Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Debate between Lord Bird and Baroness Smith of Malvern

Thursday 19th June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

I thank my noble friend for recognising the enormously broad way in which the Child Poverty Taskforce has undertaken its work, under the leadership of my right honourable friends the Secretary of State for Education and the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions. It has been about looking at the whole breadth of actions that this Government can take, and engaging with those who have the most experience of what it means to be poor, as well as others who represent them. I hope and believe that broad approach and the commitment of this Labour Government will make the real impact to children that we all seek.

[Lord Bird (CB)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for her assessment, but I do not agree. It is interesting that, when she outlined how she will tackle poverty, she mentioned school uniforms, breakfast clubs and social housing. I have an opinion, which I expressed earlier; I think that food clubs are a response to the fact that the horse has bolted and we are chasing it down the hill. The same goes for uniforms: they are not necessarily methodologies to dismantle poverty.

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

Does the noble Lord accept that I was not making that argument? What I was actually arguing—in agreement with him—is that we need a multifaceted approach and that we need to look at the causes for people ending up in poverty. Taking action to reduce the costs for families around the country—the costs he has just referenced—is an important thing that the Government can do, alongside the more strategic, detailed and cross-cutting work that the child poverty task force is also doing.

[Lord Bird (CB)]

I agree with the Minister 100%. We should never, ever abandon people who are in an emergency. But, if that is what we are doing, and if that is what most of our efforts go into, we will never come to the day when we dismantle poverty.

My problem—I have talked about this on a number of occasions in the House—is around social housing. I had an argument with a leading Member of this House, who was in social housing for many decades. I made the point to him, “Isn’t it interesting and damning that, if you give somebody social housing in current times, there’s a distinct possibility that their children and their children’s children—and, probably, their children’s grandchildren—will live in poverty?” Because social housing produces only in the region of 2%, 3% or 4% of the social mobility of finishing your levels and getting into university or an apprenticeship. Social housing is not a route out of poverty; it is, in a way, a stumbling block.

We will not move forward until we revolutionise social housing and go back to the kind of social housing that I had when we moved from the slums of Notting Hill and into a Catholic orphanage. We then left that and went into social housing in Fulham, where we had sociable housing: the people there included police officers and a trainee teacher. I have talked about this on countless occasions. We had our first parking warden; we did know what to do with him, because most of us did not have a car. The point is that there was a social element, including the disabled and the old. The problem is that, because social housing has lost its sociability and has become a place of refuge and deep need—which we cannot turn against—we have people who remain for ever in an emergency.

I thank the noble Lords, Lord Storey and Lord Hampton, and the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, because they argued for targets far more eloquently than me—this is my first amendment, so I am getting used to it and learning on the job. The point is that targets will get us thinking about those kinds of levels. What do we have to do next to get people out of poverty? We have to go beyond the food, the uniforms and the social housing. We have to get to the enemies of the people who pass through poverty, because they are “mind-forg’d manacles”.

I am not decrying this, but I had an argument a few years ago when they were saying, “Why don’t we list all the ingredients that go into a Mars bar, a KitKat, a Twix or a bottle of Coca-Cola?”, so that people would read them and say, “I’m not going to eat that”. The “mind-forg’d manacles” of poverty mean that you will go for the Coca-Cola whether or not it is good for you. These are the things that we need to do to dismantle poverty. One of the simplest ways is to concentrate the Government by bringing in all the philosophical, intellectual, cultural and social reasons why people are caught in poverty.

Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Debate between Lord Bird and Baroness Smith of Malvern

Thursday 12th June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bird (CB)]

I just wanted to remind us of a little bit of history. Napoleon said that a battle plan strategy was the most useless thing on earth but that you were lost without it.

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

That is good, because I was about to say—although I think he called it a battle plan, not a battle strategy—that the Government will set out our plans for foster care in due course, bringing together the range of activities that is already happening and taking on board the need to go further in the way that noble Lords have rightly pushed us to today.

Amendment 105, introduced by my noble friend Lord Watson, is on the introduction of a national foster care register. As he outlined, fostering services currently maintain local registers of foster carers alongside records relating to prospective foster carers. A national foster care register would insert central government into the systems and processes of foster care oversight, which are currently deployed locally. But as he said, and as I think my honourable friend in the other place outlined in Committee there, we are considering the possible benefits and costs of a national register of foster carers as part of our wider reforms.

There are a range of proposals for such a register. It will require some careful consideration. Specifically, I am sure we all recognise the need to ensure that a national foster care register would also meet local needs and avoid unforeseen negative consequences, and that it would overcome some of the risks surrounding the security of sensitive data, as well as imposing additional bureaucracy on the sector. But we want to engage with fostering stakeholders on this issue to determine next steps, and we can see some of the advantages of the national register that my noble friend outlined.

Amendment 134, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, is on the sharing of bedrooms for foster children to enable foster carers to look after more children in their home. She identified that one of the pushes for this comes back to one of the fundamental issues that we will discuss on upcoming clauses and which lies very much at the heart of the Government’s reforms: the insufficiency of high-quality places, fostering or otherwise, for the children who need them. I completely understand the belief that changing standards in this way might enable us to increase capacity.

I have already identified that the Government will invest money, for example, in allowing extensions and other ways that foster carers might alter their homes to provide more space and capacity for children. But it is also the case that our national minimum standards already allow foster children aged three or over to share a bedroom, subject to conditions being met, which are in place to safeguard and protect children. That means that fostered children, such as siblings, can share a bedroom where it is in the best interests of the child, provided that each child has their own area of the room.

We can update those national minimum standards at any time. We do not require a change to Section 23 of the Care Standards Act, as suggested in this amendment, to do so. The language in this amendment would change the tone of the national minimum standards. I am not averse to the point that is being made here; we just need to be careful about the balance that we are setting. It would shift the default position to present room sharing both as appropriate and, in fact, standard practice, rather than the current tone, where room sharing should be considered where it is not possible for each child to have their own room.

I think we all agree that children in foster care deserve to be treated as a good parent would treat their own children and to have the opportunity for as full an experience of family life and childhood as possible. I know that there are many good parents who will have children who share bedrooms, especially at a younger age, but I also know that for many children, fostered or otherwise, and for many parents, the gold standard would for them to have their own room. If we add to that the fact that children often enter foster care after experiencing neglect or abuse, including sexual abuse, and may have a greater need for their own personal space and for privacy, we can see the need to be careful about shifting the position to promoting sharing.

We recognise that room sharing in foster care may be suitable, as I have said, particularly for siblings, and we think it is right that flexibilities are already in place, but we are reluctant to suggest that room sharing should be promoted as standard practice. Importantly, we have seen no evidence from children and young people themselves to suggest that they want room sharing to become standard practice in foster care.

State Schools: Creative Education

Debate between Lord Bird and Baroness Smith of Malvern

Wednesday 15th January 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

The noble Lord is absolutely right. It is important for those of us in the Department for Education to work across government with DCMS colleagues in this area, and I assure him that that is already happening. We are making sure that, as he will know, the £444 million being invested in arts by this Government and the Arts Council is used to the best potential. He will also know that 79% of the national portfolio supported by that money is already delivering activities specifically for children and young people. We need to ensure that schools and children are able to benefit from that.

[Lord Bird (CB)]

My Lords—

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[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

The noble Lord makes an important point about the benefits to children’s learning of being able to see the development and design of ideas; I wholeheartedly agree with him. That will be an important part of our thinking on how we support existing initiatives, so that children can benefit, and so that, through the curriculum, those opportunities are not only available but supported, particularly for disadvantaged children, who have too often missed out.

[Lord Bird (CB)]

Can we also include, while we are at it, young people in the custodial system? I am here only because I did art and creative things when I was in a juvenile detention centre. Unfortunately, a lot of those opportunities have disappeared in our custodial system for young people.

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

I have no doubt that a broad education, which also enables children and young people to engage in creative activities, is one of the things that protects against some of the circumstances the noble Lord identifies. As I have my noble friend Lord Timpson sitting alongside me on the Front Bench—