Children and Adoption Bill [HL]

moved Amendment No. 89:"Page 8, line 14, at end insert—" ““(   )   to report to the court if a report under paragraph 8 of Schedule A1 is made in relation to the person;”” The noble Lord said: In moving Amendment No. 89, I shall speak also to Amendments Nos. 90, 92, 93, 98 and 99. These are straightforward government amendments to facilitate the flow of information to and from the relevant CAFCASS officer and the officer with day-to-day responsibility for allocating work to, and supervising, an individual subject to an enforcement order. The system envisaged would be that, when an enforcement order is made, the court must ask CAFCASS, or a Welsh family proceedings officer in Wales, to monitor, or arrange the monitoring of, compliance with the order, and to report to the court on that compliance and any other matters specified. The CAFCASS officer may in turn request the ““responsible officer””—being the officer of the National Probation Service running the unpaid work—to report on whether the person undertakes the work. If a person then breaches an order, they would normally be given a warning by the responsible officer, although the breach could be reported to the CAFCASS officer, and hence to the court, straightaway if the responsible officer judged that to be appropriate, which he might if the breach were particularly serious. On a subsequent breach, under the amendments, the CAFCASS officer will be informed that the person has breached the order, and has been given a warning for a previous breach. The CAFCASS officer will then report that to the family court, which might choose to re-list the case for a directions hearing. If a person entitled to do so applied to the court for action to be taken in relation to the breach of the enforcement order, the court would have the power, in certain circumstances, to make the enforcement order more onerous, or to impose a second enforcement order. Alternatively, the court may see fit to exercise its powers in relation to the contempt of court that would have been committed via the breaching of the enforcement order. The Bill as introduced does not quite provide for this system, and the amendments have been introduced to ensure that it does provide as we intend for a proper system of monitoring and enforcement. I beg to move. On Question, amendment agreed to.