My Lords, I have added my name to Amendment 307, introduced so ably by the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler. I have raised this issue from time to time over the past decade or so, including in a spirited correspondence with the noble Earl, Lord Howe, when he was a Health Minister—which shows how long this issue has been kicked around Whitehall. The one number every child has is the NHS number, as the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, mentioned, but to adopt it means education, social services and possibly police would have to accept it, and—terribly, of course—they would have to modify their IT systems. In short, what we have here is a good, old-fashioned, Whitehall bureaucratic struggle.
However, now the Children’s Commissioner Rachel de Souza has joined in rather powerfully because of all the children missing from schools, many more than
before the pandemic. There has been a problem with children missing from schools from well before the pandemic—some going to illegal schools, others being home-schooled, often without much evidence of being taught curriculum subjects. There is now to be a home-schooling register. The Children’s Commissioner has made it crystal clear that she wants all children to have a unique identifying number across the NHS, school and social services. That is the only way these kinds of changes can be made to work. What we have is a situation now where children at risk are put at unnecessary risk because there is no unique identifier across the different services.
Personally, I would not bet on the Children’s Commissioner getting her well-deserved wish. Last week, the Department for Education trotted out its traditional line—that it will introduce the home-schooling register at the “earliest possible legislative opportunity.” But the department was totally silent on the unique identifier issue, which was so important to making this work.
We have had this issue sculling around Whitehall for many, many years. There is now a chance for a decisive Minister, like the noble Lord, Lord Kamall, to do something about it, bang a few bureaucratic heads together and put the NHS number to work protecting children at risk across a range of services. At the very least, it would be helpful if he could consider protecting children through the Government having a pilot scheme to take this idea forward.