Children and Adoption Bill [HL]

moved Amendment No. 87A:"Page 7, line 34, at end insert—" ““(   )   the enforcement order is to the benefit of the child about whom the contact order has been made.”” The noble Baroness said: In moving Amendment No. 87A, I shall speak also to Amendments Nos. 88A, 88B, 106A and 111A. The temptation here was to table an amendment which deleted the whole clause, but I decided that I would try to test some parts of it which address not only the issues of the child who is the subject of the proceedings but also those of other children who might be involved in the whole process involved in a potentially new family. This group of amendments refers to the fact that many lone parents re-partner—a horrible expression—remarry or re-establish new families and that the new partner may bring children into the new family or the couple may have additional children together. Lone parenthood is a stage in the life cycle and we know that, on average, lone parents tend to spend three to five years as such. Therefore, my contention in these amendments is that any measures must take into account the welfare of the other children in these families. I believe that serious consideration should be given to enforcement orders and the impact that they would have on the whole family and on the family finances. Resident parents, many of whom will be the lone parent, belong to the poorest group in our society. Here, I thank One Parent Families for its excellent briefing on these issues. We know that one-parent families struggle more than most groups to retain jobs once they have moved into work. Thus, making them do unpaid work, whether or not they are in work, is likely to add more pressure on their time and finances and, in turn, will impact on the financial well-being of the child in question and other children in the family. I say to the Minister that the Government set themselves the target of halving child poverty by 2010, and measures that affect the financial well-being of one-parent families are likely to hinder their progress towards that objective. Let me refer briefly to the amendments. The Minister said, during the Second Reading debate and indeed now, that the enforcement orders concern the conduct of adults and that that is why the child’s interests are not paramount. I am not convinced that it is possible suddenly to divorce the parent from the child and pretend that somehow the child’s interests are not paramount at this point. In support of the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley—domestic violence being one of the reasons why parents may refuse contact to non-resident parents—I believe the safety checklist would go a very long way towards remedying that situation. So we may well return to that issue at some point later in the Bill. My first amendment, Amendment No. 87A, concerns the welfare of the child. If we believe that the child’s welfare is important, let us put a provision to that effect into the enforcement order. Amendment No. 88A addresses the issue of loss of income and taking that into consideration when sentences are being considered. The third amendment addresses the issue of the existence of extended families and taking into account the interests of other children who might be living in the household. The next amendment addresses the issue of equity, which I have raised before. We need to make sure that the compensation for financial loss addresses both resident and non-resident parents equally. I beg to move.