Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Baroness Walmsley Excerpts

Thursday 22nd May 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Walmsley (LD)]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Baroness Spielman (Con)]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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