Children and Adoption Bill [HL]

moved Amendment No. 15: "Page 1, line 7, after ““which”” insert ““the safety of the child is not an issue and””" The noble Baroness said: I break my Trappist-like silence of the afternoon for a reason that may not be immediately obvious. I guess that Members of the Committee who have looked at this group of amendments might wonder why, when they deal again with issues of safety, they were not taken with the amendments that were moved so capably and ably by the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, and her colleagues earlier. Why are we doing this again? We doing it again for two reasons—first, because we are coming at the issue of safety from a different perspective, and I believed that it was important for Members of the Committee to have the debate that they wanted to have earlier without clouding it. Secondly, I am moving the amendment because I noted throughout my silent witnessing of our proceedings this afternoon that every time on this side of the Room when Members of the Committee have talked about reasonableness, Members of the Committee on the other side have run off into the issues of safety. There is no doubt that issues of safety and the way in which courts treat those issues are extremely important; that is why we are going to return to them again, and I make no apology for taking the Committee’s time to do that. If we can spend time addressing the deficiencies of the current processes of the courts in determining safety, we shall have done a great service, because we shall have clarified the ground on which the discussion of reasonableness can take place. All afternoon two different parallel arguments have taken place, which have not actually impinged on each other. That may be a tactical ploy on the part of some—and good luck to them; but we on our Benches believe that both issues are equally serious and should be addressed. That is why we have taken the time to address them both. Having said that, I want to turn to the issue of safety and why we believe that it is important. Of course it is important; it is what the noble Baroness, Lady Howarth, has twice run to immediately when we have discussed these matters, and she is right to do so. We believe that the House of Commons Constitutional Affairs Committee made a key and important statement in paragraph 129 of its report. It said:"““It is vital that important safety issues such as domestic violence and other forms of abuse are effectively addressed””." I agree with that, and the noble Baronesses on the Government Benches set that out in great detail this afternoon. The report goes on to say:"““Enforcement action by the courts should not occur while there are unresolved safety concerns””." I agree with that too—but here is the point of difference. The report says:"““Equally, false accusations raised by parents as a mechanism to frustrate contact should not succeed. The Department should follow up the introduction of ‘Gateway forms’ by examining the proportion of cases where the courts conclude that violent or abusive conduct has actually occurred””." I have no doubt that the Minister will take an immense length of time to point out just how technically deficient are the amendments that we have tabled, but the point behind all of them was to attempt to draw a distinction between three different situations: cases in which there are allegations of abuse, cases in which there are fears about safety and cases in which there is evidence of abuse or harm which has been accepted by the court. We on these Benches do not bow to anybody about the need for there to be sufficiently rigorous, fully resourced processes that investigate allegations of abuse. But equally we on these Benches feel quite passionately that when such an investigation has taken place, the evidence has been reviewed and a direction has been issued, it is not acceptable if there is then a failure to comply. I am sure of that and I hope that the noble Baroness, Lady Howarth, will tell us how many cases we are talking about—not very many. But I suspect that they fall not into the 10 per cent of cases that we talked about, but into the 90 per cent, and that a great many of the parents who have been awarded contact orders by the courts that have not been complied with have simply run out of the resources with which to pursue the matter, if they are private cases. Indeed, I will go further than that and say that colleagues of mine in another place have a number of constituents who are in exactly that position. They have exhausted their savings and have no more resources with which to attempt to get the legal processes to work as they should. The Committee deserves an explanation of why we have gone about the matter in the way that we have. We have sought to insert the issue of safety tightly within the framework of the Bill. We have not sought to add new clauses as other noble Lords have done, as we believe that the process of safety assessment ought to be integral to the issuing of contact orders and contact activity directions, the monitoring and the enforcement. That is why we have chosen to go down this route. I had great sympathy with much of what the noble Baronesses, Lady Thornton and Lady Gould of Potternewton, said in moving their amendments. I have had great sympathy with what they have said on many other occasions when I have had the privilege of hearing them make similar speeches, for example during the passage of the Adoption and Children Bill. Given what I have said, they will not be surprised to hear that we have much sympathy with Amendment No. 7 concerning finding of fact. Our only problem with that concerns the wording:"““In all section 8 cases””." We are not absolutely sure that in all cases there needs to be a finding of fact. That is perhaps a matter that we can discuss further. Having talked to a number of people and listened to the comments of the noble Baroness, Lady Howarth, this afternoon, one is aware that it is not unknown for there to be allegations of abuse which, as regards the professionals involved in hearing them, do not have the ring of truth from the very beginning. It is for people who work in the court system to reach a reasonable judgment that there does not need to be an investigation in some cases. We have tried to stitch that provision into the Bill. Having already discussed safety extensively, I do not wish to discuss it further at length. However, we have referred in Amendment No. 15 to cases where safety is not an issue. Amendment No. 18 concerns the need for contact activity directions to promote safe contact. Amendment No. 21 is concerned with programmes and classes, including counselling, to ensure the safety of children and parents. Amendment No. 30 is concerned with the situation where the court asks for a risk assessment to be carried out for the parent and the child in question. It is important that that risk assessment—which we have not sought to define in a checklist—is carried out. Amendment No. 53 states that the first matter for a court to consider is whether contact is safe and appropriate. I particularly draw the Committee’s attention to Amendment No. 58. I refer not to the version of Amendment No. 58 that noble Lords may have seen in briefings emanating from various organisations but the version on the Marshalled List. Amendment No. 58 concerns information being available to the court with regard to,"““any repeated pattern of domestic violence””." That is included for a particular reason. One of the issues that the Commons Select Committee considered was the not uncommon situation that occurs at the time of a break-up of a relationship, which is a moment of immense stress in anyone’s life, whereby a non-resident parent might, as a one-off, do something that is completely out of character. That one occurrence of something bad is not in itself evidence of a repeated pattern of behaviour. We felt that it was important to draw attention to that in our amendments. Amendment No. 62 concerns the duty of CAFCASS officers or their Welsh equivalents, when reporting on failure to comply with a court direction, to report on evidence—I stress the word ““evidence””—that would give rise to safety issues. I am not talking about allegations or fears but evidence. We considered that safety was also an important aspect of Amendment No. 66 concerning the monitoring of contacts. Amendments Nos. 75 and 76 say completely different things. I am sure that noble Lords will have guessed that they are probing amendments. They address the part of the Bill that the noble Baroness, Lady Gould of Potternewton, discussed earlier concerning the balance of probabilities. Where a reasonable excuse has been accepted by the court that involves domestic violence, would the court direct the relevant party to an appropriate perpetrator programme, or should it suspend the contact order? Given the new nature of the contact orders, it is important that the Government give some indication of how they would work in those circumstances. We shall return to the matter at later stages of the Bill. I hope that by that time we shall have managed to convince the Committee, including the noble Baroness, Lady Howarth, that reasonable contact does not ever have to occur at the expense of the safety of children. We are committed to ensuring that the processes for determining what is safe are rigorous. In view of the Minister’s earlier comments, I suggest that he will say that all of the measures are either otiose or unnecessary, not least because the courts already have the relevant powers. If that is the case, why does the problem persist? Why are the children still in danger? Why are so many people who go through the court process dissatisfied with the way in which such issues are handled, so that their anger about that turns into anger directed towards children? I beg to move.