Children and Adoption Bill [HL]

I do not have a prepared speech, but I obviously have to say something. I have thought very carefully overnight about what is ““reasonable”” and the word ““meaningful””, the two words which the noble Earl, Lord Howe, used yesterday. He said that when we are talking about ““reasonable”” we might talk about ““meaningful””. We are really going over ground we covered yesterday. I have thought about it extraordinarily carefully, and I have not changed my position for this reason: we all have a common cause, as we said yesterday. That common cause, which has just been most eloquently outlined, is that both parents have as much contact with their children as possible, where appropriate. I have not been talking about difficult or vulnerable parents throughout. We know from research that they make up the highest number who decide not to make decisions outside court. What one might call ““ordinary families”” end up in court, however, in extraordinarily fractious situations. At that point, the people making the decisions on behalf of those children cannot be fettered by anything, whether it is reasonable or meaningful, that might impede the paramountcy of the needs of the child—this is where not being a lawyer may colour my view. I see the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, shake his head. That, however, is the view that I have come to after careful thought. I still believe that we should be looking at the paramountcy of the needs of the child. I am reminded of the case, which many of the Committee must know about, of the judge who, after careful thought about a tremendous dispute between parents, decided that he had to allocate care to a particular parent. He said that was not just, but was in the best interests of the child. The friction between parents was so great that any meaningful contact would have involved damage to the child’s emotional and psychological development. That, however, does not mean that we should not be looking at improving contact. Like many noble Lords here, I have been contacted by and read the case files of people, and have had personal friends, who have had extraordinary difficulties in implementing contact orders. I thought that we were going to tackle that in Clause 2; that we were going to look at it and say that if contact is broken when it should not be, then we have a number of constraints and powers to ensure that the resident parent must comply. Personally, I also wish—and I said this in the Select Committee—that the Government had looked at the responsibilities of the non-resident parent. The noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, alluded to that. In many of the cases I am involved in, the breakdown is because of the difficulty in getting a consistent pattern of contact by the non-resident parent. We have to look at the whole. I am concerned that we must improve the practice, and increase capacity, of involving parents in understanding the needs of their children—seeing their children at all—in their dispute. Our work is about enabling parents to focus on their children as well as their dispute. We know, from all the work that we do, that that enables them to make better decisions. In Part 1, we have been discussing enabling the workers in this field to have a better chance to do that. I read the comments of the noble Earl, Lord Howe, that reasonableness is a word that is well understood by lawyers—maybe that is the flaw from which I am suffering. It makes me extremely concerned if it does anything to impede the paramountcy of the welfare of the child. I am prepared to be convinced between now and Report if that is appropriate, and will continue to think about it. But I am also interested to hear what the Minister says in reply.