Article 39’s former Director gives evidence at UK Covid-19 Inquiry

EVIDENCE SESSION: 16 October 2025

MS CAROLYNE WILLOW (affirmed)

LADY HALLETT: I hope we haven’t kept you waiting. I think you’ve been following proceedings anyway.

Questions from COUNSEL TO THE INQUIRY MR LEE: Thank you, Ms Willow, you have provided a witness statement to this inquiry dated 11 August 2025, and the reference we have for that is INQ000588071. Can you confirm, please, that the contents of that statement are true to the best of your knowledge and belief?

A. That’s correct.

Q. Ms Willow, to start with, Article 39 and your professional background. You explain in your witness statement that Article 39 is a small independent charity which fights for the rights of children living in stateand privately-run institutions in England. You founded Article 39 in 2015, and served as its director from that time up until 2024. However, prior to founding Article 39, you had a career in social work which started in 1988; is that correct?

A. That’s correct.

Q. You became a children’s rights officer for children in care, and care leavers in the early 1990s, and you’ve held specialist posts at the National Children’s Bureau and you led the Children’s Rights Alliance for England between 2020 and 2012? And finally, in addition to that experience, you’ve served on many different advisory groups that had a specific focus on children and their care. Would that be a fair reflection of your experience?

A. That’s fair.

Q. Ms Willow, can you help us with how you define state and privately-run institutions? What type of institutions would that include?

A. They are institutions where children live in group-based settings, so they’re not in a family environment, they include children’s homes, supported accommodation for children in care aged 16 and 17, mental health units, and prisons.

Q. And Ms Willow, prior to the pandemic, just to touch upon the day-to-day and the practical workings of Article 39, it’s right, isn’t it, that Article 39 would raise awareness of the rights, the views and the experiences of children, you would provide legal education and tailored advice to independent advocates for children and young people, you would run national campaigns and you, where you deem necessary, would pursue strategic litigation, that challenge what you would define as serious and/or systematic children’s rights breaches; is that right?

A. That’s correct.

Q. Did the pandemic have any impact on the delivery or the focus of Article 39’s work?

A. We continued all of that work, and if I may say that the name of the charity comes from Article 39 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which grants children who have been abused, chronically neglected or exploited or suffered other rights violations, the right to recover in environments where their health, self-respect and dignity are nurtured, and that’s a really important starting point for the charity, because the whole ethos of the charity is children’s recovery. Children being known, understood, their perspective, their perception of their needs and what will make life better for them must prevail.

Q. And you say, Ms Willow, in your statement, that Article 39 has a rare insight into the challenges facing looked-after children across the country, as communicated by them. Can you help us with how, practically, this information gets from them to you, taking into consideration that many of these children live in secure institutions?

A. So, a core part of the charity, as you’ve said, is emboldening, informing, equipping, independent advocates who stand right next to the child, whether they live in a children’s home, a prison or mental health inpatient unit, to understand, to know, and to be able to apply the law and the rights of that child in that given situation. And the uniqueness of independent advocates is that they are there for the child and no one else. We were called children’s rights officers back in the day, which is how I got into children’s rights, and all of our work with advocates is working on what children and young people have brought, and expressed and shared with their advocates. So we have a direct route about the concerns and the experiences and views of children.

Q. Ms Willow, would that include independent advocates going into secure institutions, speaking to children maybe over the phone, or would it be a variety of different ways you would actually communicate with those children?

A. Yes, it does. Being a small children’s rights charity and very visibly there for children also means that we regularly hear from parents, from carers, from loved ones, including of children in prison, who tell us what life is like for children. And we also run groups and activities and events for children and young people.

Q. Ms Willow, the Inquiry has heard evidence from Mr Charlie Taylor, His Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Prisons through England and Wales, and how the inspectorate gains that information from a different perspective. He summarised that at times children were spending up to 23.5 hours in their cells, face-to-face education stopped and was replaced with worksheets and work packs, and prison visits were suspended, meaning that children were going many months without face-to-face contact with their families and friends. Were these findings consistent with what you were hearing on the ground of parents, carers, and from the children inside these institutions?

A. Absolutely consistent, and the description of the injury, the psychological and emotional injury to children, is also what we were hearing and aware of. And of course, when you’ve been in social work and children’s rights for an awful long time, previous research, investigations, inquiries, proclamations as to how things will be different for children in the future, they’re always there. They’re always in your head whenever you read or hear from children, read about children or hear directly from them.

Q. Ms Willow, on the topic of oversight, you’ve mentioned how you have an independent children’s advocate network. The Inquiry has heard evidence from Mr Charlie Taylor. You explain in your witness statement that Article 39 feared the loss of external oversight for children. The Inquiry knows that His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Prisons suspended inspections of young offender institutions on 17 March 2020 and introduced short scrutiny visits from April 2020. And in a similar fashion, Ofsted, who inspect — or who lead inspections of secure training centres, also suspended inspections in March 2020 but didn’t introduce assurance visits until September 2020. The Inquiry heard evidence that the main reason for that was on the back of public health advice. And of course, there’s a balance between inspectorates getting into prisons but inspectorates trying to stop bringing Covid-19 into prisons where children are, so it — in one sense it could be counterproductive. Where does that balance lie? And is there any solution as to how, in the event of a future pandemic, the inspectorates can function whilst maintaining the safety of children in prison and complying with future public health advice?

A. The public health advice needs to take the whole child, needs to take in their physical, their psychological, their emotional health, and to seriously consider the impact of advice and decision making on children as whole people. And the literature, the body of knowledge that is known about the risks for children of closed institutions goes all the way, my knowledge of inquiries, goes all the way back to the 1960s. And —

Q. Ms Willow, I’m sorry to pause you there. I think the point you’re making is that independent inspections are still needed in the event of a pandemic. Can you help us with practically, if inspectorates can’t get into the particular institutions, how can people achieve that level of oversight?

A. Well, one aspect of the prisons inspectorate process is surveys of children, which they have been doing for over 20 years. So of course that can continue. To be able to have, when they are prevented, due to lack of knowledge, the initial weeks of panic and having to work out responding to the virus, they can connect into the prisons through remote means and also, critically, to have contact with children’s loved ones, because children’s loved ones, parents, carers and others that are by the child, will know about the child, the individual child. They will know what they were already suffering and dealing with before, and they would be able to pass that to the inspectors. However, it has to be an imperative that the inspectors get in there, and that has to be the headline task for those giving advice to government, because of the knowledge of the risk of closed institutions developing punitive, coercive, cultures. There is decades of evidence of the risk and the injury caused to children when there isn’t an external oversight. And it’s not just that an external oversight exists, it’s also that it’s seen to exist.

Q. Ms Willow, just so I’m clear before we move on to the next topic, is your evidence that the balance between managing the risk of potentially bringing the virus into the prisons, but then not — inspectorates not getting into the prisons because of the potential risk of regimes and what’s happening, is your evidence that that balance would fall in favour of inspectorates getting into prisons?

A. Absolutely. Children have taken their own lives because of abuse in prisons. Children have suffered horrendously from self-harm because of abuse in prisons, and that information is known, and that has to be part of the reckoning as to what are we going to do in this scenario to make sure that we can do our absolute best to prevent harms to children?

Q. Ms Willow, remaining in the pandemic times of the prison system and the youth justice system, I want to now ask you about the process by which the changes were made to the regimes. The Inquiry has also heard evidence that the temporary regime restrictions were applied across the adult and the youth estate from 24 March 2020, but we then know that amendments were made in May and July of that year to the Prison and Young Offender Institution Rules 2000, and the Secure Training Centre Rules 1998, and the purpose of that was to reflect in legislation the current operational situation of the temporary restricted regime that had already been implemented, as we know, within the different children’s prisons. And I want to ask you about your views as to the process those changes were made, because you explain in your statement that in July 2020, Article 39 made a Freedom of Information Request for the child rights and equality impact assessments undertaken before the government made the amendments. Could you outline your headline concerns to as why you wanted that and why you felt it was important?

A. These were very substantial and serious changes to legal protections for extremely vulnerable children. Over half of children who are in prison and were in prison in March 2020 had been in care. A third were disabled. And many had health conditions and needs that required the best of protection and care during the pandemic. So the context is that these are highly vulnerable children. If you are going to take away legal protections that are there because we know children can just about survive prison by seeing their mum or their grandma or their dad, that children can just about survive prison by having something to do, and not being stuck in a cell the size of a small bathroom for 20, 22, 23 hours a day. Then, if you are going to take that away, then you have to follow a robust, rigorous process. Otherwise all the child protection legislation we have in place, all of the procedures, all of the systems we have in place, count for very little. And that Freedom of Information request was systematically going through: did you seek advice from the Children’s Commissioner? Did you carry out a children’s rights impact assessment? Did you inform children? Did you inform their parents and loved ones? And so on. And that was to hold the Ministry of Justice to account. This is what you are meant to be doing if what you say in paper — and there’s an awful lot of paper surrounding child prisons — is correct, and is to be believed.

Q. Ms Willow, I was going to move on to ask you a question that what the Ministry of Justice or the government may say is that, given the situation they found themselves to be in, which we’ll hear more about this afternoon, that irrespective of a child rights impact assessment, the amendments would have needed to change in any event. And I was going to ask you, well, what purpose would the child rights impact assessment have served, but is your evidence that it was simply to hold the government to account to make sure they were considering impact?

A. Much more than that.

Q. Could you expand on that, please?

A. If those processes had been followed, hopefully they would get a series of responses which in technicolour remind them that these are highly vulnerable children and you cannot amend the law which will legitimise treatment and arrangements that will cause great injury, psychological, emotional, physical injury to children.

Q. Ms Willow, I now want to move on to government understanding. And if we can have on screen, please, INQ000588042. This is a witness statement from Lucy Frazer King’s Counsel, the former Minister of State for Justice responsible for prisons and probation. We can see at paragraph 271 that this statement says that: “As throughout the pandemic, operational decisions were taken which considered the needs of children and the particular impact of restrictions on them.” Did you feel, from what you know and what you were hearing on the ground, that the government did in fact give sufficient consideration and weight to children’s rights and decision making during the pandemic?

A. There was no evidence of that.

Q. And if we focus specifically on the pandemic, and what was happening in prisons during the pandemic, what was Article 39 doing to try to help to promote and protect the rights of children? You’ve given us one example where you were writing to the Ministry of Justice asking for impact assessments. Was there anything else you were doing with government to say this has to change?

A. We coordinated a joint letter which was sent to government on 18 March 2020 to call for children who could be safely released into the community for that to happen.

Q. Ms Willow, just on that point, I think it’s right, isn’t it, that whilst that process would have started in March, during the pandemic, and I’ll be corrected if I’m wrong, that actually no children were released under the early release provisions? Can you just provide us with your opinion as to why that might have been the case, when we know many, many adults were released.

A. That’s correct. Fundamentally, I think it comes down to the low status and the low priority given to children, the narrative that children were not at risk of dying from the virus, rather than looking at the whole child and what the virus could do to them in terms of how prisons would then make children spend prolonged periods in their cells, stop education, stop the family contact. So there wasn’t a full understanding of children and their needs. And the calls for the safe release of children continued throughout, including from many other organisations and bodies. I have to say that I have reviewed evidence and — and disclosure that I hadn’t previously seen, to read, for example, that children who didn’t have a home, children who were in care, couldn’t be released to a bed and breakfast or released to homelessness. Well, that’s not good enough. If there are children in care, they should have homes to go to.

Q. Ms Willow, we’re going to cover that topic later this afternoon, but just on the point of the government understanding the needs of children, if we can turn, please, to His Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service operational guidance, we know that, following the restrictions on 24 March 2020, that around three weeks later the Ministry of Justice and HMPPS issued, as we can see on screen, amended guidance dated 15 April 2020. And this guidance sets outs how prisons would ensure that inmates had access to the essential services, including meals, showers, telephone contact with loved ones, access to legal advisers, and access to health services. This is a 42-page document that we’ve simply not got time to go through today but we know that there’s around two pages that are dedicated specifically to the youth custody estate. If we could move, please, to the second document INQ000575485. We can see that this is another piece of key guidance, this time the COVID-19: National Framework for Prisons Regimes, published in June 2020. And it’s correct, isn’t it, that it was this document that provided a conditional roadmap to how prisons would ease out of the restrictions. And some may suggest that this document also provides limited reference to children and the children’s secure estate. But to be fair and to be clear, that this isn’t all of the guidance, but if I understand it right you did read the guidance at the time and you’ve read it subsequently?

A. Correct.

Q. It’s been suggested, Ms Willow — and we’ve heard the Ofcom criticism — sorry, the Ofsted criticism about the guidance this morning, but in your overall view, did the guidance issued during the pandemic by HMPPS or the Ministry of Justice recognise and promote the distinct needs of children, or was it the case, as suggested by others, that adult guidance was simply shoe-horned into the youth estate?

A. The guidance is completely inadequate for children. So the answer is: no, children are invisible in these documents, apart from the words “Youth Custody Service” and — and “children”. There’s no tangible, practical, standalone — and why are children in the same documents in any case, when there is meant to be a separate secure estate for children?

Q. Ms Willow, if we can now turn to Secure Children’s Homes, please. If we can have on screen INQ000588111. We can see at paragraph 724 — this is a witness statement from Mr Matthew Coffey, provided on behalf of Ofsted, and we can see in his statement that he says that: “Children in Secure Children’s Homes received a much better offer. Although the initial period of lockdown was crisis-management, in a very short time [Secure Children’s Homes] generally got to grips with the restriction requirements. They applied a child-centred approach resulting in children for the most part having a normal routine, including attending education.” Is this something that Article 39 recognised during the pandemic from speaking to children?

A. Absolutely. Secure Children’s Homes are part of local authority children’s services. They follow the same law, standards, regulations, as children’s homes in the community. They are child establishments. They are staffed by multi-disciplinary teams that are there for children. They are, in every respect possible, different from prisons. And just because we say “child prisons”, because it has “child” in front of it, make no mistake, child prisons are prisons. They are adapted in some ways, but fundamentally, the child’s experience is the same as an adult’s experience.

Q. Ms Willow, if we could now turn to residential children’s homes generally. Can you help us, please, with how many people in March — sorry, how many children in March 2020 were living in children’s homes?

A. Just under 7,000 children.

Q. And we will return to residential children’s homes but I want now to move on to the amendments to social care regulations, to ask about the context behind those before we return to the particular impact those amendments had on residential children’s homes. We know that one of the main changes to the provision of social care was introduced via the Adoption and Children (Coronavirus) (Amendment) Regulations 2020. At a very high level, can you please just explain what the government was proposing to change in March and April 2020?

A. Well, in April 2020 it actually did change, radically change, the children’s statutory scheme. So overnight, between 23 and 24 April 2020, over a hundred changes were made to ten separate statutory instruments, and of those over a hundred changes, 65 safeguards for children were deleted or diluted.

Q. Did any of the changes increase legal protections, or was it simply they were diluted?

A. There was not a single increase. And if I may share some examples of the changes, the deletions and the dilutions?

Q. Ms Willow, we’re going to come back on to the specifics but I just want to ask you before we get there, please, that the Inquiry heard from Baroness Anne Longfield, as you know, the former Children’s Commissioner for England, and she described feeling horrified about the changes when she found out about them on 16 April 2020, and the Inquiry has already heard about the consultation and the background to that with Baroness Longfield, but I want to ask when you first became aware of the proposed changes?

A. I became aware when they were published and somebody emailed me. We were expecting a statutory instrument relating to children’s homes, we were not expecting what was published. And so then I sat at my desk for several hours until after 10 pm that evening working out exactly what the statutory instrument did and took away from children.

Q. What was your understanding as to why the government was seeking those changes, which we know changes were —

A. The explanatory memorandum which was published at the same time depicted these changes as changes to administrative burdens, to procedural matters, and that this was to ensure that children’s social care could continue to operate, so that core safeguarding could continue to operate. Now, that was a fallacy because the changes that were included in the statutory instrument included core, substantial safeguards for children. They are and were safeguarding duties. So, for example, social worker visits. I started my career as a local authority social worker, visiting children in care. I know how critical they are to children’s protection, wellbeing, sense of belonging, and being wanted. And also, what you can see when you go and visit the child. Now, not only did the regulations define a visit as having a phone call or a video call, it also took away the very clear statutory requirement to visit a child at minimum every six weeks. So here we had the Department for Education saying children in care, the most vulnerable children in society, “Local authorities, you do not have to even call them once every six weeks”, because that was taken away from the statutory scheme. Another example. The temporary approval of what was in law before of connected people to children in care. So that would be, say, a teacher or a grandma or an auntie or an uncle. There was provision already in the law that a full assessment of those people didn’t have to happen for 16 weeks, if the local authority was satisfied that, broadly speaking, it was suitable. For connected people, it’s obvious why. It would be people that the child already knew, that already knew the child. So another of the changes was to extend that to 24 weeks and to say the connected person aspect does not apply. So this can be anyone. And there was already provision in the law to — for a nominated officer to increase that to another eight weeks. So here you had 32 weeks where a child could be placed with somebody that doesn’t know them, that they don’t know, for 32 weeks, and another removal was to dispense with the nominated officer’s approval if a child was sent out of their area. Now, all of these safeguards are in law because things have gone wrong, and things are known to have gone wrong for children. That is why the out-of-area approval, for example, because social work knows that children who are sent out of area are much more vulnerable than children who are in their local authority.

Q. Ms Willow, just on that point, the Inquiry heard that Baroness Longfield concluded in her evidence that there wasn’t an understanding about the level of risk to some children. Some children were living day-to-day. In your view, was there a disconnect between policymakers and what was actually happening on the ground?

A. I don’t believe they had any understanding, and actually the Court of Appeal and the High Court share that, maybe not in the same short assessment that I’m giving, as to the magnitude of the statutory scheme taken together and the individual safeguards. Remember the characterisation of these individual safeguards, and what the minister, Vicky Ford, was told in her briefing is that these are minor burdens, procedural. Now, if you are a minister who has been in post for about a month and you get a briefing from civil servants that tell you these are minor, these are burdens, these are procedural, and “Minister, we have to do this in order to save children’s social care generally”, then unless you come with a whole load of experience of children in care, with a professional background, then you’re likely to give your approval, which of course she did.

Q. Ms Willow, can you help us with this please: we know the amendment regulations came into force on 24 April 2020. Were they time limited until 25 September 2020?

A. They — that was what the statutory instrument said, but there had been government statements elsewhere that they may be used as a testing ground to see whether these minor burdens could be done without in the longer term. Also, it was tied to the Coronavirus Act. So it was very probable, from our perspective, and many other children’s rights advocates, that these changes could continue in the longer term.

Q. And we know that Article 39 started legal proceedings to challenge the amendment regulations soon after they came into force. Did you bring your concerns to the attention of the government before the legal action?

A. Well, the pre-action protocol sets that out, of course, the letter that goes to government. On the day the statutory instrument was published, our website set out in detail that evening the consequences for children of this statutory — of this change to the statutory scheme, and we also made any noise we could in the media. Article 39 is a charity that is known by the Department for Education. They watch, and would have been well aware, even before that pre-action protocol letter, and it was published in the sector press also. And there was lots of social media coverage, including, of course, from the Association of Directors of Children’s Services, Local Government Association, the Network of Principal Social Workers, who confirmed that they were not aware of the full magnitude of what the Department for Education had pushed through.

Q. And Ms Willow, we know that the government’s position, certainly at that time, was that the changes were needed because, as you’ve already alluded to, they were described as administrative burdens and minor changes. And you’ve also alluded to the fact of fears of staffing issues, and that the danger of the pandemic would have led, if the changes weren’t made, to children and their care almost being non-existent. Is it your evidence that, in terms of the government’s balancing act between staffing issues and risk, the issue is that the government didn’t actually or properly understand the risk and the practical consequences of what the amendments were about to achieve?

A. They didn’t properly understand what they were doing. This also came after several years of other attempts by government, including through legislation, to “relax”, inverted commas, safeguards, and to give local authorities more “flexibility”, inverted commas. So they didn’t understand the safeguards. They were in a mindset of deregulation that local authorities are overburdened — their words, not mine — overburdened with duties towards highly vulnerable children, and they needed to have leeway and freedom to change their practice. So that was pre-Covid. From my perspective, that mindset carried over to the Covid times. Had there been a real understanding of the importance of social worker visits, as to the importance of statutory reviews of children in care, as to the importance of having oversight when children are put into — babies, largely — put into fostering for adoption placements, as to the importance of having an independent monthly check in children’s homes, had they understood all of that — and actually, if they didn’t understand any of that, then they could have come to children’s rights organisations, who stand next to children, and ask us.

Q. Ms Willow, I need to just cover two topics very quickly if I may, please, because we’re about to run out of time, but in terms of whether the changes were used, a statement has been provided by or on behalf of the Department for Education by Ms Frances Oram. And to summarise what it says in those statements, we can see at paragraph 21 that: “DfE has not subsequently, specifically or distinctly measured the impact (if any of the regulations), partly because reported use of the exception was low.” And at paragraph 4.9, again it reiterates the point that, after gathering regular feedback from a variety of sources, including local authorities, social workers, charities, Ofsted and other key partners, that the engagement with those stakeholders indicated that the amendments had not been widely used overall. Just very briefly, was that your view?

A. Who knows? The statutory instrument itself placed a statutory duty on the Secretary of State for Education to review the effectiveness of the regulations. As far as I can see, from what has been published and released by the Department for Education, that the one-sided consultation that happened in the — producing the statutory instrument continued when they were seeking information as to their implementation. And there is a fundamental fallacy at play if you look at some of the documentation from the Department for Education when they were sending out surveys to local authorities or ringing up their contacts in local authorities: are you using the flexibilities? So-called flexibilities. Well, we did only have one version of the statutory instruments from 24 April 2020. It wasn’t that all of the ten statutory instruments that were previously in law were still there, and then we had all these amendments; the statutory instrument had fundamentally changed the statutory scheme for children. So, asking local authorities, “Are you still with the old law?” betrays a lack of understanding. And of course, it’s self-reporting. This is requiring, expecting, local authorities to report to central government that: yes, we’ve stopped having six-weekly telephone contacts with children in care, we’ve stopped reviewing their welfare, we’ve let people who are not connected to children look after them without a full assessment, we’ve stopped placement plans, which were very clear in law before. You are expecting the local authority to say: we’ve done that, and could you tell the minister that this is the effect on children. And of course, they were never asked, actually, the effect and impact on children. They were just asked, “Are you using the flexibilities or not?”

Q. Ms Willow, final question. Having time to reflect on what happened during the pandemic, what can be done to better protect the rights of children living in institutions and being part of decision making in the event of a future pandemic? Could you maybe simplify, clarify, or provide us with your headline points.

A. Two headline points. Firstly, we need a Cabinet minister for children, a Cabinet minister who has the status, and the department that is taken seriously across government, and which is the overall Cabinet position for matters relating to children. And secondly, in order to make sure that children are not put to the side, in order to make sure their needs, their perspectives, their rights are properly considered at all levels of government, and are taken seriously, we need the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child to be made part, fully part, of our domestic law. And that is because we need a fundamental cultural shift across government, but also, children need the back-up, the legal back-up, of having enforceable rights and entitlements that cannot be just removed at a whim. And if I may add a third, a statutory duty on government departments to consult and then to give weight to the statutory children’s rights body, which is the Children’s Commissioner for England.

MR LEE: Ms Willow, thank you for that. My Lady, those are my questions. Do you have any questions?

LADY HALLETT: No, I don’t. Thank you very much indeed. I’m very grateful to you. You’re a very passionate and effective advocate… thank you very much indeed for the help you’ve given and for the participation that Article 39 have had in the Inquiry. Thank you.