Dame Rachel de Souza and Martin Lennon.

Q1 Chair: Good afternoon and welcome to today’s meeting of the Joint Committee on Human Rights. We are a cross-party committee and a Joint Committee, which means that we have Members of the House of Commons and the House of Lords. We are delighted to be hearing today from the Children’s Commissioner for England.

The session will explore the views of the commissioner on the human rights issues facing children, focusing on areas that the committee has recently or is currently working on. We will cover issues including perhaps asylum, modern slavery, county lines, youth justice and online safety. My understanding is that, although you are the Children’s Commissioner for England, you also have responsibility in reserved matters; there is a separate Children’s Commissioner in Scotland, for example, but issues that are reserved, like asylum, are your responsibility.

Perhaps I should formally introduce our witnesses. Our first witness is Dame Rachel de Souza, who is the Children’s Commissioner for England. You are very welcome, Rachel. She has been in post since March 2021. She was formerly a headteacher, and in 2012 she co-founded the Inspiration Trust, a multi-academy trust based in Norwich.

We also have Martin Lennon, who is deputy director of innovation and children’s services for the Children’s Commissioner for England. Martin has worked there for six years, focusing primarily on children’s rights in children’s social care, youth justice and health settings.

I will kick off with the first question this afternoon. Dame Rachel, you have been in post since March 2021. Since then, what have you identified as the biggest issues affecting the human rights of children living in the United Kingdom?

Dame Rachel de Souza: As the committee will have seen from my submission to the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child, I put Article 2 of the UNCRC, on non-discrimination, at the heart of my work.

When I first came into post in 2021, I did a survey of all England’s children. It got the largest survey response ever from children in the world, apart from the US census. Some 557,044 children responded, and they were from every background. There were 94,000 children with special educational needs, 6,000 children in care, 2,800 Gypsy Roma children. There were children from every region and area of the country—6% of four to 18 year-olds.

For those children, and the thousands of children I talk to, fairness is of paramount importance. That is what they talk about. I will use their evidence and voices right through today’s hearing. One of the strongest things that came out of The Big Ask was just how civic minded and caring this generation are, and how much they are care about the opportunities of all the other children in this country. It is really quite amazing and heartening when you read it.

It is clear from listening to children and looking at the data that the three groups of children that I particularly focused on at the start of my UNCRC submission—children in care, including children in care refugees and US children; children with disabilities; and economically disadvantaged children, or children in poverty—are being systematically disadvantaged.

As you rightly said, I was a head teacher. I have been teacher, a head teacher and a trust leader for 31 years in the most disadvantaged areas. I have spent my career working to advance the opportunities of disadvantaged children and, more particularly, children who other people have given up on, such as the immigrant communities in Tower Hamlets in the 1990s. When I taught there that was where I saw my first example of modern slavery—a child in my classroom. As a Tony Blair-sponsored academy principal in Luton, I turned around one of the worst, most failing, schools—the bottom 200 schools—in the country, and then I worked in schools in disadvantaged areas of the east coast. That is a very strong theme in our work.

When you work closely with these children, it is clear that they face multiple rights issues. Children in care, who are one of my key groups, have the most rights in principle and the least in practice. Children in care are disadvantaged in exercising their right to education; I have a report about that coming out later in the year. They are undermined in relation to a right to family life; I have report about sibling relationships coming out shortly. They face further hurdles in accessing their rights to healthcare, particular mental health care, and they are often criminalised by the system that should be protecting them.

As Children’s Commissioner, I have focused on the children who face the most consistent and egregious rights violations, and this is backed up by a wide programme of work across the office, to highlight this and what can be done to address it.

Q2 Chair: What discussions have you had with the UK Government on these issues and how they can be addressed?

Dame Rachel de Souza: Since I took up post, I have tried to build a relationship with the Government, with Parliament, with leaders in the public sector, and that relationship enshrines my independence. I always try to work with, and to get solutions and outcomes for children, but I am absolutely not afraid to be independent. On all these issues, and on the range of issues we are talking about today, I have met with Ministers and challenged them, and I think we have managed to create change where I have held the Government to account.

I have a great example. I talked about certain children’s education being a big concern of mine, and different outcomes. When I came into post, I was given a special educational needs Green Paper to look at in draft. I read it and thought that it was absolutely not good enough, so I made an appointment with the then Secretary of State for Education, discussed it with him and told him that I would not support it publicly. I gave him a clear set of evidence and research to explain why I did not think it was good enough, and a range solutions.

The Secretary of State sent the Green Paper back to the Civil Service, where it was reworked, and that was why there was a delay. I think we have ended up with a far better Green Paper. I did not just criticise; I then sat alongside the Civil Service team and gave solutions, challenge and support. That is the way I like to work; I am not afraid to challenge, but I also try to put in the solutions and the effort to get the outcomes that we need.

Chair: You give a very good example there of interfacing with the Department for Education, but which ministerial departments do you have the most interface with, and why?

Dame Rachel de Souza: I sit in the Department for Education; that is where the office is. Some 17% of public sector spend is through education, so it is important to be there. I also work with Justice Ministers, and pretty much any Cabinet Member, any Minister—or MP, frankly—who has anything to do with children. I have worked with Health Ministers, in Justice, with the Home Office—right across the piece.

Chair: In terms of engaging with the children you represent and the Government, what human rights instruments do you look to in assessing the extent to which rights issues are raised for children. Is it mainly the European Convention on Human Rights or do you look beyond that?

Dame Rachel de Souza: I am a big fan of the Children Act 1989, because the Act was an attempt to take the UNCRC and turn it into a thought-through piece of work that could be implemented. I often work with that, and obviously the UNCRC is key. We work with equality issues, and I work closely with the Equalities Ministers; I have just done an independent family review for them.

Chair: You look to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Equality Act, but to what extent do you look at the European Convention on Human Rights and rights such as the right to privacy, the right to family life, Article 3 on the right to be free of inhuman and degrading treatment—those sorts of articles?

Dame Rachel de Souza: I produce a business plan every year. I take the voice of the children, what the children have told me is important to them, and we map it against the UNCRC and the ERHC and make sure that we are absolutely clear about where that sits in terms of current legislation.

Martin Lennon: It is important to note that the statutory basis for the Children’s Commissioner refers to the UNCRC as our founding principle and our template. Obviously, children enjoy the protections of the Human Rights Act and the EHRC, but the UNCRC is the primary legislation; the rights in the HRA and the EHRC are also reflected in the UNCRC.

Chair: How responsive are the Government when you raise issues to do with the human rights of children with them?

Dame Rachel de Souza: One of the things I try to do when I talk to children and the Government is to make sure that I articulate the issues and the voices of children in language that people will understand. On some issues, it is really useful to go in with a rights-based approach. On other issues, it is about presenting research evidence, presenting the voices of children and making a very good argument about particular issues of the day that have been raised; I think, for example, of the victims Bill, which I have been working on recently and giving evidence on. Bringing the voice of the child and putting that up front, articulating the arguments in that way, and focusing heavily on outcomes sometimes gets me further than going in with a direct rights approach.

Martin Lennon: It is important to recognise that, with regard to children’s policy, their rights are more explicit in some areas than others. We have a team of child rights advisers in the office who work particularly in the care system, and the Children Act gives them a clearly expressed and recognised set of rights. Similarly, in youth justice and on refugees, there is a clear rights structure. The UNCRC is quite clear on what is expected.

On education, the UNCRC of course recognises the right to education, but it is much vaguer. The issues that you are raising at this level are much more specific and tend to exceed what the UNCRC sets out as a basic expectation. Again, we are simply guided by the UNCRC as a founding document.

Chair: You mentioned your panel of rights advisers, but do you think that your office has adequate resources and powers to carry out what I think is your primary function, of promoting and protecting the rights of children? Do you think you are sufficiently resourced for that?

Dame Rachel de Souza: That is always a good question. In terms of my core function, yes. We recognise that it is public money and that we need to work hard to use that money well. In fact, in our recent external audit the auditors said that they had never seen a government office of the size of mine have such a large output and impact. So I think we are using the money that we get well.

The one thing I am seeking more resource on, and I would love your support on this, is our Help at Hand service. We have a small number of child rights advisers and we help about 1,000 children in the most critical situations, such as children in care, normally with four, five or six adult professionals in their life and who are often falling between care, health and so on. We give direct advice there. I am very worried about advocacy for disabled children, particularly in relation to some recent cases, and I would like to grow that team, even by just one, to pick up those particular cases relating to disabled children. There have been some quite horrific cases, including a recent case in Doncaster.

Martin Lennon: It is important to give some context to that. You are right that the primary function is promoting and protecting the rights of the child. In 2014, the Children and Families Act slightly changed the basis, in that there is now the function of giving direct child rights advice to children who are looked after by the state. They are primarily those in care, as Rachel said, but we also work across youth offending institutions, and we support UAS children in the intake units in Kent, and so on, and children with a social worker.

But that is a very small team. Rachel inherited a team of three, and that is for a population, depending how you define it, of over 100,000 children. We would like to do a lot more work for children, particularly those in institutions, who we have the power to meet and reach out to. It is important to emphasise how small the resource is there.

Dame Rachel de Souza: On the direct child rights advice.

Q3 Chair: That brings me to a question that we are particularly interested in, because our inquiry into Human Rights Act reform recommended that the Government should embed civic and constitutional education, including education on human rights, into the national curriculum. The Government’s response highlighted that this education is covered in the key stages 3 and 4 citizenship curriculum.

Do you think the citizenship curriculum is effective in informing children of their rights and the rights framework within which those rights sit?

Dame Rachel de Souza: Obviously, as a teacher, head teacher and trust leader of schools, I am very aware of our current citizenship curriculum. It is good, but everything is down to the delivery.

In the half-million responses to our survey—this is the unique thing that I can bring to this committee—children spoke passionately about wanting a greater understanding of adult life and the issues that might arise. Issues of PSHE, RSE and the citizenship curriculum are very much at the front of their minds. One project that I am carrying out is on this curriculum. We have been speaking to young people right across the country about it and our report will come out soon. You will not be surprised to hear that children want more of this education, and I think we should have more.

Chair: I am very struck by what you said at the beginning: that the thing that children care most about, according to your survey, is fairness. I think we can all identify with that. We have all been a child at some stage and we all deal with children, and the cry of “That’s not fair” is something that we all very much feel in our heart.

From our perspective, one thing that achieves fairness is our society, in addition to equality legislation, is the enforcement of human rights. I would be really interested to know whether you were able to ascertain from the survey the extent to which children are aware that there is a United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, that part of the domestic legal system in the United Kingdom is the European Convention on Human Rights, which is for everyone, and that the universality of those rights means that they include everyone, including children. It is quite an adult concept, really.

Dame Rachel de Souza: I think I am correct in saying that, in pretty much every school I have been to, children will have had lessons on, and be aware of, human rights and the UNCRC. That basic knowledge is there, and they want to understand more about how they can influence adults, how they can influence their own lives, how to work politically and what the structures around them are. There is a desire to know more than just the basic UNCRC lessons—fairness, rights. They have got that.

Martin Lennon: I will give the committee an example that I saw just yesterday, which was a really good use of the citizenship curriculum to address some of the issues that young people were seeing. I was in Manchester yesterday at a brilliant school—with Rachel, but I got the better bit of the visit. The school, which is majority Asian-British, had realised that the boys in the school were still subject to quite shocking levels of stop and search. The boys talked to me about this yesterday and the numbers of times were quite shocking.

Chair: What age were these boys?

Martin Lennon: The oldest was 16.

Dame Rachel de Souza: The range was 14 to 16.

Martin Lennon: They were 14 to 16 year-olds who had experienced regular stop and search. Honestly, this was not the type of school where any trouble was ever allowed. The school had responded by thinking about what it would reflect in its citizenship curriculum, and how it could use it. They focus very much on British values and the importance of law and order, and their strong message was that it is the police not living up to those standards. They wanted to take that notion of fairness, take the blame away from children, give them that wider context and tell them that it is important.

What the boys were really telling me yesterday was, “Actually, we need the police to step up and do their job. They’re not doing their job because they’re harassing us, and they’re not solving crimes, and other things”. The school had very much listened to the pupils, reflected that and given them a framework to process it. The boys gave me very practical ideas about what they want to see the police do better. I think it had given them a process and understanding, not to excuse it but to understand that this is a failing on the part of the police that does not reflect British values and should not be there. They talked about things like the Equality Act and other bits of legislation that came in there to give context.

Dame Rachel de Souza: Thousands of children I talk to say that they trust their schools and their teachers to deliver this kind of education and to be able to have these kinds of sensitive conversations, so they can feel safe when they are having them and they know that they are learning correctly about the world. So I do think that education in this area is really important.

Q4 Bell Ribeiro-Addy: Thank you both. I will ask you some questions about the UK’s international obligations and domestic human rights law. I know the Children Act says that in carrying out your primary function you can monitor the implementation of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Dame Rachel, in your view, how effectively do the UK Government implement their obligations under the UNCRC?

Dame Rachel de Souza: We submit a report every three years, and I have just submitted my report. It was on that and in detail. I pulled out a couple of the areas and spoke about some of the groups that I am particularly concerned about. I have responded in full against all the UNCRC’s objectives. It is a varied picture, and I am happy to answer on any area that you want to ask about.

Bell Ribeiro-Addy: More generally, in a nutshell, I know you are saying that it is a varied picture, but if you were to rate them out of 10—that kind of answer—how much more work has to be done to make sure that we are fully implementing our obligations? Are we far away? Are we closer than we might think?

Martin Lennon: There is a big question between implementation and realisation. The Children Act 1989, for example, which we mentioned, was drafted by Baroness Hale for the Law Commission, in response to the UNCRC, and was supposed to give weight to the UNCRC in what was then British law. With respect to children in care, the UNCRC is largely laid out in law with the rights respected and with a process by which to try and deliver it. But, actually, when you talk to children in care about whether their experiences reflect that set of principles, they are possibly further away from the UNCRC than any group. We have the first stage—the legal principles—accepted, but we are still a long way from children’s everyday experiences recognising that, particularly their rights to shape their care, to be listened to, to have agency—some of the fundamental rights.

Bell Ribeiro-Addy: So it is not directly incorporated into our law.

Martin Lennon: It is not. It is reflected in some bits much better than in others.

Bell Ribeiro-Addy: At the moment, the Scottish Government are taking steps to incorporate it, and the Welsh Assembly has adopted it as a basis for its policy since 2004. Do you think things would be better if the UK Government directly incorporated it into domestic law?

Dame Rachel de Souza: The first thing to say is well done to Scotland for being the first country to attempt incorporation. This is a really interesting process that will affect hundreds of laws. It will take a long time to work that through, and I will be watching carefully. We will have a lot to learn from the Scottish situation.

Martin and I mentioned the Children Act, which is very much an attempt to be mindful of the UNCRC and to embed its principles into implementation and how we do things. That was 1989, and we are still attempting to realise it now. We all have to be mindful of what a long process these things are. It is great to see that Scotland has gone ahead and we need to learn from the Scottish situation. I am fairly pragmatic and I do not see that process happening here yet, but we can refine and work around bits of the Children Act as a really good model.

Bell Ribeiro-Addy: Do you think it should?

Martin Lennon: We need to recognise how radical the Scottish model is.

Dame Rachel de Souza: It is really radical.

Martin Lennon: You mentioned Wales adopting it in 2004 as a set of principles. When I talked to my counterparts in countries like Sweden, which is the first country to implement it, I asked them what kind of challenges they saw in the courts. They have a civil law system, so they do not really see challenges. They work through a constitutional rights framework, so embedding the UNCRC in that way was quite natural for them. Scotland has a civil law system—sorry, a common law system; I am really nervous about discussing this in front of the Chair of the committee. Let us take Article 24, which is the right to health. To say that children have a right to a healthcare system seems pretty basic. So many children would like to assert that right with regard to CAMHS, but it is a fundamental departure from the way the NHS operates, which is on the basis of need.

Chair: The right to health is a socioeconomic right, and some constitutions, like South Africa, have that in their constitution for everyone. This committee’s predecessors have looked at the tensions around realising socioeconomic rights, so I suppose I see that. This is not an exam about Scots law, and I think the point you are making is valid. I would not say that the Scots are particularly litigious, but we have had the same experience as the rest of the United Kingdom of having the ECHR incorporated into our domestic system, and people have used that to enforce their rights in the court.

This committee has looked at that and applauded the Human Rights Act both for giving people the ability to directly enforce their rights in their domestic courts, but also because it makes institutions live up to those rights, so it has a dual function. Over the years, this committee has recommended that the UHCRC should be incorporated into the domestic law of England and Wales as well Scotland, and there is all the legal hoo-ha over the fact that the Scotland Act was struck down by the Supreme Court, to a limited extent because it—very topically—strayed into reserved matters.

The essence of our interest is: do you think that, by incorporating it into the domestic legal system, it would improve children’s ability to make sure that their rights were respected?

Dame Rachel de Souza: I will really only say what I have said, which is that my worry is the difference between what we have enshrined in law for children and the reality on the ground, and the realisation of rights, laws, the Children Act. I try to work very pragmatically, and in a challenging way, to make sure that what children need to happen—they are incredibly sensitive to this; you can say to children, “You have this right”, or, “The law says this”, but they will say, “That’s not my experience”.

So although I am looking to improve children’s rights in our legal system in any way we can, my efforts are still best spent on showing the reality for children on the ground and making sure that government, public sector leaders and Parliament are aware of that situation and make the changes.

Chair: I hear you. Sorry Bell, please continue.

Bell Ribeiro-Addy: I will ask this in a slightly different way and then leave it there. If the Scottish Government do go on to incorporate the UNCRC and the UK Government do not, would children have better rights in Scotland than in England?

Martin Lennon: It is important to remember that they already have different rights across different areas, because things like the Children Act have been amended. Because so much policy on children’s social care, education and health is devolved, there are already very different rights experiences across the devolved nations.

Bell Ribeiro-Addy: But, looking at the landscape as it is, when implemented, could it create that situation, even if just on paper?

Martin Lennon: The priority given to children is quite important.

Dame Rachel de Souza: It is hugely important.

Martin Lennon: We would be interested to see what the results are. You talked about the implementation of the Human Rights Act. By the time that it was implemented in 1998, we had about 40 years of judgments in Strasbourg explaining the interpretation. We have only 18 articles; they are quite simple and conceptual. Across the UNCRC, we have 45 articles and a lot of general comments. As I said, there is no single court, as there is in the HRC, to rule on interpretation.

So, in a sense, it seems to me that the Scottish courts will be the first to make those kinds of rulings, which is why we have to recognise how radical Scotland is—I know that I sound like a broken record on this—and what a big effort we are asking the Government to make if we ask them to undertake this, because they have to review so many things. So when I say that we in the children’s rights community are really looking to see what happens in Scotland, it is genuine interest in quite how different this will be.

The Chair made some excellent points about the right to health. In 2014, we introduced education, health and care plans in England, which said that the NHS had to provide healthcare to a child with an EHC plan. That was seen as contentious, because the NHS was saying, “No, we provide health on the basis of need, and we can’t have any person queue-jumping or passporting”. There was a notion that these children had a right to this. Eight years later, we are still in a situation where, if a child or their parents rightly wish to challenge an education, health and care plan, they can go to the SENDIST, which can make an order against the local authority and ask the healthcare provider to explain why they are not providing it.

Ultimately, if the healthcare provider turns around and says, “No, we won’t provide it”, the only rights-based course is to say that the local authority has to pay for it privately. So when we look at children’s everyday experiences, the degree to which they can realise rights is based on the process there. Even just saying that children have a right to healthcare is actually a radical departure from where we are at the moment, particularly in the NHS.

Dame Rachel de Souza: But the simple answer to your question is that we have to applaud anything that puts children, their rights and their needs front and centre, and we have to think that that is a good thing, to learn from it and to want more of it.

Q5 Bell Ribeiro-Addy: With regard to something that is incorporated, we have been talking a lot at the moment about a Bill of Rights potentially coming to this Parliament. We have heard some things about what might be in it, but do you have a view about whether there would be a positive or negative impact on the protection of human rights if we departed from the Human Rights Act and went on to this Bill of Rights?

Dame Rachel de Souza: I have not seen the proposed updates to the Bill, but last year I wrote to the Deputy Prime Minister to make clear my position that, if any reforms are introduced, I want them used as an opportunity to ensure that our international obligations in relation children’s rights are upheld. Indeed, would it not be great if they were strengthened and went even further? I am meeting the Deputy Prime Minister in the next couple of weeks, and I will raise this issue with him.

Bell Ribeiro-Addy: So no specific measures, or potential measures, that you are concerned about have been announced.

Dame Rachel de Souza: As I say, as Children’s Commissioner, I want to make sure that all our international obligations towards children are upheld. I have not seen the updates, but I hope that the drafting will be better than what I saw.

Q6 Bell Ribeiro-Addy: I have some questions about county lines. Article 33 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child requires states to take “all appropriate measures … to prevent the use of children in the illicit production and trafficking” of drugs, but, in the UK, children as young as seven have been coerced through county lines to transport illegal drugs from one part of the UK to another. What role could you play, as the Children’s Commissioner, to protect children from being exposed to county lines?

Dame Rachel de Souza: I have been doing a number of things. One of the positive things is that, two or three years ago, people like head teachers and social workers were not as aware of the county lines issues as they should have been. Good work has been done and, now, when I go out to public services, everyone is aware of county lines and the training—all these key issues. This year, I have been particularly focused, including during my Justice Committee scrutiny session on the victims Bill, on making sure that the draft victims Bill supports children who are victims of criminal exploitation and who come into contact with the criminal justice system—both victims and defendants, obviously. This includes children who have been criminally exploited through county lines and drug dealing. They are often highly vulnerable and should be recognised by the victims Bill, and I hope we have positive traction on this. I was at the committee and sought its recognition and proper definitions in that Bill. So that was important work that we did this year.

Now that professionals and public sector leaders are far more aware of county lines and what it is, we need to make sure that understanding what needs to happen and implementation of support for the young people involved is up to scratch and done properly. I have been working in national attendance systems, and we have a long-running programme on school attendance looking at children missing from education: how we identify them, how we find them, and what the triggers are so that we can recognise that a child is involved. We have done lots of work on this nationally and locally. We need to be more sensitive to those triggers and warning signs, and we are trying to get that for educationalists and those in social care so that we can react quickly, because speed is of the essence. But the main thing for me this year has been the victims Bill work.

Martin Lennon: I will talk about how that has transpired in our casework. Three or four years ago, we would get cases, or find children on visits, where there was a whole litany of risk factors but no one had said, “Is this child a victim of county lines and modern slavery?” We do not see that now: there is a professional acceptance and understanding of risk factors. You see a recognition now, particularly for children in social care. County lines is part of the parlance now.

However, the system is still not responding effectively. It is good that you mentioned the UNCRC, because it is clear and strong on this and on children who are using drugs and the healthcare they need. The duties in Sections 47 and 14 of the Children Act on protecting children from harm are absolutely explicit. It should never have come to this. It is a bit like CSE. Given our legislative procedures, children should not have suffered that level of harm without professionals realising their professional responsibilities. We have moved on, but the system does not have the capacity to help them in the way they need, particularly therapeutics and supportive environment placements for children in care.

Again, it is about evolving. There was a sense that children were in gang situations and being exploited so we needed to physically remove them from where they were. That forgot about all the protective factors around them. Home life is often difficult, but that does not mean that it, and friends and school, does not have a positive, protective effect. We need to work in communities to try to provide those protective effects, but there is no capacity in the care system to do that at the moment.

Bell Ribeiro-Addy: In reference to capacity, Anne Longfield, your predecessor, published a report in 2021 called Still Not Safe, which looked at the lack of co-ordination across lots of different services, with children falling through the gaps and ending up being exploited. It does not sound like it from what you have said, but have there been any improvements? There might be something positive for you to say about improvements since this report was published.

Dame Rachel de Souza: The improvement was the point that I made first off: awareness. That is a good, positive step, and we should recognise that, but one reason why I am so focused on public sector reform is because the reality of multi-agency working—data sharing, understanding the trigger points, the “how to” on the ground—is still lagging behind.

Martin Lennon: On attendance, I worked on this for six years, and it was still quite shocking to me how easy it is for a child, for whom we have a clear statutory responsibility to have in school under the Education Act and to protect under the Children Act, to disappear off the radar and no one know where they are, or nobody know that they do not know where they are.

Dame Rachel de Souza: Before I came here this afternoon, I hosted, with one of the Education Ministers, a round table for professionals on children missing from education. We took best practice from local authorities and multi-academy trusts, and started trying to find the people who are doing this well. We are finding that there is great practice in of identifying children missing from education and getting them back, but it is very scattergun. We need to get some national frameworks around this. That is the next step.

Bell Ribeiro-Addy: Is there anything in the pipeline?

Dame Rachel de Souza: Yes. On the attendance work, when I came into the role, one of the things I was particularly concerned about was children missing from education. I used my statutory powers to write to every local authority in the country, all 151, and ask them how many children they had on the roll and how many were missing from education, because this plays to your question about where the children are who are missing.

The response I got back was very variable. Everyone responded. One London borough told me that it had 770 children missing from education and where it thought they were. Great. I had one of the largest cities in the country telling me that it had four children missing from education when I have seen more than four children in illegal schools in that city. I have worked tirelessly on the attendance issue, and I am trying to alter practice on the ground with schools, multi-academy trusts and local authorities but also at national government levels.

We now have a system where we can monitor daily attendance live, which you did not used to know until two terms later, bizarrely enough, because it was not live. I said, “It’s 2021. We have to be able to do this”. We have made some big changes there, and I am informing a whole programme of national work from the Department for Education to make sure that these children are found, brought back to education, we understand why they were missing and we have clear national guidelines. We should know where our children are.

Martin Lennon: We have also just published a paper on data sharing, which sounds like a dry topic.

Dame Rachel de Souza: It is so important.

Martin Lennon: We found that the GDPR and the framework were quite well understood, but there were maybe eight or nine different pieces of enabling legislation which local partners might use to share that kind of live attendance data, particularly with the front-line professionals who need it. It may be the police telling a school that it needs to be worried about a child because it thinks they might be involved in something. Those pieces of legislation and how they interact are poorly understood. We have published a report on that which sounds quite distantly related, but it is crucial to better identification on the front line.

Dame Rachel de Souza: To bring that to life, one of my first visits was to Bedfordshire police to look at what they were doing about the criminal exploitation of children. They talked about children they had found who were not on any school roll, GP’s list, or whatever. Multi-agency relationships will make this work better, but we need the underpinning technology to make knowing where our children are, and being able to track them across services, a reality. That is why I have argued for a unique identifier for every child—it could be their NHS number—so we know where children are who seem to have fallen off the radar, and we can help them.

Chair: Presumably that would be helpful. We have questions later on about the disappearance of children who are asylum seekers, and children affected not just by county lines but by modern slavery and human trafficking. Bell, please do continue.

Q7 Bell Ribeiro-Addy: Online safety is another area where children are exploited. How much difference do you think the provisions of the Online Safety Bill will make to the protection of children online, and how much might this impact their right to freedom of expression under Article 10?

Dame Rachel de Souza: When I came into the role, the Secretaries of State for DCMS and for Education asked me to look at keeping children safer online. This came out of the Everyone’s Invited work. As part of that work, I have pulled in porn companies. I work with tech companies, so the big eight tech companies see me every six months to give me the data I request on children and keeping children safe, and I have done a huge amount of work with children on what they want in order to be safe online and what their experience online is.

We have surveyed and done properly national representative research with thousands and thousands of children. One of the best pieces of work I did was to call in over 100 London 16 to 21 year-olds in education and ask them to answer the question, “What I wish my parents had known about life online”. It was the most instructive thing I have heard about the things that youngsters experience.

We have shown that our older teenage girls are really made miserable and unhappy by their experiences online. They tell me that in their droves, not only in survey responses, but everywhere I go. They see extreme dieting material, self-harm material, unrealistic body images. Boys as young as eight and nine are seeing pornography online for the first time, which is why I called in the porn companies. They told us to put age verification on the sites, because they did not want children on them. It should be put on all sites, which is why I fought for that clause in the Online Safety Bill to be put back in.

I have had a tremendously difficult times getting straight answers from tech companies. I ask them how many children they have online, how old those children are, what they are doing with these algorithms. I regularly challenge them. It is not pleasant, and they send KCs as answers and try to fob me off, but we will not be fobbed off. I have had ministerial round tables with them.

In short, it is really important that the Online Safety Bill goes through. Children need protection. I have spoken to Molly Russell’s father and a number of parents whose children have died after overly consuming online material aligned with depression and learning how to kill themselves. We have done so much work. There is that side, but of course we want to protect children so that they can be online and enjoy the digital world, and enjoy the things that they should enjoy and the learning opportunities.

For me, the Online Safety Bill is almost a hygiene factor that will allow parents and children to have the confidence to be online and enjoy the online world. Sorry, that was a long answer, but I have put a lot of work into this, like a lot of people. It is a key area for debate at the moment. Last week, I publicly called for tech bosses to face criminal charges if they do not keep children safe. It is that serious. Self-regulation has not worked, and the amount of time I have spent with tech bosses only confirms that.

Q8 Bell Ribeiro-Addy: Thinking of exploitation and grooming online in particular, I will ask about the revelations about Shamima Begum at the end of last year. At the time she went to Syria, a number of girls who were of concern were clearly being groomed online, and two other girls were taken through with her. All of them were underage. Those two have now died. People may know that Shamima Begum went on to marry an ISIS fighter and had three children, all of whom are dead. She has now been stripped of her British passport. A number of older people who went over to Syria have been allowed to come back into the UK to face charges here.

It was found that Canadian authorities had a role in smuggling Shamima Begum through. Papers have been seen that said that she was smuggled through by an intelligence officer in Canada, and both countries have now acknowledged this and more or less said, when people have asked questions, that intelligence authorities use a variety of methods to gain intelligence.

Strictly, my question is: is it right that children are used in the gathering of intelligence in that way? Have any investigations been done into the online grooming of young women like Shamima Begum and taking them into Syria in that way? That is essentially what happened.

Dame Rachel de Souza: I will pass this to Martin just to check whether the old office did anything. I think it did something on security services’ use of children spies.

Martin Lennon: Yes. On the safeguarding response to Shamima Begum and others, there was definitely a recognition in the safeguarding circle, although I do not remember all the details, that there was a failure and a particular risk that there was almost a gap between what the defence agenda was doing and our safeguarding responsibility to protect these children and stop this happening. A conversation about what the risk factors are happened in education and children’s services.

My recollection from the previous office is that we sought various assurances on the legislation that was brought on using children in covert surveillance. However, I understand that that legislation has only a UK-wide bearing, and I do not know whether that would cover the foreign use of British citizens as child spies. I would have to check that.

Dame Rachel de Souza: We can have a look at that.

Bell Ribeiro-Addy: That would be very helpful, because I believe that once a child a child leaves the UK we have no more responsibility for them. That could cause some concern, especially if they have been taken or groomed in some way.

Martin Lennon: We could try to look into that to see what assurances we can get or may have received.

Bell Ribeiro-Addy: Have no particular recommendations or complaints been made to the Government about the use of children in such operations?

Martin Lennon: On the legislation on the use of child spies, there was quite a lot of discussion about the tightening of the legislation and whether it could be tightened further. I am not sure whether that would apply in this case.

Q9 Bell Ribeiro-Addy: I will turn to the strip-searching of child Q, which has also come up recently. It has been found that a disproportionate number of black, Asian and minority-ethnic children are strip-searched, in comparison to their white counterparts. The committee’s report, Black People, Racism and Human Rights, and the scrutiny of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill highlighted the unequal experiences of black children in comparison to white children throughout the entire justice system. Is enough being done to hold the Government to account on these issues? Could more be done?

Dame Rachel de Souza: The work on strip-searching following child Q was done by me and my office, and we released that in the summer. After the child Q case, we talked to her team and her lawyers, and although it was a particularly egregious and unbelievable case—as someone who had been a school leader, I found it hard to understand what on earth happened—we wanted to check whether that was an isolated incident. I have powers to call for any data held on children by a public body—I do not need to use an FoI—and we used these to get all the data from the Metropolitan Police on race, ethnicity, age and whether an appropriate adult was there. We put that data together and published it last summer. That was where it came from.

I was deeply concerned by the disproportionality in that data: 95% of the 650 strip-searches—these children had not been arrested—were of black boys. It was shocking, even though, when I go to Feltham or the YOIs, I see black boys, so I was used to seeing disproportionality there. Only 50% of those strip-searches led to further action, in one-third of the cases no appropriate adult was there, and the record-keeping was terrible.

I not only shared that information publicly but met with Sir Mark Rowley and every appropriate Policing Minister since—there have been a few—to raise the issue. I asked Sir Mark to show leadership. I have used my data powers to request that information from every police force in England and Wales. I am cleaning that data at the moment, and we will publish it. We are looking at it not only for those factors but for others. We have asked for other information on that strip-searching. So we have effectively raised the issue and made it public.

I will not stop until that disproportionality and those figures come down. I will keep asking for this information every six months or year until the situation is better. That is one way I can use my powers and role, because this is extremely serious, and we owe it to child Q, who so shockingly had that experience, sitting in a classroom. It is awful.

Chair: I do not want to get too much into the details of a particular case, because it might be sub judice and we have to be so careful, but in general it is good to hear you say this. This committee carried out a report into the human rights of black people in the United Kingdom two and a half years ago, and one of the things that we are keen to see is concrete action to address racial disparities in treatment. It is really good to hear that you are keeping such a close eye on these disparities, particularly in the area of strip-searching, which all of us who read about this have been deeply shocked by.

Bell Ribeiro-Addy: Do you think anything else could be done? What is your most powerful power? What is the most severe action that you could take?

Dame Rachel de Souza: We made a series of recommendations about what needs to happen, and we published these and took them to Ministers. They range from large things to small things, obviously including training, proper monitoring and changes in practice.

On what I am able to do, just as an example I can enter any public building where a child is. We are concerned about disproportionality in the youth justice system and children in YOIs. For a time before Christmas, my team of 30 spent every weekend making unannounced visits to every YOI where a child is held to check what the conditions were like at the weekend, whether they had family visits, what their experience was, and to talk to them. We can go in, but the real power is being able to talk to those children and bring their voices out, and to take those voices to Ministers, to the public sector and to the press, if necessary, if it is a serious enough national issue. That is what I did with the strip-search situation. I will publish on that piece first.

We are absolutely focused on disproportionality in youth justice and children’s experience in general. I think that is what I opened with.

Martin Lennon: There is another thing to remember about child Q.

Chair: We cannot go into the details of child Q, because we have terribly strict rules about sub judice. I wonder if we can move on, because you have given us a very full answer on that and I am conscious of the time.

Martin Lennon: One important point about child Q is that the serious case review happened—not the content, but that it happened. It shows the power of local mechanisms to call it out. Undertaking a serious case review and putting the school and police under that scrutiny was so powerful. We would not have known that there were 600 strip-searches if that had not happened.

This is in the Children Act and it is a local power. This came from local leaders around that child recognising how damaging that had been for them, taking a subjective perspective on their harm and calling it out. It is one of many mechanisms in the system at a local level that will make people step forward and deliver change. It shows that it is incumbent on all of us to call out such action.

Bell Ribeiro-Addy: I will make one last very small point on the commissioner’s powers. That was an example of something that can be done once something has gone wrong, but what if we know that something is going to go wrong? The committee’s work on the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill highlighted, for example, that it would definitely disproportionately impact black, Asian and minority ethnic people, who are already overrepresented in the youth justice system, as you said. So what assessment have you made on the particular impact this will have, and can you do anything before such Bills go through both Houses to stop their very negative impact on children?

Dame Rachel de Souza: One really important thing that we can, and do, do when a Bill is going through is making sure that we are representing children’s voices and groups of children’s voices when we think they will be overly impacted from the passage of that Bill. We have done that with the Online Safety Bill, we have tried to be the voice of children in the draft victims Bill and we certainly can and will do it in other areas in the capacity that we have.

We do make assessments and are constantly looking at what Parliament is doing so that we can bring children’s voice and experience to it. I have to say that I have not yet had a Minister or Cabinet Minister turn away when I say that half a million children have said something. The children’s voice is a powerful thing.

Q10 Lord Singh of Wimbledon: I am a Cross-Bench Member of the House of Lords. You appear to have a very wide remit. I have a quick question following on from earlier questions. We talk of children as an entity but, in reality, even in my experience in a family, children vary enormously in their attitudes, expectations and so on. Do you find any difference in looking to the needs of children from different ethnic or religious backgrounds, and do you have the resources to do that?

Dame Rachel de Souza: It is interesting, because one of the heartening things about our huge survey of half a million four to 18 year-olds was that, among the things those children told us—across a huge age range and from different ethnic, regional and economic backgrounds—they very much saw the same barriers and wanted the same things. In a nutshell, when they talked about the barriers coming out of lockdown, one in five of that half a million, from whatever background, talked about mental health and well-being, life at school and their desire for a good education, places to go and things to do, everything from play to community and so on. For their futures, they talked about family and having a great job.

There was a voice of England’s children, which is great. However, when you dig down—you are absolutely right—you have huge amounts of difference in age, religious belief and so on. There are myriad differences. A great thing has been being able to work with particular groups of children and to protect them, whether that is groups of children such as young carers, who we have done a lot of work on, or children from different religious backgrounds. I have worked in Tower Hamlets, Luton and Norfolk, where there is a real range of backgrounds and belief.

We look at where we can have an impact and where we think children are being underserved, or where children are telling us that they have been underserved. We make it our business to get round and speak to a wide range of communities. I have spent a lot of time with the Sikh community in Birmingham, for example, talking to children in school about the particular issues there. I have spent time with the Muslim community right around the country, but in particular I have spent a lot of time in Luton and in London. I have spent time with children from a whole range of backgrounds.

Where we think there is a particular issue, we raise it and try to work on it. Overall, the big themes are really similar, and that is quite heartening and important.

Q11 Lord Singh of Wimbledon: Thank you. That is very helpful. I will move on to the main thrust of my questions. Our inquiry into the human rights of asylum seekers in the UK has highlighted concerns over the ethics and effectiveness of age assessments in determining age disputes.

In your view, are age assessments carried out in a way that is fair and appropriate to ensure that asylum-seeking children are not treated as adults and have their rights respected, including the right to have their best interests prioritised under Article 3 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child?

Dame Rachel de Souza: The committee is right to raise this important issue, which goes to the heart of a lot of issues that I am working on. The strength of the UK system is that the Children Act applies to all children in this country, including asylum-seeking and refugee children.

Practically, I have used my powers of entry over a couple of years to visit the Kent intake unit. My team is down there; my child rights advisers go down there and I go down there myself. I talk to children, both in the Kent intake unit and in the hotels, and I ask them about their experience. I also talk to the professionals who work there. One thing that I think should give some comfort is that, this year, when I talked to the social workers who do the age assessments, it was the same team who were there last year, and they are now much more experienced and much better at doing their age assessments from the information that children give them: I am in this class at school and this is what I do. Here are my papers”.

Although we are obviously right to pick up on this issue, I think we can take some assurance from the fact that my experience on the ground when I talk to children in the hotels is that they do not feel that they have been put under undue pressure. I talk to them on their own and they can tell me what they think. That is really important.

Martin Lennon: Sorry to keep sounding like a broken record on the best interests point, but that is very much enshrined in the Children Act: the children come into care and then the care of the local authority, and the local authority has duties relating to that. In relation to that and the immigration authorities, there have been a couple of judicial reviews recently about how far it extends in the duties of the local authority to support a child in their immigration process. This comes from a couple of cases of care leavers where the local authority did not support the child. Those judgments are very clear that there is a high bar and that the expectation is that a local authority will support an unaccompanied asylum seeking-child in care in their immigration process.

Lord Singh of Wimbledon: Could you suggest anything that could be done to improve the process?

Dame Rachel de Souza: Do you mean improve the age assessment process or improve the experience of children who are coming in and being held in hotels?

Lord Singh of Wimbledon: I mean both.

Dame Rachel de Souza: I have visited the hotels and talked to children in them. Ofsted has raised concerns about them, and I raised concerns last year, but the basic needs of most of the children in them are being met. There are social worker teams in them who give good advice. We have a big problem with the sufficiency of appropriate foster care and places for these children. I was pleased when the national transfer scheme was mandated, but I see children who seem to be there for longer than last year, and there are more of them. That is a deep concern. I would be keen to see specialist fostering prioritised. A lot of older teenagers are keen to get on with education or getting settled. One good solution would be specialist fostering, because taking a 15 or 16 year-old who you will look after for a few years is different. You could create a speedier, and helpful, supportive environment there. That should not be so hard to do.

Martin Lennon: We have spoken to asylum seeking-children throughout England in particular and seen best practice in supporting them. The role of the voluntary sector is important there. The best examples are where we have seen good voluntary sector and community provision in their work in the local authority. The problem is that that has generally reached capacity, and increasing capacity through the voluntary sector is a slow process. It often involves a skillset that children’s services do not have.

It is not just commissioning a place for a private children’s home; it is working with the voluntary sector to help them with grants, capital issues—all that. It is slow, and there is a kind of tension, because you want to see children coming out of hotels and into proper looked-after accommodation as soon as possible. There is not the status, and trying to push the process along without creating the capacity can involve putting children in bad placements. There is no quick fix. It is often older teenagers, and it is not that dissimilar to the problem of county lines: there is a lack of sufficiency for children in care.

Dame Rachel de Souza: In the hotels, they are in a legal grey area, and it needs to be resolved.

Q12 Lord Singh of Wimbledon: Thank you. That is helpful. I will move on to my next question. The Nationality and Borders Act introduced the creation of a national age assessment board, as well as powers for the Secretary of State to make regulations specifying scientific methods that may be used for age assessment. In your view, do these changes increase the likelihood of asylum seeking-children being properly identified?

Dame Rachel de Souza: I think I partially answered that at the start of the last question, which was to say that we are really focused on this group of children. I have spoken to the social workers, who are the same team who were doing the age assessments last year. Most of the children say that they did not feel their age assessment was onerous. Lots of them bring documents, or they are clearly children. What I am hearing is that although we might have concerns about this, the children’s experience on the ground was fairly straightforward. It was, “I was able to show … I came with data”. Like the committee, I want to see the evidence for the new assessments. I have written to the Home Secretary about it.

Lord Singh of Wimbledon: Would scientific methods adequately respect the right of the child being assessed, including their right to respect for a private life under Article 8 of the ECHR?

Dame Rachel de Souza: It is clearly an issue, and it is also an issue if we have adults masquerading as children, with children in hotels. It is complex. I have concerns, like the ones you have raised. I can offer you some comfort. We do spot checks and visit monthly, and we talk to the children regularly, and they are able to show that they are children without going through this experience. It is not something they are talking about or are concerned about.

Lord Singh of Wimbledon: That is helpful.

Dame Rachel de Souza: I know that that is only hearsay from me, but I have no reason to say otherwise.

Q13 Lord Singh of Wimbledon: Lastly, as of October 2022, 222 asylum seeking-children were missing from hotel accommodation, some for almost a year. As of December 2022, 20% of the children from Albania taken in by Kent County Council have gone missing. That is 39 out of 197. Are you taking any action on children going missing from hotels or hostels?

Dame Rachel de Souza: We are trying to improve our data and the Home Office’s data collection on this, so we have been asking questions about it. We have been down and spoken to colleagues working there, and asked them the questions.

Martin Lennon: I am afraid that children going missing comes across as poor care. It happens if children are put into poor-quality children’s homes: you see a big spike in missing incidents. Children who have been trafficked need to feel safe and there are genuine alternatives to what is going on. They need to be in care placements that meet that need. That is where the chronic problem is, and that is the issue with them being held in the hotels for too long or being put in a placement where they do not know anyone, or they do not feel safe, or they do not a social network of people they can engage with.

That is the real dilemma. As Rachel said, she supported the mandating of the national transfer scheme, but even that, for us, was a last-stage approach, because ideally you want this to be a voluntary approach with local authorities, where they have the capacity in the voluntary sector, and they have those children’s connections. You have to try to understand that child’s perspective and what is going to make them feel safe, and it is quite hard to do.

Lord Singh of Wimbledon: Yes. Who, if anyone, has responsibility for unaccompanied asylum seeking-children living in hotels or hostels?

Dame Rachel de Souza: As I said, it is a legal grey area. Children in this country should be in the care of the state. We cannot have the Home Secretary as the responsible person. It is not appropriate. There are concerns; these children should be in the care of the state with a named—

Lord Singh of Wimbledon: So it is not clear at all. Do you think that, in the case of the unaccompanied asylum seeking-children, the UK Government are effectively complying with Article 20 of the UNCRC, which requires special protection and assistance from the state for a child deprived of his or her family environment?

Dame Rachel de Souza: Article 20 is important, but so is the Children Act. These children should be in care. There is a process: the child should be advised of their rights and should be in care. There is something that should be happening but is not happening, so we have a serious concern about this.

Chair: We have heard evidence that some of these hotels are like unregulated children’s homes.

Martin Lennon: They cannot register as children’s homes, because there is no proper legal status for the children. That is the dilemma, because obviously you do not want children living there without status. I do not think anyone wants the Home Secretary to become a corporate parent for these children, because that would undermine all the rights of the Children Act. Particularly in England, this issue is not unique to refugee children. Some 80% of the cases coming through our helpline involving children anywhere in the care system are about a lack of sufficiency. The statistics for the number of children experiencing frequent moves between homes, the distance from homes and inappropriate placements show that there is a chronic issue with finding decent placements to live in, particularly for older children; we mentioned county lines.

Chair: So it is about finding appropriate placements.

Dame Rachel de Souza: It is also about specialist fostering.

Chair: Focusing on the rights of children who are asylum seekers, we heard some evidence last week, from a solicitor who specialises in this area, that the basic needs of some child asylum seekers are not being met. Our witness told us that families with children in hotels are getting only £9.20 a week for nappies, milk et cetera. Is that enough? If that is the case, are the basic needs for children in these hotels being met?

Dame Rachel de Souza: When I talk about hotels, I mean the Kent intake unit, where, rather than going straight into the care of the local authority, children are being put in hotels and cared for there.

Chair: I am talking about something slightly different now, though. I am talking about children being with their parents or families in hotels, perhaps dispersed across the United Kingdom, from Glasgow down to the south. The evidence we heard last week was that those families are getting £9.20 of support a week, including for things like nappies, milk et cetera. Is that enough, or is there a real issue about whether the basic needs of child asylum seekers are being met?

Martin Lennon: We will have to come back to you on that. I presume that this is a situation where you have accommodation, because that is lower than the national asylum support rate.

Chair: This is the individual extra amount they get for having a child.

Martin Lennon: Okay, so you have the NAS rate and then the child rate. We will need to come back on the detail, because most of our work is with unaccompanied children.

Chair: Could you do so, because I am very conscious of the time?

Q14 Lord Henley: I am a Conservative Member of the House of Lords. Modern slavery is prohibited by all the various UN conventions, the European convention and the Modern Slavery Act. But you also have a role, so, generally, what is the Children’s Commissioner’s role in tackling modern slavery and trafficking and in helping to uphold those rights?

Dame Rachel de Souza: Obviously, this is a concern of my office, which continues to work on this. My role can be most powerful in bringing the voices of those children to bear, taking those voices and experiences to government, Parliament and beyond, and ensuring that, where children are concerned, their voices are brought to Public Bill Committees and discussions with Ministers.

Martin Lennon: On identification, some of what we talked about earlier on county lines is particularly relevant here, because exploited children, particularly those who are trafficked into the country, tend to appear at one agency but not others; they may go to a hospital or a GP but they will not be in school. The fact that we cannot match that up and say, “Who are these children who appear to be known to one person but not others?”, is a fundamental problem in understanding the number of victims and where they are.

Lord Henley: Dame Rachel’s predecessor referred to the number of children falling off the radar, and you will continue to monitor this.

Dame Rachel de Souza: We have done innovative new work to find out what is known and not known about where children are and how to find them and get the agencies working together. We have done that over the past 16 months, but we have tried to ensure that that work is disseminated with the agencies and the people who are working directly with young people—local authorities, head teachers, police and health agencies—so that they are very aware of the issue, how they need to work together to solve this problem and what we know, what we do not know and what needs to happen.

Lord Henley: So it is a Donald Rumsfeld problem, with known knowns and unknown unknowns.

Martin Lennon: How easy it is for a child to be an unknown unknown is quite shocking.

Lord Henley: We do have some statistics. I gather that the Office for National Statistics reported that, in the year ending March 2021, the police recorded that slavery offences involving a child increased by 27%, up to 2,239. That was an upward trend over recent years. Should government do more to address the numbers of children in modern slavery in the UK, particularly as the Prime Minister recently announced plans to “significantly raise the threshold someone has to meet to be considered a modern slave”? What do you think of that approach?

Martin Lennon: There is sometimes confusion about what these definitions mean for children. We have seen this with the NRM; there is a real question about what the national referral mechanism adds to child identification. For adults, there is a support package, but—I sound like a broken record—for children it is the Children Act, which is still the primary piece of legislation and is based on need.

On trying to improve identification support, one problem that we came across—it is still occasionally a problem—is that someone can be referred to the NRM and then wait to get an NRM decision before anything is done. That should not be the case. The Children Act is there. It is the primary piece of legislation and we should act on that basis. So it operates slightly differently for children, and it operates differently for British national children, who are still the vast majority of these cases. Actually, the NRM does not add much for them. An NRM decision is important if they are not British national children, because it has a bearing on immigration and on prosecutions.

Lord Henley: I take it that you have had, and will continue to have, these discussions with the Home Office.

Dame Rachel de Souza: We have also had discussions with the NCA. I have made it my business to get a full briefing from it and to ask it what more it can do. We are in discussion, and I am taking a position on one of its advisory boards to keep up the pressure on this.

Q15 Lord Henley: Following on from that, the previous anti-slavery commissioner, Dame Sara Thornton, was in post until 2022. It is now January 2023. She left when her three-year term came to an end. What impact has that delay in appointing a new anti-slavery commissioner had on children’s rights?

Dame Rachel de Souza: The anti-slavery commissioner is an important role. I have made inquiries with the Home Office about why there is a delay, and I hope that an appointment process will commence soon.

Lord Henley: But nothing has commenced so far, as far as you know?

Dame Rachel de Souza: No, but we hope that we will see it soon.

Lord Henley: The Government often say that.

Martin Lennon: One important role of the anti-slavery commissioner is looking specifically at driving prosecutions. We are seeing a few more, both for county lines and for modern slavery, but the numbers are still low, and there is real work to do there.

Q16 Chair: Before we let you go, Dame Rachel, I wanted to ask you a question perhaps linked to what we said about online safety earlier. You spoke about girls’ unhappiness with their body image and the mental well-being of children. One startling change that we have seen in recent years is the increase in child referrals to gender identity services.

I know research has been done that shows that, in 2010-11, 138 under-18s were referred to gender identity services in England and Wales, whereas, in 2020-21, a decade later, 2,383 children were referred to those services. Of those, two-thirds were girls with no history of gender dysphoria. Some of these girls are going on to have hormonal treatment and double mastectomies. Dr Hilary Cass, in her interim report, has expressed concern about this.

I just wonder what you are doing to better understand this phenomenon, this huge exponential increase in the number of young women, children, girls with concerns about their gender identity, and whether you are working at all with Dr Cass in her review.

Dame Rachel de Souza: Obviously, I have read the Cass report and work closely with the Department of Health on these areas, and on education. Again, the unhappiness about body image and other issues getting higher and higher for 14 to 17 year-old girls as they get older is heartbreaking.

You raise the issue of girls wishing to change their gender. As a head teacher and teacher of 31 years, I can tell you that pastorally I have come across a number of these cases and have tried, always with deep compassion, to pastorally support any families, parents and children who are experiencing these issues. I have closely followed the recent rulings, and I have thought deeply about it and tried to think deeply about the child rights issues in relation to that, as have the courts and the responses.

In all other areas of my work, I have argued strongly that children are children until the age of 18, even if they are older children. Whether that is children in unregulated care placements, for example, I argue and try to put the case to government that they are children and they need caring for. I feel the same about the particular issue that you raise, and I would be very worried about under-18s making decisions that could be irreversible and life changing.

From that perspective and having worked with children and young people in these situations, and in general, I am very concerned about those decisions being taken under the age of 18.

Chair: Linked to your experience as a teacher and in schools on this issue, there are reports in today’s newspapers, and I have also come across a case of this in my constituency, of girls, and it is usually girls, being socially transitioned at school without the parents’ knowledge and the parents find out purely by accident that their daughter is now being treated at school as though she were a boy without the parents’ consent. We know that, generally speaking, schools will not even give children medication without the parents’ consent. Do you have a concern about this practice in some schools of socially transitioning children without the parents’ consent?

Dame Rachel de Souza: It is really important that schools are transparent with parents who are prime carers of their children, unless they think there is a safeguarding issue, in which case it should be dealt with as a safeguarding issue.

One of the things I have been working on is The Big Ask review, which is looking at the RSE curriculum. The Department for Education asked me to do it, but it also comes strongly from children, because children are very keen to talk about relationships, relationship education, sex education, what it is like to be an adult, decision-making. So we are doing a review on that and will publish it soon.

Chair: Great. Thank you both very much indeed. I am sorry that we have kept you longer than I said at the beginning, but it has been a very wide-ranging evidence session, and we are all very grateful to you for the very full answers that you have given us. We really appreciate that, and we can see what a huge amount of knowledge you have and the care with which you are approaching your work.

There was one question that you said you would write to us about. We will write to you about it first so that you have a clear understanding of what I was putting to you, based on the evidence that we took last week. So do not feel that you have to be proactive on that; we will write to about it.

Once again, Dame Rachel and Mr Lennon, thank you so much. It has been a really interesting session.