Children and Adoption Bill [HL]

There is a very simple truth associated with contact disputes. It is that 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. Contact disputes are about one thing and one thing only: the amount of time that each parent believes that he or she should have with the child. That simple truth has somehow got submerged during the drafting of this Bill. What we needed in the Bill—what everyone thought we were going to get when the Green Paper was published—was measures designed to facilitate contact; measures that would put right the deficiencies of court settlements under the current system, deficiencies which the Government acknowledged in their Green Paper. What we have in Clause 1 are not measures that will facilitate contact, but rather measures that will serve only to defer contact. The so-called contact activities for which the clause provides are not contact; they are things that the court says you have to do before you are allowed contact. That idea, with great respect to the Minister, will do nothing to help sort out the one and only question at issue between two parents in this situation: how much time should each of them be allowed to have with the child? It completely misses the point. Clause 1 is a blind alley, and the Government have got themselves into it because of a muddle about the current law and how the law operates in practice. Instead of acknowledging, as they originally did, that the system was not working and needed mending, they are now saying that the basis on which the courts operate is all right and that it does not need changing. The Minister has repeatedly maintained that case law safeguards the principle of the two-parent model—that is to say, the principle that children normally benefit from a meaningful relationship with both parents following separation, unless good reasons can be shown why that should not happen. In other words, the Government say that there is already a presumption of meaningful relations or meaningful contact enshrined in case law. But when it is put to them, as it was yesterday, that this presumption should be mirrored in statute, they say ““Oh no; we do not like the idea of a presumption of reasonable contact actually appearing in the Children Act””. Their position is thus contradictory. And the muddle of this position is compounded by their belief that the present law is all right. The present law is not all right because it cannot prevent thousands of blameless and loving parents being granted next to no contact with their children for no material or good reason. To the noble Baroness, Lady Howarth, I say that we are not talking about dangerous or dysfunctional parents but normal, loving, non-violent parents who have had to come to court repeatedly to prove to a judge why it is reasonable for them to have meaningful relationship with their child. [Sitting suspended for a Division in the House from 6.12 to 6.25 pm.]