209: After Clause 63, insert the following new Clause—
“Allergy safety provisions in schools(1) Within 12 months of the day on which this Act is passed, all schools in England must—(a) adopt a school allergy and anaphylaxis policy,(b) obtain individual healthcare and anaphylaxis action plans for all pupils with allergies,(c) purchase and store in-date adrenaline auto-injectors on school property,(d) provide training for school staff on allergy awareness and administrating adrenaline auto-injectors, and(e) record any allergic reactions in the pupil’s individual healthcare and anaphylaxis action plan.(2) The Secretary of State must provide guidance to schools on the implementation of subsection (1) within six months of the day on which this Bill is passed.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment seeks to introduce mandatory allergy safety policies for all schools in England.
My Lords, it gives me great pleasure to move Amendment 209 and to support the other amendments in this group. I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Berridge, for moving this amendment in Committee, as unfortunately I could not stay in the Chamber that night. In turn, I have taken on the amendment because my noble friend Lady Prentis has been unable to take part in this Bill. I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Freyberg, and the noble Baronesses, Lady Ramsey and Lady Bennett, for adding their names to the amendment.
As this amendment was debated at the previous stage of the Bill, I will not repeat all the arguments. In summary, it seeks to introduce mandatory allergy safety policies for all schools in England. It marks the culmination of a long campaign in conjunction with the inspirational Helen Blythe following the tragic death of her son Benedict in 2021 when he was only five. An inquest last year concluded that Benedict’s death was avoidable. It was caused by the accidental ingestion of cow’s milk after his school failed to follow the processes and procedures in place to protect him.
I know that we have heard this before, but I want noble Lords to think about it for a moment. Outside of homes, schools are the setting where the most allergy fatalities occur. Only putting these protective measures on a statutory footing will ensure that there are adequate protections for the two children in every classroom who have allergies. Helen has worked tirelessly to establish the safety measures necessary to ensure that no child is ever lost again in such a tragic and avoidable way. I pay tribute to the work of her Member of Parliament, Alicia Kearns, to other campaign groups and to other families—I know we will hear from noble Lords about this—who, sadly, have been through these tragedies and campaigned so hard. There are also the families who live with the fear of allergic reaction and sensitivities every single day when they send their child off to school or another setting, although we are talking about schools tonight.
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This is a common-sense amendment on an issue that families whose children have allergies find absolutely terrifying. I think it would cost a fraction of the amount it costs, presumably, to treat children who fall ill, or worse, and would stop untold grief and anxiety which can poleaxe families for years—for ever.
The department has had time to engage with this. Many of us feel that it needs legislation behind it. I shall be listening really carefully to what the Minister has to say. I have welcomed the engagement with her colleague but those two key points—about schools having spare auto-injectors, and the funding coming from the centre—are fundamental for noble Lords to hear tonight. In the meantime, I beg to move.
210: After subsection (1)(a), insert—
“(aa) ensure that the school’s allergy and anaphylaxis policy applies to any external catering provider operating on school premises and that such providers comply with the policy when preparing and serving food to pupils,”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment clarifies that a school’s allergy and anaphylaxis policy must also apply to external catering providers operating on school premises, ensuring that caterers follow the same procedures as school staff when preparing and serving food to pupils.
My Lords, Amendment 209 goes to the heart of what families rightly expect schools to do: keep children safe. This is not a novel or radical proposal. It responds to a long-standing and well-evidenced failure of the current system. For too long we have relied on guidance and good will, yet allergy safety in schools remains inconsistent and, in some cases, dangerously inadequate. This amendment matters because it moves us from aspiration to assurance.
Children continue to experience severe allergic reactions at school. Some have died. Families live with the daily fear that a simple mistake—a contaminated surface, a misunderstanding, a delayed response—could be fatal. The tragic death of Benedict Blythe exposed not a single error but a systemic lack of preparedness. His family’s determination to prevent another such tragedy deserves our respect—and action. I also recognise the work of the National Allergy Strategy Group and its member organisations. Its position paper, produced with the Benedict Blythe Foundation, sets out in calm, forensic detail why voluntary guidance has failed.
Schools are under huge pressures, as we have heard, and without a statutory framework, allergy safety too often slips through the cracks. I understand that the Minister met the group yesterday, as we have heard, which is welcome, and I hope she will update the House on the outcome of that discussion and any assurances given.
I became involved in this issue for a simple reason: a neighbour’s child is afraid to eat in his own school canteen because of his allergy. When a child cannot safely eat at school, something is plainly wrong. That quiet daily anxiety is shared by thousands of families. Amendment 209 is proportionate and practical. Without legislation, we cannot guarantee consistent protection for all our children.
The four amendments in my name are probing. I seek reassurance on how the framework will work in practice. Amendment 210 addresses a well-known gap: external catering providers. Compliance with allergen labelling law does not in itself create a safe school environment. Unless a school’s allergy policy clearly applies to caterers and is reflected contractually, responsibility becomes blurred and children are put at risk. There must be no opportunity for third parties to argue that the school’s policy does not apply to them.
My Lords, I will speak briefly, having attached my name to Amendment 209, as the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan of Cotes, so powerfully introduced. I express my strongest possible support for Amendment 209 and commend the noble Lord, Lord Freyberg, for making important points in his amendments.
I will tell a little tale of how I got involved in this. Like most people involved in politics, I have encountered around the country parents who say that they are worried about allergies and their child at school. In my case, I was walking down a corridor of this House, past the dining rooms, and the Benedict Blythe Foundation was holding an event to highlight the issue. I was almost literally dragged in to meet Helen Blythe, who has such a tale of horror but a powerful voice to say that she does not want this to happen to any other parent’s child. That is a demonstration of where we have got to today: campaigning works and people can make a difference through their actions. I particularly want to record that.
The case has been powerfully made, and the noble Baroness, Lady Cotes, said that there may be further technical solutions to injector pens. We do not need to argue about that. It is about the idea that every school has these instruments, whatever they are, guaranteed to be in date because the law says they have to be, and has teachers and other staff confidently trained to be able to use them in a moment of crisis. That should be absolutely basic. There should never be any question that, when something goes wrong, people are asking, “What do we do?”, “Who knows?”, “Where do we find it?”, “Is the cupboard locked?” We all know that those kinds of things can happen, unless the rules are set down in black and white in legislation. That is why I very much hope we will hear positively from the Minister that the Government are prepared to put this in the Bill, whatever the fine detail, because a child’s life is so important.
My Lords, I support Amendment 209, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan of Cotes, to which I have added my name. I declare my interest as a parliamentary ambassador for the Natasha Allergy Research Foundation.
In doing so, I will not see my youngest daughter this evening, who is severely allergic to peanuts, because of the rather unusual hours that our House sits. I hope I will see her tomorrow evening, Chief Whip permitting, as she will be off to school in the morning very early —and, like the rest of us, I need to sleep sometimes. No doubt she will use this opportunity to ask me to explain, not for the first time, what exactly it is that we do in the House of Lords and why so much of it is done after dark. I very much hope that tomorrow, I will be able to give her the best of all possible answers.
I will remind her that, a few months ago, on 16 September to be exact, rather late that night, along with many other noble Lords who I see sitting here in the Chamber this evening, I was adding my voice in support of an amendment designed to keep children safe—children like her, in fact, who have the misfortune to suffer anaphylactic shock if they come into contact with a small piece of peanut or some other food, as she has twice, frighteningly, done. Along with others, and with the excellent support of the Natasha Allergy Research Foundation, Allergy UK, Anaphylaxis UK and the Benedict Blythe Foundation, I argued then that the Government should ensure that all schools have spare EpiPens available in case of such emergencies and that staff are trained in their use.
As the clock ticked towards midnight that night, my noble friend the Minister responded as follows:
“The measures to support children with allergies proposed in this amendment could be achieved without requiring primary legislation; we will consider how we might take them forward”.—[Official Report, 16/9/25; col. 2187.]
My Lords, I support all the amendments in this group, and particularly Amendment 209, in the names of my noble friend Lady Morgan of Cotes and other noble Lords who have added their names.
I have a granddaughter, now aged 10, who from birth has been allergic to dairy, eggs and nuts. Through a lengthy medically managed programme she has been able to reduce substantially her reaction to dairy and eggs, but remains extremely vulnerable to peanuts and sesame. She carries an EpiPen, although mercifully she has not yet had cause to use it. These allergies remain a constant concern to her and her parents. Yet I regard her as being one of the fortunate ones. She is conscientious and very aware of what she can and cannot eat, but the inherent risks are heightened away from home, whenever, say, she is at a friend’s house or in a restaurant. Most importantly, she attends a school which has adopted and follows the policies and procedures stipulated by Amendment 209.
I regard these as minimum standards to be followed by schools. They surely should be regarded as best practice. However, it appears that, despite allergy being the most chronic childhood condition in the UK, my granddaughter’s school is in the minority in specifying these protections and our legislation lags behind global comparators. This cannot be right. During term time, children spend most of their waking hours at school. Schools act in loco parentis, with all the legal duties of care that that entails, but current statutory medical guidance, as we have heard, is not specific to allergies. It is vague and open to interpretation. It has created a worrying gap in allergy safeguard provision. Even were this adapted specifically to address allergies, it would remain just guidance. Unless the Minister can assure us otherwise, it would not be mandatory and it is unlikely to be comprehensive, so it would not achieve the step change required. The adoption of Amendment 209, on the other hand, would go a long way towards filling this gap.
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It is especially in the provision of catering services where schools will feel most at risk if they cannot stipulate suppliers’ quality thresholds. Those in the supply chain are accustomed to being contractually bound to act in accordance with their clients’ required standards in all sorts of areas, for example living wage and modern slavery compliance, so there is no bar in principle to allergy policy being added to the list. There must be concern that, if only a minority of schools have such policies, only a minority of providers will have them too. There must also be a danger that, as cost will be a driving factor in the awarding of these contracts, quality standards may be compromised. We cannot afford a situation where there is a mismatch between a school’s expectations and requirements and a provider’s readiness and ability to fulfil them.
Finally, on the drafting of Amendment 209, I assume that my noble friend Lady Morgan has in mind that training on allergy awareness and administering EpiPens should be provided to all staff and therefore could easily be accommodated within the general safeguarding training required of all. I say this because there might be a temptation to restrict it to those in close contact with food and the kitchen. The reality is that, although anaphylactic shock tends to happen quickly, it can occur even several hours later, so all staff need to be trained to recognise it in environments and locations where the association might not immediately be apparent, for instance on the sports field.
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The current government guidelines for schools do not mention allergies. There is one line on food and one link to an anaphylaxis charity. We now know that schools do not necessarily have the adrenaline auto-injectors or any plans and training in place. The key aim of this campaign is for schools to have spare adrenaline auto-injectors, trained staff and a proper policy in place. I understand that the Government would prefer any change to be in guidance rather than legislation, as proposed here, but there are strong feelings, as I am sure the Minister and her colleagues are aware, that this would not give the guarantees necessary. Hence the debate on this amendment.
Between 1998 and 2018, 66 children died from allergic reactions. There are 680,000 pupils in schools in England who have allergies. That is one or two per classroom, according to the Benedict Blythe Foundation’s REACT report of March 2024. The Department for Education is rightly focused on the attendance crisis; children miss half a million days of education due to allergy every year. Adrenaline auto-injectors are life savers. The Benedict Blythe Foundation estimates that their rollout in English schools, plus training, would cost only £5 million.
I remember a similar campaign to put defibrillators into every school. That was done. It was, as I understand it, funded by the department, at least initially, so I hope the Minister will address the call for these adrenaline auto-injectors and proper training and policy to be put in place in schools.
I am going to come back to funding in a moment. The reason I sort of ran towards my seat in the Chamber is that I was receiving an email about the costs which I think will be relevant to how we proceed this evening.
I want to say something about the department’s approach to this matter. On 5 August last year, the department said in response to a proposal for a Private Member’s Bill by Chris Bloore MP:
“We do not believe the School Allergy Safety Bill is necessary because in the autumn we plan to bring forward proposals for supporting pupils with medical conditions, including allergies”.
No proposals or consultation were published during the autumn. The House debated this amendment on 16 September, which is almost five months ago. There have been plenty of opportunities for engagement with Helen Blythe, the other campaigners, their MPs and me, but instead a rather rushed round table was convened yesterday morning, and in the last week statutory guidance has suddenly been promised and presented to campaigners to have a look at. If there is going to be statutory guidance, I know that a number of noble Lords will have questions for the Minister, but I seek reassurance from her on two key questions, the first of which is, will the guidance make it clear that it will be mandatory for every school to have spare adrenaline auto-injectors? We will come back to the fact that there could be other treatments, but it is particularly AAIs, and spare ones, not just relying on pupils to have their own, that are critical.
On the issue of central funding, we know that school budgets are squeezed and that if schools are left to find the money, some will and some will not. That is not because they do not care, it is just because there are other priorities. The reason I was slightly running in was that I was being briefed. The current model, which is the total annual spend on additional AAIs that can be reallocated, is just over £9 million a year. The proposed model is £5 million for the total cost of rolling out spare adrenaline auto-injectors to schools nationally, and there are some additional costs for training and programme support. That would suggest a potential saving, as a result of the introduction of Benedict’s law, of £1,000,032.15. We can obviously argue about the pounds and the pence, and I understand that it is not the role of this Chamber to help government spend its money, although we can all have strong views on that; but it is critical for noble Lords to hear tonight exactly how the Government think that policy is to be funded. That has not come up in discussions with campaigners so far.
Earlier engagement would have been helpful, because we would all have had the time to work together to get the wording right on things such as the use of the injections. I understand that there are now needle-free, more user-friendly adrenaline delivery options available, and I would have been very amenable to changing the wording of the amendment, had there been earlier engagement to help us to come to a conclusion about how this amendment could be the best it possibly could be. This lack of engagement is why people are tired of politics. It takes too long to get anything done because no one steps forward quickly enough to say, “We can put this right, so let’s make this sensible change”.
My understanding is that pretty well all noble Lords, I hope, will agree with the overall thrust that we want children with allergies in school and it is right that their parents and families know that there are spare treatments—injections and other treatments—available should the worst happen. Often, the child does not know that they are going to have a reaction so it is not a question of saying that they will have their injections with them. The first time a reaction happens may well be in a school setting. It is also right to say that teachers and schools deserve proper training to be put in place.
Amendment 212 extends that principle to other external providers. Schools, as we know, are busy places and well-meaning third parties can inadvertently introduce serious risk if they are not bound by the same policy. I have heard of a case where a third-party supplier brought a box of sweets into school as a gift, entirely unaware of the danger this posed.
Finally, Amendments 213 and 214 raise a practical question about costs and responsibility. Who should fund adrenaline auto-injectors, and how should supply and replacement be organised? An approach that relies on individual schools risks duplication, inconsistency and waste, particularly where children already receive these devices from the NHS. The same question arises in relation to training to use them. If the provisions in Amendment 209 become mandatory, responsibility for funding and facilitating proper training must be equally clear.
We have done this before. As the noble Baroness has said, the Government funded defibrillators in all schools, because the case was compelling and the cost proportionate. The same logic applies here. I hope the Minister will address these points directly, but, if the drafting of Amendment 209 is not quite right, I urge the Government to bring forward their own amendments at Third Reading. What matters is not ownership but outcome. We must not miss this opportunity to put allergy safety in schools on a statutory footing and prevent further, avoidable tragedies. I beg to move.
Tonight, I am hopeful that this is precisely what has happened, and that my noble friend the Minister will stand up and confirm that the Government will shortly be issuing statutory guidance setting out in detail how all schools will be required to properly protect children with allergies, and, in particular, that noble Lords will be assured that there will be statutory guidance requiring schools to have effective allergy policies in place, to have adrenaline devices such as auto-injectors available, and that staff will receive mandatory training on the use of adrenaline devices such as auto-injectors. In which case, I will be able to tell my daughter that these late nights can achieve remarkable things, and that it is precisely because of the way the House of Lords works that this has been achieved.
After all, we are talking about an amendment which has strong support across the House, led by the noble Baronesses, Lady Morgan and Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, and the noble Lord, Lord Freyberg. It is supported by my noble friend Lady Kennedy, among others, who has professional expertise in the subject, and has been encouraged by those impressive charities. To give due credit, we are talking about a Government who listen to the evidence and act accordingly, assuming that I have understood correctly what my noble friend the Minister will announce shortly.
I would still prefer to see my daughter in the evenings more often, but I am happy not having been able to do so on 16 September last year and this evening if the House acts to protect children at school with allergies. She will be happy too, and, in due course, so will thousands of parents and their children at risk of anaphylaxis. What an honour it is to be a Member of this House which can change lives so effectively.
I am also fully supportive of Amendments 210, 212, 213 and 214 in the name, principally, of the noble Lord, Lord Freyberg. Amendments 210 and 212 in particular would ensure that external providers, including catering providers, follow a school’s allergy and anaphylaxis policy. If we are sensibly to mandate schools to have such a policy, for compliance with which they will be held responsible, we should give them the tools to enforce that policy.