Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill Debate
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Baroness Barran
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Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill
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Baroness Sanderson of Welton (Con)
My Lords, I rise to speak to Amendments 32 and 35, which relate to children with disabilities, because these children are, sadly, more at risk and so need our protection. Also, before I begin, could I just say that my noble friend Lady Fraser of Craigmaddie is sorry that she cannot be here today—frankly, as am I, as she is exceptionally knowledgeable in this area and so I hope she will approve of the following arguments, particularly in relation to children with cerebral palsy, who I will talk about today?
While there are many different forms of ability and disability in children, if policy, systems and practice can get things right for children with cerebral palsy—the most common cause of physical disability in childhood—then the benefits will be felt by children with other conditions too.
Evidence gathered by the APPG for its report Best Practice in Education, Health and Care Plans (EHCPs), Teaching, and Learning for Children with Cerebral Palsy found that many parents of children with cerebral palsy lack confidence in their local authority’s ability to make suitable arrangements for their child. Some even view their local authorities as being obstructive, inconsistent and unaccountable. Provision inevitably tends to reflect what local authorities are able to provide, rather than what the child concerned requires to have the best chances in life.
Much of this stems from the reality that when it comes to issues relating to children with profound disabilities, local authorities are not always the people who have the relevant condition-specific knowledge, nor the experience of the lifelong trajectory of a condition, to be able to make the right assessments of potential and be suitably ambitious for the child.
Section 17 of the Children Act, as referred to in Amendment 35, outlines the local authority’s duty to assess children who are “in need”, and this definition includes children with disabilities, who may require a paediatric developmental assessment to fully understand their needs.
Amendments 32 and 35, when taken together, would provide an acknowledgement of the necessity for a member of the specialist health team involved in the provision of care for the child—someone who understands the condition and has the sector experience to understand what is possible—to be involved in the multi-disciplinary child protection teams, to ensure that these teams are assessing all the possible options.
The persons referred to in new subsection (3) relating to the provision of health who are to be involved in the multi-disciplinary child protection teams are only defined in new subsection (4)(c) as
“a registered health professional, nominated by an integrated care board for an area any part of which falls within the area of the local authority, with experience in the provision of healthcare in relation to children”.
Therefore, the health professional, nominated by the board, could be the same person who represents the health board for all the MDCPT assessments. The text does not specify that they have to know anything about the child, the health prognosis of the condition, the services and interventions that might be best for the child or whether they are—or are not—available in any one particular local authority area, nor be able to form a qualified view of the potential of the child, based on specialist experience of children with disabilities.
In Scotland, children with profound disabilities have a nominated “lead health professional” who is responsible for co-ordinating relevant, cross-sector, multi-disciplinary services and liaising with parents to take responsibility for ensuring that the needs of the child are met. Sometimes these needs, as the Committee might imagine, can be quite specific and technical; for example, when dealing with specialist resources for communication, assistive technology and mobility needs, particularly for children with complex disabilities. This lead health professional, who has practical knowledge of the individual child’s circumstances and health condition, would therefore always be included in a multi-disciplinary team discussion. It would not be left just to a representative of the health board, or a generic paediatric clinician.
Only recently, in her letter to the Times, Professor Eileen Munro warned against shifting child protection responsibilities to less-qualified staff. I therefore urge the Minister to accept—or at least to think about—these amendments, which outline the importance of including a member of the children’s disability team, someone who knows the condition or conditions, and not just a generic professional who ticks the boxes specified in the current text referring to the persons referred to in new subsection (3)(a).
Guaranteeing the right representation on these teams will go a long way to ensuring that assessments are likely to be safer, that children at risk have swift access to the resources they require and, where local areas lack appropriate provision and/or expertise, that there is a voice of knowledge to ensure there is no fear of commissioning, a voice that can work with other specialist providers in the best interests of the child.
Baroness Barran (Con)
My Lords, I will speak to my Amendment 36. I am also delighted to support my noble friend Lady O’Neill on her amendments, as well as those of my noble friend Lady Fraser of Craigmaddie, who was so ably represented by my noble friend Lady Sanderson of Welton today. All these amendments seek to clarify some of the operational issues with the proposed multi-agency child protection teams.
I do not want to steal from the Minister’s remarks, but she might remind the Committee that the context for introducing these teams came from the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care, which the previous Government commissioned and was led by the honourable Member for Whitehaven and Workington. Following a key recommendation from his review, we established 10 pathfinder sites to pilot and test out these teams, alongside a number of wider reforms to early help, targeted family help and support for children in need, as defined under the Children Act. We support the spirit and direction in which this draft legislation is going, but, as the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, pointed out, we have concerns about how it will be operationalised in practice.
Noble Lords may be aware that, in a former life before joining your Lordships’ House, I was involved in the establishment of multi-agency teams all around the country to address high-risk cases of domestic abuse, which were known as multi-agency risk assessment conferences—MARACs. We did that in every local authority in the country. At the end, those teams were managing about 60,000 adult cases a year and over 100,000 children. They involved statutory and non-statutory agencies. For better or worse, I am very familiar with the issues that are important when operationalising this kind of work.
The detail is important. Who attends these teams? Is it the same person? How senior are they? Is it the caseworker or a representative covering all cases? As my noble friend Lady O’Neill and the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, asked, who is accountable for the work? How can we share information legally? How does information sharing translate into action planning? How do you involve the family? These and many other issues are so important to get right, and we will explore them in more detail in the debates on the other amendments to Clause 3.
My Amendment 36 simply seeks to understand how the Government expect the new statutory multi-agency child protection teams will interact with existing multi-agency work, particularly the multi-agency safeguarding hubs—the MASH teams. There are so many acronyms in this world; I saw that the department has even snuck in a new one: MASA. Who knew what MASA was? Nevertheless, it is in the documentation. The MASH teams, which are now pretty much universal around the country, are not statutory. Some are great, but some are less so. How does this team interact with the multi-agency risk assessment conferences for high-risk domestic abuse or the multi-agency public protection arrangements for high-risk perpetrators? In a world where resources are tight, we need to avoid duplication.
Equally, however, we know that non-statutory agencies—the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor of Stevenage, who is in her place, knows this extremely well from her work outside the House—at the very least bring different information to multi-agency work. Frequently, they are really trusted and can build relationships with families that can be harder for statutory agencies, with the powers that they hold. I would be grateful if the Minister could set out how she expects the multi-agency child protection teams to work in practice with the MASHs, the MARACs, the MAPPAs and any other organisation that has an acronym beginning with an “M”.
I will pick up on the amendments in the name of my noble friend Lady O’Neill. My key question about Amendments 29 and 31 is: can the Minister say how she expects that the involvement of partners, both statutory and non-statutory, will be funded? What we hear from the pathfinders is that it is very difficult to get other agencies outside the local authorities to participate in the teams, and that some of the extra funding the pathfinders have been given has gone to funding police officers to attend a multi-agency child protection team, which in my world feels like a very odd thing for the local authority to do. I assume that the Minister does not believe that that is a sustainable model, let alone for non-statutory agencies, where, all too often, we rely on their good will and do not acknowledge the pressures on their budgets.
I am also very interested to hear the Minister’s reply in relation to Amendments 39 and 40, which deal with cases across local authority borders. She will know that, for vulnerable families, that happens all too often—one parent lives in one local authority and the other parent lives in another; the family are moved from temporary housing in one local authority to temporary housing in another; or a child lives in one local authority but is being groomed by a gang in another. I think I am right in saying that a contributing factor in the tragic case of Sara Sharif was that she moved local authorities but the understanding of the degree of harm she faced did not move with her.
Baroness Barran
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment seeks to confirm that Local Authorities can use their discretion in how the MACPTs are implemented operationally in their areas.
Baroness Barran (Con)
My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 30 in my name and that of my noble friend Lady O’Neill of Bexley, and to Amendment 37 in my name. Amendment 30 goes to the heart of one of the three major concerns expressed to me by several directors of children’s services. I wonder whether, with the Minister’s permission, we could park what feels like a false argument that is developing about whether directors of children’s services support the aims of these reforms. I think they are all supportive; certainly all those I spoke to—I cannot speak for others—were supportive of the aims. The concerns that we are trying to flag are that they are worried about implementation. I worry that the Minister is not seeing the whole picture, which may be something that she wants to explore further outside the Chamber.
It is not just about those private conversations. Perhaps in gentler terms, the Local Government Association and the ADCS have highlighted concerns about the degree of discretion that local authorities will have in how they implement the new multi-agency child protection arrangements. My amendment would remove some of the prescription in the Bill around membership.
Also, I commend to all your Lordships who are interested in this area the department’s cunningly titled Families First Partnership Programme Guide, because it very firmly states that it is not guidance but—trust me—when you read it and it keeps saying that it is going to set “delivery expectations”, it feels a lot like guidance. That document is prescriptive. In closing the previous group, the Minister talked about flexibility, learning and so on, but that programme guide does not feel very flexible. It says that you must have lead child protection practitioner roles and that, in many cases, independent chairs of child protection case conferences will be removed. It gives an overview of the reform across the whole system.
I can speak only personally, and it may be that I woke up a bit late to some of the problems with Clause 3, but this is whole-system reform. The Minister rightly referred to the document published in November; there is also this document, which was published in March, and there have been a number of others. The Committee needs to think about it in the round, even if only parts of it are in the Bill. The programme guide gives a very tight timescale for directors of children’s services to implement these changes and it is very clear in its expectations about how the additional funding should be spent. I am sure that the Minister is advised to talk about flexibility but, if I were a director of children’s services, it would not feel very flexible from reading the document.
The concerns we have heard would, I hope, be addressed by my amendment, but the spirit of my amendment goes wider in its aim to align autonomy and accountability. Local authorities will ultimately be held responsible for the effectiveness of the multi-agency child protection teams—in part, for some of the reasons that the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, who is no longer in his place, expressed in his remarks earlier. With that responsibility, surely more discretion over implementation should be permitted. Could the Minister address that point in her closing remarks?
As I mentioned, the worries I have heard come from some of the details that are set out in what I am now going to call the FFPPG—only those in this Committee will know what that means—which risk disrupting the finely balanced approach that currently exists in the best local authorities between early help and targeted support, under Sections 17 and 47. They also risk adding cost, with the need for additional lead child protection social workers for the separate multi-agency child protection arrangements—where are those social workers going to come from, and how will they be funded? They risk losing the critical fresh pair of eyes that an independent child protection case conference chair currently provides. It is obviously important, as we have seen in many cases, to have that independence, from someone who is experienced and can think again about the risks that remain to a child. Those families in child protection arrangements will now have two social workers, with all the resource and case management implications that brings, and indeed the risk that the family play one social worker off against another.
As my noble friend Lady Berridge said, rather than focusing on the cultural and organisational issues that make all the difference in the quality of social work, the Government seem to be focusing on process. There is a risk of adding complexity, and there is no question that it adds cost. Again, I would be grateful if the Minister could explain why. It has been said, but it deserves saying again, that there are real concerns that there is not a sufficient evidence base for this. I will cover that a bit more in the following group.
Amendment 37, in my name, would require the Secretary of State to produce a report on the impact of the multi-agency child protection teams. This would work well if, first, the Government publish the evaluation of the pathfinder sites—the Minister has committed that that will happen—and, secondly, address any practical issues arising. As she said, and I agree completely, the whole point of a pathfinder is to find out what works in practice and what does not. The timeline in the programme guide says March 2025 for 12 months; local authorities are expected to have implemented the changes needed in their teams to start these reforms by spring next year. I do not know how we can address practical issues and expect local authorities to do that transformation work with no further visibility on funding at the same time.
Thirdly, it would make sense that the Government agree with some version of my Amendment 30, so that there is some discretion for a director of children’s services in, say, Cumbria to implement these arrangements slightly differently from one in, say, Hackney. There will be variation in approach, and it is responsible and, I would argue, useful for the Secretary of State to report on this, so that we reinforce a culture of learning across the sector and support local authorities to evolve the model based on effective practice. I look forward to the Minister’s reply. I beg to move.
Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
We have come on to more understandable consideration of how the teams will work in practice, particularly with respect to local authority responsibility. Multi-agency child protection teams will be effective only if they are truly multi-agency. There is an understandable concern here about the significance of the role of local authorities, but it is probably also worth remembering, as we discussed on Tuesday, that safeguarding partners—local authorities, health and police—have joint and equal responsibilities for safeguarding in legislation. Through the multi-agency child protection teams, we are trying to ensure that day to day, in operational terms, with respect to individual children and cases, there is a practical way for those responsibilities, and the information that those agencies may have, to be brought together in that full picture about the child.
I spoke earlier about the findings from the Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel on child protection. To tackle the issues it identified, we need, as I have suggested, multi-agency experts in a room together, sharing information and bringing their different perspectives to decisions that protect children. It is important that we ensure the right people are deployed to those teams so that expert, swift and decisive action is taken to protect children, and we recognise the importance of safeguarding partners reporting on the impact of their arrangements to make sure that is happening. We need to base that, as has been the argument on other parts of the Bill, on the best possible evidence, which is both the professional work that constituted the Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel and, as others have mentioned, the independent review by my honourable friend Josh MacAlister.
Of course, we also need the evaluation that noble Lords have talked about. It will come in more than one stage. There will be evaluation of the process and some of the practicalities of setting up the process that the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, referenced, and, later, of the impact of the teams.
Amendment 30 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, seeks local discretion in multi-agency team membership and organisation. Requiring safeguarding partners to nominate a minimum team reflects partners’ collective duty to safeguard and promote the welfare of children in their area. They will also have, as I outlined in the previous group, flexibility to add other agencies or individuals, reflecting local needs and to tackle local harms. We know from Families First pathfinders that these teams are already making a real difference. In Ofsted’s recent inspection of children’s services, Dorset, one of the pathfinders, received an “outstanding” judgment. The report noted that when children are at risk of significant harm, strategy meetings are well attended by partner agencies and that effective information-sharing and analysis of risk lead to children receiving the right intervention and support. It is right that we celebrate the success of and learning from pathfinders and, as I suggested previously, learn from where things have been more challenging. On the resourcing, as I said on Tuesday, this transformation journey is being supported from our £500 million Families First Partnership Programme funding.
The noble Baroness, Lady Barran, made a couple of specific points. On whether this is doing away with an independent chair, one of the main purposes of multi-agency child protection teams is to have a fresh pair of eyes coming in at the point of the Section 47 inquiry. The new lead child protection practitioner role will work—in fact, is working in pathfinders—in a very similar way to the current independent chairs. I take her point about the need for a fresh view and independence, but that is built into the design of the teams.
On whether this would mean children having more than one social worker, children and families will stay rooted in family help throughout. Multi-agency child protection teams will lead the child protection functions, working with and wrapping support around children, families and the family help lead practitioner. The multi-agency child protection team brings expertise and a fresh focus on significant harm. The lead child protection practitioner will be an experienced social worker but will not be the case lead. In other words, the important ongoing relationship, which I know children feel strongly about, with a person they can understand, work with and gain a relationship with, will remain in place, but additional expertise will be brought to this from the multi-agency child protection team.
On Amendment 37, which would place in the Bill a requirement for the Secretary of State to report annually on the team’s impact and activities, I completely agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, and the noble Lord, Lord Addington, that it is essential that we understand how multi-agency teams are leading to better outcomes for children and that that learning be shared across the system. That being said, safeguarding partners already have a statutory responsibility to publish annual reports on their multi-agency safeguarding arrangements. This will include reporting on multi-agency child protection teams once the teams come into force. Statutory guidance, Working Together to Safeguard Children, already sets out the information that should be included in yearly reports, and that will include evidence of impact. Guidance will be updated to include the reporting requirements for these new multi-agency teams. There will be, at the level at which it really matters, a responsibility to account for and report on the nature and success of the multi-agency safeguarding arrangements.
On that basis, and with those assurances, I hope that the noble Baroness feels able to withdraw her amendment.
Baroness Barran (Con)
My Lords, I thank warmly all those who contributed to this short debate, in particular my noble friend Lady O’Neill for her practical examples of how it works on the ground and the very reasonable concerns she and colleagues have about these reforms. If I am honest, I was worried when I listened to the Minister about the amount of confirmation bias in her remarks that this will work exactly as we all wish. If that turns out to be the case, I will be the first to admit that I am wrong, but most big, complicated reforms such as this do not go exactly as planned: some things go well, and others do not. I hope the Government will keep an open mind on this.
Baroness Barran (Con)
My Lords, I oppose Clause 3 standing part of the Bill and I fully support Amendment 33 in the name of my noble friend Lady O’Neill. I thank my noble friend Lady Berridge for her support and for her very practical suggestion that the Minister meets those practitioners and experts. I hope very much that when the Minister winds up she will be able to say that she will have such a meeting.
Baroness Barran (Con)
I am more than happy to clarify for the benefit of the Committee. I have spoken personally to three directors of children’s services and one deputy director, and I have encouraged some of my colleagues to talk to their local director of children’s services. I stress that I was surprised at their response. I did not ring up and ask them to tell me about all the problems with the Bill; I rang up and explained that I would be responding on behalf of His Majesty’s Opposition. I always prefer to talk to someone who is directly affected before I give my views, which may or may not be on message. It was an unprompted response. It is for them to decide if they wish to speak privately to Ministers, rather than for me to say at the Dispatch Box who they are. If the noble Lord has spoken to others who say something different, I am sure it is helpful for the Minister to hear that too.
Lord Storey (LD)
Actually, I have spoken to only one director and I would not wish to comment on what they said, because it would perhaps give the wrong impression.
The noble Baroness, Lady Berridge, rightly said that our child protection procedures are the envy of the world. She is right to say that, but it does not mean that we are complacent about the fact that we have good child protection procedures. You have to constantly look at any policies or systems and change and improve them. I am always impressed that children are at the heart of everything we do. When we had the Question on media literacy, and I rather cheekily asked what the Government’s number one priority was, the Minister rightly said that it was child protection. That is symptomatic of how we as a House react. We cannot stand still but, when we make detailed changes, we have to be sure that they are right. We should pilot them, perhaps learn from the pilot, and then use that to change and adapt, and we have to make the resources available.
I am particularly concerned about qualifications—they are the hallmark of safety. You would not want a plumber without any plumbing qualifications to come to your house, nor would you want an electrician without qualifications to look at the wiring. So it is in child safety, where we must make sure that the people around the table are qualified to give judgments and opinions to protect children.
As somebody who has said that he is not an expert by any means in this area, I hope that, when the Minister replies, she might simply spell out for me why she wants to make those changes and why she has not taken the advice of somebody who clearly is an expert and knows what they are talking about, and who has—probably through frustration—had to write a letter to the Times.
Baroness Barran (Con)
Can I just clarify a few points that the noble Baroness made in her remarks? She gave the example of Warwickshire reducing the number of children on child protection plans, but of course the number of children on child protection plans nationally fell last year by 1.7% and has fallen by 3.1% since 2020, and that is despite the increase in unaccompanied asylum-seeking children. Clearly, we welcome the progress in Warwickshire and anywhere in the country that is achieving that, but I think the impression that she gave was that this was an unusual occurrence, and it is just important to acknowledge that that is a national trend.
Secondly, the regulations the Minister refers to are obviously extremely important in terms of implementation. I can remember other Governments publishing draft regulations during the passage of a Bill so that the House had clarity on their intentions. I wonder whether she would be very kind and take that back to the department and see if that is an option in this and potentially other areas of the Bill.
I am not sure whether I followed the Minister’s comments about the duplication of caseworkers, but page 13 of the department’s guidance appears to suggest that, in Section 47 cases, both the family help lead practitioner and the lead child protection practitioner will be involved. I am sorry to be picky about the money, and of course she is right on the £500 million, but, again, her department’s own documentation states that £253.5 million of that is mainstreamed funding originally for the Supporting Families programme. Again, this is just to be clear about what is new money and what it is for.
Finally, I wonder whether the Minister might pick up on my noble friend Lady Berridge’s suggestion about a meeting. She talked about the general engagement the department rightly has, but can she comment on whether she feels able to accept that invitation?
Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
The noble Baroness, Lady Barran, said that she did not want to undermine the good work happening in Warwickshire by pointing out a general downturn in the number of child protection plans. Good, because, as I suggested earlier, we should celebrate where there has been good work, which in Warwickshire they certainly attributed to the changes they had made.
On the point about draft regulations, there is a tension here, because on the one hand people are asking us to continue to engage on the detail of how this is going to be implemented, yet also to have the regulations alongside the Bill. I will reflect on this and come back to her. On the point about duplication, I have explained it twice, but, clearly, I have not explained it well enough. So I will undertake to write to noble Lords about the operational details, and particularly the role of the family help lead practitioner and the lead practitioner for child protection, and the operational detail that the noble Baroness, Lady Berridge, was talking about.
On the point about new money, I think I have been pretty clear about what is new money; I said it explicitly. On the meeting, my point was that there will be a whole range of meetings and engagement; I did not say I would not have a meeting. My honourable friend the Minister with responsibility for children’s social care has met many practitioners, experts and DCSs as this process has gone on. I suspect that, between us, we will be able to continue meeting people in the way suggested.
Lord Agnew of Oulton (Con)
My Lords, this is really a probing amendment. I am the first to admit that this is not an area in which I have deep expertise, but my questioning comes from the angle of the impact on schools and is on how much time and cost would be involved.
I understand that Clause 3(4) amends Section 16J of the Children Act 2004 to require safeguarding partners—local authorities, police and health—to ensure that multi-agency child protection teams are adequately staffed. This includes representation from education. Schools themselves are not made statutory partners, but safeguarding partners must secure the participation and representation of education and childcare agencies at both operational and strategic levels in local safeguarding arrangements.
I also understand that the legislation does not impose new direct financial obligations on individual schools. The duty to ensure that teams are sufficiently staffed falls on the safeguarding partners, not the schools themselves. However, I presume that schools will incur some indirect costs related to staff time for participating in safeguarding arrangements, meetings and training. How will this change from the current arrangements? What additional obligations are likely to occur?
I listened carefully to the Minister’s point on the new money for implementation—£270 million. I respect the fact that she cannot give any clarity on long-term funding until the spending review in a few weeks’ time, so I do not have an issue with that. However, if we take that money—£270 million—and assume that even half goes to schools, when of course it will be a fraction of that, it is only £6,000 a school. I will come on to this in a minute.
I understand that the Government are planning to provide guidance to support implementation and that safeguarding partners are expected to tailor arrangements to local needs, which may help manage additional burdens on schools. When will that information be available? This is important because of the need for schools to budget. Unforeseen burdens are particularly likely in schools in areas of high deprivation, which are seeing the backwash of so much suffering of vulnerable children. The point, of which I hope the Minister will be mindful, is that we have only 1,265 hours a year of directed time for our teaching cohort, so every hour doing something other than teaching is salami-slicing away our ability to provide good education. Something has to give.
The other area I am puzzled by—this, again, is my ignorance—is these pilots that have been running. I have been trying to find some feedback on these pilots but have not been able to find anything. The Commons Select Committee raised this issue of a lack of clarity, so can any be provided? My noble friend Lady Barran said that some of these pilots had received extra money to juice them up and get more participation, which is great, but will that be rolled out more widely?
I am very worried about this because, as noble Lords know, we are facing something of a financial bloodbath in the school sector. If we have to start hiring supply teachers to enable ordinary teachers to be released to go to safeguarding meetings, these costs will hit us. Can the Minister give us a timeline on the implications for schools and assure us that schools will have sufficient time between the publishing of the guidance and the setting of their budgets? For example, we really need to set our budgets in April to go live in September, because that tends to be when teacher recruitment goes on, as people resign and are appointed. I hope the Minister will understand where I am coming from. I acknowledge that I have a lot less knowledge of this sector, but I am worried about the backwash into the school sector. I beg to move.
Baroness Barran (Con)
My Lords, I am delighted to support my noble friend Lord Agnew of Oulton’s amendment. The example that he gave of teachers and teaching assistants, as cited in his Amendment 34, could obviously be replicated for many other agencies, with a valuable contribution to make to multi-agency child protection teams and wider safeguarding activities, including local drug and alcohol services, mental health services, domestic abuse services, housing associations and more. The key point here is that practitioners need to feel confident about how to engage in the process and how any information they share will be used, confident that it will not put anyone at risk and, as my noble friend so ably put it, confident that they have the time in their working day to be able to participate responsibly. From my own experience, I know we make assumptions at our peril about how confident even statutory agencies are in some of these areas, so any programme that promotes safe and effective partnership work is to be commended.
My Amendment 38 seeks to understand what capacity the Government think will be needed on the ground and what guidance they plan to give for this. The Bill says in Clause 3, page 3, lines 16 to 21:
“Arrangements … must include the establishment of one or more multi-agency child protection teams … for the purpose of providing support to the local authority in connection with the discharge of its duties under section 47 of the Children Act 1989”.
In Clause 3, page 3, lines 27 to 31, it says:
“A multi-agency child protection team is to consist of … at least one of each of the persons mentioned in subsection (4), and … such other persons as the local authority considers appropriate after consulting the other safeguarding partners”.
My cracked-record question is this: what does this mean in real life?
I am sure that the answer to this is no, but, as written, it could mean that Birmingham has one team and Rutland has one team. I am sure the Minister will reassure me that that is not the plan. Even smaller local authorities, particularly rural local authorities, have multiple child protection teams already, so adding one more will not be that useful to them if they have multiple existing teams that need that multi-agency engagement.
When I led the charity SafeLives and we did the rollout of multi-agency risk assessment conferences around the country, we gave estimates to every area based on evidence of realistic case loads, resource requirements and so forth—and we had rather less influence than the Government do. My challenge to the Minister is: if a small charity can do that, surely the Government can do something similar or work with the ADCS or the LGA to develop appropriate clarity and guidance. I would be very grateful if the Minister could explain the Government’s plans.
Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, having read both these amendments, I think it is reasonable to ask the Government what resources are required. When it comes to teachers, we have often dealt with the question of what is required and, if it is a new skill, how they will acquire it. Having enough awareness to call in an expert is another thing we have often talked about in other fields—I certainly have on special educational needs.
If you do not have that training in place, it is a matter of where you go to get that support. Asking for that is one of the things we should do here. I hope the Minister will give us a reply that at least starts to push us towards looking to where these resources are and, more importantly for the people on the ground, where they can look to for support and help, or be trained to do so. Without that linkage, people who are only now being brought into this process on an official basis will fail if they do not know what they are doing.
Lord Bellingham (Con)
My Lords, I was not going to speak in this group, but I want to add my support to my fellow Norfolk Peer and noble friend Lord Agnew and ask the Minister a question. We have talked about local authority resources and the pressure that local authorities are under. Norfolk County Council is the strategic authority and its competences include education, special needs, vulnerable children, et cetera. Its budget is under a great deal of pressure, as the Minister will know. Norfolk County Council said recently that it has to find another £40 million of savings.
As we move towards unitary government, there are plans to bring in unitary government across Norfolk, which basically means getting rid of the districts and maybe replacing them with one unitary council, which would be Norfolk County Council, plus all the other competences. However, if we move to more than one unitary authority in a large county such as Norfolk, and maybe in counties such as Suffolk as well, and have possibly one or two unitaries replacing the county and the districts, what will happen in terms of the dissipation of resources going into this type of work with vulnerable children? Would they be spread between one or more authorities? What are going to be the consequences in terms of replication of services and cost pressures on those authorities, at a time when budgets are very tight anyway?
The other question I have follows on from the question posed by the noble Lord, Lord Addington. If resources are not going to be made available, what possibilities are there going to be for teachers and TAs to get that extra training outside their local authority? If they want to enhance their career or widen their experience on their own initiative because there is nothing available for them in terms of provision within the authority, what can they do and who can they turn to to get that extra training?
Baroness Barran (Con)
I think there is a misunderstanding about my noble friend Lord Agnew’s remarks. My understanding is that he said that schools have got very good at safeguarding, but there are new responsibilities on schools in this Bill and he asked whether additional training would be required and where the resource would be, rather than saying, as the noble Baroness, Lady Bousted, and the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, seemed to infer, that this was a new thing. My noble friend knows extremely well that it is not a new thing.
Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
In previous groups, I have spoken at some length about the purpose and functions of these new multi-agency child protection teams and how they will be delivered as part of the existing joint and equal duty on safeguarding partners to safeguard and promote the welfare of all children in their area.
On Amendment 34, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Agnew, for his contribution on ensuring that teachers and teaching assistants have the right training to work effectively in child protection. Statutory guidance is clear that teaching staff should receive safeguarding training at induction and at least annually thereafter. My noble friend Lady Bousted was very clear about that position. The noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, was also very passionate about the need for schools to be involved in this issue, which is precisely why on Tuesday we debated the clause about education and childcare settings being key safeguarding partners, and the improved emphasis on that in this legislation.
However, despite having this assurance, I decided in the spirit of the previous discussion that we were having that I would consult an expert about whether this is in fact the case. I consulted a teacher very close to me about the sort of training that he is receiving. He told me, “Every year, we receive statutory update training at the beginning of the year. This can take most of one of our inset days and requires us to read the updates for KCSIE”—Keeping Children Safe in Education—“guidance. Then we get update training through the year, every couple of weeks in briefing, and then about once a half-term in an after-school CPD”. He is an excellent teacher, although as his mother I am completely biased, and he is in a very good school. I think this makes the point about the current position in terms of training for teachers and teaching assistants.
There is a reasonable point to be made about the education partners. Although they already have a responsibility for safeguarding, they will now also have a more explicit role in the multi-agency child protection teams. I hope I can reassure noble Lords by saying that the statutory guidance is also clear that the statutory safeguarding partners, which include the other partners that the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, referred to, should support practitioners that work with children, including through creating a learning culture where practitioners stay up to date on best practice. We are clear and confident that the education practitioner in the multi-agency child protection teams will be able to operate as a crucial link to and from education and childcare settings, ensuring that school staff are supported to work effectively with vulnerable children and the child protection teams.
The pathfinder areas have developed multi-agency workforce development plans and delivered comprehensive multi-agency training that has provided opportunities not just to ensure that practitioners have the knowledge and skills they need to deliver effective child protection but to align on shared values and build these vital cross-agency relationships. Training typically covers the reforms, safeguarding responsibilities, local practice frameworks and how different roles fit together across the system. There is both an opportunity within schools and an improved opportunity, from the role of the education practitioner in the multi-agency child protection teams, to ensure that that expertise is there.
I turn now to Amendment 38, which relates to sufficient resource and delegated functions. I spoke on this in the previous group. In fact, we have, understandably, talked about it in several groups so far in Committee. I will briefly revisit the key points. The new teams will be delivered as part of the existing joint and equal duty on safeguarding partners. I have previously mentioned the flexibility in the new measures, which enables teams to operate along police and health footprints, balanced with a sharp focus on multi-agency child protection delivery, where agencies are clear about their responsibilities and accountabilities. The noble Baroness, Lady Barran, answered her own question. Of course it would not be the case that you would have the same number of multi-agency child protection teams in an authority such as Birmingham as you would have in Rutland; that would not be logical.
I am not sure that I would characterise this system as simply adding another child protection team alongside the current ones, as I think the noble Baroness said. As I said in my explanations on the previous group in particular, the intention is very much that these teams will be the place where agencies will be able to work together in the consideration of child protection cases and issues. They are quite distinct from the child protection teams that might currently exist.
In terms of resources, safeguarding partners already agree and dedicate resources as part of their local multi-agency safeguarding arrangements, and the Government have provided £500 million to support the rollout of the Families First Partnership Programme, of which multi-agency child protection teams are a part, as I said previously.
I do not want to be churlish about this, but I am not sure I would have rolled up to this Committee at this point to focus particularly on how difficult school and local government funding is if I had spent the last 14 years supporting the last Government. Nevertheless, it is an important point that we ensure that there is sufficient funding, which is why this Government have already increased, in real terms, funding going to both schools and local government.
On the group before last, we responded to the point raised by the noble Lord, Lord Bellingham, about the consequences and the process of local government reorganisation. I think I gave some reassurance on that, provided to me by my noble friend Lady Taylor.
Baroness Barran
Member's explanatory statement
This is a probing amendment which seeks to question the effectiveness of the drafting of 16LA
Baroness Barran (Con)
My Lords, in moving Amendment 41, I shall speak to Amendments 45 and 46 in my name. I look forward the speech of my noble friend Lady Spielman, on her Amendment 69, and take this opportunity, on behalf of the Committee, to wish her a very happy birthday.
As I set out in an earlier group, I hope that my prior experience in setting up information-sharing fora at scale in relation to high-risk domestic abuse will be useful as the Committee debates these important changes.
My Amendment 41, as well as Amendment 42, in the name of my noble friend Lord Lucas, would remove the duty to share information in relation to safeguarding welfare for the agencies referred to in new subsection (4), which include the statutory safeguarding partners—police, local authorities and health, education and childcare agencies, and any person who is doing work for either group. That could refer to, for example, an independent chair in a serious case review. Can the Minister be clear about who is intended to be covered by new paragraph (c)?
My concerns about this part of the Bill are that it feels, when you read it, as if it is taking information-sharing in isolation. It seems to imagine a world where a relevant partner—let us say a school or a child-minding agency—has information that it is concerned about a child, which it passes on to the local authority, and then that is it. I know that that is not the Government’s intention, but I am trying to make sure that the Bill does what the Government intend it to do.
In practice, you need information-sharing protocols, and a place where you can discuss the information that you have shared. The Minister earlier referred to Annie Hudson’s comments about people being in the same place. You also need to be together to agree what actions to take in relation to that information. I cannot see how any of that works in the Bill. The Minister may say that it is not for the Government to prescribe these things, but we have a lot here in regulation and guidance, and it would be helpful if the Minister could elaborate and say exactly what the guidance will cover.
My other worry is that, in real life, you often do not know the significance of the information that you hold until you join it together with information from other agencies. We used to say at SafeLives, “You don’t know what you don’t know”. When the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Scotland, was the Minister, I remember taking one of her colleagues from the Home Office to visit one of these multi-agency meetings, which I thought would almost certainly be the kiss of death for our future relationship with the Home Office, but we survived. There was a case of sharing information, which I remember very vividly, where the police officer said that they knew about the case, they had attended the address seven times, the woman was always drunk and, on the final occasion, they fined her for wasting police time. As we went around the table, it came to the representative from the A&E team, a nurse, who looked at the police officer as only nurses can and asked him to run through the dates of those attendances, which he did. She said that they had had an attendance on every one of those nights for that woman, she had several broken bones and they had an attendance from the child the next day who had, they were told, fallen off his bike. We do not need miles of domestic abuse training to know that neither party could probably put those things together until they had heard the other side.
Even on a simpler level, any of your Lordships who have been involved in this work will know that in the same family you can have one child who is causing all sorts of trouble in school and is visibly disturbed, and a sibling who wants to stay for every after-school club and is the most immaculately behaved. I know that a Bill cannot address all those permutations, but we just need reassurance that the Government have thought this through in practice.
It is also frequently not responsible to share information if nothing is going to happen with it. We are not just offloading risk from what we know on to another agency. The balancing considerations in the data protection legislation are there for a reason and we should respect people’s privacy unless we think that, by sharing information, we will make them safer.
It is important to have a full picture of a child’s life when considering safeguarding concerns. I wonder how this works where, say, the school shares a low-level concern with health because it is the most relevant statutory agency but, in the same case, the police share different information with the local authority. That is not clear to me. I know who, in theory, should hold the full picture, but in practice how does the local authority social work team hold the whole picture? Crucially, how is that picture kept up to date? Similarly, where is the duty for the lead safeguarding agencies to share back with wider organisations what action they have taken based on the information that was shared? Those organisations need to know how they can help, what they can do that would make a child safer and, indeed, what they could do that might increase risk to a child.
It is also not clear to me from the Bill what the threshold is for sharing. The duty in new Section 16LA(1)(a) and (b) states that a person to whom the section applies—in this case, all the 400-plus schools, nurseries and childminders in a typical local authority that my noble friend Lady Spielman referred to on Tuesday—will have a duty to share information that is
“relevant to safeguarding or promoting the welfare of the child”.
That is obviously incredibly broad and would require a lot of resource if it is followed to the letter. Again, when I look at the impact assessment, I cannot see how that has been fully accounted for. If the Minister could elaborate, that would be very helpful.
I also think that agencies will need guidance about when to disclose information, as the law obviously allows them to do this today, and this does not change those duties. Even statutory partners such as the police benefit from guidance, and we need to strike a balance between hypervigilance, on one hand, and information dumping—sharing everything and risk aversion—on the other.
It is also not clear to me from the Bill whether education and childcare agencies should seek consent, presumably from the parent rather than the child, before sharing information, and where public interest overrides consent. In practice, as the Minister knows, there is a blurry line when sharing information about a child. Say the child came into school unwashed, in unwashed clothes, for the fourth day in a row. That might be something specific about the child that is legal to share, but it implicitly shares information about the parents, where the balancing considerations might play out differently.
In a world where agencies trust one another, this becomes a two-way street. The local authority makes a request of a nursery for information, for example, but can the nursery make a request of the local authority? More specifically, how do the Government think that subject access requests will be handled? I think of my grandson’s former childminder, who was wonderful. How do we expect those mom-and-pop or mom-and-mom organisations to deal with this, both administratively and in human terms?
My noble friend Lord Lucas’s Amendment 49 raises the point about retaining public trust in the process, including by clarifying the need to maintain records of processing disclosures made under this new section. I could go on, but I do not think I need to. Inserting new Section 16LA is the right thing to do, but getting it right in practice is fiendishly difficult. Moving from a world where education and childcare agencies can and do share information with statutory agencies about the safeguarding and welfare of children to a world where they have a duty to do so, without having tested this in practice, may throw up all sorts of unintended consequences, so I would be grateful if the Minister could reassure me. I think it would be unfair to expect her to address each of those points in detail, but will she consider them, comment on those that she can and perhaps find out from the department whether there have been any pilots of this approach? If there have been any in the Families First Partnership areas, how is that going?
I turn to my other amendments. As noble Lords will know, the Public Bill Office here has done a beyond superhuman job in tabling a huge number of amendments. I am ashamed to say that some came from me at a very late hour, and I am hugely grateful, but I think that my Amendments 45 and 46 overlap; we do not need them both.
These amendments link to some of the points that we raised on Clause 3. I am thinking about cases in which information unexpectedly emerges about significant risk, either to another sibling or to an adult in the family or extended family, which is, if I can sneak it back in, why I prefer Amendment 45 over Amendment 46. The former, in relation to a sibling, is easier to deal with. Domestic abuse is an obvious concern, and I know that the Minister shares my concerns about that. Our actions must be prioritised to safeguard the child, but that could in turn increase risk to the victim, which ironically could then make things worse for the child. The victim discloses domestic abuse to the childminder, who then reports it to the local authority and the police. The police turn up and, as we know, in many cases no further action is taken, and that perhaps silences the victim from seeking help. I know the Minister is familiar with the fact that we cannot legislate for every human behaviour, but I am just thinking through the risks, both to the victim and to the child, in such a case.
I will give another true case from many years ago. An abusive father was the carer for his mother, and adult services were unaware of the concerns about his behaviour despite the fact that his mother kept falling out of bed and injuring herself. Within this approach, I wonder how those wider information-sharing gaps will be bridged. My amendment is probing, but I want reassurance that the Government have thought these things through. I look forward to hearing the Minister’s reply and the contributions of other noble Lords.
Baroness Barran (Con)
My Lords, I thank the Minister for her detailed response, and I look forward to her letter on some of the even more detailed points that I think deserve clarification. It was reassuring to hear her confirmation that there will be user testing going on, as she said. I wish her and colleagues in the department good luck with the consent guidance, because it is hard. If you are in a nursery and you are worried that a child is being neglected, getting consent from the parent is not a comfortable conversation, but not telling them and them finding out could put the child at greater risk. It always was hard and does not get any easier.
On my noble friend Lady Spielman’s amendment on open data standards, it was good to hear the Minister’s response that work is going on in that area. Maybe in future debates we can get clarity about some sense of timing. Going back to the earlier debates on Clause 3, one of the biggest blocks to multi-agency work is just how slow it is to get data out of different systems to be able to share it. Can the Government do anything to smooth that along? I thought the experience of my noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe was extremely helpful in that regard.
We have at least two examples—there may be more—of doing these big data transformation projects quickly when we need to. The first was the linking of primary and secondary healthcare data—not schools—during the pandemic, so that we could predict ICU bed capacity needs. The second is, as the Minister knows, my favourite: attendance data. That has been a game-changer and, happily, we are seeing attendance start to improve. I am glad to hear that the department is taking that seriously.
Baroness Barran
“(3A) Where the relevant person considers that the disclosure would be more detrimental to the child than not disclosing the information, this decision must be recorded.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment seeks to require that decisions made not to disclose information must be recorded.
Baroness Barran (Con)
My Lords, my Amendments 44, 47 and 48 all relate to the recording of information-sharing decisions, and they cover the two obvious situations: one where information is shared and one where it is not shared because the relevant person considers that sharing it would be more detrimental to the child than not sharing it. These amendments seek to clarify what the expectations are on all agencies, from the smallest childminder to the largest college, in terms of recording their decisions and the reasons for those decisions.
Keeping good records is obviously essential but it takes time and requires secure storage and access rights. Good record-keeping can improve safeguarding situations; for example, where there are changes of staff or somebody is on holiday and a new or temporary member of staff may not know the history of the case. Similarly, an agency may decide not to share information at one point and then decide at a subsequent point that it is in the best interests of the child’s safety and welfare to do so.
I would like to press the Minister on cases where the decision is made not to share information because of the fear that it would be detrimental to the child’s safety. As discussed earlier, we do not know what we do not know. So one piece of information might not seem overly worrying but, when pieced together with others, as we have discussed, the picture changes. Also, we need confidence that practitioners are considering these decisions with care. No one expects perfection in these areas but, rather, defensible not defensive decision-making.
Will the Minister comment in this regard on subsections (5) and (6), which I assume will be clarified in regulations? Having a clear decision-making process, to record as simply as possible the decision taken and the reasons for it, will improve the quality of decision-making. In a serious case incident, by which I mean when a child is killed or seriously harmed, it will be vital, so I ask again: how is this going to work in practice? I can see that, if you are a strong local authority, a strong trust or a large college, this might be close to business as usual, but what about the single small primary school head who has to deal with this, along with 55 other responsibilities, or the nursery or the childminder? I look forward to the Minister’s remarks. I beg to move.
Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
My Lords, I rise to speak to the amendments in group six, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Barran. Amendments 44, 47 and 48 seek to require practitioners to keep records of decisions made when processing information under the new information-sharing duty. I completely agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, that documenting such decisions is important for the reasons that she outlined. This principle is already embedded in the non-statutory guidance Information Sharing: Guidance for Practitioners and Managers, as well as in the Information Commissioner’s Office’s A 10 Step Guide to Sharing Information to Safeguard Children, both of which promote clear and proportionate record keeping.
In relation to the points that the noble Baroness made about smaller organisations having to carry this out, I shall read an extract from the non-statutory guidance that I think is helpful. It includes the advice:
“Record the reasons for your information sharing decision, irrespective of whether or not you decide to share information. When another practitioner or organisation requests information from you, and you decide not to share it, be prepared to explain why you chose not to do so. Be willing to reconsider your decision if the requestor shares new information that might cause you to regard information you hold in a new light. When recording any decision, clearly set out the rationale and be prepared to explain your reasons if you are asked”.
Furthermore, data protection legislation includes key principles such as lawfulness, transparency and, crucially, accountability, which require organisations to demonstrate compliance with data protection obligations.
Our plan is, as the noble Baroness surmised, to introduce statutory guidance covering matters such as appropriate record keeping. Agencies must have regard to the guidance in discharging the duty, which further strengthens the position of recording decisions. We think this strikes the right balance by ensuring that audit trails are in place, as she outlined, without placing unnecessary administrative burdens on practitioners who are already, as she said, working under significant pressure. I hope that has reassured the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, and that she will feel able to withdraw the amendment.
Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
I did read an extract from the non-statutory guidance that already exists, Information Sharing: Advice for Practitioners Providing Safeguarding Services for Children, Young People, Parents and Carers. As I also said, there is the Information Commissioner’s Office’s A 10 Step Guide to Sharing Information to Safeguard Children. I am sure they are 10 straightforward steps.
Baroness Barran (Con)
Only 10 steps. I am reassured that the Minister has considered this carefully. I think my noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe is right to probe gently in relation to the smallest organisations, where familiarity with this degree of responsibility may be less great and it could cause some anxiety. So, in addition to the guidance, there might need to be some support for those organisations—but I am sure the Minister will consider that. With that, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.
Baroness Barran (Con)
My Lords, I will speak briefly to Amendment 59, ably introduced by my noble friend Lady Cash, and Amendment 62 in the name of my noble friend Lord Farmer. The points made by my noble friend Lord Jackson of Peterborough about some of the risks with the consistent identifier are incredibly important to get right. Nearly all of us in this House support the introduction of a consistent identifier, but the points about data protection, privacy and malicious use that he raised, as well as a potential extension of scope, need to be resolved before it can be implemented safely at scale.
My thinking behind probing Amendment 59 in my name and that of my noble friend Lord Lucas was to ask the Minister—if she can bear it at this stage of the afternoon—to run through again how we think this will work in practice for the smallest organisations. In the last group, she set out clearly the non-statutory guidance around balancing considerations and recording information. It sounds straightforward when read out like that, but, as we know, it is more complicated in real life. We are expecting those very small organisations to input and hold data on a consistent identifier in a way that is secure.
I do not think previous speakers raised the risk of data hacking. We recently had concerns over the cyberattack on the legal aid database, where personal, sensitive information was stolen by the cyberhackers. Clearly, this is not the kind of thing that should happen with children’s data. What thought have the Minister and her team given to that?
Can the Minister also confirm whether the use of the single unique identifier has been tested with all types of practitioner? I think she mentioned the pilot in Wigan, but does that include the smallest practitioners as well as the largest, and what practical implementation lessons can be learned from that?
Amendment 62 in the name of my noble friend Lord Farmer—who cannot be in his place today—which was very well introduced by my noble friend Lord Jackson, is a small but important amendment. Noble Lords have referred to the terrible death of Victoria Climbié. I remember reading the report many years ago; if I remember rightly, eight different files were held on her, partly because she had lived in two local authorities and partly because her name kept being spelled differently, which was one of the reasons why the risk of harm to her was missed. That is an argument in favour of a consistent identifier, but information can still be inputted incorrectly, including numbers—we will have a debate soon on dyscalculia. It is a very serious issue, as is the point, which I had not thought of but should have done, about how malicious information that is shared and recorded could ever be removed. I look forward to the Minister’s reply.
The Earl of Effingham (Con)
My Lords, this has been an interesting and thought-provoking debate on an important topic: namely, how we use a unique identifier in the interests of safeguarding our children. Noble Lords have quite rightly raised some crucial questions for the Minister to answer, particularly relating to privacy and aiming to clarify His Majesty’s Government’s purpose in this clause.
We hope that the Minister will be able to shed further light on both the specific and broader issues. I believe Amendment 56, in the name of my noble friend Lord Lucas, and Amendment 63, in the name of my noble friend Lord Farmer, are both important as they seek to outline what should be in future regulations. We are interested to hear the Minister’s thoughts on these, and seek to clarify if the Government would consider publishing draft regulations during the passage of the Bill.
Similarly, Amendment 62 in the name of my noble friend Lord Farmer highlights the crucial issue of accurate and secure data collection, as well as the recording and storage of that data. I appreciate that technology has moved on, but many noble Lords will remember the child benefit data loss in 2007, the cyberattack and theft of data from the Legal Aid Agency only last week and the current disruptions from a cyberattack that one of our major high street retailers is facing. This is a real and present danger, which is only going to increase. The loose nature of the clause creates veritable and justifiable concerns.
On more specific issues, we are particularly interested to hear the Minister’s thoughts on Amendment 54 in the name of my noble friend Lord Farmer. Can she please give the Committee an example of a similar set of identifiers that is of general application? We also look forward to the Minister’s response to Amendment 59, in the name of my noble friend Lady Barran, which would, if accepted, allow this project to move forward on a much lower risk and much more affordable basis.
Baroness Barran
“(1) The Secretary of State may by regulations make provision relating to the consistent identifier.(2) For the purposes of this section the NHS number is the consistent identifier.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment seeks to ensure that the single use identifier is described on the face of the Bill.
Baroness Barran (Con)
My Lords, my remarks on this group have shrunk somewhat, thanks to the Minister’s earlier reply, so this is really an opportunity for her to confirm and clarify some of her earlier comments in relation to the use of the NHS number, which is addressed through my Amendment 51, which I think shares the aims of Amendment 52, which the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, presented in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler of Enfield, earlier.
The context for considering this group of amendments is the long debate that has run for many years about whether there should be a consistent identifier for children and, if so, what that number should be. I know that the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler of Enfield, has campaigned on this very actively over many years, so I am sure she is here with us in spirit.
I was very reassured to hear the Minister say that there would not be a database and therefore that we do not have to worry about some of the concerns surrounding ContactPoint and other similar projects today. As your Lordships’ House knows, the Children’s Commissioner and leading children’s charities all support this move and believe that a consistent identifier
“will enable a child to be identified with more confidence”
across the multiplicity of information management systems that we know exist and therefore allow information
“to be shared more efficiently and securely when consent has been received or a safeguarding decision has been made to do so”.
Rightly, the assumption in their statement is that is that information can be shared only with consent—or, to be fair, if a safeguarding decision has been made to do so, which implies that there is no consent. So obviously, this will apply in both cases.
My amendment would do two things. First, it would put in the Bill that the consistent identifier would be a child’s NHS number. Many commentators on the Bill have said that it is important to do this rather than leaving it to regulations, and we need to be clear that the Government are not tempted by another major IT adventure in this area. Secondly, it would allow the Secretary of State by regulations to make provision relating to the consistent identifier. Our intention is to get clarity in the Bill that it is the NHS number, but then give the Secretary of State the flexibility she needs to keep the approach up to date. I know that the Minister has said—I do not want to put words into her mouth—that the Government are exploring using the NHS number, and it looks like the front-runner. Those are definitely not the words she used. I wonder whether she could elaborate a little, to the extent that she feels able, on whether it is really the NHS number or whether anything else is realistically in contention. Therefore, if that pilot was not successful, how much time and money would this set us back?
In debates on earlier groups, other noble Lords mentioned the limitations of the NHS number. Of course, there are children who do not have one, including unaccompanied asylum-seeking children, but the Minister has already given a constructive way through that, and there are also adoptive children. I know there are real concerns that adoptive children should have a single NHS number that does not change. I felt there was a hopeful hint behind her words, but maybe she can expand on that. I think there have been cases where changing numbers and not having that history of a child’s health has not been in the best interests of the child.
It would also be good to hear the Minister’s reflections on the concerns expressed by my noble friend Lord Jackson about families who might be driven away from registering with a GP because of concerns about how their data might be used, thus preventing access to basic healthcare for their children. How real a risk does she believe that to be? Either way, we think that those risks just pale in comparison with those of another new IT project and a number created purely for these purposes. If I have understood correctly that the NHS number is the front-runner, could she expand a little more on the Wigan pilot? Is it the only pilot that the Government are intending to run? How long will it run for? Will there be others? Will they be evaluated? Can she give us any hint on a timeline? I assume there will be no wider rollout until that work is complete. With that, I beg to move.
Baroness Finlay of Llandaff (CB)
My Lords, I support the amendments in this group and strongly congratulate the Government on having picked up the concept of a unique child identifier. I was part of the group, with the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, when we did not get there on previous legislation, and we were told that one reason was that the Department for Education could not see how it could do that and link with health, so seeing the Department for Education involved is particularly cheering.
I will make a case quite strongly for the NHS number rather than anything else, partly because I think we need to learn lessons from other number systems. If we look just at hospital records, different hospitals have different numbers and then there is the NHS number, and that has resulted in all kinds of clinical muddles and potential errors. The other thing is that children move around. People do not stay in the same area all the time, and the NHS number moves with them. If they have one number and move to a new area and register with a GP, for example, and then go to register with a school, if there have been major concerns then eventually those case notes will come through and people will become aware.
Going back to my previous experience, sometimes we found that the families with the highest risk had multiple addresses, out of town and in different cities. The other advantage is that, although we have devolved healthcare systems, we have a unique NHS number so, if people move between Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and England, that number will persist. That is not a central database; it is simply saying that the number is there.
Children’s names change and their “known as” also changes. They may be known as another name but the number, a little like their genetic make-up, is fixed, which is really helpful. It will also avoid problems of lots of children having the same name, which is when muddles happen. I am from Wales, and we have a lot of people called David Jones and David Evans, and quite a few called David Williams, let alone Siân and Ceri. They are great names but, if you are trying to differentiate between them, you have to be really careful.
The final reason why I think this is particularly important is about transition and children who have learning difficulties and neurodiversity. Transition is an extremely difficult time for children. In those late teens, hormones are kicking in all over the place and all kinds of things are happening. Their relationships with the people who have been their carers through childhood change, and they can be at particular risk during those times, particularly during puberty if they have real learning difficulties.
I really hope that the pilot with the NHS number continues. When the Minister responds, it will be very helpful to know what kinds of numbers are being evaluated in those pilot areas—I hope there are more than one—so that the studies are sufficiently powered to be valid. Where have the objections come from? Who has not complied with being engaged? There may be some education needed to remove any sense of threat, because it will make safeguarding easier for people who have responsibility for children.
Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
I am pretty certain that officials will have already consulted with the royal college, but, if they have not, I give the noble Baroness an undertaking that they will.
Baroness Barran (Con)
My Lords, I again thank the Minister for her reply. I am not sure I heard exactly whether there will be more than one pilot or quite what the timeline was, but, at this hour on a Thursday evening, I will not press her on that. I trust her to update the House when she is able to say more.
I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, for her intervention. It is a reminder that we are so fortunate to be surrounded by such experts, and such patient and persistent ones—in a good way. With that, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.
Baroness Barran (Con)
My Lords, we on these Benches are very supportive of Amendment 61 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Hampton. Of course, there is detail to be worked out, although we have already heard some encouraging ways through about how to use this anonymised data in practice. Clearly, if it could be aggregated and anonymised in whatever cut—so to speak—that would help us interrogate it and get some answers to some of the systemic issues that exist in child safeguarding and welfare.
We are interested in both parts of the noble Lord’s amendment: namely, research and commissioning. Having a better understanding of the patterns of safeguarding issues, which children are most likely to be affected and what works would be invaluable for practitioners and policymakers alike. As my noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe said, understanding what does not work and where the glitches are in the system is equally valuable. The more transparency we have on these issues, the better the commissioning of services will be. This made me think back to my noble friend Lady Spielman’s Amendment 69 on open data standards, and I know the Minister said that work is going on in that regard. If that was successful, it could be shared for some of the same purposes as Amendment 61 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Hampton. I wonder whether that might be another way through, if the Government are unable to accept his amendment.
Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, having listened to what has been said about Amendment 61, I say briefly that it is very sensible, providing that the data can be kept safe. That is the caveat. If the Minister could address that point, that would inform the Committee as to where we can go with this.