Carolyne Willow: It's time for a Children's Rights Bill

Leaving aside the minister's assertion that we have a new government, what did the government intend to achieve for children's human rights, and what might it do next?

A modern Bill of Rights would surely have contained dedicated provisions to transform the lives of children in our country, starting with a guarantee of fundamental social and economic rights. But there were none.

The Trussell Trust reports that 832,000 of its food parcels went to children in 2021/22. Nearly half of children from black, Asian and minority ethnic communities are living in poverty, as are 38 per cent of children in the North East of England.

Our children's care system is on its knees, with one in five looked-after children living more than 20 miles away from their home areas and 45 per cent not living within their local authority boundary at all. Several thousand children aged 16 and 17 are housed in unregulated accommodation purposely designed not to provide them care. More than 1,600 unaccompanied children were put into hotels by the Home Office between July 2021 and June 2022, instead of being looked after by local authorities.

Having gone through the bill line-by-line, I couldn’t find a single new human rights protection that would have come to the aid of a hungry or homeless child, or make it less challenging for children to protect their rights to safety, family relationships and non-discrimination.

One of the barriers for children using the Human Rights Act, particularly those living in coercive and frightening institutional settings such as prisons, is the requirement that cases are brought by victims. The communications procedure for the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), which the UK has not yet accepted, allows non-governmental organisations and advocates to lodge complaints on behalf of children in recognition of their heightened vulnerability and fear of repercussions. Children experience the passage of time differently to adults, which is a significant impediment to them accessing justice.

Perhaps the cruellest aspect of the bill was the introduction of an “extreme harm” threshold for human rights protection, drafted to make deportations easier. In our submission to parliament's human rights committee, we said we found it “incomprehensible that the definition of extreme harm would have been drafted with actual children in mind – harm which “is exceptional and overwhelming” and “incapable of being mitigated to any significant extent or is otherwise irreversible” – and believe the government should be pressed to disclose what it expects courts to look for as evidence of extreme harm in children”.

The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child is due to examine the UK's children's rights record next year. At every previous examination it has urged action around making the UNCRC part of UK law. The Bill of Rights was widely condemned as being a mean-spirited, dangerous power grab and an assault on the very integrity of human rights – that we are all equal in dignity and worth. Now that the desks of ministers, civil servants and campaigners are clear of it, let's set to work on a Children's Rights Bill.

• Carolyne Willow is director of Article 39