England’s new information-sharing duty makes it harder for safeguarding agencies to possess different pieces of a child’s story, fail to assemble them, and afterwards explain that nobody individually knew enough to act. After Rotherham, Rochdale, Oxford, Telford, Arthur Labinjo-Hughes, Star Hobson and repeated official reviews reaching much the same conclusion, the real question is no longer whether Britain understands the problem. It is whether institutions will finally act upon what they know.
Some of the worst safeguarding failures have a familiar anatomy. The teacher knew something. The GP knew something else. Social services held another piece. Police had attended an incident. A parent had raised an alarm. An outside provider possessed information which never reached the school file. Nobody, considered individually, thought he knew enough to justify decisive action. Then something terrible happened and, months or years later, an inquiry performed the task the safeguarding system had failed to perform while the child was still at risk: it put the pieces together.
England is now attempting to make that failure harder to excuse. On 10 September, the Department for Education published its final statutory guidance on Information Sharing to Safeguard Children and Young People, following consultation earlier this year. The guidance accompanies the new section 16LA of the Children Act 2004, inserted by the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act 2026. The duty itself does not take effect until 30 September 2026. From that date, organisations within its scope which hold information they consider relevant to safeguarding or promoting a child’s welfare must ensure that it is disclosed to another relevant organisation where, and only so far as, they consider that disclosure may assist the recipient in carrying out its safeguarding or welfare functions. The duty also applies where relevant information is requested by another organisation within the statutory scheme.¹
This is more than another layer of guidance. Schools, councils, NHS bodies, police and other safeguarding agencies have long possessed extensive powers to exchange information, and existing statutory guidance has repeatedly warned that data-protection law does not prevent legitimate safeguarding disclosure. Keeping Children Safe in Education already tells staff not to assume that somebody else will take action and states plainly that fears about sharing information must not stand in the way of protecting children. What changes now is the legal emphasis. A recurring area of uncertainty is being moved from encouragement and professional confidence into a qualified statutory duty.²
The qualification matters. Section 16LA is not a licence to circulate every fact, suspicion or professional impression about a child throughout the public sector. The information must be relevant to safeguarding or promoting welfare, the proposed recipient must have an appropriate safeguarding function, and disclosure is required only so far as it may assist that function. The duty does not apply where the organisation considers that disclosure would be more detrimental to the child than withholding the information. The statutory guidance treats that as an exception for limited circumstances and keeps the child’s welfare at the centre of the judgment.³
That discipline is essential. A child is not protected by converting every adolescent confidence, family difficulty, subjective impression or untested allegation into permanent bureaucratic currency. Inaccurate information can do serious damage. So can material stripped of context, or an opinion which passes from file to file until repetition gives it the appearance of fact. The Government’s guidance therefore retains the ordinary requirements of responsible safeguarding: relevance, necessity, proportionality, accuracy, proper context, secure handling and accountable professional judgment. The purpose is to make important information move when it should, not to create an indiscriminate state dossier on every child.⁴
Parents remain part of that picture. The new duty does not make them incidental to their children, nor does it establish a general principle that institutions should exchange information behind their backs. There will be cases in which seeking consent would frustrate the purpose of disclosure or put a child at greater risk. That has always required judgment. The guidance continues to stress transparency wherever it can safely be provided. Families should ordinarily understand what institutions are doing and why, unless such openness would itself create a safeguarding danger. The law removes uncertainty about justified disclosure; it does not abolish the family.
The reform exists because legal permission did not reliably produce good practice. Practitioners have continued to report uncertainty about when information may be shared, particularly where concern involves emerging need or welfare rather than an established threshold of significant harm. Some have behaved as though a formal child-protection threshold must be crossed before information can move confidently between agencies. The new regime is intended to address that hesitation. Relevant safeguarding information may matter long before a situation deteriorates into an emergency. That is when competent safeguarding is most valuable: before the injury, before the crisis, and before an inquiry is left reconstructing events from records which should have been read together months earlier.⁵
The history behind this legislation is therefore important. Rotherham should be the starting point.
Professor Alexis Jay’s 2014 inquiry concluded that at least 1,400 children had been sexually exploited in Rotherham between 1997 and 2013. Yet many of those children had not vanished beyond the reach of public institutions. They were known to schools, social workers, police, health services, youth workers and local authorities. Different professionals encountered different manifestations of the same exploitation: missing episodes, sexually transmitted infections, injuries, older men, school absence, substance misuse, behavioural deterioration and desperate parents trying to make somebody listen.⁶
The failure was not simply that nobody knew. Too often, nobody joined together what was already known.
The Government’s response in 2015 promised better joint working and information-sharing so that agencies could intervene earlier, while confronting the culture of inaction and denial which had allowed victims to be dismissed and ignored. The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse later reached similar conclusions. Its work on organised networks found that police, children’s social care, health services, education, specialist charities and private providers all held different pieces of the safeguarding picture, while weaknesses in information and intelligence-sharing prevented those pieces from being assembled effectively. IICSA even noted cases in which agencies were exchanging significant quantities of material without asking the more important question: what did all this information actually reveal about the child’s risk?⁷
That is the heart of the matter. A safeguarding system can generate mountains of information and remain ignorant.
IICSA found that information had to move both ways between agencies so that knowledge about children and perpetrators could be assembled, interpreted and acted upon. The Care Quality Commission had likewise identified inconsistent information-sharing between local areas and the need for practitioners to see children through the whole system rather than through a single service. The difficulty was not merely whether one computer could speak to another. It was whether the people operating the system could recognise the pattern emerging from several different records.⁸
The murders of Arthur Labinjo-Hughes and Star Hobson then forced another national reckoning with multi-agency failure. The Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel identified serious weaknesses in information-sharing, risk assessment and decision-making. Once again, the authorities collectively knew more than any single organisation had understood while intervention could still have made a difference. The lesson was painfully familiar.⁹
Baroness Casey’s National Audit on Group-based Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse, published in June 2025, should have removed any remaining doubt about how persistent the problem had become. Casey noted that review after review had identified much the same failures: poor information-sharing, inadequate training, weak understanding of victim risk factors and deficient collection and analysis of intelligence about perpetrators. She found situations in which professionals were still physically showing colleagues material on separate laptops because incompatible systems could not communicate, while police information could be scattered across databases requiring separate manual searches. Institutions had accumulated information without reliably turning it into knowledge.¹⁰
Casey’s Recommendation 5 was therefore explicit: there should be mandatory sharing of information between all statutory safeguarding partners in cases of child sexual abuse and exploitation. The Government accepted that recommendation and identified the new information-sharing duty in the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools legislation as the mechanism through which it intended to respond. The connection between the grooming-gangs scandal and section 16LA is therefore direct. This is not a convenient analogy applied after the event. The scandal forms part of the legislative road which produced the new duty.¹¹
That makes the long history of grooming-gang failures impossible to treat as a side issue in any assessment of the reform. Rotherham, Rochdale, Oxford, Telford and other towns demonstrated what happens when professionals see separate symptoms while nobody sees the organised abuse linking them. They also demonstrated something darker: institutional hesitation is not always caused by uncertainty about law. Sometimes officials understand that something is wrong and still avoid the most difficult questions.
Casey found examples of organisations shying away from examining ethnicity and cultural factors because of fears about appearing racist, inflaming community tensions or damaging cohesion. Her conclusion was careful but important. Men of Asian and Pakistani ethnicity appeared disproportionately represented in some local areas and the pattern warranted further investigation. She also warned that refusing to examine it did a disservice both to victims and to Asian and Pakistani communities themselves.¹²
The safeguarding lesson is broader than ethnicity. Institutions become dangerous when reputational risk begins to outrank the child. If a professional becomes more anxious about the consequences of asking an awkward question than about the consequences of not asking it, safeguarding priorities have already been reversed. The same is true when exploited girls are described as troublesome, sexually precocious or complicit in their own abuse; when parents become inconvenient because they challenge a professional consensus; or when an organisation protects its own preferred explanation long after the evidence should have disturbed it.
Information-sharing will not cure that culture by itself.
Casey understood this. Her audit warned that reluctance to share information can be cultural as well as legal, and that new statutory provisions would achieve little if the underlying habits remained unchanged. Britain has no shortage of inquiries, strategies or lessons-learned exercises. The more troubling history is how often a recommendation which appeared indispensable after one scandal failed to prevent the next.¹³
Nuntiatoria has returned repeatedly to the grooming-gangs scandal for precisely that reason. In “The Rape Gang Inquiry: A Public-Funded Probe into Decade-Spanning Abuse Failures”, we examined the independent inquiry led by Rupert Lowe not merely as another catalogue of appalling crimes but as an attempt to identify why warnings could accumulate for years without producing an adequate institutional response. “Seven Years, £200 Million, and Still No Action: Maggie Oliver Takes the Government to Court” asked why recommendations from the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse could remain substantially unimplemented after an investigation of extraordinary scale and expense. And in “Britain’s Grooming Gangs: Courts, Citizens, and the Fight for Truth”, the recurring question was accountability: not whether Britain could produce another strategy, but whether anybody would assume responsibility for ensuring that existing safeguards actually worked.¹⁴
The present legislation must be judged against that history. Britain promised better information-sharing after Rotherham. IICSA documented continuing weaknesses. Arthur and Star exposed them in another form. Casey identified them again in 2025 and expressly recommended mandatory sharing. Parliament has now legislated. That sequence matters because it tells us what failure after 30 September will mean. The claim that agencies were unsure whether important safeguarding information could lawfully be shared will become materially harder to sustain.
The same problem appears in other safeguarding contexts examined by Nuntiatoria. In “A Mandate Is Not an Answer”, written after the WellBN investigation, this journal argued that safeguarding failure often begins with an institution becoming too confident in its own explanation. Professional curiosity exists to resist that confidence. It asks whether the first interpretation accounts for all the evidence, whether the troublesome parent may nevertheless know something important, and whether a vulnerable child has been considered in the round rather than filtered through whatever framework currently enjoys institutional favour.¹⁵
The WellBN controversy makes the new regime particularly relevant locally, though the connection must remain precise. Neither the NHS investigation nor Nuntiatoria has established that Brighton & Hove City Council or local schools caused the unsafe prescribing identified at WellBN. Schools did not write those prescriptions and councillors did not make the clinical decisions. The governance question is wider. As “The WellBN Question: Law, Consent, and the Medicalisation of Minors in the NHS” asked before the final investigation was published, what matters is the network surrounding vulnerable children: parental involvement, referral pathways, clinical governance, outside providers, safeguarding assumptions and the relationship between local practice and national safeguards.¹⁶
After the NHS findings, those questions became harder to dismiss. “When Safeguarding Becomes ‘Conversion’: Tavistock, WellBN and the Legal Intimidation of Parents” examined what happens when adults who question a prevailing interpretation of a child’s distress risk being treated as the problem themselves. The point was never that parents are always right. They are not. Professionals are not always right either. A safe system retains enough humility to investigate both possibilities.¹⁷
That has immediate relevance to questions PSHEbrighton has continued to raise with Brighton & Hove City Council. More than one hundred residents wrote to the Council’s Chief Executive after publication of the WellBN investigation asking what lessons the authority intended to draw from it, whether concerns repeatedly raised by parents and residents had received appropriate scrutiny, and whether safeguarding governance, parental involvement, social transition and the role of external organisations required further examination. The importance of those questions is not that a causal chain between every institution has already been proved. It is that the experiences described by families involve exactly the kind of multi-agency landscape in which knowledge can become compartmentalised: schools, youth services, health providers, third-party organisations, parents and safeguarding bodies each encountering different parts of the same child’s circumstances.¹⁸
September has also brought other significant changes. Keeping Children Safe in Education 2026 came into force on 1 September. It strengthens material concerning online harms and AI-generated sexual imagery, alternative provision, safer recruitment and child-on-child abuse, while bringing guidance concerning children questioning their gender within the statutory safeguarding framework. It repeats an important instruction: staff should not assume that another professional will act or share information which might be critical to keeping a child safe. Early sharing is described as vital to identifying and assessing risk, subject always to professional judgment about relevance and proportionality.¹⁹
The same month saw removal of the former supervision exemption from regulated activity with children. From 1 September, a volunteer who teaches, trains, instructs, cares for or supervises children with sufficient frequency, or overnight, is no longer kept outside regulated activity simply because another person supervises him. Where the statutory conditions are met, an enhanced DBS check including children’s barred-list information is required. Occasional volunteering which does not satisfy the frequency or overnight conditions does not automatically become regulated activity. The legal questions are different, but the common theme is responsibility. Institutions are being given fewer opportunities to assume that somebody else, somewhere else in the system, has dealt with the risk.²⁰
Nuntiatoria has encountered the same principle within ecclesiastical safeguarding. “Christopher Clay and the Arlington Carmel: The Priest Who Should Not Have Been There” examined how a priest subject to longstanding ministerial restrictions was nevertheless able to celebrate Mass within a religious community. The central issue extended beyond one man. If restrictions exist but the people who need to know about them do not receive or understand them, institutional knowledge has failed as a protective mechanism. Nuntiatoria CXIX summarised the wider lesson simply: safeguarding requires truthfulness, institutional memory and practical accountability, not merely protocols.²¹
The same concern informed “‘Personal Reasons’: Bishop Oakley and the English Hierarchy’s Crisis of Candour”. Confidentiality and due process impose real limits on what institutions may disclose publicly, especially while criminal or disciplinary matters remain unresolved. Yet a safeguarding system cannot measure itself by the existence of a policy document. Information has to reach the people who need it, in a form they understand, and in time for it to matter.²²
That is the proper test for section 16LA. Public bodies are highly proficient at turning substantive obligations into compliance exercises. Policies will be revised. Training presentations will acquire new slides. Privacy notices will change. Additional boxes will appear on referral forms. None of this is objectionable, but none of it proves that a child is safer.
The harder questions remain. When one agency possesses information which changes the meaning of what another agency already knows, who recognises its significance? When an external provider works with a vulnerable child, how does its knowledge reach the school or local authority? When a parent contradicts an accepted professional account, is the disagreement investigated or simply entered on a file as resistance? When two agencies reach different judgments, who challenges whom? When information is later found to be inaccurate, who corrects it before it travels into another record and acquires the authority of official repetition?
Above all, when the pieces were available but nobody assembled them, whose failure was it?
Modern institutions possess a remarkable capacity to dissolve responsibility. After a catastrophe, every organisation explains what it knew at the time. Each individual decision, isolated from knowledge held elsewhere, can be made to look defensible. Nobody had the whole picture, so nobody can quite be blamed for failing to act upon it.
The child did not live in organisational boundaries.
A girl being sexually exploited did not become a different child when she left school, entered an A&E department, spoke to a social worker, was reported missing to police or returned home in a taxi. Arthur Labinjo-Hughes did not possess one life for school, another for social services and another for police. A vulnerable teenager in Brighton does not shed his history when moving between school, counselling, primary care and another provider. Bureaucracy divides children into files because bureaucracy requires categories. Their lives remain one reality.
A morally serious safeguarding system must try to understand that reality as a whole.
Catholic social thought offers a useful principle here. Subsidiarity does not mean fragmentation. It protects the proper responsibilities of families, communities and lesser institutions against unnecessary absorption by higher authority. It does not give institutions permission to ignore one another when cooperation is necessary for the common good. Parents possess a primary responsibility for their children which public authorities must respect. The state also has real protective duties where children are endangered. Neither principle is served by excluding parents without cause, nor by agencies retreating into separate professional silos while a child falls between them.
The new regime will produce difficult cases. Some practitioners will share too much; others will still share too little. There will be arguments about proportionality, confidentiality and relevance. Some judgments will prove mistaken. That is unavoidable in a system which deals with complex human situations rather than mathematical certainties.
The larger point is now much harder to evade.
Britain was warned after Rotherham. It was warned again by IICSA. It was warned by the deaths of Arthur and Star. Casey warned it again and called specifically for mandatory information-sharing. Parliament has now acted.
No Act of Parliament can make a frightened official brave, a complacent professional curious or an institution candid about its own failures. What Parliament can do is remove the ambiguity behind which such failures have too often sheltered. From 30 September 2026, it will be materially harder to say that nobody knew whether the information could be shared.
The question will increasingly be why, when the information existed, nobody made sure that it was understood.
Because the recurring tragedy of safeguarding is seldom that absolutely nobody knew anything.
It is that everyone knew a piece, and nobody knew the child.
¹ Department for Education, Information sharing to safeguard children and young people, updated 10 September 2026; Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act 2026, s.4, inserting ss.16LA–16LC into the Children Act 2004.
² Department for Education, Keeping Children Safe in Education 2026, paras. 60–61, 138–147; Department for Education, Information Sharing Duty: Statutory Guidance for Safeguarding Organisations and Their Practitioners, September 2026.
³ Children Act 2004, s.16LA; Department for Education, Information Sharing Duty: Statutory Guidance for Safeguarding Organisations and Their Practitioners, Chapter 1.
⁴ Department for Education, Information Sharing Duty: Statutory Guidance for Safeguarding Organisations and Their Practitioners, Chapters 1–3; Information Commissioner’s Office, Data sharing and safeguarding.
⁵ Department for Education, Information sharing duty statutory guidance: consultation outcome, updated 10 September 2026.
⁶ Professor Alexis Jay OBE, Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Exploitation in Rotherham 1997–2013, August 2014.
⁷ HM Government, Dealing with child sexual exploitation, 3 March 2015; Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, Child sexual exploitation by organised networks: Partnership Working, February 2022.
⁸ Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, Multi-agency information and intelligence-sharing, February 2022.
⁹ Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel, National review into the murders of Arthur Labinjo-Hughes and Star Hobson, 26 May 2022.
¹⁰ Baroness Casey of Blackstock DBE CB, National Audit on Group-based Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse, June 2025.
¹¹ Baroness Casey of Blackstock DBE CB, National Audit on Group-based Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse, Recommendation 5; HM Government, Government response to the National Audit on Group-based Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse.
¹² Baroness Casey of Blackstock DBE CB, National Audit on Group-based Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse, discussion of ethnicity, culture and local perpetrator profiles.
¹³ Baroness Casey of Blackstock DBE CB, National Audit on Group-based Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse, discussion of information-sharing barriers and implementation.
¹⁴ Nuntiatoria, The Rape Gang Inquiry: A Public-Funded Probe into Decade-Spanning Abuse Failures, 6 February 2026; Nuntiatoria, Seven Years, £200 Million, and Still No Action: Maggie Oliver Takes the Government to Court, 4 March 2026; Nuntiatoria, Britain’s Grooming Gangs: Courts, Citizens, and the Fight for Truth, 5 March 2026.
¹⁵ Nuntiatoria, A Mandate Is Not an Answer, 26 June 2026.
¹⁶ Nuntiatoria, The WellBN Question: Law, Consent, and the Medicalisation of Minors in the NHS, 15 May 2026.
¹⁷ Nuntiatoria, When Safeguarding Becomes “Conversion”: Tavistock, WellBN and the Legal Intimidation of Parents, 10 July 2026.
¹⁸ PSHEbrighton, Parents’ letter to Brighton & Hove City Council Chief Executive, July 2026.
¹⁹ Department for Education, Keeping Children Safe in Education 2026, especially paras. 60–61 and 138–147.
²⁰ Department for Education, Regulated activity: removal of the supervision exemption, updated 29 June 2026; Disclosure and Barring Service, Regulated activity with children: common misconceptions about the September 2026 supervision exemption changes, updated 4 September 2026.
²¹ Nuntiatoria, Christopher Clay and the Arlington Carmel: The Priest Who Should Not Have Been There, 18 August 2026; Nuntiatoria CXIX, Accipere non Fingere, 16 August 2026.
²² Nuntiatoria, “Personal Reasons”: Bishop Oakley and the English Hierarchy’s Crisis of Candour, 14 August 2026.
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