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Coroners and Justice Bill

I regret that I cannot support the letter of these amendments, but I certainly support their spirit. I will reflect for a moment on the context. Your Lordships will recall the UNICEF report which put us at the bottom of the developed world in terms of child welfare. That was followed by the report A Good Childhood by the Children’s Society, which again highlighted how poorly we perform in many ways for our children in this country. Subsequently there was a report from York University which put us in a league slightly above Romania, Lithuania and other countries with regard to our children. One thinks about the way in which we treat our social workers, who are supposed to protect children, the low status they have been provided and how they have been treated as pariahs—or the staff at children’s homes, who work with the most vulnerable and challenging children. There are members of staff paid the same as or less than staff at supermarket checkouts. We should think about the context in which this takes place. I commend all the excellent work that the Government have done in the past 10 years in seeking to remedy some of these situations. However, if we look at ourselves in the mirror, we have to say that somewhere or other we have rather lost our way in terms of prioritising the welfare of our children. That may be another reason to take this opportunity to look extremely carefully and think again about how children are treated in the courts. Perhaps we should be open-minded and think that perhaps, given the cultural context in which we operate, here is an opportunity to make more modern how we treat children in our courts.