I thank my hon. Friend Sam Carling for his speech, and I am grateful to other Members for their important contributions today. I welcome the opportunity to talk about the Government’s commitment to safeguarding and protecting children and adults from harm across all settings, including within religious and faith communities. I want to give a special mention to my hon. Friend the Member for North West Cambridgeshire for securing this debate and for the compassion, thoroughness and persistence that he has shown this House on this issue.

Let me first be clear that this Government recognise the central role of faith in our national life, and we are committed to building a Britain where all communities feel safe and where the contributions of people of faith and belief are warmly welcomed and richly valued, as are the contributions of those who, like myself, have no faith—well, I have a lot of faith, but none that would be recognised or organised.

The insights of faith and belief groups should and do play an important role in the national conversation around safeguarding children and preventing violence against women and girls. The other central point to make at the outset is that the Government utterly condemn all acts of psychological, emotional, physical and sexual abuse against children and adults in all settings, including religious settings of any size or denomination. All such acts should be thoroughly investigated and the perpetrators brought to justice. As with every case of abuse, my thoughts are first and foremost with the victims and survivors.

As this House knows, we are taking forward an ambitious range of measures to improve safeguarding and child protection. Through the violence against women and girls strategy published last year, which deploys the full power of the state to achieve this aim, and through the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, we are strengthening multi-agency safeguarding arrangements and improving information sharing. We are also taking forward work to safeguard and protect children from harm in out-of-school settings, including religious organisations offering education in their own faith.

All out-of-school settings have a legal duty to safeguard and protect children from harm in their care. To support them in meeting this duty, the Department for Education has published guidance setting out the safeguarding standard that they should meet and last year launched a call for evidence to gather views on potential approaches to strengthening safeguarding further, including regulation. The Department for Education is currently analysing the responses and continuing engagement with key stakeholders, and will respond in due course.

We are also taking action on the recommendations of IICSA, which have been mentioned, including establishing a child protection authority to improve the national oversight and leadership of child protection and introducing through the Crime and Policing Bill a mandatory duty to report child sexual abuse. The duty will create a culture of knowledge, confidence and openness among those most likely to be alerted to child sexual abuse. It will help children and young people to trust that their voices will be heard when they speak out. The duty will apply to those working or volunteering with children in faith settings. There will be no exceptions based on religious practices. We will continue to engage with groups that may be impacted to help them manage the implementation of this new duty.

My hon. Friend raised some specific points about the Government’s mandatory reporting duty, which I would like to address. We are grateful for the expertise of the child protection sector in shaping the new duty. Our shared aim is to have a regime that is effective for children and workable for professionals.

For the avoidance of doubt, the organisations that my hon. Friend mentioned have always fully supported the Government policy of not applying criminal sanctions to the failure to report. It is true that they also advocate for robust action against the deliberate concealment of abuse, but there is a qualitative difference between a lapse in reporting and taking active steps to deter it, or destroying or concealing evidence. The Crime and Policing Bill reflects that distinction by creating a criminal offence of obstructing a reporter from carrying out their duty, punishable by up to seven years in prison. The question of whether failures to report should be subject to sanctions was fully considered during the Bill’s parliamentary passage. Earlier today, on Report in the other place, the House rejected a proposition to amend the Bill to that effect.

The question of what triggers the duty—for example, whether to include the observation of signs and indicators —is a separate matter, although I recognise that, because these issues are often debated in tandem, some conflation may have crept in. The Government have not claimed the same stakeholder endorsement for our chosen threshold for the duty. Although some stakeholders favour adding recognised indicators or reasonable suspicion that abuse has occurred, as I have set out previously the Government’s view is that we need to deliver a model that is clear, proportionate and operable, anchored in direct disclosure, witnessing or recorded material. As with all aspects of the duty, we will keep that under review, but we are confident that the Bill as drafted strikes the right balance.

Let me respond to some of the points that have been raised. I often feel anxious that people think that any organisation that they raise will not be considered as part of the duty, but most people in positions of trust—we do not need to name them—are covered by the duty because they work in regulated activity with children. That is the core definition in the Bill for a mandated reporter. In other words, if a person’s role as a sports coach already brings them into regular close contact with children, they are in scope.