One of the items in the recent Queens Speech was the Childrens and Social Work Bill. Since May while most MPs have been focused on the referendum, this legislation has passed through the House of Commons and is now being debated in the House of Lords, which means it should in theory be a well formed and reasonably clear piece of legislation. The Bill includes ideas to require councils to ensure care leavers are aware of support on offer, introduce new ways of regulating social workers, allow councils to be exempt from some social care legislation, improve the adoption process and introduce a new centralised system for reviewing serious safeguarding incidents. One of the Peers has described it as a “skeleton bill” that offers little substance about how these new procedures and systems would be introduced, saying that these necessary details seem to disappear “off into the mist”. He added that it was so lacking in detail that the bill in its current form is “treating Parliament with contempt”. Another spoke of a “rag-tag” bill and branded the plans “ill-thought-through changes”, adding that following years of upheaval in children’s social work “it beggars belief” that ministers “now want to take wide powers to throw all of the social work regulatory cards up in the air again”. A third Peer argued that the existing serious case reviews (SCR) would work well if attention was paid to the problems they identify. The needs of all children and vulnerable adults in our community are too important to allow their rights and safeguards to be impacted by a poorly thought through law, passed whilst MPs were looking the other way.