Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)

My Lords, Amendment 131, in my name, appears in this group. I will not quite say that it is a pleasure to follow the contribution of the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, but it was a terribly important contribution, and I can only very much agree with what she said. The issues that she has outlined—about children as young as seven, with two-thirds continuing still at six months—are hugely disturbing. My amendment seeks to address a particular issue concerning children subject to deprivation of liberty orders and children in care in general. As I said to the Ministers when they very kindly had a briefing on the Bill, this arises from a campaign that I encountered in 2023, called Hope Instead of Handcuffs. This campaign came from a small group of people—a single operator of the provision of secure transport for children—who were calling for a ban on the automatic use of handcuffs. Yes, I did say the automatic use of handcuffs, which some privatised providers of secure transport were using on children who were subject to deprivation of liberty orders—or who, as it was described, were on the edges of care. They were being put in handcuffs to be transported. These are not children who have been accused of any crime; these are simply children—very vulnerable children, obviously—who have been subjected to something that I think any of us would find traumatic and disturbing. This reflects testimony that was given in 2021 to the inquiry of the Joint Committee on Human Rights on protecting rights in care settings. Serenity Welfare testified that, as I have just said, many providers of secure transportation services for children who were on the edge of care were using handcuffs as standard. I quote from its testimony: “The practice is unregulated and unmonitored, as there is no obligation on these providers to report any instances of handcuffing to the appropriate authority”. As a result of that campaign in 2023, I and a number of other Members of both Houses wrote to the Government inquiring what was happening. The response we got was, “We will look into it”. To the best of my knowledge, none of this has progressed since then, so I particularly wanted to put down this probing amendment to draw attention to the issue. I have not addressed just transport, because I want to know what is happening in other settings for these children as well, which is why I have included them in the amendment. This is perhaps a much more limited issue than the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, was outlining, but I look forward to hearing from the Minister that the Government are planning to do something about it if, as I have no reason to doubt, it is still continuing, and to stop it.