Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Debate between Lord Storey and Lord Wei

Thursday 3rd July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wei (Con)]

Perhaps I might build on that point. There seems to be a lot of conflation in this debate between home education and children who are missing education or invisible. It seems that all these measures are designed to try to find these invisible children. Is there not a risk, as I think the noble Lord is touching on, that we may bring in a system that does not actually find the missing children? The people who are very determined to abuse their children, or to hide them in very fundamentalist environments, are the very people who would not register their children even if we had a database. In which case, we would be going after all the people who are doing a good job in the noble Lord’s first few categories. Will the parents we actually want to get—the 39,000 or 300,000 or however many—really self-disclose? There is a real risk that we might not know this until we have imposed a huge amount of bureaucracy on all the parents who are doing a great job.

[Lord Storey (LD)]

I thank the noble Lord for his question. The answer is that, at the moment, we are not doing anything, which is why the children are going missing and why we do not know where they are. We therefore need to do something to ensure that those children have the opportunity of education and are safe.