Munira Wilson

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship today, Ms Barker. I thank the Petitions Committee for granting this important debate. I also thank my hon. Friend the Member for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross (Jamie Stone) for so ably opening the debate. I pay tribute to the approximately 166,500 people who have signed this petition, including the 184 in my constituency. There is much in this Bill that many of us can agree on, especially in part 1. During its passage there was cross-party support for the measures in part 1 to ensure that the Government go further in safeguarding and promoting the wellbeing of our children. Part 1 also includes the proposals for a single unique identifier, and I say to hon. Members concerned about it that I do not think it is the precursor to digital ID for our children. If hon. Members look at Professor Jay’s report of the independent inquiry into child sexual abuse, one of the biggest issues in the system—as I heard when I met her earlier this year—is the lack of data sharing between different service providers, such as health, the police and social services. Some of the young women and girls who were victims of grooming gangs across the country were regularly turning up in hospitals with sexually transmitted diseases, but that data was not being married up with what the police and social services were seeing. If data had been better shared, those issues might have been picked up. The Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health strongly supports a single unique identifier for the same reason. I fully agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Taunton and Wellington (Gideon Amos) that there are concerns about data sharing, data security and privacy that need to be tackled, and they were explored in detail in the Bill Committee, particularly by the right hon. Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds). Whether it is the NHS number or a different single unique identifier, however, it is an important provision for safeguarding our children and ensuring that we can better research their needs and commission services to meet them. As a number of Members have mentioned, part 2 of the Bill feels a bit muddled, particularly the clauses that deal with academies, and in a number of cases it puts the cart before the horse. The right hon. Member for East Hampshire looks back at the last decade of Conservative Governments with rose-tinted glasses, but I gently remind him—