Children: Physical Punishment

Question

Asked by

To ask His Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the University College London report Physical punishment and child outcomes in the UK, published on 10 June, particularly its findings about the effect that hitting children has on their behaviour and wellbeing.

My Lords, we welcome the evidence in this report, in particular the inclusion of the voices of children and young people. The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act is a key step towards delivering the Government’s mission to break the link between young people’s background and their future success, and will deliver new measures to support children’s behaviour, well-being and protection. This sits alongside earlier support for children and families through our £2.4 billion families first partnership programme and our Best Start Family Hubs.

My Lords, we already know that regular physical punishment encourages children to bully other children and damages their relationship with their parents. The UCL research has now shown us that it also damages their educational attainment and future prospects. When will the Government take not just a small step but follow the example of Wales and Scotland and dozens of other countries and give children equal protection under the law of assault as the adults around them have? The Government plan to protect children from online harms. How about protecting them in their own homes?

The UCL research is interesting. I note that UCL itself says that the analysis does not necessarily prove causality, although it does demonstrate correlation. The action that this Government are taking is not a small step, including as it does the reform of the children’s social care system and considerable investment in the Best Start Family Hubs programme to support children and parents with some of the difficult decisions and issues that any of us who have parented know that we will face. That strikes me as being a quite important development, very well invested in, in this country.

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend the Minister on her lifelong professional commitment to children and young people. Might doubters in England be persuaded if we explored replacing the common-law defence of reasonable chastisement with a statutory defence of reasonable restraint of a child?

The point I am trying to make is that, even if you look at the evidence in Scotland and Wales, I am not sure that changes to the specifics of the law around reasonable punishment are the most important and effective way to protect children and to support parents in not resorting to physical punishment of their children. The steps that this Government are taking are more profound and more effective than a change in the law would be.

My Lords, do the Government recognise that this report shows quite clearly the link between a failure to protect children from abuse and poor outcomes for those children? If parents who are not coping with parenting are to access family hubs and all the other support services, the law has to give a clear message that children should not be assaulted. You cannot assault an adult repeatedly; therefore, you should not be damaging a child’s life chances by repeatedly assaulting the child.

The law in this country gives the strong message that it is wrong to assault a child. The clear advice from government is that it is wrong to use physical punishment against a child. What is more, we are providing the support necessary to help parents to address that. We are investing in the capacity of social care to be able to identify where neglect and abuse has happened in families. We are investing in earlier intervention through the families first partnership programme. The question is whether the appropriate thing to do at this moment is to focus on changing the law. That is not our priority.

My Lords, I turn to the point mentioned by my noble friend Lady Walmsley about the experiences of Scotland and Wales. Have the Government looked at the assessments that have been made by those Governments on safeguarding and the number of incidents reported to them of harm to young children?

We have looked, for example, at the Welsh report on the implementation of the abolition of the defence of reasonable punishment in Wales. As I said, the report is on the implementation of the law rather than the outcomes achieved by it. It highlights the importance of professional confidence, inter-agency collaboration and widely available parenting support. As I have already identified, those are all things in which we are investing considerable amounts of money in England and where we have taken action through legislation to transform the social care system so as to prioritise them.

My Lords, it would be wrong to speak today of physical punishment without raising the evil murder of the baby Preston Davey. As the Minister knows, we on the Conservative Benches welcome her structural reforms to social care, but there is still a gap. As the Munro inquiry and repeated case reviews have found, the assumptions, biases and culture of individual agency workers are still a major problem. These need to be addressed so that individuals will act to protect children without fear or favour. How does the Minister propose to address these issues?

The noble Baroness is right to draw attention to that terrible case, and to the requirement, whenever we are faced with tragedies such as that, to learn the right lessons about how we need to reform the system. On her particular point about workers, one of the ways that we improve the way in which social workers and others, whether agency or otherwise, work is to increase their capacity, to focus them, as we are doing, on neglect and abuse, and to improve their training. We will continue to do that while, of course, learning the lessons from tragedies such as the one that she has identified today.

My Lords, it is already the case that the serious assault of a child is illegal. What we are talking about is smacking children. Is there any evidence that, since that has been introduced into countries, parents are being prosecuted—that is what it means; prosecuting parents—and that that has helped the situation?

My noble friend is right that it is, as I have emphasised, already illegal to assault a child. He is also right to identify what we can most effectively do to prevent parents feeling that they need to resort to smacking in order to discipline or control their children. The £900 million that we are investing in the Best Start in Life centres, for example, is being used to develop parenting education on behaviour management. How do you set appropriate boundaries? What type of methods should you and could you use to discipline your children? That feels like a more constructive and wide-ranging response than a change in the law at this point.

My Lords, did not the Preston Davey case prove that the current situation is simply not working? That poor boy was sexually assaulted and abused for months. The question has to be asked: why did no one from any agency pick this up?

One of the important points about the legislation that we have just taken through this House is a stronger duty to report abuse and to share information. We must continue to support and train all professional staff who work with children to understand their responsibilities to both recognise and report abuse when they see it.

My Lords, does the Minister agree that there has been overwhelming acceptance in Wales of the policy that was introduced by the former Labour Government? In the recent election, there was hardly an issue on this matter arising. Will she take the opportunity to discuss with her two colleagues who are former First Ministers of Wales how this policy has been implemented?