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Della's Law — requiring a registered sex offender to notify police at least seven days before using a new name — and its sister provision on entering specified premises where children are present were voted through in April 2026. Neither has ever been brought into force. Debated, passed, shelved. Survivor Della Wright, whose abuser changed his name at least five times, has placed her experience before decision-makers for years — and the formal open letter sent to the Prime Minister with The Safeguarding Alliance demands a commencement date. Because DBS checks run on the name a person gives, a new name can return a clean certificate to the very schools and employers relying on it. The protection exists on paper. Until it is switched on, the only duty is to tell police after the change — within three days, on the offender's honesty alone. Every day it stays switched off, offenders keep choosing new names first and reporting later — legally.

Offenders come under notification requirements automatically on conviction, but the record still depends on them personally attending a police station and reporting every change. The Safeguarding Alliance's published research found 913 registered sex offenders reported as missing by just 17 of the police forces that responded, and 10,461 failure-to-notify offences prosecuted over three years. Records should connect automatically across courts, police, prisons, the DBS and identity systems, and their equivalents in Scotland and Northern Ireland, so an offender's identities stay linked wherever they move in the UK — with the court sending an offender's details, including every known name, straight to police at the point of sentence — so a new name can never produce a clean slate. Right now, an offender can walk out of prison under a name no school, no employer and no family they meet has ever heard.

Under regulations 10 and 11 of the 2012 Notification Requirements Regulations, a registered sex offender who stays in a household with a child for under 12 hours at a time never has to notify police — no matter how many times they return — because the hours are not counted cumulatively. Eleven hours a day, every day, is invisible. A day trip abroad is notifiable; eleven hours in a home with a child is not. And the same Home Office guidance shows the drafters knew how to write a cumulative rule — the seven-day address rule counts cumulatively across twelve months; the child-contact rule does not. Fixing it needs no Bill: it is a statutory instrument the Home Office already owns. This is the Eleven Hour Amendment. A rule that notices a weekend abroad but not an offender in a child's home every night is not protection — it is paperwork.

Anyone — a parent, grandparent, neighbour or friend — can ask the police whether someone with access to a child has sexual offences against children on their record. But the scheme runs on Home Office guidance, not statute. The guidance allows 28 days for a decision — some forces publicly quote up to 45 — time a child at risk does not have; and disclosure is made only to whoever police judge best placed to protect the child — which, when the danger is inside the home, can mean the very adult standing by the offender, while the person who asked is told nothing. And the scheme's presumption to disclose covers child sexual offences — violent offending is shared only if police choose to. The published review into Sara Sharif's death found police records of her father's history of domestic abuse were not consistently shared with social care or the family court: under the scheme as it stands, police would not have been required to disclose the very danger that was in her home. The letter asks for enforceable timescales, applicants kept informed, disclosure of relevant violent offending to become part of the scheme's presumption — not a matter of discretion — and written reasons and a route to review whenever disclosure is refused. The power to fix this — section 97 of the Crime and Policing Act 2026 — is in force. No guidance has ever been issued under it. A scheme that may tell the one adult standing beside the offender — and no one else — is not a safeguard. Make it law, make it enforceable, and make violence count.

Grandparents and other family members who step up when parents cannot are keeping children loved, rooted and out of a care system that costs many times more per child. Yet unlike foster carers, most receive no guaranteed allowance for doing so. A Government pilot begun in 2026 pays an allowance in just seven council areas in England — everywhere else, nothing is guaranteed. The letter asks your MP to support a national, non-means-tested allowance for kinship carers.

Hospitals, police, schools and social services each hold their own records — and no one sees the whole child. The Children's Wellbeing and Schools Act 2026 provides for a shared ID number and a duty to share, but a flag raised on one system is still invisible to the others, and no single record follows a child who moves between the UK's four nations. Two-year-old Isabella Jonas-Wheildon moved council area twice in the weeks before she was murdered; the published review into her death called for national guidance on cross-border working. In Sara Sharif's case, what police knew about the adult was not consistently shared with the people protecting the child — the adult's record and the child's record never met. The regulations that decide how the ID number works are being written now — this is the window. If it closes, the warnings will keep travelling slower than the children they exist to protect. Read the full ask at speakforthem.org.uk/one-record.

Every baby cries, and sometimes nothing will settle them. Persistent crying is a known trigger for babies being shaken, and shaking a baby can cause lasting injury, brain damage or death. Harm to babies under one is the biggest category of serious case the national Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel sees. We are asking each UK government to make preparation for coping with crying and preventing abusive head injury a required part of every baby placement. Every adult caring for the baby should take part, with fathers, partners and male carers specifically engaged. Each carer should have a written crying plan, with completion checked and support available. The letter also asks for every new parent to be offered support with crying. Read the full ask at speakforthem.org.uk/unshaken.