Children: Social Services

(asked on 24th January 2017) - View Source

Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what potential mechanisms will be available to children and young people to challenge an application from their local authority for an exemption from or modification to statutory requirements under clause 32 of the Children and Social Work Bill.


Answered by
Edward Timpson Portrait
Edward Timpson
This question was answered on 27th January 2017

The list in clause 32(4) was determined through discussions with legal advisers and consultation with policy officials across the department. We also undertook informal consultation with voluntary sector organisations on our planned approach, including with the Children’s Society, Barnardo’s, NSPCC and Action for Children as well as Partners in Practice local authorities. There will be an opportunity to further debate the list as the Bill progresses through Parliament.

Before applying for an exemption or modification to legislation a local authority must undertake consultation, in particular they must consider consulting affected children and young people. The feedback from this consultation will be provided to both the Secretary of State and the expert panel who advise on applications. We would expect any successful application to ensure children and young people’s views were taken into account.

Every trial will be carefully monitored by the Department for Education, to ensure that children are not adversely affected. The specific monitoring arrangements will be agreed as part of the application process, however we expect them to include provision for children to raise concerns about a trial. The expert advisory panel will provide published advice as to whether the monitoring arrangements in the application are sufficient. If, through the monitoring of trials, the Secretary of State received evidence that children were being adversely affected by a trial, she would act swiftly to revoke an exemption. There may also be other circumstances where the Secretary of State would revoke an exemption, for instance if the local authority decided they no longer wanted to continue with a trial.

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