Children and Adoption Bill [HL]

Perhaps I can deal with that last point first and give fulsome apologies to my noble friend. I did not reply to her Amendment No. 106A, which aims to ensure that financial compensation orders can impact not only on resident parents who breach contact orders, but also on non-resident parents who fail to follow arrangements set out in those orders. In response to that amendment, I want to make it clear that the Bill allows financial compensation orders to be applied to both resident and non-resident parents. The only condition is that they must have breached the contact order, which requires the court to name both parties in its orders. The court is entirely free to do so, and if it does, they can be enforced on both sides. But it is for the court to decide who it addresses orders to. There is nothing in the Bill that prevents them being enforced in respect of both parties. On the issues raised in Clause 4, the noble Earl ranged very widely to sum up all our debates on the Bill, including issues to do with presumptions on contact, arrangements for the allocation of time in contact proceedings, and the efficacy or otherwise of the contact activities proposed in Clause 1. I am still feeling my way through this Committee and I am not sure how far I should repeat all the arguments I have given many times before in responding. If the noble Earl will forgive me, I shall simply say that I think we have the right provisions in respect of presumptions and contact time. I know he disagrees with this, but we believe that the contact activities set out in Clause 1 will be of benefit. In parenthesis, I should say that as we get further through the Bill, I find that a lot of our differences are not as great as they might seem from the presentation of them. The noble Earl says, if I may paraphrase him, that the contact activities in Clause 1 do not amount to a row of beans but, as I understand it, one of the main contact activities that he is keen that we should prosecute more is mediation. We are entirely at one with him on this. There has been a significant increase in mediation and the contact activity, which will provide information about the mediation, will, we confidently expect, lead to a significant increase in the use of mediation in family disputes of this kind. I think that in these areas we may be closer together than it might seem, although I am sure that the noble Earl will wish to dispute that in a moment. In so far as the issues to do with enforcement in Clause 4 are concerned, one can debate how beneficial these provisions will be. The noble Earl thinks that they may not be as beneficial as all that. But we are responding to a clear and strong call from the judiciary for these powers for precisely the reason that the noble Baroness, Lady Howarth, gave. They provide alternatives to the courts in enforcing these orders in very difficult cases—we hope that there will be a small number of them. They provide alternatives to imprisonment as the only recourse that the courts have to ensure that children have access to their parents as the courts determined in the first instance. The report by Lord Justice Wall and his committee, Making Contact Work, made very clear recommendations in this respect. It stated that:"““fines and committal are not only crude methods of enforcement; they are wholly inadequate as a means of addressing the problem of contact orders which have not been implemented. The result is that the current system is seriously deficient in the means available to it to enforce its orders, and, in our judgment, the system needs swift and radical change . . . The most obvious change required, in our view, is for the courts to be given much wider powers to ensure that its orders are obeyed, or otherwise to facilitate their implementation. This means in turn that there must be legislation widening the powers of the courts to enable them, in addition to imposing fines or ordering imprisonment, to make a whole range of orders designed to meet the circumstances of the individual case””." It is precisely to achieve that objective that we have Clause 4. In giving evidence to the committee on the draft Bill, Dame Elizabeth Butler-Sloss made exactly the same point:"““A fine is a waste of time because virtually nobody has any money. The second alternative is prison—and that must be a last resort, because it is not a good idea to put the carer of the child inside if you can avoid it . . . We are stymied at the moment, so we are enormously enthusiastic about the two stages of the Bill””." She is referring to facilitation through contact activities and enforcement where necessary. I am glad to say that a senior member of the judiciary is enormously enthusiastic about these provisions, and I hope that her enormous enthusiasm will in practice lead to some change in the way that these cases are dealt with to promote more and better contact between children and their parents.