2025-02-12
This Bill, currently wending its way through Parliament, looks set to reach the Statute Book just as soon as their Lordships have finished with it and passed it on to the Monarch for his Royal Assent.
Given that the Labour Party has a stonking majority in the Commons, there will be no delaying its arrival before their Lordships.
Given also the Government's obsession with ultimately centralising all powers of any note unto itself, it's no surprise that this bill is long on rhetoric and very very short on devolution (after all, if it started devolving powers to, say, parents, there would be a chaotic free-for-all and the government would have nothing to do except twiddle its thumbs and dream of powers forsaken).
Let us in the interests of brevity quote directly from the government's own "Policy Summary Notes" document:
The ambitions of the Bill are set out in seven key parts:
-
- Making a child-centred government
- Keeping families together and children safe
- Supporting children with care experience to thrive
- Cracking down on excessive profit making
- Driving high and rising standards for every child
- Removing barriers to opportunity in schools
- Creating a safer and higher quality education system for every child
OK, it's feel-good verbiage that coming from politicians, tells us nothing useful, but ... what exactly is a "child-centred government", and why should we want it?
Happily, the first part of this question is answered robustly:
- Make a child-centred government by facilitating a statutory framework to authorise the deprivation of liberty of children with complex needs in accommodation provided for the purposes of treatment and care; strengthening Ofsted’s powers in relation to children’s social care providers by giving them the power to issue fines for breaches of the Care Standards Act 2000, including to unregistered providers, and enabling them to hold provider groups to account for quality issues in the provision of care; regulating the use of agency workers in children’s social care; and protecting 16 and 17 year olds from ill-treatment or wilful neglect.
So ... if my child has "complex needs", the government's first instinct will be to look after my child by locking him/her up in an institution of its choosing, then regulating such "providers" to ensure that they are fined and inspected and punished and work within the statutory guidelines and on no account take any dreadful untried and unsupported initiative outside of those guidelines, because being government-mandated guidelines they are of course perfect for my child - who will now be deprived of the reassuring consistent presence of his/her parents, whilst feeling totally insecure and unprotected in new and strange surroundings under ever-rotating unfamiliar carers who attend according to changeable schedules.
I don't doubt that for the most severe cases of parental neglect or parental incompetence such measures may in extremis be warranted, but if this is setting the tone for thinking about "children's wellbeing" then I am concerned.
Keep families together and children safe by mandating local authorities to offer family group decision making so that all families with children on the edge of care have an opportunity to form a plan of family-led care, improving information sharing across and within agencies, strengthening the role of education in multi-agency safeguarding arrangements and implementing multi-agency child protection teams.
We can see where this is going. If the local authority (advised by its 'sharing and caring' agencies) in its wisdom decides that a child is being inadequately managed by its parents/guardians then it can effectively compel parental behaviour more to its liking, with the implied threat that if compliance isn't forthcoming then the child can be removed from their care.
The whole family thus becomes subject to state control, and state control means control by AI.
Today, the AI is the Statute book and its surrounding agencies (local authorities, care providers, NHS behavioural specialists, etc, all supported by a plethora of rules guidelines and protocols).
Tomorrow (or at current rate of "progress", later this afternoon) the "family group" will be clustered around the screen to receive its latest "advice" from their AI-Family-Chatbot care-advisor app, which will issue penalties for missed appointments and forfeits for wrong-think, or in the worst case it will notify the goon-squad to come knocking.
Perhaps I exaggerate a little just now ... but would you bet on it?
And so far I have only looked at the the first couple of paragraphs. We ignore this Bill at our children's peril.
Like most government initiatives, it is based on the presumption that a better world will result if we can only legislate for everything that could possibly go wrong and every risk that we will possibly encounter, and that by following the expert advice we will stay safe and happy in a government-mandated Utopia, enjoying our government supported freedom to comply with all its inevitably-proliferating rules and regulations.
There is no such thing as absolute safety. The first law of the Universe is " If it can go wrong, it will".
The best we can hope for is for it to go wrong safely - but even that can never be ensured.
Bringing up children is best handled by those who have brought them into the world, who have cared for them through helpless babyhood and happy toddlerhood and who share a loving trusting and intimate relationship with them. As kids grow older they will interact with the State as necessary under the direction of their parents, who naturally take responsibility for their behaviour until they become adults.
At what age and for what causes does it become acceptable for Government to override parental responsibility?
There are risks associated with parental responsibility, and there are risks associated with government responsibility, and it seems to me that total avoidance of risk is impossible.
Where the relationship is based upon love, the risk is lower overall than where it is based upon monetary reward. Motivation is everything.
(See links for more information. Read the Bill here)
