The criticism came during the second reading of the Children and Social Work Bill in the House of Lords.
The legislation, announced in the Queen's Speech last month, includes plans to require councils to ensure care leavers are aware of support on offer, introduce a new system of regulating social workers, allow councils to be exempt from some social care legislation, improve the adoption process and introduce a centralised system for reviewing serious safeguarding incidents.
But Labour's Lord Watson criticised it for being a "skeleton bill" that offers little substance about how these new procedures and systems would be introduced, saying that these necessary details seem to disappear "off into the mist".
He added that it was so lacking in detail that the bill in its current form is "treating Parliament with contempt".
Former children's services commissioner in Birmingham, Lord Warner, was particularly critical of the "rag-tag" bill's plans to overhaul social work regulation.
He branded these plans "ill-thought-through changes", adding that following years of upheaval in children's social work "it beggars belief" that ministers "now want to take wide powers to throw all of the social work regulatory cards up in the air again".
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