Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Baroness Walmsley Excerpts

Monday 9th June 2025 Lords Chamber

Our system is failing the victims of child sex abuse and changes need to be made. Too frequently, there is a lack of understanding surrounding child sex abuse across professions and organisations working with children. Raising public awareness and providing culturally sensitive training and support for all is essential. A significant number of people support some version of mandatory reporting. As legislators, we need to ensure that the right protections are put in place. I beg to move.

[Baroness Walmsley (LD)]

My Lords, I strongly support this amendment and thank the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, for tabling it.

I would like to quote from a speech I made on 26 June 2014, soon after the terrible crimes of Jimmy Savile had been analysed in the Lampard report. Our campaign for the mandatory reporting of child abuse went back at least a decade before that, but the Savile case showed clearly what happens when people who know do not tell. I realise, as the noble Baroness does, that the Minister might tell us this is the wrong Bill to explore this issue, but I have always taken every opportunity to raise it, and that is why I am doing so again today.

On that occasion, I said:

“I have always felt that a child is his or her own best protector. We can do what we can to protect a child, but we cannot sit on her shoulder all the time. This is why it is so important that children are taught in every school, through a balanced PSHE course, how to protect their own personal integrity … They also need to be taught what a healthy, non-abusive relationship looks and feels like, and who to turn to in case of fear or of actual abuse”.


I still believe that this is every child’s right. I went on to say:

“We must then minimise the opportunity for perpetrators to reach vulnerable children”,


and to talk about the shortcomings of DBS checks, which

“are not enough, as they only identify those who have offended before, and are no use against first-time offenders or those who are clever enough to avoid detection”.—[Official Report, 26/6/14; cols. 1418-19.]

This is still the case.

In that situation, the knowledge or suspicion of abuse by adults around the child is a vital ingredient of protection. We need to ensure that those who know or suspect what is going on report what they know to an appropriate and responsible person. I mentioned that lawyers who acted for dozens of Jimmy Savile’s victims had told me that the most shocking revelation of all was the number of victims who had reported what had happened at the time to someone in their institution, only to be ignored and their claims covered up. One girl in Stoke Mandeville told a nurse what Jimmy Savile had done, only to be told, “You’re making a mountain, you silly girl. Do you know what he does for our hospital?”—how shocking.

That is why I believed then, and I still believe 11 years later, that we need a clear and comprehensive system for the mandatory reporting of child abuse which would make it an offence—with clear penalties—for those in a position of trust in a regulated activity to fail to report knowledge or reasonable suspicion of abuse. The person making the report need not know for sure that abuse was taking place; that is for the competent authorities to decide after investigation. Reasonable suspicion is all that is needed.

The amendment before us refers to regulated activity as defined in the Children Act 2004 and the Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups Act 2006, both of which I well remember—though the definitions would need amending to exclude such confidential helplines as Childline. These measures have been successfully in operation in Australia for years, so I do not believe that it would be a problem here. I am grateful for the advice of Professor Ben Mathews—who also advised IICSA—about the Australian system. The idea that there would be a lot of mendacious reporting did not occur in Australia; in any case, one cannot fail to lift a stone for fear of the slime one might find underneath.

Childline advisers will often encourage children to report the abuse themselves to a trusted adult. In that situation, the child must be able to have confidence that, if they do so, their disclosure will be properly dealt with, and no concern about reputational damage should get in the way of that adult doing the right thing by the child. The only way children can have that confidence is to make failure to report abuse an offence. When a child gets up the courage to confide in a trusted adult about abuse, they do so because they want it to stop. Imagine how that child feels when nothing is done.

The intention of the amendment is not to put people in prison, except in the most egregious cases, but to change the culture. I believe that it would help workers to report abuse if they saw it as a public duty and not as telling tales. There is considerable public support for this. In an independent poll of the public in 2014, 96% of people supported it. I am not sure what the figure would be now, but, in the years since then, given the revelations of mass grooming gangs abusing young girls for years and nobody believing the children, I would think the figure might be even higher now. I urge noble Lords to support this amendment.

[Lord Moynihan (Con)]

My Lords, this amendment is both necessary and important. It is a credit to the noble Baronesses, Lady Grey-Thompson and Lady Walmsley, who eloquently introduced it, and for years fought for the mandatory reporting of child sexual abuse to be firmly placed on the statute book.

Child abuse, whether in the form of physical, emotional or sexual mistreatment, whether through lack of care, or whether leading to injury or harm, is offensive and detestable. I welcome recognition by the movers of this amendment that the amendment should capture the importance of child sexual abuse in schools and sport clubs, as covered in proposed new Schedule 1A.

Within sport, each case of sexual abuse among children is one case too many. In sport, it is compounded because it takes place within a relationship of trust or responsibility; it is an abuse of the power and it is a breach of that trust. The influence that a sports coach or physical education teacher has over children is disproportionately compounded by the physical nature of proximity in sport and the near total control which can be exercised over an ambitious child seeking success in the world of sport. We have seen how prevalent this is in the worlds of gymnastics, football and athletics, to name just three sports which have witnessed the ugliness of child sexual abuse.

Taking each in turn, for decades this was a problem that was festering at the heart of gymnastics. For far too long, some coaches and teachers have been able to act with total impunity, forcing young children to experience extreme training programmes while bullying and humiliating dissenting voices into silence. Some coaches have abused their power and authority to commit terrible crimes against the children they should have been caring for, leaving lives destroyed in their wake. In the wake of the #MeToo movement, numerous prominent gymnasts spoke out about the bullying, discrimination and abuse that they experienced in the sport at schools and in clubs. As a result, the Whyte review was commissioned, and an independent report examined the allegations of mistreatment in the sport of gymnastics. Predatory coaches and teachers were allowed to move from school to school and gym to gym, undetected by a lax system of oversight, and predatory coaches and teachers worked to conceal abuse.

In football, a child abuse scandal involving the abuse of young players at football clubs began in November 2016, and by the end of 2021, 16 men had been charged with historical sexual abuse offences, 15 of whom were tried. One was head of PE at a school in Birmingham, another a secondary school teacher. In athletics, the documentary “Nowhere to Run” in the UK concerned the sexual abuse of athletes by a coach and how the athletes tried to deal with the impact of the abuse.

The current situation in law, as noble Lords in this Committee know, is that while child safeguarding requirements are mandatory for all schools and colleges in the UK, a duty is legally enshrined in the Education Act and various statutory instruments, which are welcomed. However, we need to go further. Those measures did not deter many of the cases that have come to light, and there is no law that compels everyone to report child sexual abuse. Despite the promises for action within the Crime and Policing Bill, there is no criminal sanction for failing to report child sexual abuse under the mandatory reporting plan. We need to go further than a duty to report that “may be referred” to a

“professional regulator (where applicable) or the Disclosure and Barring Service, who will consider their suitability to continue working in regulated activity with children”.

I join the noble Baronesses in their view that there should be professional criminal sanctions for failing to report or covering up child sexual abuse, which they have put in the amendment they have tabled.

The noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, has led work on a duty of care and safeguarding; I have been privileged to support on it for over 20 years. We have sought to create a sports ombudsman, or a sports duty of care quality commission, who would also have duties of care within all schools. We have sought to develop an independent benchmark survey to measure duty of care, to monitor whether duty of care policies are working, and to inform future policy and investment decisions, and we have sought to ensure that there is a duty of care guardian—one in every school, I hope—with responsibility for engaging with participants in school sport, as well as with young people across the talent pathways and in community sport.

Today we can go one step further. We can rectify the position of the absence of a well-designed, mandatory reporting law at the heart of the safeguarding shortcomings in institutional settings such as sport and recreation at schools. Let the lessons of the past protect the children of tomorrow, and let those of us who I hope one day will vote for this amendment, if it is not accepted by the Minister today, take the lead for future generations.

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[Baroness Walmsley (LD)]

My Lords, I am very sorry to hear the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Jackson of Peterborough. I believe he totally misunderstands the point of the amendment so ably introduced by my noble friend Lady Finlay. He used “smacking” quite a lot. I will never use that word myself, because it trivialises what we mean. We are talking about a hit—about a physical assault on a child. The reasonable chastisement defence is only ever likely to be used in a court of law, and it has been.

As I think we know, the rationale is that every battery of a child starts with a hit, but not every hit of a child leads to battery. One recent case illustrates the point. On the first day of the trial of the killers of Sara Sharif in 2024, the prosecutor, Bill Emlyn Jones, told jurors that Urfan Sharif called British police, having fled to Pakistan after Sara’s death. He said:

“He used what you may think is an odd expression. He said: ‘I legally punished her and she died’”.


I wonder where he got that phrase. I can tell your Lordships: it appears in Section 58 of the Children Act 2004, and for the last 20 years, I and others have tried to delete it. The presence of those words in the law sends a message that it can be lawful to beat a little child.

Back in 2002, the Adoption and Children Act acknowledged the damage done to children from witnessing violence in the home. So long as the reasonable chastisement defence remains, babies and children who witness violence still have greater legal protection than those who are directly assaulted.

Emlyn Jones said that Urfan Sharif also told the police:

“I beat her up. It wasn’t my intention to kill her, but I beat her up too much”.


An intention to kill is not necessary. An intention to cause serious harm is sufficient for a murder conviction if death ensues. The prosecutor said that a note in Urfan Sharif’s handwriting was found next to his daughter’s body, which read:

“I swear to God that my intention was not to kill her. But I lost it”.


Sara had more than 70 injuries to her ribs, shoulders, fingers, spine and brain, and a burn from a domestic iron to her buttock. She had numerous bruises, scald marks from hot water, restraint injuries, and human bite marks. These injuries did not occur on one occasion when her father “lost it”.

This sort of case is not new. When Maria Colwell died in January 1973, she had black eyes, fractured ribs and brain damage. This was inflicted by her mother and stepfather, William Kepple. Kepple was convicted of Maria’s murder in April 1973, but the charge was later reduced to manslaughter. Officials repeated the mantra: “It must never happen again”. But it has, and it does.

Victoria Climbié, who died on 25 February 2000, was rushed to hospital suffering from hypothermia, weighing just three stone and ten pounds and suffering 128 injuries.

In arguably one of the most notorious child deaths, Peter Connelly, known in the media as baby P, died in London on 3 August 2007, aged just 17 months, after suffering more than 50 injuries. He had been seen 60 times by healthcare professionals and social workers.

On 3 March 2012, four year-old Daniel Pełka died after being severely battered by his mother and her partner. Daniel had suffered 22 injuries, including 10 to his head.

Arthur Labinjo-Hughes was murdered after months of abuse in 2020. Arthur, aged six, was tortured to death by his father, Thomas Hughes, and stepmother. After months of horrific abuse, he was starved and poisoned with large quantities of salt. When he died, his skeletal body was covered with 130 bruises and he suffered 93 different areas of injury.

On 22 September 2020, Savannah Brockhill caused baby Star Hobson catastrophic injuries after inflicting months of brutal abuse alongside her mother. Medics said that her injuries were usually seen only in car crash victims. Boris Johnson vowed that action would be taken to stop such shocking and heartbreaking tragedies in future, but it has not been taken. Many other fatal cases have hit the headlines, and there have been hundreds of beaten children who did not die but were marked for life by their experience. Briefings we have received from the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health have made it clear that hitting children is not harmless; it is harmful.

Yes, there were serious shortcomings in the actions or inactions of various public services in the cases I have just outlined, but the social workers and police did not kill these children; their parents and carers did. They did it because they thought they could get away with it. Every terrible beating started with a single hit, a single physical assault: the sort of thing that recently lost an MP his seat and his liberty.

The reason why these children died was that they did not have the voice or ability to stop it and they were not sufficiently protected by the law. If the early stages of any one of these cases had been perpetrated on an adult, the attacker would have been imprisoned long before the pattern of assault became fatal. The fact is that children do not have equal protection against assault under the law, because of the excuse expressed in the chilling words “reasonable punishment”. These assaults are not reasonable by any measure, and they are not punishment either.

No child was ever naughty enough to deserve such abuse. It is not punishment; it is an expression of the anger, hatred and frustration of the perpetrator, leading to actions that should be classed as criminal, without mitigation. These children are calling from the grave to make them so. Let us do it at last by carrying this amendment.

[Lord Hampton (CB)]

My Lords, I rise to speak to Amendments 67 and 505 in the name of my noble friend Lady Finlay of Llandaff, to which I have added my name and to which she spoke so eloquently. I am afraid that I am unable to comment on the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Jackson of Peterborough, because my cerebral cortex received so many messages of complaint that it shut down quite early on.

I have lived on this planet for 60 years, I have been a parent for 20 years, a cricket coach for 15 years, a teacher for 10 years and a kinship carer for over a year, and I have never hit, slapped or smacked anybody, except one unfortunate time in a tour game against Tredegar Ironsides, and the opposition scrum-half started it.

As has been mentioned, this is the children’s well-being Bill, but it is quietly going on its way without mentioning a fundamental problem of well-being: legalised violence against children. That is what we are talking about. Not a quick clip around the ear, not a short, sharp shock that teaches them right or wrong. Not something that was done to us and we are no worse for it. No, we are grooming our children to believe that violence is acceptable by the powerful against the weak for their own good. That is not an acceptable message.

I believe that the results from Wales and Scotland are showing no major increase, if any, in prosecutions. I suspect that, for most people, it will not be a surprise that hitting a child is a bad idea, so a change in the law would remove the defence only for those who really aim to harm children. The rule of thumb is an urban myth. It has never been acceptable to hit women. Why do we still allow violence against children?

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

My Lords, I rise slightly nervously to respond to this debate, which follows and covers a number of very important and thorny issues. But one of the reasons I am anxious—I double-checked, hence my looking at my telephone— is I felt that, at points, the Committee was talking about slightly different things.

I accept absolutely the very valid point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, that in every terrible serious case review of child death at the hands of their parents the issue has started with a single hit, but she would also accept that, thank goodness, those are very much the exception rather than the rule, and that the overwhelming majority of parents who may or may not smack or use physical discipline towards their child do not end up anywhere near those kinds of tragedies.

The reason I pulled out my phone was just to check that I had understood correctly. The reasonable chastisement defence applies only in cases of common assault and battery since the Review of Section 58 of the Children Act 2004 and the implementation of that review in October 2007. With the leave of the Committee, I will read a couple of sentences from the advice produced by the department in October 2007:

“Therefore any injury sustained by a child which is serious enough to warrant a charge of assault occasioning actual bodily harm cannot be considered to be as the result of reasonable punishment. Section 58 and the amended Charging Standard mean that for any injury to a child caused by a parent or person acting in loco parentis which amounts to more than a temporary reddening of the skin, and where the injury is more that transient and trifling, the defence of reasonable punishment is not available”.


So, I am sorry for whatever having to listen to my noble friend Lord Jackson of Peterborough has done to the brain of the noble Lord, Lord Hampton, but I think my noble friend made a very fair point. Noble Lords and parents around the country may or may not agree, but this advice is absolutely clear that where chastisement amounts to more than a temporary reddening of the skin, or where the injury is more than transient or trifling, the defence is not available. It is fair to ask—and it would be interesting to hear what the Minister has to say, and the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, who I know has thought about this long and hard—that we understand what difference this is going to make to the kinds of cases that have been cited in the Committee this afternoon.

My other concern is about non-physical chastisement. I spent the first six years of my time in your Lordships’ House never mentioning domestic abuse, and I do not think I have stopped talking about it since we started the Bill. We know that in many abusive relationships—and this applies to children as well as adults—you do not need to use physical violence; coercion and fear and control are incredibly harmful. Figures were cited about the harm of physical violence, and I do not question those for a second, but I wonder where the law then goes. If we were to adopt the noble Baroness’s amendment, which obviously has significant support in both Houses, where do we then go in dealing with what, I would argue, is perhaps much more toxic and damaging for a child’s mental health and their physical health, given what we know about the links between the two in terms of emotional abuse and psychological harm to children? I look forward to noble Lords’ comments on that.

We also need to address—as ever, I am surrounded by people who know much more about this than I do—the reality that, if a parent is accused of smacking, hitting or slapping a child, not the kind of severe physical violence that was cited but the violence that would fit under the defence of reasonable chastisement, they may enter a slow, stressful and ultimately quite harmful criminal justice process, during which time they may be prevented from having contact with their child and that child might be removed into care. We need to balance the impact of the kind of chastisement as set out in Section 58 with the kind of harm that that process would bring to children. In no way do I endorse violence—

[Baroness Walmsley (LD)]

I hope the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, will excuse me for picking up one point that she has just made. The law, as it stands, is extremely confusing and unhelpful to parents. For example, she talked about reddening of the skin. I do not know about the noble Baroness, but if I was going to hit a child, I would not know what level of pressure was going to raise a red mark on that child’s skin and which would not. How can a parent possibly know? So, the law is confusing and unhelpful. It is certainly discriminatory; as has been mentioned, you cannot as easily tell when a bruise is arising on a skin of colour as on a paler skin. Those are just a couple of examples where the law is confusing and it needs clarifying.

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I am not sure that I entirely agree with the noble Baroness on the spirit of the law. It talks about “trifling”—where the chastisement is of a trivial nature—and, while different parents might interpret that in a different way, the kinds of abuse that were cited in the debate that we have just listened to were not trifling; there was no question that they were trifling.

I will turn now to Amendment 173 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler of Enfield, which seeks to introduce a national strategy to address neglect of children. As we heard the noble Baroness explain—from her own professional experience, she brings great expertise on this matter—neglect is too common a feature in too many children’s lives. I commend her for bringing this to the attention of the Committee, and I would support her assertion that many practitioners lack confidence in how to respond to neglect. The approach set out in the amendment is practical in terms of sharing best practice and supporting both professionals and parents to understand and address neglect. My question to the noble Baroness, and potentially to the Minister, is whether it is wise to try to separate neglect from abuse, since we know that in most cases they will coexist, and therefore I imagine one would want practitioners to go in with their eyes open to both.

Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Baroness Walmsley Excerpts

Thursday 22nd May 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Walmsley (LD)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 53 in my name and that of my noble friend Lady Tyler of Enfield. It is designed to ensure timely implementation of the single unique identifier, otherwise known in the Bill as the consistent identifier.

Timely access to high-quality and personalised education, health and social care services is fundamental for good childhood outcomes and reducing inequalities. Important information on children’s needs and outcomes is, as we know, held by many different services across health, local authorities, police, education and beyond, but so often these services have not communicated with each other and crucial parts of the jigsaw around a child’s life have not been fitted together by professionals interacting with the child. Sometimes that results in tragic cases, as the Minister mentioned earlier.

Clause 4 inserts two new sections into the Children Act 2004 on information sharing. This includes a provision to introduce a consistent identifier for children, which is to be welcomed. Many Peers from around the House, including my noble friend Lady Tyler, argued strongly for the introduction of a single unique identifier for children during the passage of the Health and Care Act 2022, in which I also took part. We know that too many serious safeguarding case reviews—especially the heartbreaking and harrowing ones that hit the headlines—have said that better data sharing between services is urgently needed to properly safeguard children and improve their wider health and well-being outcomes. This very welcome clause is intended to provide a clearer legal basis for sharing information to promote the welfare of children and prevent them falling through the gaps. Through the introduction of this unique consistent identifier, it will be much easier to match records and share information confidently.

Implementation within this Parliament of this crucial measure, as promised in the Government’s manifesto, is paramount. We cannot run the risk of it being lost in a subsequent Parliament if it is no longer considered a priority. That is why many in the sector, particularly children’s charities, are working together to scrutinise the planned timescales and implementation plan.

As things stand, there is a risk that full implementation of this identifier will not take place before the next general election. The NHS and local authorities might be using a common identifier by 2029, but schools, early years settings and the police might not. Partial implementation would fundamentally undermine the benefits of a single identifier. Either all services should be supported to use it soon, or the purpose will be lost and children will continue to be at risk. Hence Amendment 53 would ensure that full implementation of this part of the Bill takes place before the next election, as set out in the Labour manifesto.

I will say a brief word about some of the other amendments. I also have concerns about other possible vulnerable members of the family, as the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, raised. I look forward to hearing reassurances on that from the Minister.

On Amendment 69 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Spielman, which has not yet been introduced, it sounds to me like a good idea that the data should be consistent, so that those accessing it will understand exactly what it means. I am concerned it might turn into a tick-box exercise, although I hope that would not be the case. I look forward to hearing what the Minister has to say.

[Baroness Spielman (Con)]

My Lords, Amendment 69 would make provision for a common open data standard for those with responsibilities for individual children. I will start with a couple of wider comments. Like the noble Baroness, Lady Longfield, as chief inspector at Ofsted, I reported each year, for many years, on the concerning shift of local authority spend into acute services and away from early help and targeted support. The reasons why that was happening seemed fairly simple: resources were constrained and these were the statutory services, so it was logical for local authorities to prioritise their spend on those.

I was therefore surprised when the Minister cited this concerning shift as a reason for the changes proposed in the care review and in the Bill. There are potentially much simpler solutions, such as rebalancing the obligations or providing funding. Yet this Bill creates a lot of additional structures, duties and complexity, which could unintentionally take more resources and time away from front-line work, which I know everybody would like to prioritise. I would like to get more sense of the thinking as to how the Bill can enable all the players in an extremely complex system, rather than simply direct and control from the ministerial office.

A particular missed opportunity is data and the value of a common open data standard to help facilitate sharing at individual level, but also to make it easier to aggregate and analyse. Every service working with vulnerable children has its own data system. Typically, a number of proprietary systems are available in each sector; each of those is set up and works in different ways. There are no common data standards for the bodies involved. This makes it genuinely hard. There have been obligations to share data between the different parties for very many years, yet every serious case review points out failures in data sharing, almost without exception.

It is right that we have privacy by default, so it is a hard decision each time you decide it is important to share information and override privacy. The process of sharing is itself time-consuming and expensive, because these systems do not work to any common standard. There would be potential improvement in the management of individual cases if we can reach the kind of common open data standard that is being developed and used in other sectors.

In the care review, everybody realised quite how hard it often is to put together a national picture with data about social care. The understandable protection around individual children, and the kinds of disconnect that have already been referred to, mean that information about those who are causing harm, or the children or others who are collateral damage in the same situation, is not necessarily neatly joined up. It is genuinely hard to find out about types of abuse and all its different aspects, and who is implicated. This is a real problem; it should not be down only to journalists armed with FOIs to go hunting for things that we should already know about and be acting on.

As chief inspector, I served until the end of 2023 on the national implementation board for the care review. I was sitting alongside the eminent professor, Sir Anthony Finkelstein, who is a data systems expert and gave me valuable input into the framing of this amendment.

Data was an important strand of the initial care review and the report, and an important part of the initial plan for its implementation, but it seems to have got largely lost. So, I have put forward this amendment to bring this strand to the fore. The Minister should make sure that this opportunity is not lost to enable all the players in this complex system. By making this provision now, she will have the flexibility to set a sensible, reasonable and proportionate timescale for all these proprietary providers to start creating the kinds of alignment that can help us going into the future to do the best for all children.

Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Baroness Walmsley Excerpts

Tuesday 20th May 2025 Lords Chamber

There is lots of other information, but I am over my time limit already. This is not a silver bullet—it cannot be taken on its own—but family group conferences are an important part of a process, and they should be provided alongside ongoing high-quality support that meets the needs of the child and the family.

[Baroness Walmsley (LD)]

My Lords, as one of the many qualified teachers in your Lordships’ House, I will speak to Amendment 14 in the names of my noble friend Lady Tyler—who cannot be with us today—me and others. Before I do so, I warmly welcome the noble Baroness, Lady Longfield, to this Committee. I know that as the Children’s Commissioner she was so very committed to all these issues, and I know she is supporting the amendments of the noble Baroness, Lady Armstrong, today.

I was involved with the legislation that set up the UK Children’s Commissioner in the first place and was involved in making sure that the commissioner “must” have regard to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, not “may”, as was in the original version. That is relevant to what I will say about Amendment 14.

The intention of Amendment 14 is very simple: to ensure that those making decisions affecting children and young people seek and take into account their wishes and feelings, if they wish to give them, and to support them to do so. I welcome the Government’s ambition to be a child-centred Government and support the important steps taken in the Bill to strengthen the systems intended to keep children safe, yet there is more that the Bill could do to be truly child-centred. Specifically, it currently fails to embed meaningful consideration of the child’s wishes and feelings. I would like to strengthen it, hence this amendment.

As noble Lords will be aware, more than 30 years ago, in 1991, the UK ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. In doing so, we recognised that children have a distinct set of rights that uniquely value all that it means to be a child. Article 12 of that convention sets out the right of every child to express their views freely and to have those views given due weight in all matters affecting them, including the family conferences we are talking about. They must be afforded that chance to express their views, wishes and feelings. The word “should” in Amendment 13 is not quite good enough in that respect.

In short, it recognises that children are experts in their own lives. I believe that children under 16 are perfectly capable of this, so I do not support the bit of Amendment 12 that limits this to over-16s. As long as they have appropriate support and understanding, many young children can be very articulate about what they think.

The amendment seeks to ensure that the systems designed to protect and support children and those who work with them are founded on the basis that we can hope to truly understand what is in a child’s best interests only by hearing and giving heed to their experiences and unique perspectives—the voice of the child, as we often call it.

As we know, in cases of abuse and neglect, giving children the opportunity to express their views is a critical factor in building trust and keeping children safe. Children themselves tell us that they are not routinely heard when decisions are made that affect them. Indeed, research undertaken with children and young people for the Children’s Charities Coalition’s 2024 Children at the Table campaign found that 62% of UK children think that politicians do not understand the issues that affect them, and almost three-quarters feel that children are not listened to by politicians. Let us listen and hear them today.

That is why I consider Amendment 14 to be so important. It would ensure that local authorities, in offering family group decision-making, are required to ascertain children’s wishes and feelings and give them due weight when making decisions related to that decision-making. It would also provide for a clear entitlement for the child to be supported to participate in the family group decision-making meeting. Where this is not in the child’s best interests, it would provide for the local authority to ensure that the child’s wishes and feelings are appropriately represented, for example by an independent advocate. Some effort will have to be made by somebody who really understands these things to ascertain those wishes.

The Bill currently requires local authorities to seek the child’s views. I welcome the Government’s recognition of the importance of listening to children in the context of family group decision-making, including by the Minister in response to a similar amendment in the other place. But this duty falls short of the gold standard of the Children Act to seek and—importantly—give due weight to the wishes and feelings of the child in different contexts, including children in need assessments, child protection and any decisions relating to a child in care, or possibly going into care. We know from serious case reviews and inquiries that where children are not listened to, it can have devasting consequences.

Wishes and feelings are broader than views. Amending the Bill in this way would mean that those children who choose not to express their views—perhaps they are younger or shyer, are non-verbal or lack capacity—will still have their feelings taken into account when decisions are being made about their safety and where they might live. Passing Amendment 14 would do all that.

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

My Lords, I rise to speak to Amendment 18 in my name and to Amendments 7 and 14, which have just been ably spoken to by the noble Baronesses, Lady Armstrong and Lady Walmsley. Amendment 7 is also supported by the noble Baronesses, Lady Longfield and Lady Drake, and Amendment 14 by the noble Baronesses, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle and Lady Tyler of Enfield, who is not in her place.

This group is primarily about family group decision-making, so I will speak to Amendments 7 and 14 first. The Government have avoided referring to family group conferencing per se, presumably because they want to allow for evolution of good practice of the family group decision-making model. But as I said at Second Reading, the evidence base on which they are relying for this legislation assumes faithful implementation of what we know makes a difference.

One key aspect of family group decision-making is that it is not a one-off meeting. If it were, this could become a token effort to bring together all those with family or other close relationships to the child. Currently, however, the Bill makes provision only for the offer of a family group decision-making meeting.

Rather, family group decision-making involves a process with careful preparation that typically goes way beyond a single meeting, as Amendment 7 would require. When the child is supported to be involved in an initial meeting, as Amendment 14 specifies, they might flag that key people are missing, or their input might throw up previously unforeseen issues that need attending to before important decisions are made concerning their future.

Support is required because many children will be daunted by being involved in a family group decision-making meeting. They might even say that they do not want to be there but regret not being involved later on. When there have been long-standing difficulties in a family, they might be concerned about revealing secrets, getting into trouble or making things worse.

Safety planning—a key aspect of any process involved in rehoming a child—can also be delicate and difficult and should certainly not be rushed. The pressures on local authorities are unlikely to ease anytime soon, and the legislation should not be written in such a way that short cuts are taken and the family’s involvement is marginalised to speed things up. That cuts across the spirit of the whole approach, which is the coming together —and, we hope, the strengthening and developing— of a relational network for the good of the child at the centre.

Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Baroness Walmsley Excerpts

Thursday 1st May 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Walmsley (LD)]

My Lords, I too congratulate my noble friend Lord Mohammed, and the noble Lord, Lord Biggar, on their maiden speeches. The noble Lord, Lord O’Donnell, is absolutely right about the child well-being problem, which is why I focus my interventions on the well-being aspects of the Bill, including children’s rights and voices and physical, mental and emotional well-being—specifically, their nutrition and protection against physical or sexual violence.

Research shows strong links between poor well-being and child poverty. Children from low-income homes often go hungry or have a very poor diet. That is why the Government must use all their levers to ensure that children are properly nourished. The Healthy Start scheme has helped young families buy fruit, veg and milk for their children. However, uptake is low as many eligible families have never heard of it, let alone applied for it. The value of the vouchers has not kept up with food inflation, and this must change. Will the Government welcome an amendment from me to auto-enrol eligible families to ensure that children get their entitlement?

The second lever is the food served in schools. I welcome the new school breakfast clubs, but they must serve healthy food. It is important to distinguish between a breakfast that fills the tummy and one that nourishes. The school food standards have not been reviewed for 10 years, and they hardly mention breakfasts. Does the Minister believe that current school food standards are strong enough to guarantee that children will be getting nourishing food in breakfast clubs? Will she welcome an amendment to update the school food standards, as recommended by the report Recipe for Health of the Lords committee, which I had the honour to chair, including clear rules on what a nutritious school breakfast must look like?

Breakfasts are not the only problem. There are still children who meet the narrow entitlement for free school meals but do not get their free meal, so we also need auto-enrolment here. The quality of school lunches is often poor and may not comply with school food standards, and neither is there any proper monitoring of and compliance with the existing standards. What are the Government planning to do about that? Perhaps we can do something during the passage of the Bill.

On violence against children, children still do not have equal protection against assault as we, as adults, have. It is time that the “reasonable chastisement or punishment” defence, which can be used in court, is removed, as in Scotland and Wales. I am delighted to see a great deal of support for this change here and in the new intake of MPs in another place. Some 90% of social workers, 77% of healthcare professionals, 75% of teachers and 51% of police also support the change. Social workers say that the current legal position makes their safeguarding work more difficult, and it is unclear for parents. The current law is discriminatory because it says you can hit a child as long as it does not leave a mark on the skin. What about dark skin or one that does not bruise easily? Will the Government bring equality and clarity to the law by accepting amendments to remove the defence referred to only recently by the perpetrator in the tragic case of Sara Sharif?

Sexual violence has lifelong effects: people live with unwarranted guilt and difficulty in making healthy relationships. The IICSA has recommended that knowledge of or reasonable suspicion that a child has been sexually abused must always be reported to the relevant authority. The Government claim they intend to enshrine this in law. I look forward to reassurance from the Minister, but I am not sure that a duty of candour will be enough. If I am not reassured, the Minister will be hearing more from me and others as the Bill progresses.