Lord Hampton (CB)

My Lords, I will speak briefly to Motion K1 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Barran. I thank the Bill team and the Minister for our very useful meeting yesterday, and, as ever, I must declare my interest as a state school teacher. When we talked to the Bill team yesterday, I thought that they almost seemed to use the language of this amendment. As we have heard, the Sara Sharif review says that the overview is at fault, not the system; but this amendment seems the very way of tightening oversight without, as has been mentioned, penalising adoptive parents and children, where the concern was about a previous iteration of their life. This seems to be the crux of the amendment. The Minister actually said the Bill says that “almost all” children fall within the Bill. I think this tightens it up, so hopefully all children will fall within the purview of this Bill. Moreover, it seems to me that, in the Bill as it stands, the local authority could not require a child who left local authority care and returned to their family, say, three years ago, to attend school, while they could for a child who came off child protection three years ago. I do not understand that at all. At the moment, I am not clear about the Bill as it stands. I think Motion K1 makes it much clearer, and I implore the Government to accept this.