A letter from the UK Children’s Minister

Dear children and young people across the United Kingdom,

I am the Minister for Children, Families and Wellbeing and I wanted to write to you on World Children’s Day to update on the action your government is taking to protect and promote your rights as children and young people.

Every few years, an international organisation, called the United Nations, checks in on the UK government to see how well we are protecting and promoting your rights as children, through something called the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC).

The UNCRC is a worldwide agreement on the rights of all children and young people up to age 18, no matter what their race, religion, or abilities are. When the government signs up to this, they commit to supporting young people to: be able to learn and play; be listened to; have a comfortable place to live; and be protected from harm.

Every five years, we report back to the United Nations on how we plan to keep improving your rights. Our most recent response was in June this year and we produced several bite-sized videos and an illustrated overview of the report to help explain what this means for you.

The government has already taken a range of actions, including raising the age a young person can marry or enter a civil partnership from 16 to 18, so no young person can be forced to marry someone they don’t want to and taking further action to support young people with special educational needs and disabilities, as well as children in care.

We are now getting ready for a meeting with the United Nations in May 2023, where we will answer questions from them about the progress we have made on issues such as climate change, education, and discrimination – all of which are areas that we know are really important to young people across the UK.

As the future of this country, it is so important that your views and experiences are heard to help shape children’s rights. Over the next year, we will meet more young people from across the country so we can take your views directly to our meeting with the United Nations.

I look forward to meeting and listening to more of you in the coming months so you can help shape the future of children’s rights in the UK.

Yours sincerely,

Claire Coutinho MP
Minister for Children, Families and Wellbeing