. Therefore, I support the amendments, and Amendment 23 in particular.

[Lord Storey (LD)]

I will speak to the amendments in reverse order. We very much support having a single unique identifier. Unless the pilot of using the NHS number causes some unforeseen problems—we hope that that would not happen—we believe that it makes absolute sense to use the NHS number to link health and education. It is also important for children’s safeguarding: we need to know where they are, what is happening to them and when they change schools. It rightly brings added responsibility to schools, headteachers and governors.

We also believe that Amendment 19 is important. When there is a multi-agency approach, it is important that information and understanding are shared between different teams when cases are passed between them. This amendment rightly highlights the problem and comes up with a way forward.