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Children's Commissioner: Hodge removes role's focus on rights

1 min read
The English children's commissioner will be the only one in Europe who will not be able to champion children's rights, campaigners have warned after the Government forced through a series of amendments to the Children Bill.

Children's minister Margaret Hodge removed five mentions of children's rights that had been added during the Bill's passage through the Lords in the summer.

During a debate on the Bill's Commons committee stage, Hodge told MPs: "If we focused simply on rights, it would limit the work that the commissioner could do on behalf of children. That is why I believe we are establishing a much better commissioner than those elsewhere.

"If a commissioner is established with a purely rights focus, it is inevitable that the main focus of their work will be on pursuing individual complaints, as has happened in Wales.

"The commissioner in Wales has a heavy caseload of about 500 cases a year. To think that he can pursue those effectively, while at the same time taking a view on the wider issues that we wish the English commissioner to champion, is mistaken."

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