I beg to move, That the clause be read a Second time.

With this it will be convenient to take the following amendments: No. 25, in page 5, line 3, leave out clause 5.

No. 26, in clause 5, page 5, line 5, leave out from 'Court' to end of line 15 and insert

'on the grounds that proceedings in relation to the same child are already continuing in the High Court.

Most of these amendments should have been dealt with in Committee. To get the Bill on the statute book, which we obviously want to do, we shall have to rush through these quite substantial amendments which come before us for the first time. Because of the Government's handling of the Bill, the Committee stage was wasted. In all courtesy to the hon. Member for Westbury (Mr. Walters), who introduced the Bill, the Government should have got their act together and revealed their hand earlier. If the Government had undertaken meaningful discussions with the hon. Member for Westbury, who has been entirely reasonable about the Bill from the outset, we could have had a lengthy and extremely useful Committee stage. Because the Government had not decided what they wanted to do, the Committee stage lasted less than half a day. So we are more or less having the Committee stage now.

The purpose of new clause 1, which deals with wardship, and the grouped amendments is to knock out clause 5 and insert a clause that would give any party to proceedings the right to apply to have a case heard in wardship. It is necessary to avoid the introduction of a further anomaly into child care legislation, arising with the right to transfer proceedings to the High Court. Currrently, many cases concerning children in care are dealt with in the High Court under the High Court's wardship jurisdiction. There are a number of reasons for that. The principal reason is the flexibility and wider powers that the court has in wardship. The most important point which the court has to consider is the best interests of the child, and in that respect it can make wide-ranging orders.

Clause 5 as it stands proposes that cases may be transferred to the High Court, but it does not specify that that should be done within the wardship jurisdiction. As the amended Bill stands, there is no indication how such cases should be dealt with. Therefore, the court will have no greater powers than a juvenile court. It is difficult to see why a case should go through the delaying process of transfer to the High Court if the court cannot exercise its wider jurisdiction and flexibility which makes wardship a useful proceeding.

Because of the decisions of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, from 1981 onwards, children and their relatives and friends have found it impossible to use the wardship jurisdiction where a child is in care unless the local authority concerned agrees. My proposed new clause would remedy the injustice faced by children, their families and other interested persons. If clause 5 were deleted and new clause 1 inserted, the power of transfer to the High Court—obviously it would be used only rarely—would be a useful addition.

We are talking about an important part of a very much wider mechanism in the spectrum of jurisdiction in child care law. The Government have handled the issue badly. It is wrong that we have to put all the measures in one clause dealing with one part of the whole spectrum of child care law. We should be considering all parts at the same time. We should be looking at all the jurisdictions of all the different courts with a view to instituting a family court with wide jurisdiction which takes over the duties of all the other courts that now exercise jurisdiction over family and matrimonial matters.

I hope that the new clause will bring about an improvement. I am disappointed that we have had to deal with it in such an unsatisfactory and piecemeal way. The blame lies at the Government's door. It is not too late for the Government to make a commitment to comprehensive legislation on child care. The child care law review imposed strict consultation timetables. Many organisations felt that the time limits were too short and had to abandon their other valuable work to prepare their comments to assist the Government. They were happy to do so because they felt that swift action would result. They are bitterly disappointed that there still appears to be no commitment that child care law will be completely and comprehensively redrawn, let alone any commitment on the time for action on a family court.

Like the hon. Member for Peckham (Ms. Harman), I very much hope that the Government will make a commitment to introduce comprehensive legislation in the next Session—or if not then, as soon as practicable. I fully sympathise with the aims of the new clause. It is precisely the type of proposal that I should have liked to be contained in clause 5 of my original Bill. However, I recognised that its provisions represented a considerable change which was unlikely to be accepted by the Government at that time. My clause 5 was not nearly as far-reaching as new clause 1, but it was made abundantly clear to me that the Government were not in a position to accept it. I therefore agreed with the Minister that clause 5 should be dropped. Although I applaud the new clause, I realise that it has little chance of success.

This group of amendments includes amendment No. 25, which proposes to leave out clause 5. My hon. Friend the Member for Barking (Ms. Richardson) and I tabled that amendment, not knowing that our hon. Friend the Member for Peckham (Ms. Harman) and the Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Security—the hon. Member for Wycombe (Mr. Whitney)—intended, independently, to table the same amendment at the same time. The House will recognise that this amendment is a ship with a pretty formidable if somewhat variegated crew.

The Under-Secretary of State has tabled also two new clauses and no fewer than 14 amendments. I am bound to say a word of support about the comments of my hon. Friend the Member for Peckham. That is no way for the Government to treat a private Member's Bill. The Government are virtually hijacking the Bill, taking it out of the hands of the hon. Member for Westbury (Mr. Walters), and turning it into a Government Bill. That is grossly unfair to the hon. Gentleman. He was excited about winning, I think for the first time, a high place in the ballot. He was rightly congratulated. The hon. Gentleman obviously put a lot of thought and work into the legislation. But it has now, for all practical purposes, been snatched from his hands.

9.45 am

If the Government really wanted a Government Bill on child care, they should have introduced such a Bill, preferably one that fulfilled the promises that have been made for a long time. We see no signs that there will be a comprehensive Bill to clear up all the judicial problems and provide for family courts. We all know that, in the long run, family courts are the only sensible permanent solution. Over the years, the Government have been constantly ducking and putting off implementing that solution. I do not blame the Under-Secretary of State, because many of his predecessors did nothing. I feel for the hon. Member for Westbury. I believe that his feelings about his colleague the Under-Secretary of State are not all that friendly, because this takeover of his Bill is an act of daylight robbery.

I am always anxious, in dealing with the complex and often delicate and sensitive cases covered by the legislation, that in the interests of the child—it is the child about whom we care most—a decision should be made at the moment it is needed. All too often, that is a moment when the decision is urgently needed.

That point was put forcibly on Second Reading by the hon. Member for Surrey, South-West (Mrs. Bottomley). I hope that she will not mind my saying that she put the House and the Committee in her debt by bringing her many years of practical and professional experience to bear on our deliberations. She said:

"in child care cases, of all cases, a speedy decision is vital."—[Official Report, 31 January 1986; Vol. 90, c. 1212.]

I am sure that no hon. Member would dissent from that judgment which was strongly reinforced by some authoritative bodies whose views were quoted in Committee by my hon. Friend the Member for Peckham. She quoted from a document from the Law Society, which stated:

"The Bill's provisions will almost inevitably lead to additional delay in decisions being taken about the future of children in local authority care, with consequent distress for both the children and families involved."

My hon. Friend added:

"That is also the view of the Association of Metropolitan Authorities and of the Legal Action Group."—[Official Report, Standing Committee C, 17 March 1986; c. 8.]

Clause 5 and certain other clauses shunt a decision about a child care case—often an urgent decision—into the High Court. I am not a lawyer, but I know enough about the law to be able to say that it often takes a long time to get a case into the High Court. Once the case has got there, it often takes a long time to get it out again—that is to say, to get a finding.

The Minister expressed some anxiety about that in Standing Committee. In columns 18 and 19 of the report he said:

"I have some experience of the courts and can tell my hon. Friends that it often takes much longer to go to the High Court than to go back to a magistrates court for appropriate consideration to be given to a problem."—[Official Report, Standing Committee C, 19 March 1986; c. 18–19.]

There is also the matter of the cost of actions in the High Court. Who will pay for High Court hearings which are often long and always expensive? There is no provision in the Bill as drafted for legal aid. There is no point in legislating for parents or for anyone else to have statutory rights that they cannot afford to exercise. That merely creates frustration. I know I must not anticipate the debate on new clause 2—you would be angry with me, Mr. Speaker, if I tried to do that—and I must not anticipate the conclusion the House may come to on that clause. Perhaps I could say in half a sentence that even if it is carried, it provides legal aid only in the juvenile court, which is not very costly, but not in the High Court, which can cost an arm and a leg. For those reasons I attach great importance to amendment No. 25 and I hope the House will support it.

In response to my hon. Friend the Member for Peckham (Ms. Harman), the hon. Member for Westbury (Mr. Walters) said that he had some sympathy with what she said. I did not take part in the Second Reading debate and I was not on the Committee, but the thought that immediately came to my mind was: in that case, why did he not support her? The hon. Gentleman immediately supplied the answer, when he said that he thought my hon. Friend's new clause was too far-reaching, that his was a more modest approach, and that the new clause to replace clause 5 was a considerable change. It is time that we thought about having such a change, so that we get the proper restructuring. That is the purpose of my hon. Friend's new clause. Clause 5 seeks to provide that care proceedings can be transferred to the High Court in certain circumstances. We all know that, but it does not provide any additional powers to deal with them, as the High Court would do in wardship.

Until we get a comprehensive restructuring of the court system that creates a unified family court able to allocate cases to the requisite level of the judiciary, according to the complexity and sensitivity of the case, this provision would create additional difficulties, delay and confusion, and, far from satisfying the intention of the sponsor of the Bill—to move forward a little more slowly—the Bill might make things much more complicated than they were before. I have read the Second Reading debate and the report of the Committee stage. Various references are made to family courts and to the Finer report. I came to the House in 1974 and my early years here seemed to be studded with references and campaigns about Finer because that report came out in the first few years of the Labour Government. It caused a great deal of discussion and its findings were a challenge to the concept of courts dealing with matrimonial problems.

Clause 5 attempts to fit judicial court cases into High Court procedures, but it does not provide the advantage of High Court's additonal powers of wardship. It is not clear, if the case were referred to the High Court, whether High Court procedures like the service of affidavits, directions, hearings, discovery and so on, would be followed. Perhaps the hon. Gentleman could clarify that, because I could not find any clarification in the Standing Committee report. It is something that we ought to know about. It is not clear on what grounds a court could decide that a case is of unusual difficulty or late, or whether the High Court could refuse to hear a case that it did not consider to be of unusual difficulty. That means there could be considerable delay and uncertainly for the child. As my hon. Friend the Member for Bow and Poplar (Mr. Mikardo) has said, we are all discussing the Bill with the child in mind.

Would the hon. Lady accept that, as a result of the inevitable delays that occur when a case goes to High Court, the situation of the child could easily change? For that reason, the Opposition have urged the Government not to tinker with Bills like this which would include family court procedures.

The hon. Gentleman has made a valid and cogent point. As I was saying, it is the child that we must bear in mind and any change in the procedures brought in by Parliament must be seen in that context. Any changes would have an effect on a lot of children and we must take that into account. Any party to a court hearing that wished to delay the proceedings could raise arguments in the High Court about the venue and the jurisdiction as well as about the nature of the evidence and the difficult points of law.

I have put down two amendments to clause 5 which for convenience have been linked to the new clause that we are discussing. They are an alternative to deleting clause 5, although I thoroughly support the aims of my hon. Friend the Member for Peckham and follow her along that way. Perhaps I can briefly explain the purpose of amendments 26 and 28 which I have tabled. Clause 26 proposes to

"leave out from 'Court' to end of line 15 and insert 'on the grounds that proceedings in relation to the same child are already continuing in the High Court.

(2) This section applies to—

(a) any of the proceedings mentioned in paragraph (a) to (e) of section 4(1) above;

(b) any proceedings under section 1 of this Act.".

The amendment seeks to remove the ability to transfer care cases on the grounds that the case is of unusual difficulty or length or because a difficult question of law arises. I have had briefings from a number of different organisations, as I am sure other hon. Members will have had. It seems that people who are expert in these matters feel strongly that the powers to transfer cases on these grounds alone would create unnecessary delays in dealing with decisions affecting a child's future, although the clause provides no additional powers to the High Court to deal more effectively with them. Although people seem unconvinced that the clause as drafted would be of any benefit, I gather there would be less objection to the transfer of cases if this amendment, as an alternative and as a second bite at the cherry, were carried.

Amendment No. 28, in clause 5, page 5, line 23, delete the words:

"and who may re-transfer the proceedings to the Juvenile Court",

is an alternative way of dealing with the matter, and improves the Bill. It appears to be unrealistic to allow a case to be retransferred in that way, as it would only add to the delay in reaching a decision on the child's future, in a way that appears to be simply for the convenience of the court. Again, we come back to the point about whose interests are to be the prime interests in the consideration of such cases. Obviously, it is the child's interests, not the court's.

Each transfer appears to offer no additional powers to deal with the case. Delay in juvenile proceedings was identified as a serious problem, as hon. Members know, by the Select Committee on Social Services in its second report in 1984. It said so categorically. It seems that the provisions of the Bill would serve to increase rather than reduce delays in care proceedings and to use the Committee's words, "the evils attendant on" such delays do not appear to have been recognised.

I hope that new clause 1 will be accepted, along with the deletion of clause 5. However, if that does not happen, I hope that consideration will be given to the two amendments to which I have referred, which would at least effect some improvement.

I should like to speak in support of amendment No. 25, which stands in my name and the names of some Opposition Members. As the hon. Member for Bow and Poplar (Mr. Mikardo) said, that is an intriguing combination.

I have no wish to prolong unnecessarily the discussion on this part of the proceedings, or, indeed, the Bill as a whole. However, it is right that I should respond to some of the points that have been made, particularly by Opposition Members.

The hon. Member for Peckham (Ms. Harman) made the charge that the Government's position has been inconsistent throughout the handling of the Bill. That is totally unjustified. The Government's position has been made clear from Second Reading and throughout the Committee. In Committee, the hon. Lady and I shared the same view about the vital part of the Bill of my hon. Friend the Member for Westbury (Mr. Walters), which concerns the proceedings and role that the magistrates play. However, while she and I voted in a particular direction on the Bill, none of her colleagues was present in Committee. That is one of the reasons why we are now tabling amendments, which we would have wished to avoid in handling such a Bill.

We welcome the interest that the hon. Member for Bow and Poplar has taken in the proceedings. That is an innovation. He claimed that we have hijacked my hon. Friend's Bill in an unacceptable way, but I find that difficult to accept. It is true that my hon. Friend was forbearing enough—or perhaps farsighted enough—to accept a significant change in clauses 1 and 2 of the original Bill. That was because we had fundamental misgivings about his proposals. The implication of the remarks made by the hon. Member for Bow and Poplar was that he wished we had gone along with proposals that were resisted by so many people in the professions concerned in the handling of child cases.

Why did the Minister not bring forward his amendment to delete clause 5 in Committee? Then there could have been a proper discussion. Nothing has happened since the Committee to change the situation. If the Minister had proposed the amendment that he has now tabled, we could have had a proper discussion in Committee. That is why I am suggesting that his strategy has been so shameful.

I see no difficulties about having a discussion now. It flows from other discussions with my hon. Friend the Member for Westbury.

I do not wish to delay the House any longer than necessary, but I need to make one other point, which seems to have escaped the hon. Member for Peckham, about the Government's intentions. As the House knows extremely well, at the end of last year we launched our consultative document on the review and reform of child care law—a truly massive exercise, as the House understands. Therefore, we feel some nervousness and have some misgivings about legislation such as this. However, we do not use the piecemeal argument, saying, "If it goes in the right direction, let us have it."

The House will be aware that yesterday, in response to a parliamentary question, my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State made it clear that the Government, having absorbed about 200 responses to the working party report on the review of child care law, will now draw up their own proposals for child care law and day care. The Government intend to publish them in the autumn as a basis for legislation. It will be introduced as soon as parliamentary time can be found.

Will my hon. Friend give an undertaking that such legislation will be forthcoming within the lifetime of this Parliament?

That brings in several other issues on which I am not at liberty to comment now. However, I hope that the House will accept that it is a major step forward that the Government have given an undertaking to introduce that legislation. The rate of that response is, in no small measure, a reaction to the pressures generated by my hon. Friend the Member for Westbury and the importance of the discussions that he has prompted as a result of his Bill. The proposals for a major piece of legislation, absorbing those responses to the report, will be published in the autumn.

What the Minister has just said about a family law review is welcome. Hand in hand with that goes the question of family courts, to which reference has been made. How long do we have to wait before we have the Government's proposals? We have had suggestions that they are coming for a year or more. Now we hear that they will come out in a week or two. Can we have any assurance that we will see those proposals?

At this stage, I can say only that my hon. Friend's reference to a week or two is probably near the mark. I wish that I could say more than that at this stage, but I think that my hon. Friend is in the correct target area.

I hope that we can agree on the proposal to delete clause 5. The purpose of the clause is well understood by all hon. Members present. It introduced a novel procedure, because it would require proceedings to be transferred from what is essentially a criminal court exercising a summary procedure to a civil court with a formal and much more elaborate procedure. While it would be possible to resolve that procedural problem, a great deal would be required by way of rules to achieve that.

The serious disadvantage in what is proposed is that it would inevitably cause delay in dealing with child care cases beyond that which is now experienced, and which gives cause for concern. We are all worried about the delay to which the hon. Member for Cambridgeshire, North-East (Mr. Freud) referred. Delay would be inevitable in most cases because, until the case was ready for hearing, or even part heard, the parties would not know whether the case was one of unusual difficulty or length, or would give rise to an unusual or difficult question of law. The court would be able to transfer a case on its own motion only where the matter was part heard. Only then would it be possessed of the necessary information.

When the decision had been made to transfer, it would be necessary for the magistrates court to give notice to the High Court, on receipt of which the proper officer of the High Court would give notice to the parties, and after the defendants had acknowledged service of that notice, an appointment for directions would have to be arranged.

The Minister has described the litany of procedure. What will be done to monitor the changing circumstances of the child? I expect that cases could change radically between the beginning and end of legal proceedings if the High Court was invoked, because there are many stages in the legal process. A child is not a static human being.

I entirely accept that point. That is why we wish to delete the clause. That issue will be addressed when we introduce our child care law reforms. There will be difficulties in the transfer of such cases, and I hope that, in view of our consultations and the responses that we have received, which include an examination of delay and changing circumstances, when we produce our legislative proposals we can deal satisfactorily with the inevitable problems.

The transfer of cases to the High Court could increase demands upon High Court judges and would be an unjustified burden upon the legal aid fund, without any of the offsetting savings which we hope will be made in the package that should emerge from our child care law reforms.

Should not the overriding criteria be the best interests of the child and the best judicial forum for assessing the interests of the child, not the requirements of the legal aid fund? Even if the Minister believes that clause 1 is unlikely to survive and, therefore, the transfer mentioned in clause 5 would not apply, would it not be useful to apply the transfer to the procedures set out in clause 4(1), paragraphs (a) to (f)?

I wish that the hon. Lady would make her point only once. Of course, children are important, as is the reduction of child abuse cases to the fewest possible. I understand and, to a large extent, sympathise with the high-and-mighty attitude that money should be no object. However, having accepted that we are struggling to find a set of arrangements, be they legal or administrative, to reduce to the absolute minimum—to eliminate completely is not for this world—cases of child abuse, there is a duty on any Government to take account of resources. I hope that the hon. Lady, having played her card once, will rest on that trick.

It is absurd for the Minister to accuse the hon. Lady of repeating herself and doing so four times over. It is unhelpful to our proceedings.

Perhaps I am practising for "Just a Minute"—

The Minister would be good at that.

Yes, I think I might be better than some.

I am happy to agree with the Opposition that clause 5 should be deleted from the Bill. I do not recommend the House to accept new clause 1, mostly on grounds of principle but partly on grounds of resources. The objectives that will be set out in our review of child care law will improve care proceedings in juvenile courts so that recourse to wardship is reduced, while acknowledging that it would be available in exceptional cases. Although I shall be accused of repetition, I must say that new clause I would add considerably to costs and to delays in court proceedings, which the House would abhor. I urge the House to accept amendment No. 25.

I beg to move, That the clause be read a Second time.

With this it will be convenient to take the following: Government amendments Nos. 22 and 23.

Amendment No. 24, in clause 4, page 4, line 35, at end insert

'for a period of not less than three months ending not more than six weeks before the date of the application'.

Government amendment No. 29.

New clause 2 deals with legal aid, and is necessary to ensure that people who are made party to care proceedings are entitled to apply for legal aid. Clearly, without legal aid for parents or anyone else who may be made a party to the proceedings, the right to participate in those proceedings is absolutely hollow unless they can afford to provide legal representation. Obviously, many people cannot get legal representation unless they receive legal aid.

A good illustration of why people need legal aid in care proceedings and why they cannot appear in court in person is given in new clause 5, which the Minister has tabled. The first sentence is absolutely incoherent, and should be submitted for a prize for legal gobbledegook. There is no way that people can begin to understand discussions about what is, perhaps, the most important feature of their lives—what is happening to their children—without legal representation.

The Minister made some backhanded remarks about a comment I made on legal aid when we discussed new clause 1. We are not simply making "money-no-object" points—we are talking about people's ability to enforce the legal rights which the House has seen fit to put on the statute book. The Government are always talking about law and order, but the law is absolutely meaningless and not worth the paper it is written on unless people can have representation to enforce those rights and to participate in proceedings which will profoundly affect their future.

At present there is a great problem with legal aid. Some firms are going out of business because of the restrictions being exercised on the legal aid system. Other firms, although still in business, are reducing the amount of legal aid work they will do in favour of increasing the amount of privately paid work. Therefore, the availability of legal representation for people on the legal aid scheme is being reduced seriously, and with it all the rights people could have enforced, had they had that legal representation.

There is also a problem facing law centres, and at present their future is in doubt. They are a further way by which people can obtain legal representation to enforce their rights and to be party to proceedings which will affect their future. Without them, some people could not participate meaningfully in court proceedings.

We have rather got used to the idea that the law centre movement is part of the legal scene, and is here to stay. However, there are only a few law centres, and there is by no means the comprehensive spread that there should be. Moreover, their future is in doubt because of a whole range of funding problems. It is highly regrettable that the Government have not seen fit to say that they will secure their future and extend their provision to other parts of the country.

Consequently, the new clause is important. It is not a question of money being no object. We are talking about basic justice and basic legal rights. The Minister raised the point about money when we discussed new clause 1, but it is more relevant to this new clause. However, let us see what the Government are prepared to find money for. It has been estimated that the attempt to abolish capital transfer tax and to return to some sort of voluntary estate duty will mean a saving for just one man—the Duke of Westminster—of about £600 million in tax on his estate. As the Government have just facilitated that, it ill behoves them to talk about being thrifty in the case of legal aid, which merely enables people to enforce their legal and basic rights.

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I am not happy with Government amendments Nos. 22 and 23. Amendment No. 23 restricts those who could be parties to the proceedings to the parent or guardian. The Bill recognises that more people have a legitimate interest in being parties to a case than just the parent or guardian. In the Jasmine Beckford case, the foster parents could well have been a party to the case and could have considerably assisted the magistrates. The magistrates might not then have made the disastrous comments that were so heavily criticised by Louis Blom-Cooper and his inquiry team. The amendment means that foster parents or anyone else with a legitimate interest or involvement with the child could not be a party.

The Bill makes a considerable improvement to child care law in recognising the contribution that parties other than the parent or guardian can made to the proceedings. Obviously, the court has discretion and flexibility about who should be involved, so that those who do not have a legitimate involvement cannot be parties. I believe that it can be safely left to the court to exercise its discretion, using guidance on the criteria that should be taken into account.

I am not entirely happy with amendment No. 24, which stands in the name of my hon. Friend the Member for Barking (Ms. Richardson). It narrows the opportunity for foster parents to become involved in proceedings and to be made party to them. They could be made party to the proceedings only if they had cared for the child for a period of three months, ending

"not more than six weeks before the date of the application."

I cannot quite remember the dates now, but in the Jasmine Beckford case I think that the foster parents had not been looking after the child six weeks before. Consequently, I think that the amendment is unduly restrictive. I understand that its aim is to be consistent with other child care law. Obviously, that is important as we have a tangled enough web as it is. Indeed, we need a comprehensive review of child care law. However, imposing an absolute limit might exclude some people who have a contribution to make. Therefore, I hope that new clause 2 will be accepted, but that amendments Nos. 22, 23 and 24 will be rejected.

I have considerable sympathy with the call for legal aid to be provided to parents faced with the problem of adoption proceedings for their children. All hon. Members will have had parents in their surgeries with similar problems. Members of Parliament and those who are not qualified in law find it difficult to give them helpful advice. Moreover, to my knowledge not as many lawyers are qualified in child care as in divorce law, commercial law, the law for fraud and so on. That is a counter-argument to that put forward by the hon. Member for Peckham (Ms. Harman).

Although I have general sympathy for the hon. Member for Peckham, I was unhappy about her approach when she said that the money could come from the changes made in the Budget. It was a little beneath her to talk of money coming from the estate of the Duke of Westminister. Although a flood of money has been released by the change in capital transfer tax, it was a one-off thing and does not support her argument.

The principle of legal aid for parents faced with adoption proceedings should stand or fall on its own. If the House feels that the principle is right, it should will the means. But I do not want to become involved in the rather cheap arguments that have been put forward. I have 23 years' experience of being a schoolmaster and seven years' experience as the head of a mixed school with more than 2,000 children. Parents who face adoption problems are often people with difficulties of their own. They are sometimes inadequate people, and they have a job to put a case together. That is not always true, but on the whole those people need to be able to talk their problems through with someone who is qualified and who is in a position to help them. I rather fancy that suitably qualified lawyers are the best people to do that.

Parents involved in adoption proceedings are in a sensitive and emotional state, and often understandably find it difficult to make an objective case for themselves. After all, it is essential to be objective in legal proceedings because ultimately the decision will have to be taken objectively in the interest of the child's welfare. If parents are struggling and fighting—some of them do when they are involved in these matters—they are often not in a position to be subjective. Parents have come to my surgery begging to be allowed to see their own children. I find that heart-breaking—I do not want to load the debate emotionally—and I feel that the House and individual Members have an obligation to lean over backwards to assist those who are in that difficult position.

I have found in my long experience that parents tend to lean on anyone who will listen and who may have some means of giving sensible and useful advice. These third parties may include schoolmasters, headmasters, social workers or vicars. A multitude of sympathetic people can be brought into these matters. However, unless the pesson on whom a parent leans can pinpoint the law, describe how it stands and describe how it can be called in aid in the individual case, the parent will not receive the right sort of assistance that he or she needs and deserves.

I know of a school in a fairly deprived area where 10 per cent. of children are said to be involved in adoption proceedings. The problem is considerable and needs to be faced by the House. The care and welfare of the child must come first and if parents can be assisted to ensure that that happens, the House should make that assistance available.

Like the hon. Member for Ealing, North (Mr. Greenway), parents have come to my surgery—not many—to complain that they have not been allowed to see their child. The last parent to complain to me on that ground had treated the child abominably before it had been taken from him. He subsequently treated the child abominably when he had a chance to see it. All these matters must be dealt with on a case-by-case basis and in a way that relates to the particular circumstances.

I wish to say through you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, to the Under-Secretary of State that if he wants us to have a pleasant and effective discussion of the Bill, which is what the rest of us want, he will have to treat the House with rather more courtesy and respect than he did in the course of his previous speech, in which he was disgustingly patronising to my hon. Friend the Member for Peckham (Ms. Harman). He insulted the intelligence of the House in the reason that he gave for not tabling amendments in Committee. He said, "I did not table the amendments in Committee because no Opposition Members were present in Committee and we could not discuss them". Amendments that come before a Committee have to be tabled at least 48 hours before the Committee meets. Unless the Minister has taken on the mantle of Isaiah, Nostradamus or Old Moore, of almanack fame, he cannot know 48 hours before a Committee meets how many Members will attend it. His explanation was nonsensical.

My hon. Friend the Member for Peckham was right. If the Minister wanted to change the Bill in the way in which the Government are now changing it, and if he could have obtained the agreement of his hon. Friend the Member for Westbury (Mr. Walters), the sponsor of the Bill, so to do, he should have tabled amendments for the Committee to consider. That would have enabled a proper discussion to take place because the Committee members would have had reasonable time to study the amendments and to take advice on them. Instead, we saw the amendments only yesterday, and that is treating the House cavalierly.

I applaud the attempt of my hon. Friend the Member for Peckham to secure legal aid for those who are involved in juvenile court proceedings, but if there is to be High Court involvement it is there, more than in the juvenile court, that legal aid will be required. If it is not to be granted, however, we are merely giving statutory rights to parents in the knowledge that they will not be able to take advantage of them through lack of resources. That will frustrate parents and embitter them. We shall appear to give them a gift, but it will be so tightly wrapped in an impregnable box that it will be of no value to them.

10.45 am

Amendment No. 24 stands in my name and the name of my hon. Friend the Member for Barking (Ms. Richardson). The subsection gives rights of evidence to

"any person with whom the child is or has been boarded out".

That will be foster parents generally, and foster parents will know and understand the child if they have had it for a while, and recently. I did not table the amendment to make the Bill consistent with other legal provisions. It was an original thought and the amendment is designed to ensure that a foster parent who wants to give evidence shall be one who has reasonable knowledge of the child, and reasonably recent knowledge. As matters stand, someone could demand to give evidence who had had the child with them for a couple of days only two years ago. He or she could be entirely unacquainted with the present circumstances.

I accept that the figures which I have chosen—

"for a period of not less than three months ending not more than six weeks before the date of the application"—

may not be the best ones. I admit at once that they were plucked out of the air. If there are better figures, or figures which would be supported by those with greater knowledge of these matters than I have, there will be an opportunity in another place, if the principle is accepted, of inserting them. It is not unfair to have some restriction because evidence of a child's condition and attitudes is not of much value unless it is recent and based on reasonable experience with the child. Even if the amendment is not accepted, I hope that the sponsor will be disposed to say that he is willing to think about it and perhaps to consider what might be done when the Bill goes to another place.

The hon. Member for Peckham (Ms. Harman) has complained that amendment No. 23 is too narrow. I suspect that my hon. Friend the Minister will complain that the original clause 4 was too wide. That is the problem that we face. In the proceedings which we are discussing, there will be many who could have an interest in and knowledge of the child and something to contribute to the court proceedings.

I am not a lawyer and my experience is limited to sitting as a magistrate in the juvenile courts. My understanding is that, once someone is made a party to the proceedings, he or she has legal status and the court is obliged to hear them. That person—this is what worried the Government—will be entitled to legal aid. As the hon. Member for Bow and Poplar (Mr. Mikardo) has said, the various categories that are set out in clause 4 are quite wide. They go wider than

"any person with whom the child is or has been boarded out".

Subsection (3)(c) states:

"any other person appearing to the court to have a proper interest in the welfare of the child."

That is an extremely wide provision.

If my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of State is to ask the House to accept the far narrower definition of amendment No. 23, for the reasons that I anticipate he will give to us, may I ask him to look closely at the present position with regard to other persons appearing before the court in these proceedings. They do not necessarily have to be parties to the proceedings in a legal sense. However, there could be circumstances in which it would be highly desirable that people who do not fall within the normal legal categories should be heard by the magistrates court. For example, the lady next door, who is not a relative but who knows a good deal about what has been going on in that house for some years, perhaps ought to be heard by the court. That might also apply to the lady round the corner whom the child knows as "auntie" and with whom the child stays for much of the day while mummy is out at work. I realise the difficulty of giving to those people the status of parties to the proceedings in a legal sense, but the court would benefit from hearing what they have to say.

The hon. Gentleman is confusing the question of the court being able to hear evidence from somebody who lives next door and whether that person has sufficient concern, interest and involvement to be a party to the proceedings. Does he agree that he has slightly misled the House by saying that my view is that clause 4 has been drawn too wide? Will he accept that I do not think that it has been drawn too wide but that I think that it is too woolly? There should be a wide clause, but guidance should be given to the magistrates about how to exercise their discretion. The new clause has been tabled to include such a provision in the Bill. Will the hon. Gentleman accept that, although I believe that the Government's proposal is too narrow, I do not believe that clause 4 is too wide?

I apologise if I gave that impression. I said that the hon. Lady thought that it was too narrow and that my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of State thought that it was too wide. I was seeking to say exactly what the hon. Lady has just said: that it is important that guidance should be given to the courts by means of rules, guidance, or circulars, to ensure that the interested parties, in the layman's expression, are able to appear in court.

My experience of sitting in these proceedings is that it might be an advantage to grant legal aid to people so that they may be represented by solicitors but that there are occasions when this might be a disadvantage and that it would be of help to the court to hear people informally and listen to the information that they are able to give to the court.

I understand why my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of State will ask the House to accept amendment No. 23. However, I ask him to ensure that the courts are fully advised of the desirability in these proceedings of listening to anybody who, in the normal layman's expression, would have an interest in the outcome of the proceedings.

Amendments Nos. 22, 23 and 29 would remove clause 4 on parties in care and related proceedings and substitute a new provision with three separate inserts in the legislation.

Subsection (1) adds to section 32A of the 1969 Act that a separate representation order in care proceedings carries with it party status for the parent or guardian. "Guardian" here means not legal guardian but the 1933 definition of

"any person who in the opinion of the court has for the time being the charge of or control over the child".

Subsection (2) adds a new section to the 1969 Act providing for grandparents in circumstances specified in rules of court to be made parties by leave of the court, which can be a single justice.

Subsection (3) provides legal aid for parents, guardians and grandparents where made parties.

These are the differences from clause 4, to which I shall draw attention.

First, the amendment relates to care and related proceedings under the 1969 Act but not to the Child Care Act 1980 proceedings when parents are already parties. Secondly, the amendment relates to parents and guardians only if a separate representation order has been made because there is a conflict of interest with the child. Thirdly, the amendment allows party status to grandparents but not to any relative, any person with whom the child is or has been boarded out and any other person appearing to have a proper interest in the welfare of the child. However, the extended definition of guardian will bring in those relatives who have the control and care of the child.

One person who might have something worthwhile to contribute but who seems to have been left out of the picture altogether is the child's teacher. Why has the teacher been left out?

That would be a matter for the court. There could be cases in which a teacher could play a role, but the contribution of the teacher is not automatically provided for.

The amendment leaves for rules of court the criteria for giving party status to grandparents.

Amendment No. 29 is a technical amendment to clarify the rule-making power. As foreshadowed in Committee, I have discussed the clause with my hon. Friend and I hope he will support the amendments I have now tabled. I appreciate that he is disappointed we cannot go further at this stage. We shall, of course, come to this whole area again in our own legislative proposals. At this point we have been able to conclude only two of the more important possibilities in this Bill. The first of the two is parents and guardians in care proceedings where there is a separate representation order. This is wider than it seems, because in this context "guardian" includes any person who had charge or control immediately before care proceedings started, or has the charge or control of the child for the time being, in the judgment of the court. This seems to me an urgent improvement. I was also much impressed by my hon. Friend's arguments about the contribution which in some circumstances grandparents can make to obtaining the best outcome for the child. We endorse that point and recognise that grandparents can often play a major role in the child's life.

As for new clause 2, we accept that legal aid should be granted to parties to the proceedings. However, the way forward proposed in amendments Nos. 22, 23 and 29 is the better way forward. Therefore, I hope that the hon. Member for Peckham (Ms. Harman) will withdraw new clause 2 and accept our amendments.

The suggestion, even the possibility, that teachers might become parties in care cases fills me with absolute horror. The suggestion by the hon. Member for Bow and Poplar (Mr. Mikardo) shows a misunderstanding of the complexity of our court proceedings. If one becomes a full party to the proceedings, it means that one can not only give evidence but cross-examine all the other witnesses. That highlights the misunderstanding about clause 4 and the need for people to give evidence.

Care proceedings are traumatic, emotional and difficult occasions. I feel very strongly that all those who have a contribution to make to a child's welfare and future should be able to give their opinion to the court and make representations, but that is a million miles away from granting full party standing to them. The idea that each and every one of them should have legal aid and be able to employ a lawyer—which would result in a wonderful job creation scheme for the legal profession, a matter about which my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Burton (Mr. Lawrence) may care to comment—fills me with horror. I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Chislehurst (Mr. Sims), who often speaks in a similar vein and who has presided over many difficult care cases.

In the past, the standing of parents has been equivocal, to say the least. If the least that my hon. Friend the Member for Westbury (Mr. Walters) is able to achieve is to give formal standing to parents in care cases, it will be a great step forward. For the most part, the modifications to the Bill have been an improvement. I feel strongly that clause 4 is too wide. I said so on Second Reading, and I welcome the modification that has been made.

11 am

It is fair that grandparents should be given leave to be parties, although it would not be helpful or right for them automatically to have the full standing of parties. The review of child care law has been much discussed, and many hon. Members were pleased to hear the welcome news that there is to be concrete action and a timetable for legislation in at least the foreseeable future. It is better than anything that we have been able to hope for in the past. The review of child care law must make the distinction between the need of those who might want to make representations to feel that they are involved in the decision over the child and the need for them to have full party status.

The new clause is the result of discussions between me and some of my sponsors and the Government. I single out my hon. Friends the Members for Surrey, South-West (Mrs. Bottomley) and for Chislehurst (Mr. Sims) for their continuous and invaluable support throughout the discussions. I welcome the fact that the Government have been able to extend the right to be a party to parents and guardians and have accepted that, in appropriate circumstances, grandparents may become parties as well.

In my Bill I specified the circumstances in which grandparents might become parties—normally when they have an important contribution to make. I am a little concerned that the Government's proposals leave it entirely to the rules of court to do this. I would much appreciate a commitment from my hon. Friend the Minister that, when the Bill is enacted, the rules of court will not be framed in an unduly restrictive manner. If it is not possible for him to spell it out this morning, perhaps it can be made clear in another place.

I am delighted to have achieved this important improvement, and the flood of letters that I have received from grandparents all over the country recounting some sad and moving stories of the unhappy consequences of the present state of the law leaves me in no doubt about how welcome, right and beneficial this provision will be.

The new clause leaves unclear whether the definition of grandparent would extend to the grandparents through the father of an illegitimate child. By use of the word "relative" and its statutory definition in the Child Care Act 1980, my clause made it plain that the father and grandparents of an illegitimate child were also included. It is established that the reference to parents normally excludes the putative father. There is no definition of grandparents in any of the relevant statutes, and I hope that when the Bill goes to the other place this point will be clarified, and that the grandparents of the illegitimate child will also be included. In such cases, it is not infrequent that such grandparents are involved.

Whatever view is taken about the rights of the putative father, I can see no possible welfare grounds for distinguishing between the classes of grandparents. Therefore, I hope that this matter will be clarified in the other place.

Order. I have to notify the House, in accordance with the Royal Assent Act 1967, that the Queen has signified Her Royal Assent to the following Acts:

1. Gaming (Amendment) Act 1986

2. Statute Law (Repeals) Act 1986

3. Highways (Amendment) Act 1986

4. Yorkshire Water Authority Act 1986

This has been a most interesting debate. The hon. Member for Westbury (Mr. Walters) has raised an interesting point about the grandparents of an illegitimate child who are the parents of the putative father. That supports the theory that I think is shared by my hon. Friend the Member for Peckham (Ms. Harman) that, while we think it right that grandparents, if they so wish, can make an application, so can other people, and the court would deal with any frivolous applications.

Does my hon. Friend agree that it is sad and inappropriate that the hon. Member for Westbury (Mr. Walters), having raised this important point about the grandparents of the illegitimate child, should be talking about amendments that might have to be made in the other place to clarify the position? If the Bill had been dealt with properly by the Government, those points would have been raised in Committee and then we would have been clearing it up now and making the situation satisfactory on Report. The hon. Member for Westbury does not sit in the other place. Therefore, does he support the point made earlier, that the Bill has been hijacked by the Government and taken out of his control?

I am glad that my hon. Friend has raised that point. I was not on the Committee, being engaged in Committee on the Social Security Bill, but I have read the debate. It seems to me from the remarks that the hon. Member for Westbury has just made that it has just occurred to him that the Bill is being stitched together as we go along. Bits are being snipped out and other bits are being stitched in. That may be the tradition in legislation, but it is normally a process carried out in Committee. It is rather strange that, in effect, we are having a Committee on the Floor of the House, with new ideas being trailed, and this is not necessarily the right time to deal with them.

I support legal aid. I speak as a lay person. I have never been a magistrate, and I have great admiration for those who have devoted much of their spare time to that valuable work. I am not a lawyer like my hon. Friend the Member for Peckham—I am a lay person in every sense of the word. However, I have had complaints, not on child care, but on other subjects, about the difficulties that some people have in getting legal aid in magistrates courts. They are not necessarily refused legal aid, but they do not know about it and it is not pointed out to them.

A few years ago, I had a long and somewhat acrimonious discussion with the now retired clerk of my local magistrates court. I discovered that Barking magistrates court was towards the bottom of the league table of legal aid granted in courts. I tried to find out why. The clerk was frank and said that he wanted to save the Crown money. My reaction was that it was not for him to make that decision. If people qualify for legal aid they must be encouraged and shown how to claim it.

The amendment suggested by the Family Rights Group attempts to ensure that people made parties to care proceedings are entitled to apply for legal aid. The group says that its case work with parents prior to the introduction of legal aid for parents in care proceedings showed that a right to participate was an empty right unless parents were able to obtain legal representation.

I can see that the provision might create a field day for the legal profession, but not many people would apply. I can see the nub of the concern, but the problem is overplayed. Against the possibility of lining solicitors' pockets, we must set the rights of, and the responsibilities which we have towards, people making application to a court to be parties in care proceedings.

It is crucial in such proceedings to ensure that those who are party have access to the best representation. Is it not therefore vital that the new clause be included in the Bill?

I agree that the new clause is necessary. No one is in a worse position than the person who is not represented or who is represented by someone not of their choice and given at the last moment. I know that the proposal is costly, but it is a cost that we must bear. The rights of people must be made known. People should be able to engage the person with whom they feel most comfortable. In a court action, the person acting for the party must command trust. I support the new clause.

The Government amendments, specifically amendment No. 23, make it clear that legal aid would be provided for parents, guardians and grandparents who are made parties in such cases. The word "guardian" means, not a legal guardian, but is as defined in the 1933 Act which states:

"any person who in the opinion of the court … has for the time being the charge of or control over the child."

I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Westbury (Mr. Walters) for his remarks about how we were able to co-operate. We shall consider what he said, including his remarks about the illegitimate child. The rules of court will be outlined in the House of Lords. The consultation process, in particular with the rules committee, might take a little time. The matter is the Home Secretary's responsibility, but I shall pass on my hon. Friend's comments.

I beg to move, That the clause be read a Second time.

The clause deals with revocation and discharge proceedings. Earlier clauses make parents parties in all care and related proceedings. That is an important step. New clause 3 is designed to make it clear that not only can parents or guardians be parties to applications but that they can initiate revocation and discharge proceedings.

Parents face many problems because they are not necessarily parties to discharge proceedings. There is a technical right to initiate discharge proceedings but the legal position is currently complex. Following the decision in 1985 in the Avon county council case, it is possible that parents will not be able to proceed with an application to discharge if there is a guardian ad litem and where that guardian ad litem does not support the application by the parents for a discharge.

Parents have to go through legal contortions in fighting their way through an application for discharge. A system which deprives parents of the right to seek the return of their children but gives them rights to be parties only when the application is made by the local authority cannot be fair or just. That is why I have tabled the new clause. I hope that it will be accepted.

I am advised that the practical effect of the new clause would be small because under section 70(2) of the 1969 Act an application can be made on behalf of a child by a parent or guardian as defined, but including someone who was guardian when the original order was made.

I urge the House not to press the new clause as it would not fit in with Government amendments 22 and 23 by which party status is given to parents and guardians only when a separate representation order is made because of a conflict of interests with the child. When we present our own proposals for comprehensive legislation, I shall take account of the comments by the hon. Member for Peckham (Ms. Harman).

Does the Minister accept that section 70(2) of the 1969 Act was hedged around in the court decision in the Avon county council case? That means that section 70(2) no longer applies. The Minister assures us that in the far distant future we shall benefit from the child care law review, but now the situation remains unclear.

I do not accept that it is wrong to wait while we complete the comprehensive process of revising legislation. I have already said that our concrete proposals will be made in the autumn. I am sure that it is right to take account of that and of section 70(2) of the 1969 Act as it now applies.

I beg to move, That the clause be read a Second time.

The new clause recognises the critical importance of access in rehabilitation. It is agreed that, wherever it is possible and safe to do so, a child should be returned to live with its parents and that the period spent in care should be as short as possible.

The contact that the child maintains with the parents while it is in care and the access allowed to the parents are critical to rehabilitation. If parents lose touch with the child because they do not have proper access, rehabilitation can be simply a paper exercise, because the bonds between parent and child may have been broken.

The new clause provides that a parent, guardian or relative may apply for any matter involving access to be decided by the courts. When making access orders, courts could impose specific conditions on the access.

Hon. Members may think that the clause is too wide, but it gives courts extensive powers to impose conditions when granting access. It says that courts may impose conditions on the

"frequency, duration or place of access"

and on any other matters. If a court were worried about the common law husband or boy friend of the mother, it could order that access should not take place in the presence of the man. It might also order that the child should not be taken on a visit to see that person.

Does not the hon. Member see a contradiction between her view that the court should be given these powers on access and her vote against clause 1 in Committee? Clause 1 gave the courts small powers covering simply the return home. Decisions about access would be multiplied endlessly compared s with that initial decision.

There was wide agreement in the child care law review that access decisions should be made by the courts. The new clause is in line with the general spirit of the Bill and with the recommendations of the review.

At present, only parents may apply for access to children in care. The Bill recognises the importance of other relatives and people who are interested in the child's life, as does the new clause, which extends the range of people who may apply for access.

At present, courts can make orders for access only when it has been stopped by the local authority. No doubt hon. Members have met parents in their surgeries and know of cases where local authorities have not stopped access, but have imposed conditions that render access unsatisfactory. The new clause would allow parents to apply to a court and to say, "Although the local authority has not denied us access, the terms on which it has granted it are so unsatisfactory as to make it virtually impossible." The court could then agree with the conditions imposed by the local authority, scrap them, or impose new conditions.

The child care law review recommended that all disputes over access should be decided by the courts. We should prefer the forum in which access was decided to be an experienced, well-trained and consistent judiciary under a family court system. That would make the new clause a much more important step. I believe that it is important, but at present it is limited.

The European Commission of Human Rights has recently found the Government to be in breach of the convention that protects family life in, I think, five cases where parents have been denied access to their children in local authority care. The new clause would open up the situation, but the orders and conditions that the courts could impose would prevent it from getting out of control.

A major anxiety about children in care and their families is that insufficient work is done to enable children to return home. They must be able to see and to keep in touch with their parents as much as possible. Therefore, it would be right to allow a parent or relative to challenge a local authority's decision. If a child is very young or is to be in care for some time, access is important in rehabilitation, but there may never be rehabilitation and it is also important to ensure that there is close scrutiny of the conditions under which parents are allowed to see their children.

The new clause, which would extend the rights of parents or relatives to apply for access orders, is outside the scope of anything in the Bill.

I have some sympathy with the aims of the new clause, but I cannot resist the observation, already tellingly made by my hon. Friend the Member for Surrey, South-West (Mrs. Bottomley), that it would considerably increase the involvement of magistrates courts in the management of children in care, and the hon. Member for Peckham (Ms. Harman) firmly and, in my view, regrettably resisted that move in relation to my proposals in clause 1.

Subsection (5) of the new clause places within the purview of the juvenile courts the decision on a matter on which decisions are not always easy. It induces me to make some observations about that subsection and about other references in the Bill to juvenile courts.

I have to be careful that nothing I say could be interpreted as being derogatory of juvenile courts. I have a daughter who is a magistrate and who sits in a juvenile court in the north of England and I would not want to say anything that might import tension into what has hitherto been a loving and relaxed family. I know that she and her colleagues spent a considerable time reading and attending seminars to prepare themselves for their role.

11.30 am

We must bear in mind that it is a long time since the children of lay magistrates were young and a long time since those magistrates had day-to-day contact with children. My daughter would be the first to admit that, notwithstanding the study involved, the qualifications of a lay magistrate to make difficult judgments on child care cases, including access cases, on average—there are exceptions—are well below the qualifications of a trained, professional certificated social worker. The judgment of such a social worker should not, therefore, be cast aside.

Does my hon. Friend agree that the greater involvement which would be provided to the courts under the new clause is realistic, because, by definition, the parents and the local authority would be on opposite sides? Therefore, the magistrate would have to choose between contending cases. Does my hon. Friend recognise that clause 1, as it was first brought before the House, provided that the parents and the local authority would be, by definition, on the same side and, therefore, the scrutiny would not be realistic? Does my hon. Friend recognise that that was one of the reasons why we opposed clause 1?

I understand that. I do not seek to make more of the argument than it justifies or to make too much of the position. I know that lay magistrates place importance on the opinions expressed to them by social workers. A magistrate should not be over-influenced by what may well be an understandable and human fellow feeling for a parent and lightly discard—I use that word carefully—the views of the professional officer who is trained for the job and has probably studied the child closely over a long period.

Notwithstanding the disclaimer of the hon. Member for Westbury (Mr. Walters)—I do not cast any doubt on his integrity—it is clear that the introduction of the Bill at this time was inspired, at least in part, by a small number of recent cases of gross abuse of a child by one or both of his parents—cases which have horrified us all. I refer particularly to the Jasmine Beckford case. To the overwhelming majority of people, and especially parents, such cases are not merely horrifying; they are incomprehensible. Normal people cannot understand a parent behaving in that incredible way. They find it hard to believe that such a monstrous thing could happen. Our strong reaction is to overlook the fact that these abnormal cases represent only a tiny fraction of the many thousands of child care cases that are handled every day of the week by social workers. No one hears about those cases because they are brought to a satisfactory conclusion.

I appreciated the remarks of the hon. Member for Surrey, South-West (Mrs. Bottomley) on Second Reading—she took a crack at me earlier—when she said:

"The history of child care law has, in my view, been too frequently an over-reaction to appalling incidents."

She continued:

"It is very easy at a time of emotional strain and difficulty, especially when there is a great deal of press and public interest, to look for scapegoats."—[Official Report, 31 January 1986; Vol. 90, c. 1211.]

She cited the Jasmine Beckford case. She was absolutely right. We must remember that, in the Jasmine Beckford case, it was the court, not the social worker, that made an error which in the end, unhappily, turned out to be fatal.

In the Jasmine Beckford case, the magistrates, having made the order, commented that they would like the child to be returned to the home as soon as practicable. In retrospect, that was a grave mistake and a great pity. The decision to return the child was entirely that of the social workers.

That is not as I read the case and as some pretty authoritative people have interpreted it. Many people think that the social services department of the borough council involved in that case was made a scapegoat in the way that the hon. Member for Surrey, South-West said.

Is my hon. Friend aware that the inquiry chaired by Louis Blom-Cooper felt that, although the social workers said in evidence that they had not placed undue weight on the remarks of the magistrates, the remarks of the magistrates had been critical in leading to the decision? In fact, the report stated that the magistrates should be publicly upbraided.

Rubbish.

The hon. and learned Gentleman says, "Rubbish." I am simply bringing to the attention of my hon. Friend the Member for Bow and Poplar (Mr. Mikardo) something of which he is probably aware—that the Blom-Cooper inquiry felt that the error of the magistrates was significant and, combined with the error of the social workers, disastrous.

My hon. Friend should not be surprised that the hon. and learned Gentleman said, "Rubbish." Honourable and learned Gentlemen never agree with their learned friends about anything under the sun. Obviously, they do not like Mr. Blom-Cooper. However, we do not have to become involved in high-level legal quarrels.

I refer to the intervention of my hon. Friend and that of the hon. Member for Westbury. The least one can say is that responsibility in that case must be shared. The professional people were disciplined and their careers put in jeopardy. To that extent, they were made scapegoats for a decision that was not entirely theirs. That is the point which I took the hon. Member for Surrey, South-West to be making. She returned to the point, with good effect, in Standing Committee. She said:

"Having been a psychiatric social worker for 10 years, I feel strongly about the value of the profession, the importance of people's judgments, their skills, the need for further training and the respect which they should have from the public. I have felt incensed in many cases where things have gone wrong that the social worker was all too easily the scapegoat."

The hon. Lady was strongly supported by the Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Security—the hon. Member for Wycombe (Mr. Whitney)—who said:

"The implication—indeed, the practice—of what is now proposed would be to ask the magistrates to get involved in detail of child placement and in making provisions which would take this whole subject into a different area. I suggest that the experience we have would not necessarily lead to the conclusion that this would provide the better answers in child care that we are all seeking."

Later in the sitting, the hon. Gentleman returned to the subject when he said:

"the local authority will … take the professional decisions on case management, such as the placement of the child. Because of its composition and procedure, the court is not an appropriate forum for reviewing such professional decisions."

Later he stated:

"Our social services inspectorate, in consultation with the field agencies, will offer a more comprehensive and appropriate way of dealing with an issue than a bench of magistrates."

That is putting it more forcefully than the hon. Member for Westbury (Mr. Walters) or I would.

The Under-Secretary of State was not finished with the point, because he said:

"I suggest that a careful examination of the cases which have gone wrong, whether the Jasmine Beckford case or others, does not lead me to the conclusion that to bring the magistrates back into the process at this stage … would improve the possibilities of achieving better management in child care cases. Rather, it would lead to delays. It would introduce another court element which inevitably would have a degree of confrontation about it."—[Official Report, Standing Committee C, 19 March 1986; c. 4, 6, 14–15.]

We should bear this major consideration in mind not only in relation to the new clause, especially subsection (5), but throughout our deliberations.

I support the new clause tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Peckham (Ms. Harman) for two major reasons. First, we must all recognise, as my hon. Friends the Members for Peckham and for Bow and Poplar (Mr. Mikardo) have done, that the issue of access is crucial, not simply for the mere fact of access but because access is a preparation for any future change in the relationship between a parent or guardian and the child. If a person who may, in due course, again be given the care of the child does not have access for some months and if the change in care status happens cold, the chances that a successful relationship will develop and hold will be much fewer than if access were available. Access is important not simply for the well-being of the child and for the peace of mind of its relatives or parents but because it prepares people for what might happen later. That is an extremely important point.

11.45 am

Secondly, I am sympathetic to the new clause because it seeks to enable not only parents but other relatives to apply for access. Hon. Members have commented on the importance of grandparents. One example in my constituency immediately springs to mind because in the past week I have been attempting to assist those involved. A grandparent whose daughter died just before Christmas is developing an extremely close relationship with her daughter's child. The father has disappeared from the scene. The relationship that is developing, in the absence of parents, is mirrored by many similar relationships in Britain. In such circumstances, surely it is right that relatives other than parents should be able to apply for access.

Is the hon. Gentleman aware that the legislation of my hon. Friend the Member for Westbury (Mr. Walters) has passed the stage where it was agreed that grandparents with the leave of the court would be parties and would, therefore, have the right to be heard? That is a substantial achievement.

I am, of course, aware of that fact. I was simply using the example of a case in my constituency to emphasise that not only parents but other relatives have an interest in the welfare of the child and in building up a good relationship with him. I am delighted about the improved status of grandparents which has been achieved by the hon. Member for Westbury (Mr. Walters). I would not wish to imply that I was not delighted about that.

I make one caveat about the new clause. I imply no criticism of my hon. Friend the Member for Peckham, because she has to work within the existing legal framework. It is difficult and daunting for many people to approach any sort of court in the present legal system to apply for access or to make any other request concerning their relationship with their child.

I should like to make one other point. I may be straying a little from the new clause but, Mr. Deputy Speaker, I hope that you will allow me to press the point. I hope that the efforts by my hon. Friend the Member for Torfaen (Mr. Abse) and other hon. Members to try to establish a completely different system for court consideration of such matters will have greater success than they appear to have had hitherto. The more we can do to make court and legal proceedings less daunting and less difficult for parents, grandparents and other relatives the better. Given the legal system under which we have to operate, this new clause is a sensible provision and will enlarge the scope for those involved in the welfare of children and enable them to seek access. I support the new clause.

I agree with hon. Members who have spoken about the importance of access in child care cases. That is why in the Health and Social Services and Social Security Adjudications Act 1983, or SSASSA, as we call it in my trade, we introduced a new arrangement under which parents, guardians or custodians could appeal against termination or refusal of access to a child who was subject to a care order. In December 1983, we published a statutory code of practice under the provisions of that Act.

The work of the social services inspectorate is an important part of the DHSS operation. It has recently been concentrating on this area and has completed an inspection. We recognise the importance of access and are taking practical steps to ensure that it is improved. Our now much-trailered proposals on the reform of child care law will, as the hon. Member for Peckham (Ms. Harman) suggested, cover this area.

The hon. Lady's clause goes much further than the suggestions in our review document, where a total package is proposed. That package differs considerably from the scope of the present clause which has serious and unacceptable implications. For example, it would allow a wide range of relatives to apply for access. It would bring in a new procedure that would apply to voluntary care and was drafted in the expectation that an order would delineate in advance all the main parameters of the arrangements. It suffers from all the main disadvantages of the original clauses 1 and 2 of the Bill. My hon. Friends the Members for Westbury (Mr. Walters) and for Surrey, South-West (Mrs. Bottomley) have already said that it would necessitate the detailed involvement of the court. I hope that the hon. Lady will accept that we recognise this area as important.

Does not the Minister think that it is totally unsatisfactory that, when a number of new clauses are brought before the House and he acknowledges that they raise important points and will be dealt with when the legislation arising out of the child care law reivew comes before the House, he fails to give us a date for that? He recognises the importance of the issues but says that for technical reasons he will not at this time accept the new clause but will wait until some far distant time in the future. That is entirely unsatisfactory and unacceptable.

I do not accept that. The hon. Lady normally accepts that one of the dangers in this area is piecemeal legislation. We do not object to what my hon. Friend's Bill seeks to achieve, but having set in train the process of the massive review of the child care legislation it would not make sense to pick and choose out of the whole corpus of review material. I shall be charged again with repetition by the hon. Member for Bow and Poplar (Mr. Mikardo). I said that these proposals will be published in the autumn as a basis for legislation, but because of the nature of parliamentary arrangements I cannot give a date for that legislation. I hope that the hon. Lady will find it in her heart to be generous enough to accept that that is a firm undertaking. As I have already said, the clause has serious drawbacks. However, we accept the importance of access and the importance of improving arrangements for it, and to the extent that those improvements can be widely agreed we look forward to making recommendations in our own Bill.

This has been an interesting debate. As hon. Members were speaking I felt that we were all thinking of examples of relatives or constituents who had faced these problems. I certainly had that feeling when my hon. Friend the Member for Islington, South and Finsbury (Mr. Smith) was speaking. This new clause reflects the recommendation of the child care law review and I am a bit surprised that its acceptance is being resisted when such an august body thought it worth pursuing. This was recommendation 193 and, although I have not read the whole of the review, the fact that it is recommendation 193 leads me to believe that a lot of thought must have gone into putting together so many recommendations. That distinguished body has looked at the subject seriously and the House ought to take its recommendations seriously.

The hon. Lady spoke about recommendation 193. This a complex package that is being instituted, and there are serious dangers in taking little bits and pieces when it is a package that is at issue.

That brings me to the point that was made many times in the debate. We are adding bits on because in a Bill of this sort we have no alternative. If we had a proper comprehensive Bill, which is what I hope we will eventually get, we would not have this problem and would not have to look around for what we see as gaps or tears in the fabric of the patchwork and then try to fill them in. I accept the Minister's point that recommendation 193 is only one recommendation, but I was trying to underline its importance and saying that that was why we sought to put the new clause into effect.

I apologise to the House for not being in the Chamber during the early part of the debate.

This new clause seems to be moving in the right direction. For a number of years I served on a local authority social services committee, and I remember the difficulties that we faced when we considered precisely the terms of access in cases where children might be at risk and where the officers of the social services department were reluctant to expose the children to risk. We had difficult decisions to make and seldom went against an officer's decision, although occasionally we did. I always had serious misgivings about whether we were doing the right thing. In fairness, local authority social services departments get it right almost all of the time, but it is a tragedy when now and again they do not, because that is what hits the headlines.

I should like to give three examples, from constituency experience, of where the new clause would be relevant and appropriate, and where one parent or relative may have a real sense of injustice if the new clause is not put into effect. The first concerns a case where a child is in care, and where certain access conditions have been arranged, but they have been arranged in the knowledge that the parents are split up—that the marriage has broken down—and one of the parents does not have an adequate home. In this case, I have been approached by the father, who says that his access conditions have not been generous because, when the decision was made, he did not have an adequate home environment that the children could visit occasionally for the weekend. The father is anxious to improve his home to make it better than a bedsitter so that the children could go there. However, if the local authority is not sensitive to that and the father gets better accommodation, he has no guarantee that the limited access given to him on the basis of his bedsitter accommodation will be changed by the local authority to take account of the improved housing conditions.

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I know from my experience that the limited access that may result from housing conditions causes much distress to a separated parent. A separated parent may feel that, even if the housing conditions improve, he may not automatically get better access, which he would have obtained if he had had a proper flat when the decision was made. That is a distressing example. I hope that it does not happen too often.

The second example concerns other relatives who wish to have access. A grandmother who, I believe, was of Jamaican origin was very distressed that she was not allowed to have access to her grandchild, although the father had access. She felt shut out of a relationship that was traditional to her background and culture, and felt extremely upset that there was no way that she could challenge the decision. The father had access and the mother, who was the grandmother's daughter, was a longterm patient in hospital. The grandmother felt that her traditional family responsibilities could not be exercised. She wanted better opportunities to do so, but that was not possible.

I mentioned the third group of people—fathers—obliquely in my first example. I am not one who says that fathers alone have a sense of grievance about this, but on occasions fathers have complained bitterly to me that they have had only limited access to children in care following the breakdown of the marriage.

I cannot help thinking that the new clause would give a better opportunity to those three groups of people—those in housing difficulties, other relatives, and fathers who feel that their wish to have more access and establish a closer relationship with the child in care is frustrated because the local authority is not always sensitive to such pressure. I cannot help thinking that the Minister's arguments against the new clause, while I understand them, do not carry the weight that one would normally expect when a sensible suggestion is made. I do not fully understand why he took such a hard line against a modest but sensible proposal. After all, the courts would still have to consider the matter and could still take all the facts into account. It is not a matter of opening the door to unlimited access by people who might be thought to be not totally desirable by the social services department that has care of the child. It is a matter of the courts being a second line of appeal, as it were, for people who have a sense of grievance and injustice. I hope that the Minister will think again. The new clause is moving in the right direction.

I beg to move, That the clause be read a Second Time.

With this it will be convenient to take the following:

New clause 7—Parent's application for care and control—

I may have to delay the House a little on this group of amendments because it is a substantive change, as my hon. Friend the Member for Westbury (Mr. Walters) will be the first to agree. It is the essence of the debate that we have had not only this morning but in Committee and on Second Reading.

There is no doubt about the objective that we all share. Child abuse represents an abhorrent challenge to society. Our search is for practical steps to prevent it as far as possible and to protect children. Equally, we all accept that it is an insufficient response, in terms of the welfare of the child, simply to ensure that an abused child is kept safe by never returning him to his parents. If that were an adequate response, the responsibility of child care agencies would be much more straightforward.

The reality is that in many cases the needs and wishes of the child will best be met by a return to the natural parents or parent and the advantages of restoring and reestablishing those natural relationships will be seen as justifying such a step, even though the possibility of risk to the child cannot be entirely eliminated. So the agencies responsible for child care cannot simply pursue a safety-at-all-costs policy. They have to be prepared—in the interests of the child and in the right circumstances—to make balanced decisions, weighing carefully and professionally all the evidence and opinion available to them, which may necessarily involve some measure of risk. The debate that we shall have about new clause 5 and on the amendments to delete clauses 1 and 2 is essentially about how those decisions can and should best be made in the interests of the children concerned, not whether they should be made at all.

It will help our debate if I begin by referring to clauses 1 and 2. Those two clauses have taken up most of the time of the House both on Second Reading and in Committee. I know that my hon. Friend the Member for Westbury has regarded them as the central feature of his Bill. The clauses were supported in Committee, but concerns were expressed about whether the role envisaged for the courts was appropriate, about the practical effects on children in care, and about whether it would in practice achieve its primary purpose of protecting children who might be abused if returned home on trial.

Since the Committee my hon. Friend has been kind enough to have several discussions with me and my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Social Services. In those discussions we have been able to go into our reservations about his clauses and also let him know of the results of the wide-ranging consultations we have had since the Committee stage with bodies representing local authority, social work, legal and voluntary child care interests to ascertain their views on the proposals and on the Bill as amended in Committee. I shall not give details of those reservations today or elaborate at length on the comments from interested organisations—for reasons that I hope to make clear a little later. But I must summarise again the main reservations that we have, as I believe it important, when we are all anxious to do what is right in the interests of children, that it should be clear why the Government do not feel able to support a measure which was so clearly intended to benefit children.

Our reasons, in brief, are these. The first relates to delay. The imposition of a requirement on the local authority to go back to court, in the circumstances specified in the Bill, before returning a child in its care home on trial will inevitably lead to lengthy delays before cases can be heard. That is especially so as the Bill now provides for the court to be able to appoint a guardian ad litem for the child, and the demand for guardians in care proceedings is already leading to delays. Delay in decision making for the children in question can be particularly damaging and have long-term consequences, reducing prospects for successful return home of the child or other settled placement.

Secondly, we have concerns that the very making of a direction under clause 2 could discourage local authorities from attempting rehabilitation and lead to an undesirable categorisation of children in care. Alternatively, they may seek prematurely to discharge a care order without a prior period home on trial.

Thirdly, the imposition of conditions by the court which would apply until altered by the court would restrict the local authority's ability to respond flexibly and professionally to the child's and the family's needs and to optimise the use of its resources to help all the children in its care.

In addition to those practical objections, we have reservations about the principle of court involvement in the decisions. Courts must, of course, make and discharge care orders. They involve the transfer of legal rights between parents and local authorities and are often strongly disputed. Such decisions cannot be left to local authorities to take without there being a possibility of challenge and the case taken to court for a decision. The decision by the local authority to return a child home on trial while subject to a care order is different in character, although not necessarily less important from a child welfare angle, because there is no transfer of legal rights—the local authority remains responsible in law for the child as its legal parent and, unlike most care order proceedings, there is no dispute to be resolved between parents and local authority, so no need for a third party to settle the matter.

The argument that the court authorised the removal from home and that, therefore, the court is an appropriate forum to authorise the return is a misunderstanding of the rationale of care proceedings. Such decisions are more appropriate for the local authority, as part of its responsibility under the law to safeguard and promote the welfare of the child, than for the courts.

Following what I have said, there can be no certainty that involving the courts in sanctioning return home on trial will prevent such children from subsequently being abused. We would never know whether the clauses had their desired effects. We would know in how many cases the courts refused to sanction return home, but not what might have happened had they allowed the child to return. However, we can be more certain that the delays and restrictions which the clauses would impose on the good professional management of cases would damage the interests of many children in care, which I know is the opposite of what my hon. Friend wishes to achieve. It is clear from the consultations that we have undertaken since the Committee stage that our reservations about clauses 1 and 2 are widely shared by a broad spectrum of organisations.

Of course, many organisations advanced as part of their cases the belief that it would be wrong to have further piecemeal legislation adding yet more complexity to what is already recognised as an area of law where the need is for greater consistency and clarity. Many said that it would be especially undesirable to do so at a time when the Government are known to be considering a comprehensive major reform of the law, following the extensive review that we initiated at the end of last year. But there was no evidence from the consultations we have undertaken that the organisations concerned would like provisions on the lines of those in clauses 1 and 2 to be incorporated into the comprehensive legislation that we plan to introduce. Indeed, the reverse is the case. The consensus is that the clauses would not necessarily achieve the objectives the sponsors of the Bill wish, but would be potentially damaging to the interests of many children in care along the lines that I have described.

In our discussions with my hon. Friend, he acknowledged and took note of the views of the Government and of the bodies that we have consulted. On the understanding that the new clause to provide the Secretary of State with a regulation-making power is added to the Bill, I understand that he is now willing not to oppose the amendments to delete clauses 1 and 2. In a moment, I shall discuss the substance and purpose of the new clause, but first I wish to place on record my sincere appreciation of my hon. Friend's willingness to listen with an open mind to the views that have been put to him and his willingness at this late stage to accede to the argument that an alternative approach should be followed, despite his strong personal commitment to the idea of an independent check through the courts.

The alternative approach to which I referred starts from the premise that the right way to promote the welfare of abused children is, in broad terms, through improving the performance of the local authorities which are statutorily charged with that task. There can be no satisfactory external substitute for the involvement of experienced staff acting within a well-considered framework of policies directed towards and centred on the welfare of the child.

We shall soon publish a draft guide for local agencies on working together in dealing with child abuse, and the report of inspection by the social services inspectorate of assessment by social workers of children who have been at risk of abuse and the supervision of social workers handling child abuse cases. That inspection focused on work with children placed home on trial. Both documents in their different ways will, we hope, help local authorities to improve practices and procedures where a child is returned home on trial, in respect of the decision itself and the subsequent arrangements for the care and well-being of the child at home, including health, growth, and development. Both documents reinforce the need for professionals working with the child and family to remain child-centred, and always to have the welfare of the child as their first consideration, as the law requires.

Were there no regulations, restrictions, guidance or a framework for supervision before the Jasmine Beckford case?

Of course there were, and there was a great deal of experience, but the experience is developing and lessons are being learnt. We may argue about this, but the Jasmine Beckford case in no way supported the suggestion that magistrates get the answers right and social workers get them wrong. Mistakes can be made in any area. We are anxious to strengthen the professionals working in this area, although neither I nor any member of the Government would suggest that we have found perfection. We must continually strive to co-operate and educate and to ensure that the best practice, which is very good, is spread and becomes the norm. That must be the way forward.

I hope that my hon. and learned Friend will be reassured if I say that the Government do not believe that there is no place for the further involvement of the law in these matters. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Social Services announced that following extensive consultations on their child care law review the Government intend to introduce a comprehensive Bill on child care law as soon as parliamentary time allows. That Bill is likely to include some changes specifically aimed at increasing the powers of local authorities and the courts to protect children who may be at risk.

The Government broadly share the views of those who have argued that, pending the introduction of comprehensive legislation, there should be no more piecemeal changes in what is already a complex and confusing legal framework, but the opportunity provided by this Bill gives us scope for making limited changes where they can sensibly be made ahead of a major Bill. The new clause to which I shall now speak falls into that category.

The new clause would give the Secretary of State power to make regulations in respect of the discharge of the responsibilities by local authorities for children in their care where a return home on trial is contemplated. The lack of such a power to make regulations in this area is clearly anomalous as powers already exist, and are exercised, to regulate arrangements made by local authorities for other placements for children in care—in children's homes or boarded out with foster parents. The regulation power proposed by the clause will cover not only placements at home with parents, but placements with other relatives and friends not covered by the boarding-out regulations. It would apply in respect of all children in care regardless of the reasons for their entry into care.

Subsection (2)(a) would enable requirements to be set governing the way in which decisions are taken to return a child home on trial. That would enable requirements to be laid down, for example, to ensure that the local authority always obtained the views of the health authority where it had been concerned with the child, and that other interested persons—for example, foster parents and concerned relatives—were formally notified of the intention to return a child home and could have an opportunity to comment before any decision was put into effect. This subsection would be wide enough also to provide for some involvement of local authority members in the decision-making process, should it be thought desirable. I stress that the Government have reached no view about that at this stage.

Subsection (2)(b) would enable the regulations to cover matters such as the arrangements for the supervision by the authority of the children concerned and for securing regular monitoring of their health as well as their social well-being.

The detailed content of the regulations would, in the usual way, be the subject of consultation with local authority and other interests before they were made. It would be important to strike the right balance between providing for the desirable degree of legal requirement to support and promote good practice in all cases, and being over-prescriptive in ways which would hamper the local authority's ability to act flexibly and responsibly to the requirements of the individual circumstances. I hope that our consultations will help to get this balance right. However, I am sure that there is a sound prospect here of providing what I described earlier as a valuable statutory underpinning of good professional practice, and of reducing the possibility of standards of decision-making and practice falling below acceptable levels in any individual cases.

The Government accordingly believe that regulations to govern return home on trial can play a positive and useful role in improving the prospects both of improved child protection and positive work for rehabilitation. In the Government's view, this is the right way ahead, rather than seeking an increased role for the courts in local authority arrangements of individual cases.

I speak in favour of amendments Nos. 1 and 13, which leave out the existing clauses 1 and 2 respectively, and of amendments Nos. 30 and 31, which provide for the new clause to come into force by order made by statutory instrument. I do not wish to take up the time of the House by discussion of new clause 7, which seems to suffer from the same objections as clauses 1 and 2, or the other amendments bracketed with it which concern the existing clauses 1 and 2, which I hope the House will decide to drop. I commend new clause 5 to the House.

Any hon. Member who has followed the need for legislation is anxious to see the introduction of speedy comprehensive legislation. The Minister referred to it and said that it would come soon. I believe what he says, and hope that it will come very soon. We shall follow the progress with much interest.

I greatly regret that the Minister's new clause will negate and replace the original clause 1, although the scope of that clause was considerably redefined and restricted in Committee. I still believe, as do many hon. Members from all parts of the House, that the reintroduction of the magistrates court to review in certain limited and specific cases, and only when the magistrates making the original care order had so decreed, the decision taken by a local authority to return a child in care to the home from which it had been removed by court order on grounds of cruelty, neglect and moral danger, would have had a significant and beneficial effect. It would have introduced an experienced body of people, detached from the case under consideration, to review a decision taken by a group of people closely associated and involved, and, on certain occasions, too closely involved, both with the child and all members of its family.

I remain convinced that such a review by a judicial body detached from the in-house atmosphere of the decision taken by social workers would have been salutary. Moreover, in a small but significant number of cases, it would have provided an important additional safeguard for the child, although I accept that in some other cases, perhaps more numerous, it might have slowed the process of the return of the child.

In Committee my hon. Friend the Minister and the hon. Member for Peckham (Ms. Harman) were the only two Members present to vote against the clause. However, despite the sympathetic hearing given to me and some of my hon. Friends by the Minister and Secretary of State, we failed in our efforts to persuade his Department.

I also had to take account of the fact that, although I received widespread popular backing for the measure, the wholehearted support and valuable assistance of the Family Law Bar Association, and, in private, the support of a number of senior judges, the Law Society and several other organisations concerned with child welfare did not accept the strength and validity of our argument about magistrates courts. Perhaps I may say how much the Bill owes to the enormous work and help given by the Family Law Bar Association, particularly by Mr. Robert Johnson, QC and Mr. James Holman.

There is a certain illogicality in accepting that magistrates should make the original court order which places a child in care, and the need recently announced by the Lord Chancellor for expanding training for magistrates dealing with care orders, but not accepting their competence to deal with the limited number of cases to which I have referred. Perhaps the daughter of the hon. Member for Bow and Poplar (Mr. Mikardo) will agree with that. Logical or not, that was the position that my supporters and I had to face. Therefore, we agreed that it would be sensible in the circumstances to accept the Government's amendments, thus preserving other valuable proposals in the Bill.

Although more limited and different in character, the proposals in the Government's new clause provide useful additions to the present state of the law which will considerably strengthen the protection of children at risk within the existing parameters.

Although the clause introduced by the Government differs substantially from the proposals which I envisaged when drafting the original clause, I am wholly satisfied that a considerable improvement will have been achieved as a result of its introduction. Therefore, I welcome it.

I speak as a lay person on the Bill, but I wish to make a number of points.

First, I congratulate the hon. Member for Westbury (Mr. Walters) on the hard and sincere work which he has done on the Bill and on his attitude towards it, which was illustrated by his speech. I can hardly wait for the family courts which the Minister has promised us. They are a major step forward, and I hope that the Minister's deeds will be as good as his words because those courts are the essential missing link.

I am particularly glad that grandparents and others in the family will come within the Bill's provisions. I believe that the new clause will give force to making provision for accommodation for children. After all, they are our primary concern. But there is also provision for parents, guardians and friends to be involved in proper consultation and supervision.

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We are discussing this issue because authorities often inadvertently neglect their responsibilities. I would hesitate to say that we are talking about only a few cases. There are probably more than we know about, and many cases probably exist under the surface and do not come to light. If new clause 5 means improved supervision, and that we can reach some of those cases under the surface, we will have made a substantial step forward.

The guidelines are being laid down, and the Secretary of State will impose requirements on local authorities to ensure that they follow them. If that too means the more effective supervision of children, I welcome that step and recognise it as an improvement to the Bill.

I rise to oppose the new clause and its attendant amendments, and to voice my strong objection to the Government's effective decimation of an eminently sensible, necessary and widely supported Bill, which I have had the privilege of sponsoring. It is widely supported not only in the House but in the country.

I do not blame my hon. Friend the Member for Westbury (Mr. Walters) for accepting the situation. If he had not done so, the entire Bill would have been lost, and saving something good is better than losing everything good. Those of us who are concerned about child welfare and the need to stop Jasmine Beckford-type cases recurring greatly appreciate the fact that my hon. Friend the Member for Westbury has chosen this subject for his Bill from among many other important subjects for legislation. He has, moreover, pursued the Bill with great skill and determination.

But I do blame the Government for what is, in effect, a craven surrender to the pressure of the social workers' lobby. As a result, a measure will be rejected that might otherwise have slightly but intelligently extended the rule of law. Both these effects are as unlikely manifestations of the Government of my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister as it is possible to imagine.

Does my hon. and learned Friend believe that the Law Society has been recruited by what he describes as the social workers' lobby? Can he explain the role of the magistrates in the Jasmine Beckford case? Was he happy with their role then, and does he believe that it justifies his case now?

I shall mention the magistrates shortly. However, my hon. Friend the Minister is quite right—I bracket the Law Society with the Government for their craven surrender to the pressures of the social workers' lobby.

In his list of those craven people who have surrendered to the social workers' lobby, does the hon. and learned Gentleman include the Association of County Councils, the Association of Metropolitan Authorities, the Justices Clerks' Society, the Magistrates Association, the Children's Legal Centre, the Law Society, the Association of Directors of Social Services and numerous other organisations? Have they, too, suddenly and most uncharacteristically been led by the nose by social workers?

The social welfare workers' organisations are very persuasive. They have considerable influence over local authorities, because they are advised by social services officers. Social services officers have close and necessary liasion on a day-to-day basis with social workers. It should come as no surprise to the hon. Lady that a few people who feel strongly about an issue and who are in close day-to-day contact with those who have to take the wider decisions can influence them. We all know that that happens, and it has clearly happened in this case.

I object to what the Government are doing for four reasons. First, what they are doing is contrary to the wishes of the majority of our constituents—the very people who sent us to Parliament. They trust the courts but they do not always trust social workers. They admire and value the dedication of social workers, as we all do, but they do not always trust them to operate without adequate supervision and control. They do not trust them to act without proper control because they read about cases such as that of Jasmine Beckford. There are rules and regulations, a framework for action and a structure for adequate supervision and yet, left to the devices of the social workers, these poor babies and children are abused and their lives destroyed.

That is because the system as it exists is inadequately supervised and controlled. That may be because social workers are under extreme pressure through the size of their caseload—some people are not able to make proper judgments when they are under supreme pressure. Or it may be because they become friendly with, close to, sympathetic to and committed to the families concerned. I do not blame them for that, for anyone would do so in any circumstances. However, it means that the system as it has hitherto operated has been shown to be inadequate, and gravely and tragically inadequate in some instances.

The people support the idea that there is a need for the court to supervise social workers' actions. That is not because the court left to itself would know best. As the hon. Member for Bow and Poplar (Mr. Mikardo) said, the court would not have the necessary experience, despite all the training programmes, to make decisions on its own. However, the courts would make decisions on the advice of social workers, tested by others who have representations to make, and it would act as an objective filter, a protection or a final test, before potentially harmful and risky decisions were taken.

I believe that that is what the people understand to be the function of the magistrates court in child welfare cases. I believe that the people wanted a Bill to take account of that. That is why I think that the Government are going contrary to the people's wishes.

Secondly, what the Government are doing is contrary to the wishes of the House, which on 31 January granted a Second Reading to a Bill which contained the very provision that is now being snuffed out. The very essence of the original Bill was to give the magistrates court which made the care order the power to decide whether the child, the subject of the care order, should be returned to parents whose behaviour has resulted in the state's protection to the child being given in the first place.

When the Government first showed signs of beginning to crumble at the behest of the care organisations and the social welfare workers' lobby in Committee—and the Law Society, for which I hold no brief, financial or otherwise—my hon. Friend the Member for Westbury offered a compromise—always look for the compromise. My hon. Friend offered a sensible compromise that had the effect that cases would be referred to the magistrates court if the magistrate who made the original care order stipulated that that should happen before the child was allowed home. The good sense of that compromise was that it ensured that in the most worrying cases magistrates could reserve to themselves the right to reconsider the case.

The Government rejected even that compromise. As a result, they had to suffer two indignities. The first indignity was that of being defeated on a vote by their own supporters, who were reflecting the will of the House on Second Reading. The second indignity was having as their only supporter the hon. Member for Peckham (Ms. Harman)—as bizarre a union between my hon. Friend the Minister and the hon. Lady as it is possible to conceive of in this astonishing place. By overruling the Committee's decision today, my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of State is clearly going against the wishes of the House.

My third objection to the Government's emasculation of the Bill is that they are concentrating almost total power, subject only to some relatively small although perhaps important improvements that my hon. Friend is to make, in the hands of the social workers. The Government have done this, despite the fact that in a few but nevertheless important cases social workers have been found wanting. That is why, alone, I believe among Government Back-Benchers, I went into the Lobby in support of new clause 1 because it gave to the courts the power to consider all matters with a little more care and thoroughness.

If the social worker lobby had accepted its errors and taken full responsibility to purge its lapses by a self-regulating reform of the system, perhaps one could have had more confidence in it. However, in the Jasmine Beckford case, some of the social workers tried to blame what they did on the juvenile court that had made the care order. In his hardly completely objective or unbiased report, Mr. Louis Blom-Cooper said that they were misled by the chairman of the court having said that it was hoped that the child would be returned—

Will my hon. and learned Friend give way?

Perhaps my hon. Friend will allow me to finish this point. If the people that we are about to trust with unfettered power and judgment cannot recognise that a statement from the chairman of a bench was no more than a gesture of long-term hope and optimism, the court having taken the child away from its parents, it cannot fill us with much confidence about the judgment of social workers.

It is manifestly clear that on that occasion the Willesden juvenile court said that the child must go into care, that the social workers would give the matter their urgent, continuing attention and that one day it was hoped that things would be better and the child would be able to return home. That is not the same as saying that the child must be returned at the earliest possible moment, perhaps to be put at risk, without considering whether the parents were fitted enough to have the child back, since they had been responsible for the damage to the child that resulted in the care order. For social workers, or anybody speaking for them, to say that it was not really their fault because the court had given a strong indication that at the earliest possible moment Jasmine Beckford should be returned to her home was a distortion of any moderate and objective reading of the situation.

The social worker organisation is wonderful, but it needs to be controlled, like any other organisation that is closely connected with the wrongdoing section of our society. The same applies to a probation officer when he gives evidence in court. However many armed robberies there may have been, or however many serious assaults may have been committed, a very responsible probation officer can usually be found to say, "Poor fellow, he had a bad childhood and he has a bad past. He is trying to put it all behind him, but he lost his temper. The proper sentence is to put him under care, where we can keep an eye on him." We understand why probation officers sometimes come to that conclusion, but it brings home to those of us who are involved in the law the necessity for another body to make an objective judgment over and above the opinion of a witness that is so committed to the individual concerned that their judgment may for the time being be clouded as far as the wider interests of society or the particular interests of the child are concerned. After all, social workers cannot talk to very young children. They cannot say to the baby of one or two years, "Would you like to go back to your parents?" They hear only one side of the story, and it is very difficult to assume that always, in every case, even the best-meaning social worker will not make a misjudgment.

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Of course social workers do not like to have their empire interfered with—nobody likes that. That is one of the forces of behaviour with which we incessantly come to grips in this place. That is all the more reason why we should be careful before we accord to them the absolute powers as this emasculated Bill now more or less does. Social workers want to keep their power—the question is whether it is wise to let them.

My final objection to what the Government are doing is that their stated justifications seem to be without much substance. It is said that the social workers are more professional than the lay magistrates in child care. That is true, and if the Bill gave to the courts the power to examine, check and filter before deciding to return the child to the parents' care, with no part played by the social worker, I should not support it. However, we are talking about the court acting on the advice of the social worker and after testing that advice against other people's representation, and the court applying its objective experience and good sense to the problem.

It was said in a letter to The Times of 19 March 1986 by Mr. Blom-Cooper, who conducted the panel of inquiry into the Jasmine Beckford case:

"In our view, the experience of Jasmine Beckford's death—and some others—is that magistrates in juvenile courts lack the necessary professionalism to be able to make the difficult judgments which have to balance the risk of future abuse against the need to reunite families."

If it is not too technical for magistrates to decide whether a child should he taken away in the first place, why is it too technical for magistrates to be able to decide whether the child should be returned to the parents? My hon. Friend the Minister said that that point is a misunderstanding of the mysteries of the child care world and what it is about. That is manifest nonsense—it is gobbledegook to protect empires. There is no substance in the criticisms that magistrates are technically incapable of making the second part of the decision once they are capable of making the first part.

It is then said that the Bill that was given a Second Reading would mean delays before a child properly returnable to his parents could be allowed so to do. However, if there are delays it will be because it is better to be careful, thorough and safe than to be sorry. It may be that there would be delays, although there are shorter delays in the magistrates courts than in the High Court, and that the magistrates courts delays can be speeded up. A priority could be given to cases of reconsideration of a care order. It is not necessary that such a case should go to the end of every list, and that one should have to wait for two, three or four months before the matter is reconsidered, but it is conceded that there will be delays. If those delays lead to thorough and careful reconsideration they will be well worth having.

It is said by some that the Bill with its original clauses 1 and 2 is a piecemeal change in the law and therefore bad. I agree that reforming the law in a piecemeal way is not ideal. Even the Minister agreed with that. Some of the Bill's opponents say that it is better to wait for comprehensive reform of the child welfare law than to tinker. If they wait for comprehensive change, they have a long wait coming. I asked the Minister earlier whether he could guarantee that such legislation would be introduced within the lifetime of this Parliament. He could not give that guarantee. Still less can he guarantee that such comprehensive changes will come in the lifetime of the next Parliament, or of the Parliament after that.

We have been waiting for years for family courts. We have been waiting for years for comprehensive legislation. Since we must wait for years and years for the comprehensive, we must do the piecemeal. We never object to that. Most of the Government's legislation is piecemeal. The argument that it is better not to have the piecemeal but to wait indefinitely for the comprehensive might end in the deaths of more Jasmine Beck fords throughout the country. That is wholly and utterly undesirable.

The Government's action in effectively killing the substance of the Bill has saddened me because it has been done with little or no justification. I forbear from dividing the House only because that would take up valuable time which my hon. Friend the Member for Davyhulme (Mr. Churchill) might need for his important and widely supported Bill and because I have a feeling that not sufficient hon. Members are here to ensure that the Bill survives if we divide against it.

I hope that the Government will have second thoughts and that if they do not have second thoughts of their own volition the noble Lords in another place will have second thoughts for them. If they do, a measure that has the support, not only of the House of Commons on Second Reading, but of the people in the country, a sensible, wise and intelligent improvement in the law will be restored and a measure that has the support of the whole House of Commons will go on to the statute book. I hope that the original measure is not yet wholly dead.

The hon. and learned Member for Burton (Mr. Lawrence) has a well-deserved reputation as a doughty fighter in the House, in the courts and in other forums. Today he engaged—it was quite a performance—in two separate civil wars. He engaged in a civil war between hon. Members on the Government Benches and in a civil war between various eminent people and various branches of the legal profession. I do not wish to interfere in any of those quarrels, certainly not in the quarrel between the stratospheric lawyers. I am a mere mortal, groping around in the foothills. Who am I to pass judgment upon the legal immortals sitting at the top of Mount Olympus?

I was puzzled by one part of the hon. and learned Member's speech. He began and ended by telling us what the people of the country want. I wondered what his authority was for saying that. I wondered whether he conducted a referendum and how he took the census. We all tend to judge subjectively from what we hear in our constituencies and at our surgeries.

I have heard a lot of criticism of social workers in relation to child care cases. However, I have heard many more of my constituents complaining about the behaviour of the courts. In both cases, no doubt, their views were affected by subjective considerations. So I reckon that I do not know what the people want, and that the hon. and learned Gentleman does not know either. It was uncharacteristically pretentious for him to pretend that he does.

Unlike the hon. and learned Member for Burton, I believe that the new clause improves the Bill. It still has some defects, but it will be better for the inclusion of the clause. If I had any reservations about voting for the Third Reading of the original Bill, I have few, if any, about voting for the amended version.

I agree with almost everything that the Minister said, but one passage worried me. I am not sure that I heard him aright, because he was galloping along at a fair old pace. He reminded me of a colt running its first race in a five furlong maiden on hard going. However, if I did not misunderstand the Minister, he cast doubt on whether any say in these matters should be given to the elected members of a local authority who serve on the social services committee. If the Minister said that, I disagree with him.

I said earlier that I have great regard for the overwhelming majority of social workers and directors of social services, but we must not get away from the principle that all local authority officers, like all officers of Government Departments, must be subject to the supervision and control of the elected representatives of the people. Otherwise, we shall slip out of being a democracy and into being a bureacracy.

Eighteen amendments have been selected for debate with the new clause. My hon. Friend the Member for Barking (Ms. Richardson) and I are responsible for seven of those amendments, but if the first—to delete clause 1—is accepted, the other six will fall, so I shall not waste the time of the House by referring to them, except to say that the fact that it was possible reasonably to table so many amendments to a single clause demonstrates that the drafting of that clause was defective. I join the Minister in saying farewell to it without pangs of regret.

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Bow and Poplar (Mr. Mikardo). I have much more sympathy for his judgment on these matters than for his judgment on the views expressed by my hon. Friend the Member for Davyhulme (Mr. Churchill). I should like to feel that the hon. Gentleman's judgments on those two issues are not related.

I have great sympathy with the arguments of my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Burton (Mr. Lawrence) who put the case for those of us who felt strongly in Committee that clause 1 should remain in the Bill. However, I take issue with what my hon. and learned Friend said about the responsibilities of social workers and the way in which they conducted themselves.

The British Association of Social Workers was among the first to come forward with a detailed and rigorous code of practice for social workers in child abuse cases. It included not pious words, but ways of managing and enforcing the practice set out in the code.

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Some of us felt extremely strongly about the court that had had a part to play in the difficult decision to return to his home the child who had already been subjected to injury, abuse or moral danger in his home. We felt that the matter should go back before the court for approval. We did so for a number of reasons. I acknowledge that we failed to convince not only the Government but the many well-meaning voluntary organisations which play a part in influencing public opinion. Perhaps we must take some responsibility for not having worked harder to explain our reasons and thinking behind the steps we took.

I accept the concern about delays. I agree with my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Burton that, if there is a will, there is a way, and that the problem can be overcome. I am concerned about the cut-off period of seven days. A child can be returned home up until seven days without returning to court. It has been put to me that the increase takes place gradually. A child who has been going home regularly for two, three or four days may decide that he wants to stay for seven days. In that event, the court has to give approval. I recognise that parents have weight in that respect. Approval would have to be obtained from the court if older children at boarding school want to go home during the holidays. I can see the sense in that.

I find it difficult to understand why the Government were unable to agree to the court setting conditions for the return home. In the review of child care law, great weight was put on the desirability of enhancing a supervision order so that requirements set down by the court can be made in the supervision order. For example, the supervisor should be informed of the child's address, the supervisor should have access to the child, the child should be medically examined, the child should comply with the supervisor's directions to attend at specified places for specified activities, the child should receive medical and psychiatric treatment where necessary, and the child should comply with directions on education.

That recommendation of the child care law review would allow great intervention of the court in the future treatment of a child. It has been suggested that half a loaf is better than no loaf at all and that, if we can move some way at this stage, perhaps when we come forward with comprehensive proposals there will be greater scope for encouraging the court's intervention.

There is another area in which I feel the court makes a valuable contribution. Too much is made of the Beckford case in the sense that there were faults on all sides. Of course, the magistrate should never have said, "We hope that you will be reunited," or whatever. That was straightforward bad practice. I am pleased that the Lord Chancellor is setting up a training scheme for juvenile court magistrates. It has been made abundantly clear that the magistrates' advice was unwanted and unuseful.

One cannot help but say that the social worker involved in the case failed to see the child on her own. One cannot fulfil one's parental obligations as the representative of a local authority if one fails to see the child for whom one is discouraging those responsibilities alone.

I believe that it would be of value to have an independent hearing prior to the child returning home. I accept that we have to find different ways of achieving that. It would be an independent element hearing all the evidence and information. I shall make a few comments on the way in which that can be achieved.

My hon. Friend has put her finger on the real value of a court. The first question that a court would have asked in the Jasmine Beckford case was, "When did you last see the child at the home?" The answer would have been, "I have not seen the child at the home." It is inconceivable that the court would then have allowed Jasmine Beckford to go home to her parents until the matter had been looked into further. My hon. Friend has put her finger on a wonderful example of the value of the judicial process as a test.

If my hon. and learned Friend will bear with me, my understanding is that the child had been seen before she returned home. The incident occurred when the child was at home under the care order. If it were a condition that the child attended a medical examination, that would ensure that the child was seen. A court hearing would have the value of ensuring that there was a thorough reappraisal of the history of the case, the factors concerned and the personalities involved.

We are being encouraged to move down the line of regulations. I believe that there is a need for an independent element. It is abundantly clear that a case or review conference cannot be chaired by a person with management responsibility for the person implementing the decision. It cannot be chaired by the supervisor of the social worker concerned. A person with direct management responsibility for the key worker would not be able to separate himself from resource issues and many other local variables.

A person with a supervisory responsibility for the work involved would be subject to exactly the same procedure identified by my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Burton—great emotional identification with the family, which could sometimes cloud his judgment. We have all identified the fact that that emotional identification with and feeling for the family is one of the best tools for helping the family to improve and get over its difficulties. We should not regard it as distinctly unprofessional.

I am extremely wary about any suggestion that the independent element on the review should be an elected representative of the local authority. I am deeply concerned about recent reports of too much political interference of the most destructive sort in social work practice. We all know about cases in which racial issues have become involved, global aspirations about racial values applied and social workers questioned about particular cases. That is not helpful.

The only aspect which we are not covering in any way is what the parents make of the events and their responsibilities and whether they feel that they have been given a fair hearing. If I had an overall critcism of the voluntary organisations which have responded to the Bill, it would be that they seem to have little understanding of the perplexity of many parents about the way in which decisions are made behind closed doors by do-gooders who, in the parents' view, have already made up their minds. A court hearing on this vital decision would, first, make the parents realise that all the issues had been considered fully and fairly and, secondly, spell out to the parents their responsibilities and the seriousness of the matter.

I hope that my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of State, in bringing forward the regulations, will consider the way in which parents will be formally addressed—whether there is to be a formal meeting in the local authority's offices, whether there is to be a document setting out the details in writing and whether an official will have the job of emphasising the seriousness of the matter. In some senses, such a formal meeting would have the weight of a court hearing with the parents. It would be similar to police cautioning in the juvenile bureau. Some ceremony would be attached to the procedures. I believe that that would be helpful.

We are being encouraged to follow what one would have to call boarding-in regulations. We shall have to see how they, together with the review of child care law, develop concrete proposals. I regret that the Bill has not been able to move in the direction that we had hoped. I also recognise that that is apparently because we failed to convince a great number of others who are as anxious as ourselves to see that child care practice and provision for abused children should be improved.

I want to speak only to new clause 7 which is down in my name. As my hon. Friend the Member for Bow and Poplar (Mr. Mikardo) has said, the amendments that we have down will become redundant if, as we expect, clause 1 goes. New clause 7 has a slightly different principle, but the Minister dismissed it in his closing sentence when he said that it was subject to some of the same objections as clause 1. Perhaps it is, but I confess to being a lay person and I do not know whether it is or not.

New clause 7 was drafted by the Family Rights Group which saw it as an extension of the principle contained in clause 1. The existing clause 1 gives the court the power to decide whether or not a child should be placed at home on trial. It is just and logical that the court should exercise this power following applications from families as well as from local authorities.

A common problem faced by children in families is that the local authority does not do the work which would enable the child in care to return home. Although children and parents can apply to discharge orders, the courts are understandably reluctant to discharge an order unless a child is already living at home and the process of rehabilition has been shown to work. If a care order is discharged before any rehabilitation work is started, the child will go home without any preparation and there will be little support or supervision.

The child care law review working party was also aware of this problem, as I am sure the Minister knows. As a result, it recommended that a juvenile court should be able to make orders for phased rehabilitation. We think that new clause 7 is in line with that recommendation. Although I shall not press it, I should like to place it on record that it is intended as a helpful addition to the previous clause 1 of the Bill which, we expect, will now go in favour of the Minister's new clause.

I spoke strongly on Second Reading and in Committee in support of clauses 1 and 2 and I do not propose to repeat what I said on those occasions. In any event, the arguments have been well deployed by my hon. Friend the Member for Westbury (Mr. Walters) and by my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Burton (Mr. Lawrence). It is a pity that the clauses are to be dropped. They would have offered additional protection to the child and to the social worker. That is an aspect that has not been considered.

It is a pity that a number of the organisations to which my hon. Friend the Member for Surrey, South-West (Mrs. Bottomley) has referred seem to have misunderstood or misinterpreted that which my hon. Friend and his colleagues were trying to do in clauses 1 and 2. Of course, one cannot entirely ignore the strength of the recommendations that they made. I was more impressed by some of their representations than by the case advanced by my hon. Friend the Minister. I am bound to say that his arguments against the clauses did not hold up. I argued against him in Committee and will not repeat my arguments here. He says they introduce the principle of court involvement in these decisions. That is exactly what they do and exactly what we are arguing there should be. Again, I do not need to repeat all the arguments because we have heard them all in this debate. There is perhaps a philosophical difference between us about how cases of this sort should be heard.

My hon. and learned Friend the Member for Burton spoke of the Bill being decimated. I would go further and say that the heart is being torn from it. I admire and commend the gracious manner in which my hon. Friend the Member for Westbury has taken the way in which the Bill has been treated. The heart having been torn from it, the transplant is modest, but at least it is better than losing the Bill altogether. The proposals that have been made are an improvement on the present situation. While I accept them, I do not do so with great enthusiasm.

It is right that clause 1 should be deleted and that new clause 5 should be inserted. That will improve the Bill. None the less, I am unhappy about the situation in which we are discussing new clause 5. The measure is small when one considers the comprehensive framework of child care law. My criticism is that we are discussing it rather than the comprehensive review. However, that is not a criticism of the hon. Member for Westbury (Mr. Walters), by any stretch of the imagination, but it is a criticism of the Government. It is not the fault of the hon. Member for Westbury that he has not introduced legislation giving effect to the child care law review. As a private Member, he is not able to do so. But it is wrong that we should be discussing only the returning home of a child or regulations on accommodation at home of a child in care. We are not allowed to decide on access, revocation or discharge of orders. That has to wait. If the Government had had the political will, they could have brought comprehensive child care legislation before the House, but they simply lack the political will to do so.

I fear very much that nothing we have heard from the Minister gives us any reason to hope that we shall get a child care law review in the lifetime of this Parliament. That will be a great disappointment to all those who want to see a comprehensive improvement. It will also be a great disappointment to all the organisations and people who have worked so hard to achieve a consensus to enable the Government to bring forward a comprehensive Bill. The piecemeal criticism is not a criticism of the hon. Member for Westbury or his Bill, but it is a criticism of the Government.

I am also disappointed that we are discussing new clause 5 and the deletion of clause 1 in the context of the old juvenile court system that we now have, not in the context of family courts. If we had a system of family courts, I do not think that there would be objections to greater involvement of the courts in the decision whether to send a child home. But let us look at what the so-called scrutiny of the courts as currently constituted would have meant under clause 1 when considering whether to send a child home.

First, we know that there would be delays. There already are delays. The Magistrates Association and the Justices Clerks Society are absolutely certain that, without radical changes, an addition to their jurisdiction in that way would cause delay. We heard in Committee and on Second Reading of the real problems that delay can cause. It is not just a technical matter, but concerns the breakdown of relationships during the period when the child is in care.

There is also a problem of continuity. Extra bits of jurisdiction would be given to the juvenile court in relation to family matters, and there might be a different bench each time one comes before the court. One must also consider the lack of experience of a juvenile court because as the jurisdiction of those courts is currently constituted they cover a whole range of matters. However well-intentioned they are and however great their aptitude, they will not gain the experience that will help them to give sensible scrutiny.

People have said, "If juvenile courts are experienced enough to decide to take a child into care and to decide on conditions of access, why are they not experienced enough to decide that a child should be returned home to his parents?" But when a child is taken into care or a parent applies to vary the terms on which access was granted, there are two sides to the case, so the magistrates are still operating in an adversarial system and will have brought before them the two sides of the case between which they must decide.

The trouble with clause 1 is that it deals with cases in which both parties agree. The local authority wants the child to go home, or it would not have applied to the court, and the parents want the child to come home, or it would be pointless for the local authority to bring the matter before the court. The court should consider those cases only if it can exercise an inquisitorial role. If not, all that will happen is that everyone argues on the same side and the court can only rubber-stamp the decision. The hon. and learned Member for Burton asked, "How can social workers make a sensible decision if they have heard only one side of the case?" How can magistrates in a juvenile court make a decision worth all the delay involved if they, too, will hear only one side of the case? They will hear only the local authority and the parents agreeing.

If we had the system that exists in Scotland and that is proposed under the family court, with a mixture of the adversarial and the inquisitorial approach, and with court welfare officers to go behind the unanimity of the evidence presented to the court, such extra scrutiny would be worth the delay and bureaucracy involved. But otherwise the decision would be a sham which would cause delay, confuse the lines of responsibility and provide no better scrutiny.

I regret that the new clause was not introduced in Committee. Had it been, we could have amended it so that it made sense. We have a rough idea of what it means from its title, which is

"Regulations as to accommodation at home of children in care."

We also have a rough idea of its meaning from the Minister's explanation. But I defy anyone to understand what this means:

"The Secretary of State may by regulations make provision as to the accommodation under the charge and control of a parent, guardian, relative or friend of children who are in the care of a local authority."

It is legal gobbledegook. Perhaps "charge and control" and other matters are mentioned in other parts of child care law, but that is no excuse for introducing an extremely complicated and muddled new clause to deal with a simple concept. Efforts should be made to ensure that new measures can be understood in their own right and that we need not call upon the services of, for example, the hon. and learned Member for Burton before we can understand what we are discussing.

The hon. Member for Westbury and the hon. and learned Member for Burton talked about public support for the Bill. The hon. Member for Westbury said that it had widespread public support. I agree that there is widespread public support for something to be done about the law and that there is widespread anxiety about what has happened recently to children in care. But that does not mean that there is widespread support for the means by which the Bill tries to achieve those aims. We should acknowledge the feeling that the Government should recognise the widespread pressure for a comprehensive child care law Bill and for the introduction of family courts. I agree that that public opinion exists and that the Government should respond to it by doing what they have failed to do so far—they should guarantee to introduce within the lifetime of this Parliament a child care law review and the implementation of family courts. We would like to see both effected together because some changes in child care law cannot be supported properly without changing the forum in which they are discussed.

The hon. and learned Member for Burton talked about many organisations being led by the nose by the social workers' lobby. That is absolute garbage. The Law Society and social workers have often disagreed. The Law Society and the Legal Action Group have often disagreed. Indeed, I am sure that they disagree more than they agree. The Association of Directors of Social Services finds it easy to disagree with the Association of County Councils, as is its right, and the ACC often disagrees with the Association of Metropolitan Authorities. It is rare to find the Justices Clerks Society and the Magistrates Association agreeing with the children's legal centre.

The fact remains that all those organisations, representing everyone in the field except for the Family Law Bar Association, reached a concensus that clause 1 was wrong and would do more harm than good. It is ridiculous to suggest that somehow they have been swept up in a tide of emotion. They have all separately considered it from their point of view and reached the same conclusion. The hon. and learned Gentleman should accept that, instead of suggesting that they have all abdicated their responsibility and been led by the nose.

I think I heard the Minister suggest that the Government would produce a pamphlet on working together on child abuse directed at encouraging agencies to work together to deal with child abuse. Obviously, agencies must cooperate to ensure that a problem which is recognised in one part of the system does not go unrecognised in another part which might lead to a wrong decision. Obviously, there must be co-operation and planning on an inter-agency basis.

I venture to suggest that health visitors, social workers and teachers in Southwark will probably regard a booklet on working together on child abuse with some degree of cynicism. The ability to work together on a sensible basis requires that one does one's job properly and liaises with other organisations. At present the pressures on the Health Service mean that people leave hospital much sooner than would be the case if they convalesced there. That has increased enormously the pressure on health visitors. The deteriorating housing conditions caused by cuts in capital spending and rate support grant to local authorities, and increasing joblessness, which has increased poverty, has increased pressure on both social workers and health visitors.

A key element in the inability of social workers to respond properly to increased pressures and demands has related to social services spending. The increase in spending on social services was only 0·5 per cent. in the last financial year. Even the Department of the Environment recognises that, just to stand still, there must be an annual increase of 2·5 per cent.

If the ability of health visitors, teachers and social workers to do their job is undermined by a lack of increased spending with which to meet the growing and very real demands on their services, they will not want to be told that the problem can be solved by a booklet on working together on child abuse. Many of them would see that as yet another cynical public relations exercise on the part of a Government, who could really do something about child abuse. For example, they could introduce a comprehensive Bill on child care law or reform the court system by introducing a family court, yet they have singularly failed to do so. They could ensure that the Health Service, housing, and social services have adequate resources. I look forward with interest to the booklet, but I should also like the Government to take some real action. Instead of using the Bill as an important spur to action over an issue about which there is immense public concern, they have used it and the booklet as an excuse for inaction.

The hon. Member for Peckham (Ms. Harman) has taken the opportunity to make her usual plethora of groundless and baseless accusations against the Government and our record of achievement. She has suggested that we do not spend enough on the Health Service. But if a 24 per cent. increase in spending on health is not enough, she must explain what would be enough, and by how much she would be willing to increase taxation. She has also suggested that local authorities do not spend enough. Yet spending is at record levels. Spending on the personal social services is also at a record level.

Will the Minister give way?

I shall not give way, as the hon. Lady had quite a fair go. She complained that nothing was being done about child care law. However, last October we launched a monumental consultation exercise. We have announced that the proposals will be published as a basis for legislation, and publication will be in the autumn. As the original consultation document was launched in October, we have moved very quickly, and I hope that the hon. Lady will have the grace to accept that.

Does the Minister accept that the amount of money going into housing via the local authority, which is the main housing authority in Southwark, has fallen drastically as a result of the Government's policies? Moreover, does he agree that the amount spent on the Health Service in Southwark, in the shape of Camberwell district authority and the Lewisham and North Southwark district health authority, has also fallen drastically? Does the hon. Gentleman accept that?

rose—

Order. I hope that we can now return to the subject of children in care.

I apologise for being led astray by the hon. Member for Peckham, but when she has seen the impact of the Resource Allocation Working Party and the amount of money devoted to the provision of her constituents in Southwark, I hope that she will understand how favoured they are. But it is typical that yet again the hon. Lady thinks that the answer is to take more and more money from the taxpayer. The answer in most of these areas must be to improve performance and procedures, and that is the object of the new clause. I am confident that that aim will be achieved.

I am grateful for the comments—or at least most of them—of my hon. Friend the Member for Surrey, South-West (Mrs. Bottomley). I recognise that the content of the consultation process should ensure that the procedures that finally emerge in the regulations take account of the issues that she raised. The home-on-trial scheme, for example, is an important step and should be recognised as such. That is an area in which we are determined to continue to improve practice. My hon. Friend the Member for Westbury (Mr. Walters) made a difficult decision when he decided to co-operate with the Government and agree to a very different provision being inserted in the Bill, but I believe that the new clause will be a useful step forward.

I shall clarify my position on local authority members and whatever role they may play. The hon. Member for Bow and Poplar (Mr. Mikardo) suggested that I spoke rather quickly when I last intervened, and I plead guilty to the charge. I was trying to give other hon. Members the chance to participate in the debate. The subsection that the Government have proposed would be wide enough to provide for some involvement of local authority members in the decision-taking process should this be thought desirable. I hope that that clarification will place me on the side of my hon. Friend the Member for Surrey, South-West. I must stress that the Government have not yet reached a view on the involvement of local authority members.

The Minister has used the phrase "should this be thought desirable." Thought by whom to be desirable?

As I explained in my earlier intervention, the framing of the regulations will be preceded by consultation. I am sure that must be right in this difficult area.

I do not want to detain the House for long because I believe that all the ground has been covered, much of it on Second Reading. However, I must refer to the speech of my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Burton (Mr. Lawrence), who was rightly described by the hon. Member for Bow and Poplar as a doughty fighter. What we had this morning from my hon. and learned Friend was more in the nature of an intervention by a knight errant or a Don Quixote because he appeared to be tilting at windmills. He has conjured a phantasma out of the air—

rose—

—a phantasma that the Government are cowering against an attack by the serried ranks of mobilised social workers. It appears that others are cowering as well as the Government, including the Law Society, the Association of County Councils, the directors of social services, the Association of Metropolitan Authorities, the Justices' Clerks Society and the Magistrates' Association. That is the windmill at which my hon. and learned Friend, Don Quixote from Burton, seems to be tilting.

I thought for a moment that my hon. Friend was calling the Government a phantasma. I would reject that description immediately.

I am most grateful. We are now clear between us where the phantasma is established. I hope that my hon. and learned Friend will accept that he is wrong.

I must say in somewhat more serious terms to my hon. Friend the Member for Chislehurst (Mr. Sims) that I reject his argument that the associations—I shall not go through the list again—did not understand the original proposals. That is not a very tenable position. It is going a little far to suggest that the Law Society and the Government, no less, should not understand the proposals. I was tempted to take up the argument about magistrates but I shall not do so.

It should be accepted that we all share certain objectives. My hon. Friend the Member for Chislehurst spoke of a philosophical difference between us, but I do not believe there is. Perhaps the difference between us turns on practicalities in determining how best we can ensure that terrible mistakes are not made. Mistakes will be made from time to time. In the Jasmine Beckford case, terrible mistakes were made by many people, including the magistrates.

The Government believe that the way forward is to continue to improve the way in which cases are dealt with. I know that my hon. Friend the Member for Surrey, South-West is well aware of that and recognises that that is the way forward. We reject the piecemeal approach when it is in the wrong direction. We do not believe that to go back to the court at this stage in a particular case is the correct way to approach the matter. The airy-fairy dismissive approach, "There may be the odd delay, but does that really matter?" is unjust not only to the particular case that is under consideration but because of the effect that it would have on all child care cases.

We have ranged widely on a number of occasions over these issues. I hope very much that the House will accept new clause 5.

I beg to move, That the clause be read a Second time.

With this, it will be convenient to discuss the following amendments: No. 17, in page 3, line 27, leave out clause 3.

No 18, in clause 3, page 3, line 38, leave out subsection (2) and insert—

This new clause amends the Children and Young Persons Act 1969 to allow a parent or guardian who was a party to care and related proceedings by virtue of amendments Nos. 22 and 23 to have a right of appeal to the Crown court.

Subsection (4) also amends the 1969 Act to allow a parent or guardian who was a party to the proceedings in which an interim order was made to apply to the High Court to have that interim order discharged. In this clause the term "guardian" means not legal guardian but refers to the definition in the Children and Young Persons Act 1933 of any person who in the opinion of the court has for the time being the charge of or control of the child.

In Committee I said that clause 3 presented considerable difficulties. The implications of the clause would bring with it unacceptable resource costs in extra High Court judges and legal aid, but I hoped to bring forward amendments which my hon. Friend would support. I had in mind appeal rights for local authorities and for parents when a separate representation order has been made, in each case to the Crown court as at present. In the event, in agreement with my hon. Friend who had hoped we could at this stage agree to transfer to the High Court, I have limited the increased appeal rights to parents. This will close an unfortunate gap which has emerged in recent cases when the appointment of a guardian ad litem after a separate representation order deprived the parents of the opportunity to appeal on behalf of the child. The House will agree that there is an exceptional case for parents where they are made parties to be able to appeal on their own behalf in such cases. There was a case, quite widely known as the "brittle bones" case, raised in the House by my hon. Friend the Member for Sherwood (Mr. Stewart). In other cases they can still appeal on behalf of the child.

I am also speaking to amendments Nos. 17, to leave out clause 3, and 32 which covers commencement of the new clause 6. Amendments 18, 19 and 20 would fall if the House accepts amendment No. 17, and I have no further comment on them.

Is the Minister able to assure me either that my points have been taken into account or that they will be looked at, since he plans to introduce other amendments?

I understand that they will be unnecessary if amendment No. 17 and new clause 6 is agreed to.

The original clause 3 had two distinct aims: first, to enlarge the category of appellants and, secondly, to transfer the appeal from the Crown court to the family division of the High Court. I greatly regret that, despite the recommendation by the review on child care law, the Government have not found it possible to accept this second and important aim. The involvement of the Crown court in care proceedings is anomalous and widely deplored. While no assurance has been given to me, I very much hope that this will continue only for a short while longer, and that, when we have the promised major review of child care law, it will include an end to appeals to the Crown court.

1.45 pm

In the meantime, I am reluctant to be associated with any increase in appeals to the Crown court. As at the moment parents have no appeal, nor can they, unlike the local authority, take advantage or wardship, I am in support of this modest enlargement of the category of appellants proposed by the amendment.

I beg to move amendment No. 33, in page 5, line 34, leave out '4 and 5', and insert 'and 4 above shall'

With this it will be convenient to take Government amendment No. 34.

These are both technical amendments, which provide for the means by which the clause on appeal should come into force. It is intended that the measure will come in as soon as possible.

I beg to move amendment No. 35, in page 5, line 37, leave out subsection (4).

This amendment removes the provision that all sections of the Bill shall come into force within one year of the Bill being passed. I assure the House that there is no lack of intent on the part of the Government. We wish to bring in the provisions of the Bill as soon as possible, but it would be wrong to insist that the Government should do all that is necessary within the inflexible provisions of the clause. We shall continue our best endeavours.

I am grateful for that assurance because I regret the presence of the amendment, which is designed to remove a long-stop provision for the implementation of the Bill. I introduced the long-stop period of one year in Committee after due discussion with officials in the Department as to a reasonable period for implementing these proposals.

I have referred, as have several other hon. Members, to the deplorable fact that parts of the Children Act 1975 were not implemented until 1985. As I have agreed to accept major compromises, I very much regret that the Government do not accept that what is now enacted should be brought into force as soon as it reasonably can be.

The proposed amendment can only raise fears about the Government's intentions. I am a little reassured by what the Minister says but I should be grateful to him if he repeated his assurance as clearly as possible. I hope that he can assure us that the Government genuinely intend to implement the relatively modest package, which they have now accepted, as soon as possible.

I should have thought that the Minister could have given us something better. I understand that he cannot fix a firm date and that this is only a long stop. The Minister says that the legislation will be implemented as soon as possible. He should be able to give us some idea of when he expects the measure to come into force. Saying that it will be as soon as practicable is like asking, "How long is a piece of string?" The Minister owes it to the hon. Member for Westbury (Mr. Walters) to be a little more specific.

I understand that the Law Society is a little bothered by the 12-month proposal because it foresees difficulties in putting all the procedures in place. It is not against the proposals, but it envisages problems. It will not be easy to set an absolute time. That is why I tabled a similar amendment. To set a 12-month limit is perhaps too rigid, although we hope that the Bill will be implemented as soon as possible.

I am glad of the opportunity to enlarge upon my earlier remarks. I was seeking to truncate the debate for other reasons. I take note of the remarks made by my hon. Friend the Member for Westbury (Mr. Walters) and by the hon. Member for Bow and Poplar (Mr. Mikardo).

The Government certainly intend to bring the measure into effect as soon as practicable, but it would be wrong and would mislead the House if I said that we could accept an inflexible date. To do that would be rare, if not unprecedented. No Administration would accept such a provision. We must make allowance for unforeseen difficulties and changes in circumstances. I note the awful warning from my hon. Friend the Member for Westbury. We have no intention of following that pattern.

The hon. Member for Barking (Ms. Richardson) referred to the Law Society. Adequate time must be allowed not only for regulations and rules to be drafted, but for consultation in the usual way before the instruments are laid and for local authority and court staff to undertake training, where appropriate. The professions concerned will also need time to assimilate the effects of the reforms and changes in procedure before they come into effect. I assure the House, and in particular my hon. Friend the Member for Westbury, that we shall make every effort to deal with the rules and advice for local authorities as quickly as possible.

I beg to move amendment No. 36, in page 6, line 1, leave out subsections (1) and (2) and insert—

`No provision of this Act shall have effect in relation to any proceedings which were commenced before the commencement of that provision.'.

This amendment removes the transitional provisions in clause 8 which applied clause 3—appeals—to any order made in proceedings on or after commencement of the Bill even though the proceeding or hearing might have begun before the Bill came into force, and also applied clause 4—party status—and clause 5—transfer of proceedings—to proceedings which might already have begun. It substitutes a clause that any provision in the Bill should apply only to proceedings beginning after that provision came into force.

If the provisions of the Bill were to apply to proceedings already in progress when the Bill came into force there could be confusion and problems if, for instance, a grandparent applied to be joined as a party part way through a hearing. The amendment is intended to prevent any such problems arising by limiting the Bill to cases which begin after the date of commencement.

I beg to move, That the Bill be now read the Third time.

We have had a long Report stage and I shall not detain the House. Introducing the Bill has been a fascinating experience and it has involved an enormous amount of hard work. I thank my sponsors, from both sides of the House, for their help and support.

Taking the Bill through the House has been more difficult than I had expected, and I have not achieved as much as I had hoped. I believe that valuable proposals have been lost on the way, but, given the fact that we live in an imperfect world, I am satisfied that useful measures have been introduced and that a worthy piece of legislation will be placed on the statute book.

I intervene briefly to congratulate the hon. Member for Westbury (Mr. Walters) on having carried the Bill this far and, if I may anticipate events, on getting Third Reading for the Bill, which will be sent off to another place where I am sure that it will be looked at as carefully as it has been here.

As I said earlier, the hon. Member for Westbury has been shabbily treated by the Government in having his Bill hijacked and turned into a de facto Government Bill, but I hope that his initiative in introducing the Bill has contributed something to hastening Government action on comprehensive legislation.

I broke a lance earlier with the hon. and learned Member for Burton (Mr. Lawrence), but I agree with him about the imprecise and unsatisfactory nature of the Minister's comments on the timing of the legislation. Under challenge from the hon. and learned Member, the Minister, like a frightened horse, shied away from giving any assurance that legislation would be brought forward in the lifetime of this Parliament.

People have been appealing for comprehensive family courts legislation for a long time. I do not blame the Minister alone. Many of his predecessors, including some Labour Ministers, are also to blame. It has been a long and sad concatenation of procrastination and it is time that it was brought to an end. If the initiative of the hon. Member for Westbury has exerted a little pressure to that end, on that ground, if on no other, he deserves the thanks of the House.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Westbury (Mr. Walters) on the progress that he has made in circumstances that have proved to be more difficult than he had expected. I share his disappointment that the Bill will not be leaving the House in the form that he and I would wish.

However, I hope that my hon. Friend will not underestimate what he has achieved. The new provisions on child care are an improvement and will be widely welcomed, and he has also precipitated discussion inside and outside the House on an important issue. I suspect that that would not have happened if my hon. Friend had not introduced his Bill.

The hon. Member for Bow and Poplar (Mr. Mikardo) said that he hoped to put pressure on the Government in other respects. There is little doubt that that has been done. It is a measure of the success of my hon. Friend the Member for Westbury that the Government's response will be recorded not only in today's Hansard but in yesterday's Hansard. In reply to a question on child care, the Secretary of State for Social Services implied that, because of pressure from my hon. Friend and others, the Government felt that we should know exactly where they stood on the question of child care and family courts The Government's announcement is a recognition of the high profile that my hon. Friend has given to the matter.

In his reply yesterday, my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State made it clear that proposals on child care would be forthcoming in the autumn. He was less forthcoming about the family court proposals, other than to say that they would be made soon. My right hon. Friend did not challenge the suggestion that the proposals would be introduced in the next week or so. We have heard such promises so often that I shall believe that when I see it. In his reply, the Secretary of State said:

"Some of those commenting on the review of child care law have said that no changes to child care law should take place in advance of a family court. The Government do not accept this need to be so and continued to see advantage in not delaying desirable improvements in child care law pending possible introduction of a family court."—[0fficial Report, 1 May 1986; Vol. 96, c. 472.]

We are not asking the Government to delay improvements to child care law; we are asking them to accelerate the introduction of a family court. There is no reason why the two measures should not go ahead. They have been considered for some time. If the family court proposals are introduced shortly, it should be possible to consider them along with a proposed White Paper in the autumn and for the legislation on both to be considered together. One knows the difficulty of achieving co-ordination between Government Departments, but that should not be beyond the wit of man, if the political will is present in the Government.

I am sorry that the Bill will not leave the House in the form that we had hoped—I hesitate to use the aphorism about half a loaf because I think that we are getting no more than a slice—but the time that we have spent on it has been time well spent.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Westbury (Mr. Walters) on his success in getting the Bill through to Third Reading. It must be a satisfying achievement—one which I shall not experience with my Bill. I congratulate my hon. Friend on the work that he has done.

I, too, congratulate the hon. Member for Westbury (Mr. Walters). As soon as I had had an opportunity to study the Bill carefully and to consult those who were involved outside the House, unlike the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Security, I made it plain to the hon. Member for Westbury what my attitude and the Opposition's attitude would be. I am not being mealy-mouthed in saying that the hon. Gentleman used the opportunity of coming high in the ballot to focus the attention of the House on the considerable concern about the pressing issue of children in care. Unwittingly, he has carefully exposed the Government for their inaction in not bringing forward child care law legislation and legislation for the implementation of a family court.

At the outset, I was concerned about clause 1. It was important to draw the problem to the public's attention. Following the Jasmine Beckford inquiry report, and after the heated hysteria generated by some elements of the press had died down, it was important for the matter to be considered fully by the House, and on a wider basis. The hon. Member for Westbury has put the debate on child law back on to an even better keel. That of itself created a better climate in which to discuss the issues and to try to resolve the problems. That is very important.

It is worth looking briefly at the background against which children are taken into care. It is important to ensure that children are taken into care only when it is absolutely necessary and that families are broken up only when it is absolutely unavoidable. I should like to consider the background against which the reluctant decision is made by magistrates and social workers alike to take a child into care, and the necessity for that decision.

It is ironic that, although we rightly and collectively condemn mistreatment of children and are horrified, outraged and angered by parents who mistreat their children, and although we collectively feel a sense of shame at belonging to a society which includes people who abuse and even kill their children, all too often our collective sense of shame does not extend to a collective desire to support families with small children.

All too often, the spiral of problems which ends in child abuse is tied up with lack of proper public services, with bad housing and with inadequate income. That does not excuse child abuse and it is not the whole story. Despite having low incomes, bad housing and suffering a complex network of problems, many people manage to be caring, loving and good parents. Lack of day nursery places, day care facilities and decent housing and inadequate income can be the straw that breaks the camel's back and the spark that leads to child abuse in vulnerable families.

We should collectively not only have a sense of outrage but recognise that the children in families where battering takes place are the children not only of that family but of society as a whole. We all have a collective responsibility for them. It is shameful that, compared with the rest of Europe, Britain has the lowest provision of nursery classes and places for children under five. That is typical of the division of attitude between people on the continent and people in Britain. The culture of Europe is much more welcoming to and accepting of children. It recognises that they are part of the community as well as, most importantly, part of their families.

Research has shown that the children in care are the children of the poor. The Government are responsible because of the increasing number of families hit and blighted by joblessness. The problems will be exacerbated by the Social Security Bill, which will result in more families in poverty and therefore more families vulnerable to having a child taken into care. Judging by the Government's figures in the technical annex to the White Paper on social security, 100,000 low-paid families and 100,000 families in which a family member is unemployed will lose out under the legislation. Those low-paid families and unemployed families will be worse off. About 30,000 low-paid families and 10,000 families in which a member of the family is unemployed will be worse off by £5 a week or more.

Order. The hon. Lady seems to be widening the debate in an unacceptable way. She should confine her remarks to the contents of the Bill.

I hope that I have shown the link between poverty and reception of children into care, and between poverty and family breakdown. Perhaps I can leave it there. We offer our congratulations to the hon. Member for Westbury on taking the opportunity to use his place in the private Members' ballot to bring before us an important issue.

Before I come to the points that I want to make, I have to say that it is a pity that throughout these difficult proceedings on a complex and sensitive matter we have been treated in almost every intervention by the hon. Member for Peckham (Ms. Harman) to her standard litany of promoting her party's distorted views on the present situation. If she is interested in the problems of poverty, unemployment, homelessness and deprivation, she should think hard about how those problems would be exacerbated if her party's policies were implemented. The policies advocated by her right hon. Friends would cost an additional £24 billion. How much social deprivation would there be then?

I should also like to join in congratulating my hon. Friend the Member for Westbury (Mr. Walters) on using his good fortune in the ballot to promote a Bill of such importance about a matter that is of great interest to everyone. Whatever views we have about the practicalities and the steps that would be needed, none of us underestimates the great amount of work that requires to be done to prevent child abuse. It presents a challenge to the whole of society and that is why my Department is active in this whole area. Much of the work is of a practical nature and consists of liaison between the social services inspectorate, local authorities and social services departments. The work is not headline-grabbing but nevertheless a great deal of work is being done. I can assure hon. Members that we shall continue to strive to see that the best practice in Britain, which is exceptionally good, becomes as near as possible universal.

In addition to the practical aspects, the law has a role to play. The law is not yet right and that is precisely why we launched a consultation exercise last October and we look forward to producing proposals in the autumn which will form the basis for further comprehensive legislation. I recognise the deep disappointment felt by my hon. Friend about the change in the Bill, but I hope he and our hon. Friends will accept that the Bill as it now stands will do a great deal of good and will be of benefit in this difficult area.

The new regulation-making power about "home on trial" will help to strengthen the existing arrangements for child protection, especially when it is linked to the other steps that we are taking to assist local authorities in their child abuse work, about which I have already spoken.

The new provision allowing parents to have party status where an order for separate representation of the child is made will, if the Bill becomes law, remedy what many people see as a real injustice to parents. Their present inability to appeal against a child care order is a defect and I am glad that we have the opportunity in this Bill to put it right. The measures we have achieved on the status of grandparents will be greatly appreciated by my hon. Friends. Despite their disappointment about clauses 1 and 2, I hope that my hon. Friend and his sponsors will accept that the great efforts they have put into the Bill have had a worthy outcome.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Chislehurst (Mr. Sims) said, I acknowledge that the wide national debate that has been generated has been a factor in our rapid digestion of the response to our working party report. There have been 200 detailed responses in this complicated area. Thus my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State was able to make the announcement to the House yesterday about his proposals in the autumn.

Therefore, I am sure that my hon. Friend the Member for Westbury (Mr. Walters) can look with great satisfaction on what he has achieved. I congratulate him on his Bill.

I should like to add my wholehearted support and congratulations to my hon. Friend the Member for Westbury (Mr. Walters) on moving us a significant and important stage forward in the protection of children at risk.

I have been provoked to speak in defence of my hon. Friend the Minister by a naive and simplistic remark by the hon. Member for Peckham (Ms. Harman). Since 1979 there have been dramatic increases in resources for health and personal social services. But much more at the heart of the matter is the fact that, to protect children in care, social workers need professional autonomy, not political interference. I urge the hon. Lady to look in her own back yard for political interference in professional work.

With regard to the Bill, the need to rectify the position of parents and grandparents has been long overdue. I am aware of the interest in that matter of my hon. Friend the Member for Cambridge (Mr. Rhodes James).

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Minister on the fact that there has been a sincere, thorough and thoughtful examination of improvements in and the promotion of good practice. Guidelines have been issued by his Department. I join him in his remarks about the work of the inspectorate. At some stages, some of us have wondered whether we were going fast enough, and whether the introduction of a court hearing would help to move things forward. That is borne out by the figures. Every child abuse death is a death too many and a tragic waste. The evidence is that the number of children who are seriously injured or killed has been coming down in recent years. I am sure that that has been achieved through concerted action and the maintenance of good practice. We look to the Minister to move on as fast as possible in comprehensive child care law reviews and the development of good practice.

On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. It is not my wish to delay proceedings in the House unduly, but I must seek your guidance and protection, as a custodian of the procedures of the House and guardian of the rights of Back Benchers, on a matter concerning the denial of access to information that I consider to be essential to the performance of my role as an elected representative.

I refer specifically to information relating to the report of the Advisory Committee on Irradiated and Novel Foods, which was published on 10 April, and requires the response of the Department by the end of July. I consider that information essential to the formulation of any response. The report itself gives little information and lacks scientific reference. I approached the Library before noon on Thursday 24 April and asked it to provide me with some facts relating to the report. People in the Library set about the business of trying to get that information. After persistent telephone calls each day since then, speaking with the private secretary to the Minister with responsibility for this matter, I find that I am denied that information. This week we have heard justifiable criticism of the lack of information about the possible exposure to radiation of British subjects.

Order. The hon. Gentleman is unreasonably taking up private Members' time. His statement that the Library has not been supplied with information that he has tried to obtain from the Minister is not a matter for the Chair. The Chair is not responsible for Ministers' replies or non-replies.

Further to that point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. I simply wish to say that we complain about the denial of information, yet we are guilty of denying ourselves information. If you do not have the right to rule on this—

Order. The hon. Gentleman cannot argue in this way when we have private Members' business before the House. I have ruled that this is not a matter for the Chair.

I beg to move amendment No. 1, in page 3, line 5, after 'person', insert

', except by way of example for a general case without any identifying name or address included'.

I shall be brief, because I hope that the Bill will receive its Third Reading during the remaining 10 minutes.

The amendment would be useful in enabling a joint consultative committee to discuss in public a general point that might refer specifically to individual medical circumstances without disclosing the name and address of the individual. It would ease matters and marginally improve the Bill. It is a small point, but I hope that the Bill's promoter and the Minister will accept it.

The hon. Member for Islington, South and Finsbury (Mr. Smith) will understand if my speech is even shorter than his. I have not had much time to consider the full implications of the amendment, but, speaking only for myself, and subject to the views of my hon. Friend the Minister, the amendment seems to make sense. However, the hon. Gentleman will understand if I say that I would not wish to jeopardise the measure if there proved to be a handicap to absorbing his suggestion.

I am advised that the amendment is unnecessary because the clause specifically refers to information about individuals and is clearly intended to preserve their privacy. I hope that the hon. Member for Islington, South and Finsbury (Mr. Smith) will withdraw the amendment.

The Opposition would have welcomed the amendment, but, in view of the Minister's assurance that its aims are already contained in the Bill, I shall listen with interest to the comments of my hon. Friend the Member for Islington, South and Finsbury (Mr. Smith).

After that brief but helpful debate, I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.

I beg to move amendment No. 3, in page 3, line 40, at end insert—

'(4) On any occasion on which the Secretary of State is made aware that a joint committee has failed to carry any of the provisions of subsections (1), (2) and (3) above he shall forthwith publicly issue a directive to that joint committee requiring it to carry out that provision or those provisions as the case may be.'.

Clause 3(1) states that a joint committee shall have an obligation to do one thing; subsection (2) states that it shall have an obligation to do something else; and subsection (3) states that a joint committee shall have an obligation to do yet another thing. However, the clause does not say what will happen if a joint committee does not do those things. There is no point in having a clause which places duties on bodies if there is no sanction against the non-fulfilment of those duties.

Of course, it is not easy to impose sanctions on a joint committee. Fines would simply remove money that it must use for other purposes. The only sanction that I could envisage was to say that if they do not do what they are supposed to do, the Secretary of State must tell them to do it. What is wrong with that?

The amendment is not only defective but unnecessary. Clause 3 lays clear duties on joint committees and on constituent authorities. If a joint committee or constituent authority neglects to carry out those duties, any member of the public can draw attention to the omission and, in the last resort, although it is hardly likely to come to this, may have recourse to the courts. It is difficult to see what the amendment would achieve that is not already achieved by clause 3.

I cannot see it in the Bill, but if there is a remedy through the courts for someone who is aggrieved, of course I accept that the amendment is unnecessary. I shall engrave the Minister's words on tablets of stone to make sure that something happens as a result of them. To give me time to do that, I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.

I beg to move, That the Bill be now read the Third time.

My comments will be brief. I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Peterborough (Dr. Mawhinney) who initiated the process before he was elevated, so to speak, to a higher place on the Government Benches. I thank the community rights project and the Freedom of Information Campaign in general for their assistance. I thank hon. Members on both sides who have supported the Bill and have ensured that it passes to the statute book today. The Bill provides a small increase in access to information, and we should all be grateful for that.

I warmly congratulate the hon. Member for Peterborough (Dr. Mawhinney) who originally selected this subject for a Bill, having had the good fortune to be drawn high enough in the ballot. Fortunately for him, he joined the Government, so he could not proceed with the Bill. On behalf of the Opposition, I also congratulate the hon. Member for Hornchurch (Mr. Squire) who has looked after the Bill, and has brought it through Committee and a rather shortened Report stage.

The Bill will add significantly to information available to the public. Any member of the public will be able to find out the members of the joint committees in his local area and what they are discussing. It is a small piece of legislation, which well deserves to be on the statute book. Once again, I congratulate the hon. Member for Hornchurch on bringing the Bill to Third Reading.

I join in the congratulations to my hon. Friend the Member for Hornchurch (Mr. Squire) and my hon. Friend the Member for Peterborough (Dr. Mawhinney), who is now the Under-Secretary of State for Northern Ireland and who first had the foresight to introduce the Bill. I acknowledge the help received from the hon. Members for Birkenhead (Mr. Field) and for Southwark and Bermondsey (Mr. Hughes).

The Government certainly support the concept of a greater degree of public awareness of the committees and their functions, and that is one of the essential achievements of the Bill. I hope that it will produce a greater awareness of information and a greater and better degree of all-round performance of the organisations. Therefore, the Government wholeheartedly support the Bill and renew their congratulations to our hon. Friends.

I, too, in just a moment or two, wish to express my appreciation of the Bill. It makes one more little dent—and we must keep denting away—in the obstinate carapace of secrecy in our public life. There are much wider, more serious areas of secrecy than that which is the subject of the Bill. I do not say that to denigrate the Bill or its sponsors. Indeed, those wider areas could not possibly be tackled in private Members' legislation. The hon. Member for Peterborough (Dr. Mawhinney) was wise to confine his Bill to an area which, while maintaining the important principle of openness in the conduct of public affairs, was sufficiently restricted to ensure that the Bill had a reasonable chance of reaching the statute book, as this one, happily, will do.

I hope that the Bill will set a precedent, and that all hon. Members who care about open government—one cannot care about democracy without caring about open government—will take a leaf out of the hon. Gentleman's book. If they draw a high place in the ballot next Session, I hope that they will find other similar areas of public life which are at present shrouded in secrecy and about which citizens cannot find out what is going on, and amend them. I am happy to give my full support to the Third Reading.

When I was rudely interrupted—

Is my hon. Friend aware that my hon. Friend the Member for Davyhulme (Mr. Churchill) has already agreed to all the amendments?

It might have helped if the hon. Member for Davyhulme (Mr. Churchill) had been here to tell us that. But I could not resist giving way to the hon. Lady when she called me her hon. Friend—

Debate to be resumed what day? No day named.

On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. Before we reach the next item on the Order Paper, the Animal Welfare (Royal Commission) Bill, can you advise me whether its Second Reading can be moved, as the Queen's Consent has not yet been signified?

The hon. Gentleman can move the Second Reading, but we had better wait to see whether the Queen's Consent is signified.

I beg to move.

Queen's Consent?

That is a very good question.

Object.

Object.

With permission—

Object.

Objection taken. Second Reading what day?

On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. I was not objecting to the Bill. I was moving—

Order. The objection was recorded from elsewhere in the House.

I did not hear it, Mr. Deputy Speaker. Can you say where it came from?

The objection was taken from elsewhere in the House. Can the hon. Gentleman, on behalf of the hon. Member in charge of the Bill, name an alternative date?

Yes, indeed—Friday 4 July.

Object.

Bill not printed. Second Reading what day? No day named.

Object.

Objection taken. Second Reading what day?

On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. I have introduced the Bill because I suffer from industrial deafness. The Bill seeks to end abuses, so that people will be able to hear properly. I did not hear the hon. Member who objected. Would it be possible, Mr. Deputy Speaker, for the hon. Member who objected to stand up, so that we can identify that half-baked individual?

I distinctly heard an objection made in some part of the House.

I did not hear it.

The hon. Gentleman is surely not that deaf. I also suffer from industrial deafness, but I can hear him.

rose—

Order. I am trying to explain the difficulty that the Chair is always in. The procedure followed today is no different from that followed regularly on Fridays since I have been a Member of Parliament. That is a matter—

rose—

Order. The hon. Gentleman must contain himself. I was about to point out that the position of the Chair is no different from the position that it is always in when a Question is put that evokes a response. Hon. Members do not rise in their places to say Aye or Noe. If I followed the logic of the hon. Gentleman's argument, the Chair would have to ask hon. Members to stand in their places whenever the Question was put. That has never, to my recollection, been our practice.

rose—

Order. I can take only one point of order at a time. We have merely followed the normal practice today.

Further to the point of order raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Jarrow (Mr. Dixon), Mr. Deputy Speaker. I do not doubt that you heard "Object" from somewhere in the Chamber. I am concerned, however, because I cannot see the lips of some hon. Members who are hidden by the Clerks' Table, who appear to sink deeper into the Benches as the afternoon passes.

Secondly, Mr. Deputy Speaker, would you accept that it would be perfectly possible for someone—a stranger or an intruder—to shout, "Object," and for there to be an echo that would even mislead you, Mr. Deputy Speaker? It would be much better and it would clear up any possible doubt or misunderstanding if the hon. Member who objects—

Order. I have the hon. Gentleman's point, which is one that we have heard before. I think that he should have a little more faith in the judgment of the Chair than to think that I might inadvertently pick up as a genuine response an interjection that was made expressly outside the House.

It would help the Chair enormously if Members who wished to object were clearly to identify themselves by rising in their places, but the Chair has no power to require an hon. Member to do so. It has no more power to require that to happen on an occasion such as this than it has, for example, when there is a mid-week Second Reading, when voices are heard on both sides of the House, those interjections being made usually from a sedentary position. It would be unrealistic for the Chair to expect those hon. Members to rise in their places. The Chair is in a difficulty on such occasions and all that I can do is appeal to the House, as I have done previously, that those hon. Members who wish to take objection should do so loudly and clearly and should not be ashamed to identify themselves.

rose—