House of Commons
Thursday 2 March 2006
The House met at half-past Ten o'clock
Prayers
The unavoidable absence of Mr. Speaker having been announced, The Chairman Of Ways And Means took the Chair as Deputy Speaker, pursuant to the Standing Order.
Oral Answers to Questions
Treasury
The Chancellor of the Exchequer was asked—
Millennium Development Goals
Next month, the international finance facility will start issuing its first bonds, supported by the United Kingdom and five other countries. We expect more countries to announce support next week. It will be a truly global facility, which will release an additional $4 billion to save 5 million lives between now and 2015. On Tuesday, France and Britain agreed a working group to push ahead with the full international finance facility to support health and education. We have invited other countries to join, and that is one way in which we can meet the millennium goals.
My right hon. Friend has helped to ensure that the United Kingdom is the largest funder of the election preparations that are under way in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which the all-party group on the great lakes plans to visit in a couple of weeks. Does he agree that a responsible approach by all parties in that country is fundamental to ensuring that it can progress properly towards its development goals after the election?
I am grateful to my hon. Friend. I know that he takes a great interest in matters in the Congo and I wish the delegation well when it visits that country soon. We are in a position to give additional support to it and other conflict-ridden countries as they prepare for the future. The purpose of the international finance facility is to front-load finance and make it possible to achieve the millennium development goals by 2015. That applies especially to areas where there is high infant mortality. Of the 130 million children born each year, only 30 million are vaccinated. We need to do something about that.
What contribution does my right hon. Friend believe that the international finance facility makes to ensuring environmental sustainability, which is one of the millennium development goals? Last week, I visited a secondary school where year 7 and year 9 children pressed on me the importance of development and climate change issues. Of course—
Order. The question is sufficient.
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for asking about development and the importance of the environment to it. Having met environmental groups this week—[ Hon. Members: "Ah!"]—as I have met them almost every month for the past few years, I see a huge interest in considering environmental and development questions together. [Interruption.] It is interesting that not one Tory seeks to ask a question on that important matter.
We are pressing the World Bank to introduce a new facility, similar to an international finance facility, for loans and grants for alternative sources of energy to be developed by developing countries and emerging market countries so that greater energy efficiency can be achieved there. We are already doing for the environment—for alternative sources of energy and energy efficiency in developing countries—what we do for health and education. I would have thought that there was all-party support for that.
Cash Machines
As we set out in our response to the Treasury Committee's recent report, the Government believe that access to cash is important. Although 96 per cent. of cash machine withdrawals are made from free machines, we know that many hon. Members have serious concerns. The Government would be especially worried if people on low incomes incurred a disproportionate cost in accessing their money.
The Economic Secretary is doubtless aware that British consumers will pay £250 million in charges to access their money this year. What steps is he taking to prevent banks from further selling off their cash machines and to ensure free cash machines in public places such as hospitals, railway stations and colleges? Wakefield college in my constituency charges students £1.85 to withdraw their own money.
I understand my hon. Friend's concerns. In the past five or six years, as a result of the work of the Treasury Select Committee and the Treasury, there has been an improvement. However, there are continuing concerns about the danger that the position may deteriorate. That is why, in a recent debate, I said that I would facilitate a meeting in the next few weeks between representatives of the Select Committee, the industry and the financial inclusion taskforce to ensure that we do not go backwards on such an important public policy issue.
I thank the Economic Secretary for his generous gesture in holding that meeting. Before that, two issues need to be considered: first, sharing postcodes in areas where there is concentrated financial inclusion or exclusion, and secondly, transparency. Approaching cash machines should be akin to going to a petrol station, where the customer knows what he or she is getting into. Knowing that is imperative.
I entirely agree with my right hon. Friend, and pay tribute to the work that he has done on this issue. He is right to say that we should be concerned if there were evidence that paying for cash was more prevalent in areas with low-income families and financial exclusion. However, we cannot make a judgment about that unless we are able to collect the appropriate evidence, so it is important that we do that as part of the process. On transparency, I agree entirely with him. It is perfectly reasonable that, when consumers go to cash points, the nature of any charges should be made absolutely clear.
Is the Minister not concerned that some of the changes mooted in the ongoing consultation on the arrangements for Scottish banknotes—involving changes to the till level, the fiduciary level and seniorage—might put additional pressure on the free-to-use cash machines in Scotland?
That is nonsense. The scare stories that the Scottish National party has put about on the proposed changes to Scottish banknotes simply do not stack up in relation to the facts. That should not surprise us about the SNP. We are going to consult further on any changes, to assuage any concerns, but the SNP scare stories are simply untrue.
Gershon Review
The Government are on track to meet the Gershon efficiency targets. The pre-Budget report of 2005 announced a total of £4.7 billion in efficiency gains as at the end of September 2005, with 31,000 head-count reductions and more than 6,000 relocations. This is part of our long-term commitment to improving value for money in public services. Indeed, the National Audit Office agreed, in its recent report, that we were making good progress in that regard.
With reference to the National Audit Office report, is the lack of clearly measurable efficiency gains a problem of deficient management information systems or of a lack of will to bring about deeper and more systemic changes, or both?
I do not know whether the hon. Gentleman has had the opportunity to read the National Audit Office report, of which I have a copy here. I will give him this copy if he has not had the opportunity to read all of it. I say that because I have recently had to debate this report with people who manifestly have not read it. The National Audit Office report was summarised by the Comptroller and Auditor General, Sir John Bourn, in the following terms in his press release:
"There are many worthwhile activities going on within the efficiency programme and . . . good progress is clearly being made."
We are now 10 months into the delivery of this process, and of course there are challenges in regard to the technical measurements involved. However, those challenges are being met in partnership with the National Audit Office and the Audit Commission. As the report makes clear, the measurement issues are being addressed and resolved.
Does the Chief Secretary accept that one important way to make efficiency gains is for central Government to have a more strategic, slimmed-down role, with resources devolved to local level, so that local solutions can be found for local problems?
Absolutely—[Interruption.] Let me just make the point that, in the whole of my public and political life, I have been arguing for and supporting devolution. Certainly, no Back Bencher needs to persuade me of its importance, or of what it has delivered for Scotland. The most important thing for my hon. Friend and his constituents is not only that decisions are made at the appropriate level—and some of them ought to be devolved—but that we devolve jobs out of the south-east. Part of the process of the efficiency agenda involves moving jobs from London and the south-east to the regions of England, Scotland and elsewhere, and we have been successful in doing so.
In the Chancellor's last Budget, three weeks before the last general election, he claimed £2 billion worth of Gershon efficiency savings. On Monday, the National Audit Office will tell the Public Accounts Committee that it can find no evidence for half those savings. Will the Minister make a commitment, on behalf of the Chancellor, that, in the forthcoming Budget, he will use no figures claiming Gershon savings unless they have been signed off as above board by the NAO first?
The hon. Gentleman would also benefit from reading the National Audit Office report. It confirms that significant progress is being made, and says—particularly in relation to the Department for Work and Pensions, which accounts for a significant portion of the head count—that the published figures are "robust". It deals with exactly the issue that the hon. Gentleman has raised. We have not yet reached the end of the first year, but we have a transparent system. We have published the technical notes and the basis of measurement, and we have worked with the National Audit Office and the Audit Commission on the measurement.
As I have said, in our view the report published last week confirms that our figures are robust; and where they are not robust, we are dealing with the measurement issues. We will continue to report, in a transparent fashion, to Parliament and the country on the progress that we are making on this important matter.
In 2004, the Chancellor promised a reduction of 70,600 in the number of civil service posts by 2008. Most people would understand that to mean that in 2008, 70,600 fewer people will be working for the civil service than when the Chancellor made that promise. Will that be the case, or will the Treasury permit Departments to include head count reduction in full towards their Gershon targets despite additional recruitment for new projects? That would mean, paradoxically, that we could end up with more people working for the civil service in 2008 rather than 70,000 fewer—and I am not even taking into account the issue of civil servants being laid off and rehired as consultants. Have not the Government set the Gershon goalposts in such a way that they can claim savings without making real improvements to embed a culture of efficiency and value for money in our delivery of public services?
The hon. Lady has made the same error in comparing statistics that she made when we debated the issue on the "Today" programme. I say to her now, as I said to her then, that page 29 of the report deals with it in some detail, and explains why comparing different data is inappropriate.
Let me deal directly with the question of the number of civil servants. The hon. Lady relies for her argument on the fact that during the period of measurement the magistrates courts were transferred from local government to central Government. With that decision came 12,000 people, whom the Office for National Statistics redesignated as civil servants. It is not a case of more people working in the magistrates courts; those people were redesignated. However, the National Audit Office report confirms the opposite of what the hon. Lady has argued—that, in bald civil service number terms, there was a significant reduction over the period. We will meet the target as it was set out in the Gershon review, and we will maintain our approach to meeting that target.
Pensioner Households
As a Labour Government, we have given pensioners pension credit, winter fuel payments, extra help with council tax, free prescriptions, free eye tests, free local-area bus travel and, for the over-75s, free television licences. All those measures have, directly or indirectly, increased pensioner household incomes, and all of them were opposed or criticised by the Conservatives at the time of their introduction.
The Chancellor has indeed done much to eradicate pensioner poverty with such measures as free off-peak bus travel. The Greater Manchester passenger transport authority provides free travel on trains and trams after 9.30 am. Will the Minister encourage other PTAs to follow Manchester's example, and even to consider cross-county agreements with the aim of giving free travel to pensioners and disabled people in particular throughout the country?
I am glad that my hon. Friend welcomes the fact that, in his constituency and throughout Greater Manchester, half a million people will benefit from the beginning of next month. It is true that some bus journeys from the Greater Manchester area will be free. It is also true that local authorities and passenger transport executives will retain the ability to arrange concessionary travel beyond their areas. We would certainly encourage them to do so, and I am sure that the Greater Manchester passenger transport executive is considering such action.
I acknowledge that genuine measures have been taken to increase the prosperity of pensioners throughout the United Kingdom, but does the Minister accept that the widespread and growing use of means-testing acts as a major deterrent, discouraging low-income pensioner households in particular from claiming benefits?
The Government are spending around £7 billion more on pensioners this year than we would be if we had restored the link to the rise in earnings. In a situation where almost one in five people are retiring on more than £400 a week, it is surely right that we put in place help for all pensioners. Clearly, the basic state pension remains the cornerstone for that, but it is right that we put in more help for the pensioners who need it most.
Is my hon. Friend aware that in the seven years since 1997—[Hon. Members: "Nine years."]—the poorest fifth of single pensioners have seen their incomes rise by more than in all the years between 1979 and 1997? Is he further aware that the reason for that is the pension credit, and will he ensure that, in the years ahead, we build on those gains?
I thank my hon. Friend for that question and for the statistics that he has supplied the House. He is right about the progress that has been made, and he is right to urge the Government to do more. Since 1997, 2 million pensioners have been lifted out of poverty by the measures that we have put in place. When we combine the personal tax and benefit changes made since 1997, this year, the average pensioner household will be £26 a week better off and the poorest 10 per cent. of pensioners will be £42 a week better off than they would have been under the Conservative system.
The Minister is avoiding the question. How can he possibly justify a system that, through means-testing, means that it is possible for someone who has saved prudently for their retirement to be worse off than someone who is entitled to means-tested benefits?
The hon. Gentleman needs to study the operation of the pension credit. For the first time, we have a system in place that gives extra help to the poorest pensioners but also gives an extra reward for those who put a bit by for their retirement, either through savings or modest personal or occupational pensions. It is high time that he and his party accept and welcome the operation of the pension credit and see it as something to build on further.
Lisbon Agenda
The review of the Lisbon agenda will take place at the European Finance Ministers meeting on 14 March and at the European Council on 23 March. I have today published a written statement showing the progress that has been made on the reform agenda under the British presidency. Our proposals include further liberalisation of services, energy and utilities and risk-based regulation—areas where Britain is leading the way in Europe.
At a meeting in Brussels last Monday, Commissioner Günter Verheugen stated that 90 per cent. of the Lisbon targets could only be implemented by national Governments on a member state basis. Given the success of the United Kingdom's achievements against the score card—we were fifth overall in terms of progress last year, we are fourth in terms of the entire targets since 2000—what will my right hon. Friend do to encourage other EU countries to match Britain's excellent performance?
I have even better news for my hon. Friend: in the last survey, we were third. One of the Lisbon targets is for the overall employment rate to reach 67 per cent. by 2005 and 70 per cent. by 2010—we are at 72 per cent. Another target is for the female employment rate to reach 57 per cent. by 2005—we are at 67 per cent. already. Those are examples of where we are making progress. I will continue to press our colleagues in the rest of Europe to do so. It might help if the Conservatives were to enter the mainstream of European politics.
Further to the answer that the Chancellor has just given on the Government's performance on unemployment, does he agree that, while the claimant count is relatively impressive in the UK, when we take into account the number of people on Government schemes, the number of people who retired early and want to work and the International Labour Organisation measure of unemployment, the true level of unemployment is closer to 10 per cent. than the 3 million figure suggests? Is that a satisfactory basis from which to lecture other members of the European Union?
I do not accept the hon. Gentleman's figure. Uniquely among our European partners, we have created 2.3 million jobs in the past eight years, and surely even the Liberal Democrats will acknowledge that fact. the hon. Member for Eastleigh (Chris Huhne) is giving the hon. Gentleman instructions this morning—he is sat next to him—or is simply acting as his lieutenant. We will see what happens this afternoon, but I understand that very few people have voted in the Liberal Democrat leadership election. For a few months, the Liberal Democrats have been in search of a leader; now, we will see a leader in search of a party.[Interruption.] I do know whether
On the question of the UK's performance, will my right hon. Friend give some indication of the impact of the high energy costs of the past few months? They could lead to job losses, particularly in my constituency, where up to 2,000 jobs are under pressure as a result.
I understand my hon. Friend's worries about energy costs, and the cost of gas in particular has risen very fast recently. It is an achievement of British macro-economic policy that, even despite the big rise in energy prices, the inflation target of some 2 per cent. continues to be met. One issue in terms of pricing is what is happening in the EU energy market, and all Members will agree that it is about time that we saw the full liberalisation of the EU's gas and general energy markets. We estimate that British business would save about £20 billion a year if that happened.
Will the Chancellor be boasting, as he has just done today, to his fellow Finance Ministers about how wonderfully well we are doing and, by implication, how badly they are all doing? In that context, what will he say to the French Finance Minister about the current scandal in France? The French are advancing protectionism, which is completely in conflict with the so-called Lisbon agreement.
I would quote the right hon. Gentleman's own Conservative leader, who praised the United Kingdom for doing far better than any other country in the EU. I point out to the right hon. Gentleman that it would help if the Conservatives participated in debates in the EU in a sensible way. Even the leader of the Conservative group in the EU says, "You can't move to the centre ground at home and move to the extreme right abroad. The Conservative policy is just barking".
Does my right hon. Friend agree that, although we have done quite well on the Lisbon agenda targets, that agenda will be undermined if, in a free market such as ours, our companies are opened up to takeovers? France and Germany, however, seem absolutely determined to prevent British companies from doing the same thing in Europe.
I accept my hon. Friend's point about the opening up of markets and trade protectionism in general. We will continue to press the EU and America to move further and faster in order to secure a world trade agreement based on the removal of the protectionist policies that have been pursued in the past. Within the EU, we will continue to press for the liberalisation of markets that my hon. Friend proposes, but I must point out that it is free trade countries and countries that are open to competition that are creating jobs. Countries closed to competition are, in the long run, not creating the jobs that they need.
The Chancellor agrees with me that the big challenge that European countries face is competing in the new global economy. Presumably, he shares my disappointment that Britain's trade deficit with China widened by 20 per cent. last year. What is his explanation for that?
We are trading more with China—[Interruption.] If the hon. Gentleman will just listen. We are trading more with China. I have visited China twice this year and we have signed trade agreements with the Chinese in a range of areas, including financial services. Chinese companies are now registering on the London stock exchange and trade between China and Britain is improving. The hon. Gentleman should be congratulating us on our efforts, instead of criticising us.
I asked the Chancellor about the trade deficit. The truth is that he can change his ties, change his shirts and even change his teeth, but he actually needs to change his economic policies if Britain is to compete in future. So will he comment today on the decision by the internet book retailer Amazon to relocate its European service headquarters from England to Ireland? What is his explanation for that?
I will read out what the chairman of the Conservative party's economic research policy commission, the right hon. Member for Wokingham (Mr. Redwood), has said. He has just published—
Order. The Chancellor has had at least three strikes outside the sphere of the question. I must ask him to confine his answer to the question that has been asked.
As you rightly say, Mr. Deputy Speaker, I was asked why a company should relocate to Ireland. The right hon. Member for Wokingham's answer was that companies were relocating to Ireland because the EU had heavily subsidised the Irish Republic and thus allowed it to reduce corporation tax. If the shadow Chancellor wishes to be consistent in his approach to economic policy, why does he not remind the House that he has spent months congratulating the Government on establishing economic credibility after improving the macro-economic management of the economy, and admitting that his own policies lack popularity?
Public Sector Pensions
Pension payments from unfunded public sector pension schemes were £16 billion in 2002–03, £17 billion in 2003–04, and £18 billion in 2004–05. As set out in the long-term public finance report published in the pre-Budget report, spending on unfunded pensions as a percentage of gross domestic product remains unchanged. Principally because of a change in the discount rate effects, the Government Actuary's Department estimates the total accrued liability of unfunded public service pension schemes at £530 billion as of 31 March 2005, but the actual payments by Government as a percentage of GDP are the same as set out a year ago.
I shall place a technical note explaining that estimate in the Library of the House today, as the matters involved are quite complex.
I am grateful to the Minister for clarifying that point, and I shall read the technical note with interest. However, the revision to the calculation of the discount rate has increased the public service pension liability by an astonishing amount, from £24 billion annually to £81 billion. At Warwick, did not the Government fail to address the ballooning crisis in funding public sector pensions, and is that not a further reminder that the Chancellor's self-styled reputation for prudent stewardship of the nation's finances is in tatters?
I do not wish to be pedantic, but the hon. Gentleman is relying on a figure of £81 billion that he got off the front page of The Daily Telegraph, and it is clear that he has not performed a simple arithmetical calculation between the figure that I have given and the figure that was in the public domain previously. When he comes to read the technical note, that calculation will be very clear.
It is not on page 29, but page 1.
The hon. Member for Ludlow (Mr. Dunne) will know that the calculation is based on a set of assumptions, and that it is an aggregation of liabilities based on international accounting standards. However, the technical note makes it clear that none of the new information and assumptions used to make the new estimates of total liabilities has any material effect on the future cash payments from the schemes in the longer term, which are set out in the public finance report. The sustainability of the public finances is a function of what has to be paid, and does not depend on a calculation of aggregated liabilities in the long term.
Has my right hon. Friend had any discussions about the funding of local government pension schemes? He will be aware that there is much concern among local government employees, and in local government itself, about how such schemes will be funded.
My hon. Friend raises an important and live issue, for local government employees and for local government itself—and consequently for council tax payers. However, the distinction between the substance of the question and the local government pension scheme is that the latter is a funded scheme. I am, of course, involved in discussions with my right hon. Friend the Deputy Prime Minister and with other Ministers in the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister about their negotiations and discussions in respect of the scheme, but it would be inappropriate for me to comment on matters that are the responsibility of other Ministers.
According to the pre-Budget report, the annual cost of public sector pensions is set to rise by 0.7 per cent. of GDP over the next 30 years—the equivalent of £8 billion in today's prices. Is the Chief Secretary satisfied that the deal cut by the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry at Warwick will make the cost of public sector pensions more sustainable, or does he agree with the Chancellor's remarks in November, when he said that there was still a lot more work to be done?
I have given additional figures today that may inform the hon. Gentleman's analysis, but the long-term financial report shows that the cost of public sector unfunded pensions over the next 50 years is sustainable. As for the settlement that was arrived at by my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry in negotiations with public sector unions for the long-term sustainability of these schemes, we achieved exactly the objectives that we set for savings, and the unions and the work force have agreed to absorb those savings.
May I urge my right hon. Friend to be resolute in resisting panic over the issue of public sector pension liabilities? A relatively small change in the discount rate can produce apparently very much larger figures. My right hon. Friend is not running a hedge fund; he is operating public sector finances. Will he bear it in mind that if he were panicked into taking drastic action on this topic, one effect would be a reduction in public sector borrowing issues, and the problems of private sector pension schemes would therefore be increased?
My hon. Friend is precisely correct. On one famous occasion a non-governmental organisation—clearly outside of government—adopted a negative discount rate and suggested a terrifying figure for the cost of unfunded public sector pension schemes. Of course the selection of the discount rate has a significant effect on the calculation. That is why it is important to come back to what the funds cost year on year. The detailed figures that I gave to the hon. Member for Ludlow (Mr. Dunne) in answer to the original question showed that they are sustainable and that it is important to look at the long-term projections that are published with the pre-Budget report and the Budget. This is sustainable provision; it is constantly reviewed and revised. We now accept international accounting standards for public accounts, so we adopt and apply the discount rates that those standards compel us to adopt.
Business Productivity
Productivity is estimated to have grown by around 2.6 per cent. in the first half of the current cycle from 1997, compared with just 2 per cent. in the previous cycle from 1986 to 1997. In addition, the Office for National Statistics has recently announced new estimates for higher investment. Software IT investment in 2003 is now estimated to be not £8 billion but £21 billion. That will mean that the figures will show increased growth, and we will update our estimates for higher productivity.
The Chancellor has been keen to claim credit for a strong economy, but on the figures that we have been given Britain's position in the global productivity league table has fallen from fourth to 13th. Does the Chancellor take responsibility for that, or does he blame others?
I have just given the hon. Gentleman the figures to show that productivity is higher in this cycle than in the last cycle. I have just given him figures to show that it is 2.6 per cent. on average as opposed to less than 2 per cent. If I may say so, the only years in which productivity has fallen have been Conservative years. In each year of the Labour Government, productivity has risen, and manufacturing productivity rose 5.1 per cent. in 2003 and 5.8 per cent. in 2004.
The Chancellor has stated:
"To secure the fastest productivity growth of our competitors over the next decade . . . business investment must rise."
Under this Government, business is voting with its wallet; business investment is officially now the lowest for 40 years. Would he describe that as prudence with a purpose?
These figures are completely wrong. Business investment has been rising under this Government and it continues to rise. I have just given the hon. Gentleman the new figure produced by the ONS, which shows that software investment alone, which people thought was £8 billion in 2003, is actually £21 billion. We have had one of the fastest rates of business investment growth since 1997, and that is to the credit of a Government who have insisted that stability must be the foundation of policy. Should he not be giving us some credit for a 40 per cent. fall in unemployment in his constituency?
My right hon. Friend will be aware that the recent rises in productivity have gone hand in hand with rising employment. Does he agree that producing a highly skilled, highly trained work force is crucial to achieving future productivity gains?
Under the previous Government, productivity rose slowly and unemployment was high. Under this Government, since 1997, productivity has risen faster and, at the same time, employment has risen. The Conservatives are making a grave mistake if they think that people believe that a British economy that has grown faster, had more stability, met its inflation targets, had low interest rates and rising employment—[Interruption.] The claimant count fell last month, and the Conservatives should give us credit for that. They would be wrong to bank on the idea that the British people believe that the economy has done badly under this Government.
Does my right hon. Friend agree that as welcome as supply-side policies are to improve productivity, the real key is still maintaining macro-economic stability?
I accept what my hon. Friend says, and I understand that the Conservative leader has now reached the conclusion that stability is the foundation of what should be done. Since 1997, we have been consistent in supporting stability as the foundation of policy and that required us, in the first instance, to take the difficult decision of making the Bank of England independent—a decision opposed by the Conservatives.
The Chancellor's comments on business investment levels are worrying. It would be hard for him to find a single economist to agree with him—and few members of the Monetary Policy Committee would agree—that performance has not been lacklustre. Is he now planning his growth against a much lower trend of business investment?
The answer is no.
Does my right hon. Friend agree that the success of Swindon's economy, with the highest gross domestic product per head in the south-west, is due to the UK's competitiveness, our macro-economic stability since 1997 and the productivity of the Swindon work force?
I congratulate the Swindon work force on their productivity. Long-term unemployment has fallen by almost 70 per cent. in my hon. Friend's constituency and youth unemployment has fallen by even more. Employment has been rising over the past eight years at a faster rate than in most countries in the European Union—
Well, if I may say so, employment rose by more than 150,000 in the last year. It is difficult to point to many years under the Conservative Government in which that happened.
Growth Forecasts
The best way of obtaining more reliable growth forecasts is to deliver a stable and steadily growing economy. The radical reforms to monetary and fiscal policy that my right hon. Friend the Chancellor has put in place have done just that. Britain is no longer the world's stop-go economy, as it was under the Tories. It is now what the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development describes as a paragon of stability.
Given that the Chancellor had to downgrade his growth forecasts for 2004 and 2005 and has now had to downgrade them for 2006 and 2007, is not the most effective way to have reliable forecasts to adopt the Conservative party's proposals for independent assessment of the fiscal rules—the golden rule and the sustainable investments rule—and independent statistics, so that balance sheets, borrowing and other contentious issues are measured transparently?
In the pre-Budget report, my right hon. Friend the Chancellor recognised, as did most businesses and forecasters, that 2005 was a particularly tough year. We saw a doubling of world oil prices, weak further growth in the key export market of the European Union and adjustments in the UK economy as we managed down what was double-digit house price inflation. During that year, the UK economy still grew, for the fifth successive year—at a faster rate than the economies in Germany, France, Japan, Italy and the eurozone area—and added a third of a million extra jobs. As the distinguished member of the Monetary Policy Committee, Richard Lambert, said:
"The idea that we could have seen a doubling of oil prices in eighteen months accompanied by a still expanding economy and CPI inflation running at . . . just over 2 per cent is absolutely astonishing."
Child Trust Fund
I am pleased to announce to the House that the latest child trust fund account figures to 20 February show a strong performance: 72 per cent. of the earliest vouchers have been used by parents to open a child trust fund account and nearly 1.5 million child trust fund accounts have been opened in total. The Government continue to encourage parents to open accounts, through activities such as simple step-by-step guides for parents, media advertising and working with a range of community bodies to reach less financially confident families. The child trust fund has kick-started a revolution in the way that the nation saves for its children. It will strengthen the saving habit of future generations and ensure that at the age of 18, for the first time in our history, every child will have access to a financial asset.
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that answer. A few moments ago the shadow Chancellor asked the Chancellor to change not only his policies but his shirt. It is a matter of grave concern to me that the shadow Chancellor and I are wearing the same tie, so I will have to get changed.
The scheme has been criticised as unnecessary and expensive, but is not it a really good way of encouraging children to save for the long term?
I assure my hon. Friend that I will not tell his constituents that he was wearing the same tie as the shadow Chancellor, as it would damage his credibility in terms of his ever going home again.
The important point about the policy is that it is at the heart of the kind of society that the Government are seeking to create on a long-term basis, with a savings culture offering opportunities to every child that previously were available only to some, and replacing inter-generational deprivation with inter-generational advance. We need to put the child trust fund alongside enhanced child care and employment opportunities. We are lifting the ambitions and aspirations of families who were previously left behind, shamefully, by the Tories when they were in government.
From the figures the Minister has given us, we see that almost a third of parents have failed to invest in a scheme. Is it right that Revenue and Customs should make that choice for parents? Does not that go to the heart of what the Government are trying to achieve and show that they have not chosen the most effective scheme?
The point is that, although the doom and gloom merchants said that the take-up of vouchers for accounts would not be above 50 per cent., I can report that the figure is 72 per cent.—but we are not complacent. No child should lose out because a parent fails to convert the voucher into an account after 12 months, which is why we are willing to do it. We intend to continue advertising and promoting, and we want every Member of the House to encourage parents in their constituency to take advantage of those opportunities. The helpline number is 0845 3021470—I urge Members to get on and advertise it to parents.
I very much welcome the improvement in take-up of the scheme, which has been really important for my constituents. As my hon. Friend is a former Education Minister, can he say whether the Treasury will promote take-up through Sure Start and children's centres so that this important scheme reaches some of the most excluded families?
I agree entirely with my hon. Friend. When we reach out to people who were financially excluded in the past, it is incredibly important that we are far more imaginative and innovative. Whether through Sure Start schemes, health visitors, grass-roots, community and voluntary organisations or faith groups, it is very important that we are innovative and imaginative as we seek to reach every individual.
Working Tax Credit
The child and working tax credits are designed to make work pay and reduce poverty, and nearly 2 million individuals are benefiting. Research published today shows that tax credit take-up rates for families with children reached an unprecedented level in the first year of operation. Figures show take-up of about 80 per cent. overall and 90 per cent. for the poorest families, which compares with 57 per cent. in the first year of family credit. Additional research on how family incomes vary shows that the flexible nature of the working tax credit and child credit helps to smooth income, particularly for disadvantaged groups. As the hon. Gentleman will be aware, the 2005 pre-Budget report announced a series of reforms to be introduced over the next 18 months, which will give families more certainty about their tax credit award while maintaining the flexibility that is crucial.
I am grateful to the Paymaster General for that detailed reply, but she will be aware that the administration of the system is certainly in chaos. Many people have been given money to which they were not entitled. That has not been their fault; they have provided information, which the system has not been able to take on board. The Paymaster General has, for example, increased the disregard from £2,500 to £25,000, but that addresses only part of the problem. Surely, it is better to make the system efficient, rather than using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. What on earth will that cost?
The hon. Gentleman will be aware that the announcements made in the pre-Budget report in 2005 were widely welcomed as precisely the way to continue to improve the tax credit system. I reiterate that the take-up rate for the poorest families is over 90 per cent., which does not show the failure in the scheme that he suggests. I also remind him that, in 1997, a one-child family on average earnings received just £11 a week for help with their child. By April 2006, that figure will be somewhere near £62. That is a success. Take-up continues to grow, and it is about time that the Conservative party started to support the tax credit scheme, instead of constantly trying to knock it and undermine it.
Although the scheme is undoubtedly excellent, does the Paymaster General accept that the Government are not necessarily getting the credit that they deserve? Would it not be much better if individual Members—particularly Labour Members, who support the tax credit scheme—were given the opportunity to present the cheques directly to those of their constituents who receive the money?
I can understand the attraction to Members of my hon. Friend's proposal. I have a feeling that the administration would be somewhat expensive, but he makes the point that every Member has thousands of families, with thousands of children, benefiting from tax credits, and Members need to ensure that they understand the benefits of the scheme before they start knocking it and trying to undermine people's confidence in it.
Will the Paymaster General now clarify when she was first briefed by officials of the Inland Revenue on the organised criminal fraud in the tax credit system?
Yes, I can confirm that all the parliamentary answers that I have given to the House, including those to the hon. Gentleman, give the correct information and that the House has been kept fully informed.
Labour Members welcome the announcement in the pre-Budget report which will streamline the administration of tax credits, because we fundamentally believe that tax credits are a good system, but will my right hon. Friend give me an indication of the time scale for those who are on income support to migrate on to the tax credit system?
I promised to keep the House informed of developments in the transfer of income support and jobseeker's allowance claimants to the tax credit system. I will continue to do that, but I have nothing further to add now. My hon. Friend raises an important point about a particularly vulnerable group, which other hon. Members on both sides of the House have raised, and we need to be sure that the system will be right.
The Paymaster General pointedly refused to answer the question about the cost of the tenfold increase in the income disregard, but when senior officials in Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs gave evidence to the Public Accounts Committee on 14 December, they admitted that that separate figure had been calculated, and offered to provide it to PAC
"in liaison with our Treasury colleagues".
However, that liaison has been going on for two and a half months and has not come to a conclusion. As Ministers obviously have a figure for what the income disregard will cost, when will they share it with the House and the British taxpayer, so that we know how much that very major element of the Chancellor's pet project will really cost?
I really cannot help the hon. Gentleman if he does not read the papers and the information that is presented to the House. He will see in the pre-Budget report that the costings were provided for the package. He has seen the explanation that the package interrelates with obligations and benefits, and that it is the net cost of the package that has been identified to the House. He knows that. It is nonsense to try to separate the individual items, because it is their interaction that produces the cost that needs to be accounted for to the House.
Public Funding (South-west)
The south-west region, like all parts of the United Kingdom, is benefiting from increased investment in public services. I am sure that the hon. Gentleman will be pleased to hear that the latest available figures show that, for 2004–05, the total identified expenditure invested in the south-west was projected to be about £30 billion—almost £6,000 per head. Information on public funding in the south-west region for 2005–06 will be published by the Government in the spring in their public expenditure statistical analysis.
I am grateful for that reply. I understand that the cost of the South West regional assembly is about £4 million a year. Regional assemblies are robbing local councils of their power. Why are taxpayers being made to pay for a deeply unpopular organisation that they never had the opportunity to vote for in the first place?
I reiterate to the hon. Gentleman what his Conservative colleagues in the regional chamber said to him when he stood up and spoke on this subject before, which was that it is good to make sure that one's policy is consistent across the party. He has called for more investment in transport, technical colleges, and recycling and regeneration. He knows full well that that has to be paid for and it is about time that he, with his colleagues, started to understand how.
Off-balance-sheet Debt
The Government are meeting their fiscal rules and the long-term public finance report shows that public finances remain sound and sustainable. The risk of off-balance-sheet projects lies with the private sector. Under the UK's internationally agreed and independently measured national accounts, off-balance-sheet debt is not included in measures of public net debt. The decision about whether any individual private finance initiative is on or off balance sheet is made in accordance with the UK's accounting standards. It is made independently of Government by the relevant audit body.
Now that the Office for National Statistics has decided to reclassify the borrowings of London and Continental Railways to bring them on balance sheet and therefore make them part of Government debt, is it not time to review the off-balance-sheet status of Network Rail's debts to give a clearer picture of whether the Chancellor's sustainable investment rule in relation to the country's national debt is being complied with?
With respect to the hon. Gentleman, the answer lies in his question. It is the independent assessment, which is carried out according to international accounting standards agreed by treaty, that judges whether a debt is on or off balance sheet. In both cases, the National Audit Office makes that decision independently. Rather than the Government making a decision in relation to one piece of debt and the National Audit Office making a decision in another case, we should leave things as they are. We should leave the decision with the independent body, which applies the same national standards and rules to one railway operation as it does to the other. That is precisely what we will do.
New Deal (Swansea, East)
Since 1998, the new deal has helped 3,170 young unemployed people in Swansea, East and 1,870 young people have found work through the new deal, contributing to a 75 per cent. reduction in the number of unemployed young people in the constituency claiming benefit for more than six months. Independent evidence has repeatedly demonstrated the impact of the new deal and suggests that overall youth unemployment has been reduced nationally by between 30,000 and 40,000.
I appreciate my right hon. Friend's answer. I recently met one of my constituents who praised what the new deal had done for his teenage daughter, who is a lone parent. The new deal helped her to train as a hairdresser and provided support for child care. No doubt she would still be on benefit had the scheme not existed. Her parents were profoundly grateful to the Government. Will the Government ensure that the new deal continues to help young people?
As the House will know, in 1997 Britain had the fastest growing youth unemployment and long-term unemployment in Europe. The contribution of the new deal to helping young people return to work, and the return of others to work through the programme, has proved a huge success. The Government are committed to its continuation, unlike the Conservative party, which wants to abolish the new deal, presumably because it thinks that unemployment is a price worth paying.
Business of the House
Will the Leader of the House give us the business for the coming week?
The business for next week will be as follows.
Monday 6 March—Second Reading of the Police and Justice Bill.
Tuesday 7 March—Remaining stages of the Merchant Shipping (Pollution) Bill [Lords], followed by motion to take note of various European documents relating to Financial Management.
Wednesday 8 March—Second Reading of the Road Safety Bill [Lords].
Thursday 9 March—Remaining stages of the Childcare Bill.
Friday 10 March—Private Members' Bills.
The provisional business for the following week will be:
Monday 13 March—Second Reading of the Northern Ireland (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill, followed by consideration of Lords Amendments to the Terrorism Bill.
Tuesday 14 March—Remaining stages of the Animal Welfare Bill.
Wednesday 15 March—Second Reading of the Education and Inspection Bill.
Thursday 16 March—Consideration of Lords Amendments.
Friday 17 March—Private Members' Bills.
I thank the Leader of the House for giving us the business for the next two weeks. True to his word, the Education and Inspection Bill was published by the end of February—just. There is, of course, considerable interest in this issue. The Prime Minister has described the reforms as the crux of his agenda and
"extremely important to the future of a Labour government".
I ask the Leader of the House again whether he will allow two days of debate on Second Reading to ensure that hon. Members have proper time to air their views on the Government's reforms.
There is growing concern about the impact of avian flu on the United Kingdom. Indeed, the Government's chief scientific adviser has said that it will be with us for a number of years. Given the different views on the value of vaccination and public interest in this matter, may we have a debate in Government time on avian flu and the Government's strategy for handling it?
I am sure that the right hon. Gentleman will have seen the letter in The Times today from Sir David Attenborough, co-signed among others by the executive director of Friends of the Earth, the director of conservation of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and the executive director of Greenpeace. The letter refers to the proposal by the Natural Environment Research Council to close five out of the nine centres of the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology. It says that the cuts are "scientifically flawed" and
"will . . . have a serious detrimental effect on the Government's ability to make policy that is based on sound scientific research."
Given the significance of climate change, to which the issue relates among other things, will the Leader of the House arrange for publication of the evidence given by DEFRA to the NERC review and for a debate on the issue?
In business questions recently, hon. Members on both sides of the House have raised the Government's proposal to remove the Post Office card account. We have had interesting debates on the different meanings of "interim" and "temporary". I understand from papers placed in the Library that it is not clear that it was made apparent to those signing contracts with the Post Office that the account was either interim or temporary.
Given that the Post Office has said that it could run the mail service on only 4,000 branches, which would mean a cut of more than 10,000 post office branches, and given that many constituencies throughout the country, including mine, are already reeling from the impact of post office closures, will the Leader of the House make Government time available for a debate on the future of the Post Office, and in particular on the Government's strategy on whether or not they want to keep our rural and suburban post offices?
Finally, yesterday, in reply to a question from my hon. Friend the Member for South Norfolk (Mr. Bacon) on the present inquiry by the Cabinet Secretary, the Prime Minister said:
"We will, of course, examine any allegations that are made, and reply to them fully."—[Official Report, 1 March 2006; Vol. 443, c. 254.]
Will the Leader of the House confirm the Prime Minister's position?
I am delighted to welcome the right hon. Lady's observations on a range of policy matters. This week, in the spirit of giving credit where credit is due, we have witnessed the wholesale conversion of the Conservative party to large parts of the Labour Government's manifesto. The phrase about sinners repenting comes to mind. We all want the Opposition to maintain their commitment to economic stability, which they say is a good thing; to protecting the environment—we have been telling them so for years; and to the belief that poverty is a bad thing. The fact that the Conservative party has admitted that is progress of sorts. It wants, too, to encourage family-friendly policies.
I am sure that Opposition Members would benefit from reading the rest of the Labour Government's manifesto. I have it with me and would be delighted to make it available to the right hon. Lady so that, when her party publishes its next document—the present one is curiously entitled "Built to Last", presumably followed by the words "for at least a week"—it can continue in the same spirit and adopt our manifesto. Government Members are delighted by that progress, just as we are delighted with progress on the Education and Inspections Bill. I am sure that there will be adequate opportunity for hon. Members to debate that important measure in due course. We have debated on several occasions the Government's excellent preparations to deal with the prospect of a flu crisis.
As for climate change, the right hon. Lady is entirely in order in raising those issues, but it would be helpful if she were in order on her own party's policies. As for the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, there is no doubt about the Government's commitment to fund high-quality scientific research. The funding of the overall science budget and the Natural Environment Research Council is outstanding. Indeed, it has doubled since 1997. It is important that that organisation should set its own scientific priorities. It is not right for Ministers and politicians to determine the way in which that money is spent. It is for that organisation to judge how best to develop its own research.
We have had a number of discussions about the Post Office card account in recent months, but I should have thought that everyone was united in the objective of ensuring the continuation of the services that the Post Office provides to people who take advantage of the Post Office card account. Everyone will accept that it is sensible, given the long lead time during which the Government are funding the card, that we should find ways of encouraging people to continue to take advantage of the Post Office and use a range of other services that it offers. If Opposition Members had thought this through, they would see that there is a clear and obvious link between the Post Office card and the future of the Post Office, which provides a range of services. It should be clear to people using the card—[Interruption.] I hope that the right hon. Lady will listen—I listened to her—instead of screeching from the Front Bench. I hope that we all share a commitment to the Post Office and the services that it provides. It makes available a range of accounts, which should be used to support the people who use the Post Office card.
I do not know whether the Leader of the House had the opportunity yesterday to visit the "Stop Climate Chaos" lobby across the road, but would it not be opportune to hold a debate on early-day motion 178?
[That this House agrees with the Government's Chief Scientific Adviser that climate change is a threat to civilisation; welcomes the cross-party agreement in favour of major cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, and particularly in carbon dioxide emissions, by 2050; believes that such a long-term target will best be met through a series of more regular milestones; and therefore notes the Climate Change Bill that was presented by a cross-party group of honourable Members in the final days before the General Election, and hopes that such a Bill will be brought forward in this Parliament so that annual cuts in carbon dioxide emissions of 3 per cent. can be delivered in a framework that includes regular reporting and new scrutiny and corrective processes.]
The motion was tabled by the right hon. Member for Oldham, West and Royton (Mr. Meacher) and signed by no fewer than 338 hon. Members, including almost the entire Liberal Democrat parliamentary party. This is an important issue, and it needs to be debated in the House.
May we have a debate on higher education, given that this year the number of applications to universities fell for the first time in six years, with a particularly pronounced fall among English students applying to English universities, which suggests that tuition fees are an important factor?
If we are to properly address terrorism, as of course we must, would it not be the right time to examine again the admissibility of intercept evidence? Perhaps the Police and Justice Bill is an opportunity to do so, given the view expressed by Assistant Commissioner Andy Hayman last week that to continue banning telephone tap evidence would be foolish.
Lastly, may we have a debate in Government time on the Government's view of local government? The Minister of Communities and Local Government gave his views last week about what he called "double devolution" without mentioning local authorities at all. We also have the Secretary of State for Education and Skills determining that local education authorities cannot build schools without her having a veto, and the Home Secretary wanting to appoint police authorities himself. Do the Government still believe in local government?
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for raising those matters. This is probably the last day on which I will be able to comment on his prospects of becoming the leader of the Liberal Democrats. There does not seem to be any sign of a write-in vote, but we live in hope. We have yet to see the result of that magnificent contest.
I was intrigued to discover the other day that the party committed to proportional representation seems to have failed to persuade its own Members of Parliament to cast their second preference votes. Since the party constantly, at business questions and on other occasions, encourages the Government to consider the benefits of proportional representation, which presumably involves second, third and other preference votes, it is surprising that members of the Liberal Democrat party in the House do not seem to have followed their own advice. I was intrigued to see comments by various Members, including the hon. Member for Twickenham (Dr. Cable), who apparently said:
"I filled it in the other day after it came. I honestly can't remember whether I just went for Ming and not the other two, or voted for Chris second. It wasn't something I regarded as being a terribly important decision at the time."
I wonder whether the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome (Mr. Heath) was adopting the same approach as the hon. Member for Montgomeryshire (Lembit Öpik), who said:
"I have not declared, basically because"—
Order. I have given the right hon. Gentleman a very generous run. I take the old-fashioned view that this session is about the business for next week. If everyone is hoping to catch my eye in the time available, that is what we should do.
I entirely agree, Mr. Deputy Speaker.
With reference to the questions raised by the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome, I have already dealt with climate change. The Government would always be delighted to debate the matter. The United Kingdom is on course to meet and exceed its Kyoto target—one of only two of the EU 15 to do so. We have an outstanding record in this regard, of which the Government are extraordinarily proud.
On higher education, there is a clear explanation for the adjustment in the figures for this year. Last year, there was a significant increase in the number of university applications. Not surprisingly, that has been adjusted. It is impossible to keep up that level of increase, but overall there is a significant increase in the number of people applying for university places, which the Government strongly support.
On the admissibility of intercept evidence, anyone responsible for trying to bring terrorists and other significant criminals to justice wants as much evidence as possible to be made available to the court. That is not the issue. I hope the hon. Gentleman will think about this carefully. The issue is the extent to which making intercept evidence available jeopardises the way in which that evidence is secured. Frankly, that is a difficult balance to strike. I have seen the product of such intercepts, and it would be extremely dangerous for the future of our security services and the means that they adopt if we were to allow such evidence to be adduced in court and challenged in cross-examination. He must think through those important issues.
The Government are undertaking a number of important pieces of work on local government. I anticipate that a White Paper will be produced in due course, as a result of which there will be lots of opportunities for hon. Members to debate the matter.
No topic is more controversial locally than the disposal of waste. Although I do not expect my right hon. Friend to comment on a controversial planning application in my constituency, can we have an urgent debate on the strategy for waste recycling and disposal, including incineration? If he cannot find time to hold a debate immediately, will he ask his ministerial colleagues in the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and the Department of Trade and Industry to put the best available scientific evidence in the public domain, which would allow hon. Members to deal with the matter constructively?
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for raising that issue, which is important up and down the country. He takes a considerable interest in such matters, so he knows that the Government have devoted an enormous amount of extra effort to, for example, promoting recycling, which is an important part of waste disposal. The level of recycling in this country has been significantly improved, but more needs to be done to meet the standards achieved in other European countries, so I am grateful for his interest in the subject.
I thank the Leader of the House in anticipation of his finding time to debate the health funding crisis in Shropshire. Is he aware that patients are being told that beds are no longer available because of the low nurse to patient ratio at the Princess Royal hospital? The primary care back-up services are insufficient, which means that my constituents are suffering.
I do not in any way minimise the difficulties and challenges faced by those responsible for providing health care in Shropshire, but the hon. Gentleman knows that there has been huge investment in the national health service. The amount of money made available for health care will have tripled between 1997 and 2007–08. When he refers to a health funding crisis, he must put it in this context: 432 out of 566 NHS organisations provide a service by balancing their books, and if three quarters of the national health service can do that, there is no reason why the rest cannot do the same. Only around 4 per cent. of NHS organisations account for 50 per cent. of the overspend, and it is perfectly reasonable for the Government to say in the light of the huge amount of extra money being put into the NHS that those organisations that are failing to balance their books should look hard at why that is the case.
I note that next week's provisional business covers Monday 13 March, which is Commonwealth day. Has the Leader of the House seen early-day motion 1709, which has been signed by numerous hon. Members, including me?
[That this House, in common with all parliaments of the Commonwealth, gladly observes Commonwealth Day on Monday 13th March; sincerely supports this year's theme of Health and Vitality—The Commonwealth Challenge, emphasising the Commonwealth's commitment to health and fitness to bring hope to the world; and recognises the excellent work done by the United Kingdom branch of the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association in partnership with its sister branches in the advancement of parliamentary democracy and good governance throughout the Commonwealth.]
Despite the pressures of parliamentary business, would it not be appropriate to have a debate in Government time on the performance, role, objectives and future of the Commonwealth's promotion of parliamentary democracy and good governance in countries throughout the world?
My hon. Friend has raised an important issue. The Government strongly support the Commonwealth and I share his commitment to Commonwealth day and what it represents. If he were to apply to secure an Adjournment debate in this House or Westminster Hall, I am sure that that topic would be suitable.
My constituents are extremely concerned about the news, which the shadow Leader of the House has mentioned, that 10,000 more post offices around the country may be closed. Post offices are particularly important to people in isolated rural communities, and it is the old, those who do not have transport and the poorest members of our society who most depend on their services. Those people are concerned that the Government are not committed to rural post offices because of the withdrawal of the Post Office card account. The Leader of the House has said that the Government are committed to rural post offices, but can we have a debate as soon as possible?
I have already emphasised the Government's commitment to postal services, particularly rural postal services. We all know that local post offices play a vital role in the community in many small towns and villages. The Government remain committed to that. That is why we introduced the Post Office account and why we continue to want the people who use that account to use postal services. Some 25 Post Office accounts are available to people, and they are simple and straightforward to use. The whole purpose of the various pilots that have been conducted recently is to encourage people to move away from the account to use other Post Office accounts that will give them greater benefits than are currently available to them, not least interest on their accounts.
It is some time since the House was given an opportunity to debate progress on the Government's 10-year strategy on the misuse of drugs. Several issues are in the headlines at the moment. The Home Secretary is considering the classification of drugs, many Members are worried about the increasing use of methamphetamine, and drug deaths are on the increase. May I ask the Government to give us the opportunity to debate progress on their strategy?
My hon. Friend is right to raise an issue that is important everywhere. The Government have used their considerable powers all over the country, and indeed internationally, to deal with the threat that drugs pose in our society. We regularly discuss that in this House and I am sure that such opportunities will be given to hon. Members in due course.
Will the Leader of the House encourage his right hon. Friend the Health Secretary to attend the House as soon as possible to explain why her welcome commitment to community hospitals, as laid out in the recent White Paper, is being so flagrantly ignored by primary care trusts, notably West Wiltshire primary care trust in respect of Westbury hospital, which is due virtually to close this weekend?
I happened to be in the Chamber yesterday evening, and I am sure that I saw my right hon. Friend the Health Secretary here to participate in debates concerned with the health service. [Interruption.] Opposition Members are making noises from sedentary positions, but I know that their ingenuity is sufficient to allow them to raise such questions in the context of yesterday's debate.
My right hon. Friend announced that we are to debate the Education and Inspections Bill on 15 March. No doubt we will be treated to long speeches from the Front Bench and curtailed time for Back Benchers to contribute. With that in mind, will he ensure that when we come to discuss the detail of the Bill on Report, ample time is allocated so that we can all contribute to this very important debate about the future of our education service?
I am sorry that my hon. Friend, who is usually an outgoing and optimistic Member of this House, takes, if he will forgive me for saying so, such a cynical view of our proceedings. My experience of speaking from the Dispatch Box is that the length of Front-Bench speeches is largely the result of the number of interventions that are taken. Perhaps if my hon. Friends resist the temptation to intervene on the Minister there will be more time available for Back-Bench contributions. To deal with my hon. Friend's substantive point, it is important that the House has a full opportunity to debate and discuss these issues, and I am confident that sufficient time will be made available.
May I thank the Speaker and you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, for helping me, following the point of order that I made 13 or 14 days ago, to extract the secret contract between the Post Office and the Government in 2002? It revealed that the POCA—Post Office card account—was intended to be an interim step for account holders. Incredibly, however, the contract that went to benefit customers did not mention the fact that the card was meant to be interim or temporary—words which, for the benefit of the Leader of the House, are synonymous according to the dictionary. That is an extraordinary deceit pulled on millions of benefit holders. The fact that the Government now intend to shift all benefit recipients on to direct payment, regardless of what the Leader of the House just said, means that 14,400 post offices across the country may be in jeopardy because Adam Crozier came to the all-party group on sub-post offices and said that he needs only 4,000 to run a postal service. Can we please have a debate—
Order. At the risk of losing the gratitude of the hon. Gentleman, I think that he got his question in just in time.
And a fairly predictable one it was, as well. I seize on one part of the hon. Gentleman's remarks—"regardless of what the Leader of the House just said." I am not sure that he can ignore what I said in quite the way that he has chosen to do. We all want rural postal services to be preserved and, indeed, enhanced where appropriate. We all want to ensure that people who currently use the post office to receive their benefits continue to do so and that a large number of simple and straightforward Post Office accounts are available. Surely all that means that it is wholly sensible to continue to have the benefits paid in this way and, moreover, to enhance the interest available to the hon. Gentleman's constituents, and other constituents around the country, through using the other Post Office accounts.
When can we have a debate on early-day motion 1316, which draws attention to the dangers of contaminated air in aircraft?
[That this House is concerned that medical and scientific evidence shows that as many as 200,000 passengers a year are exposed to air contaminated with organophosphates and hydrocarbon compounds on UK registered aircraft and that the number of contaminated events in 2005 reported by the British Airline Pilots Association, were a record high; regrets the lack of UK research into the danger of exposure to pyrolised engine oils; notes that effective filtration systems costing less than £10,000 per aircraft are available and calls for their mandatory use to reduce serious risks to the health of the travelling public and operating crews; and believes that passengers should be informed when they have been exposed to air contamination on UK registered aircraft.]
That matter has been raised by the British Air Line Pilots Association, which is greatly anxious about the incidents that occurred last year in which 200,000 passengers on British planes were exposed to contamination from fumes from organophosphates and hydrocarbons. Since the early-day motion was tabled on 9 January, there has been a further incident in a plane flying from Belfast airport whereby the pilot became incapacitated and could not react to his safety instructions. The other pilot had to take over, and the flight was recalled to Belfast airport. There is a serious danger of a catastrophe—
Order. I think that the Leader of the House has probably got the gist. The hon. Gentleman must not use all his arguments in advance of the debate that he may be granted.
I could not have put it better myself, Mr. Deputy Speaker. I know that this matter is taken extremely seriously by my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Transport. It is being investigated, and I will ensure that he writes to my hon. Friend.
May we have a debate in Government time on Government measures to help to create and sustain job and employment opportunities in economically deprived areas? Such a debate would allow us to raise the issue of the Trivirix plant in west Belfast. Sadly, that constituency is not represented in this House by its elected Member, but I am happy to raise the concerns of workers and constituents on this occasion. Those workers have been badly treated, and the management have simply abandoned the operation. I urge the Leader of the House to allow a debate so that we can highlight those issues.
The hon. Gentleman makes his point with his customary clarity. I am sure that the issue will be considered very carefully by my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland.
The Leader of the House will be aware that next month sees the introduction of the Government's scheme for free bus travel for pensioners. Is he aware that a serious anomaly has arisen in Tyne and Wear, where there is a £5.5 million shortfall in funding the scheme? Given the urgency of the situation, can we have a debate next week to establish how it has arisen and what might be done about it, and, in particular, to make it clear that it is not local councillors, but Ministers and mandarins in Whitehall, who are responsible?
I emphasise to my hon. Friend the importance that the Government attach to bus travel and bus services. That is why a significant amount of money has been made available right across the country to ensure that free bus travel and other concessionary schemes are available to our constituents. I will invite my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Transport to respond directly on the specific issue in my hon. Friend's constituency.
When can we expect a statement from the Secretary of State for Defence on the future size and shape of the Territorial Army? It has been rumoured—and interestingly not denied—that the TA unit in Shetland is to be closed as part of the rebalancing exercise. If true, we will be left with no military presence in Shetland and any Shetlander wishing to serve in the TA will be denied the opportunity to do so. An Army spokesman told us in January that an announcement would be made in the House in early to middle February. When will we get it?
I know from my experience in the Ministry of Defence the importance that it and the Government attach to the contribution of members of the TA to our armed forces. In recent years, they have provided an indispensable source of support for regular forces in ways that would not have been recognised historically. Instead of simply training regularly, they now train and deploy, often alongside their regular Army counterparts. The Ministry of Defence therefore attaches great importance to the service that they provide.
Will my right hon. Friend find time for a debate on special schools? There is a good school for those with moderate learning difficulties in my constituency, which Ofsted rated as excellent, yet the Conservative council in Wandsworth plan to close it. A debate would give us time to explain Government policy—and, I believe, that of the Leader of the Opposition—that we should not close special schools but ensure that parents have a choice between special and mainstream schools. Hon. Members of all parties should support that policy.
I recognise the concern that has been caused to my hon. Friend's constituents. The Government's position is clear: it is for local education authorities rather than for Ministers to determine school provision in their area. That is a matter for school organisation committees, but that policy does not appear to be followed with any consistency by Conservative-controlled local authorities, which act as they think fit, and not according to the policy that the Conservative party leader set out.
I do not know how much the Leader of the House knows about planning, but it appears that Her Majesty's Government are changing the planning status of airfields by characterising them as brownfield sites. Of course, we need more affordable housing in the countryside but surely such a far-reaching change should be properly consulted upon.
I am sure that a far-reaching change would be consulted upon. Obviously, it is important that the appropriate planning rules should be applied to specific circumstances. I have no doubt that that will happen and I assure the hon. Gentleman that there is no significant change in Government policy on that.
Will my right hon. Friend grant time for a debate on the postcode lottery and loss of patient choice for those requesting stem cell salvage from umbilical cord blood samples? My constituent, Claudia Harrison, has multiple sclerosis. She wants a simple blood test taken from the umbilical cord when her baby is born in June. My local hospital has refused that request, yet the hospital 17 miles down the road will do the blood test, but only if she transfers her ante-natal care to it. It is unfair that parents are faced with the choice of either travelling extensive distances for a test that will cost nothing to the local hospital—my constituent will pay for the stem cell banking—or doing without it. It is unfair and not right that parents should face such choices, and the House should debate the subject.
My hon. Friend has made her point clearly. I shall not comment on an individual case with which I am not familiar but I am sure that, if it raises wider issues, my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Health will respond accordingly.
May we have an early debate on the Government's plans for reform of the House of Lords? At the weekend, the Lord Chancellor hinted that there would be a fresh initiative to take forward the stalled reform but, since then, the line appears to have gone cold. May we have a debate or will the Leader of the House tell us what is going on?
The Government clearly set out their position on the House of Lords in our manifesto. I checked the Conservative party's policy on that but it is difficult to determine. [Interruption.] I hear groans from Conservative Members, but my right hon. Friend the Lord Chancellor clearly said that there needed to be some consensus on the matter. That requires the Conservative party to think about what its policy might be on House of Lords reform, not least because we have never been entirely clear whether it continues to support the concept of preserving the rights of those who inherited their seats in our legislature. If the Conservative party was clear about that, there might be an opportunity to hold a debate.
May we have a debate on the future of the winter fuel allowance? It would give us an opportunity to remind the public of the great contribution that the allowance has made to alleviating fuel poverty and that the Opposition parties voted systematically against it, and to consider, if the Chancellor were inclined to increase the allowance in a future Budget, whether it would be better to convert it into an energy efficiency allowance rather than simply increasing the cash payment. That would avoid simply increasing the profits of the multinational utilities by increasing household energy efficiency and reducing carbon dioxide emissions. May we have a debate on the matter?
I recently confirmed the date of the Budget. I take my hon. Friend's carefully thought-through, well-reasoned argument to be an early submission to my right hon. Friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer. I assure my hon. Friend that there will be every opportunity to debate the Budget in the subsequent days.
Earlier, the Leader of the House failed to answer the final question of my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead (Mrs. May), so let me give him another opportunity to do so. Yesterday, my hon. Friend the Member for South Norfolk (Mr. Bacon) asked the Prime Minister:
"Will the present inquiry by the Cabinet Secretary examine whether the Home Office acted improperly in relation to an extradition request involving Mr. Mills?"
The Prime Minister replied:
"We will, of course, examine any allegations that are made, and reply to them fully."—[Official Report, 1 March 2006; Vol. 443, c. 254.]
Does that remain the case, given the remarks in the press? Will the Prime Minister make a statement next week to confirm that those allegations are being properly investigated by Sir Gus O'Donnell?
I did not respond directly to the right hon. Member for Maidenhead because, as all hon. Members know, there is a continuing inquiry, the results of which will be set out in the appropriate way shortly.
Is my right hon. Friend aware that 10 years have passed since the horrific massacre of a teacher and children at Dunblane? Does he agree that now is therefore an appropriate time for a debate about what has happened since? We could then discover, for example, why we have no central register of gun licensees. I acknowledge that other measures have been introduced and they are appreciated.
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for raising a subject that continues to be a source of great sadness. It was a terrible tragedy. Cutting gun crime in this country remains one of the Government's top priorities and I hope that she accepts that we have taken several steps to achieve that. I recognise and share the disappointment that the national firearms licensing management scheme has taken so long to deliver. The Government remain fully committed to the project, which is planned to be rolled out in all forces in England and Wales from June, assuming that the final pilot in May is successful.
Irrespective of the outcome of the inquiry by Gus O'Donnell, does the Leader of the House believe that it would be timely to hold a debate on the ministerial code of conduct to remind Ministers of their responsibilities, whatever their complicated personal circumstances, and so that we can work out whether the code is worth the paper it is written on?
I do not believe that the hon. Gentleman can simply say that there should be such a debate "irrespective" of a continuing inquiry, not least because the inquiry demonstrates how seriously my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister always takes such matters. The ministerial code exists to govern the conduct of Ministers during and after a period of office. All Ministers are made aware of it and, in my estimation, consistently adhere to it. The Prime Minister has shown his continued commitment to the code and its enforcement. The hon. Gentleman should accept that.
We all welcome the introduction of free pensioner travel, but will my right hon. Friend make time for a debate on the anomalies associated with it? Unfortunately, in Lancashire, the availability of free travel will vary from district to district unless we can reach an agreement on the matter. We all recognise that, when we discussed free local travel, we intended it to apply within county areas, not districts. Pensioners in Wales and Scotland have free travel across the country, and we need to ensure that that also applies to England.
That sounds like an ingenious rephrasing of a previous question that I failed to answer. I am not going to get drawn into the difficulties of ensuring free pensioner travel across Lancashire, but I will ensure that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Transport deals with the matter.
The Leader of the House will be aware that, in Scottish questions, a great deal of anxiety was expressed about the propriety of Scottish Members voting on English-only business. May we have a debate on that issue? The House needs to assert the principle of accountability, which means that Members of Parliament are accountable to their constituents. If their constituents are not affected by the decisions that they take, there is no accountability, and that infringes on the basic principle of democracy.
I am not sure that I agree with the right hon. and learned Gentleman. This is probably not the occasion on which to have a profound debate on the nature of our constitution, but the truth is that right hon. and hon. Members routinely vote on matters that do not directly affect their own constituents. I know the right hon. and learned Gentleman to be a strong supporter of the Union, and he has in his time been a member of the Conservative and Unionist party, so I am slightly surprised by the implication of his question, which would be to challenge that Union. That is not something that I, or, I hope, he would want.
Has the Leader of the House had the opportunity to consider early-day motion 1489?
[That this House considers that the work of the Department for International Development is of the highest importance; notes that only half an hour per month is allocated for questions to the Secretary of State; believes that hon. Members should have one hour per month for this purpose; and calls upon the Leader of the House, on behalf of the Government, to make this necessary change at the earliest opportunity.]
The motion calls for an extension of the time allowed for questions to the Secretary of State for International Development. Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that half an hour just before Prime Minister's questions is clearly insufficient for a subject in which so many hon. Members take a keen interest? Will he seriously consider this request?
I have seen the early-day motion. Indeed, I have also seen correspondence dealing with the matter. In the course of planning the parliamentary timetable from week to week and month to month, it is difficult to ensure that appropriate priority is given to all the subjects that are debated here. The difficulty that I face on behalf of the business managers is that if more time is given to one subject, less must necessarily be given to another. When the hon. Gentleman considers making a further submission on this matter, perhaps he could suggest what might be cut out of the parliamentary calendar, rather than what should be added to it.
In November, I secured an Adjournment debate on the crazy decision by the Liberal Democrat-controlled Stockport council to develop a new primary school on a former landfill site without first having conducted a full environmental impact study. Since then, the leader of Stockport council has assured local residents in Reddish that the Greater Manchester geological unit would conduct such a survey. This week, however, I received a letter from the GMGU stating that its investigations did not constitute a full environmental impact study. Will the Leader of the House make time for a debate on planning regulations relating to the development of former landfill sites?
My hon. Friend has made his case extremely effectively. I know from my own constituency the sensitivity that surrounds planning applications for landfill sites. Such applications understandably arouse a great deal of concern and sometimes controversy. My hon. Friend has made his point, and I am sure that an opportunity will arise in due course for those issues to be debated on the Floor of the House.
Will the Leader of the House make time for a debate on the plight of sugar beet farmers in constituencies such as mine? Those farmers have two significant concerns about the reform of the EU sugar regime. The first involves the method of allocating compensation payments; the second relates to how the reforms are to be implemented and who will be consulted. The growers are worried that decisions are being made without consulting the people who will be directly affected—the farmers themselves.
It is important that the implementation of this decision should be fair and effective, and that it should give all those concerned an opportunity to make the appropriate adjustments to their livelihoods. However, I might have been more persuaded by the hon. Gentleman's observations if he had told me whether he supported the policy in principle.
Will my right hon. Friend find time for a debate on the increased use of coin-operated, unstaffed tanning salons, which are appearing up and down the country? This development was highlighted in an article in The Guardian last week. The advice is that under-16s should not have access to such facilities, yet they are clearly using them in my constituency and in many others. Will my right hon. Friend allow time for a debate on this matter, so that we can discuss ways of protecting children from the threat to their health posed by sunbed abuse?
My hon. Friend raises an important issue—one with which, I confess, I have not had to deal before. However, given the nature of my responsibilities, I get to discuss a range of difficult issues, and I will certainly ensure that whichever Minister is responsible for these matters replies to her.
When the Leader of the House concedes a debate on the threat to thousands of post offices—as I am sure that he will, given the non-partisan way in which he exercises his office—will he frame its terms broadly enough to include a discussion of the closure of thousands of bank branches? That will enable us to raise the concern of our constituents that 20 per cent. of all bank branches have closed in the past 10 years, and that the promise not to close the last branch in town is being systematically undermined by the stretching of that commitment if, for example, there is a branch in another village four miles away.
It has always been a delight to debate these issues with the hon. Gentleman, because he is what I would call a proper Conservative. He believes in conserving things even in the face of obvious market forces. While the Government have direct responsibility for post office services, that is not so in relation to highly competitive international operations such as our modern clearing banks. Perhaps the hon. Gentleman could tell the House how the Conservative party would ensure that rural bank branches remain open. Is he suggesting a subsidy, or some way in which the Government might interfere in the market to provide such facilities? I look forward to hearing his suggestions. In the light of what he has to say, I might be minded to grant a debate on the subject.
Will my right hon. Friend bring the armed forces Minister to the House to explain why the stipulation that the tartan for the new Royal Regiment of Scotland should be produced using traditional high-quality methods has been dropped? That means not only that the standard of the finished article will be compromised but that there is every chance that it will be produced in Poland or Czechoslovakia.
The one thing that I certainly learned from my previous responsibilities was that I should not get involved in matters as sensitive as the question of tartan. I know how important it is, and I recognise its importance to my hon. Friend and to many others from his part of the world. I will ensure that the Minister, who takes an interest in these matters, contacts him accordingly.
Last autumn, I wrote to the Secretary of State for Health about the crisis in the NHS in my constituency, and asked for a meeting. I was granted a meeting on 1 December, but, just before that day, the meeting was cancelled. It was rearranged for yesterday, but that meeting was subsequently cancelled and another arranged for mid-April. Could we have a debate on the relationship between Ministers and Back Benchers?
I apologise on behalf of my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State. I am sure that meetings with Members of Parliament are cancelled only in extreme circumstances. I imagine that the extreme circumstances yesterday involved the fact that the Opposition had tabled two motions for debate on aspects of health care. I am sure that the hon. Gentleman would not have been happy if my right hon. Friend had chosen to maintain her appointment with him, rather than appearing before the House to take part in the debate. Nevertheless, I am sure that she will rearrange her appointment with the hon. Gentleman. All my ministerial colleagues attach great importance to ensuring that their contacts and relations with Members of the House are of the highest quality, as I know my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State understands.
I welcome the news that the Road Safety Bill is to be given its Second Reading on Wednesday. The Leader of the House may know of the tragic case of 12-year-old Callum Deacon, who was killed in my constituency last June by a driver who, although he had admitted careless driving, received the derisory penalty of a £2,000 fine and a few points on his licence. Will the right hon. Gentleman assure the House that a speedy Commons timetable is intended for the Bill, so that in future drivers guilty of causing death by careless driving face tough and appropriate punishment from the courts?
I am aware of that tragic case. My hon. Friend is right to raise it. The Road Safety Bill will enable Members to debate all the issues relating to road safety, which causes great anxiety to our constituents. I am sure that the specific matter raised by my hon. Friend will be discussed in due course.
May we have a debate on Ministers' total lack of grip on their private offices? Bashkin Bushaki, who is in Bullingdon prison, was eligible for deportation on 12 December, and the immigration and nationality directorate confirms that the deportation order was sent to the Minister of State's private office early in January. However, the deportation has still not happened, and keeping Bashkin Bushaki here is costing the taxpayer money. If we cannot deport people in prison who want to be deported and are eligible for deportation, what hope is there of deporting anyone in this country who deserves to be deported?
It is obviously important for deportation arrangements to proceed according to law and according to the rules that apply. I am not entirely sure how those in my private office will react to my agreeing with the hon. Gentleman about the need to get a grip on them, but, as a former Minister, the hon. Gentleman will be well aware of the importance of maintaining good relations with one's private office.
On 11 December last year, the largest explosion and fire that Europe has seen since the second world war erupted at the Buncefield oil depot in my constituency. The firemen did a fantastic job, and the Deputy Prime Minister did a fantastic job in co-ordinating measures while the fire was burning. Once it had gone out, however, a plethora of Departments were put in charge of different aspects of the disaster. May we have a debate on how national disasters are dealt with—whether they are natural disasters or industrial disasters like the one at Buncefield—so that we can establish exactly who should be in charge?
The hon. Gentleman has adopted a sensible, careful and practical approach to that terrible tragedy, and I admire the way in which he has represented the interests of his constituents. Each such terrible incident generally turns on the particular facts of the case, and no two national disasters necessarily involve the same issues; but I will consider the hon. Gentleman's suggestion carefully.
You will be well aware, Mr. Deputy Speaker, that for quite some time the East Anglian Daily Times has been running a campaign entitled "Save our post offices". The Leader of the House has assured us that the Government support rural post offices, but in my constituency they are being closed year after year. All that we are asking for is a debate on the subject, so that we can agree on whether there is or is not a problem. May we have such a debate?
I have made clear the Government's support for rural postal services, and I have made clear in the context of the specific issue that has been raised why I believe that the Government's policy is right. I am sure that there will be opportunities to debate these matters in due course.
May I press the point about the future of post office services? I am disappointed by the right hon. Gentleman's apparent reluctance to grant Government time for a debate on the subject. In the past two years 2,500 sub-post offices have closed, five of them in my constituency. This is a serious issue, which is of real concern to communities throughout the country, and the change that the Government have made in the Post Office card account has thrown further doubt on the future of local post office services. We need a debate; may we have one soon, please?
I have referred to the importance of the issue, and to the possibility of a debate in due course. [Hon. Members: "When?"] In the fullness of time.
I hope that the hon. Gentleman will fairly recognise that the process of change in relation to the provision of post office facilities in rural areas has been going on for a long time. I will not trade with him the number of closures that took place under the last Conservative Government—although if he continues to press me, I might.
May we have a further debate on the future of ambulance trusts in the United Kingdom? I am particularly interested in the future of the excellent Two Shires Ambulance Trust, which covers Buckinghamshire and Northamptonshire. The consultation period does not end until 25 March, and on many occasions the Prime Minister has assured the House that he will take full account of people's views. Can the Leader of the House explain why posts in the new ambulance trust were advertised in The Sunday Times on 19 January, before the completion of any consultation?
I am sure that that was designed to make clear our commitment to providing ambulance services that are cost-effective and of the high quality that we expect from such a vital emergency service. I assume that the hon. Gentleman supports the Government's approach in wanting high-quality and cost-effective services. We should be united on that particular policy.
Orders of the Day
Children and Adoption Bill
[Relevant documents: Report of the Joint Committee on the Draft Children (Contact) and Adoption Bill, Session 2004–05, HC 400, and the Government's response thereto, Cm 6583. Fourth Report from the Constitutional Affairs Committee, Session 2004–05, Family Justice: the Operation of the Family Courts, HC 116, and the Government's response thereto, Cm 6507. Fifth Report from the Joint Committee on Human Rights, Session 2005–06,Legislative Scrutiny: Second Progress Report, HC 767.]
Order for Second Reading read.
I beg to move, That the Bill be now read a Second time.
I hope that we can all welcome the Bill. It was the subject of much debate in the other place, and I think that it has come to us changed for the better. I hope that Members on both sides of the House will be able to support what it offers: much-needed help for children who are often in extremely challenging circumstances, both in this country and abroad.
As I am sure Members will know, every year between 150,000 and 250,000 parental couples separate. One in four of the 12 million children in this country will experience the separation of their parents at some point during their childhood. For every one of those children that separation is a painful and difficult time, and represents the breakdown of their families. It is a difficult time for the parents as well, and we should offer them support; but I firmly believe that our focus should be on the needs of the children, who are often lost in the conflict between the adults.
I welcome what my hon. Friend is saying, but does she accept that one of the huge costs of the separation of parents is often incurred by the children? That burden is increased when one of the separated parents is not allowed access. The Bill makes useful suggestions for strengthening the courts' power to insist that access be granted when it can be granted safely. Would it be possible to arrange through the normal channels for us to have plenty of time on Report to discuss suggestions from Members on both sides of the House on how we might add to the powers of courts to ensure that the needs of children to see both their parents are observed?
I am aware of my right hon. Friend's considerable expertise and commitment to ensuring that our arrangements to deal with those difficult issues for children are the best that we could possibly have. There is a range of potential provisions, only one of which consists of legislation. What we can do before parents go to court, and what we can do in relation to the nature of the decisions that courts make on access and contact, are equally important. However—I am sure that this will be a subject of debate, as it was in the other place, as we go through the detail of the Bill—we would not want any different legal model to compromise the interests and welfare of the child, which are paramount. Having said that, it is our view—this is enshrined in case law—that for most children it will be in their best interests, subject to safety issues, to have continuing contact with both their parents. That is something that we want to facilitate. Indeed, when the Bill was debated in the other place, that was one thing on which both sides were agreed. Children need to have the love, close interest and involvement of both their parents wherever it is safe and in their best interests. We should make every effort to support families in achieving that.
I thank my right hon. Friend for what she has just said.
I can only thank my right hon. Friend for thanking me. That was a most straightforward intervention. I am grateful to him for those remarks.
I will come to the provisions of the Bill in detail shortly. It is important to remember at the outset that the provisions deal only with the 10 per cent. of separating families who turn to the courts for help in resolving arrangements for contact with children. However, the Bill does not sit in isolation. Just as important is the action that we are taking to help parents to agree a way forward without the need for court intervention if they can.
It will not surprise any hon. Member, all of whom have a great interest in this matter, to hear that parents who agree contact arrangements between themselves, without the courts being involved, tend to be much more satisfied with those arrangements. Therefore, where we can, we want to take steps to help more people to agree their own arrangements without going to court. We have announced a programme of work, including producing new parenting plans to help in working out those arrangements, access to specialist legal advice through a telephone helpline, which is working well, and stronger encouragement towards mediation to help parents to avoid the need for a court-based solution.
As we know, however much success we have with those arrangements, there will always be a minority of cases where people need to turn to the courts for help. Those will be the most difficult, most emotionally harrowing and most highly contested cases. They will be the cases that probably will not resolve themselves if left to continue and where the ongoing conflict could risk harm to the welfare of the child or children involved. Where the court is called upon, we must ensure that the intervention does not entrench the conflict any further, but offers a positive way forward for everyone, and most of all that the court proceedings and the solution remain uncompromisingly focused on the needs of the child or children.
As my right hon. Friend knows, in the most difficult cases, the court will make orders for supervised contact, or contact at contact centres, yet there is a woeful lack of those. As this issue moves forward, particularly when she comes back to the detail, will she look at that matter? In Northamptonshire, for a variety of complicated reasons, there has been low take-up at the centre that serves that area. In my town of Northampton, all the contact centres are provided on a voluntary basis. It is important in these difficult cases that there is proper provision for safe, supervised contact, and safe contact centres.
I agree. We need to think creatively about how we can extend provision both for unsupervised and supervised contact centres. The Government have already put considerable resources into that. Since 2000, some £5.3 million has gone to the sector, and in the last spending review a further £2.4 million was provided to develop 14 new centres for supervised contact in England. There will be a further sum totalling £7.5 million for 2006–08 to support that. The development of extended services in schools and children centres offer us enormously creative possibilities for contact to take place, probably non-supervised contact. I have already been to children centres that are being used for non-supervised contact and access. We need to ensure that we use those facilities to the full for the benefit of parents.
In my constituency, we have some contact centres that are run by the voluntary sector. They have some funding but are worried that the funding is drying up and will be moved away to Government-funded centres.
That is not the case. Much of the money that I mentioned is going to the local level. Contact centres for supervised access that are run and managed by voluntary agencies have a great role to play. It is not the case that that money is simply for Government or local authority-run centres. By and large, they are run in partnership with voluntary agencies. We want that to continue because they have great expertise. Many parents find the concept of supervised contact undertaken by a voluntary agency more palatable than the concept of supervised contact at a centre run by a local authority or by the Government.
Does my right hon. Friend accept that many of the contact centres that have received Government funding come within the ambit of the national charity for contact centres but that some fall outside that, are still run by the voluntary sector and are not receiving the investment to which she referred? Will she examine that matter to ensure that all contact centres have the same high-quality supervision and training for staff? My contact centre in Luton is run by the WRVS, and very good it is too, but I fear that some contact centres simply do not have the quality of staff and training that are desperately needed in such difficult circumstances.
I take my hon. Friend's point. The role that staff play in those situations, particularly for supervised contact, can be critical for the parents and children concerned. It is very important that they are as high quality as we can make them. I will certainly look at that matter.
Where the court is involved, we have to ensure that whatever intervention we make does not entrench conflicts any further. The Bill will be critical in achieving that and in maintaining the focus on the child. It offers the court new powers to facilitate contact, and to enforce contact when that becomes necessary.
Clause 1 offers the court the power to direct parties to participate in "contact activities", ranging from parenting classes to domestic violence perpetrator programmes, and explicitly including the power to require attendance at an information session with a mediator to explore the benefits of mediation. We believe that those activities will help parents to begin to face up to the difficulties, and the conflict, behind their disagreement over contact arrangements. That can be key to helping the court to reach a resolution without the need for fully contested proceedings.
Clearly, the ability to refer to such groups is valuable and can help in the most difficult cases, but I am far from sure that the resources are currently available at most courts for such projects. How will the Department go about finding what is out there already and ensuring that the gaps are plugged, so that, for example, domestic violence perpetrator programmes will be available at literally every court if they are needed?
My hon. and learned Friend raises an important point that we are considering actively. We are piloting various forms of activity to which we think that we can direct parents. We are trying to promote through local authorities the provision of parenting classes. We accept that the support parents need when they are separating is rather different from the support that they may need when they are not separating but trying to cope with the behaviour of their children. We are looking with local authorities at the availability of what is likely to be required and trying to ensure that, when courts wish those activities to take place, they will be available. That involves a variety of local agencies, including local authorities and the probation service.
I listened very carefully to the right hon. Lady's opening remarks and the lesson to be learned from the lack of success—I will not say failure—of the family resolutions pilots is surely that without an element of compulsion, the desired objectives simply will not achieved. Such an approach will not work on a voluntary basis alone.
The hon. Gentleman raises a fundamental point. The model and culture in this country has been based on the understanding that unless people come willingly to the table to participate in sensitive activities such as mediation, they almost certainly will not work. But he is right to draw attention to the fact that we want to encourage as many people as possible to avail themselves of the undoubted benefits that voluntary dispute resolution practices can bring to separating parents.
As the hon. Gentleman may know, we have published today the evaluations of the family resolutions pilot project to which he refers, and of the in-court conciliation project. Although the findings are, as he suggests, mixed, both projects have provided very important information on what parents value and find helpful, and on what works well and what does not. In both projects, certain approaches demonstrated good success rates in helping parents to reach consensus and to avoid further dispute in court. We all know how important that is to outcomes for children. So although the results are mixed, we will take the positive findings and try to build them into further development of voluntary dispute resolution. But forcing people down that road is a very serious step that is likely to be counterproductive. As I said earlier, we are making it possible for courts, through directed activity, to insist on a session with a mediator to explore the benefits of mediation, but it would be a step too far to force people to participate in mediation itself.
Did I hear the Minister say that she is publishing today the findings of the family resolutions pilot and if so, would it not have been slightly more helpful to have had them ahead of this debate, particularly given that the project finished last September? I accept that the best form of mediation is that to which people come willingly; otherwise, it does not really work. But where one party fully embraces the mediation route, the other flatly refuses it and the case therefore goes to court, what is the penalty against the person who has decided not to participate, or the reward for the person who has gone along with the court's wishes?
Although the project finished a few months ago, we received the evaluations only very recently. Indeed, I understand that the original date of publication was the end of March, so we have been able to bring it forward to coincide with today's debate; but it was not possible, given the original timetable, to publish beforehand. [Interruption.] I understand that the evaluations have been published today on the departmental website and are available. After the debate, I shall clarify for the hon. Gentleman's benefit precisely where he can find them.
That is not very helpful to the House. If the Minister thinks that vital information that is germane to this Bill may be available on her Department's website, she should, at the very least, out of courtesy and respect to those participating in this debate, have ensured that Front Benchers were notified that the document was available before we made our submissions to this debate. Would that not have been common courtesy?
I agree that the hon. Gentleman should have received those evaluations, and it was our expectation that he would. I apologise and I shall certainly pursue the matter, because I accept that he should have received them.
May I endorse the point made by the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton)? I certainly have not received notification of the evaluations' publication; indeed, I did intend to ask the Minister about them in my speech.
I apologise to the hon. Lady, as well, and I shall certainly investigate the reason why the evaluations were not sent directly to her.
On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. Would it not help the good conduct of our deliberations if somebody printed off copies of those important documents, so that Members can read them before they participate in the debate? Surely that would make for a better debate.
Order. While I can well understand hon. Members' desire to see those reports, it is outside the remit of the Chair to make that order. But I understand the point being made.
I accept the general point being made and as I said, the documents have been published on the departmental website today, some four weeks in advance of when we expected to publish them. They are important and they will prove particularly important in Committee, where we will discuss the detail of what works and what does not. But as I said, I shall investigate why the Opposition spokespeople were not sent copies, which they should have been.
As I said, both pilot projects are important in helping us to understand what works best for parents in avoiding the need to go to court. Where a court order does prove necessary, clause 2 offers a new power to ask the Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service to monitor that order and to make sure that it is followed. If it is not, the court will hear about it. As many Members know from the experience of their constituents, in some cases, after the long and difficult process of a court dispute, a contact order is made only for it to be ignored. We have all heard sad stories of non-resident parents being unable to spend any time with their children, despite such contact having been directed by a court order, which is often obtained only after considerable struggle. We also know of cases where a non-resident parent is not complying with a contact order by not providing the contact that their children may well greatly need.
Courts often find themselves with no realistic way to deal with this problem. The only sanction at their disposal is to hold the person breaching a contact order in contempt, leading to a fine or committal to prison, but they are understandably reluctant to do that because of the impact on the child concerned. The courts have told us that they need broader powers to address this problem realistically, and to respond to the circumstances of particular cases. In 2002, a committee chaired by Lord Justice Wall produced a report entitled "Making Contact Work", which called for these powers. The Bill responds to the recommendations made in that report.
In addition to providing the ability to require participation in contact activities, clauses 4 and 5 provide new powers to respond to breaches of contact orders, in line with the recommendations in "Making Contact Work".
Will the Minister clarify the following point, which I may not have understood fully? On enforcement of a contact order and the imposing of a subsequent penalty, community programme-based punishments have a slight drawback, in that they might not be in the best interests of the child. Can such punishments be imposed under the terms of the Bill, and are they in fact permissible?
The hon. Lady is to some extent confusing contact activities with the responses that a court can make to breaches of contact orders, such as requiring unpaid community work of some kind. Clause 1 deals with activities that can be directed, but which are intended specifically to facilitate compliance with a contact order prior to that point.
Clauses 4 and 5 will give the courts access to enforcement orders, allowing them to direct those in breach of an order to undertake unpaid work. They will allow the courts to order compensation to be paid from one parent to another in circumstances where the breach of an order causes genuine financial loss. One example is the cost of a holiday that had been planned with the child concerned.
I have two questions for the Minister. First, how many breaches of contact orders have resulted in the penalty of contempt of court, which she says the courts are reluctant to use? Secondly, the Minister said that a financial penalty is proposed to replace contempt of court, but what will happen when a parent with custody who is on benefits and relies on maintenance payments from a former partner is not able to pay that penalty? Will the proposed penalty be in the best interests of children who rely on maintenance payments to meet their basic living costs?
I do not have the figures to answer the hon. Gentleman's first question, but I shall give them to him after this debate. On his second question, we are proposing not a financial penalty, but a means of redress for parents who can demonstrate that they have paid out money to have contact with a child in respect of a special arrangement that has subsequently been aborted by the non-compliance of the other parent. It is important to describe that as a financial loss rather than a financial penalty. We are not proposing what might be called a fine, but that a financial loss can be repaid. All the circumstances under which compensation orders are made will be taken into account by the court, and that will include the direct or indirect impact on the child. We believe that the provisions will give the court greater flexibility in dealing with those who fail to comply with contact orders—a flexibility that the courts have told us that they genuinely and urgently need.
I am grateful to the Minister for giving away again, but we need to tease out some detail, although I am sure that we will do so in Committee. It does not really matter whether we call this proposal a fine, a penalty or compensation. Let us say that a parent with custody has frustrated a contact order with the result, for example, that a holiday with the non-resident parent costing £500 is aborted. The Minister has suggested that, in those circumstances, the court would direct the parent with custody to pay compensation of £500. However, what will be the penalty if that parent relies on maintenance or is on benefit and cannot afford to pay? What is the next stage of the process?
The court will consider all the circumstances of each case. If a compensation order for a certain amount of money is made, the court will take account of the ability of the non-resident parent, in the case set out by the hon. Gentleman, to pay the money. The court will put the arrangements in the compensation order. If the money is subsequently paid, the court will reconsider the matter and decide what action to take. It will look at all the circumstances in the round, including whether the contact order has subsequently been complied with in full. The details of each case are for the court to decide.
The provisions in this part of the Bill have been asked for by the courts. They want the flexibility that will allow them to act against those who breach contact orders, without that having a disproportionate effect on the child. We all understand how important that is. When they make contact orders, the courts have a single guiding principle in mind—that the welfare of the child is paramount. That principle is set out in section 1 of the Children Act 1989. It underpins all our policy and is the foundation of this Bill.
When assessments for contact orders are made or breaches of contact considered, will my right hon. Friend the Minister say—either now or later—what attention will be paid to domestic violence? Such violence affects 66 per cent. of all CAFCASS cases, and parents with care often breach contact orders because they are worried about a child's safety in the care of a violent former partner.
I hope that my hon. Friend will bear with me, as I shall come to that important point in a moment. It was raised in the other place, and I am sure that it will be the subject of detailed discussion in Committee.
My hon. Friend the Minister is very generous in giving way, although I think that she is getting bored, so I will not bother again after this intervention. In connection with enforcement, is it possible that people found to have denied an ordered contact without a reasonable excuse could be required to allow compensating contact? Such an approach might be suitable when the person involved is short of money, and would give the deprived parent an extra allotment of time with the child. That approach has some good points, although it contains the curious notion that one parent can be punished by giving the child to the other. Is that an idea that merits further reflection?
My hon. and learned Friend will know better than I that the courts already have the power to vary the amount of contact, so the option that she sets out is available to them in principle as things stand. However, the courts must decide what is in the best interests of the child, without using that child as a reward for one parent and a punishment for the other. The risk is that compensatory contact could be seen to be used in that way, and that is something that I am sure that we would all want to avoid.
When a court, with the principle of the paramountcy of the child in mind, makes an order for contact, that order should be followed for the sake of the child. The court should be able to act if it is not. Much of the debate on the Bill in the other place centred on whether any change should be made to the paramountcy principle—whether we should be more specific and say that the child's welfare is normally best served through contact with both parents, or whether we should specify that contact should never be ordered until the court has first satisfied itself that it is safe.
The Government believe that both of those positions are well intentioned. They stem from concern that the right outcome for children is not always achieved, and that the law should be more specific about what the best outcome is. However, were we to accept either position, we would irrevocably compromise the clear statement in the Children Act 1989—that, in any case, the court must do whatever is best for the welfare of that individual child. It should not have to make an assumption, independently of the facts, about what is best for the child, and then be forced to row back if that assumption turns out to be wrong. The court should look at the circumstances of the case, think about the child, and make its decision.
I agree with most of what the Minister has said, but I have read the Hansard report of the debate in the other place with great care. Neither my noble Friend Baroness Morris of Bolton nor the Liberal Democrat Baroness Sharp of Guildford made any concession in respect of the paramountcy principle, so perhaps the Minister should revise her views on the matter.
The point of view that I set out certainly was expressed in the other place, and that may happen again when we discuss the Bill in Committee, although it is worth noting that the House of Lords as a whole did not vote to overturn the paramountcy principle and insert a presumption of contact.
In respect of a court making a decision on the basis of the principle that the welfare of the child is paramount, it should have as full a range of options as possible to deal with the case in a way that best serves the child. That is what part 1 of the Bill offers. Of course, in making its response, the court must be fully informed about the circumstances of a case. As has been noted already, the question of domestic violence is often raised in disputes about contact, and it has been argued that courts are not always sufficiently aware of it when making their decisions. We take that very seriously, and a great deal of work has been done across Government to try to address the damage that domestic violence can do to everyone whom it affects—including, in some instances, children.
There are some vital safeguards already in legislation, such as the requirement in the welfare checklist in the Children Act 1989 for the courts to have regard to any harm that the child has suffered or is at risk of suffering. However, we were persuaded in debate in the other place that something further was needed. What is now clause 7 of the Bill places a new and specific duty on CAFCASS to carry out a risk assessment and inform the court of the result whenever it is involved in private law Children Act 1989 proceedings and it has cause to suspect that the child concerned is at risk of harm, including harm as a result of witnessing harm to another.
I have no doubt that we will return to the issue of domestic violence during our debate today and later, but I believe that the addition of clause 7 represents an important change.
May I take the Minister back to clause 4? I am not clear in my own mind. Let us say that a parent with custody denies contact that has been ordered by a court, and an enforcement order is then imposed which the parent with custody fulfils. What happens if the parent with custody continues to deny contact? She may fulfil the unpaid community work requirement and continue to deny custody. What will happen then?
Those cases would come back to court and it would be up to the court to decide what further action needed to be taken. Clearly, it would not be right for those circumstances to persist—for non-compliance with a contact order to have taken place, for an order to have been made to do community work, for the community work order to be complied with, but for non-compliance to continue on the contact. The court would have to decide what further action it wanted to take to ensure compliance with the contact order because that would be the primary objective in those circumstances. The community work option gives the courts another element of flexibility in their response, but the objective is to obtain compliance with the contact order.
Having had a look at clause 7, may I ask whether those considerations would also apply to breaches of contact orders? People often say that they have breached a contact order because they are concerned about what they have seen happening to the child and they have difficulty in using the process. Will the clause help them?
I believe that it will, and for this reason specifically. I am aware that some women find it difficult to reveal at the start of proceedings that there has been harm to them through domestic violence. The gateway process now makes it more straightforward and prompts people to reveal that there has been domestic violence by means of a tick box. If they tick it they go straight to a CAFCASS member of staff. My hon. Friend should also bear in mind the option for CAFCASS to undertake a risk assessment not only if harm has been declared by a party to the proceedings, but if it suspects from its dealings with a family that there has been harm through domestic violence. CAFCASS can undertake that risk assessment at any point in the proceedings, including after enforcement order proceedings have started. There is no limit on when CAFCASS, if it has concerns, can undertake a risk assessment and make that and its judgment on the issue available to the court.
Of course, that would be the ordinary thing to do, but I do not think that the Bill requires that a risk assessment, initiated perhaps by CAFCASS, be reported to the court. Although it may sound an excessive requirement, is it not better to ensure that risk assessments, whether positive or negative, always find their way to the court by including in the Bill a duty for CAFCASS to report them?
Is my right hon. Friend totally confident that CAFCASS can meet its obligations to do such risk assessments? I have read the thematic review prepared, I think, by the inspectorate of court administration last year, which said:
"There is a worrying lack of attention to safety planning in almost all the observed sessions",
when commenting on CAFCASS.
My hon. and learned Friend distinguishes two points. There is a requirement that the risk assessment, if undertaken by CAFCASS, be brought to the attention of the court. She questions whether the court takes sufficient account of that. The court is bound to take account of all the information that is germane to the proceedings. I point my hon. and learned Friend to the important judgment at the end of November by Lord Justice Wall on a case in the Court of Appeal. He felt that the judge had failed to follow the guidelines in relation to that particular issue. He took the rather strong step of attaching the guidelines to his judgment. In so doing, he said:
"I append them to this judgement in the hope that this court will not again be presented with a case such as the present, which not only ill-serves the parties and the child, but does the system discredit, and helps to devalue the valuable and conscientious work which courts up and down the country are undertaking in an attempt to tackle the scourge of domestic violence and to minimise the effect it has on parties and children."
That sends a strong signal to judges and courts that they have to take the issue seriously and demonstrate that they do. I certainly believe that when CAFCASS presents a risk assessment to courts, the onus on the courts, underlined by that judgment, is to demonstrate that they have taken it into account seriously.
My hon. and learned Friend raises the capacity of CAFCASS. It is a developing issue. We have applied increased resources to CAFCASS and will do so next year. I am confident from that point of view, but also from that of its own desire to ensure that the issue of domestic violence comes squarely into the arena when it is appropriate. CAFCASS is charged as the organisation to make sure that that happens.
I will come now to part 2 of the Bill. It addresses a different, but no less vulnerable, group of children—those who are adopted across national borders by individuals in this country. This will often be in the most extreme of circumstances, as a last resort where the child has no chance of a happy or safe family life in their own country. Part 2 contains a number of important measures to help safeguard those children and to improve the procedures around inter-country adoption.
First, and critically, clauses 9 to 12 provide a statutory framework for the suspension of inter-country adoptions from a specified country where there are concerns about the adoption process in that country. Those would be serious concerns, such as child trafficking, and a rigorous assessment of evidence would always be undertaken before taking the step of suspending adoptions. There is a real need for this power. In 2004, my predecessor as Minister for Children suspended adoptions from Cambodia, as hon. Members will know, in response to evidence of problems with the adoption process. She did this using prerogative powers, but I hope that Members on all sides of the House will recognise the importance of a clear statutory process for us to respond to such circumstances in future.
Clause 13 provides a power for the Secretary of State to charge to meet the costs of the administration of inter-country adoption casework. That proposal was the subject of some debate in another place, but it was acknowledged that this was a matter of prioritising. With limited funds available, it is vital that we target them at front-line services for vulnerable children in this country, and asking those who can afford it to meet a proportionately small charge is, in my view, reasonable in the context of wider priorities for public spending.
Finally, clause 14 makes further important provisions around the process of inter-country adoption. It amends section 83 of the Adoption and Children Act 2002 to make it harder to circumvent restrictions on bringing children into the UK. Section 83 currently states that where an external adoption order was effected less than six months before the child is brought into the UK, the adopter must meet certain conditions, such as being assessed and approved by an adoption agency. These restrictions are being circumvented, in some cases, by UK residents adopting the children and then leaving them in the care of a person in the other country until six months has passed so that they do not have to meet those conditions. The Bill will, rightly, make it harder for people to circumvent those restrictions by extending the time limit in such cases from six months to 12. Clause 14 also clarifies that certain children brought into the UK for adoption are not also privately fostered children. That will prevent an overlap of functions for local authorities.
I have pressed my right hon. Friend often on the private fostering of children, in particular those brought from Africa. I had not picked up the exact implications of clause 14, so I hope that she can say more about its impact on protecting the welfare of such children.
I know that the issue is of great concern to my hon. Friend, and I share that concern, but she is straying on to the important issue of the regulation of private foster carers, which was considered during the passage of the Children Act 2004, which strengthened the notification scheme. A sunset provision was included, so that in the event that the notification scheme does not produce the desired results, we can introduce a registration scheme. My hon. Friend knows that we are actively monitoring the impact of the notification scheme and will come to a decision on its effectiveness. It is an important issue.
Taken as a whole, the Bill offers an improvement in life chances to some of the most vulnerable children in our society and elsewhere. It carries on our commitment to improving outcomes for children based on their individual needs, founded on the principle that whatever the situation, and however severe the conflict between adults, we must put the children first. While there are some contentious issues about precisely how we approach that—in such an emotional area, it would be strange if there were not —I believe that that principle unites the House. We all agree that the needs of children should be paramount, and that that should be the standard to which we hold any change we consider to children's legislation. The Bill has been prepared with that principle firmly in mind and will give children facing extremely challenging circumstances a better chance of positive outcomes during their childhood and in later life. I commend it to the House.
This is yet another Bill with "children" in the title, and is not to be confused with the Adoption and Children Act 2002, the Children Act 2004 or the Children Act 1989. I wish that we could find different titles for Bills, as I have suggested in Committee before now, because it is so confusing. Perhaps we can address that point when we cover the short title in Committee.
This is an important Bill that addresses an important problem. I must first say how disappointed I am with the programme motion, which provides only two days in Committee. My understanding was that we would have four days, or eight sessions.
It is my understanding that the programme motion was agreed through the usual channels. Ministers are relaxed about how much time the Bill should have in Committee.
There must have been some confusion, because the understanding of our Whips was for four days. I hope that the confusion can be cleared up and, given the constructive spirit in which we have dealt with other legislation involving the Minister, I hope that we can change the motion. Two days for a complex Bill—although it is short, it is complex, especially in clause 1—is a short time, and we will have several amendments to table and debate.
The Bill has been a long time coming. We have waited patiently for it since it finished its passage through the other place on 14 November, almost four months ago. It is more than six months since it started its passage there on 29 June. Why has it taken so long, especially as the Bill has changed little since it was originally presented? It was preceded by the parental separation Green Paper in July 2004, the next steps progress report in January 2005, the draft Bill and the pre-legislative scrutiny committee, and there is some mystery about why it has taken so long to progress.
We are also disappointed that, although the Government have recognised in introducing the Bill that this serious issue needs tackling, it will fail to provide effective and lasting solutions to the problems that the Minister outlined. I have some questions about who is running the legislation, given the history of turf wars between the Department for Constitutional Affairs and the Department for Education and Skills on the early interventions project and others. The cross-departmental responsibilities of the Minister for Children and Families are being tested in this case, because it is no secret that Departments have dissented on the early interventions project.
I do not wish to break the consensus of wishing the best for children—which we all do—but the Bill is a limp fudge that lacks teeth and relies on a court infrastructure that is already creaking under its workload. It is at full stretch, as the hon. and learned Member for Redcar (Vera Baird) suggested. In short, we have some severe reservations about the Bill and will seek to amend it substantially.
It was worrying that, in response to some of the detailed questions that we tried to put to the Minister about how the breaking of contact orders and compensation may work, she kept saying that it was a matter for the courts to decide. That is true, but the introduction of the Bill is a recognition of the existence of a problem, and the courts need to have a much stronger steer on how to use some of the mechanisms that will be introduced to deal with that problem. I hope that in Committee she will not keep falling back on the mantra that it is up to the courts to decide. Of course the courts must decide in individual cases, but they need a strong steer on what the legislation is intended to achieve. That is why we need the detail on how compensatory contact might work, if that is to be one of the measures available.
I am anxious to probe what the hon. Gentleman means and what sort of strong steer he thinks should be given. Surely the judge will have powers under the Bill to apply appropriately in each case, given its individual complexities and his training, background and experience. What more guidance can the hon. Gentleman offer to the judiciary?
The hon. and learned Lady has already mentioned contempt of court, which is one penalty that can be applied at the moment, but the courts are reluctant to use it. The measures in the Bill include penalties for breaches of contact and we need to have clearly set out the expectations as to how those penalties will be escalated if breaches continue to occur. If the Minister says it is up to the courts, the position will remain confused and that is why we need to tease out more detail on that issue in Committee.
I hope that the hon. Gentleman finds this attempt to clarify the questions as helpful as I do. If my right hon. Friend the Minister produced the record, I suspect that, although we would find that few courts had actually sent parents with primary care to prison, there are probably more cases where they use that threat. Indeed, the district judges who tell people that if they do not comply they will have to bring their toothbrush with them when they next come to court show that the threat is used. Surely the point of the legislation is to remove that dilemma for the courts, because it is bad for a child if their primary carer is sent to prison. There is a raft of different measures, so in what sense is the Bill failing to deal with the problem?
I agree that the worst outcome for the parent, and especially for children, is for the parent to end up in prison, which is certainly not something we want. That is why it is essential that there is a scale of penalties with a realistic expectation of imposition. The hon. and learned Lady rightly says that few people, if any, go to prison, so if the threat of that penalty is never actually carried out, it is not much of a threat. I was trying to tease out whether the details of the scale of penalties that the Bill sets out, and which we want to be better set out, will be imposed by the courts if necessary. A threat can only be any good if it is realistic and credible, and somebody believes it will be carried out.
Does the hon. Gentleman accept that some of us welcome the provision precisely because we have had to take up cases of constituents who have been utterly terrified by being told in court that they will be sent down for not letting a violent ex-partner have contact with their child? The courts are used to dealing with people who get into debt or who have financial liabilities, even though they are on benefits and can make repayments only at a low rate. It is perfectly possible for the courts to deal with such cases without their being set out in the Bill. The provisions are a welcome alternative to sending women down for refusing contact to violent ex-partners.
If there is a threat of violence to an ex-partner and his or her children, I entirely agree that a breach of contact may be justifiable and the Bill makes provision for that—it is a matter on which the court must be satisfied. The Bill also includes clause 7 on risk assessments, which we welcome, and which will provide clearer evidence of the strength of the risk. However, unless the risk is proven—unless the case is put—the assumption should still be that a contact order granted by a court should be adhered to and it is up to the person who has breached the order to prove why he or she was justified in doing so. If not, and if the risk assessment does not show that there has been a threat of violence, the penalties should be invoked. I am not in any way trying to put at any more risk someone who is at threat from violence, or indeed, his or her children, but the person who uses that excuse with no vindication must realise that there are realistic penalties that will be enforced.
Clause 7, the risk assessment provision, is one of the most crucial and difficult parts of the Bill. If the hon. Gentleman has concerns about it, will he explore how it could be made more waterproof?
I have no concerns about clause 7. That is the point that I have just made. I said that including provision for risk assessments gives greater security. People who have serious concerns about domestic violence can have them taken into account by the court so that a breach of contact would be justified. I think that the hon. Lady slightly misheard what I said. The risk assessment gives greater security, but if it showed that a person was not at risk, the penalties should be enforced if there was a breach of contact.
I had better make some progress, otherwise I shall speak for even longer than the Minister, which will get me into great trouble—[Interruption.] I am not criticising her. She generously took many interventions and I am not trying to be churlish. We are having a nice debate. You try to be nice and you get it thrown back at you, Madam Deputy Speaker—you cannot win.
We are determined that the problem of breach of contact should be addressed once and for all, which is why we have done a lot of work to highlight it, through summits held at Westminster, amendments that we proposed to the Children Act 2004 and some key undertakings on contact provisions in our manifesto for the 2005 general election. When we scrutinise the Bill in Committee, we shall maintain the resolute and principled stance taken on the subject of contact in particular by those doughty fighters in the Lords for the interests of children, my noble Friends Earl Howe and Baroness Morris of Bolton.
The Bill addresses two major but unrelated issues in respect of contact orders in part 1 and adoptions with a foreign element in part 2, as the Minister said. Although we have some concerns about the fashioning of new procedures for overseas adoption, there is a fair degree of agreement in principle, so we shall concentrate our fire, and our time, on the woeful inadequacies of some of the contact provisions.
Let us consider the problem. Up to 200,000 children a year experience the emotional distress of their parents' separation or divorce. That experience is likely to befall 20 per cent. of children before they reach the age of 16—the same experience affected me when I was 11. Members of Parliament are probably not good role models for parents trying to promote stable families. My noble Friend Baroness Morris said that if she was the subject of a CAFCASS report, she would be described thus:
"Works away from home, involving long and anti-social hours; appears more interested in everyone else's children than her own; and spends long, hot, summer week-ends indoors writing speeches."—[Official Report, House of Lords, 29 June 2005; Vol. 673, c. 255.]
Not a very good model for stable family life.
Although 90 per cent. of separations are resolved without resorting to dispute in the courts, the remaining 10 per cent. can end up in protracted, messy and acrimonious legal proceedings, as the Minister said. There is much work for CAFCASS to do in producing 28,000 or so contact orders and writing 33,000 court reports, and we have concerns about its resource capability to cope with that work load, while acknowledging the improvements that we are beginning to see under the new board, which, with Baroness Pitkeathley and the new chief executive Anthony Douglas, is doing a good job after a traumatic first few years due to the Government's poorly thought-through conception of CAFCASS in April 2001.
From our surgeries, we are all aware of the pain of non-resident parents who are denied meaningful contact with their children and who often live in reduced circumstances that militate against proper relationships with the children. We see cases of multiple breaches of contact orders by the parent with custody, which require multiple and costly returns to court by the non-resident parent. There are horrendous cases of members of the extended family being shut out of the lives of children—especially grandchildren. I stress the important role played by grandparents who feel so much pain when splits go wrong. Grandparents who have given family members great support, acting as chauffeurs, babysitters and bankers, suddenly find after a split that they are left completely out of the equation.
I can reinforce the hon. Gentleman's last point. Is it his experience, as it is mine, that many grandparents come to MPs' surgeries for advice because they are so completely shut out of the process?
The hon. Gentleman is right. Indeed, my hon. Friend the Member for Peterborough (Mr. Jackson) held a debate on that very subject in Westminster Hall recently. Just this morning, I heard that a loving grandmother in my constituency, whom I know well, and who has not seen her grandchildren for the best part of 10 years, is in hospital due to the stress caused by that. It is unacceptable that extended family members are just as much victims—even more so—as the people directly involved.
The number of contact orders does not reflect the amount of contact that is given. We hear the complaint that the contact simply consists of passing on postcards or a Christmas or birthday card, and nothing happens face to face. I fear that the contact often takes place at rather soulless and anonymous contact centres, although I acknowledge that some of the voluntary organisations in particular do a very good job in that respect. I am pleased to hear the Minister mention the greater use of family centres and some of the other new measures that will provide a family-oriented environment, because such places can be depressing and certainly not conducive to allowing the absent parent to spend good-quality time with his or her children.
Too often, the parent with custody can use the children as pawns in an ongoing fight against an ex-partner by taking children away when a holiday has been booked, by denying ex-partners access to school reports or school photographs or by moving to the other end of the country, well away from where the ex-partner lives or can visit because of work commitments. None of that is helpful to children, and there are some extreme cases of people who serially frustrate contact orders and seem to get away with it, time and again—hence my concern that any threat against the infringement of contact must be realistic and able to be brought into play.
Will my hon. Friend comment on the practice that obtains in respect of the existing statutory duty under section 23 of the Children Act 1989, which places a statutory duty on local authorities to consider friends and family first when considering care orders and court orders but is being disregarded in practice by most local authorities?
My hon. Friend makes a very good point. We have heard a number of stories where members of extended families and close family friends could effectively step in, in loco parentis, and offer an opportunity, perhaps temporarily, for a stable family upbringing for those children, who are ignored from the equation. In many cases, that is down to the pressure on local authorities but, in too many cases, local authorities do not think that that should be first port of call, although they are obliged to do so. Time and again, when contact orders are frustrated, it causes stress and anguish for parents and an increase in mental illness problems. We are all aware that 40 per cent. of non- resident parents lose contact with their children within two years of a family split. That is the most alarming figure of all.
Does the hon. Gentleman acknowledge that not all contact is effective and nor does it produce a stable outcome? There are relationships in every family unit that cause serious problems—a fact that becomes apparent in my surgery, time and again. Does he also accept that, in vexatious situations and when there has been domestic violence, unsupervised contact can often be very undermining to the development of a stable family unit? We can talk about contact and understand its value but we must also put in place controls if those children are to benefit from the stability of relationships.
The hon. Lady is right, and I will come in a minute, if I can, to the presumption that the child will benefit from maximising contact with both of his or her parents, as the Minister has said already. In some cases, that is not the norm, which is when special provisions need to be made. We want a presumption that that will be appropriate for most children, but there are certainly cases of domestic violence where contact with a non-resident parent can be counter-productive and where proper supervised contact may be needed—it is a case of horses for courses—but that is not necessary in the majority of cases.
Will my hon. Friend give way?
I am trying to make progress, but I will give way.
My hon. Friend is making some very good points, and he should not be upset that we interrupt him because we want further information from him. My hon. Friend the Member for Peterborough (Mr. Jackson) made a point about other family members who could be involved, but I have noticed the corrosive effect of the secrecy of the courts on social workers. There is a rather patrician view that they do not need to explain their reasons for taking decisions about the placement of children. Does my hon. Friend share my concern?
My hon. Friend makes a very good point, and I shall briefly refer to a call for greater transparency in the court system, as that would go some way to address people's concerns about what may be going on. Decisions may be made for perfectly good reasons, but they are not explained properly and can then be misinterpreted and subject to all sorts of other problems. I will mention that in a minute.
Too many contact orders are breached, which is not good for the parents and the extended family, but, above all, it is not good for the children themselves. Everything we do in our approach to the Bill, as with all other children's legislation, will be guided by the principle that the welfare of the children is paramount, which is set out in the Children Act 1989 and is still relevant today.
What are we trying to do with the Bill? It is in everyone's interests to promote stable family life and, wherever possible, to maximise the amount of meaningful quality time spent with both parents, whether or not they are living together. However, it is not a question of the rights of parents to have access to their children, but rather that the child has a right of maximum access to his or her parents, unless there is an overwhelming case that doing so would be harmful to that child.
The best blend of both parents is what we need to achieve. It is rarely, if ever, the fault of a child that his or her parents separate, and children should not suffer even more as a result by not having equal access to both parents. Surely, that was the principle set out by Ministers in the Green Paper, which said:
"After separation, both parents should have responsibility for, and a meaningful relationship with, their children, so long as it is safe. This is the view of most people in our society."
In the debate in the upper House, Lord Adonis said:
"We fully support the position established in case law that children normally benefit from a meaningful relationship with both parents following separation, so long as it is safe".—[Official Report, House of Lords, 29 June 2005; Vol. 673, c. 251.]
We entirely agree. Parents do not stop being parents simply because they are no longer partners.
Does the hon. Gentleman agree that meaningful access does not necessarily mean equal access?
Yes, I do.
There is much research to support the greater role of fathers in the lives of the children and the benefit that that brings to the child. Figures on the amount of time that fathers spend with their children reflect our country's social development. Compared with 30 years ago, men spend eight times as much time with their children. In the 1970s, the fathers of young children spent less than a quarter of an hour a day involved in child-related activities. Recent surveys show that, on average, the fathers of under-fives now spend an hour and 20 minutes on child care activities during the week. Our society has changed greatly over the past 20 or 30 years, as has the relationship that female and male parents have with their children.
Research overwhelmingly highlights the fact that children whose fathers have been actively involved in their children's lives achieve more academically, have more satisfying relationships in their adult lives and are less likely to get into trouble with the police. Indeed, if fathers are involved, children are less likely to have a criminal record by the age of 21. Pre-school children who spend more time playing with their dads are often more sociable when they enter nursery school. Children benefit equally, if not more, from their mothers, but I am making the point that both parents have an equal role to play and can have an equally beneficial effect on their children by maximising such contact where it is appropriate to do so.
The Government need to do more to enable both parents to play an active role in the upbringing of their children, yet there is a cohort of dejected non-resident parents— predominantly, but not exclusively, fathers—who are being prevented from doing so often unfamiliarly and without good reason. That does not diminish in any way the fact that there are some very difficult non-resident parents, particularly fathers, who may have threatened violence and may have a detrimental effect on children, but they are the minority.
We will table amendments to the Bill that maintain:
"that the court shall, unless a contrary reasons be shown, act on the presumption that a child's welfare is best served through residence with his parents and, if his parents are not living together, through residence with one of them and through both of them being as fully and equally involved in his parenting as possible."
I emphasise that that should happen where the safety of the child is not an issue. We also propose that contact with the non-resident parent should be frequent and continuing and that it should be reasonable—not a 50 per cent. share of the time or anything as prescriptive as that. We believe that the system needs to be fundamentally overhauled and effectively turned on its head. There should be a presumption of shared parenting and dissenting parents should have to put forward a coherent case explaining exactly why the right of the child to maintain reasonable and substantial contact with both parents should not be respected. Safety and welfare considerations should be duly weighed up by the court. I repeat that, in all that, the welfare of the child is paramount. Surely the welfare of the child is complemented, not contradicted, by maximising contact and interaction with each parent.
The implication of the hon. Gentleman's argument seems to be that, at present, the majority of cases do not involve a presumption of contact. Is he aware of the report of Her Majesty's inspectorate of court administration, which states that the presumption of contact with both parents is so overwhelming that children are being put at risk because of it? In that light, his argument does not seem sustainable.
I do not agree with the findings of that report, which was based on a rather small sample. The findings did not seem to match up with the material that was being used. The allegation that the hon. Lady has made—I have heard it before—is exceedingly unrepresentative and unhelpful.
We are not suggesting a prescriptive arrangement, or an artificial 50:50 time split that is monitored by a stop watch, as I have said. We have made submissions to the Government on how better contact could be achieved in relation to the study that is being carried out by the Minister's colleague, Baroness Ashton. Our proposals are not unique. For example, best practice jurisdictions across the United States are light years ahead of the UK and are yielding some interesting and positive results. Such legislation is common in many US states. In Canada, the new Conservative Government pledged in their election manifesto to amend the Divorce Act
"to ensure that in the event of a marital breakdown, the Divorce Act will allow both parents and all grandparents to maintain a meaningful relationship with their children and grandchildren, unless it is clearly demonstrated not to be in the best interests of the children."
Australia is amending its Family Law Act in more than 300 places to introduce the concept of parental equality. Australian judges will have to consider equal time sharing and give written reasons for any departure from equality. A mediation service is being proposed to take account of children's views. Most recently, Italy has followed suit. However, the UK Government apparently have some difficulty getting their head around the concept.
The fundamental principles behind our amendments met with widespread support in the other House and, at one stage, even secured the support of the Liberal Democrats. Liberal Democrats voted in support of the principles during the passage of the Children Act 2004 through the Commons, but reneged when it came to the crunch.
Does the hon. Gentleman concede that that very unpleasant debate was held before the publication of the significant Constitutional Affairs Committee report and the responses to the Green Paper, and also that the Liberal Democrats on that occasion said quite clearly that there was much of the wording with which they agreed and much with which they did not agree, but that neither did they agree with the Government's position? I think that that is quite clear. Will the hon. Gentleman tell the House why his party has changed its mind on abolishing the Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service?
With the greatest respect to the hon. Lady, I think that she is wrong. She is factually wrong on the first count because the Constitutional Affairs Committee report on the Bill was published in the last Parliament and the vote that her colleagues declined to join us on at the last minute happened during this Parliament in July, when all the information was out there. Her colleagues spoke in favour of this principle and strongly indicated that they would back amendments on it. She and I went merrily through the Lobby together during the Report stage of the Bill that became the Children Act 2004 in support of the principle that we are putting forward again today. I was surprised and delighted that she joined me on that occasion, although I suppose that I should not have been surprised that when it came to the crunch, her colleagues in another place did not have the courage of their convictions. However, we shall see what the Liberal Democrats do in the later stages of this Bill.
I will help the hon. Gentleman to move on from that little spat. I am attracted to much of what he has just said and interested in pursuing the point about cases that will go to court because of the intractable attitude of one parent. It will take some time to get a decision from the court. What is his view of the practicality of starting court proceedings on contact?
If I may, I will come on to contact—where it all starts—and mediation later in my speech.
I want to make some progress, but will come back to the hon. and learned Lady, too.
Our proposals have widespread support among a multitude of family and parenting groups, but I fully acknowledge that many professionals in the judiciary and some voluntary organisations do not share our view. We have engaged them in constructive debate and perfectly respect the position that they have argued reasonably, even if we do not agree with their conclusions.
It pains me to have to single out one organisation that has behaved reprehensibly on this issue. I would be the first to acknowledge that the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children has done a lot of good work in raising awareness of child abuse and campaigning against it, promoting good practice by engaging children, and raising substantial funds for services for vulnerable children. Many members of my party in my constituency enthusiastically raise money for the NSPCC, as I have in the past. However, during the proceedings on the Bill in the Lords, the NSPCC put out a briefing note that attacked our amendments as a threat to the safety of children, yet produced no evidence to support its claim.
In its latest briefing note, for our scrutiny of the Bill, the NSPCC has made the following claim:
"NSPCC believes that any proposals to introduce into the Bill a legislative presumption of contact will be interpreted and put into practice by the courts in a way which is detrimental to the welfare of the child and could ultimately threaten the safety of the child."
In effect, it is saying that if a non-resident parent—predominantly a father—benefits from a presumption of contact, he is more likely to do harm to his own child.
Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
Let me finish and I certainly will.
In support of its claim, the NSPCC cites the fact that 29 children were killed over the past 10 years during contact visits to non-resident parents. That is an appalling figure. However, it ignores its own research, which shows that over the same period some 800 children have died at the hands of resident parents or carers, and the 2000 publication "Child Maltreatment in the UK", which showed that violent treatment was more likely to be meted out by female carers than male ones.
The briefing is alarmist, sensationalist, misleading, empirically flawed, completely irresponsible and highly reprehensible. It is not worthy of an organisation such as the NSPCC, which claims to stand up for our children. I hope that our deliberations on the amendments will be based on balanced, rational and well-informed debate, rather than the arrant nonsense that I am sure will shock many dedicated and hard-working NSPCC supporters around the country.
I have no torch to bear for various elements of the lobby, including the NSPCC, but my interpretation of its comments is that paramountcy is incredibly important and might be comprised by the kind of presumption that the hon. Gentleman suggests.
The NSPCC has said quite clearly—it has not minced its words—that if our amendments about a presumption of contact, in which many other people believe, were accepted, the safety of children would be compromised at the hands of their non-resident parents, but has not offered any evidence for that. That is not a helpful addition to the constructive debate that we are trying to have in the interests of children.
The NSPCC will have to find another forum to explain why it said what it did, but the Minister has the chance to explain why she cannot trust the courts. A non-resident parent should not be denied contact unless the case has been put to a court. If a court decides that contact should be denied, that is fair enough, but if that does not happen, the situation proposed in our amendments is right and should be supported by the Government.
My hon. Friend is right. We should not automatically consider a non-resident parent in some way to be inferior to that same parent when he or she was part of a married couple or a couple together, or inferior to the parent with whom custody resides. It is being strongly suggested by the briefing that the NSPCC has insisted on putting out again, and in stronger terms, that in some way non-resident parents are a threat to the safety of their own children. That is disgraceful and insulting to many thousands of parents who are not able to live with their children.
I will not tangle with the hon. Gentleman about what the NSPCC says. I can see that he has become riled by it. Underlying the courts' position—I hope that he accepts that historically this has always been the case—there has always been a presumption that there will be joint contact, continuing contact, where that is at all possible. That is not something that CAFCASS or the Courts Service conjured up for the report. That has always been the principle for many years. Child charities worry that if the paramountcy principle is ousted so that the safety of the child stops being the first criterion and we introduce parental rights, too much emphasis is given to the need to guarantee what the hon. Gentleman calls the child's right to see the parent. There must, of course, be a two-way right. Too much precedence is given to that right and not enough is given to safety. Where domestic violence is raised, that consideration is undervalued.
The hon. and learned Lady is misinterpreting what I have said. I have not talked about parental rights. I have been clear in saying where I am coming from on this issue. We are constantly told that there is a presumption of equal contact that pervades in the courts, but that does not appear to be working. Why, therefore, is the NSPCC not complaining about the status quo? What harm will we do by putting explicitly in the Bill—something from which everybody starts—that there is that presumption? It will then be possible for everyone to argue why that should not be so in individual cases.
It is for the NSPCC to explain its interpretation of what it has put out in its briefing. The position that we are taking does not imply a qualitative different judgment about the safety or otherwise of the non-resident parent. We must trust the courts to make individual decisions. It is important to understand—I wonder whether the hon. Gentleman does—that a statutory presumption in law is something that the courts must follow in all but exceptional circumstances. Therefore, a statutory presumption starts to fetter the discretion of the courts and makes a fundamentally different model that would compromise in law the principle of paramountcy.
The right hon. Lady needs to speak to her colleague in the upper House, Baroness Scotland, because, on 16 November, the day after consideration of Report in that House, she said in response to one of my noble Friends that a presumption "is only a presumption." That answers the Ministers question. That does not fetter the courts. The issue is up for interpretation and a presumption is only a presumption.
The system that we are talking about is best served if we can avoid reaching a certain stage by means of prevention. The best solution to acrimonious legal disputes is to prevent them coming to court in the first place. We favour concentrating more on preventive action, which keeps families together. We need to see much more work undertaken by properly resourced professionally trained social workers, who spend more time not fire fighting if something goes wrong, but more time on preventive action to keep families together in the first place rather than pulling them apart. For example, Kent has done some excellent work in that regard. That is one reason why the number of children in care in Kent has fallen dramatically.
We need also to achieve an agreed settlement earlier. As my noble. Friend Earl Howe said in the other Chamber, there is a simple truth associated with contact disputes: if both parties to the dispute are content with the amount of contact that they have with the child, there is no longer any dispute. We must also agree to some form of mediation. We will have further debates about the extent to which that mediation should be imposed on, or agreed with, the parties.
The Government initiated the promising form of mediation in what was called the early interventions project in the autumn of 2003. It was a successful and imaginative project. The prototype was due to be up and running by 2004, with a national roll-out by 2005. The aim was to defuse parental battles and dramatically to reduce the number of court cases. The project was mysteriously abandoned and replaced with the ill-thought-through family resolutions pilot project, which has been mentioned, having been scuppered by the Department for Education and Skills. Perhaps the Minister can give us more detail on that, though that happened under her predecessor.
The family resolutions project, which ran for one year from September 2004 to 2005, with three pilots in London, Birmingham and Brighton, cost more than £300,000. Thousands of couples were expected to come through the process but only 47 couples started the process and only 23 of them finished it. We have already heard about that independent evaluation.
As The Guardian put it, that project was a waste of time. That was a great shame because it replaced something that was rather more worth while. We need to set up an expectation that mediation will be used to try to get things sorted before they come to court. We think that it should be close to mandatory for parents to embark on mediation processes before they come to court, and that if they refuse to take up the offer, that should go on their record. Hence my intervention earlier about differentiating between a partner who is perfectly happy to go along with the mediation process and the other party who decides that they will not have anything to do with it, with the result that both parties are subjected to court proceedings. Surely that must count against somebody who had refused unreasonably the mediation process and count more favourably to the person who was prepared to go along with it.
We want the early interventions project to be restored—it should be given a fair chance. That confidential mediation process would be privileged and could not be cited in subsequent court proceedings. However, there are question marks over the limited financial incentives for divorcing parents in opting for mediation. We are also concerned about the availability of people who are skilled in mediation within the Courts Service. There are many examples of where a more compelled mediation service has brought about dramatic results, particularly in Virginia where mediation has shown that after 12 years 30 per cent. of parents who had attended mediation were in weekly contact with their children as against only 7 per cent. who had been through litigation and had shunned mediation. This shows that mediation does work.
Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
For the last time, I will give way. I will then finish. The hon. Lady can then make her own speech.
I am most grateful to the hon. Gentleman for giving way again. Does he accept or agree with the Cleveland family mediation service that if mediation is to be effective and is to be a useful tool, it should be used well before a divorce comes to court? Does he agree that it should be taken out of that arena? There is a hothouse of sensation once there are court proceedings. Mediation is much more effective before those proceedings. I would be grateful to hear the hon. Gentleman make a statement about how valuable that approach could be if it were to be supported, as it were, in the Bill.
I completely agree. I do not need to say any more. I have been making the point that the hon. Lady has outlined. It is something that works. The more that we can take such proceedings out of the court procedure, the more likely the process is to succeed. I do not think that any of us would dispute that.
I have concerns about CAFCASS, to which I shall briefly return. The Minister said that she would fund CAFCASS with increased resources. Yet its budget for this year is frozen, which effectively means a £4 million shortfall. That is at a time when more work is being imposed on CAFCASS. There are still difficulties although I accept that there have been improvements in overcoming the time delays for allocating officers to cases. However, the courts are still congested and it takes far too long before cases are scheduled and come through.
We agree with the proposal to ask CAFCASS to take on greater work with risk assessments and various other things, but none of it, however well-intentioned, will work unless properly trained, well-resourced professionals at the coalface put them into operation. The same holds for properly trained social workers who undertake preventive and monitoring work in the field and enable cases to come to court. I have attended far too many family courts where good social workers had not worked on the case when it first came to court. I was in court one day when not a single social worker had worked on the case when it first came to court.
May I echo the point that my hon. Friend is making so eloquently? A reply dated 27 February to a question that I had asked in correspondence said that as of 30 November, 16.5 per cent., or one in six, private cases dealt with under the auspices of CAFCASS were unallocated. To develop the point made by the hon. and learned Member for Redcar (Vera Baird), I am concerned that the extra work programmes that we are imposing on CAFCASS may put it in a difficult position.
My hon. Friend has made a very good point. If the measure is to work, the professionals must be given the tools that they need. CAFCASS is concerned about its budget, and whether it can maintain the progress that it has made since it experienced a significant transformation.
As for court transparency, a great deal of resentment is caused by proceedings in camera. Many decisions are difficult to comprehend, so there is a need for courts to open up as we look forward to the consultation paper promised by the Government. The Select Committee on Constitutional Affairs said before the election:
"A greater degree of transparency is required in the family courts. An obvious move would be to allow the press and public into the family courts under appropriate reporting restrictions and subject to the judge's discretion."
A less radical proposal would be to make it a rule that all judgments are published in family cases unless there are exceptional circumstances. Judges already have such a power, but many choose not to exercise it. We would therefore like to see the Government's proposals on opening up the court system, as they would provide reassurance for many parents who feel hard done by. Recently, Mr. Justice Munby made a strong plea for more transparency, suggesting that the current restrictions may even breach the European convention on human rights:
"Because of this secrecy misunderstanding about how the family justice system operates are allowed to grow and fester unchecked and uncorrected."
In Committee—assuming that the Committee of Selection selects me as a Committee member—I will go into greater detail about the frustration of contact orders but, as I said earlier, the Bill lacks teeth. Defiance of contact orders should be monitored by the court system. We should not just rely on the non-resident parent crying foul before we initiate and pay for legal challenges. Serial frustrators are able to play the system, ultimately leading them to be in contempt of court, although the relevant powers are rarely used. Prison is not a practical option, and electronic tagging, I am glad to say, has been dropped. There are problems with the payment of compensation, and I would like the Government to consider the proposal on compensatory contact time, which we support and which was mentioned by the hon. and learned Member for Redcar. Whatever measures are put in place should be on a sliding scale so that the offender has many opportunities to reform their behaviour and comply with the contact orders, subject to checks and balances if they are scared to do so because of domestic violence and other threats. Penalties must be realistic, and there should be a perception that they can and will be imposed if the offender continues to flout the contact orders.
False accusations, usually of domestic violence, are sometimes made. I am not seeking to undermine the fact that domestic violence takes place, but parents may fabricate claims of domestic violence, and we should come down hard on such claims. We certainly need to speed up investigations of claims of domestic violence. Some interesting work is under way in Australia, where serious consideration is being given to a proposal to compel people to pay costs for vexatious complaints.
Finally, on the subject of inter-country adoption, it is perfectly legitimate to adopt overseas and, in many cases, such adopters perform a humanitarian role. I share concerns about cases of child trafficking, particularly, it was claimed, after the tsunami. There were claims of such cases in Cambodia, which is why a decision was made on that country. We should clamp down rigorously on anything that constitutes the trafficking of children. Procedures were tightened in the Adoption and Children Act 2001, and we supported those measures. I am concerned, however, about the imbalance in adoption numbers. In the past 10 years, about 3,000 children have been adopted overseas, of whom 1,441—almost half—came from China. Many of those children, I suspect, were baby girls. Should we concentrate so much on a country with a questionable social stance on baby girls? The next largest contributor was India, where 235 children were adopted; followed by Guatemala, where 205 children were adopted; then Russia, where 177 children were adopted, and Thailand, where 171 children were adopted. I am in favour of inter-country adoption where appropriate, but I question the imbalance in the countries from where children have been adopted in recent years.
Another problem arises from the fact that, unlike many other western countries, we lack an inter-country adoption agency. How much evidence of trafficking will be required to trigger the suspension of a country from inter-country adoption arrangements? Why are the rules not working if we are clamping down properly on child trafficking? We need to act in the best interests of the child, and I certainly welcome the provisions that allow for special exceptions in individual cases. We are concerned, however, about the scale of charges for work on inter-country adoption. Such a proposal was not included in the draft Bill, and inter-country adoption is already an expensive and bureaucratic business. The British Association for Adoption and Fostering has expressed concern about the Government charging for a service:
"It is hard to see why one group of UK residents—prospective intercountry adopters—should be singled out for payment of a fee for the provision of a service such as this . . . Any suggestion that public money should only be spent on safeguarding the welfare of children indigenous to this country is surely repugnant both morally and in the light of our international obligations.
We believe any additional financial burden on intercountry adopters may run the risk of a minority seeking to circumvent procedures, thereby putting some children at risk."
We should clamp down on inappropriate inter-country adoption but, equally, we should be wary about encouraging private fostering arrangements by the back door. As we seem to do on an annual basis, we will table an amendment on the registration of private foster carers. Such registration was not included in the Children Act 2004, although there was a fallback suggestion that it might be introduced. We will therefore revisit the issue, and dust down our amendments on private fostering registration.
The Bill is a short one, but it includes a great deal of detail. Some provisions are contentious, particularly those on contact orders. It received a great deal of scrutiny in the other place, but it remains a highly unsatisfactory Bill. Many parts are fundamentally flawed, and it is a missed opportunity. Above all, it fails to do what it could and should do, so we are letting down too many children who have been let down by an acrimonious split in a family. We had an opportunity in the Bill to give them a second chance of a meaningful relationship with both their parents, and for most children that is the best start in life that we can give them.
I welcome the Minister's strong support for the principle of paramountcy, particularly in the face of comments by the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton). Many of us believe that his proposal would undermine that fundamental principle.
I am afraid, however, that the Bill could go further to ensure that the principle of the safety of the child is enhanced. This feels a little like groundhog day, because many hon. Members participating in our debate took part in similar discussions in the Joint Committee that considered the draft Adoption and Children Bill as well as the subsequent Bill Committee. We were concerned that existing legislation had not done enough to safeguard children at risk in contact situations, particularly if there was a risk of domestic violence.
I was pleased that the Government accepted our arguments about the risks to children in contact cases involving violence, and that my amendment was accepted, which extended the definition of harm to the child to include impairment due to seeing or hearing ill treatment of another. For the first time we enshrined in law and recognised the damage to the child caused by witnessing domestic violence and the fact that that should form part of the court's consideration. As the Minister noted, further measures have been introduced to improve family court practice with regard to domestic violence, most recently in January this year, when new court application forms were introduced.
Even so, at that time many of us said that the measure would not be sufficient to remove the risk to children, and so it has proved. None of the measures so far introduced or in the Bill require courts to ensure that contact is safe. To date there is no evidence to suggest that court practice has been improved. That is asserted not just by me, but by all the leading children's charities, including the NSPCC, Barnado's, NCH Action for Children, Women's Aid, the Greater London domestic violence project, Respect, Men's Advice Line and Enquiry Service and others—in other words, all the experts on the subject.
Despite the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham decrying the report of Her Majesty's inspectorate of court administration, we cannot ignore the evidence from its study showing that in the work of CAFCASS in this regard, there is such a strong presumption of contact with both parents that concerns about safety and the risk to the child are overridden, thereby putting children in severe danger of violence and abuse.
Notwithstanding the legislation and recent Government initiatives, there is still grave concern that children's needs are minimised or ignored, and that many parents and children remain unsafe during contact arrangements as a result of contact orders being awarded inappropriately. If, as we all profess, the safety and welfare of the child should be the key principle throughout the legislation, we need to amend the Bill further in the interests of the safety of the child. It is important that all the proceedings covered by the Bill have the paramountcy principle at their heart.
I welcome the amendments made in the other place in relation to the introduction of clause 7. That is a significant step forward, but the court is still not required to act on the risk assessment by CAFCASS. I recognise the extensive work done by the Government to tackle domestic violence, but in the interests of children's safety the Bill should incorporate a requirement that the court act upon the risk assessment required under clause 7. It is clear that in the criminal justice system the dangers of separation where there has been a history of domestic violence are recognised, but the same understanding is not evident in many parts of the family justice system.
Much of the debate in the other place and to some extent in the Chamber today has been based on anecdote. We need a great deal more research on the subject of contact and the reasons why contact is not taking place in cases where an enforcement order has been issued. I hope that the Department will take that on board.
Let us deal with some facts. The victims of domestic violence face greatest risk post-separation. Research shows that children ordered by courts to have contact with a violent parent are likely to be abused and in some cases killed. The Green Paper on parental separation recognises that of the 10 per cent. of contact cases that get to court, in at least 35 per cent. of them there are concerns about the safety of the child. CAFCASS officers state that in about 66 per cent. of the caseload domestic violence is a significant factor.
Despite that, judicial statistics indicate that less than 1 per cent. of applications for contact orders are refused. It is clear that parents and children are being exposed to unsafe conditions by court orders. Research by Trinder in 2005 shows that
"In many of these families there had been violence in the home. Quite commonly, there were child protection concerns. The disputes presented to the court did not reflect straightforward arguments about 'contact'; they reflected a range of issues, including commitment to the child, reliability, parenting quality, the child's reaction to contact, and perceived attempts to bully or control. In short these families experienced problems on a different scale from those experienced by the majority of separating parents, including multiple risk factors associated with poor outcomes for children."
In other words, the family courts are dealing with the most difficult cases where children are likely to be at risk.
That is reinforced by a study of 73 private law family cases, which found that one year after contact proceedings ended, the children were still experiencing similar levels of emotional and behavioural disturbance as children who had been the subject of child protection proceedings. That was linked to distress among the parents and high levels of intimidation and domestic violence.
Rather than a blanket assumption that contact will always be beneficial, the findings emphasise the importance of assessing risk and considering what is best for each child. That is supposed to happen because the welfare of the child is paramount in the Children Act 1989, so why are children still at risk after all this time? First, there is insufficient liaison between the criminal justice system and the family justice system. Following an investigation into the murder of Georgina McCarthy, whose violent ex-husband used contact proceedings to obtain information as to her whereabouts, the Advisory Board on Family Law stated:
"The view of the Home Office, with which we agree, is that there needs to be much greater liaison and co-operation between the criminal justice system and the family justice system over issues of domestic violence at all court levels".
When Dame Elizabeth Butler-Sloss was asked by the Select Committee why schedule 1 offenders were still being granted contact with their children, her response was that judges do not always know when they are dealing with a parent who has been convicted of an offence against a child. That cannot be satisfactory.
Clearly, the family justice system does not have good liaison with the criminal justice system, yet we hear that the judiciary would like greater powers to enforce contact orders, even though they might unknowingly be granting contact in high risk cases. How can we legislate to give judges more powers to enforce contact, when the Bill does not contain a clause requiring pre-court checks in all cases? Such checks are needed because domestic violence tends to remain hidden. I understand that two cases in which children were killed during contact visits involved consent orders. The parents' solicitors agreed contact arrangements which were then rubber-stamped by the court, with no consideration of the possible risk.
Does the hon. Lady agree that some children's charities have already criticised the Bill because the paramountcy principle is not explicitly at its centre, and less so than the 1989 Act?
I do not agree with the hon. Gentleman. The representations that I have received state that the Bill includes the paramountcy principle. There are concerns that the paramountcy principle is being undermined by existing case law and practice within the family courts, and we therefore need to reinforce clause 7 to ensure not only that risk assessments are conducted, but that the courts are required to act upon such risk assessments when they make decisions in difficult cases.
Most children's charities argue for a further strengthening of the Bill, because they know that the paramountcy principle has already been undermined by case law precedents. For example, in re O in 1995, which concerned the imposition of conditions for contact, it was stated that contact is
"almost always in the interest of the child".
It was hoped that court practice on child contact and domestic violence would improve after the judgment in re L, V, M & H in 2000, which stated that the courts should have a heightened awareness of the effects of domestic violence on children and that they should make findings of fact and minimise risk. That judgment also upheld the ruling that contact is almost always in the best interests of the child.
Both case law and the inspectorate of court administration report on the practice of CAFCASS indicate that there is a strong presumption of contact despite the existence of the paramountcy principle, which is supposed to be the court's priority. The inspectorate of court administration report on CAFCASS's activities in such cases states that
"No formal risk assessment was undertaken in any of the observed interviews".
The report also notes
"a worrying lack of attention to safety planning"
and that
"the nature of domestic abuse is not sufficiently understood by most CAFCASS practitioners".
The inspectorate of court administration report identifies the strong presumption of contact as the fundamental reason for the failure to protect children. CAFCASS officers admit that it is difficult for them to challenge the strong presumption of contact, even when there are concerns about the continuing impact of abuse on a child. Although the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham does not regard the report as significant, many hon. Members do, and it should make us think carefully about what the Bill does to facilitate and enforce contact.
Are the safeguards adequate to ensure that contact is safe before contact orders are enforced? I shall pray in aid the Prime Minister's reply to my recent parliamentary question:
"We of course are concerned by the finding of the Inspectorate of Court Administration report that there is such a strong presumption by the courts that there must be contact with both parents that concerns about violence and children's safety are overridden. We remain utterly committed to the principle that the welfare of the child should be paramount in the consideration of the courts. We recognise that more needs to be done to address domestic violence concerns".—[Official Report, 2 November 2005; Vol. 438, c. 828.]
As I have said, the amendment by the other place is extremely welcome, but it does not require the court to take that advice into consideration, and the Bill should state that that is a requirement. Furthermore, we must examine pre-contact risk assessment, which must be considered throughout all proceedings, including enforcement proceedings. When enforcement takes place, we must ensure that there is a requirement for a further risk assessment should it be necessary to safeguard the care and welfare of the child. We know that the most dangerous points for children and their parents in domestic violence cases are the points of separation and of contact. In the interests of children, it is therefore vital that we not only say that a risk assessment may be taken into account, but require it to be done before enforcement, because the danger is that domestic violence has taken place after the parents first had contact with the courts. We owe children nothing less than that.
The Bill requires a further provision on the voice of children. The Adoption and Children Act 2002 includes a requirement that children's views should be taken into account, but as I understand it, that provision has not been enforced. We should include a provision in this Bill to enforce section 122 of the 2002 Act, which introduced separate representation for children in family proceedings.
I have some sympathy with the idea of taking children's views into account and have cited the example of Australia, where representations by children are being beefed up. However, putting a young, vulnerable child in a court scenario will create problems in practice, and it may be better to conduct such matters from the home of the parent who has custody. Does the hon. Lady have practical solutions on how best to take into account the views of a child without intimidating them, which may prevent them from providing a balanced view?
Those concerns were extensively debated in the proceedings on the 2002 Act. Children's charities have introduced many proposals on how we can ensure that children's voices are safeguarded, that undue pressure is not applied and that the child's voice, rather than that of their parents, is considered. I think that we need to seek the advice of children's charities.
Does my hon. Friend agree that working out how children's voices can be heard in court is an urgent issue? These days, it is easy for child abuse to take place in a criminal context, but it is impossible to bring action because of the tender years of the child, which means that people of tender years are not protected. It is critical that we turn our minds to the whole issue of bringing children's evidence into court.
I agree with my hon. and learned Friend. I hope that we will have a detailed discussion on that topic, if we are lucky enough to be selected as members of the Committee.
I am making a habit of agreeing with the sensible comments made by the hon. and learned Member for Redcar (Vera Baird). Given that the 2002 Act has been on the statute book for more than three years and that there is ample academic evidence that the voice of children acts as a catalyst to obviating the need for a bitter and long-standing dispute between parents, does the hon. Member for Luton, South (Margaret Moran) agree that the Government are remiss in not having acted on section 122 of the 2002 Act? Indeed, perhaps she knows why the Government have not acted.
I am not furnishing all the answers today. I hope that we will all seek greater truth in Committee, should we be lucky enough to be selected.
My hon. Friend is being used as something of a ping-pong ball by me and the hon. Member for Peterborough (Mr. Jackson), who is of course missing the point. This is nothing to do with introducing the ability to have a child's voice heard in a technical sense—the problem is how to involve the views and experience of the child so that that becomes credible evidence.
I thank my hon. and learned Friend for her usual clarity.
Opposition Members and those in the other place have been extremely exercised by the enforcement of contact orders. I would hate for anyone to misunderstand me on this. I agree that in the best of all possible worlds, it is always best for children to have contact with both parents, but we are dealing not with the best of all possible worlds but with cases where the evidence suggests that there are severe risks to the child. We must therefore build into the legislation every precaution to ensure that contact is safe for those children. We are not dealing with the generality of contact orders. Equally, I agree that vexatious parents who deny contact for their own reasons should have the proverbial book thrown at them. Again, however, we must be absolutely certain that those children are safe before contact is enforced. As things stand, the Bill has no such requirement. That is urgently needed.
We need pre-court checks at the beginning of all proceedings to assess whether there may be safety concerns and a more comprehensive definition of risk assessment in legislation or in regulations. Courts must have regard to any risk assessment and order contact only if it is safe to do so. I fully support perpetrator programmes, provided that they are legitimate programmes run by organisations such as Respect and MALE, which have a long history of understanding perpetrator practice, not short courses that purport to resolve domestic violence and treat perpetrators in one day. We have to be careful about what is meant by proper perpetrator programmes, and we must ensure that the voice of the child is heard.
We do not want to experience further groundhog days as parliamentarians, but this is not only an issue for us but one that has serious implications for the lives of our children. Twenty-nine children have been killed as a result of contact arrangements in England and Wales. Serious case reviews indicate that with regard to five of 13 families involved, contact was ordered by the court, but no court professionals have been held to account for those homicides. Children have paid with their lives for the presumption that exists, and will continue to exist unless we amend the Bill, that contact is almost always in the best interests of the child—the presumption that the family justice system abides by and holds so dear. It is time that that is balanced by a legal requirement that the court must have due regard to risk assessments and be satisfied that that contact will be safe for our children. Nothing less will do.
I congratulate Members who have spoken so far on the tone of the debate. We have already had a useful sharing of views and new ideas. That is all-important—after all, we are all trying to ensure that the best interests of the child are served.
Our debate must focus on the best outcomes for the child. For me, it is important that the principles in the United Nations convention on the rights of the child are upheld. Many articles are relevant to the Bill. Article 3 states that
"the best interests of the child shall be a primary consideration."
As we have heard, article 12 covers the right of the child to express views freely—
"the views of the child being given due weight in accordance with age and maturity."
The next paragraph is especially relevant. It states that
"the child shall in particular be provided with the opportunity to be heard in any judicial and administrative proceedings affecting the child."
The right to be heard and how it is facilitated are critical.
Article 9 states that it should be ensured that
"a child shall not be separated from his or her parents against their will except"
under some of the conditions that we have discussed. When there is a possibility of separation from one or both parents, the article states that relations and direct contact should be maintained with both parents regularly, except if that is contrary to the child's best interest. Articles 11 and 21 are especially relevant to the adoption provisions of the Bill.
I welcome some aspects of the Bill. I do not feel quite as negative as the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton) about it. Its origins go back several years and there has been a great deal of consultation. The issues that part 1 covers constitute an acknowledgement of the great dissatisfaction with the way in which the legal process has handled contact disputes.
As the Minister for Children and Families said, a multi-faceted approach is important. It is also important to try to increase the proportion of parents who resolve contact issues without recourse to the courts, and the proportion of those who have reached the court process but are supported to find agreed solutions. We must also improve the efficiency and effectiveness with which the remaining intractable cases are tackled. We must appreciate that those cases—approximately 10 per cent. of the total— are complex.
To go back a stage further, it is important to recognise the importance of the family unit, with no prescriptive view of the shape that a family may take. The family structure may change for a child, but the important aspect is loving, caring and safe relationships in the family. The preamble of the United Nations convention on the rights of the child stresses
"recognising that the child, for the full and harmonious development of his or her personality should grow up in a family environment, in an atmosphere of happiness, love and understanding."
I suppose that we could say, "We wish."
The Constitutional Affairs Committee report that covered matters of importance to the Bill was entitled "Family Justice". Sometimes, experiences in my constituency surgeries make me ask, "Justice for whom?" Do we mean justice for parents or for the children? Somehow, one loses sight of the fact that there was a family unit. We need to proceed in such a way as to retain the importance of the family, even if all its members are not located in the same residence.
Support for the family generally is important. I declare an interest—I wish it were greater than it is—as a trustee of Poole community family trust. I do not believe that it will receive any Government funding in the near future. The principle behind community family trusts of working on relationship education prior to partnerships becoming permanent—for example, by working through checklists and especially through providing relationship education in schools—is excellent.
Such preventive measures are part of what should be a lifetime of family support that can be accessed at appropriate times. When we consider the amount of support that is needed when a breakdown occurs, we realise that such early investment is crucial. Clearly, even in the case of an irrevocable breakdown, if the parents have an amicable split contact arrangements are much easier to tackle.
Part 1 is the result of a process that began way back in March 2001. Following consultation, a report entitled "Making Contact Work" was published in 2002 by the Children Act Sub-Committee—CASC—of the Lord Chancellor's advisory board on family law. Its recommendations covered several issues that we are debating today. However, it was not until July 2004 that the Government published their Green Paper on parental separation, which acknowledged that the way in which the courts intervene in disputed contact cases does not work well. The results of the consultation were published in "Next Steps" in January 2005. We then had pre-legislative scrutiny. That is an excellent process, on which the Government are to be commended. There should be much more of it. The Bill was then introduced in the other place, and we are now debating it today, five years after the process started. It is hardly surprising that people have become impatient.
There has been high drama throughout the period, involving not only the antics of various fathers' groups, but the significant report of the then Select Committee on the Lord Chancellor's Department on the Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service—CAFCASS—which resulted in the whole of the CAFCASS board resigning. Positive changes have emanated from that and we are now beginning to feel confidence in its ability to change the way in which it works, but it certainly faces enormous challenges. CAFCASS has just completed its consultation paper "Every Day Matters", and I shall say more about CAFCASS later. I want to note the significance of that title. It illustrates the importance of dealing with these disputes in an effective but cautious way. However, we have just been through a five-year process. Surely that is too long.
We have already heard evidence of important case studies and seen data from the Office for National Statistics, but do we really know the extent of contact denial or breakdown? The evidence that I have seen suggests that we tend to get different answers, depending on whether we ask the resident parent or the non-resident parent. Obviously, perceptions will differ, but that makes it all the more important to set up the research projects with great care. It is welcome that the Government are setting up a further research project on what happens between a case arriving in court and a final contact order being made. However, that research could well take 18 months, and we shall have completed our work on the Bill long before that. Research has also been undertaken on the gateway forms, although I have not come across its findings. Perhaps the Minister will talk about that later. Time is ticking by—we should have commissioned some of this research rather earlier.
We wholeheartedly support the presumption that the welfare of the child must be paramount, as set out in the Children Act 1989. Given that presumption, I should like to address four issues: safety, mediation, contact and enforcement. If I have time, I shall also mention resources and transparency. I concur with what has already been said about the paramountcy principle being included in all proceedings referred to in the Bill. In particular, it should be added to clauses 4 and 5. I agree with the points made by the hon. Member for Luton, South (Margaret Moran) on that matter.
The Government have made an important contribution to tackling domestic violence, but can we ever do enough in that regard? In relation to contact and the safety of children, there is frequently a history of violence behind the cases that come to court. A statistic that is often cited is that in 2003, 16,000 cases involving domestic violence came before the family courts, but contact orders were refused in only 601 of them. It is difficult to say whether domestic violence is under-recorded. Many groups feel strongly that it is, and I certainly have a distinct feeling that that is the case. However, others will argue that it is over-recorded.
I am pleased also to be able to congratulate the Government on the fact that the availability of supervised contact centres is improving. However, the provision of such centres is still inadequate and many more are needed. We heard earlier about the inadequacy of provision in Northamptonshire. In Dorset, even if we achieve two contact centres, people will still have great difficulty because there is so little public transport.
I am pleased that the Government responded favourably to the Select Committee's suggestion that more innovative solutions should be considered. The Minister mentioned the use of children's centres and extended schools, for instance. I have no idea whether the resources that the Government are allocating will be adequate, but I sincerely hope that they will.
We have long felt strongly that any contact activity should be subject to careful and separate risk assessment to minimise possible risk, especially to children but also to others involved, particularly women. The Joint Committee responsible for the scrutiny recommended that before making contact or enforcement orders, courts should be explicitly required to consider the safety implications for both child and parent. I am glad that the other place agreed to introduce risk assessments. I look forward to scrutinising the new clause in Committee because it concerns a vital issue. I hope that it can be strengthened.
Why are reports of domestic violence increasing? Are we becoming a more violent society? Have the gateway forms encouraged people to come forward and say something, or are people using domestic violence as part of the unfortunate game, as has been suggested? It is encouraging in many ways that people are speaking out more and acknowledging the issue of domestic violence, but when there is a dispute between two parents on whether domestic violence has occurred, a mandatory risk assessment will be helpful. Both sides will have an opportunity to present their points, and the playing field will become more level.
The safety issue needs to be revisited over time. That will be difficult because the situation will not remain static. We hope that some of the perpetrator programmes will be successful. There will be additional strains as time goes on, and domestic violence may occur when it has not occurred in the past. Safety issues should also be considered before the mediation route is taken, although mediation must be a priority.
The Government have made a good start. We may have criticisms over which project has been adopted and which has not, but there is much more emphasis on mediation and an understanding that it must be better than warfare and conflict, in which the child becomes a pawn. Mediation should be used as an opportunity to strengthen relationships and to ensure that the outcome is the best for the child and does not merely serve the parents' interests. It might be good for the parent to see the child, but if it involves hundreds of miles of travel for the child, that must be borne in mind. Putting the child first is all-important.
I strongly support mediation, but who pays for it now and who does the hon. Lady think should pay for it in future?
I understand that if both parents are on legal aid, mediation will be free, but I am not sure what happens when, for example, one parent is on legal aid and the other is not. I hope that the Minister will address the issue. Certainly we should consider it in Committee.
The 10 per cent. of cases that reach the courts are those in which people need the most support and problem-solving. It may seem a small percentage, but in terms of numbers it represents a large tragedy. Each year there are 40,000 applications to the courts over child contact, and 70,000 breaches of child contact orders. That should concern us greatly.
The consultation document issued by CAFCASS, "Every Day Matters", makes some good points about intervention. CAFCASS frequently intervenes too late, long after parents' attitudes to each other have hardened, or long after one parent has created a new household excluding his or her former partner. Indeed, many attitudes have hardened long before the first court application—hence the need for even earlier intervention where possible. Arguments about the fine detail of contact arrangements occupy huge amounts of scarce professional time, often unproductively. Once a court application is made, there is a clear risk of an adversarial model of law being started. The consultation document illustrates why we must put such emphasis on early intervention. However, we must also make information easily accessible. The Minister mentioned the telephone helpline. I understand that booklets are available, but I wonder whether they are necessarily the best format for those who need to access information. I would like to know exactly what is available for parents at the moment and whether, for example, videos as well as printed leaflets are available.
Research by the university of East Anglia and other research indicate that many of the parents among the 10 per cent. that go to court are very young, poorly educated and on low incomes with extremely young children. Partly because of their lack of education, they often find it difficult to communicate not only with each other, but with those who try to help them. There may be a deep lack of trust between the parents, a history of violence, or poor parenting skills. Parenting skills play an important part in preventing such situations from becoming adversarial, which is when worries arise about the vulnerability of the children.
We agree with the Government—I have done quite a bit of that so far—that mediation cannot be made compulsory. One can put two people in a room with someone but, if they are not prepared to participate, one cannot make it work. However, we support the case for a compulsory referral meeting about mediation. We think that that is where the compulsion should take place. We argue that that meeting should be free, as we do not think that we can compel people to do something and then charge for it. I qualify that by saying that any meeting would need to take account of the principle that the welfare of the child is paramount.
As the hon. Lady says, it is wrong to compel people to take part in mediation, but is it not also wrong to try to arrange that? There are reservations about mediation where there may be domestic violence issues. Clearly, if someone is to be forced to try to resolve things through a face to face with the person who has been oppressing them for many years, that is an inappropriate model.
I thank the hon. and learned Lady. I have mentioned twice in that context that safety must be the prime consideration. It is important that, before we consider mediation, we examine the risk assessments. I said that earlier. I am conscious how dangerous—emotionally dangerous, too—it could be to put two such people in a room.
I am following the hon. Lady's speech closely. Is she aware of the experience in both the United States and Norway, where empirical evidence shows that compulsion largely has worked, and that when people are compelled to take part in mediation it makes a real difference in trying to save the situation from deteriorating further after divorce or separation?
I have heard mention of projects in other countries, but have not come across the full, long-term evaluation of them. I feel that, logically—perhaps my background as a school teacher showed me this—we cannot make people, or children, do something that they do not want to do.
On the family resolutions pilot project, I know that there was general disappointment about the number of cases that were referred to it. However, it was a starting point. I regret that we cannot discuss the evaluation of that project, as we were not aware that it was put on the website today. I look forward to the Minister telling us a bit about it later.
Returning to mediation, it would help if the court application triggered compulsory attendance at the preliminary meeting. At that introductory session—the couple in question might choose to meet the mediator separately—the options for mediation could be outlined, including offers of other parenting help. That information could be given to the parents face to face, which, I suspect, would be the most efficient way of dealing with some of these difficult cases. The first meeting must be free; otherwise, cost could prove a barrier. Of course, there is the question of what happens if one partner is on legal aid and the other is not. If both are not on legal aid, that could present difficulties.
I take on board entirely the point about risk assessment before mediation and the desire to intervene as early as possible. Here, we need to strike a balance. Perhaps that first meeting could be held even before going to court. I realise that that would present difficulties, but the sooner the conciliation process begins, the better. The whole package—mediation, counselling, parenting classes, contact activities—is important, but we need to consider the money and skills needed to resource such activities. That is particularly true of the domestic violence programmes.
It is difficult to know how big the problem is. Contact is a high-profile issue and we all know of people who feel aggrieved. Indeed, we probably all have friends who have told us how big a problem this is. Such people appear to have genuine grievances and we cannot just brush them aside and say, "We are doing all these other things—it's going to be all right." We need to address the question of contact and bear in mind the United Nations convention on the rights of the child. A child has the right to direct and regular contact with both parents, unless it is contrary to the child's best interest. It is generally acknowledged to be in the child's best interest to sustain a full relationship with both parents but, obviously, in some cases it is not—for instance, if there is a risk of harm. Indeed, relationships involving conflict can be immensely mentally damaging for the child caught in the middle.
We should not be too prescriptive—I would hate to go down the 50:50 route and argue that that is a fair starting point—but we should go a bit further than we currently do. As we have heard, various documents acknowledge the presumption of joint contact.
I should be interested to hear the hon. Lady's views on the fact that 40 per cent. of parents lose contact with their children within two years of separation or divorce. We need to focus on that issue, because that is the reality.
I thank the hon. Lady for that intervention, but I shall deal with that point in due course as I want to make some progress.
We have talked at great length here and in the other place about whether it is possible to have two presumptions, and what I hear about the possible undermining of the safety of the child worries me. It is a question of listening. In its written evidence to the Select Committee, Resolution—formerly the Solicitors Family Law Association—suggested that there should be a first presumption and then a second: the first relating to the child, and a second, lower-order presumption relating to the right to see both parents. That was the position during one of our debates, but when Resolution gave oral evidence to the Select Committee, it appeared to change its mind, supporting instead the insertion of a statement into the welfare checklist in the Children Act 1989. It is significant that a major association should, on having listened to what others had said, change its mind in the process of giving evidence.
I understand the hon. Lady's concern, but Resolution is talking about putting a common-sense presumption in the welfare checklist, whereas the Tory Opposition advocate a legal presumption. However, an absolute legal presumption cannot be changed. If it is rebuttable, it can be rebutted, but it still has to be overturned, and that is a very different matter.
That is my point. The Select Committee concluded that inserting a statement into the welfare checklist offered a possible solution and did not have the dangers associated with having two legal presumptions. It also said that the court should have regard—and this is the critical point—to the importance of sustaining a relationship between children and non-resident parents.
That approach was also endorsed by the Scrutiny Committee. I know that the Government heard that request, and I hope that the Minister will say whether there will be any response to it.We have been told again today, as we have been told repeatedly, that the assumption of reasonable contact is established in case law, but we should try to find appropriate wording—perhaps in the form of something added to the welfare checklist—to give some clarity and guidance.
With reference to the point raised by the hon. Member for Basingstoke (Mrs. Miller), what amounts almost to a self-generating bias has been caused by the delays that occurred in the past. It is clear that a resolution is even harder to achieve if a non-resident parent has not had contact with a child for six months or longer. In such cases, the outcome is almost a self-fulfilling prophecy. What can we do? Is it a question only of making the court process more efficient, or can we put in place some mechanism to deal with the problem, where there is no risk of harm? I hope to be able to explore that in greater detail in Committee.
The hon. Member for Luton, South said that it is vital that the views of children are fully considered. My impression is that, in good circumstances, CAFCASS does take account of children's views and deals with them very well. It would be interesting to have some evidence in that regard, but hearsay suggests that that body's response is patchy across the country. I support the NSPCC's contention that the Bill fails to make any provision in respect of the mechanism by which the courts may ascertain the child's wishes and feelings, or ensure that separate representation for the child is available when that child might be at risk and his or her interests are in conflict with those of the parents.
Section 122 of the Adoption and Children Act 2002 has been mentioned already. I have tabled some parliamentary questions on the matter, but it would be very helpful if the Minister who winds up the debate is able to say whether the provision is likely to be implemented in the near future. A great deal of research exists to suggest that taking a child's wishes and feelings into account can lead to better resolution between parents. We must find the best practice in that respect, but I am sure that all hon. Members want that outcome.
Much has been said in the debate about enforcement, although I have not devoted as much of my speech to the topic as the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham did. It is important to consider different penalties, and my earlier intervention was aimed simply at establishing whether a range of penalties existed. The community punishment is obviously preferable to sending a parent to prison, which is a last resort, but the way that it is operated by the probation service means that some parents will find it difficult to make sure that the child's interests are not affected. For example, a parent who is sent on a gardening scheme might have to wear a very visible jacket, and her child might think, "That's my mother doing that."
I am not convinced that the community punishment work would be appropriate in all cases. Will the Minister say whether the provisions in the earlier part of the Bill could be applied as part of a contact order's enforcement process so that, for instance, a person could be sent off to an appropriate parenting course? That would add to the range of available penalties, although all matters to do with contact activities, community service and so on obviously require adequate resourcing. We know that delays have been caused by CAFCASS, but in "Every Day Matters" it seems almost to be putting on a brave face. It says that it does not have enough resources, but that it has proposed new solutions. We have to be concerned that CAFCASS is adequately resourced.
I asked a parliamentary question recently and established that while the average training budget per employee was as high as £644 in one year, this year it had slipped down to £390. If we envisage CAFCASS carrying out a much wider range of activities, including risk assessments, training will be all-important. We have to get it right. There is a great deal of concern about the potential under-resourcing of CAFCASS when it is taking on a changing role.
Finally, on part 1, I concur with the Conservative Opposition that increasing transparency where it is safe and appropriate to do so in the family court system will help to address some of the current grievances.
I shall be rather brief on part 2, not because it is not important, but simply because with the interventions that I have taken I have been speaking for rather a long time. It is absolutely right that we have slightly more focus on adults in this part of the Bill, although safeguarding children is still important. We all know that inter-country adoption happens for different reasons. Frequently, people adopt children from within their extended family or friendship ties. More often than not, such adoptions are nothing like that. There are thousands of children waiting for adoption in this country, but they are older children and they have a number of problems. People choose to go abroad to adopt babies. The proposed legislation will cover countries, I presume, such as the USA. It is not simply about people who, for humanitarian reasons, go abroad to adopt children in need.
The procedures for suspending adoptions from other countries need to be clear, transparent and fair. I supported the decision to take urgent action on Cambodia when trafficking issues arose. The process of inter-country adoption is extremely long. It is an extensive and expensive process. I have some concerns about the fee issue, which was discussed at length in the other place. I agree with the extension of the time limit from six to 12 months, as proposed in clause 14. It will stop people evading some of the rigours of the adoption procedures in other countries. There is quite a dilemma in terms of time taken and expense, but it is important to get it right. I look forward to debating that fully in Committee.
Baroness Barker moved an amendment in another place to make it easier in appropriate cases for children to be adopted from the UK to overseas, more often than not by relatives. As promised by the Minister in that debate, a meeting has taken place with civil servants. Does the Minister have any update for us on that today? I understand the difficulties of establishing sufficient safeguards for children, but clearly it is important to look at the issue that way on as well.
Baroness Barker said in the other place:
"Until such time as we have a private fostering system that is properly regulated in this country, we will continue to run up against problems that sometimes are masked as inter-country adoptions but more likely are about trafficking."—[Official Report, House of Lords, 29 June 2005; Vol. 673, c. 282.]
Recently, we have seen reports about the number of children in this country who simply disappear as a result of a badly regulated system of private fostering. I, too, have made my cause the need to make progress to proper regulation of private fostering. That is important.
All in all, there are some important and useful aspects to the Bill and I look forward to a constructive time in Committee, where everyone will listen to one another and we will come up with a safe solution, while acknowledging that there are issues about how the current system operates.
I was a member of the Joint Committee that performed the pre-legislative scrutiny of the draft Bill in February 2005, together with my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Redcar (Vera Baird) and my hon. Friend the Member for Chatham and Aylesford (Jonathan Shaw). I am also a member of the Modernisation Committee, which is conducting an examination of how scrutiny of legislation can be improved. A Committee that gives pre-legislative scrutiny to Bills makes a valuable contribution to ensuring that we get the best possible legislation to achieve the outcomes that we want. It enables interested parties, including lobby groups, to give evidence, both oral and written, to the Committee and allows members to look at the legislation, taking into account those comments. It also enables those comments to be more closely scrutinised and challenged by the Committee members.
The Committee takes its task very seriously because members know that the Government will listen carefully to their recommendations. Indeed, the Government accepted 11 of those recommendations, which shows the benefits of the process in improving legislation. I was particularly pleased that the Government withdrew both curfews and electronic tagging as enforcement orders.
The major clauses in the Bill deal with the very difficult area of how the courts can intervene when separating parents cannot agree on the kind of contact each parent should have with the child of that relationship. The interest of the child must be paramount in a system that still remains mainly focused on the resolution of disputes between adults. Fathers do not have rights, mothers do not have rights: they have only responsibilities.
Each child and their family circumstances are different, and it is not therefore appropriate to approach the welfare of the child from definitions of parental rights or notions or presumptions of equal parenting. However, it is right to start from the basis that children benefit from having a meaningful relationship with both parents. When their relationship fails, it is the responsibility of parents to come to arrangements about contact that are in the interests of the child. Of course, in the overwhelming majority of cases they do. Nine out of 10 separating couples agree informal contact. Of the 10 per cent. who have a formal arrangement, 90 per cent. work successfully. It is that small and difficult minority who cannot agree and who ask the courts to resolve their disputes that the Bill attempts to address. But as the Joint Committee report pointed out, in the small minority of cases in which a parent has applied to court, the problems of those families may be complex and not easily resolved through any enforcement measure.
In her excellent speech, my hon. Friend the Member for Luton, South (Margaret Moran) referred to the research done by the university of East Anglia, which has provided an insight into those problems. The parents involved were often young, on low incomes and with very young children. The parents' ability to communicate with each other was limited and the relationships were characterised by a lack of trust, empathy or flexibility, often with high levels of anger. The disputes presented to the courts did not reflect straightforward arguments about contact, but a range of issues and the courts were typically presented with competing his-and-her accounts. Given that, many of these families need support and a facilitative approach to problem solving sustained over a period of time. I welcome the provisions in the Bill that will enable that to happen, including the ability of the court to make contact activity directions. Although it is not clear what those might be exactly, there are several activities that could relate to the promotion of contact, such as attending advice or guidance sessions, including those that give information about the value of meditation—I am sorry, I mean mediation, although meditation might also be useful.
It would make sense to look at basing those contact activities in the new children's centres. The Sure Start project in my constituency already gives advice and information to parents to increase their understanding of children's behaviour and their skills in managing that behaviour. Attendance at such a session might help parents in conflict separate out their needs from those of their children and help to resolve disputes between parents.
I also welcome the expansion of the role of CAFCASS in facilitating and monitoring contact in that supportive approach, but bearing in mind the complexity of the difficulties of some parents, I am pleased that the Government have responded positively to the Joint Committee's recommendations on expanding family assistance orders, which are underused. With the roll-out of children's centres and the establishment of new local children's centres, there will be an opportunity to use all available resources to provide families with help and support not only to resolve contact disputes but to enable better outcomes for children.
We must be clear about the limitations of contact activity directions in dealing with the more complex underlying problems where violence and the fear of violence has been a factor in the separation and continues to be an issue in contact. I very much agree with women's organisations that say that abusive behaviour in a violent relationship cannot be dealt with by parenting classes and that the primary responsibility must be to ensure the safety of the child in any contact arrangements. However, even when a court has decided that contact is in the child's interests, there will be situations where a parent persistently undermines the decision and refuses to co-operate for reasons that have little to do with the child's welfare, so I welcome the new enforcement powers, including the court's being able to direct a parent to do unpaid work and make financial recompense. Courts are reluctant to send a parent with care to jail and those new powers, together with a more facilitative and supportive approach, will mean, I hope, that that does not have to happen.
I am sorry that the Government did not agree to the time and placement requirement recommended by the Joint Committee as a form of bridging order between facilitative contact activities and enforcement orders. It would have enabled the court to direct a parent to be at a designated place for a designated time. The Joint Committee saw great advantages in such orders, as the court could direct a parent to stay in their house while the non-resident parent had contact with the child in another place, thus preventing that parent from undermining the contact arrangement.
Finally, I turn to the provisions on restricting inter-country adoption. I welcome the proposals to set up a list of restricted countries that the Secretary of State deems have bad practices relating to the adoption of children, such as not having proper systems to verify that children are orphans or not attempting to reunite abandoned or lost children with their families. The Government will of course need to ensure that they have good information about what is going on in other countries.
As the Minister will be aware, one of the Joint Committee's recommendations was that the Government take steps to establish an inter-country adoption agency, which we believed would enhance good practice and inform the Government about unsatisfactory practices in countries where children are available for adoption. It would also inform the Government when a country should be placed on the restricted list. As has already been said, there are about 300 applications each year to adopt children from a number of countries, with a few countries receiving the bulk of the applications. Home study reports are prepared by almost as many individual local authority or voluntary organisations as there are countries, so the channels of communication to the DFES from so many agencies cannot be as good as they would be with a small number of specialist agencies, which could network with similar agencies in other countries. The overseas adoption helpline, in its evidence to the Joint Committee, made a good case for pump-priming money to be made available to facilitate the setting up of specialist agencies that would perform a linking or mediation function with the state of origin, and which exist in a majority of countries worldwide.
The overseas adoption helpline argued that the establishment of such agencies would result in a more child-protective system for arrangements for adoption by UK applicants, as the agencies would be accredited by, and accountable to, the proper authorities in the country of origin as well as the relevant central authority in the UK. A network of such agencies would provide a mechanism to monitor adoption practices in situ in those states.
The Government did not accept that recommendation, as they thought it unnecessary. They also pointed to the cost. However, 300 applications a year with a charge to applicants of £5,000 for a home study report indicates that there is already a substantial revenue stream, and the DFES plans to recover some of the administration costs at the rate of a further £800 to £1,000 per head.
In other countries, the costs of inter-country adoption applications, like domestic applications, are borne by the state as it is seen as a service to the child, not to the adopter. We do not take that view in this country.
I would argue, however, that some pump-priming money to set up one or two specialist agencies would be a recognition that, with such complex issues, a degree of specialisation would benefit both the child and the Government. It would also be a good investment for the Government, as it would help to achieve the objectives of the highest practices in inter-country adoption in both this country and the country of origin. I realise that that is outside the Bill's scope, but I hope that Ministers will look at the issue again.
This is a good Bill that will legislate on a difficult issue, and I believe that the Government have achieved a good balance of facilitative and enforcement measures to achieve the objective of ensuring that, as far as possible, separated parents fulfil their responsibilities to their children.
Thank you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, for allowing me to participate in this vital debate, which has been marked by good sense, clarity and shared principles, as exemplified by the speech of the hon. Member for Stockport (Ann Coffey), who clearly knows what she is talking about. For the record, I will confine my remarks to part 1, concentrating on contact orders and the operation of family courts. Other hon. Members may wish to debate the more thorny subject of inter-country adoptions.
I believe that there is a consensus across the House for us to achieve an outcome that is not only practical and pragmatic, but fair and compassionate, with the paramount consideration being the welfare of children, both in theory and practice in statute. I am pleased to say that there is a political will on both sides of the House to put aside party differences and focus on getting the legislation right. We are, of course, dealing not with dry, arcane academic case law, but with people's lives and the future of our children, whose lives may be fractured or broken by the raw emotion and hurt engendered by the disintegration of their families and the growing phenomenon of divorce and separation. As has been mentioned, the trauma and stress of that affects about 200,000 children each year.
I see that the annunciator says that I am "Nick Herbert, Arundel and South Downs", Mr. Deputy Speaker. I am sure that Hansard will amend that.
Two thirds of those children are under 10 years of age. As my hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke (Mrs. Miller) mentioned, 40 per cent. of children lose contact with the non-resident parents, often as the result of bitter and protracted disputes following separation and divorce.
We agree on much in the Bill. In particular, I welcome the Government's commitment on risk assessments in clause 7, which is supported by hon. Members on both sides of the House. There is a demonstrable need for a more effective method of enforcing contact orders. In so far as Parliament can legislate to change people's lives for the better—as Disraeli may have said in another context, "The elevation of the people"—that is what we are trying to do today. It may not be Catholic emancipation or the abolition of slavery, but we are trying to improve people's lives and to give adults and children a better future, to ameliorate the tragedy of family disintegration.
We agree that, as legislators, we have a duty and responsibility to balance the best of what has gone before, best practice and an evidence-based analysis of the current system with a realisation that there are significant flaws in what passes for the practice of family law today, which is sometimes perceived as ineffectual and certainly perceived by many people as unfair.
I welcome much of the Bill. I support the insertion of the domestic violence perpetrator programme into the Bill and the introduction of risk assessments, especially given the points made eloquently by the hon. Member for Luton, South (Margaret Moran) about circumstances where allegations or proof of abuse are involved. It is right to reform the Children Act 1989 and I am glad that there is recognition that the principle of children maintaining contact with both parents after divorce and separation should be enunciated, even though I might think that is not expressed sufficiently robustly in the Bill.
The recognition that contact orders are meaningless in their practical application without legal sanction is also welcome. Non-compliance cannot and should not be allowed to be tolerated by the courts with impunity. If it is, we risk undermining the whole discharge of family law. The Bill's proposals establish a marker that creates a disincentive for those who would otherwise flout the will of the court. They restore balance to an area hitherto considered wholly biased against the non-resident parent. As has already been said by my hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton), giving the court a range of options, such as the early intervention projects, is realistic and sensible. Most importantly, it recognises that all families— parents and children—are different and that a one-size-fits-all approach is inappropriate in this particularly sensitive area. It goes without saying that I welcome the fact that Ministers have supported the decision not to proceed with tagging, which would have been a grotesque and gratuitous overreaction.
The failure—or, if I am being charitable, the non-success—of the family resolution pilots, which were launched and discontinued at a hugely disproportionate cost and which involved low take-up and a lack of compulsion, should not prevent Ministers from being imaginative, especially when reviewing the efficacy of mediation in the package of measures. However, voluntary measures will once again fail. As I mentioned when I intervened on the hon. Member for Mid-Dorset and North Poole (Annette Brooke), only a legal obligation enacted by the courts will have the desired effect. Academic evidence from Norway, the United States and other countries has shown that that is the case. I hope that that matter will be debated in Committee at length and in detail.
The wider range of options available to the courts, the improvement in the monitoring of contact and—I agree with the hon. Member for Stockport—the enactment of family assistance orders are positive steps. The idea of a legal presumption to promote contact has attracted wide support across parties.
I want to focus on a reasonably small number of areas that concern me and which remain unresolved in the Bill. At the outset I have to say—this may be controversial—that I believe that there is no contradiction between the presumption of co-parenting and the safety of the child or children subject to a contact order. I do not believe that the case has been sufficiently made that a legal presumption is, in general, in any way at odds with the interests of the child or children. I regret that the Government have not sought to strengthen the Children Act 1989 to give legal power to reasonable contact. I will come back to the word "reasonable" later.
Common sense indicates that children desire successful co-parenting after divorce and separation, and are happier and healthier as a result of it. Those children mostly go on to be settled, responsible and decent adults and to be good parents themselves. That is borne out by research by the National Council for One Parent Families in a study by J. Hunt in 2003.
We are attempting to establish, where practicable, a strong and loving relationship between a child and both parents. Noble Lords and Ladies in the other place debated at length—I believe in relation to amendment No. 2—the word "reasonable", which is enshrined in section 34 of the 1989 Act. I would also add "meaningful" as a given. I am glad that the Minister acknowledged in her comments to the Joint Committee the use of the word "meaningful". "Substantial" was mentioned by my colleague, Baroness Morris of Bolton in the other place.
The positions taken by organisations such as Families Need Fathers and children's charities such as Barnardo's and the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, notwithstanding its ill-judged and intemperate comments in its briefing notes, need not be irreconcilable. The presumption is an instrument that gives flexibility to the courts to tailor their decisions accordingly. Evidence shows that it would only formalise the current situation, where very few contact orders are not granted. That in no way invalidates the paramountcy principle in respect of the welfare and interests of the child.
A corollary of this practical approach that the Government have not yet fully acknowledged is the strong argument in favour of a greater role for the child's voice to be heard in court, an argument that some Labour Members have advanced. It is one of the issues in the NSPCC briefing paper with which I agree, so it does not get everything wrong. Perhaps the Minister will touch on why section 122 of the Adoption and Children Act 2002, which provides for children to have a legal and discrete right to be participants and to have separate representation in court, remains unimplemented.
I shall make some tangential comments. There has been consensus but the partisan comments of the hon. and learned Member for Redcar (Vera Baird) obscure the issue. We all want children's voices to be taken into account. If an important piece of legislation has been on the statute book for three years and an important section of it remains unenacted, it is surely reasonable for us to ask why that is so.
Why does the hon. Gentleman not tell us how to do it?
There might be a causal link, given that the Labour party is in Government and the Conservative party is in Opposition. Three years is surely plenty of time to come up with practical and pragmatic approaches to this point, particularly as it has been said that the issue is very important in the context of the proposed legislation.
There is much evidence including that, for example, from the Family Law Journal, under the auspices of the National Youth Advocacy Service. Far from exacerbating the bitterness that is endemic in legal wrangles around contact order disputes, allowing the child's opinion to be heard acts as a catalyst in helping to resolve even the most long-standing and protracted difficult disputes.
On a broader issue, the paramountcy principle is only implicit in the Bill—particularly in clauses 1, 4 and 5—and is not as explicit as it was in the Children Act 1989. The Minister may want to comment on that when she replies.
I return to the sensitive subject of co-parenting and child safety. Thankfully, the awful phenomenon of child murder in contact situations is extremely rare. Although that issue is distressing, it must not obscure the case for co-parenting. More particularly, we should resist recourse to stereotypes. There is no definitive evidence that non-resident fathers per se, as a group, are a greater risk to child safety than substitute non-biological partners or non-biological mothers. In this respect, I deprecate the comments of the NSPCC. It has undermined its kudos as a respected children's charity in putting forward arguments that have no basis in fact and no evidential back-up. Let us remember that many of the dreadful crimes that take place involve not natural or biological fathers, but men brought into the family unit in the wake of divorce or separation. They may have very poor or non-existing parenting skills. At present, unlike the natural or biological father, they are unlikely to have been risk assessed.
May I turn to the issue of compensation via community-based enforcement orders for unpaid work and financial compensation based on affordability? I remain unconvinced that the Government have thought through the practical consequences of the relevant provisions and their impact on CAFCASS, especially the availability of appropriate financial resources and, just as important, the uniformity of resources and facilities across the country. Under clause 7, CAFCASS officers will have a considerably enlarged portfolio of duties, and it is imperative that that does not impact on existing work flows, which are very demanding. I wish to take issue with the Minister, because there have been significant staffing shortfalls, long delays in assigning officers to children and a £4 million cut in funding. As I said in an earlier intervention, the chief executive of CAFCASS, Mr. Anthony Douglas, wrote to me in response to a written question that I had tabled, confirming that one in six private law cases that dealt with parental responsibility, contact orders and residence were unallocated to a staff member.
I pay tribute to the work done in sometimes very trying circumstances by the professional staff of CAFCASS, but there is dissatisfaction with the organisation, including complaints about inadequate time spent with children and institutional bias against non-resident parents. We should be mindful lest inadvertently we make matters worse. I am glad that the hon. and learned Member for Redcar has flagged up her concerns and cited the thematic review. The hon. Member for Mid-Dorset and North Poole (Annette Brooke), too, was concerned about the matter. Like other hon. Members, I await further details from Ministers. No doubt, the issue will be debated at length in Committee. Perhaps the Minister will clarify her rather opaque description of a new and robust statutory framework, and the way in which it will affect funding and resources. Above all, we need proper planning, proper training and a realistic business plan for future CAFCASS workflows.
In conclusion, may I make a plea on behalf of non-resident parents—usually fathers—and praise the invaluable role of the extended family in child care, especially grandparents who, as the hon. Member for Stafford (Mr. Kidney) will agree, are the unsung heroes of our sometimes difficult and dysfunctional families? Grandparents contribute 60 per cent., or £1.1 billion-worth, of child care, yet they have few if any legal rights. I truly hope that the presumption of co-parenting in the Bill and other provisions will redress the balance in favour of fathers, reduce the bitterness inherent in many family courts cases, and have a commensurate positive impact on children. At the moment, non-resident fathers believe that they are on the receiving end of a slow legal system that tends to accept the status quo as a fait accompli, appears hostile to them as a result of their absence and, we should remember, imposes significant costs on them for having the temerity to seek equity and fairness. The most recent figures show that 7,000 court orders are breached every year. At the very least, notwithstanding the recognition in the Bill that non-compliance with court orders will not be tolerated, there must be an assumption by the state that it is responsible for upholding court decisions. That burden should not fall on the impecunious shoulders of individual non-resident parents.
Finally, on grandparents, I declare an interest. I am not a grandparent—I am far too young.
No, the hon. Gentleman is not.
Despite her heavy cold, the Minister is as sparky as ever.
I was fortunate to secure an Adjournment debate in Westminster Hall on grandparents' access to grandchildren. The House, and certainly the Minister, will not indulge me if I rehearse the arguments that I deployed in that debate. Suffice it to say that grandparents, especially paternal grandparents, should not be the de facto victims of family breakdown. In that context, I pay tribute to the right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr. Field), who has done so much to keep the issue at the top of the political agenda, like all matters relating to welfare.
I hope that the Minister keeps her word on grandparents and that she will consider the lack of grandparents' legal rights following family disintegration. I hope that she will reconsider section 23 of the 1989 Act, which imposes on local authorities a statutory duty to look first at friends and family in respect of care for children, section 8, which forces grandparents to overcome two hurdles to gain access to their flesh and blood—leave to apply, then a court or care order—and section 17, regarding financial assessment for family and friends acting as carers.
For the most part, I welcome the Bill. It builds on the foundations established by the 1989 Act, which have stood the test of time. I commend the work of colleagues across all parties in the other place. Today, we have an opportunity to help in a small way to prevent the misery and heartache caused by family schism and heartbreak for thousands of children. Let us make the best of that duty and responsibility. With some small caveats, I ask hon. Members to support the Bill on Second Reading.
I was pleased to hear the hon. Member for Peterborough (Mr. Jackson) say that he broadly welcomed the Bill. Although he followed his leader in getting outraged at the NSPCC, he did not follow his leader who said at various points in his speech that the Bill was a wasted opportunity and that it was woefully inadequate. He did not quite say that it needed pulling limb from limb and putting back together again, but his comments were not very far from that. If that is the considered view of the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton)—I do not know that it necessarily is—he is on his own.
The Bill has been through pre-legislative scrutiny. There were a large number of eminent, distinguished, knowledgeable and experienced people from the Conservative side on the Committee and all agreed—there was no dissent, and there was no vote even on the Committee—that the Bill was a benevolent and good measure, subject to the odd caveat, as the hon. Member for Peterborough wisely said. I, in common with the Committee, of which I was privileged to be a member, and most of the Lords in the conversations that they had about the Bill, welcome it.
The Bill's emphasis on early intervention, support, re-tasking CAFCASS away from just reporting on the history and making recommendations to becoming more involved in resolution at an early stage, and the availability of a range of optional projects to help support the right attitude to contact is obviously the right model. Clearly, that must all be properly resourced or it will not work. The Bill offers a sympathetic and rational way forward.
I have three areas of concern, one of which arises from comments from the Opposition, rather than from the Bill—that is, the suggested presumption that there should be joint parenting. I accept entirely that the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham did not speak about an equal split, but if he is speaking about a legal presumption that both parents should be heavily engaged—co-parenting, as the hon. Member for Peterborough said—that worries me immensely. There is a very real difference between that and what Labour Members were discussing when he was speaking and graciously taking interventions—that is, an underlying assumption in the courts which, believe me, does exist and has existed as long as I have been involved in the family courts, that the welfare of the child requires as much contact with both parents as possible. That is a common-sense assumption which underpins what the courts seek to do. However, that is a far cry from a legal presumption in the Bill which states that it is presumed that there will be co-parenting.
A legal presumption can be of two kinds. It can, for instance, be an absolute one, which means that it cannot be knocked over, whatever happens. On the other hand, a legal presumption can be rebuttable—the words are archaic, but we lawyers love them—which means that it can rebutted, but the onus is on somebody to unsettle what is otherwise an edifice of uncrackable law. If one gives such rights to parents, then one is giving rights to bad parents as well as to good parents, and one is also ousting the welfare of the child as the paramount principle.
If we talked about the issue for a long time, nobody would disagree that both parents should be kept involved, if possible. However, if we were to drive the courts into a framework that disciplines them to say, "These people have rights which we cannot easily get round", we would subvert the paramountcy principle and might put children in danger.
I am sure that I am not going to agree with the hon. and learned Lady on this point. Why is this issue so different from the rest of the law, in which there is a presumption of innocence until one is proven guilty? Why can there not be an assumption that a parent is a good parent until they are proven not to be, given all the checks and balances in the courts, which this Bill will reinforce? Why would such a presumption undermine the welfare of the child?
The explanation why such an approach would undermine the paramountcy principle is straightforward. In a situation in which it is not the child but the parents who are battling, the parents are obviously expressing what one might conjure up as the right of the child to have contact with dad, but it is dad who is fighting for that right, so it is his right. Once one makes that the presumption, the welfare of the child cannot be paramount, so the presumption must be ousted in some other way. In that case, one must bring to the surface the danger to the child in order to rebut the presumption, which self-evidently means that the presumption of paramountcy is not coming first. I would never agree to that proposal, which is not only technically nonsense, but wrong. It could be extremely dangerous, too, because it would oblige courts to give too many rights to bad parents, which is not what any of us want.
Why are they wrong in America, Australia, Canada and Italy? And how has that wrongness manifested itself in gross harm to the welfare of children, because I am not aware of the evidence on that point?
The hon. Gentleman is not comparing like with like. I am unaware of any legal system that includes a legal presumption of the type to which he has referred. The hon. Member for Mid-Dorset and North Poole (Annette Brooke) discussed the ability to put a presumption into the welfare checklist, but that is not a legal presumption. Most family law systems in societies resembling ours will be based on such a presumption, which is not a legally binding presumption of the kind mentioned by the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham—I hope that he eventually gets why he is wrong.
Child contact is a child-protection issue, and there are dangers. This Government, more than any previous Government, have recognised domestic violence as a serious issue that has been hidden for many years, that is very hard to get the measure of and that is seriously under-reported. That point applies to male domestic violence, too, which the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham and I have discussed before. I talk about domestic violence against women because the vast majority of domestic violence involves women, but there is domestic violence by brother on brother, father on brother, brother on father, gay partner on gay partner and women on men. In every situation it is a hidden problem that needs teasing out, because, as it is wrapped up in a relationship, it is not easy to speak freely about it.
In this connection, though, it mostly concerns women. The statistics suggest that 750,000 children witness domestic violence annually. Seventy-five per cent. of children who are on the at-risk register for their own safety live with domestic violence, and up to 66 per cent. of children suffer physical violence from a perpetrator who is attacking the mother but also at some point attacks the child. In the criminal justice system, the point where the parties separate is now well recognised as being one of enhanced danger when the violence tends to increase because the perpetrator appreciates that he is losing his grip and tries to use even greater force to bring the person back into the fold. However, that is not half as well recognised in the family sector. When domestic violence is recognised in family courts, it is generally regarded as having come to an end when the couple has split, not as a continuing issue. It is often undervalued because it is perceived as a tactic in a fight.
The hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham, whom I know does not think as his words suggest, talked about the need to be rigorous and punitive about false allegations in court. Everybody agrees with that, but he cited only false allegations of domestic violence. That is a slightly partisan view. Of course, in heated situations where there is a child to play for, more unscrupulous parents make all sorts of allegations against one another, but there is not a high incidence of false allegations about domestic violence, although there is a great deal of it.
Those of us who sat on the Joint Committee that scrutinised the draft Bill had the benefit of the scrutiny unit statistician's figures about a whole range of related issues. In the year for which he gave us figures—I think that it must have been 2003–04—out of 40,000 contested custody cases, 13,000 concerned issues of safety, of which 5,500, or nearly half, concerned child abuse or neglect and the other 7,000 or so domestic violence. It is therefore utterly vital that the child's welfare is paramount and that that cannot be changed. I am pleased that the Government cling to that position and will continue to do so. The question is whether the Bill goes far enough to guarantee the safety of the large number of vulnerable children and domestic violence victims who are present in the statistics.
The Government would say that those worries are adequately addressed by the welfare checklist in the Children Act 1989, the extension of the definition of "harm" to include impairment due to seeing or hearing ill-treatment of another, and the new family court application forms that try to ensure that domestic violence is put at the top of the list so that cases can be verified and dealt with at the outset. However, the joint charities grouping, which consists of a large number of pressure groups concerned with children, including the NSPCC, suggests that there is no clear requirement to ensure that contact is safe. We recommended—
Order. I am not sure that the hon. and learned Lady's microphone is working. Until we are sure that it is, perhaps she would like to speak up a little.
I am sorry. It is rare for me to be accused of not speaking loudly enough. I referred to and commended two recommendations that we made in Committee. They consist of checking the safety of the child at every stage. I mentioned the thematic review, which showed that CAFCASS paid
"a worrying lack of attention to safety planning in almost all the observed sessions".
I was pleased that the Minister said that CAFCASS is now receiving plenty of resources. It will have to change its culture if it is to move from report writing to active solution seeking. It needs beefing up.
The thematic review makes the point that if we have existed with a family court system in which the stars representing the social workers, the sense of both sides to a dispute and the expertise acquired has never paid sufficient attention to safety planning, that speaks volumes about keeping children's safety paramount. Even the officers charged with the task of recommending welfare outcomes have not had that requirement as high on their agenda as they should.
My second concern about the Bill is the absence of the paramountcy principle from the provisions that deal with enforcement against a recalcitrant parent. Clearly, the point is to enforce, but orders for contact can only be prospective. The judge works out the likely way in which it will happen but events can call safety into question. For example, something could alarm the mother or make the child afraid so that it does not want to go, and she says, "I won't go through with it." At that point, enforcement is directed at dealing with her. If the paramountcy of the interest of the child is lost then, we lose a good deal of the point of the Bill. That is deeply worrying.
An individual needs to be punished but that should not undermine the paramountcy of the child. We are back to the point that the Bill is intended to tackle. The courts do not easily send a primary carer to prison because that is bad for the child and we are trying to get away from that model. The courts might express concern that, if they make someone do unpaid work at a time when they would otherwise take the child to a football match or do something nice, it undermines the welfare of the child. However, I believe that we could give the courts a strong steer and emphasise using reasonably civilised means to enforce an order, which the court remains assured is in the interests of the child. That model is compatible with the paramountcy of the welfare of the child. If that does not remain at the top of the agenda, we are worried that punishing the person will be put first and the child's welfare will be lost along the way. I hope that those who serve on the Committee can ensure that the paramountcy principle is included in the relevant provisions.
Section 122 of the Adoption and Children Act 2002 about representation for children has been mentioned. It has not been implemented and I understand some of the criticism from Conservative Back Benchers. There is no doubt that all the joint charities believe that it is crucial that the courts hear and understand the child's wishes and feelings about the circumstances to help them decide what would be safe for the child, yet the Bill neither implements section 122 nor orders separate representation when there is risk.
The lobby groups say that separate representation should be considered in all cases where there is a risk and that courts should ascertain children's views in all cases. In principle, I agree strongly. However, I ask a question that I hope will be considered in a broader context than simply that of the Bill. How do we do that?
In cases involving an older child, we can get the kid to give evidence if we have to, although that is not necessarily desirable. Such evidence could certainly feed into a social worker's report in some way. But what about the younger children? And what about the 5,500 out of every 40,000 who are subject to the threat of child abuse or a lack of safety? They need to be able to make an input into the question of contact, and they need to be able to articulate what has happened to put their safety in danger. That can be hugely difficult.
That question is reflected in the criminal justice system, where case after case is brought involving allegations of abuse of young children, usually as a result of physical evidence, which might not be totally compelling, or concerns about the child not thriving. In other cases, a sibling might have said something, or the child might have said something to mum or dad to cause real concern. But how can a child be facilitated to express what has happened to them, and to give that kind of evidence, which is highly material to a prosecution but equally material to the tortured issue of contact where there might have been child abuse?
There is a provision in the Youth Justice and Criminal Evidence Act 1999 for intermediaries to be supplied to help people who cannot communicate in the normal way to put their evidence before a court. That is used for a variety of vulnerable groups. I had the privilege a few weeks ago of visiting the Barnardo's Bridgeway project in Redcar. The project deals with what it calls troubled children. These are children who are suspected to have been abused. Its primary role is to unearth what has really happened, in order to help the child to deal with it and to give them counselling. It is that unearthing of what has happened, by using very clever methods, and then being satisfied as a professional that is has indeed happened, so as to know how to tackle it through the right kind of counselling, that offers a potential medium for getting complaints of child sex abuse before the courts.
I had a pretty limited opportunity to get to the depths of how those professionals work. Through the use of toys, books and pictures of a specific kind, they try to get the child to go back through the experience, to see whether they respond to anything that registers that they have had an abusive experience. For instance, rather than asking a child a complex question such as, "How did you feel when that happened to you?", they have puppets that represent different emotions. This is just one example of how ingenious these methods are and the potential that they hold. The child would be asked which puppet was there at the time of the experience, and they might hold up the sad puppet or the angry puppet to show that that was how they felt. Or they might hold up the happy puppet, which would show that there was nothing to worry about.
I am not suggesting that we use puppets in court—I think that my colleagues in the legal profession might be a bit worried about that. However, I am suggesting that we all have a big responsibility, in confronting the inability to get children's testimony in these cases, to consider how those kids are not being protected because their testimony cannot be brought forward, and to examine some of these very clever methods, including those being used in the Barnardo's Bridgeway project. We need to acknowledge that, if they represent a well researched and methodologically sound way of getting reliable information about child abuse out of a child, so that an expert can then report it in court, that could be a way forward. I do not blame the Government for not introducing that part of the earlier Bill. It is easy to say that there should be separate representation in all circumstances, but a lot of questions remain about how exactly that should be achieved.
I welcome the Bill immensely. My only reservation is whether we have put safety sufficiently at a premium. Let us cleave to the paramountcy principle at every stage, and let us not lose sight of the opportunity that the Bill offers us to open the door into the world in which some children—not all, but a substantial proportion, as the figures show—suffer from abuse and from the spin-offs of domestic violence. Let us give serious thought to how we can, from now on, try harder to get children's voices properly heard.
I am grateful for the opportunity to make a modest contribution to the debate. It is a particular pleasure to follow the hon. and learned Member for Redcar (Vera Baird). I hope she will forgive me if I do not pursue some of her excellent points, as I want to concentrate on a narrower aspect of the Bill, namely adoption. I want to say something about the secrecy of the family court. I think that some of the general rules on adoption concerning foreign nations are relevant to our own system. A particularly sad case in which I have been involved over the last few months has a direct bearing on how adoption works in practice, especially forced adoption, the most extreme of the many issues that we must consider.
My hon. Friend the Member for Peterborough (Mr. Jackson) described the Under-Secretary of State as sparky. I am not sure that I can follow him down that avenue, but I want to record my enormous appreciation for the courtesy that she has shown me in connection with that case and my concerns about adoption. We have had three formal meetings and many more informal meetings. The Under-Secretary has changed my views on a number of important issues. She has also reinforced some of my prejudices, which is a nice feeling—but I am genuinely grateful to her, and grief-stricken by the fact that she is plainly suffering from a heavy cold. I wish her a quick recovery.
As I have said, I am concerned about the secrecy of the family court. I tabled an early-day motion on the subject. Looking around the Chamber earlier, I noted that almost every Member present, apart from Ministers and, obviously, the occupant of the Chair, had signed it. Early-day motion 869, entitled "Workings of the Children Act 2004", stated:
"That this House urges the Government to remove the veil of secrecy from the workings of the Children Act 2004; considers that the closed door policy of the family courts breeds suspicion and a culture of secrecy which does nothing to instil confidence in those using them, which affects not just the courts but the social services departments of local authorities; and believes that it is possible to preserve the anonymity of children involved in the proceedings without the cumbersome rules which obstruct parents from receiving advice and support, which in particular works to the disadvantage of parents with special learning difficulty."
The hon. and learned Member for Redcar spoke about the concept of the rights of the child being paramount. Her explanation was a good deal clearer than some that I have received from social services departments. However, I am less concerned with the effect on the courts than with the effect on social services. There is almost a process of Chinese whispers, whereby that noble concept becomes bastardised into an unwillingness to disclose, to justify, to listen to arguments, or even to see a need to explain decisions. The law was changed because of Members' difficulties in obtaining information from social services departments. At one time, they were threatened with contempt proceedings and prosecutions for pursuing constituency cases. Since the beginning of April last year, however, we have been able to look at case files and discuss the issues. I may be wrong but I think that I was the first Member of Parliament to take advantage of that, after a constituent who was going through the process brought it to my attention in the early part of April last year.
The change in the law seems to have wholly passed by Essex social services department. Despite the will of the House and the change in the law, it led me through quite an elaborate dance when I wanted to get some basic information from it. At one point, it insisted that I went to court to get special permission, when by Act of Parliament I already had that right. Had it not been for my noble Friend Lord Hanningfield, who happens to be the leader of Essex county council, I do not think that I would have been able to pursue the case to the full.
I cannot go into the details of the case, but I can talk about it in the abstract and discuss the way it affects the law. It concerned the decision by Essex social services to remove two children from a family because they considered the mother to be stupid and incapable of bringing up the children because of her lack of intellect. The mother had an IQ of around 60. Social services sought to present her as stupid to the point of being unable to understand maternal feelings. In my view, she was a little slow but someone who clearly loved her two children. She was faced with an unending stream of social workers dealing with her case—at one point, I counted 16—who were pushing her in different directions. She was left bewildered and unable adequately to rebut social services' allegations. I want to say a few things about people with learning difficulties and then move to the general question of social services. I want to stay firmly within the terms of the Bill.
A problem has been identified recently with the Meadow case. I do not want to go down that route but it illustrates the fact that, sometimes, proceedings have been initiated because hospital consultants or social workers have been a little over-zealous. It is typical for the person who initiates proceedings to see the complaint through. There is a need for a separation of powers between those who take the decision to initiate an investigation and those who actually conduct it. I am worried—I will come to this a little later—about the targets for adoption and the obvious financial benefits that accrue.
The principal problem is that social services departments cannot be entirely non-partisan in the way in which they identify the issues. Few people who initiate a serious chain of events are likely to admit it when it goes wrong. The temptation is to tailor evidence to fit the complaint. That should be resisted.
I can give a few brief examples of how that happens. As I said, I think that I was almost certainly the first MP to go through the process of wading through a social services file concerned with a forced adoption. It was thick, repetitive and at times confusing. I have talked to the Minister about that. I speak as a former chairman of a social services department and was used to seeing that kind of thing. I was shocked at the sloppiness of record keeping, the shoddiness of the process and the basic injustice. In that file—this is directly relevant—there was misinformation, embellishment and inappropriate assigning of motives.
I shall give just two examples, which illustrate the general problem. In the first example, the husband did not have learning difficulties but was, by mistake, described as having them. The mistake was recognised and corrected in the file but subsequently, such allegations continued to be made, as though it was a proven fact. More seriously, it was suggested that the child had witnessed domestic violence. It became clear that this was a single incident in which the husband, in a moment of pique, had picked up his slippers and thrown them against the wall. He is a gentle and passive man and at no time were the slippers aimed at anybody; nor was any damage caused, except, perhaps, for a slight mark on the wall. However, the file on that family states that the female child
"has witnessed domestic violence and this will have an impact towards her development".
Following close scrutiny on my part, social workers told me that there was no evidence of any violence toward either child in the family. No doctors or casualty departments had expressed concern, and there was no evidence of repeated accidents involving the children. Yet the allegation remained on the file.
An allegation was also made of poor parenting and I asked for various examples. I was given two. First, the female child had been given sandwiches and a packet of crisps for her lunch, and because she chose to eat the crisps first, she was too full to eat her sandwiches. That was deemed sufficiently important to be regarded as an example of poor parenting. The second example—we should bear in mind that at this point, I was pressing for another such example—involved allowing one of the children to stay up late at night to watch television. I asked whether "late" meant 10 o'clock at night, or perhaps 9 o'clock. I was told that she was allowed to stay up until 8 o'clock to watch the end of "EastEnders" or "Coronation Street". I have many middle-class friends with children of a similar age who are allowed to have crisps and to stay up until 8 o'clock. None of them is subject to a care order.
I turn to the issue of stories being embellished. By this point, the social worker was finding me a tad provocative. He said that the mother had screwed up a baby-wipe tightly in her fist and had repeatedly rubbed it against the genitals of the young male child, to the extent that they were "red raw." However, the report actually said that the mother had used heavy pressure, and that the genitals were flattened and "very red". There is a world of difference between "red raw" and discoloured.
I found distressing the way in which motives were ascribed in the report, without any obvious discipline. The father was criticised because he had refused to leave his job of some 23 years to become the full-time carer. It was said that that showed a lack of commitment. I believe that holding down a job—in his case, a humble job—for 23 years and putting bread on the table week in, week out sets a fine example to one's children. The social workers wanted the father to live off benefits. That might have been a solution, but if someone can set an example to their children by working hard, that is something to be proud of.
I want to return to the way in which the primacy rule can be bastardised. I confess that by this time I was beginning to irritate people, although I am sure that hon. Members will find that hard to believe. I found myself being lectured by a very senior person whom I shall not name, as that would be embarrassing. He said, "We have to consider the welfare of the child. That is absolutely paramount; whatever is best for the child is what we do."
I replied, "OK, but if that rule is applied generally, let's apply it to your children. If I arranged for them to live in the house of Mr. Bill Gates, they would get enormous intellectual stimulation—probably more than you can offer—and they would certainly enjoy much greater financial well-being." The very senior person did not seem to like that, which made me glad that I had not used my second choice of example—Michael Jackson.
I have talked these matters through with people who really understand them. They have said, "Look, Eric, what about the guardian? The guardian is there to look after the interests of children and to be impartial in the process."
I put that approach to various leading counsel with an interest in the matter. Although some guardians may exist who are prepared to stand up to social services departments and act as bastions of freedom, they are very hard to find. Generally speaking, guardians act as cheerleaders for social services departments. They are entirely compliant, and seem incapable of doing more than being a cheering section.
I had the opportunity last night to speak about such problems to the Under-Secretary and I shall give one example of the role of guardians. A leading counsel on these matters—who, by the nature of things, acts sometimes for the local authority and sometimes for parents—told me about one occasion when he was acting for the local authority. Just before proceedings began, people started to gather round the table. He was not paying attention to who came through the door, and was about to begin his contribution when he noticed that the guardian was sitting in the room. "What are you doing here?" he asked, to which the guardian replied, "Well, you know, I'm here as part of the team."
That person should not have been in the room, because the guardian's presence could demonstrate partiality. The system needs to make sure that the different strands of the process can be separated.
I was enormously surprised to find that there is no national system for the regulation or disciplining of social workers. No royal charter exists that sets out professional standards or disciplinary procedures and thus allows peer judgment to take place. The social work profession needs to address that defect. The solution does not need to be elaborate, but peer evaluation among social workers on relevant matters is important. Without that, there is enormous variation between authorities, which can be as slack as the one involved in the Climbié case, or as tough as Rochdale in the face of ridiculous accusations of satanism.
I shall quote briefly from Andrew Scott, an admittedly newly qualified barrister who deals with these matters on a daily basis. I suspect that he may be known to some hon. Members, as he has made quite a reputation for himself. He said:
"I don't think the public appreciates how low the threshold is. When children are taken from their parents, it is not because there is a certainty of future harm or even that, on the balance of probabilities, those children could be harmed. It is enough that there will be a possibility of future harm. If there is a 70 per cent. risk of a child being harmed and every child with that risk was taken into care then, in 100 such cases, 30 children would be taken from families where they would come to no harm. Sometimes, I wonder whether children are being protected, or whether it is social workers' careers."
Those are wise words. There may be a temptation for local authorities, possibly because of the financial advantage, to move towards adoption when other solutions may be possible.
Mr. Scott goes on to say:
"There's an unspoken fear that children from poor backgrounds are being freed up for middle-class adopters."
I would like to give an illustration which, of all the features of the case, has really chilled me. It is about the question of duty of care. In the April before the children were finally taken with a view to an enforced adoption, there was a case conference. The second child had not yet been born. The conference was considering whether to put the child on the at-risk register. The daughter was already on it. On the basis of the facts before it, the conference decided that it was not necessary to put the young boy on the register and furthermore that it was appropriate to take the young girl off it. Somebody at that conference, notably the chairman, did not like that decision. There was no change of circumstances and no other substantial incidents had taken place. Yet the same circumstances were seen as making it appropriate to put the children into care with a view to permanent adoption.
Let me say what I think needs to be done. Those who investigate a complaint must be independent of those who initiate it and those who may in due course be called on to care for the children. A proper code of conduct for social workers is long overdue. I certainly believe that those with special learning difficulties deserve special care. We are told that in 1 per cent. of all families one partner or the other has learning difficulties. We are also told that 20 per cent. of children in care have one parent with learning difficulties. There is some dispute over the figures, but whether they are precisely right or not, they demonstrate a problem.
The secrecy of the family courts needs to be opened up. We wait for the consultation document. I believe that there is a strong case for judgments to be published and that they can be published while retaining the anonymity of the child. I have one additional suggestion. It goes back to the Meadow case. There is a question whether the professional witnesses should be identified. If the Government take the decision that they should, I will generally support that. Once you become involved in a case you get e-mails from all over the country. Some are heartbreaking, but they all have strong emotion running through them. Very normal people sometimes become irrational. I recognise that there might be a problem obtaining witnesses if they are routinely named.
As an absolute minimum, each professional witness should be given a unique identifying number. I think that that is important—I suspect that hon. Members understand—because we need to establish a pattern so that if we get a problem with the veracity of a witness we can have another look at them.
We need to change the rules with regard to advice. Parents are put in the dreadful position of being unable to seek advice. They cannot talk to their county council or unitary authority; they cannot talk to friends or members of their family. Only recently could they come and talk to us. I can give examples of where there is a problem. In care or adoption proceedings it is understandable that parents want to take a fair amount of time off. Under the existing rules, parents cannot tell their employer why they are absent from work without going back to the court. Psychiatric evaluations are also often necessary in such proceedings, but people cannot make full disclosure without first going back to the court. We have to find ways to solve those problems, and I wholeheartedly endorse the Committee's recommendations for greater transparency.
It might be slightly controversial to say so, but some cases resemble attempts to make bricks without straw. Once the facts have been established, the courts are reluctant to revisit those facts or their interpretation. However, if adoption has resulted from fraud or seriously erroneous evidence, we should have a procedure to enable that adoption to be overturned, although the period in which that could be done should be limited. In care proceedings, any carer who is accused of abuse should have an automatic entitlement to legal aid; the opportunity to instruct an expert of their choosing; a right of appeal against any findings; and legal aid for any appeal.
I am grateful for the opportunity to raise these issues, but I wish to make one final point. I hope to be a Member of Parliament for many years to come—[Hon. Members: "Hear, hear."] Well, that is marvellous and makes me feel wonderful. However, the case I have described will haunt me, because a grave injustice has been done and the system has let those people down. Those two young people now live in my constituency in a flat that is spotlessly clean and well maintained, with a bedroom full of toys that their children will never see. The beds are made up and presents are waiting for them. While there will be an attempt to overturn the original care proceedings, everyone understands that the likelihood of reversal is not great. When the state intervenes in people's lives, we must ensure that it does so fairly. In the case that I have dealt with over the past few months, that intervention was "intervention beyond the humane."
Child contact disputes can be tremendously painful and affect everyone involved in them. They can leave long-lasting damage in their wake, so it is in everyone's interest to keep them to a minimum. For families, it is a deeply personal and private decision whether parents should live together or separate, and, if they separate, what arrangements should be made for caring for their children. We—as the decision makers—and the agencies and courts that affect those people's lives should be very aware of the difficulties that people have in engaging with the state when they have to make those private decisions.
I have often wondered about the preparations that we make for having children. I cannot recall going on a parenting course and I have never had any help with the tricky questions that have arisen from time to time as I have raised my children. People have expected that I will naturally know what to do because I am a parent. That is the case for many people.
As we consider how, through the Bill, we can reduce the number of painful disputes and the severity of those that we cannot eliminate, the starting point for our deliberations should be much further back. The Bill may not be able to cover some of my interests, such as a universal parenting support service, but we should remember that services for parents in difficulty are woefully inadequate. There is some preparation. The external assessment process for adopting and foster parents may prepare them for what is to come. Some people attend marriage preparation courses, during which they may give some thought to their future duties and responsibilities as parents.
I want to draw the House's attention to a little-celebrated change in the law eight years ago, whereby unmarried parents who jointly register the birth of their child both acquire the joint parental responsibility automatically accorded to married parents under the Children Act 1989. Many people have overlooked that change. I asked my local register office why we could not have a ceremony to mark the registration of a birth and was told that there was one but not many people asked for it. Such a ceremony could be an occasion for parents not only to celebrate the joy and pleasure that they will derive from parenthood, but to learn a little about their duties and responsibilities, which is relevant to our debate about parents' responsibilities for the welfare of their child when they are in dispute.
The Children Act is that rare bird—a good law passed by a Conservative Government. We should recognise the success of a long lasting, wise law. The concept of joint parental responsibility, much overlooked in today's debate, has been extremely successful. The statistic has become hackneyed in our debate today, but in nine out of 10 cases parents who separate come to their own agreement about the future care of their children, because they exercise their joint parental responsibility. Most of our focus has been on some of the cases in the other 10 per cent. The existing law is sound, but some of the practices about which we have heard today are unacceptable. We need to give thought to them in designing legislation to improve the situation.
When parents separate, children benefit from a continuing relationship with both of them, provided that it is safe. The Children Act makes the welfare of the child rather than the rights of the parent the paramount consideration for the family courts. Both parents have equal status and equal value in the eyes of the court. When I was involved in such a case as a lawyer, the court was certainly gender-neutral.
Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
I am happy to give way to the newcomer to the debate.
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman, although I am not that much of a newcomer as I have been in the Chamber for almost an hour.
There is a slight problem with the hon. Gentleman's use of the word "equal". When people separate and try to set up arrangements for their children, under existing law—whatever lawyers may say—it is in fact the mother who has care of the children and will decide when the father sees them. That is why many agreements are made without problem. Fathers fully understand that they cannot fight in the court for a 50:50 arrangement because the court will not give it to them.
I respect the hon. Gentleman's opinion, if what he has just said is his opinion. However, I profoundly disagree with everything that he says about the assumptions that fathers and courts make. I think that he is wrong on both counts.
I do not know the hon. Gentleman's background and whether he has ever been put in such a position, but may I tell him that, for most fathers who have found themselves in that position and have had to negotiate a deal, what I have said in my earlier intervention is, in fact, the case?
I do not want to extend this discussion, but for 20 years I was a practising solicitor in the family courts and dealt with a great many cases that involved divorce and the care of children. My experience in those 20 years was that the two situations that the hon. Gentleman describes were very infrequently relevant factors in the cases in which I was involved.
The law is clear, but the current systems for resolving disputes must be improved, which is what we set out to achieve with the Bill. There is clearly a need for specialist family services to provide support as part of the overall system with which I want to deal, and even for compulsory family services for some families, such as those in conflict, those with addictions and, perhaps, mental health difficulties, and certainly in cases of family violence.
In general, in cases where disputes that involve children occur during the breakdown of a relationship between the parents, the first port of call should be mediation. We need not wait for a breakdown in communication before mediation takes place. It is a structured process, whereby a couple are helped by an impartial third party—the mediator—to negotiate their own decisions for the long-term benefit of their children.
Research has shown that five hours of mediation can promote sustained contact and an ongoing relationship between parents and their children. A long-term study of outcomes in the USA was referred to in a briefing that we have received from National Family Mediation and which resulted in a book called, "The Truth about Children and Divorce" by Robert Emery, who says that, 12 years after the event, 30 per cent. of parents who had attended mediation were still in weekly contact with their children, as against just 7 per cent. who had been through litigation.
Mediation should be, in the words of National Family Mediation, the routine method for resolving child contact disputes early if the family have not already reached their own agreement. I agree with the Grandparents Association that mediation should also be available to grandparents and other relatives who have been involved in children's care.
I asked a question earlier about the funding of mediation, because that is relevant if there are barriers to something that could be successful and save costs downstream. Publicly funded solicitors' clients are required to consider mediation unless it is unsafe—for example, because of an allegation of domestic violence—before they can go on to receive further legal help with their court cases. In the past, they may have received legal aid. For those clients, mediation is free. No contribution is required from them, and there is no suggestion of a statutory charge being placed on their property after the case has finished.
In the hon. Gentleman's experience of cases where such matters come to court, do the courts sufficiently take into account the importance to the child of grandparental and other extended family relationships, or are they not considered sufficiently seriously by the courts?
The point that I want to pursue in a little while is that the enemies of dissatisfied parents, grandparents and wider family members are usually obstacles that are nothing to do with what the court would decide if it had a fair opportunity to make the decision. Those obstacles are things such as cost, which I am about to mention, and whether those people can get into the proceedings.
Delay in the court process is also an obstacle. By the time that a judge makes the final decision some way down the line, circumstances may have changed so much that what everyone thought would be a fair outcome a year earlier no longer seems appropriate. I want to talk about how to sweep away the obstacles of cost and delay to get a fair outcome. It is my experience that if grandparents can get themselves in front of the court, their argument gets a fair hearing.
I was explaining how a person with legal assistance gets all the mediation for free, but a person who does not qualify for legal aid gets none of it for free. A person who already thinks that that is unfair and that, if the mediation does not work, lawyers in the court case will have to be paid, will worry that mediation involves a wasted cost and will be reluctant to incur that in the first place. The first thing to address is: if mediation is such a successful route and might save lots of costs later, is it not worth investing something in the mediation process for both parties to make it an attractive solution for the early resolution of disputes?
I would need to be in the position of the Minister and her officials and have the budget in front of me to make an assessment on the actual design. There are a number of choices. We could continue to load the cost on to the parents with a system of assistance from public funds, depending on how low the parents' income was, or we could have a publicly funded system, but with contributions from some parents, in the way in which NHS dental contracts now require contributions from some patients. Either way, we need to remove the obstacle.
If mediation has not been tried or has been tried and failed, the courts will be involved. The Children Act 1989 states clearly, very early on, that any delay is likely to prejudice the welfare of the child. It is my experience that that is definitely so and, unfortunately, that that happens too often. The Under-Secretary of State for Constitutional Affairs, my hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham, East (Bridget Prentice), in answer to a question from me, wrote that Government-commissioned research shows that
"almost a quarter of cases lasted over a year or arose following previous proceedings".
She continued:
"almost a quarter of cases have two or more repeat applications and about a third of these are the result of enforcement issues, while over a half are . . . driven by the need to have a previous order updated."—[Official Report, 28 November 2005; Vol. 440, c. 170W.]
My central argument is that such delay distorts the decisions that judges can make at the end of the case because new situations might develop in the time that it takes to get there. Sometimes the delay in effect decides for the judge what the outcome can be. That does not seem like the fair solution that people thought that they would get when they started court proceedings much earlier.
What does the Bill do to reduce delay? On its own, it is silent about that, but it introduces a new power to direct parties to undertake a contact activity—information sessions, classes and counselling. It is possible that that could be the first thing that a court orders immediately after somebody applies for a decision. In that instance, if something comes of the information sessions, classes and counselling, it might bring about an early resolution of the dispute and achieve a satisfactory outcome for both parties. That will depend on the order being used and resourced so that things happen quickly, as well as whether the parties feel that they get sufficient help through that route to resolve their dispute. Clearly, the approach will not work if parties retain hardened attitudes.
On the resources to make the approach work, it has been mentioned in the debate that, in some parts of the country, there are contact centres and admirable voluntary schemes where such work is undertaken very well. Mention has also been made of the Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service. I hesitate to say that CAFCASS will make that approach work because we have also heard that it has to carry out the new risk assessments, administer the reformed family assistance orders, presumably carry on its current role regarding inquiries and reports to courts and, hopefully, fully resource its public law cases, which are an important priority for it.
I do not know how many other Members have received a briefing from the probation officers' trade union—the National Association of Probation Officers—that describes a budget crisis at CAFCASS last summer, management cuts this year and a stand-still budget next year. That does not sound like the basis for CAFCASS being in a position to help us to make a success of the new orders and thereby reduce the delay that is causing so much harm in some cases. If delay continues, the current dissatisfaction, of which we are all well aware, will grow.
Some say that there is an alternative in the approach of early interventions. I found the explanation for early interventions in an article in the Family Law Journal, family law 455. It refers to a report of a seminar in London in April 2003 called "Early Interventions— Towards a Pilot Project". It contains many references to the presentation that day from the Florida judge, John Lendermann, under the title "How and Why Most American States Changed to Early Interventions". His article describes how it was based on a statutory requirement for frequent and continuing contact founded on child development research. He said that children did better when both parents were kept in their lives. He added that the basis of the whole scheme is well publicised in parenting plans setting out cycles of contact in the average case.
I have some difficulty with the concept of the average case. The problem with these few cases is how highly individualised they are in terms of the needs and demands of the parties to them. Nevertheless, the judge said that the combination meant that American parents knew what sort of orders the courts might make in the absence of exceptional circumstances, and that by implication they concentrated more on making a success of the alternative. It is clear from that description, as it should be in this country, that allegations of domestic violence should be taken out of the process immediately and dealt with separately by courts.
In the judge's scheme in Florida, the remaining cases are streamed through a two-stage process. The first is that separated parents are mandated—I think that that means that they are made—to go to group parent educational classes where their post-separation responsibilities to their children and each other are explained to them. They are given the opportunity to agree a parenting plan and exit system. For the remainder—what the judge describes as resistant parents—he says that they are obliged to attend a single session of contact-focused mediation. He says also that Florida has a standard standing temporary order, which is issued in every case, binding the parties to maintain contact prior to the first hearing. The judge describes in his article that therefore only a minority of cases, mostly involving serious issues, need further intervention. Florida's overall caseload was up and costs were down. Enforcement was a rarity and delay was negligible. Most disputes were resolved within a few weeks.
There are some difficulties in what is described. When the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton), who spoke from the Opposition Front Bench, gave the House his presentation, I thought that he was trying to move towards a situation in this country where costs would be down, enforcement a rarity and delay negligible. That is an outcome that I would like very much to achieve with him. However, I do not think that the Bill will achieve all of those things. We need to consider what more might be needed.
As a summary of my view, I think that there should be robust systems for screening for domestic violence. There should be specific procedures to deal with those cases once they are identified. We should hear the families' views, including the children's views. We should certainly consider the separate representation of children in appropriate cases. We need to identify those cases where continuing contact has already been shown to be in the beginning of the case in the child's best interests, and there is a danger that that continuing contact will cease unless something is done at the early stage of the case and not at the end of it. That was the point that I wanted to raise.
The more that I listen to this debate, the more I appreciate how crucial the new amendment in the other place could be for risk assessment, which will be undertaken if clause 7 becomes part of the Act. I have described both domestic violence cases and cases in which contact should clearly be maintained during court proceedings, otherwise it would be lost and a decision made against the court's wishes. All those things can be identified in a robust risk assessment and targeted approaches designed as a result, and I hope that that will happen in future. Children's welfare certainly includes protection from physical and psychological harm, so our systems of dispute resolution must be vigilant so that they can detect cases of domestic violence. It is important not to put parents in danger, even at the early stage, as I mentioned, of mediation, and certainly not during the proceedings. It is important not to put children at risk of harm through contact before the risk assessment is made.
The new family court application forms will protect children from domestic violence, as will the extension of the definition of harm to include impairment due to seeing or hearing ill-treatment of another. Following the amendment that was made in the House of Lords, we have gone further in the Bill and introduced risk assessments. We have made attendance on domestic violence perpetrator programmes a possible condition of contact, but we still need to ensure that there is an assessment before every step of the proceedings and that we act on the result, so that there is clear reporting and prioritising of cases.
We have limited enforcement powers, including fines and imprisonment for contempt of court, but those powers are not often used, for the reasons that hon. Members have given. The courts will be able to order community-based enforcement, unpaid work and financial compensation paid by one party to another, but there are many uncertainties about the new powers, some of which we have discussed. While I support the extension of enforcement powers, those uncertainties reinforce my strong view that we must sweep away obstacles that arise early in the process, such as delay and cost, so that we can deal with more disputes more effectively.
Part 2 deals with adoption. The Joint Committee that considered the draft Bill and the Joint Committee on Human Rights both recommended that the Bill should require the Secretary of State to pay particular regard to the United Nations convention on the rights of the child when deciding whether to impose special restrictions suspending inter-country adoptions from a particular country. I very much agree with that suggestion, which would provide an important safeguard to ensure that the power to issue special restrictions is exercised in conformity with, and in support of, the convention.
The Bill is necessary because of the difficulties relating to some contact disputes, as we well know. It goes in the right direction, as most speakers have said. It has been improved in the other place and, in my view, it could be improved still further in the House. My strong wish is that we continue this debate in Committee and hammer out a position from those that have been articulated today to make the Bill much better and much more effective in reducing those disputes.
May I begin by commending the Minister for Children and Families, my hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton), who spoke on behalf of the official Opposition and, indeed, all hon. Members on the tone and manner of their contributions? These are emotional issues and there are many different perspectives on them, but everyone who has spoken today has made a considered contribution. Indeed, I am heartened by the extent of consensus in the Chamber. We are all united in wanting children to be safe, both in their own home with the parent who has custody of them, and with non-resident parents. We are united as well in agreeing that it is in children's interests to have ongoing contact with both their mother and their father, although there will be some exceptions where that is not in the best interests of the child.
The first aspect that I shall consider is prevention, which is not specifically dealt with in the Bill. Again, I commend my hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham, who touched on trying to prevent couples from splitting up. I also commend the hon. Members for Mid-Dorset and North Poole (Annette Brooke), who referred to that, and the hon. Member for Stafford (Mr. Kidney) who mentioned the important topic of marriage preparation. We miss that all the time. It is not something for which we can or should legislate, but it is a matter of political will and a matter for greater funding priority than it is currently given.
Is it possible to reduce the workload of the family courts and of CAFCASS, which we have been hearing about? I would argue that it is. There is a growing body of evidence around the world that that is the case. Let us start in America. The community marriage policies that have sprung up there have halved—yes, halved—the divorce rate in some cities. Modesto in California and Austin in Texas are two examples. The university of Texas has undertaken independent corroboration of the effect of community marriage policies across America and estimates that they have prevented some 31,000 divorces and that the divorce rate across all those community marriage policy areas is significantly lower than in areas without it.
In Australia, there is a concerted effort to tackle the problem. We heard briefly from some hon. Friends about the family relationship centres in Australia, which play a role in making sure that the arrangements are correct for children when parents have separated. They also do important preventive work beforehand to try and help couples stay together and make marriages successful. Those organisations are not run by the state but receive some support from it. Given that the Government are considering reform of the Child Support Agency, it is interesting that the Australian child support agency is involved in helping non-resident parents to be good parents and provides materials to enable them to do that. That is a good example of the way in which, cross-departmentally, across all the agencies of Government, we could do better in this country. In Singapore and Malaysia, both Governments are taking the matter seriously. Similarly, Dubai in the middle east came to my attention recently.
I am trying to set up a project in my constituency. Last week, we launched our own community marriage policy and, in time, I hope to develop two community family trusts. I know that the hon. Member for Mid-Dorset and North Poole has an excellent one in her constituency doing very good work in schools. I am envious of that, and want the same in my constituency. I hope that all hon. Members might take more of an interest in such projects, so that we can reduce the flow of parents and children coming into the family court system and reduce the demands on CAFCASS. We have heard from almost everyone who has spoken today that CAFCASS will have great difficulty in coping with the extra demands placed upon it by the Bill.
Does the hon. Gentleman remember that a couple of hon. Members spoke about the new children's centres that are planned for many parts of the country as being places where contact can take place? Does he agree that they could also make admirable focuses for parent support services? In my constituency, Stafford, I have an ambition to get Home Start to be the front-of-house service for supporting parents.
The hon. Gentleman is right that children's centres are good forums for support centres for parents, but I am discussing support for couples, which is a slightly different point. Support for parents is important, but almost the most important thing that parents can do for their children is to be kind to each other. If parents do that, it sets a wonderful example to their children and helps them to stay together, which benefits their children.
I am particularly interested in the point that my hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham made about the contribution of social workers in Kent. Neither the voluntary sector nor social services have a monopoly in that area, but much more could be achieved through working together.
Does my hon. Friend support the work of the charity Parent Talk? Last week, I attended an event specifically designed to help parents cope with the difficult job of parenting that that charity put on in a primary school in one of the most deprived areas in my constituency. Support includes videos and booklets to help keep together families which are sometimes in difficult financial circumstances.
I do not know that particular charity, but it sounds excellent and I happy to commend it, given what my hon. Friend has just said about its work.
When I mentioned the work of community family trusts to the Prime Minister on the Floor of the House on 7 December, he was full of praise for their work, but the projected budgets for them across the country have been released since then, and, as the hon. Member for Mid-Dorset and North Poole said, they are not good, which concerns me. When the Under-Secretary of State for Education and Skills, the hon. Member for Liverpool, Garston (Maria Eagle) and I debated fatherhood in Westminster Hall, she agreed to ask her officials to examine best practice around the world. The Government could do so much more.
I am sure that the hon. Gentleman will not be surprised to hear that, despite the excellence of the community family trust in Poole, plans are being made to close the office because, although some grants have been achieved from outside bodies, the funding is not sufficient to maintain the current excellent service.
I am sorry to hear that. The onus is on local community family trusts to try to raise as much money as they can. Some of the central support for the work of community family trusts has been cut and I hope that today's debate will enable Ministers to review some of those decisions. As the hon. Member for Stafford and others said, it is right that the focus should be on mediation, avoiding cases going to court in the first place and early intervention.
I, too, have examined the situation in Florida, which is also mentioned in the Department for Education and Skills publication, "Children's needs, parents' responsibilities":
"Schemes to divert parents away from court have been developing, including the scheme led by Judge John Lendermann in Florida whereby parents are given information about the damaging impact of their conflict on their children and invited to work out a parenting plan with the help of a mediator. Other programmes are being developed to help and support parents by teaching about their new roles as collaborative mothers and fathers after separation."
We should be going in that direction in the United Kingdom, and I share the concerns expressed by the hon. Member for Stafford that the Bill does not explicitly state how we can do so and whether sufficient funds are available.
Clause 4 deals with the enforcement of court orders, which remains an area of great concern to me. Over the past four and a half years, several constituents have come to me to complain about this. Typically, they are good, concerned fathers who regularly pay their child support as they should, month by month. Some of them have been back to the court 30 or 40 times to try to get their disputes resolved and to have enforced the contact that they have been granted by the court after it has weighed up all the considerations. They have come to me and said that neither the court nor the police have been interested in ensuring that the contact that they were granted is enforced.
That was graphically illustrated to me in my constituency surgery about two weeks ago, when a serving company sergeant-major came to see me. He sat down in front of me and took off the fleece that he was wearing, and right in the middle of his chest was the symbol of his office as a warrant officer in the Army—a large crown. He said, "I don't believe in the antics of Fathers 4 Justice"—who, it is worth remembering, have physically changed the shape of this Chamber since we last debated these issues. He went on, "I stand for what this country stands for. I am a serving soldier and I have done everything right. I pay all the money that I am required to. I have a court order that has stamped on it the same crown that I wear as the badge of my office, yet it is not worth the paper it is written on in terms of my ability to see my children." That is an absolutely scandalous state of affairs for a good, caring father who has every right to see his children, and whose children will be missing out on the input of a good and dedicated father. The tragedy is that the gentleman who came to see me is one of 7,000 non-resident parents every year who find that the court orders that have been granted to enable them to see their children are being breached.
My worry is that it is not sufficiently clear exactly what will happen if these contact orders continue to be breached. When I intervened on the Minister during her opening speech, she said, properly, that the matter would be left to the courts. However, as Members of Parliament, we collectively represent the High Court of Parliament. It is important that we make it absolutely clear that, where people have acted properly, the court has duly considered all the information, the non-resident father clearly has no history of domestic violence or anything similar, and the court has said that contact must happen, that contact is in the best interests of the child and we must ensure as a Parliament that it happens. That is fundamental.
If the constituent whom I spoke about, or any other such constituent, comes back to see me after the Bill has passed into law, I will feel that I have failed him if the contact that the court has said that he should have with his children, and his children with him, is not being granted. I am sure that the Minister understands the seriousness of this. We have to ensure that the law has teeth and that where contact has been ordered it really does happen.
The difficulty will centre on what series of escalating steps—my hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham mentioned this—is put in place by the courts to bring that about. It is clearly sensible to have parenting intervention programmes to try to convince parents to do the right thing. I like the idea of giving compensatory time. We could also consider fines going from one parent to the other so that the child does not lose out, with perhaps some mechanism to ensure that that money is indeed spent on the child. It is a vital issue. Many non-resident parents—often fathers—give up their house and the day-to-day care of their children. In many cases, another man moves into their house and lives with their children for most of the time. If the one thing that they have been given—a right by a court to see their children—is flouted, it is a massive injustice for the children and the non-resident parents.
I echo all the points that have been made about grandparents, but why confine the comments to grandparents? Uncles, aunts, cousins and the extended family generally are vital for the development of our nation's children. Many of us have benefited from close relationships with all members of our extended family. Our view of the family is much too nuclear in this country and in several European countries. We could greatly benefit from a more southern European approach. Contact and enforcement is important not only for the non-resident parent but for all those who have loved and cared for children. For many grandparents, uncles and aunts, the children whom they will not see have been an incredibly important part of their lives. We must ensure that the matter is taken seriously for their sake, too.
I want to raise a practical point. We cannot legislate for it, so it properly does not appear in the Bill, but it concerns me and I should like to consider it. When non- resident parents travel some way from their homes to see their children, there may not be a contact centre in which to see them. Supervised visits have to take place in a contact centre, but if the visits are unsupervised and there is no contact centre, where do they go? There is an expression, "McDads". In the summer, it may not be so bad—perhaps there is a park or another place outside on a warm day—but where, physically, do we expect non-resident parents to spend any quality time with their children? I am not looking for state provision from the Minister but I am trying to think of solutions.
Perhaps charities can help. We have heard much about children's charities today. Perhaps the NSPCC or other charities that have been slightly criticised may like to consider the problem. Perhaps churches, faith groups or anyone in a community who has space in their home and a heart for such matters could help. Perhaps arrangements could be made to put non-resident parents and their children with people who would like to open their homes to them. The non-resident parents could relax and play with their children in a familiar, family environment. That would have to be done by agreement and negotiation, but it is an important matter that some of my constituents who are non-resident parents—and non-resident grandparents—who have to travel some way have raised with me. I do not look to the Government for an answer—it is properly not within their remit—so Ministers can relax. However, I hope that they at least agree that it is an important matter to consider in the context of the care of children with non-resident parents.
Other hon. Members have mentioned delay. "Justice delayed is justice denied" is a common saying about the law. That is nowhere more true than when children are involved. Childhood is finite and crucial. If a parent misses specific stages of a child's development, they are gone for ever. That is a tragedy. Speed is therefore important. Of course, we must get things right but speed is also vital and I hope that that will be taken fully into account.
We have had a full and wide-ranging debate. We have heard that children everywhere must cope with increasingly complex and difficult family relationships. Every year, 150,000 children have to deal with the distress and upset of divorce. One in five children are likely to go through their parents' separation or divorce before they reach the age of 16. That is difficult for any child.
Indeed, parental divorce is seen by children as one of their biggest concerns and fears. We need to bear that in mind as we discuss the Bill. We have heard that great importance is put on children maintaining a relationship with both parents after separation or divorce, and that has been accepted by all speakers on both sides of the House. However, the harsh reality is that after only two short years of separation, 40 per cent. of non-resident divorced and separated parents lose contact with their children. That should set alarm bells ringing for all of us.
We have also heard arguments on both sides of the House that reinforce the fact that the Bill does not grasp the full magnitude of the social problems faced by children growing up in this country today. We must not miss the opportunity to get to the heart of the problem, because we face many challenges as we consider this very difficult and sometimes apparently intractable problem.
There needs to be a change in the way in which family law deals with establishing and maintaining contact between non-resident parents and their children, and a change in the way in which we ensure that the law is put into practice. We have heard today that many other countries are considering new and different ways of doing that, and it seems entirely appropriate that we should examine those options in more detail in Committee, to see whether we can learn anything from them. Those countries' legal systems are not dissimilar to our own, so I hope that that would not be a difficult challenge for us to undertake.
There is also common ground between the Government and the official Opposition on these matters. The Government's Green Paper clearly states:
"After separation, both parents should have responsibility for, and a meaningful relationship with, their children, so long as it is safe."
The document goes on to say:
"It is in the interests of the child to have a meaningful ongoing relationship with both parents".
That is important.
It should not be the role of the Government to dictate the relationship between parents and their children, but it is their role to ensure that systems are in place to provide guidance when it is needed. The Bill lacks explicit guidance on the important role that both parents can play in ensuring the well-being of their children. The Green Paper was more explicit about such provisions, but the Bill is not.
As I have said, there is common ground between the Government and the Opposition. We all agree that the child's welfare is of paramount importance, and we must ensure that any legislation designed to support children has that at its heart. We need to debate these matters as they appear to children. I am not a lawyer, and perhaps Members of Parliament should try to speak not as lawyers but as Members of Parliament. I am married to a lawyer, and I know that it is sometimes difficult for lawyers to get out of the habit of speaking as lawyers, but that is an important challenge for us.
First and foremost, we should focus on the everyday, practical problems that children face. We should then let the judiciary decide how they are dealt with, when it comes within its remit to do so. Indeed, the judiciary itself says that family law does not fit easily into the judicial system, and some of the problems that we have discussed today suggest that that perspective is correct.
We have all agreed today that parents play a pivotal role in achieving the best outcomes for children. We have also agreed that the vast majority of non-resident parents want to stay in contact with their children, and we need to keep in the forefront of our minds that, in 90 per cent. of cases, it is perfectly safe for them to do so. However, anyone reading the transcript of today's debate might find that somewhat surprising.
The Bill attempts to encourage contact and to make the sanctions that are in place workable. We cannot help feeling, however, that it merely tinkers at the edges of a more deeply rooted problem. There is a general feeling that a lack of confidence in the family court system has resulted in many parents settling for less contact, or unreasonable contact time, as legal fees and court time make it difficult or even impossible for non-resident parents to dispute cases. I have encountered many such instances in my constituency, and most Members who are present can probably think of one or two in theirs.
All too often, as others have said, even when parents have not had to resort to the courts, non-resident parents find it difficult to secure the time with their children that they need in order to maintain and develop the parent-child relationship. Difficult situations are often compounded by non-resident parents' living in accommodation that is not suitable for their children to visit, let alone stay in. My hon. Friend the Member for South-West Bedfordshire (Andrew Selous) made that point. A parent who has had to leave the family home may well be living in bed-and-breakfast accommodation, or other accommodation that is deeply unsuitable for a child to visit.
Lengthy and costly judicial process only serves to exacerbate the problem. As we heard earlier, the Government's own research shows that one in four contact and residence cases lasts more than a year, and a quarter of all cases involve multiple applications resulting from enforcement problems. The system often fuels existing tensions between parents, and a feeling of marginalisation for non-resident parents. Clearly none of that is in a child's best interests.
The law should make clear that we value the contribution of both parents to the future welfare of a child whenever that is safe—and, as I have said, it is safe in the vast majority of cases. If a child's relationship with his or her parent is to flourish and not wither on the vine, time is needed. We must examine ways in which the legal system can become more accessible, and can work better to bring about successful outcomes for children rather than fuelling conflict in already difficult and emotionally charged circumstances. That is why we will seek fundamental amendments to the Bill, including a legal presumption of co-parenting and an explicit statement of reasonable contact, backed up by early intervention and mediation.
We have heard a great many speeches today, which will give us some interesting topics to think about before the Committee stage. My hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton) made a powerful case for some of the changes that I have talked about. That led to a useful discussion on many issues, including co-parenting and children's safety. I am sure that we shall return to them in Committee.
My hon. Friend the Member for Peterborough (Mr. Jackson) made a number of interventions as well as his speech. He made an important point about the invaluable role of extended families, particularly grandparents. As we all know, they have a noted role in child care. I expect that we shall hear more of that next week. I agree that it is important for us to understand grandparents' role in children's lives. We must also ensure that the legal approach, which at present can seem rather hostile to that group of people, is amended so that we can support them more. Perhaps we should take a leaf out of the book of Canada, the home country of one set of my own children's grandparents. I am sure that I shall gain some useful input from them in the next few days.
My hon. Friend the Member for Brentwood and Ongar (Mr. Pickles) focused on adoption, which is an important element of the Bill and should not be overshadowed by the debate on part 1. He drew extensively from his constituency experience, broadening the debate in a useful and helpful way. My hon. Friend the Member for South-West Bedfordshire raised the issue of preventing marriage breakdown, which I agree should be given more priority, and cited a number of examples in the United States. Divorce rates have been significantly reduced there because the importance of supporting marriage has been acknowledged. My hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham made an important point about not automatically assuming that a non-resident parent would be an inferior parent.
Labour Members raised issues that were raised by my hon. Friends. The hon. Member for Stafford (Mr. Kidney) talked about helping parents to be better prepared for the responsibilities of parenthood, and made a strong case for increasing mediation. Importantly, he questioned the Bill's silence on the issue of delays in court proceedings, which can be corrosive and destructive during the separation and divorce process. We should pick up on that matter in Committee.
The hon. and learned Member for Redcar (Vera Baird) talked about a number of aspects of the Bill, including CAFCASS's capacity to meet the requirements of the Bill as regards risk assessments. Importantly, she touched on the issue of safety and the hidden aspects of domestic violence, of which we should all be aware when we discuss the Bill. It is an important issue.
The hon. Member for Luton, South (Margaret Moran), who made a considered contribution, raised the important issue of domestic violence and child care and various other aspects of the Bill, including the importance of clause 7. The hon. Member for Stockport (Ann Coffey) touched on the importance of mothers and fathers and the fact they have responsibilities, which, again, we should keep to the fore.
As my hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham pointed out, there is a fair amount of agreement in principle on the issue of inter-country adoption, although we have some concerns about the fashioning of the new procedures and will consider that in a little more detail in Committee. We feel strongly that it is perfectly legitimate to consider overseas adoption but we share the Government's concerns about the cases of child trafficking in recent months. However, we must be vigilant that restrictions do not lead to a growth in private adoption.
In Committee, the official Opposition will seek to challenge and to encourage the Government to face head on the scale of change needed to achieve a better result for children, who are all too often caught in the middle of their parents' separation or divorce. We will encourage the Government to be bolder in the Bill to achieve those ends. We know that the Government often have regretted not having the courage to be bolder when seeking solutions to the important problems that are faced by our country. I can reassure Ministers that we will do all we can to ensure that that is not the case in this instance.
I agree with the hon. Member for Basingstoke (Mrs. Miller) that we have had a very interesting and constructive debate. I congratulate her on what I think is her first effort at the Dispatch Box, which was extremely accomplished.
The first of many.
No doubt it is but that is not a matter for me to decide.
I congratulate hon. Members on both sides of the House who have participated in an extremely stimulating, wide-ranging and well-argued debate. It is apparent from their speeches that they approach the issue with a passionate commitment to try to ensure that children caught up in the divorce or separation of couples, and the bitterness that sometimes results, are not harmed too much by that experience. There is no doubt that that commitment was apparent even if it was also apparent that there may be one or two slightly different approaches to how best to achieve that. That is no different from the tone adopted when the Bill was debated in another place and during later proceedings on it. The hon. Member for Mid-Dorset and North Poole (Annette Brooke) was right to say that proceedings on the Bill have been going on for some time. That lengthy deliberation is only correct because we need to get things right; the future of the children whom we are trying to assist depends on our doing so.
The debate did occasionally descend into slightly bad temper and we had a couple of somewhat vehement spats between the hon. Members for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton) and for Mid-Dorset and North Poole. There was also a spat involving the hon. Gentleman and the NSPCC, which was of course unable to defend itself. However, it will doubtless find an opportunity to do so when the debate is over.
I want to sort out what I believe to have been a genuine misunderstanding—it does not happen very often—between the usual channels. The hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham suggested that the Government are trying to avoid giving the Opposition the time that they want for consideration in Committee, but I assure him that that is not the case. There has been a genuine misunderstanding, in that the usual channels on our side gave what was asked for, but I assure him that the Government intend to be flexible and to provide more time in Committee if required.
I shall deal with some of the points and broad themes that were raised, although I will not have time to deal with them all, given that most Members spoke at great length. It is clear that contact with both parents is in the interests of the child if it can be done in safety; indeed, there is general agreement in all parts of the House on that point. I would argue—as my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Redcar (Vera Baird) argued, perhaps more eloquently than I ever could—that case law already suggests that the courts start from the position that contact between a child and their parents is generally in the child's best interests.
The different perspectives expressed on the Floor of the House disagreed on the question whether such contact compromises the safety of the child in some instances, or the paramount interest of the child's welfare, given that such contact often breaks down. The Children Act 1989 does of course contain the paramountcy principle, and the Government and I believe it incredibly important that that principle, which was established with the support of Members in all parts of the House, be retained. We heard from my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Redcar an excellent exposition on what changing the presumptions would mean in legal terms. It is undoubtedly true that many fathers are unable to spend the time with their children that they would like to spend, and it is right that we offer them support and encourage a positive relationship between children and both parents after separation. The Bill attempts to ensure that we do just that by providing the courts with more flexibility in enforcing contacts that they have ordered, on the basis that they are in the interest of the child. That is what the Bill is about.
However, we need to be clear that any presumption—even if couched as a principle in the absence of evidence to the contrary—represents a different legal model from the one enshrined in the 1989 Act. To place something else on a level with that which is supposed to constitute paramountcy is incompatible with the paramountcy principle. I am certain that we will continue to have legalistic and non-legalistic arguments on this issue—from lawyers and non-lawyers—as the Bill proceeds through the House, but the Government do not want to do anything to compromise the paramountcy principle.
In the main, Members in all parts of the House had something positive to say about mediation. The issue was raised of whether voluntary mediation is best, or whether mediation could—or even should—be compulsory. It is clear that voluntary mediation is best: one can lead a horse to water, but one cannot make it drink. Can we really expect people to be forced to mediate if they are not in the mood? Requiring mediation before a case can proceed, for example, could simply result in further unnecessary delay if the parties are already well-entrenched in their respective positions and are in no fit state to see that mediation might actually help. However, the Joint Committee considering the draft Bill recommended that the court should be able to direct people to attend an initial meeting with a mediator, and I think that that would be appropriate.
The hon. Member for Mid-Dorset and North Poole asked whether information about mediation was available other than in the form of leaflets. She asked whether a video was available, and I can tell her that the Government are even more modern than that, having produced a DVD on the subject. We are moving into the modern world, and the courts will have to do the same.
The hon. Member for Basingstoke said that some 40 per cent. of non-resident parents lose contact with their children within two years of separation. I have heard that figure before, but I am not sure of its provenance. I hope that the hon. Lady will be able to let me know, perhaps during the Committee stage. However, the omnibus survey by the Office for National Statistics suggests that about three quarters of non-resident parents who have been separated for between two and three years have contact with their children at least once a week, and that fewer than 10 per cent. of them have no contact at all. In respect of longer separations, the survey suggests that about 20 per cent. of children have no contact with a non-resident parent after two years. That is still far too many, but it is fewer than the hon. Lady suggested, and we might have to return to the matter in Committee.
I am glad that hon. Members on all sides of the House mentioned the positive role played by grandparents and other members of the extended family. I agree completely with that, and note that the Bill can apply not only to resident or non-resident parents but to grandparents as well. It is not restricted to parents, so I hope that it will assist in all of these matters.
The question of resources for CAFCASS and the courts was raised. I can understand that, but the Government have always made it clear that they should have adequate funding so that they can fulfil their responsibilities under part 1 of the Bill. My right hon. Friend the former Minister for Children, who is now Minister for Employment and Welfare Reform, said as much in evidence to the Joint Committee. She stressed that the Bill's provisions will be implemented only when we are satisfied that appropriate resources are available.
My hon. Friend the Member for Stafford (Mr. Kidney) and the hon. Member for South-West Bedfordshire (Andrew Selous) both spoke about how the work loads of the family courts and of CAFCASS could be reduced. We have high hopes that the Bill will enable us to shift resources from too much report writing to more proactive and helpful interventions. I know that CAFCASS is very committed to ensuring that that happens.
The hon. Member for Brentwood and Ongar (Mr. Pickles) was extremely ingenious in managing to talk about public law and domestic adoption in connection with a Bill that deals with private law and inter-country adoption. I congratulate him on that, and I am, of course, aware of the case that he raised. I would take an extremely dim view if any local authority sought to remove children from parents simply because they were learning disabled. Some of the legislation for which I had the honour to be responsible in the previous Parliament will come into force in December, and make it even more difficult for public authorities to behave in that way than is currently the case. There is an increased awareness of these matters, and I am sure that the hon. Gentleman will continue the campaigns on behalf of his constituents for which he is known.
In conclusion, it is clear that we will have a lot more to say in Committee. We might even have a little more time in which to say it, given the accidental error in the programme motion that meant that only four sittings were originally provided for. I look forward to that discussion, as I believe that hon. Members of all parties have a genuine interest in making things better for the children of divorcing and separating couples.
That is certainly true of the Government. If every child in this country is to matter, we must make sure that those whose families separate do not suffer the consequences—that is, lack of development and self-esteem, and an inability to do their very best in future life. We are all in favour of that, and I commend the Bill to the House.
Question put and agreed to.
Bill accordingly read a Second time.
Children and Adoption Bill [Lords] (Programme)
Motion made, and Question put forthwith, pursuant to Standing Order No. 83A(6)(Programme motions) ,
That the following provisions shall apply to the Children and Adoption Bill [Lords].
Committal
1. The Bill shall be committed to a Standing Committee.
Proceedings in Standing Committee
2. Proceedings in the Standing Committee shall (so far as not previously concluded) be brought to a conclusion on Thursday 16th March 2006.
3. The Standing Committee shall have leave to sit twice on the first day on which it meets.
Consideration and Third Reading
4. Proceedings on consideration shall (so far as not previously concluded) be brought to a conclusion one hour before the moment of interruption on the day on which those proceedings are commenced.
5. Proceedings on Third Reading shall (so far as not previously concluded) be brought to a conclusion at the moment of interruption on that day.
6. Standing Order No. 83B (Programming committees) shall not apply to proceedings on consideration and Third Reading.
Other proceedings
7. Any other proceedings on the Bill (including any proceedings on consideration of any message from the Lords) may be programmed.—[Mr. Heppell.]
Question agreed to.
Children and Adoption Bill [Lords] [Money]
Queen's recommendation having been signified—
Motion made, and Question put forthwith, pursuant to Standing Order No. 52(1)(a) (Money resolutions and ways and means resolutions in connection with bills),
That, for the purposes of any Act resulting from the Children and Adoption Bill [Lords], it is expedient to authorise the payment out of money provided by Parliament of any increase attributable to the Act in the sums payable out of money so provided under any other Act.—[Mr. Heppell.]
Question agreed to.
European Union Document
Motion made, and Question put forthwith, pursuant to Standing Order No. 119(9) (European Standing Committees),
Exchange of information between law enforcement authorities
That this House takes note of European Union Document No. 13413/05 and ADD 1, Draft Framework Decision on the exchange of information under the principle of availability; and supports the Government in welcoming the general application of the principle of availability to the exchange of information between law enforcement authorities, subject to detailed consideration of the adequacy of data protection and other safeguards and of the cost and technical feasibility of specific proposals. —[Mr. Heppell.]
Question agreed to.
Petition
Vodafone Site (Felpham)
I have pleasure in presenting a petition signed by more than 400 residents of Middleton and Felpham in my constituency. It expresses opposition to the proposal to install a 14 m high telephone mast in the middle of the village. The planning authority, Arundel district council, refused planning permission, following which Vodafone appealed to the Deputy Prime Minister. I am grateful to Mandy Brown and all those who have worked to collect the signatures and who have organised protests against the mast.
The petition reads:
"The Petition of residents of Middleton, Felpham, Bognor Regis and others,
Declares that there is a proposal for a Vodafone base station site at the Southern Water compound, Middleton Road, Felpham, Bognor Regis, West Sussex. The petitioners strongly object to the positioning of a Vodafone mast close to Bishop Tufnell Schools, the Health Centre and at the heart of a residential area.
The Petitioners therefore request that the House of Commons urge the Deputy Prime Minister to reject the proposal.
And the Petitioners remain, etc.
To lie upon the Table.
Child Psychiatry Services
Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.— [Mr. Heppell.]
I am extremely grateful for the opportunity this evening to debate the important subject of child psychiatry; indeed, to continue the theme of this afternoon and talk about services for children. I begin by making a few general remarks about mental health in this country. It is a matter of common agreement that mental health services are often seen as the Cinderella of the health service. It always seems to me that mental health services are last in the queue for funding and first in line for cuts. It is particularly difficult because in recent years we have grown to understand more and more about mental health issues and problems. In this country, for example, it is now known that up to 10 per cent. of young people between the ages of five and 16 experience significant mental health problems such as depression, self-harm, obsessional disorder, anorexia or anxiety. What is less well known perhaps is that 40 per cent. of those children have no contact at all with any kind of mental health service.
In fact in The Independent today an article on this very subject highlights the problem. It points out that children with mental health problems are being put at severe risk by long waiting lists to see a psychiatrist. It claims that there is now an average wait of six months and increasing reliance on inappropriate drug treatment. Adrian Worrall, of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, is quoted as saying:
"All too often, children are not being picked up, are not receiving fast access to treatment or appropriate treatment when they do get it. This will have long-term consequences for everyone."
The article quotes a survey of 1,300 GPs by the medical magazine Pulse which found that the average wait for a child psychiatrist appointment was 188 days. Children have to wait 79 days before an initial assessment is made by the child and adolescent mental health service, and a further 102 days before they receive treatment. Some 93 per cent of family doctors—in effect, almost all GPs—admit that they prescribe antidepressants to children because of a lack of alternative therapies, despite safety concerns surrounding the use of drug treatments.
The article concluded with a quote from the editor of Pulse, Phil Johnson. He says:
"It is a scandal that some of the most vulnerable patients in the country are left languishing on waiting lists because apparently mental health is not seen as a priority."
That sets the general scene of mental health services for children and young people, but I want to concentrate this evening on a specific aspect of that care—that is, care for children, and even more specifically, in-patient care for these children. I should stress that I am talking about children, not adolescents, for whom care can often be very different. Many of the children about whom I will talk have specialist and complex needs. Some have neuro-psychiatric disorders that do not respond to out-patient treatment and most of them come from families that need a huge amount of support. Apart from the simple humanitarian need to give those children the best possible care at the earliest possible stage, it is clear that children left untreated continue to have a poor quality of life into adolescence and adulthood and sometimes cause wider problems in society.
In-patient treatment for children can have a spectacularly beneficial effect. The children and young persons in-patient evaluation study, commissioned by the Department of Health and published in 2004, showed that substantial improvements could be achieved in the mental health of children admitted to in-patient child psychiatry services. The study made it clear that the subsequent needs of children who had benefited from in-patient treatment were reduced, to the extent that they could usually be treated in a child and adolescent mental health—CAMHS—community tier 3 service. Further, the improvements in those children were sustained one year after in-patient admission, often with very little further community service provision. So there is little doubt that in-patient services are vital for the small numbers of children who require complex treatment. I have been told by practitioners, especially in child law, that they have seen remarkable results from such in-patient units, including swift turnarounds and remarkable outcomes.
Despite that evidence, the availability of in-patient child psychiatric services seems suddenly to be in precipitate decline. In 2001, the national in-patient child and adolescent psychiatry study showed that in 1999 there were 103 beds in 12 children's units and 46 beds in five general CAMHS units. In 2003, there had been a slight increase to 110 beds. But since then, four children's in-patient services have closed. Shirle Hill in Sheffield no longer provides in-patient care. Stepping Stones in Sutton, Surrey, has closed completely. Larchwood in Haywards Heath now has only two beds as part of an adolescent ward, and an outreach service. Red Oak in Lancaster has closed with a loss of 12 beds, but it may reopen in 2007 although only as an adolescent unit for 12 to 17-year-olds. A bed recount is underway and it is likely to show a reduction in beds to levels substantially below the 1999 figure.
Those closures are bad enough, but three more in-patient services are under imminent—I stress the word imminent—threat of closure, including the Park hospital in Oxford; the ward in Birmingham children's hospital; and the West End children's unit in Hull, which currently runs only a skeleton service anyway. If those services close, it will mean a dramatic reduction of about a third in the number of units specialising in that work for children and their families.
This evening, I want to concentrate on one unit in particular which serves my constituents in Oxfordshire and acts a case study of what is happening across the country. The Park hospital in Oxford has provided in-patient care for children for some 50 years. It provides a general service with a strong neuro-psychiatric leaning and highly valued national epilepsy services, based on skills that have been built up over many years. Child psychiatry is a highly specialised area of clinical practice. The closure of the Park is not simply the closure of a hospital—although that would be bad enough—but also risks severely damaging, and probably losing altogether, one of Britain's leading centres for training, research and treatment of child psychiatric disorders.
What makes the threat of closure even harder to understand is that the child psychiatry service in Oxford and nationally is set to be enhanced by the provision of a specialist scanner, at a cost of some £2.7 million, at the Warneford Hospital in Headington. Its major clinical use will be the investigation of complex epilepsy and the pre-surgical investigation of patients with intractable seizures. Together with the new in-patient facilities that have been promised for so many years, it would have provided the country with an important world-class resource for the management of children with complex interactions between behaviour and epilepsy.
As I said, in-patient child psychiatry is not a service that can be seen merely as an add-on; it cannot suddenly be set up at short notice. It takes years and years to build up the highly specialised expertise that exists at the Park, which must be preserved at all costs. For example, higher specialist training in child psychiatry requires at least six months' full-time experience working in a children's in-patient service, often with a year's follow-up specialist training. There are already unfilled consultant posts across the UK, so the closure of the Park would further reduce training for doctors and other mental health professionals. The possible closure of the Park, which is being carried with little consultation—as anyone in the House would understand it—highlights general concerns about the resourcing of child psychiatric services nationwide.
First, it is clear to me that the reason behind the potential closure is undoubtedly financial, although it is being dressed up as a clinical decision. The local mental health trust says that it is inappropriate these days to admit children to hospital, although there is no clinical evidence for that claim. Indeed, I have already mentioned a study that shows that that is not the case. Of course, specialist clinicians will do all they can to avoid admitting children to hospital but in some cases it is unavoidable and is clearly beneficial.
I am sure that my hon. Friend shares the concern of many of us that if the Park closed, there would be no children's in-patient service in a triangle bounded by London, Manchester and Dublin. The consequence would be that children admitted to hospital would have to travel huge distances, which would have a clinical impact on their treatment.
I absolutely share my hon. Friend's concern. It is incredibly important that families can visit their very young children when they are in unfamiliar surroundings. The more units that close—especially if we lose the Park—the longer the distances that families will have to travel and the more time that they will have to spend apart, which will have a further devastating impact.
It is said that low bed occupancy at the Park illustrates the point that fewer children are being admitted to hospital as part of clinical practice. However, I submit that low occupancy rates are a symptom not of a clinical decision but of contractual complexity. It is well known that many specialist services across the country would like to make use of the Park and Oxford's facilities, but—as I understand it—the trust has not pursued those case-by-case contracts.
The dilemma faced by the Park is a clear example of how local commissioning falls down. The Park is a national as well as a local service, yet it is suffering the severe side-effects of the local financial crisis that affects Oxfordshire's health services across the board. For example, Oxfordshire's supporting people budget, which helps adults with learning difficulties lead independent lives, has been severely cut. The mental health trust faces cuts of £1 million this year and a further £5 million over the next five years. Nursing and psychiatric posts are being cut. The Barnes unit at the John Radcliffe hospital, which provides psychiatric services to those admitted to the accident and emergency department after a suicide attempt or self-harm, is also under threat of closure. Day services are being closed, including the Ridgeway day centre at Didcot in my constituency. Local financial pressures are leading to the potential closure of a national specialist service.
I have been in correspondence with the Department of Health about mental health and local health issues since July last year—they were some of the first issues that crossed my desk after I was elected—and I have been greeted throughout by the Department's mantra:
"It is for PCTs, with the support of the Strategic Health Authority if required, to plan and develop services in line with national priorities and in context of local need within the financial resources available to them".
With the best will in the world—
It being Six o'clock the motion for the Adjournment of the House lapsed, without Question put.
Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—[Mr. Heppell.]
What was just said was not meaningless verbiage—it was a very important procedural point of the House—but to return to the meaningless verbiage to which I was referring from the Department of Health, it is effectively passing the buck. Partly because I am currently a member of the armed forces parliamentary scheme and have recently been attached to the Royal Marines, the analogy occurred to me that allowing a local mental health trust to decide the fate of the Park would be a bit like asking Devon county council to decide the fate the Royal Marines.
Although I believe in local commissioning and local accountability, at some point the Government must recognise where they have a national resource that must have national backing. For example, a local primary care trust will admit a child to an in-patient unit less than once a year on average. So why on earth would a local mental health trust be charged solely with the responsibility for the Park? When the local mental health trust writes that the trust
"is not able to continue to host tier 4 in-patient services for children under 11 as the future withdrawal of local contracts leaves us without any secure income",
it is saying that it has been left holding the baby. Given that situation, it is further saying that it is going to sell the cot—the land on which the hospital stands.
Since it became more widely known that I would hold this Adjournment debate, things have moved somewhat. I was told this week by the mental health trust that
"for the foreseeable future, services will remain at the Park and we are in discussion with the PCTs about how the services will look in future and where in-patient facilities will be available".
Again, I am not at all sure what that means. Certainly, the people whom I have been speaking to do not believe that the Park has been saved from closure. Certainly, the mental health community believes that the Park will close. Has there been a failure of communication or a failure of consultation? How long is the foreseeable future? Where will in-patient services be available? Until the recent crisis, the intention had always been to close the Park, but to reopen a new in-patient facility.
The Government seem to be refusing to take responsibility for a national service. That is why I have chosen to raise this subject at a national level, in the House this evening. Managers, removed from the clinical chalk face, push through changes—or perhaps they are forced to push them through—that the professionals counsel against, whether in respect of special needs education or specialist clinical services, such as child psychiatry.
This, though, is not, and should not be, a matter for party politics. It is genuinely an issue of national concern, and if we do not act, it will be a matter of national shame. The Park, and other units, shine as beacons of national excellence throughout the world. Moreover, they shine as beacons of hope for many vulnerable and disadvantaged children and their families. With little notice and even less justification, those beacons are being snuffed out one by one.
As my hon. Friend the Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Angela Browning) reminded the House, that will mean longer journey times for children and their families; more time spent apart; the inappropriate use of adolescent and even adult services for children; a greater cost to the community, because of the need to provide longer-term treatment; and the loss of a specialist service built up over many years.
As a House, we cannot sit idly by and let that happen. I am sure that the Minister, who has listened very carefully to what I have said this evening, will not let it happen. I know that, tonight, the Minister will say that the Park must be saved and that we must retain and enhance the national specialist child psychiatry services that we still have—just—in this country.
I congratulate the hon. Member for Wantage (Mr. Vaizey) on securing the debate. We have not had a chance to debate with each other before, but, through various channels, his reputation preceded him and this evening he has shown that that reputation is richly deserved.
The hon. Gentleman made a number of local points in the context of a broader national debate. This is a rare opportunity to debate child and adolescent mental health services, so I hope that the House will permit me to widen my remarks to the national picture before addressing the important local points. He singled out child psychiatric services, but we cannot consider that issue on its own; we must consider child and adolescent mental health services across the board. I pay tribute to the outstanding hard work of all staff who work in that area in the NHS and in other related services up and down the country. They provide important services, often under difficult conditions, to our children and young people.
The hon. Gentleman helpfully started with some facts and figures to set the context for the debate. He is right that last year the Office for National Statistics reported on the prevalence of mental disorders among five to 16-year-olds and found that one in 10 children had a clinically diagnosed mental disorder, 4 per cent. had an emotional disorder such as anxiety or depression, and 6 per cent. had a conduct disorder such as oppositional defiant disorder or hyperactivity. The prevalence in 2004 remained broadly unchanged from that found by the previous survey that was conducted in 1999.
To address those needs, we need to make sure that we improve the life outcomes of children with mental health problems by ensuring that all patients who need it have access to a comprehensive child and adolescent mental health service, and not just to child psychiatric services. We attach enormous importance to this matter and the hon. Gentleman was not correct to say that we do not regard it as a priority. The Government have set themselves a public service agreement target with the Treasury for the Department of Health. The way in which we achieve that vision is extremely important and our way of doing so was set out in the children's national service framework, which was published in September 2004. Quite rightly, it was recognised around the world as a leading example of how such services can be specified for children. Full implementation of the principles set out in the national service framework will not happen overnight, which is why it was given a 10-year timetable.
Quite rightly, there has been, and continues to be, significant additional investment to ensure that the important targets attached to our CAMHS work can be delivered. In the three years up to and including the current financial year, £300 million has been made available to the NHS and local authorities. Dedicated teams of CAMHS workers are advising commissioners up and down the country to help them to understand the best local strategies for improving services. The hon. Gentleman is right to say that aspects of those services have national significance and it is important that we recognise that.
All that activity is beginning to have an effect. We track our progress on CAMHS work through an annual mapping exercise. The latest results that we have relate to late 2004 and show encouraging signs of progress. The hon. Gentleman is right to say that there is an enormous amount still to do, but, between 2002 and 2004, the number of CAMHS staff—both professional and non-professional—increased by 20 per cent. The number of cases dealt with increased by 30 per cent. One of the biggest worries is the length of the wait before seeing a specialist, but, here too, the CAMHS mapping work shows that there is cause for optimism. In 2002, only 24 per cent. of new cases were seen in four weeks; by 2004, that figure had risen to 50 per cent. As the hon. Gentleman says, there is an enormous amount still to do, but the direction of travel is encouraging. Similarly, the number of cases waiting for more than 13 weeks has reduced from a little more than 50 per cent. and is now down to just over 30 per cent. Again, there is an enormous amount to do but there are some encouraging signs of progress.
The debate is about the future rather than the past. There are important elements that we need to get right if we are to make serious progress on this agenda, and I want to highlight them. The first is our ability in every part of the country to provide access to 24-hour services to meet urgent needs. I am pleased to say that emergency coverage of this sort is now available in 80 per cent. of primary care trusts. It has increased from about 57 per cent. in 2003.
The second area is the provision of CAMH services to people who have a learning disability. It has been of some interest to many right hon. and hon. Members. The availability of this type of service has increased from about a third in 2003 to more than 50 per cent. of PCTs now. The third area is the provision of CAMH services to 16 and 17-year-olds. I know that the hon. Gentleman centred the debate not on adolescents but on children, but that is an important area because as young people reach maturity and independence at different ages, CAMH services should be structured to take account of that.
Young people may wish to decide whether their care is managed within CAMHS or within adult mental health services. We think that it is important that CAMHS should be available for young people up to and including the age of 17. In 2003, half of local services were able so to deliver. The figure has now increased to three quarters. There are signs of progress although there are a number of important hurdles that we still need to leap over, as it were.
The first issue is that of staffing. It is an important part of the set of challenges that the hon. Gentleman has outlined. There is some good news to report in that the number of consultant child psychiatrists working in hospitals has increased from about 390 in 1997 by nearly 25 per cent. to nearly 500 in 2004. That is the last year for which figures are available. The rate of progress on staffing appears to be accelerating not only in the case of child psychiatrists but in other staff sectors as well. For example, in England the total number of staff employed in CAMHS teams in 2004 was nearly 9,000. That is up by 15 per cent. compared with the previous year. That is quite a rate of growth in the space of a year, given how long many of these professionals need to spend in training.
Over the same year, the number of clinical child psychologists increased from nearly 1,000 by nearly a third to 1,320. Over the same period, the number of CAMHS nurses increased from 2,000 to nearly 2,500. That is quite a rate of growth in such a short period.
The second big hurdle that we need to confront lies with the criminal justice system. We are tackling the mental health provision that is available to young people in contact with the CJS. That is a considerable issue for children in the CJS. Services that are now available include mental health screening for young people in court. There are joint appointments between CAMHS and youth offending teams—dedicated teams—that are providing in-reach to secure units and young offender institutions.
Our basic principle on this aspect of CAMHS is that a child or young person who is in contact with the CJS, whether they are in custody or in the community, should have the same sort of access to the comprehensive service as any other child or young person within the general population.
The third issue is that of adult psychiatric wards, a subject that has been of some interest to right hon. and hon. Members. The national service framework recognised that, for the majority of 16 and 17-year-olds for whom admission becomes necessary, admission to a young people's unit is the appropriate and preferred option. For some young people who are living away from the family home, or those with certain types of clinical need, an adult facility may be more appropriate. Our plans to increase CAMHS provision will reduce the incidence of placing children and young people inappropriately. As a contingency measure, NHS trusts should identify wards or settings in adult units that would be appropriate.
The issues raised by the hon. Gentleman related to his local facility of the Park hospital. I know that there have been provisional plans to close in-patient facilities there. I am advised by officials that the Park building has been deemed inappropriate for in-patient over-night care of young children. There has always been, and continues to be, an intention to develop new facilities to provide appropriate modern community and extended day services for children with a mental health problem to help the hon. Gentleman's local health community to achieve the ambitions set out in the national service framework. It is worth underlining the fact that that framework is not optional for the national health service—it is mandatory. It is spread over an extended time horizon, because of the scale of the ambition that it expresses. I understand that, because of concerns that have been voiced locally, not least by the hon. Gentleman, the plans are being further considered. I do not have a precise update on those considerations but, once I do, I would be more than happy to write to him with full information.
A fundamental point made by the hon. Gentleman was that we cannot expect a national facility such as the one that he described to be funded purely or mostly by local commissioning. Does the Minister agree with that basic point?
In many services, it is inappropriate for local facilities to be funded exclusively by local sources. That is right, but that is why there are national arrangements for some forms of specialised commissioning. My noble Friend Lord Warner is overseeing a review of specialised commissioning, and the Department of Health makes substantial provision in central budgets for moneys that have been identified to support specialised commissioning where appropriate.
The Minister said that the plans were designed to create modern community child psychiatric facilities. Everyone agrees that the building at the Park is inadequate, but it was always understood that it would be replaced. The phrase, "modern community facilities", does not include the word, "in-patient". Can the Minister be more specific, and say whether the facility will be replaced with in-patient services?
I regret that I do not have the precise details of the plans that are being developed for the Park hospital. I understand that they are under further consideration so, as soon as I have information on the latest consideration, I am happy to write to the hon. Gentleman.
In conclusion, I would like to advertise something that is very important to CAMHS—the annual positive practice awards. I was pleased to attend this year's awards in November, and they highlight some of the ways in which CAMHS teams across the country are delivering new and better services. The number and range of entries showed the enormous diversity of initiatives, and I pay tribute to the hard work and vision of all the staff who developed and delivered those service improvements. In my correspondence with the hon. Gentleman, I will include information about recipients of this year's awards. If, as I hope, he takes a long and continued interest in the years ahead in child psychiatric services and CAMHS more generally, many of those awards will be of great interest to him.
Question put and agreed to.
Adjourned accordingly at eighteen minutes past Six o'clock.