Child Risk Disclosure Scheme

Josh MacAlister Excerpts

Tuesday 14th October 2025 Westminster Hall

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Josh MacAlister)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Efford. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Blaydon and Consett (Liz Twist) for securing a debate on this important subject, and for her powerful and heartfelt speech.

We are here today because of Maya Chappell, a two-year-old girl whose life was cruelly taken far too soon. Maya’s death was a tragedy. No child should suffer at the hands of someone entrusted to love them, and no family should endure such a loss. I begin by paying tribute to Maya’s great-aunts Gemma and Rachael, who I believe are here today. Their tireless campaigning has brought us together for this debate. Their petition, now signed by more than 6,000 people, calls for Maya’s law. It is a call born out of unimaginable pain but also a deep commitment to protect other children from harm. In Gemma’s words,

“it is a call for prevention, accountability and a united commitment to child safety”.

This is my first parliamentary duty as a Minister, so it is fitting that I am here to talk about keeping children safe, which is a top priority for this Government and, unquestionably, the top priority for me in my role as the new children and families Minister. Every child should feel safe and loved. Sadly, Maya’s family are not alone in calling for change; the stories of Star Hobson and Tony Hudgell have also been mentioned, and their families echo that call.

When I led the independent review of children’s social care, which my hon. Friend the Member for Blaydon and Consett referred to, I heard from families, professionals, frontline practitioners and many others who shared exactly those concerns. The child safeguarding practice review panel’s most recent annual report found that 81% of serious incidents involved poor co-ordination or handover between services. That theme has been repeated over many decades; to date, we have failed to grasp it.

That tells us one thing clearly: we need fundamental change. I believe that we are now delivering that through the most significant overhaul of children’s social care in a generation, backed by legislative change, which I will speak more about in a moment, and over £2 billion of investment in this spending review period. Through those reforms, we are laying the foundation for much better information sharing, introducing a responsive family help system, and significantly sharpening up our child protection arrangements. I think that is a comprehensive response to the lessons we have learned from Maya’s murder.

My hon. Friend set out that a principle of the child risk disclosure scheme is to enable proactive information sharing where a child is deemed at risk. With the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, we are ending misconceptions about when information can and cannot be shared. The new information-sharing duty places a legal obligation on relevant organisations to share information to safeguard and promote the welfare of children. That replaces a duty only to have regard to the need to safeguard and promote the wellbeing of children, which is a significant shift.

[Carolyn Harris in the Chair]

The duty responds directly to feedback from my independent review, and it will blow away the fog of confusion between agencies about when it is and is not appropriate to share information. Crucially, and linked specifically to Maya’s story, the duty also states that information about other individuals, if relevant, must be shared. That will allow practitioners to act. In the coming months, we will be consulting on and publishing statutory guidance to support practitioners in implementing the duty, and I welcome contributions from Maya’s family—from Rachael and Gemma—to the process.

I agree with those campaigning for Maya’s law that we need to change the law, and that is what we are doing right now. Given the progress of the current reforms—particularly the information-sharing duty, and the passage of the Bill through Parliament, which is at an advanced stage—I do not believe that now is the time to introduce a child risk disclosure scheme specifically. However, many of the proposals are reflected in what we are taking forward as a Government with the wider children’s social care reforms, and there are other aspects, which I will also mention.

Alongside the introduction of a duty to share information, we are exploring how to support frictionless sharing of information between agencies through technological improvements. The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill introduces a single unique identifier for children—in my first week in this role, I went to Wigan to see the pilot for that being successfully rolled out—to meet our manifesto commitment to stop children falling through the cracks of services. We are working closely with NHS England, the Department of Health and Social Care and local authorities to pilot the implementation of that programme, using the NHS number as the identifier.

A single unique identifier will not solve the whole problem on its own, but we believe that it will allow much freer sharing of information between agencies to enable them to spot links and make sure that children do not fall through the gaps. Once needs are identified—this leads to the second major plank of change that we have under way—our reforms will ensure that children and families receive support when they need it, through much more extensive family help services.

That will be delivered through the families first partnership programme, a new model for supporting families earlier to prevent problems from escalating. It has been tested in a number of areas across the country, but we are committed to rolling it out nationally. We want local areas, children’s social care, police, health, education and other partners to deliver the programme as highly skilled, multidisciplinary teams that get around families early in order to provide support when it is needed.

My hon. Friend the Member for Blaydon and Consett urged me to commit to cross-departmental collaboration to ensure that safeguarding partners work together effectively to uphold their responsibilities. We published the “Families First Partnership Programme Guide” in March—we are updating it for next March—and we are working closely with the Home Office and the Department of Health and Social Care to deliver this work. I will chair a new keeping children safe board, which will involve Ministers across Government, to ensure that we deliver these changes effectively.

It is not enough just to share information and provide intensive support to families; we also need a much more responsive and decisive child protection system where there is significant harm. Building on more proactive and intensive family help, we will be making major changes to child protection in England—some of the most dramatic in years. We are introducing new multi-agency child protection teams, which will bring together safeguarding partners so that, where there are concerns about significant harm, we are not waiting for agencies to refer to one another or come together for a meeting. Instead, they will be nested together permanently in a shared multi-agency arrangement.

My hon. Friend rightly outlined the need for the police to protect children from a wide range of harms, not just those traditionally associated with criminal activity. The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill introduces a duty on each of those multi-agency child protection teams to include police representatives nominated by the chief officer for the area. There will be, in statute, a requirement on the police to be part of those teams. These reforms will ensure that strong multi-agency protocols are in place locally to better protect children from significant harm.

[Liz Twist]

Clearly, there is a whole lot of activity going on to improve child protection, but we think there are some significant gaps. Would the Minister be prepared to meet me and the family so that we can explain where we think the gaps are and how we could improve the legislation?

--- Later in debate ---

[Josh MacAlister]

Of course I will.

All of us in this room agree that keeping children safe is a top priority. To quote my hon. Friend, the lives of the children we have been talking about were still important, still cherished and still worth protecting. To do that effectively, we need to share data, provide intensive help to families when they need it and sharpen up our children’s social care system.

My hon. Friend made a number of asks of me. We are firmly committed to working across Departments to improve how safeguarding partners work together and ensure that police are fulfilling their obligations for children, and yes, I will meet her and Maya’s family to hear their concerns and the changes they wish to see. I would also welcome their views and experiences being heard as these changes are progressed through the roll-out—

Motion lapsed (Standing Order No. 10(6)).