Children and Adoption Bill [HL]

I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Pitkeathley, for that and also thank the Minister for his detailed reply and I look forward to reading its technicalities in Hansard. We are coming at this from two very different ends. We believe that if early intervention is mandatory and parents know that that is what is expected for the benefit of their child when they split up, it will resolve many issues early that will not come to court. The Minister also mentioned abuse and we feel that such issues will be highlighted at a very early stage and could be referred for a special resolution. All the professionals in the family law system say that time is the enemy of resolution. The amendment would signpost to everyone what was required at the beginning. In many respects, whatever went wrong between the early interventions project being delivered to the Department for Constitutional Affairs and Family Resolutions—I take on board the noble Baroness’ point about different methods being used in different places—there has been a tragedy. If we had run an early intervention project, as run successfully in many other countries, the outcomes of which the Minister spoke could have been very different. As Caroline Willbourne, the Family Law Bar Association’s designated expert on contact issues wrote in the November 2004 issue of Family Law:"““The Early Intervention project, as formally submitted, was fully specified, properly designed and costed. And it commanded across-the-board professional support””." Family Resolutions, based on the ““every case is different”” approach, was the complete antithesis of early intervention. This is where we need to concentrate our resources—we were talking about early intervention in social work in our debate on Thursday. I urge—implore is too strong a word—the Minister to rethink and consider running a project upon the lines originally intended. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment. Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.