Law to bolster child protection announced in Labour's first King's ...

King Charles delivering the 2023 King's Speech in Parliament (credit: Prime Minister's Office via Wikimedia Commons)

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The new Labour government has pledged to legislate to strengthen the child protection in its first King’s Speech, unveiled today.

The long-awaited reform of the Mental Health Act 1983 and action to deliver “fair pay” for staff in adult social care are also included in its first legislative programme since taking office this month.

Strengthening child protection

A Children’s Wellbeing Bill would “safe, happy and rooted in their communities and schools by strengthening multi-agency child protection and safeguarding arrangements”, the government said.

It added that the legislation would deliver on Labour’s manifesto commitments on children’s social care “to ensure that all children can thrive in safe, loving homes”.

Labour offered little detail on its children’s social care plans in its manifesto and its King’s Speech background document is similarly unclear on what these reforms will involve.

The government has also not confirmed how much of its predecessor’s Stable Homes, Built on Love agenda to reform children’s social care by, among other things, investing more in family support and kinship care to reduce the need for statutory interventions.

Registers of children not in school

Labour also said that the bill would place a duty on councils to have and maintain registers of children not in school, something its predecessor had planned to do but did not achieve.

Councils would also need to provide support to home-educating parents. The bill follows a rise in the number of home-educated children in England, from 80,900 to 92,000, in the year to autumn 2023.

A Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel analysis of reviews of serious cases involving home-educated children, published in May, found there were “potential risks of harm for some children when they are not visible to public agencies and cannot access the potential benefits of school as a protective factor”.

The panel said the evidence it had seen “[reinforced] the need for a statutory register so that relevant statutory organisations know which children are being home educated” and enable safeguarding agencies to have better knowledge of them.

The government said its bill would “ensure fewer children slip under the radar when they are not in school and more children reach their full potential through suitable education”.

‘Fair pay’ for adult social care staff

As trailed in the manifesto, the King’s Speech also included provisions to introduce a fair pay agreement for adult social care staff, which will form part of an Employment Rights Bill.

The Labour manifesto said this would set fair pay, terms and conditions, along with training standards, for care staff, and would be based on consultation with trade unions and providers.

However, the party did not set out any funding plans for the agreement, despite any policy that raises pay in social care requiring a significant funding boost to councils to enable providers to meet the increased costs.

UNISON welcomed the plan, with general secretary Christina McAnea saying: “After years of government neglect, the fair pay agreement is the first sign things are set to change [for social care]…Once the new pay agreement is in place, wages in care will rise across England, easing the sector’s staffing nightmare and relieving pressure on the NHS.”

The move was also welcomed by think-tank the King’s Fund but its chief executive, Sarah Woolnough, stressed the importance of the agreement being funded.

“The government’s plan to increase adult social care pay is good news for care workers, and we hope it will come with a commensurate rise in local government budgets to avoid the pay boost being funded by cuts elsewhere,” she said.

Ban on ‘exploitative zero-hour contracts’

The employment bill would also ban “exploitative zero-hour contracts”. This would provider workers with a contract that “reflects the number of hours they regularly work” and ensure they get reasonable notice of shift changes and are compensated for cancelled or curtailed shifts.

This will have significant implications for the home care sector, with a recent Homecare Association survey finding that two-thirds of providers offer zero-hour contracts to their staff.

The association, which represents domiciliary care organisations, said zero-hour contracts were the result of council and NHS commissioning practices that do not guarantee providers a set number of hours.

“For employers to stop or reduce use of zero-hour contracts and improve pay, public bodies need to change how they commission and purchase home care,” it said in the report on its survey.

This should include commissioning based on outcomes – rather than time and task – and paying providers for planned hours in advance, the association added.

Risk of ‘unintended consequences’

Following the King’s Speech, the association’s chief executive Jane Towson said: “Care employers need higher fees and secure contracts from councils and the NHS to provide better pay and working conditions. This requires government investment.

“Focusing on employment practices without also improving funding and commissioning risks unintended consequences”.

There was a similar warning from think-tank the Nuffield Trust, whose director of policy, Natasha Curry, said: “The hard reality is that adult social care has become reliant on zero hours contracts and some workers value the flexibility, and so there needs to be a careful, cautious, approach here that seeks to improve terms and conditions without suddenly destabilising the sector.”

Long-awaited Mental Health Act reform

The King’s Speech also included long-awaited legislation to reform the Mental Health Act 1983. This was promised by the Conservatives in their 2019 election manifesto, but not delivered during their subsequent five years in power, despite the party producing draft legislation in 2022.

Labour said its planned legislation would ensure “patients have greater choice, autonomy, rights and support, and make sure all patients are treated with dignity and respect throughout their treatment”.

Specific measures set out in the King’s Speech background briefing appear very similar to the Conservatives’ planned reforms. These include:

• Revising the detention criteria to ensure that people can only be detained if they pose a risk of serious harm either to themselves or to others, and where there is a reasonable prospectthat treatment would have a therapeutic benefit.
• Shortening the period that a patient may be kept in detention for treatment, which is currently an initial six months, and providing faster and more frequent reviews and appeals in relation to both detentions and treatment.
• Further limiting the extent to which people with a learning disability and/or autistic people can be detained and treated under the Mental Health Act and supporting such individuals to live fulfilling lives in their community, including by ensuring an adequate supply of community services to prevent inappropriate detentions.
• Replacing the nearest relative role – a family member with key rights and responsibilities in relation to patients but whom the patient has no role in appointing – with that of nominated person, who would generally chosen by the patient.
• Extending access to independent mental health advocates to informal patients and introduce an opt-out system for formal patients.
• Removing police stations and prisons as places of safety under the MHA to ensure people experiencing a mental health crisis are supported in the most appropriate setting.
• Adding statutory weight to patients’ rights to be involved with planning for their care, and to make choices and refusals regarding the treatment they receive.
• Supporting offenders with severe mental health problems to access the care they need as quickly and early as possible, and improve the management of those patients subject to a restriction order (for the purposes of public protection).

‘Once-in-a-generation opportunity’

“Reforming the Mental Health Act is a once-in-a-generation opportunity,” said Sarah Hughes, chief executive of mental health charity Mind.

“This bill is a chance to strengthen people’s rights, choice, and control when they’re being treated in a mental health hospital. It’s a chance that must be taken to address the shameful racial disparities the law currently enables, particularly for Black people who are nearly four times more likely to be detained.

“And it’s a chance to ditch community treatment orders, which are meant to give people supervised treatment in the community but are too often intrusive, restrictive and fail to reduce readmissions as they were intended.”

For the Centre for Mental Health, chief executive Andy Bell said: “We hope the bill that is delivered will be sufficiently comprehensive to update legislation that does not provide enough safeguards and that leaves people spending months in prison waiting for an urgent hospital bed.”

However, in outlining its plans for the bill, the government  said its impact would be years in the making.

“These reforms will take a number of years to implement, as we will need to recruit and train more clinical and judicial staff,” it said. “We plan to introduce these reforms in phases as resources allow, and we will not commence new powers unless we have sufficient staff in place that means it is safe to do so.”