Children and Adoption Bill [HL]

moved Amendment No. 124:"After Clause 7, insert the following new clause—"    ““REMOVAL OF CHILD FROM JURISDICTION    The Secretary of State shall lay before Parliament proposals to strengthen the efficacy of the Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction, done at the Hague on 25th October 1980.”” The noble Baroness said: Abduction is a sad and drastic development in contact arrangements after relationship breakdown. The Hague Convention is a multilateral treaty that seeks to protect children from the harmful effects of their abduction and retention across international boundaries by providing a procedure to bring about their prompt return. Under Section 1 of the Child Abduction Act 1984, it is a criminal offence for any person connected with a child under the age of 16, to take or send the child out of the UK for a period exceeding one month without the consent of any person who has parental responsibility of the child. However, I understand that real concerns have been expressed about our implementation of our duties under the Hague Convention and the use of the International Child Abduction and Contact Unit. Are we properly understanding the scale of this problem and are we addressing it effectively? There is no doubt that we need proper statistics to understand the scale of the problem. In the UK, we have no idea how many children are abducted in this way by a parent in a given year. An incident reported to the police must come within the legal definition for it to be recorded. That means that offences of child abduction will not include victims over the age of 16. Parental abduction will be recorded only if the child is taken out of the UK. Therefore, domestic abductions are excluded and recorded only if the incident lasts longer than one month. We understand that many left-behind parents do not report their child’s loss to the police. In other words, studies based on police records do not give us an accurate picture. In 2003, the Foreign Office started keeping a record of the number of cases of international parental abduction that it handles. But they do not keep a record of how many children are involved, their ages or sex. So its statistics do not help to build the accurate picture that we need. I understand that the Department for Constitutional Affairs keeps statistics only on the number of Hague Convention cases that it handles—again, there is no record of the number of children involved, their ages or sex. The NGO Reunite has some figures which are slightly more helpful as they include the number of children, but not all left-behind parents contact Reunite. Then there is the added complication that there is no way of knowing if there are duplications in those three sets of statistics. This lack of proper statistics is the subject of a report by PACT due out next month. This will show that there is a distinct difference when we compare the situation in the UK with that of the US, where there has been considerable effort by the federal Government to tackle the problem of missing children whether they are throwaways, runaways, abducted or a victim of family abductions. But in the UK, we have no clear set of definitions and no national statistics. If we cannot establish the nature and scale of the problem, it is impossible to plan effective programmes and preventive policies. The Department for Constitutional Affairs should take a much more hands-on role to help left-behind parents. In a recent case, the ombudsman clearly condemned the Department and directed it to offer better advice and help to future left-behind parents. Again, the situation in the UK is in sharp contrast to that in America. What measures have the Government taken to ensure parents of children abducted abroad are given full and appropriate legal advice? The roles of the Department for Constitutional Affairs and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office should be much more clearly established. They should better co-operate with each other, as well as with NGOs and the police. For the moment, it is still very difficult for left-behind parents to know what to do and where to go. Abduction is the most dramatic strand of parent alienation. Abduction risks grave damage to a child’s welfare and mental wellbeing. The Government must take all available steps to ensure that these distraught parents receive the help and the advice which they so desperately need. I beg to move.